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About the Field Guide

The Civic Tech Field Guide is the world’s most complete collection of projects, tools, and organizations using tech for democracy. It’s primarily a crowdsourced directory where you can find helpful resources and inspiration, and share your own work with the world. We also publish research and regular updates about the state of the field.

Democracy advocates use the Civic Tech Field Guide to find tools and partners. Builders use it to find open source code, data, and inspiration. Students use it to learn about the field. Job-seekers use it to find their next career move. Funders use it to ensure they’re supporting truly original or impactful projects. Researchers use it to better understand the field and its triumphs and challenges. Organizations use it to share their work with a wider community.

Explore the sections below to learn more:

Why maintain a collection of democracy tech projects?

How you can get involved

Legal structure

Philosophy

Terminology

History of the Field Guide

Team

Curators

Inclusion Guidelines

Data usage

Recognition

Transparency

 

Why maintain a collection of democracy tech projects?

We’re always searching for ways to give everyone fighting for the common good an edge over the competition.

We’re inspired by the millions of people practicing digital democracy. They’re connecting citizens to decision-making power, upgrading government, campaigning for a better world, opening data, powering journalism. They’re fighting the unethical use of technology itself, like disinformation, while fighting to restore digital rights and cybersecurity.

They’re fighting these battles all over the world, from mature democracies to active autocracies. Through creative games, maps, and art, they’re even having fun doing it. Establishing a foundation of civic and digital literacy, accessibility, and inclusion, they’re forging new modes of working.

What if there was a place to find each other? To get beyond the narrow, self-serving nomenclature of civic tech, public interest tech, ethical tech, and whatever term comes next? To look past our own borders and silos to gain inspiration from the best?

What if we developed this fledgling sector into a deeply interconnected movement? By helping talent find jobs, connecting professionals to relevant events and funding opportunities, and introducing generations of students to learn about this line of work through academia and online education. Enriching communities, online and in-person, all while evaluating our impact and learning from what hasn’t worked, so we can sustain the things that do.

All while keeping up with the latest possibilities of emerging tech like AI without accepting its harms as a foregone conclusion. So that we can grow the field of digital democracy, and work together to realize our missions.

Sound worthwhile?

We help over 50,000 people per month keep up with the latest launches. To develop partnerships with peers fighting the same fights. The Civic Tech Field Guide will jump-start your own efforts to build something with open source code and freely available data, find funding, not to mention pointing you to related efforts.

How you can get involved

The Civic Tech Field Guide is your map. It’s your place to find and be found. And it’s as good as you make it.

We are fiscally sponsored by Superbloom Design, a US 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.

The Civic Tech Field Guide is led by its Curator, Matt Stempeck.

Philosophy

We have many challenges facing democracies and the world at large, and it’s our belief that we need more people contributing more productively to improving things. This belief drives our core values of:

  • A global perspective, as we can all learn from others’ work.
  • Making our resources as available as possible through open source code, open data licensing, and strong accessibility.
  • Inclusively pointing to helpful resources others have created, even and especially if they’re doing work that’s similar to our own.
  • Providing an archival memory of the field that’s too often missing, so we can learn from our past mistakes and get better at what we do, rather than brush failures under the carpet.

Terminology

We take a broad definition of ‘civic tech’: the use of newly available possibilities for the common good. The field has had many names over the years, often driven by powerful actors in the field, and we try not to get bogged down in semantics. “The common good” can be thought of as pro-social activity, things that help other people, things that address shared challenges rather than private challenges.

You can learn more about the original motivation for the Civic Tech Field Guide here.

History of the Field Guide

The Field Guide was conceived in early 2016 by Micah Sifry, co-founder of Civic Hall, Matt Stempeck (then the Director of Civic Technology at Microsoft), and Erin Simpson, then at Civic Hall Labs. This team created the first edition of the Field Guide, an open spreadsheet.

After this initial prototype gained considerable traction and validated the need for the resource, Stempeck developed the project into a full directory in 2018 under the auspices of Civic Hall with support from Knight Foundation, Luminate, and Patrick J. McGovern Foundation.

In 2020, Stempeck spun the project out of Civic Hall and independently sustained it for the next two years. In 2022, the National Endowment for Democracy provided critical support to revamp and activate the project, making its resources readily available to people fighting for democracy all over the world.

Today, the Civic Tech Field Guide is the most comprehensive collection of tech projects for the public interest and democracy, anywhere. Its continued success is thanks to the ongoing leadership by Stempeck and a growing community of contributors.

Team

As a community-led resource, we depend heavily on contributions from volunteers. You can help the project by volunteering your skills, making a small donation, and telling people about it.

