Design for Civic Change is a professional development program for government workers interested in implementing community-engaged design within their work.

• trainings
• coaching

• Govtech
• Participatory democracy

The Initiative for Media Freedom (IMF) is a five-year program implemented by Internews and funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

• Media
• Fight disinformation

Ethiopia Check debunks claims and exposes fake news using its platforms on Facebook (52,000 followers), Twitter (7,000 followers) and Telegram (34,000 followers).

• Media
• Fight disinformation
• Factchecking

Animal Politico's fact-checking project. "Fooling a dog is difficult."

• Media
• Fight disinformation
• Factchecking

DUBAWA is Nigeria’s independent verification and fact-checking platform, initiated by the Premium Times Centre for Investigative Journalism (PTCIJ) and supported by the most influential newsrooms and civic organisations in the country to help amplify the culture of truth in public discourse, public policy, and media practice.

• Media
• Fight disinformation
• Factchecking

The Digital Enquirer Kit is centered around misinformation, fact-based research and digital security.

• guides

• Media
• Fight disinformation
• Media literacy

Mission: Determine the veracity of the political statements that refer to specific data based on their contrast with reliable sources.

• Media
• Fight disinformation
• Factchecking

Suara Masyarakat (Community Voices) is an Internews Europe project with local Malaysian partners on a 36-month project which aims to strengthen capacity of Malaysian media as the key actor in promoting good governance, transparency and accountability.

• Media
• Fight disinformation

South Asia Check is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit initiative by Panos South Asia which aims to promote accuracy and accountability in public debate.

• Media
• Fight disinformation
• Factchecking

Goal is to promote cross-border learning and networking on a wide range of existing initiatives and to develop new capacity in political participation, government transparency and election administration.

• Media
• Voting and elections
• Election administration

PUSAD is a center for research on religion and democracy, they conduct research on hate speech and political disinformation.

• hate speech

• Media
• Fight disinformation

The Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA) was formed in the firm belief that there is an urgent need to strengthen institution and capacity-building for good governance and conflict transformation in Sri Lanka and that non-partisan civil society groups have an important and constructive contribution to make to this process.

• Engagement tech
• Citizen Engagement

Animal Político is a digital native medium that brings together journalists, designers, programmers and video editors to create content with rigor, precision and thought to serve citizens.

• Media
• Journalism

The Magnifier is the first news agency in Brazil to specialize in journalistic technique known worldwide as fact-checking and was founded on November 1, 2015.

• Media
• Fight disinformation
• Factchecking

Learn about, discover resources, and explore research on the industry using our personal data to influence citizens in political campaigns.

• Advocacy tech
• Organize campaigns
• Digital security and privacy

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

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

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

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

FastFWD is a partnership among The City of Philadelphia, GoodCompany Group, a social enterprise accelerator, and the Wharton Social Impact Initiative.

• cities

• Accelerators

The hidden costs of artificial intelligence, from natural resources and labor to privacy and freedom What happens when artificial intelligence saturates political life and depletes the planet? How is AI shaping our understanding of ourselves and our societies? In this book Kate Crawford reveals how this planetary network is fueling a shift toward undemocratic governance and increased inequality. Drawing on more than a decade of research, award-winning science, and technology, Crawford reveals how AI is a technology of extraction: from the energy and minerals needed to build and sustain its infrastructure, to the exploited workers behind “automated” services, to the data AI collects from us. Rather than taking a narrow focus on code and algorithms, Crawford offers us a political and a material perspective on what it takes to make artificial intelligence and where it goes wrong. While technical systems present a veneer of objectivity, they are always systems of power. This is an urgent account of what is at stake as technology companies use artificial intelligence to reshape the world. Kate Crawford is a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research, the inaugural visiting chair of AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure, and the Miegunyah distinguished visiting fellow at the University of Melbourne. She co-founded the AI Now Institute at New York University, and leads the Foundations of Machine Learning international working group. She lives in New York City. By Kate Crawford

• Books

We are a driver-owned ridehailing cooperative in New York City.

• mobility
• gig economy

• Platform coops

All In: Data for Community Health is a nationwide learning collaborative that helps communities build capacity to address the social determinants of health through multi-sector data sharing collaborations.

• health
• Good health and well-being

• Civic data
• Digital literacy

New York City is launching the second cohort of its NYC[x] Innovation Fellows program to expand on this successful collaboration, embedding small teams of technologists with City agencies to rapidly solve specific challenges through the use of best practices in digital service delivery.

