Want to help contribute to the development of the Civic Tech Field Guide? Sign up to volunteer.

February, 2022:

• Pushed a simplified, much faster-loading, much more accessible homepage
• Began redirecting category pages to the new Directory app
• Surpassed 5,000 project entries

February, 2020:

• Created pages for Poland, Washington DC, and South Africa (with additional project data from the curators coming shortly)
• Fixed over 50 broken or missing project links
• Removed clutter from submit listing page
• Fixed 478 project screenshots that went missing due to a site migration bug
• Updated navigation menu links to point to improved table of contents pages
• Added all project categories (instead of just one) to card view in lists across the site
• Fixed broken map pins on sub-page maps (example)
• Fixed projects’ featured images not appearing on when their map pin is selected

January, 2020:

• Fixed a pagination bug where proceeding past the first page of search results and category pages would reset the filter to display all listings.
• Organized and cleaned up tags, and began making them discoverable.
• Added categories for campaign event tools and official campaign apps.
• Made the full hierarchy of categories visible on project cards, and restored the category list to listing profile pages.
• Created a table of contents page for Advocacy tech and Media tech sections, with category descriptions and suggested readings.
• Updated supporter logos in the footer to their negative versions to better match the dark background.
• Rewrote submission page confirmation copy.

December, 2019:

• Imported 171 new project entries.
• In partnership with the Narrative Initiative, added a Narrative Tech page and relevant subcategories: Story tech, Big listening, Listening, Story-based campaigns, and Internal coordination and communication. More information here.
• We’ve added a “commercial” tag to distinguish tools that are mainstream and/or commercial products, but used toward civic ends. For example, WhatsApp and Slack in the Internal coordination and communication category.
• Expanded the short description field on project cards across the site so they aren’t truncated.
• Added Trustmarks category to the table of contents.
• Improved formatting of profile RSS feeds with line breaks.
• Hid main content area block on profile pages if it’s blank.
• Added a ‘Message received’ confirmation dialog on the Contact page.
• Removed extra whitespace in header of blog, and cleaned up blog post header to remove extraneous cruft.
• Added introduction text at https://civictech.guide/new, and expanded it to include the 50 most recently added entries.
• Updated the reply-to in site confirmation emails to point to info @ civictech.guide.
• Added useful sidebar widgets to the blog feed and blog posts.
• Made the Description field optional on the Submit Listing page to improve the user experience of adding new projects.

November, 2019

• The NYC page’s map now begins focused on NYC, rather than zoomed out
• We’ve extended grayed-out background shading to Graveyard entries site-wide, so users can easily distinguish live projects from dead ones.
• Created a Govtech table of contents page with more category descriptions
• Improved the homepage world map on mobile to show more than 2 aggregated pin bubbles
• Upgraded site to PHP 7.3, the latest and most performant version of PHP
• Updated to WordPress 5.3
• Optimized CSS, HTML, and Javascript to improve page speed (reduced 44 CSS files to 4)
• Created a High-tech civic tech table of contents page with category descriptions
• Fixed line spacing on lists to match normal copy
• Expanded the “Shows” category to “Shows and films“

October 31, 2019

• Added Internet governance, Public project trackers, cameras, advertising, govtech vendors, and Narrative Tech categories
• Removed repeating globe image from banner on category pages
• Removed categories for health, housing, and mobility, as we will be using tags for issue verticals.
• Added country flag emoji to country pages
• Created an actual page for the Civic Tech Graveyard
• Created a better table of contents for the Engagement Tech section
• Created new country pages with new curators

September 31, 2019

• Redesigned pillar table of content pages e.g. Civic data
• Broke the 30 individual civic maps and 39 mapping tools and platforms out into two distinct subcategories.
• On mobile, moved the Listing sidebar blocks containing the map, project URL, and social links to the top of the Listing entry, instead of the bottom
• Improved pin clustering on the maps to reduce visual clutter
• Fixed homepage map pin clustering on mobile
• Improved map and header sizing on country pages
• Improved search layout on subpages
• Fixed category descriptions overlapping with ‘view map’ link
• Fixed homepage “Add to guide” button breaking out of design on mobile
• Updated favicon and social avatars to compass
• Created a cleaner page template without the top banner – e.g. https://civictech.guide/civic-data/
• Fixed broken search functionality on sub-pages on mobile, and improved its design layout
• Granted stronger edit permissions to users who have claimed their project pages
• Added more specific subcategories for the AI section so we can follow specific technologies

