Civic technology
Civic technology, or civic tech, enhances the relationship between the people and government with software for communications, decision-making, service delivery, and political process. It includes information and communications technology supporting government with software built by community-led teams of volunteers, nonprofits, consultants, and private companies as well as embedded tech teams working within government.
Definition
There are four different types of e-government services and civic technology falls within the category of government-to-citizen, the other categories include government-to-business, government-to-government, and government-to-employees.A 2013 report from the Knight Foundation, an American non-profit, attempts to map different focuses within the civic technology space. It broadly categorizes civic technology projects into two categories: open government and community action.
| Open government, includes: | Community action, includes: |
| Data access and transparency | Peer-to-peer local sharing |
| Voting | Civic crowd-funding |
| Visualization and mapping | Neighborhood forums |
| Data utility | Information crowdsourcing |
| Resident feedback | Community organizing |
| Public decision making |
Within the Knight Foundation, they "care about ensuring that people have access to the news and information that they need to lead their lives in a democracy." They seek to establish a precedent of accessibility to information and the sharing of these sources for the common benefit of the people. With this accessibility, they enable for a more transparent, open system of sharing information for the benefit of more insightful, informed users and citizens that can engage more often in political and social matters that pertain to their concerns and to their lives.
Citizens are also now given access to their representatives through social media. They are able to express their concerns directly to government officials through sites like Twitter and Facebook. There have even been past cases of online voting being a polling option for local elections, which have seen vastly increased turnouts, such as in an Arizona election in 2000 which saw a turnout double that of the previous election. It is asserted though that civic technology in government provides for a good management technique but lacks in providing fair democratic representation. Social media is also becoming a growing aspect of government, towards furthering the communication between the government and its citizenry and towards greater transparency within the governmental sectors. This innovation is facilitating a change towards a more progressive and open government, based on civic engagement and technology for the people. With social media as a communicating platform, it enables the government to provide information to the constituents and citizens on the legislative processes and what is occurring in the Congress, for the sake of the citizens' concerns with the government procedures.
The definition of what constitutes civic technology is contested to a certain extent, especially with regards to companies engaged in the sharing economy, such as Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb. For example, Airbnb's ability to provide New York residents with housing during the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy could be considered a form of civic technology. However, Nathaniel Heller, Managing Director of the Research for Development Institute's Governance Program contends that for-profit platforms definitively fall outside of the scope of civic technology: Heller has said that "while citizen-to-citizen sharing is indeed involved, the mission of these companies is focused on maximizing profit for their investors, not any sort of experiment in building social capital." From a goal perspective, civic technology can be understood as "the use of technology for the public good".
Microsoft's Technology & Civic Engagement Team have attempted to produce a precise taxonomy of civic technology through a bottom-up approach. They inventoried the existing initiatives and classified them according to:
- their functions
- the social processes they involved
- their users and customers
- the degree of change they sought
- the depth of the technology.
The Technology & Civic Engagement Team have also produced a network visualization tool for civic technology organizations, .
Technology that is designed to benefit the citizenry places the governments under pressure "to change and innovate the way in which their bureaucracies relate to citizens." E-government initiatives have been established and supported in order to strengthen the democratic values of governmental institutions, which can include Transparency, along with improving the efficiency of the legislative processes to make the government more accountable and reactive to citizens' concerns. These will further civic engagement within the political spectrum for the sake of greater Direct representation and a more democratic political system.
Civic hacking is a way to refer to problem solving by programmers, designers, data scientists, communicators, organizers, entrepreneurs, and government employees. Some projects are led by nonprofits, such as Code for America and mySociety. The work often includes paid staff and the contributions of volunteers.
As the field of civic technology advances further through the coming years it seems as though apps and handheld devices will become a key focus for development as more companies and municipalities reach out to developers to help with specific issues. Apps are being used in conjunction with hand held devices to make life easier. Tasks such as communication, data tracking, and safety are just a few of the topics app developers and communities have tried to make easier. The cheapest way for citizens to get help and information is through neighbors and others around them. By linking people through apps and websites that harbor conversation and promote civil service cities have found an inexpensive way to provide services to its people.
