A toolkit for communities to listen, tell stories, and imagine better futures together.

• Narrative tech
• Toolkits

Greater Good Studio is a design firm dedicated to the social sector.

• Social impact design firms
• Design

Based on extensive research with these communities to build and refine products, we are offering: best practices, use cases, and knowledge from human rights activists, community organizers, and technologists from across the globe.

• human rights

• Courses

The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab constructed a timeline of key events, both online and offline, centered on the coordination of “Stop the Steal” efforts that escalated to violence and threatened the transition of power core to American democracy.

• Media and social media analysis
• Timelines

a multi-dimensional digital agency for organizations on a mission

• Social impact design firms

Community Based Alternatives to the Police Not911 is designed to direct you to New York City-based organizations that offer counseling, mediation and intervention services.

• apps

• Access social benefits
• Justice tech

By CivicMakers: The City [of SF] turned to CivicMakers to create a new program, Public Voice SF, that allows any San Francisco department or agency to connect to a diverse group of community members, collect real-time feedback, and use the input to improve City services.

• cities

• Graveyard
• User research
• User research groups

In 2017, Media Democracy Fund launched a pilot for PhDX, a fellowship program designed to pair graduate or PhD level university students with a background in technology with DC-based public interest technology policy organizations for an immersive fellowship experience over two consecutive summers.

• students

• Fellowships

ᴜᴄʟᴀʙ is a visualization research group situated  between design, computing, and the humanities.

• cities

• Data visualization
• Research and policy centers

showcases work by artists and designers that demonstrate the power of numbers in helping us understand New York and New Yorkers.

• Civic data
• Data visualization
• Artistic interventions

Bi-Weekly Hacknights where technologists, designers, policy nerds, community builders, or basically anyone (yes, no matter what your background!) Come together to build solutions to civic issues in Tiohtià: ke / Montreal.

• Civic hacking meetups

Digital Civics is a long-term research initiative led by Open Lab, Newcastle University that is exploring how digital technologies can empower citizens and communities.

• Research and policy centers
• Urban planning
• Assistive and Accessible Tech

This class uses the idea of values-driven design to help creators consider the politics of the technologies we use and which we bring into the world and teaches methods of research, design and deployment intended to help technologies meet the needs of real-world communities.

• Ethical tech and responsible tech
• Courses

Our accelerator program provides 24 months of customer development, product development, network building, and expert guidance for startups, all in preparation for securing state & local contracts. 

• Govtech
• Accelerators

Skylight is a digital consultancy using design and technology to help agencies deliver better public services.

• trainings

• Govtech vendors
• Procurement

An incubator for radically disruptive public service ideas, designed, owned and delivered by the public sector for public impact. An endeavour from FutureGov.

• Govtech
• Partner networks and coalitions
• Assistive and Accessible Tech

The Brown Institute’s Local News Lab is a new team of engineers, designers, data scientists, and journalists, working to build AI-powered, open-source products to help support local newsrooms and their businesses.

• Media

The citizens agenda is a way for news organizations to ensure that voters get the information they need from the politicians competing for their votes, in order to make the best decisions they can. The approach can be used for any type of election: school board, local government, state government, national or otherwise. In order for newsrooms to adopt a new kind of thinking, process and behavior, it takes more than one passionate person to make lasting change happen. This readiness assessment is designed to give you a sense of how easy or difficult it might be to get a citizens agenda model deployed in your newsroom, so you can go in with eyes wide open around any challenges.

• guides

• Media
• Voting and elections
• Voter assistance tech

Most tech is designed with the best intentions. But once a product is released and reaches scale, all bets are off. The Risk Mitigation Manual presents eight risk zones where we believe hard-to-anticipate and unwelcome consequences are most likely to emerge.

• Build something
• Ethical tech and responsible tech

The Day One Project is launching its Technology Policy Accelerator to identify, develop, and publish a set of technology policy ideas that could be implemented by Congress or the Biden-Harris Administration.  The accelerator is a nine-week process, designed to guide each participant as they develop an initial idea into a tailored, actionable set of policy recommendations. Selected participants will have a chance to develop their ideas with guidance from policy advisors, meet with veteran policymakers to learn more about the nuances of policy implementation, hone their ability to craft actionable policy on the federal level, and build a community with their fellow cohort. 

• Accelerators
• Tech or Digital Policy

Poland-based design studio that builds civic products

• Behavioral economics programs
• Social impact design firms

In 2019, Executive Order 50 created the Algorithms Management and Policy Officer (AMPO) role. This role is unique in urban governance and is intended to help provide protocols and information about the systems and tools City agencies use to make decisions.

• Govtech

This site loads one of a series of prompts to help the user empathize with people experiencing various conditions, from Multiple Sclerosis to near-sightedness.

• Assistive and Accessible Tech
• Design

Mobilizing the next generation of technologists to create civic impact in cities and states across the country.

• Find a job or hire someone

A Field Guide to the Dark Ecologies of Newtown Creek is designed in phases that we are developing over time.

• local
• Sustainable cities and communities

• Artistic interventions

Trestle is a non-profit team of expert engineers, designers, and product managers who partner with leading movement groups and campaigns doing critical organizing work nationwide.