August 31, 2019

• Made site style more closely resemble Civic Hall CSS
• Added some TICTEC presentations to their project pages
• Fixed duplicate locations
• Reduced blog post header buffer space to a more reasonable size

July 31, 2019

• Added sitemap
• Fixed padding issue on category descriptions
• Replaced “Join Now” nav item for logged out users with “Add Project”
• Cleaned up copy on “Claim listing” modal
• Updated WordPress to version 5.2.2
• Added placeholder image for listings missing a featured image
• Imported 838 new projects – we’re now at over 3,000 entries!
• Opened permissions to that Contributor-level users can add and edit more data, including images
• Removed 9 extraneous data fields from listings in WordPress

June 30, 2019

• Added page explaining How to claim your page on the Field Guide
• Rewrote “claim your page” modal to improve the copy, and removed phone number required field
• Added categories for Journals, Glossaries, Government trainings, Civic tech community surveys, Shows, Certifications, Circumvention tech, Surveys, Interactive Voice Response, Fintech for low-income communities, Decentralization, Whistleblowing, Direct action, Network visualizations, Civic imagination, Canvassing, Report cards, Satellites.

May 20, 2019

• Created https://civictech.guide/new/ for a longer list of recently added entries
• Fixed Twitter timeline embed on many entries
• Updated homepage: we’ve hosted visitors from over 100 countries
• Resolved issue with search autosuggestions, so that clicking category autosuggestions now go directly to the category page without requiring further action
• Backfilled parent category hierarchies for submissions that were missing them to improve consistency of category data
• Added project URLs to project cards in the Grid view so that users don’t need to click through to each profile. https://civictech.guide/new/, for example
• Added feature icons to homepage to replace some of the wall of text
• Updated Knight Foundation logo with white background for improved visibility and cropped Luminate logo to standardize sizes
• Create country- and city-specific maps to populate geographic pages. https://civictech.guide/france/, for example
• Added bit.ly links to track calendar downloads, removed Berlin timezone parameters from calendar URLs
• Fixed issue with CSS caching to clean up homepage fonts and category page bullet points

April 24, 2019

• Updated 3 months of WP theme improvements
• Added Home navigation item to menu, along with Blog, Name generator, Adjacent fields
• Added action buttons to civictech.guide/timeline
• Resolved some broken Twitter embeds
• Prototyping country-, city-, and topic-specific pages like https://civictech.guide/france/, https://civictech.guide/access-public-benefits/, https://civictech.guide/nederland/
• Cleaned up primary nav menu so it doesn’t break
• Added Whatsapp field for mobile-based projects
• Removed images from submission page for faster loader time
• Cleaned up extraneous categories
• Divided “open data platforms” into discrete categories for portals (14) and platforms (33) and fixed images for all of them
• Set new entries to automatically included featured images from the media library, or a default fall-back image if there is none
• Added TICTeC presentation to the timeline page for additional context
• Rescued ~20 listings that lost their category when they were originally imported
• Removed character limit on project cards so that project titles no longer get truncated.

March 28, 2019

• Fixed the raw HTML that was sending in transactional site emails, and rewrote email copy for all emails
• Added Founded year data for over 2,000 entries and pending entries
• Added the environment and sustainability category to the adjacent fields index
• Fixed password recovery link not appearing in recovery emails
• Added pages for About Us, Guiding Principles, and How to use this, and added “What can I do with” to the front page with more explainer text
• Added Civic Hall, Knight, and Luminate support logos to site footer
• Added Civic Hall link, About Us, Guiding Principles, and What can I do with… to the primary navigation
• Moved ‘Related entries’ recommendation engine to appear below Twitter embeds (example)
• Resolved issue with primary navigation submenus not loading
• Fixed issue with long URLs breaking the project card design on mobile by truncating human view of the links while retaining the link value upon clicking
• Added categories for Artistic interventions and Government AI strategies
• Fixed SSL certificates
• Updated https://civictech.guide/what-can-i-do-with-the-civic-tech-field-guide/ with images and space