As civic technology is "just a piece of the $25.5 billion that government spends on external information technology," it is not difficult to see how this sector will grow from here on out towards fostering more innovation in the public and private sectors and towards furthering civic engagement within these sectors and with these platforms of technology.
Worldwide
A worldwide organization for civic tech is the Open Government Partnership. It "is a multilateral initiative that aims to secure concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance." Created in 2011 by eight founding governments, the OGP gathers every year for a summit. Countries involved are located mainly in America, Europe and South-Asia. Only a few African countries are part of the OGP, though South Africa is one of the founding countries.Technological progress is rampant throughout the nations of the world, but there are dividing efforts and adoption techniques in how rapid certain countries are progressing compared to others. How countries are able to use information pertains to how devoted nations are to integrating technology into the lives of their citizens and businesses. Local and national governments are funding tens of billions of dollars towards information technology, for the sake of improving the functions and operations of this technology to work for the people and the governments. With more governments attaining a grasp on these technologies, it is paving the way towards more progressive and democratic political systems, for the concerns of future society and for those of the citizens of these nations.
Civic technology in Africa
Burkina Faso
Government-led initiatives
The government of Burkina Faso has a government website portal offering citizens online information about the government structure, their constitution, and laws.Kenya
Citizen-led initiatives
Launched in Kenya in 2014, "MajiVoice" is a joint initiative by the Water Services Regulatory Board and the World Bank's Water and Sanitation Program. As opposed to walk-in complaint centers, the initiative enables Kenyan citizens to report complaints with regards to water services via multiple channels of technology. The platform allows for communication between citizens and water service providers with the intention to improve service delivery in impoverished areas and user satisfaction. Users are given four options to report their water complaints. They can dial a number and report a complaint, send a text message through their cell phone, or login to an online portal through a web browser on their phone or their laptop. One evaluation highlights the citizen engagement achieved after its implementation, from 400 complaints a month to 4000 complaints, and resolution rates from 46 percent to 94 percentSouth Africa
Government-led initiatives
The South African government has a website portal for citizens called www.gov.za - this was created by Center for Public Service Innovation in partnership with the Department of Public Service and Administration and the State Information Technology Agency. The government portal allows the citizens to interact with their government and provide feedback, request forms online, as well as access online to laws and contact information for lawmakers.Uganda
Government-led initiatives
The Ugandan government has a website portal created for citizens called Parliament Portal, which gives citizens online access to laws, their constitution, and election related news.Citizen-led initiatives
U- Report, a mobile platform introduced by UNICEF Uganda in 2011, is an initiative that runs large scale polls with Ugandan youth on a wide range of issues, ranging from safety to access to education to inflation to early marriage. The goal of the initiative was to have Ugandan youth play a role in civic engagement within the context of local issues. U-Report is still active, with over 240,000 users across Uganda. Support for the initiative primarily came from the aid of the government, NGO's, youth organizations, faith based organizations, and private companies. Users sign up for the program for free by sending a text on their phone, then every week "U-Reporters" answer a question regarding a public issue. Poll results are published in public media outlets such as newspapers, radio, etc. UNICEF takes these responses and provides members of parliament a weekly review of these results, acting as a bridge between government and Ugandan youth.Civic technology in Asia
Taiwan
Taiwan has the world’s most vibrant civic technology sector.Citizen-led initiatives
The vTaiwan was created initially by members of the open source community and later as a collaboration with the Taiwan's government. They use a conversation tool called pol.is that leverages machine learning to scale online discussion. Governemnt minister Audrey Tang has been instrumental in popularizing civic technology in Taiwan and it formed a key component of Taiwan’s successful response to the COVID-19 epidemic.Civic technology in Oceania
Australia
Citizen-led initiatives
In Australia, a platform and proposed political party called MiVote has a mobile app for citizens to learn about policy and cast their vote for the policies they support. MiVote politicians elected to office would then vote in support of the majority position of the people using the app.Civic technology in Europe
Denmark
Government-led initiatives
In 2002, MindLab an innovation public sector service design group was established by the Danish ministries of Business and Growth, Employment, and Children and Education. MindLab was the one of the world's first public sector design innovation labs and their work inspired the proliferation of similar labs and user-centered design methodologies deployed in many countries worldwide. The design methods used at MindLab are typically an iterative approach of rapid prototyping and testing to evolve not just their government projects, but also government organizational structure using ethnographic-inspired user research, creative ideation processes, and visualization and modeling of service prototypes. In Denmark, design within the public sector has been applied to a variety of projects including rethinking Copenhagen's waste management, improving social interactions between convicts and guards in Danish prisons, transforming services in Odense for mentally disabled adults and more.Estonia
In 2013 the online platform People's Assembly was launched for crowdsourcing ideas and proposals to amend Estonia's electoral laws, political party law, and other issues related to democracy.France
The most dynamic French city regarding civic tech is Paris, with many initiatives moving in the Sentier, a neighborhood known for being a tech hub. According to Le Monde, French civic tech is "already a reality" but lacks investments to scale up.Government-led initiatives
In France, public data are available on data.gouv.fr by the Etalab mission, located under the authority of the Prime Minister.Government agencies are also leading large citizen consultation through the Conseil national du numérique, for example with the law about the digital republic.
