I'm Pontus Westawerg and I'm coordinator of Block by Block which is a global program where we use Minecraft as a community participation tool in public space programs. We run participatory workshops with communities all over the world where they get to use Minecraft to redesign their urban areas particularly focusing on public spaces. Minecraft is one of the world's biggest computer games. It's essentially like digital Lego. You get blocks, multi-cutted blocks that are one by one meter cube. In an endless world you can basically design whatever you want. It's used by...it has something like a hundred million players. I think it's the world's third and every most popular video games after Tetris and Wii Sports. Communities are fantastic. They work all together on multiplayer servers and they'll build fantastic stuff. Everything from Kings Landing, from Game of Thrones to Paris or New York. It becomes kind of an architectural tool almost for young people mainly. I work at UN Habitat and we have this global program where we are improving public spaces all over the world. We do these kind of building projects then community participation becomes really important. We run all sorts of participatory processes but generally it's quite difficult to get young people involved in these processes. When we heard of Minecraft I think it was the summer of 2012 we thought this really seemed like a good tool. We basically contacted Mojang which is the company that makes Minecraft and they were super interested in having partnerships. For the last three years we've been working together on this program, block by block. In the context of block by block it's about ensuring that marginalized communities are able to actively engage in these processes. Often we find that poor people or young people or women in normal participatory processes the voices are not always heard. Finding a really useful tool like Minecraft means that we can give voice to the voice less in the sense and it's about changing the power relationships as well to ensure that non-professionals can really participate in these processes. When it comes to Minecraft we're really interested in moving into a bigger scale. What we're doing at the moment is manually building spaces. We work with a bunch of gamers who basically manually build our Minecraft models. It's quite a resource-intensive to do it in a manual way. We're exploring different ways that we can use for example JS data or other open data sets to bring them into Minecraft to generate urban areas on a larger scale. We really see a lot of potential of bringing JS data from different formats into Minecraft, doing visualisation, doing community participation and then bringing them out into other CAD programs. I think that has a lot of potential. Outside of Minecraft I'm really interested in citizen science and citizen observatories. I'm thinking about how smart cities, if you're not super fond about the term but if you're thinking about digital technology within cities, what happens a lot is that you get top-down approaches. I think that different citizen science or citizen observatory type processes can bring you more bottom-up approach to tech in cities. For example, last year we had been testing a maintenance system of water sensors in Islam in Arabic using input from local residents. One of the things with sensors is that we've been installing water sensors in the Mathura and one of the issues with sensors is that they need battery change quite often. In Islam that could be quite difficult to do when we were working in partnership with the water company and they don't always feel that they have access to the slums they would like to do. We've been testing a community model where citizens in Islam are maintaining these sensors and changing the batteries and these kind of things in return for the environment. I think this kind of citizen observer type model can have a huge potential impact for smart cities. There's a really interesting initiative by the FabLab network where they're using a kind of sensor box, which is called the smart citizen kit. It's a similar kind of thing that you give this kit to lots of different citizens across the city and they can do different kind of readings. It could be air quality, it could be noise pollution, it could be temperature and this kind of thing. And then you can, with the help of citizens, you can start building up a picture of how the city functions. It's kind of a nice interesting counter to, for example, top-down, private sector-led, big data initiatives. I think these can complement each other quite well. Working in civic technology in lots of different ways, I hope, is always really interesting though. Other practitioners and researchers and so on. So I think conference like Tiktoks is a really good opportunity to do that.