Over-centralization left the movement vulnerable as well. A more diverse space would not have felt the same impact of Sunlight’s internal instability, or Code for America’s shift away from funding brigades.
One could with grim amusement note that this is a microcosm of the same issue which at the national level got us into the mess we’re in today and rendered blue team ineffectual–but, that’s strictly politics and not super helpful to look into here.
I hope most of these civic technologists will find that they can continue their work at the state or local level, but it is likely many will not be able to.
My take, having watched this space and been super tangentially involved in civic hackathons and things, is that this is most useful for all the boring local and state touchpoints. Being able to access usable datasets, being able to give people in local government good tooling to do their jobs more efficiently…all of this is good. That said, even with good tools sheer combination of inertia, incompetence, and motivated self-interest one encounters can make it incredibly hard to do something even as simple as keep maps up to date–and that particular is even more pernicious given the staking out of datasets by folks like Esri.
If I had my druthers, we’d standardize at a state level on forms for all the normal shit cities do and provide a state-level depot for that stuff–including hosting and software development–and offer a supported “toolbox” of very simple tools that cities could compose to match their needs (do you have a lot of oil and gas? okay, here’s the stuff for registering wells or whatever. do you have a library? okay, here’s basic circulation desk stuff. do you have a water treatment plant? your own police force? fire department? …etc.) Ditto for useful data and querying.
Then, periodically, there’d be like quarterly or yearly conferences so different state bureaus could share what tools the’ve made and lessons they’ve learned and bubble those up to a federal repository of same.
The problems of course are numerous–an incomplete accounting here:
Every city is going to think it’s a special snowflake with its own needs…and this is even true!
Every city is going to have civil servants that do not want to change how they do anything because they’re scared of getting in trouble, having to learn a new thing, or risking their gravy train.
Even without the current atmosphere, long-term maintenance of development and infrastructure projects is…dicey…at every level of government.
This sort of thing directly cuts into the rackets of the usual beltway bandits and firms who specialize in extracting maximum shareholder value from unlucky or ignorant government officials.
At least in the US, this sort of work would be suspect (“the gubberment can’t do anything worthwhile, private profit motives will save us, muh reaganz”) and an easy target for folks looking to pander to their bases.
A good chunk of the current generation of developers have been brain-rotted by the ZIRP years or are young and full of that New Shiny energy; this makes them ill-suited to the task of boring, durable, tiny, maintainable software.
I’d love to see this fixed, but I’m not enough of a fool to expect it nor enough of a masochist to attempt it.
I appreciate the framing. The “third wave” will also present an incredible opportunity. Local, state, and eventually national governments are going to need to contract people to work on their technology projects, and the erstwhile civic tech people will be in the best position to do so. That said, they need to organize themselves in ways that can set the example not just for civic tech as a (admittedly tiny) subfield, but for information technology writ large. Here I’m thinking specifically of worker owned cooperatives or even networks of coops that do this kind of work successfully across the country and, if possible, the world.
Author here, I definitely agree with this. It’s an area I know very little about but am looking to learn. I work with some incredibly talented students in a unique civic tech oriented degree program and feel like they have the potential to pilot new models in particular. If you, or anyone reading this knows a good place to start having those conversations I’d be very interested.
How does the funding for these projects go? Is it similar to academia, where you’re chasing after grants? Or are there some more … uhh… stable sources as well?
Often it’s foundation-driven funding. When I was at CfA the active ones were Knight, Rockefeller, Omidyar, Google, maybe Macarthur. I’m not sure who’s in the sector now. They tend to echo the priorities of government and academia which are clearly upside-down at the moment.
I thoroughly enjoyed “Recoding America” which IIRC was written by someone very involved with Code For America (a founder, perhaps?–it’s been a while). Even still, while I sort of understand what Civic Tech is inside of government (for example, healthcare.gov or some other government form), I don’t really have a good idea about what Civic Tech looks like outside of government? What are some good examples of things non-government agencies have built? Do they require partnering with a government entity, or are there things that people can do for their fellow citizens independent of a local government? How can I find out if there is anything happening in my state or municipality?
Some of the classic “first wave” examples would be sites like everyblock (now defunct), govtrack.us or my own project openstates.org. These projects aim to help citizens better understand what’s happening at different levels of government (local, federal, and state respectively) and, in theory, give them more of a voice. These projects do not require partnership with governments (in fact, at the federal and state level it is very hard to “partner” in any meaningful way if you’re a small/independent team) but benefit from open data if it is available. (But do not require it, web scraping is a big part of the job in a lot of cases, since improving a government interface often means a crufty HTML site a vendor built in 2004.
Alaveteli is a codebase that enables you to run your own Freedom of Information website in any country.
FixMyStreet is a codebase which in its basic form will let you run a site that helps citizens report street issues to the authorities responsible for fixing them. It has also been successfully adapted many times for other projects which a) collect reports or posts with defined geographical points, b) optionally also collect a category, description and photos, and c) forward these to an email address which is defined by the user inputs.
