Fifty-One Civic Technology Platforms, and Why They Ended

Lessons from Civic Tech History now holds 51 case studies and eight failure patterns. It launched in July with 29 cases and six patterns. It is free to read.

Every case follows the same structure: what the platform bet on, what worked, the mechanism by which it came apart, and what we take from it. Every case carries its sources.

The patterns are the point

A list of dead platforms is a curiosity. A named set of recurring mechanisms is something you can design against.

The eight are the supply-side cold start, the business-model void, the engagement trap, transparency mistaken for participation, the advisory ceiling, partisan capture, the vendor endgame, and the narrowing survivor.

What we added, and what we left out

This batch closes out the candidate list named in the Civic Tech Field Guide''s own writing on the subject. Of the eighteen platforms they name, we wrote eleven and skipped seven.

The seven are recorded as skipped rather than quietly dropped. In each case we could not source the outcome well enough to write it honestly. One more candidate was set aside because it did not fail: the project became its founder''s next venture, which does not fit a teardown.

Why we keep doing this

Agora is another attempt at a problem with a long record of failure. Writing down why the earlier attempts ended is the cheapest due diligence available to us, and it is more useful in public than in a private document.