What Is Civic Tech? A Plain Definition, With Examples

OneBusAway shows you when your bus is coming. In 2016 it ran on open transit data and was maintained by volunteers. When Government Technology explained civic tech that year, it quoted the City of Seattle's civic technology advocate, who pointed to OneBusAway as the quintessential example.

Now consider a site where residents petition the White House, or a text-message survey a city sends before a budget vote. All three get the same label. A term that stretches that far stops telling you anything, so it is worth fixing what it means.

A plain definition

Civic tech is technology built to improve how people and their government deal with each other. Government Technology's 2016 explainer defined it as "technology that enables greater participation in government," and added that it can also help government deliver services. It noted that "government technology" is the better name for the wider world of public-sector software. The line between the two is the purpose. A permitting system a city buys to run itself is govtech. It becomes civic tech when it changes what a resident can see, say or get done.

Four kinds, with examples

Getting something done. SeeClickFix began in New Haven in 2008 as a way for residents to report problems such as potholes and graffiti. Residents use it free. Governments pay for the tools that manage the reports. CivicPlus bought it in October 2019.

Making public information usable. OneBusAway is one example. Open-data portals and livestreamed meetings belong here too. The tool shows you something that was already public but hard to reach.

Running government itself. Granicus and CivicPlus sell software to local governments for meetings, websites and communications. This is the part most often called govtech.

Having a say. Decide Madrid, launched in 2015, let residents put forward their own proposals and back others', and ran a participatory budget that, by Consul Democracy's account, grew to €100 million by 2018. Its open-source software, Consul Democracy, is now used in 35 countries.

What happened to them

Look at what became of the tools for getting something done and for having a say, and a pattern shows. Textizen, which ran text-message surveys for about forty governments, was bought by GovDelivery in July 2015. GovDelivery merged with Granicus the next year. Bang the Table, an Australian online-engagement company, was bought by Granicus in 2021. Countable, an app for following bills and contacting representatives, turned to enterprise community engagement and raised $12 million in 2021 to serve brands.

Our Lessons from Civic Tech History pages call this the narrowing survivor: what lasts is often what a paying customer, usually a government, will pay for. The builders were not wrong to follow the money. In the government cases above, the customer was the government, and it paid for tools that made its own work easier. The cost is that a tool for having a say can turn into a tool for sending notices. We cover fifty-one cases in the full set, and the two earlier posts on why civic tech keeps failing and what civic infrastructure is go further into the causes.

A test for any product with the label

Ask two questions. What can a resident do with it that they could not do before? And what does the government have to do once they have done it?

Plenty of civic tech has a good answer to the first. The second is harder, and it is the one that decides whether participation between elections lasts. A bus app needs no answer from anyone. A petition site, a survey or a vote does.

We build one of these tools, so weigh our view accordingly. Agora is an early alpha, and no elected office uses it yet. How many civic tools can name what an office must do with what residents tell it?