February 24, 2019

• Updated Listing template to display all categories a Listing has, instead of only one category. For example, https://civictech.guide/listing/public-school/ actually belongs to ‘Graveyard’ and ‘Supporting specific public sector efforts from outside government’. Ordered these by hierarchy, with commas separating.
• Also removed the duplicate Listing title from this breadcrumbs section, since it already appears immediately below it.
• Distinguished Graveyard entries throughout the site with light gray background color (listing-category/graveyard/)
• Broke News to Action tools out into their own category and fixed Media section so it’s not all under Solutions Journalism header
• Added site to the Internet Archive

February 15, 2019

• Added this changelog to site
• Configured new calendar and calendar widgets (see footer area) system, replacing the buggy Jetpack widget that was intermittently synchronizing with Google Calendar.
• Refreshed and reformatted the events in both calendars as well.
• Added and populated “In the news” block to homepage for hot topics
• Improved and updated the Tech and the People table of contents pages
• Got Related entries recommendation engine working below posts, example
• Fixed bug where Links URL spills over into main body section of Listing
• Determined cause of a bug that was routinely breaking image filepaths

February 5, 2019

• Improved visibility of the footer font, including the site CC license
• Removed duplicate admin data fields in the Listing edit page to clean things up
• Added an XML site generator to improve SEO
• Added a live “happening now” block for key conferences and events
• Fixed ability to use WordPress.com logins on the site
• Profile page improvements:

• add “Founded” year to profile
• add “Closed” year to profile for graveyard projects we have date info for
• Move “Language” ACF higher in the template, immediately under “Date founded” and “Date closed”
• Corrected “Founded” line to read “Founders”
• Changed “Parent organization” to instead read “Host organization”, and fixed the broken link where this data wasn’t appearing correctly
• Fixing ‘Links’ section so link description text is hyperlinked
• Added a field for postmortem links and displayed it in the “What happened” section
• For entries where we have their Twitter information in the ACF Twitter field, it will now automatically embed their recent tweets at the bottom of the listing
• Improved ‘Get in Touch’ section copy to:
• Contact page
• Open jobs
• Upcoming events

January 25, 2019

• Restored category descriptions and moved them to the TOP of category pages, instead of languishing at the bottom underneath listings.

• Completed category descriptions for all Tech categories
• Speed optimizations:
• Optimized / defragmented WordPress database
• Set up “lazy loading” of images, videos, iframes, etc. to drastically improve user experience of speed
• Installed a database viewer to facilitate admins adding data quickly
• Fixed an issue with custom fields plugin not updating
• Removed the “tag” icon clutter on listing cards.
• Fixed a bug where the second pages of certain categories would display all Listings, rather than displaying the second page that category’s Listings.
• Fixed a bug where the grid view design was broken on the second page of some results.

January 22, 2019

• Updated category pages to show 40 entries per page
• Speed optimizations:

1. Brought page render start from 1.7 to 1.3 seconds
2. Brought render complete from 3.79 to 2.95 seconds
3. minify, aggregate HTML
4. minify, aggregate, and pre-load CSS
5. minify, aggregate Javascript
6. remove WordPress cruft
7. Combine and load fonts asynchronously with webfont.js
8. Disabled Gravatar
9. Re-hosted testimonial images locally to cache

• Cleaned up the copy at https://civictech.guide/submit-listing/

January 15, 2019

• You can now view and click the links for each entry from their category pages, so you don’t have to click through to individual page profiles first. (example)
• The search bar in the header no longer performs its silly entrance animation
• Removed duplicate search bar on Category pages so you can see the listings faster
• Profile pages now display section and other headings only if the data exist, making for cleaner profile pages
• Category pages now display only the category title, like “Participatory budgeting”, instead of “Results for Participatory budgeting Listings”.
• Fixed a bug where some Listings displayed a second Website URL, “h”, underneath the first URL.
• We’ve updated the Civic Tech Graveyard with a more complete collection, and brought it more information to the profiles from previous reporting (and will continue adding to it).
• We’re adding sub-categories for political social networks, chat apps and bots, and campaign call tools (with entries for these on the way).
• We’ve cross-posted the problem with impact measurement and civic tech graveyard pieces on the site
• Updated the theme

January 1, 2019

1. improved styling of the ‘Explore the Guide’ Table of Contents on the homepage
2. Updated the theme