Main point: Most civic tech orgs aren't sustainable, and there is no clear single path or vision to get them there.
The civic tech and open government community spends a fair amount of energy persuading government counterparts to get in the game, measuring how well they do, and encouraging them to do more and better. There seems to be based on a general assumption that doing so works best when appealing to government incentives, either to make their work easier, to increase their legitimacy or to get on the...
Papers & Findings The world is ending. The 2016 Corruption Perceptions Index finds links between corruption and inequality, and notes falling scores for countries around the world. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index is titled Revenge of the “deplorables”, and notes a worsening of the worldwide “democratic recession” in 2016. Civic techs. What are...
There’s a recurrent obsession with self-naming and differentiation in international thinking about how technology can facilitate some kind of betterness (nice overviews here and here). Part of this is likely about fashion, funding and social prominence, but there’s also legitimate concerns about how our labels impact “the field”’s popular salience or ability to learn. For me, the greatest...
Last week I joined the Impacts of Civic Technology Conference 2016, a sort of annual mixer for researchers and the civic tech community, organized by MySociety to “promote and share rigorous and meaningful research into online technologies and digital democracy around the world.” The event was good (write ups here, here, here, and here), but notable for being so firmly grounded in the idea...