The Civic Tech Field Guide's view of impact metrics

• resources

• Learn about civic tech
• Evaluate impact

Think of us as talent matchmakers for democracy (but with less swiping and fewer awkward one-liners)

• partisan

• Find a job or hire someone
• Job boards
• Job-matching

Adaptable buttons and mice for everyone

• Microsoft

• Hardware
• Assistive and Accessible Tech

The Affordable Connectivity Program is an FCC benefit program that helps ensure that households can afford the broadband they need for work, school, healthcare and more.

• Adjacent Fields
• Connectivity

Mozilla Foundation survey of builders' perceptions of data governance

• Build something
• Ethical tech and responsible tech
• Data governance

A programme aimed at circumventing our geographic limitations and strengthening regional connection and participation within the African civic tech community.

• Partner networks and coalitions

A self-directed learning program, adapted from a selective executive education course, intended to support data stewards in creating public value through data collaboration

• trainings

• Civic data

Filter and aggregate data to provinces or districts without code or mapping software

• Mapping tools

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

A guide to help progressive donors consider more political choices. Key learnings on the journey from non-political to political giving. The political donor experience is terrible. The reward for donating is spammy emails and phone calls. Few unbiased sources of information exist. We’re fixing that; check out the donor guide and other resources.

• guides

• Get funding
• Funders & donors

The cities in this Atlas represent the vanguard of urban governments that are hosting tests, developing their own autonomous vehicle (AV) pilots, making plans and policy, and monitoring developments in AV technologies, uses, and markets.

• mobility
• cities

• Emerging tech
• Hardware
• Automated Vehicles

A guide on how to manage technical debt in government software development projects.

• resources
• guides

• Govtech

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

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

The unregulated attention economy driving social media is fraying our democracy, threatening our mental and physical health, and exposing our children to violent and disturbing content. Our limited attention has become the most valuable resource on the internet and it is captured and manipulated via the rampant and unregulated collection of our personal data. This is surveillance capitalism at work - a relentless assault on our private data that provide intimate insights which are sold to the highest bidder, with next-to-no awareness or control. We are told that having our data taken is the price we pay for the “free” use of digital services. But this system places the priorities of corporates ahead of the social good while it manipulates our social perspective, drives division and isolates us from each other. There are few practical ways to opt out of the attention economy that depends on pervasive surveillance. And even if you manage to on an individual level, the real world impact of this data-driven social manipulation is impossible to avoid. Big Tech controls a global audience of billions with a market power that is unprecedented in the history of media. Yet they have almost no oversight and reject liability for the harms their products cause.

• Ethical tech and responsible tech

UnBias aims to provide policy recommendations, ethical guidelines and a ‘fairness toolkit’ co-produced with young people and other stakeholders that will include educational materials and resources to support youth understanding about online environments as well as raise awareness among online providers about the concerns and rights of young internet users.

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

MisinfoDay is an annual event co-hosted by the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public (CIP) and Washington State University’s Edward R. Murrow College of Communication.

• Fight disinformation
• Holidays

A great overview map and gallery of the global trend toward open streets

• mobility

• Civic maps

The 2021 Global Mayors Challenge is the farthest reaching, most ambitious to date. After uncovering the 50 most innovative urban solutions in the wake of COVID-19, the Challenge will award 15 grand prize winners $1 million each—to help cities implement their breakthrough ideas and, ultimately, to spread those ideas to other cities on a global scale.

• cities

• Get funding
• Challenges

596 Acres built tools to help neighbors see vacant lots as opportunities and create needed green spaces that become focal points for community organizing and civic engagement.

• land
• cities

• Graveyard
• Specific campaigns

After the installation, users can decide which messages they want to receive. Then, they will start getting notifications, assigned to one of six categories: alarms (emergencies), safety (e.g. meteorological warnings), breakdowns (e.g. water and sewage), housing estate (neighbourhood messages directed from individual housing estate councils), air (smog reports, exceeded dust particle limits, free communication), transport (road works, communication difficulties).

