An intelligent urban measurement project that’s changing our understanding of cities and urban life. The Array of Things (AoT) is a collaborative effort among scientists, universities, federal and local government, industry partners, and communities to collect real-time data on urban environment, infrastructure, and activity for research and public use. AoT uses an open intelligent sensing and edge computing platform called Waggle, developed at Argonne National Laboratory. AoT was funded primarily by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

• air quality
• cities

• Smart Cities and sensors

Our research suggests that stepping outside your echo chamber can make you more polarized not less. One of the reasons why this happens is that we become captivated by extremists on the other side who overshadow more moderate voices. The bots below retweet messages 12 by moderates each day who our research indicates resonates with members of the other party. We also screen out messages that score high on toxicity/incivility.

• X (Twitter)

• Bots
• Filter bubble poppers

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

Created in 2009-2010, Town+Gown is a city-wide university-community partnership program, resident at the New York City Department of Design and Construction (DDC), that brings academics and practitioners together to create actionable knowledge in the built environment. Town+Gown is also an open platform research program that uses service (experiential) learning and faculty-directed research to facilitate partnerships between academics and practitioners on applied built environment research projects through the collaborative inquiry model of systemic action research.  

• Research and policy centers
• Supporting public sector from outside government
• Public Private Partnerships

Circular City Studio, a program established with support from NYCEDC, encourages entrepreneurs to reimagine urban environments and help New York City address short, medium, and long term challenges facing our city. The 2020 iteration empowers engineers, inventors, and entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds to pilot technologies that support NYC's sustainability agenda and rethink energy, waste, and recycling systems in New York City. Selected teams will deploy products and services in testbeds around Manhattan and Brooklyn, working with program partners, domain experts, and research institutions to deliver solutions and introduce relevant technologies that can support community needs.

• Climate action

• Incubators

Research ICT Solutions Ltd. is a boutique consultancy based in Canada and South Africa. Started in 2013, we have built a select list of clients who need simple but effective tools to make better decisions. RIS targets the policy and regulatory intersection between policy makers, regulators and the private sector. Our clients range from country regulators, international donor organisations to multi-national companies like Facebook.

• guides

• Connectivity

a research project and a research collective exploring the politics of big data broadly defined. We take a critical look at massive data collection, privacy and surveillance | social movements, activism and internet activism | internet infrastructure, cybersecurity and their governance | open data and civic tech networks.

• Research and policy centers

The Polarization Lab at Duke brings together scholars from the social sciences, statistics, and computer science to study how to bridge America’s partisan divide.

• Research and policy centers
• Filter bubble poppers
• Polarization

Through training, research and digital tools, our expertise in relational organizing makes an impact at hundreds of progressive organizations, including Sunrise Movement, AFL-CIO, and Rock the Vote.

• trainings

• Organize campaigns
• Relational organizing

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

Though successive generations of digital technology have become increasingly powerful in the past twenty years, digital democracy has yet to realize its potential for deliberative transformation.

• Digital Public Infrastructure

OCSI provides high quality research, data and analysis to public and community sector organisations, helping you make better decisions – decisions that contribute to the public good.

• neighborhoods

• Civic data

Twitter bot making US Congressional Research Service reports publicly available to all. By Demand Progress.

• Watchdogging and transparency
• Bots
• Govtech

The Digital Democracy Lab researches the implications of digital technology for politics and democracy using computational social science methods.

• Research and policy centers

The PIT Lab is building a thoughtful community around public interest technology at Stanford. Themes include systemic inequities, democratic values, bridging the divide, career pathways.

• Research and policy centers
• Ethical tech and responsible tech
• Public Interest Tech

The Yearbook of International Organizations includes detailed information on c. 73,000 international organizations from 300 countries and territories, c. 41,000 of which are active organizations. Coverage includes intergovernmental (IGOs) and international non-governmental organizations (INGOs). Approximately 1,200 new organizations are added each year.

• Civic tech catalogs

With the onset of COVID, BARI has sought to construct a data-support system for a city during a pandemic–both to serve our local communities and to act as a model for others across the country.

• cities

• COVID Data Projects
• COVID Engagement Projects
• Surveys & polling

• Research and policy centers

an AI-powered scientific paper search engine. It provides a one-sentence tl;dr (too long; didn’t read) summary under every computer science paper (for now) when users use the search function or go to an author’s page.

• Artificial Intelligence
• Research tools

How to increase public engagement in environmental issues is a central question in environmental communication and environmental psychology literatures.

• research
• Sustainable cities and communities

• Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR, AR, MR)
• Peer-reviewed research
• Academia

Soils Revealed is a platform that visualises how soil organic carbon stocks have changed globally, and how they might change in the future.

• soil
• Climate action

• Civic maps

Advancing the responsible adoption of Artificial Intelligence and other emerging technologies for the benefit of humanity.

• Digital literacy
• Artificial Intelligence
• Tech or Digital Policy

We explore societal perspectives surrounding the development and application of digital technology, focusing on ethics, policy, politics, and quality of life. 2017

• Research and policy centers
• Ethical tech and responsible tech

Resident Fellows seek to advance society's understanding of surveillance capitalism and change the way Reset works by embedding within Reset to produce creative research and technology outputs.

