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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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
By geography
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:
We reserve the right to curate the collection so that it's of use to our users.
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.
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.
We're proud to have been featured and cited in the following books and resources:
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.
In addition to the Civic Tech Field Guide, Matt Stempeck works part-time or on freelance projects with:
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.