Citizen-led initiatives
The French citizen community for civic tech is gathered in the collective Démocratie ouverte. The main purpose of this collective is to enhance democracy to increase citizen power, improve the way to decide collectively and update the political system. Démocratie ouverte gathers many projects focused on understanding politics, renewing institutions, participating in democracy, and public action.Several open-source, non-profit web platforms have been launched nationwide to support citizen's direct involvement: Communecter.org, Demodyne.org as well as Democracy OS France.
LaPrimaire.org organizes open primaries to allow the French to choose the candidates they wish to run for public elections
Iceland
The Icelandic constitutional reform, 2010–13 instituted a process for reviewing and redrafting their constitution after the 2008 financial crisis, using social media to gather feedback on twelve successive drafts.Beginning in October 2011, a Citizens Foundation platform called Betri Reykjavik had been implemented for citizens to inform each other and vote on issues. Each month the city council formally evaluates the top proposals before issuing an official response to each participant. As of 2017, the number of proposals approved by the city council reached 769.
The Pirate Party uses the crowdsourcing platform Píratar for members to create party policies.
Italy
Citizen-led initiatives
A consortium made by TOP-IX, FBK and RENA created the Italian civic tech school. The first edition was in May 2016 in Turin.The Five Star Movement, an Italian political party has a tool called Rousseau which gives members a way to communicate with their representatives.
Spain
The Madrid City Council has a department of Citizen Participation that facilitates a platform called Decide Madrid for registered users to discuss topics with others in the city, propose actions for the City Council, and submit ideas for how to spend a portion of the budget on projects voted on through participatory budgeting.Podemos uses a reddit called Plaza Podemos where anybody can propose and vote on ideas.
Sweden
The City of Stockholm has a make-a-suggestion page on stockholm.se and available as an app, allowing citizens to report any ideas for improvement in the city along with a photo and GPS. After receiving a suggestion, it is sent to the appropriate office that can place a work order. During 2016, one hundred thousand requests were recorded. This e-service began in September 2013.The city government of Gothenburg has an online participatory voting system, open for every citizen to propose changes and solutions. When a proposal receives more than 200 votes, it is delivered to the relevant political committee.