• cities

• Fellowships
• Pro bono and volunteer

The Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer has developed the NYC Internet of Things Strategy in order to support a healthy cross-sector IoT ecosystem in New York City – one that is productive, responsible, and fair.

• Smart Cities and sensors

One Dollar Lots documented each time NYC sells or plans to sell a vacant lot to developers for $1. This tool can help New Yorkers better shape how dollar sales of public land impact our neighborhoods and city.

• land
• cities

• Civic maps

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

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

With the Beta launch of the Angeleno Account, the City of Los Angeles is building the foundation for a common account to access your City apps.

• cities

• Govtech
• Identity

DEDA helps data analysts, project managers and policy makers to recognize ethical issues in data projects, data management and data policies.

• toolkits
• resources

• Ethical tech and responsible tech

Tonika Lewis Johnson’s Folded Map™ Project visually connects residents who live at corresponding addresses on the North and South Sides of Chicago.

• racial equity

• Civic maps
• Artistic interventions

This page provides an overview of open source projects that are developed, commissioned or funded by public administrations in the state of Berlin. With this offer, we want to improve the transparency of the public IT landscape and invite the digital community in Berlin and beyond to work collaboratively on the development of good software for our city. Diese Seite bietet einen Überblick über Open Source-Projekte, die von öffentlichen Verwaltungen im Land Berlin entwickelt, beauftragt oder gefördert werden. Mit diesem Angebot möchten wir die Transparenz der öffentlichen IT-Landschaft verbessern und die Digital-Community in Berlin und darüber hinaus einladen, kollaborativ an der Entwicklung guter Software für unsere Stadt zu arbeiten.

• cities

• Civic tech catalogs

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

• Media
• Games and gamification

A first-of-its-kind effort for community, non-profit, and private organizations to share data with the City to aid in COVID-19 response and recovery efforts.

• Civic data
• COVID Data Projects
• Public Private Partnerships

DxD is an annual exhibition celebrating tangible and multimedia expressions of New York City’s Open Data. It provides space for creative engagement with data and new perspectives and understanding of its role in our society.

• Data visualization
• Artistic interventions

A space to enhance civic participation, promote civic trust, and strengthen democracy in New York City

• Decidim

• Engagement tech
• Participatory democracy
• Participatory budgeting

People-powered news on your local government. We’re putting every public meeting on the record. A City Bureau project.

• local

• Media
• Crowdsourcing
• Archives

The Anti-Racism Extended Reality Studio, or UA-ARXRS hopes to test the capacity of immersive and interactive “extended reality” tools, including volumetric video capture, virtual reality and digital narrative.

• racial equity

• Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR, AR, MR)

Civic Bridge recruits private sector professionals to volunteer their time to work alongside government employees on critical City issues. Pro-bono, private-sector support can increase the City’s capacity to identify and analyze pain points, provide agile and iterative solutions, as well as increase interest in cross-sector collaborations. Civic Bridge is a cohort-based program, the program builds off of the example set by a number of Cities such as Chicago’s Civic Consulting Alliance and San Jose’s Silicon Valley Talent Partnership .

• Pro bono and volunteer

The Infrastructure Accessibility Index - IAT© highlights areas with ample services and easy pedestrian access to different types of infrastructure. IAT© is based on the "15-minute city" idea, which says that all important facilities and services for urban dwellers should be easily accessible within a 15-minute timeframe. We assess infrastructure accessibility by surveying the facilities reachable within 15 minutes on foot, by car and by public transport.

• cities

• Civic data
• Indicators

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

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

The leading news platform on urban mobility and innovation, reaching an international audience of city leaders.

• cities

• News and blogs

Documenting the use of defensive urban design in the Greater Toronto Area and beyond.

• cities
• place-based

• Archives
• Artistic interventions

To recognize outstanding Smart Cities projects, IDC launched its Smart City North America Awards (SCNAA).

• Smart Cities and sensors
• Awards and prizes

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

Baltimore Mayor Brandon M. Scott created an open source tool to track progress made during his administration’s first 100 days.

• Promise trackers

Harvard report on “smart city” technology risks to civil liberties.

• reports
• public space

• Smart Cities and sensors

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

• Find a job or hire someone

Explore how your local criminal justice system performs.

• Civic data
• Open data publishing portals
• Justice tech

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

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