Lessons from Civic Tech History Is Now Live

On July 17, 2026 we published Lessons from Civic Tech History at tryagora.org/civic-tech-history. It opens with 29 case studies and six failure patterns, and it is free to read.

Each case covers one platform: what it bet on, what worked, the mechanism by which it came apart, and what we take from it. Sources are listed on every page.

Why we built it

Agora is an attempt at a problem with a long record of failure. Before building much more of it, we wanted to know specifically rather than vaguely how the earlier attempts ended.

The six patterns are what came out of reading them together. A list of dead platforms is a curiosity. A named set of mechanisms is something you can design against.

What is next

More cases, and only where the outcome can be sourced properly. A platform we cannot document honestly does not get written up.