In addition to Stempeck’s leadership and everyone who has added to this collection over the years, we’d like to acknowledge and thank the following contributors:

  • Georgia Bullen and the team at Superbloom Design, not only for fiscally sponsoring our project but also for providing countless other forms of support that sustain and improve the Field Guide.
  • Devin Balkind of Sarapis has architected the migration of the Field Guide from an outdated WordPress site to a modern, open source knowledgebase, and provided advanced technical resources to the project. All of our improvements in usability, accessibility, design, speed, and ease of curating the collection are thanks to Devin’s initiative.
  • Benjamin Munyoki has led the software development of our open source Directory app. He is a software engineer specializing in web application development, APIs and Fintech. In the last 8 years, Benjamin has implemented several high profile projects and led teams to deliver products that solve societal problems through technology. He also contributes to open source projects in Fintech, the latest being an Mpesa (mobile money) payments integration package for PHP.
  • Elza Dabola leads special projects, and is improving many of our workflows, including the edit listing flow and our donation process.
  • Vitor Pinheiro keeps many things running smoothly, most of all our community calendar of relevant events and application deadlines.
  • Carmen Maymó contributed an open source script to automatically check the availability of every link in our collection, flag inactive projects, and provide a replacement link from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. This has drastically improved our ability to identify inactive projects.
  • Emma Jackson has improved our Sri Lankan project and Peacetech collections, and is working to implement the new design of our directory app.
  • Mark Renja reinvigorated our communications campaign, improving both the consistency and quality of our monthly newsletter. Mark was at the time a project manager with Code for Africa’s Engagement team. As an alum of Meta’s 2021/22 Accelerator Challenge for fact-checkers, they help implement growth strategies for PesaCheck – Africa’s largest indigenous fact-checking organisation. They also work with global non-profits Code for All and mySociety to develop accessible products that get the civic tech community to serve more diverse users.
  • Bharat Kashyap has helped us integrate project screenshots into our data processing pipeline so that in the near future, every listing in the collection will have a representative image to go with it.

Curators

The Civic Tech Field Guide also benefits from expert curators who help keep the collection current from their perspectives and expertise within civic tech.

They are:

By topic

  • Drones for good: Fatima Sarah Khalid
  • Access social benefits: Greg Bloom
  • Civic data: Deblina Mukherjee
  • Connectivity: Georgia Bullen
  • Promise trackers: Farhad Souzanchi

By geography

  • Sri Lanka: Emma Jackson
  • Colombia: Juliana Uribe Villegas
  • Iran: Feiredoon Bashar and ASL19
  • Chile: Auska Ovando
  • Poland: Aleksandra Kamihska
  • Paris and France: Clémence Pène
  • Australia: The Code for Australia team
  • South Africa: Civic Tech Innovation Network. Previously Melissa Zisengwe and Lailah Ryklief.
  • Tunisia: Wafa Ben-Hassine
  • United Kingdom: Gemma Humphrys and the mySociety team
  • México: Alma Rangel and the Codeando México team
  • Washington, DC: Meag Doherty
  • Thailand: Opendream

Inclusion Guidelines

As a crowdsourced collection, we try to be as inclusive as possible. Our priority is to focus on projects using tech and innovation to meaningfully shift power in society from the few to the many. We take an intentionally global view in our work, and fight silos of every kind.

We will include projects from across the political spectrum as long as they can inform about the role of technology in democracy.

We will not include projects that:

  • are unrelated to this field
  • could harm people
  • are purely commercial with no apparent public benefit
  • don’t want to be found by others

We reserve the right to curate the collection so that it’s of use to our users.

Data usage

As a policy, we only want to include public projects (publicly available URLs) and we refrain from collecting any personally identifiable information, other than publicly available information about the name of a project’s founder or author, and a contact email address, if the project owner provided it in order to stay in touch.

If you find any information about yourself that you would like removed, simply click the “Suggest a change” button on every listing and make a request, and we will comply.

We reserve the right to catalog publicly available information to better inform the field.

If you find your own project(s) in the collection and would like to improve or update how they are presented, you can click the “Claim This Listing” button on every listing page to get in touch.

Third party services

We use Google Analytics to understand aggregated trends in which content is most popular, Mailchimp to communicate with people who sign up for our email list, and Airtable to collect and organize our database. In all cases we turn off features that might impinge on user privacy wherever possible.

Recognition

We’re proud to have been featured and cited in the following books and resources:

Books

Scholarly citations

Online

Transparency

Any sponsored promotion on our website or email newsletter will include a “Partner Content” heading to distinguish it from other content.

Editorial inclusion in the Civic Tech Field Guide is not up for sale; projects will be added or excluded based solely on their relevance to the field. As noted above, we take an inclusive but carefully categorized approach to listing projects.

Current affiliations:

In addition to the Civic Tech Field Guide, Matt Stempeck works part-time or on freelance projects with:

Past affiliations:

Matt has worked with the following organizations related to civic tech, usually on a freelance basis. Whenever possible, the fruits of this work go into refreshing and improving the Field Guide.

  • People Powered and Google Jigsaw (2024)
  • Cornell University’s Public Interest Tech program (2020 – 2023)
  • Internal research, Luminate Strategic Initiative (2023)
  • Advisory Board, the Civic AI Observatory (2023 – 2024)
  • Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom (2023): Wrote an essay on civic tech in the US.
  • Democracy Technologies magazine contributor (2023-24)
  • Code for All (2022)
  • OEN (2022)
  • Mozilla Foundation (2019 – 2021)
  • People Powered (2021)
  • OECD (2019)
  • Civic Hall (2018-2020)
  • Knight Foundation (2017)
  • Hillary for America (2016)
  • Engagement Lab at Emerson College, unpaid advisory board (2016)
  • Microsoft Technology & Civic Engagement (2014 – 2017)
  • Google Social Impact (2013 – 2014)
  • Voto Latino (2014)
  • MIT Center for Civic Media (2011 – 2013)
  • Personal Democracy Media (2013)
  • Youth & Participatory Politics program, MacArthur Foundation (2013)