• partisan

• Advocacy tech
• Organize campaigns

How local governments can serve people better through effective communications and digital services.

• local

• Govtech
• Playbooks and design principles

The Brick House Cooperative is a publishing platform designed, owned and operated by journalists—ad-free, expandable and subscription-based.

• Media
• Platform coops

systemic racism, cannot be solved with yesterday’s toolkit. Solving PublicProblems shows how readers can take advantage of digital technology, data,and the collective wisdom of our communities to design and deliver powerfulsolutions to contemporary problems."

• Books

The Sage project will design and build a new kind of national-scale reusable cyberinfrastructure to enable AI at the edge.

• air quality
• cities

• Smart Cities and sensors

Human-centered design frameworks start by identifying who a product is for and then placing them at the center of the product strategy. The Co/Act toolkit adapts and expands this approach to design digital products, services, or campaigns through modular do-it-yourself style activities that are aggressively low cost, high impact, interdisciplinary, and focused on building the capacity of participants. Co/Act will help you design more powerful products, services, and campaigns by centering them on your community, stakeholders, and colleagues - ensuring that the end result is more inclusive and therefore democratic.

• Design
• Toolkits

After playing thousands of hours of transportation simulation games, we were left wondering what could happen if some of the traditional limits of the genre didn't exist: in map sizes, track layout complexity, or train scheduling.

• mass transit

• Games and gamification

We empower startup innovators and pioneering partners to better collaborate and create scalable impact to speed up the EU’s goal to create 100 sustainable cities by 2030.

• cities
• Sustainable cities and communities

• Accelerators
• Social impact design firms

Our syllabus is a set of free, open access ‘teach the teacher’ materials designed to help educators teach master’s level students the skills they need to thrive as public servants in the Digital Era.

• resources
• curricula

• Govtech
• Courses

The adoption of policing technologies must be guided by democratic legitimacy and an imperative to minimize harm.

• police violence

• Justice tech

Copia Gaming is our ongoing initiative to design and facilitate a variety of games that explore serious and important subjects.

• Media
• Games and gamification

We build digital brands and products for the future of government. A digital brand and product design studio

• Social impact design firms

Discover how deepfakes work and the visual clues you can use to identify them. We are a group of communication designers that have created this project to demonstrate our research into making our own deep fake, and to communicate the signs you can spot to identify them.

• guides

• Artificial Intelligence
• Fight disinformation
• Digital literacy

The e-LIberate / openDCN tool supports synchronous online deliberation with the goal of making decisions. It can be seen as an advanced chat where the times and modes of interaction are governed by Robert’s Rules of Order, a set of meeting rules that were designed to support equitable decision-making. This tool is intended to support groups of people who work together synchronously on specific issues or bound domains. 2003 e-Liberate is an online software application that facilitates online meetings utilizing standardized rules of discourse.

• Meeting tech
• Predecessors

The Fellowship Program is a 6-month program supported by Code for Pakistan, the KP IT Board, and the World Bank, where a team of talented researchers, designers, community organizers, and developers collaborate to build apps, inspire citizen engagement, improve government, and show how to innovate in public services. These apps can help solve problems in a variety of public domains, such as healthcare, crime, disaster management, citizen engagement, transportation, traffic, education, etc.

• Fellowships

Humanity Innovation Labs is an agile consultancy that offers Mixed Methods Research, UX/UI, and Industrial Design services for emerging technologies within wearable computing (e.g. physical devices and digital experiences).

• Civic and social impact companies
• Design

A free online course offered by The GovLab on: How to take advantage of technology, data and the collective wisdom in our communities to design powerful solutions to contemporary problems.

• Courses
• Online courses

The SPP Accelerator is a learning and coaching program to source and develop promising projects designed to improve education, learning, and development using data.

• coaching

• Accelerators

Terreform ONE is a nonprofit architecture and urban design research group. We endeavor to combat the extinction of planetary species through pioneering acts of design.

• buildings
• Sustainable cities and communities

• Design

The Alliance is a nonpartisan collaborative that is bringing together election officials, designers, technologists, and other experts to help local election departments improve operations, develop a set of shared standards and values, and obtain access to best-in-class resources to run successful elections.

• Voting and elections
• Partner networks and coalitions
• Supporting public sector from outside government

We are a digital agency focused on innovative work for social good.

• Civic data
• Data visualization
• Data science for social good

Feminist.AI works to put technology into the hands of makers, researchers, thinkers and learners to amplify unheard voices and create more accessible AI for all.

• Artificial Intelligence
• Ethical tech and responsible tech

The Microsoft Justice Reform Initiative works to empower communities and drive progress towards a more equitable justice system.

• Microsoft
• criminal justice
• racial equity

• Justice tech
• Civic teams at tech companies

We’re a collection of agile technology and design firms that serve—or aspire to serve—the government.

• Govtech
• Partner networks and coalitions
• Govtech vendors

The Digital Public Goods Standard is a set of specifications and guidelines designed to maximise consensus about whether a digital solution conforms to the definition of a digital public good: open-source software, open data, open AI models, open standards, and open content that adhere to privacy and other applicable best practices, do no harm by design and are of high relevance for attainment of the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

• Partnerships for the Goals

• Data schemas and standards