United Kingdom
Government-led initiatives
In 2007 and 2008 documents from the British government explore the concept of "user-driven public services" and scenarios of highly personalized public services. The documents proposed a new view on the role of service providers and users in the development of new and highly customized public services, utilizing user involvement. This view has been explored through an initiative in the UK. Under the influence of the European Union, the possibilities of service design for the public sector are being researched, picked up, and promoted in countries such as Belgium.Care Opinion was set up to strengthen the voice of patients in the NHS in 2005. Behavioural Insights Team was originally part of the UK cabinet and was founded in 2010, in order to apply nudge theory to try to improve UK government policy, services and save money. As of 2014, BIT became a decentralized, semi-privatized company with Nesta, BIT employees and the UK government each owning a third of this new business. That same year a Nudge unit was added to the United States government under president Obama, referred to as the 'US Nudge Unit,' working within the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Citizen-led initiatives
.com is a website and app developed by mySociety, a UK based civic technology company that works to make online democracy tools for UK citizens. FixMyStreet allows citizens in the United Kingdom to report public infrastructure issues to the proper local authority. FixMyStreet became inspiration to many countries around the world that followed suit to use civic technology to better public infrastructure. The website was funded by the Department for Constitutional Affairs Innovation fund and created by mySociety. Along with the platform itself, mySociety released FixMyStreet, a free and open-source software framework that allows users to create their own website to report street problems. mySociety has many different tools, like parliamentary monitoring ones, that work in many countries for different types of governance. When such tools are integrated into government systems, citizens can not only understand the inner workings of their now transparent government, but also have the means to "exert influence over the people in power". Newspeak House is a community space and venue focused on building a community of civic and political technology practitioners in the United Kingdom.Spacehive is a crowdfunding platform for civic improvement projects that allows citizens and local groups to propose project ideas such as improving a local park or starting a street market. Projects are then funding by a mix of citizens, companies and government bodies. The platform is used by several councils including the Mayor of London to co-fund projects.
Democracy Club is a community interest company, founded in 2009 to provide British voters with easy access to candidate lists in upcoming elections. Democracy Club uses a network of volunteers to crowdsource information about candidates which is then presented to voters via a postcode search on the website whocanivotefor.co.uk. Democracy Club also works with the Electoral Commission to provide data for a national polling station finder at wheredoivote.co.uk and on the Commission's own Your Vote Matters website.
Ukraine
Government-led initiatives
In Ukraine, major civic tech movement started out with open data reform in 2014. As for now, public data are available on data.gov.ua, national open data portal.Citizen-led initiatives
Some widely used Ukrainian civic tech projects are donor recruitment platform DonorUA, Ukrainian companies' data and court register monitoring service Open Data Bot, participatory budgeting platform "Громадський проект". The latter accounts for over 3 million users.In 2017, to foster the growth of civic tech initiatives, Ukrainian NGO SocialBoost launched 1991 Civic Tech Center, a dedicated community space in country's capital, Kyiv. The space opened following a $480,000 grant from Omidyar Network, the philanthropic investment firm established by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.
Civic technology in North America
Canada
Government-led initiatives
Canadian Digital Service was launched in 2017, as part of an attempt to bring better IT to the Canadian government. The CDS was established within the Treasury Board of Canada the Canadian agency that oversees spending within departments and the operations of the public service. Scott Brison, the president of the Canadian Treasury Board, launched CDS and was Canada's first minister of digital government.Citizen-led initiatives
As in other countries, the Canadian civic technology movement is home to several organizations. Code for Canada is a non-profit group, following somewhat the model of Code for America. Several cities or regions host civic technology groups with regular meetings : Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Waterloo Region, Toronto, Ottawa,Fredericton, Saint John, and Halifax.United States
Government-led initiatives
The Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations sought initiatives to further openness of the government, through either increased use of technology in political institutions or efficient ways to further civic engagement. The Obama administration pursued an Open Government Initiative based on principles of transparency and civic engagement. This strategy has paved the way for increased governmental transparency within other nations to improve democratically for the citizens' benefit and allow for greater participation within politics from a citizen's perspective. During his run for president, Obama was "tied directly to the extensive use of social media by the campaign."According to a study conducted by the International Data Corporation, an estimated $6.4 billion will be spent on civic technology in 2015 out of approximately $25.5 billion that governments in the United States will spend on external-facing technology projects. A Knight Foundation survey of the civic technology field found that the number of civic technology companies grew by roughly 23% annually between 2008 and 2013.
Citizen-led initiatives
Civic technology is built by a variety of companies, organizations and volunteer groups. One prominent example is Code for America, a not-for-profit based in San Francisco, working toward addressing the gap between the government and citizens. College students from Harvard University created the national non-profit Coding it Forward that creates data science and technology internships for undergraduate and graduate students in United States federal agencies. Another example of a civic technology organization is the Chi Hack Night, based in Chicago. The Chi Hack Night is a weekly, volunteer-run event for building, sharing and learning about civic technology. Civic Hall is a coworking and event space in New York City for people who want to contribute to civic-minded projects using technology. And OpenGov creates software designed to enable public agencies to make data-driven decisions, improve budgeting and planning, and inform elected officials and citizens.OneBusAway, a mobile app that displays real-time transit info, exemplifies the open data use of civic technology. It is maintained by volunteers and has the civic utility of helping people navigate their way through cities. It follows the idea that technology can be a tool for which government can act as a society-equalizer.