• Fellowships
• Ethical tech and responsible tech
• Digital security and privacy

The Digital Lab Fellowship is a paid, non-resident opportunity to uncover and address emerging consumer harms in the digital world. The Fellowship may be of interest to engineers, computer scientists, information security professionals, independent researchers, academics, social scientists, and others. 

• Fellowships
• Ethical tech and responsible tech
• Consumer watchdogging

Urban Impact Lab excels at strategy development, research and analysis, program development, implementation, creative placemaking, and community engagement.

• Govtech vendors

Just One Giant Lab (JOGL) is the first research and innovation laboratory operating as a distributed, open and massive mobilisation platform for collaborative task solving.

• Partnerships for the Goals

• Challenges
• Help out
• Civic tech catalogs

We're looking for tech workers, researchers, journalists and content creators who want to tell the stories of collective action in tech in the Global South.

• labor

• Get funding
• Fellowships

iDPI looks to move beyond "fixing" existing internet infrastructures like Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter and asks what we might build if we constructed digital spaces for the public good instead.

• Research and policy centers
• Digital Public Infrastructure

S.T.O.P. at NYU fights to end discriminatory surveillance.

• Research and policy centers
• Ethical tech and responsible tech
• Digital security and privacy

SMARTFISH H2020 is an international research project which aims to develop, test and promote a suite of high-tech systems for the EU fishing sector.

• Life below water
• Sustainable cities and communities

• Smart Cities and sensors

Public Interest Technology (PiTech) at Cornell Tech catalyzes and amplifies technical advances that promote societal welfare and address systematically unfulfilled needs. The programming currently consists of a Master's-level applied internship and a public interest track in the program's product studio.

• Research and policy centers
• Public Interest Tech
• Academia

Coded Bias follows M.I.T. Media Lab computer scientist Joy Buolamwini, along with data scientists, mathematicians, and watchdog groups from all over the world, as they fight to expose the discrimination within algorithms now prevalent across all spheres of daily life. 

• Ethical tech and responsible tech
• Adjacent Fields
• Artificial Intelligence

We track progress towards the globally agreed aim of holding warming well below 2°C, and pursuing efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C.

• Climate action

• Promise trackers

In this report, we dive into the history of public investment in technologies at the foundation of Big Tech, and the imbalances between these investments and the returns to the public sector.

• reports

• Ethical tech and responsible tech
• Decentralization

netCommons is a Horizon2020 research project, which follows a novel transdisciplinary methodology on treating network infrastructure as commons, for resiliency, sustainability, self-determination, and social integration.

• research

• Community wifi
• Connectivity
• Decentralization

A media and research project to advance the tech workers movement.

• labor

• Ethical tech and responsible tech
• Solidarity networks

eDemocracy Network and the researchers at Corporate Knights Magazine launched a public engagement survey to invite the public to weigh in on budget priorities using the Vancouver-based Ethelo Decisions platform.

• Communicating with the people
• Surveys & polling

Cybersecurity for Democracy is a research-based effort to expose online threats to our social fabric – and recommend how to counter them. We are part of the Center for Cybersecurity at NYU.

• Research and policy centers
• Digital security and privacy
• Advertising

The Center for Digital Transformation researches issues related to digitization and its challenges and opportunities.

• Govtech
• Research and policy centers
• Digital transformation

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.

• Timelines
• Media and social media analysis

Reset how you publish with Hypergraph (Beta) Document your research journey step by step, before hindsight happens. Easier for you, better for science. Hypergraph (Beta) is free-to-play, free-to-access, and will have some rough edges. By using it, you can help improve it.

• Citizen science

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

• User research
• User research groups
• Graveyard

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

AidData has assembled a collection of replication datasets associated with scholarly research on aid allocation and aid effectiveness. Whenever possible, there is a link to the computer code that is necessary to replicate the results reported in a particular publication.

• Civic data
• Information & Communication Tech for Development ICT4D
• Evaluate impact

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

• cities

• Research and policy centers
• Data visualization

The Digital Equity Laboratory uncovers and addresses structural inequities that persist and evolve as technology transforms our cultural, social, and political systems.

• Research and policy centers
• Ethical tech and responsible tech
• Digital security and privacy

A participatory European community of practice made of local actors of change from different sectors and contexts dedicated to experiment, action-research, re-imagine and co-create how to live and work in Europe. CitizensLab is a self-organised community of practice currently hosted by the French organisation CRICAO. From 2016 until 2018 CitizensLab has been implemented by MitOst e.V. supported by Robert Bosch Stiftung, Stiftung Mercator, and European Cultural Foundation.

• Partner networks and coalitions

The Global Innovation Fund is a non-profit innovation fund headquartered in London with an office in Washington D.C. that invests in the development, rigorous testing, and scaling of innovations targeted at improving the lives of the world's poorest people. We believe that the best ideas for solving some of the world's most critical problems can come from anyone, anywhere. Through our grants and risk capital, we help breakthrough solutions to global development challenges from for-profit firms, non-profit organisations, researchers, and government agencies to maximise their impact and affect meaningful change.

• No poverty

• Get funding
• Funders & donors