Civic Tech
Summary
Civic technology — the design and use of digital tools (open data, participatory platforms, organising apps, transparency dashboards) to strengthen democratic practice and citizen power.
Body
Civic technology — the design and use of digital tools (open data, participatory platforms, organising apps, transparency dashboards) to strengthen democratic practice and citizen power.
Civic tech is the field of designing and deploying digital tools for democratic purposes — from open-data portals and participatory-budgeting platforms to organising apps and transparency dashboards. The Civic Tech Field Guide is the global directory of projects, tools and organisations [source: civic-tech-field-guide]. Ciudadanía Inteligente develops open-source democracy tools (Escazúbarómetro, Del Dicho al Hecho) and publishes the methodological write-ups behind them [source: ciudadania-inteligente]. Wingu trains Latin American CSOs on digital tools and data practice [source: wingu]. Tactical Tech’s broader work on info-activism frames the field as one that combines the technical (data, security, tools) with the political (who controls the data, who benefits) [source: tactical-tech]. The recurring failure mode: a tool built without a constituency — civic tech that no campaign uses is a portfolio, not infrastructure.
Use it for
Choosing a civic-tech tool for a campaign; evaluating participatory-platform design; benchmarking transparency dashboards.
Worked examples
- australian-campaign-case-study-divestment-campaign-2013-2021 — Australian student-led divestment campaigns used online platforms and open data to coordinate activists and pressure banks over fossil-fuel financing.
- barnard-college-wins-divestment-from-fossil-fuel-companies-2013 — campus organisers used a petition and social-media mobilisation strategy to win a fossil-fuel divestment commitment.
- chinese-americans-protest-conviction-of-nypd-officer-peter-liang — a diaspora-organised response coordinated online to press for accountability, illustrating civic organising tools for cross-border constituencies.
Learn more
- On Wikipedia: Civic technology — CC BY-SA 4.0
Video
Embedded YouTube CC clips related to this page:
Related
- digital-security
- distributed-organizing
- petitions-and-e-campaigning
- ciudadania-inteligente
- civic-tech-field-guide
- tactical-tech
- wingu
Open Questions
(none)
FAQ
What is civic tech?
Civic tech is the field of designing and deploying digital tools for democratic purposes — from open-data portals and participatory-budgeting platforms to organising apps and transparency dashboards. The Civic Tech Field Guide is the global directory of projects, tools and organisations [source: civic-tech-field-guide]. Ciudadanía Inteligente develops open-source democracy tools (Escazúbarómetro, Del Dicho al Hecho) and publishes the methodological write-ups behind them [source: ciudadania-inteligente]. Wingu trains Latin American CSOs on digital tools and data practice [source: wingu].
What does Tactical Tech add to the field?
Tactical Tech’s broader work on info-activism frames the field as one that combines the technical (data, security, tools) with the political (who controls the data, who benefits) [source: tactical-tech]. The framing matters because civic tech built without attention to power produces tools that look democratic but replicate the data asymmetries they claimed to disrupt. Tactical Tech’s info-activism lens is the practice’s answer to that drift.
What is the recurring failure mode of civic tech?
A recurring failure mode is a tool built without a constituency: civic tech that no campaign uses is a portfolio, not infrastructure [source: tactical-tech]. The Civic Tech Field Guide exists precisely to surface which tools have a real user base, and which are pilot-stage projects that never travelled. The field discipline is to build tools in partnership with the campaigns and constituencies that will use them.
How do the canonical civic-tech providers differ?
Ciudadanía Inteligente focuses on open-source democracy tools with methodological write-ups [source: ciudadania-inteligente]. Wingu focuses on training Latin American CSOs on digital tools and data practice [source: wingu]. Tactical Tech focuses on the political framing of info-activism [source: tactical-tech]. The Civic Tech Field Guide indexes all three as part of a global directory of projects, tools and organisations [source: civic-tech-field-guide] — the directory is the field’s map.
Sources & verification
- sources/civic-tech-field-guide — grounding: secondary — RAW (5392 chars)
- sources/ciudadania-inteligente — grounding: secondary — RAW (6377 chars)
- sources/wingu — grounding: secondary — RAW (1965 chars)
- sources/tactical-tech — grounding: secondary — RAW (588 chars)