Princeton University Professor Andrew Appel set out to prove how easy it was to hack into a voting machine. On February 3, 2007, he and a graduate student, Alex Halderman, purchased a voting machine, and Halderman picked the lock in 7 seconds. They removed the 4 ROM chips and replaced them with modified versions of their own: a version of modified firmware that could throw off the machine's results, subtly altering the tally of votes, never to betray a hint to the voter. It took less than 7 minutes to complete the process.
In September 2016, Appel wrote a testimony for the Congress House Subcommittee on Information Technology hearing on "Cybersecurity: Ensuring the Integrity of the Ballot Box", suggesting to for Congress to eliminate touchscreen voting machines after the election of 2016, and that it require all elections be subject to sensible auditing after every election to ensure that the systems are functioning properly and to prove to the American people that their votes are counted as cast.
Mexico
Government-led initiatives
Within the Mexican president's office, there is a national digital strategy coordinator who works on Mexico's national digital strategy. The office has created the gob.mx portal, a website designed for Mexican citizen to engage with their government, as well as a system to share open government data. According to McKinsey & Company, in a 2018 survey Mexico had the worst-rated citizen experience for convenience and accessibility of Mexican government services, of the group of countries surveyed.Citizen-led initiatives
Arena Electoral was an online platform created by Fundación Ethos during the Mexican electoral process of 2012 to promote responsible voting. An online simulation was created by taking the four presidential candidates in that election cycle and each were given policy issues based on the Mexican national agenda that they had to come up with a solution to. Once each candidate gave their solutions, the platform published it on their website and left it to the Mexican citizens to vote for the best policy.Civic technology in South America
Argentina
Partido de la Red is an Argentinean political party using the DemocracyOS open-source software with the goal of electing representatives who vote according to what citizens decides online.Effects of civic technology
Effects on social behavior and civic engagement
Because of the conveniences provided by civic technology, there are benefits as well as growing concern about the effects it may have on social behavior and civic engagement. New technology allows for connectivity and new communications, as well as changing how we interact with issues and contexts beyond one's intimate sphere. Civic technology affords transparency in government with open-government data, and allows more people of diverse socioeconomic levels to be able to build and engage with civic matters in a way that was not possible prior.Communication
The importance of face-to-face interactions has also been called to question with the increase in e-mails and social media and a decrease in traditional, in-person social interaction. Technology as a whole may be responsible for this change in social norm, but it also holds potential for turning it around with audio and video communication capabilities. More research needs to be conducted in order to determine if these are appropriate substitutes for in-person interaction, or if any substitute is even feasible.Preece & Shneiderman discuss the important social aspect of civic technology with a discussion of the "reader-to-leader framework", which follows that users inform readers, who inform communicators, who then inform collaborators, before finally reaching leaders. This chain of communication allows for the interests of the masses to be communicated to the implementers.
Elections
Regarding elections and online polling, there is the potential for voters to make less informed decisions because of the ease of voting. Although many more voters will turn out, they may only be doing so because it is easy and may not be consciously making a decision based on their own synthesized opinion. It's suggested that if online voting becomes more common, so should constituent-led discussions regarding the issues or candidates being polled.Effects on socioeconomics
With advanced technologies coming at higher costs and with an increased reliance on civic technologies may leave low-income families in the dark if they cannot afford the platforms for civic technology, such as computers and tablets. This causes an increase in the gap between lower and middle/high socioeconomic class families.Knowledge of how to use computers is equally important when considering factors of accessing civic technology applications online, and is also generally lower in low-income households. Public Schools have taken the lead in ensuring proper technology access and education in the classroom to better prepare children for the high-tech world, but there is still a clear difference between online contributions from those with and without experience on the internet.