EveryPolitician is a repository of open, structured data which aims to cover every politician in every country in the world. It’s free to use and should be useful to anyone running a website or app which helps citizens monitor, understand or contact their elected representatives.
These represent three common kinds of civic applications: those that provide a better interface to a government service (make it easier to file FOIAs), those that crowdsource information within communities, and those that bring together information from different governments or levels of government into a single place to make it easier for the citizen to digest. (Different units of governance often themselves have little incentive or ability to collaborate directly.)
I wish I could point you towards an easy way to find stuff in your state or municipality, that is a part of what we lost when we lost Sunlight & the brigades.
One could with grim amusement note that this is a microcosm of the same issue which at the national level got us into the mess we’re in today and rendered blue team ineffectual–but, that’s strictly politics and not super helpful to look into here.
My take, having watched this space and been super tangentially involved in civic hackathons and things, is that this is most useful for all the boring local and state touchpoints. Being able to access usable datasets, being able to give people in local government good tooling to do their jobs more efficiently…all of this is good. That said, even with good tools sheer combination of inertia, incompetence, and motivated self-interest one encounters can make it incredibly hard to do something even as simple as keep maps up to date–and that particular is even more pernicious given the staking out of datasets by folks like Esri.
If I had my druthers, we’d standardize at a state level on forms for all the normal shit cities do and provide a state-level depot for that stuff–including hosting and software development–and offer a supported “toolbox” of very simple tools that cities could compose to match their needs (do you have a lot of oil and gas? okay, here’s the stuff for registering wells or whatever. do you have a library? okay, here’s basic circulation desk stuff. do you have a water treatment plant? your own police force? fire department? …etc.) Ditto for useful data and querying.
Then, periodically, there’d be like quarterly or yearly conferences so different state bureaus could share what tools the’ve made and lessons they’ve learned and bubble those up to a federal repository of same.
The problems of course are numerous–an incomplete accounting here:
I’d love to see this fixed, but I’m not enough of a fool to expect it nor enough of a masochist to attempt it.
I appreciate the framing. The “third wave” will also present an incredible opportunity. Local, state, and eventually national governments are going to need to contract people to work on their technology projects, and the erstwhile civic tech people will be in the best position to do so. That said, they need to organize themselves in ways that can set the example not just for civic tech as a (admittedly tiny) subfield, but for information technology writ large. Here I’m thinking specifically of worker owned cooperatives or even networks of coops that do this kind of work successfully across the country and, if possible, the world.
Author here, I definitely agree with this. It’s an area I know very little about but am looking to learn. I work with some incredibly talented students in a unique civic tech oriented degree program and feel like they have the potential to pilot new models in particular. If you, or anyone reading this knows a good place to start having those conversations I’d be very interested.
How does the funding for these projects go? Is it similar to academia, where you’re chasing after grants? Or are there some more … uhh… stable sources as well?
Often it’s foundation-driven funding. When I was at CfA the active ones were Knight, Rockefeller, Omidyar, Google, maybe Macarthur. I’m not sure who’s in the sector now. They tend to echo the priorities of government and academia which are clearly upside-down at the moment.
Yep. My open data gig way back when was funded by the Knight Foundation.
I thoroughly enjoyed “Recoding America” which IIRC was written by someone very involved with Code For America (a founder, perhaps?–it’s been a while). Even still, while I sort of understand what Civic Tech is inside of government (for example, healthcare.gov or some other government form), I don’t really have a good idea about what Civic Tech looks like outside of government? What are some good examples of things non-government agencies have built? Do they require partnering with a government entity, or are there things that people can do for their fellow citizens independent of a local government? How can I find out if there is anything happening in my state or municipality?
Some of the classic “first wave” examples would be sites like everyblock (now defunct), govtrack.us or my own project openstates.org. These projects aim to help citizens better understand what’s happening at different levels of government (local, federal, and state respectively) and, in theory, give them more of a voice. These projects do not require partnership with governments (in fact, at the federal and state level it is very hard to “partner” in any meaningful way if you’re a small/independent team) but benefit from open data if it is available. (But do not require it, web scraping is a big part of the job in a lot of cases, since improving a government interface often means a crufty HTML site a vendor built in 2004.
If you look at MySociety, the pre-eminent UK civic tech organization, (https://www.mysociety.org/advice-and-support/) their flagship products are
These represent three common kinds of civic applications: those that provide a better interface to a government service (make it easier to file FOIAs), those that crowdsource information within communities, and those that bring together information from different governments or levels of government into a single place to make it easier for the citizen to digest. (Different units of governance often themselves have little incentive or ability to collaborate directly.)
I wish I could point you towards an easy way to find stuff in your state or municipality, that is a part of what we lost when we lost Sunlight & the brigades.