• apps
• cities

• Issue reporting

We integrate fragmented data into a powerful analytical view, providing on-demand analytics that can uncover insights at unprecedented speed.

• Public project trackers
• Challenges

Providing solutions to respect and protect your Digital Rights The IO Foundation is a non-profit organization born from a fundamental concern on the state of Digital Rights in the world. We aim to raise awareness on the importance of Digital Rights and seek to help in promoting the creation of a Universal Declaration of Digital Rights (UDDR) with the collaboration of other organizations, both from civil society and bodies of governance. To this end, we implement specific programs that help users to protect their data and metadata in their digital interactions. We also organize activities to inform people and provide them with tools to effectively protect their rights.

• Digital rights

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 Data Projects
• COVID Engagement Projects

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

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

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

• Artificial Intelligence
• Digital literacy
• Tech or Digital Policy

It educated policymakers and the public on a wide range of issues. CPSR incubated numerous projects such as Privaterra, the Public Sphere Project, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the 21st Century Project, the Civil Society Project, and the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference. Founded by U.S. computer scientists at Stanford University and Xerox PARC, CPSR had members in over 30 countries on six continents. CPSR was a non-profit 501.c.3 organization registered in California.

• Ethical tech and responsible tech
• Peer networks
• Predecessors

The ODK-X community produces free and open-source software for collecting, managing, and using data in resource-constrained environments.

• Civic data
• Data visualization
• Information & Communication Tech for Development ICT4D

Judgment Call is an award-winning game and team-based activity that puts Microsoft’s AI principles of fairness, privacy and security, reliability and safety, transparency, inclusion, and accountability into action.

• Media
• Artificial Intelligence
• Ethical tech and responsible tech

PLACE is a non-profit data trust that creates and stewards hyperlocal mapping data for a membership community that is open to all and serves the public interest.

• Mapping tools
• Data schemas and standards

A suite of govtech products mostly tailored toward local government websites.

• Govtech
• Meeting tech
• Forms

In Close Up at a Distance, Laura Kurgan offers a theoretical account of these new digital technologies of location and a series of practical experiments in making maps and images with spatial data.

• Mapping
• Books

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

• Promise trackers

The Creative Bureaucracy Festival celebrates outstanding innovation in the public sector and its contribution to a better, more sustainable, and more just world.

• Govtech
• Conferences
• Bureaucracy tech

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

• Find a job or hire someone

/dev/color is the most powerful community of Black software engineers, technologists, and executives in the world.

• racial equity

• Peer networks

The State of Mobile Internet Connectivity report is the annual flagship publication of the Connected Society programme.

• reports

• Connectivity
• Information & Communication Tech for Development ICT4D

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

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

Parliamentary Network Africa (PNAfrica) is a convenor and connector of civil society parliamentary monitoring organizations and journalists towards promoting Open Parliaments across Africa.

• Watchdogging and transparency
• Government transparency
• Parliamentary and Legislative Tech

Visualize your impact, track data trends, and share the stories that matter most.

• human rights

• Evaluate impact

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

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

GovStack offers governments with open-source tools for digital services, including building block specifications, a sandbox for testing (upcoming), and communities of practices, and more.

• Govtech
• Digital transformation
• Digital Public Infrastructure

Code for Romania's information portal for people fleeing war in Ukraine

• refugees
• Ukraine

• Mutual aid
• Disaster response and humanitarian tech

An academic and practitioner-focused journal on all aspects of technology and communities.

• Journals
• Academia
• Information & Communication Tech for Development ICT4D

Democracy Pioneers is an award for innovations that are experimenting with ways to re-energise civic participation and everyday democracy in the UK.

• Engagement tech
• Awards and prizes

The Institute for Rebooting Social Media is a three-year, “pop-up” research initiative to accelerate progress towards addressing social media’s most urgent problems, including misinformation, privacy breaches, harassment, and content governance.

• Research and policy centers
• Social media

Community engagement and organising in the rural wards of Swansea

• Participatory democracy
• Participatory budgeting
• Citizen Engagement