Presenting, Civic Tech Wrapped

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2024

In the community | In the Field | Published | In Field Guide Friday | On our site | All thanks to

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In the community

I'm excited to share that we've joined as a People Powered organizational member. We've been collaborators for years, predating either of our organizations’ existences, and more recently when we teamed up to create People Powered's Guide to Digital Participation Platforms. I'm already enjoying being part of this globally distributed (but similarly motivated) community of participation champions around the world.

We joined Casa do Impacto’s social impact accelerator in a former convent in the heart of Lisbon.

We launched a new NGI Search partnership with Eticas to audit public-facing AI together, and open source resources that will help others shift from AI principles to a benchmarking model for measuring AI impacts. We’ll be sharing the fruits of that work with you next year.

We organized a collective civic tech community response to the White House’s call for ideas on how to improve public participation and community engagement with the federal government.

We worked with Superbloom's roster of coaches to support startups taking on a wide range of public interest missions with open source solutions.

Not to mention we joined the Global Coalition for Tech Justice’s Year of Democracy campaign, a global movement of over 200 organizations and experts to ensure Big Tech plays its role in protecting elections and citizens’ rights and freedoms across the world.

And we were honored to participate in:

• Matriculation weekend to welcome the scholars of the London College of Political Technology at Newspeak House (plus teaching a module on Knowledge Management & Production)
  
• The first TICTeC since COVID-19, in London, to share common civic tech needs across global contexts, plus convene the Access to Information Community of Practice with mySociety
  
• A trip to Japan to help launch and participate in a workshop on discontinued civic tech initiatives at the Digital Spatial Society at the University of Tokyo
  
• Attending the Innovation in Politics Awards Ceremony in Barcelona, the European Capital of Democracy
  
• The Feira Global Gathering of the Digital Rights Community
  
• Sharing with the Open Government Leadership Collaborative of OGP
  
• Sharing at Data 4 Public Good with Twin Cities Innovation Alliance
  
• Joining the first-ever digital peacebuilding expo, organized by the Digital Peacebuilding Community of Practice.

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We were inspired by these new projects to create 30 new categories to better describe our field.

The top 5, by number of listings, were:

1. Specific digital participation instances
2. Deliberation
3. Open source
4. Polarization
5. AI Auditing

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Civic AI was clearly big this year: We added nearly 200 civic AI projects to our collection. That’s an increase of 43%.

And we're currently working on a deep-dive on the use of AI by participation platforms – stay tuned.

We also created 33 new tags. The top 5, by number of listings, were:

1. Decidim
2. Access to Information Community of Practice
3. 2024 elections
4. 2024 Webby Awards
5. g0v

Plus, we populated more tags to spotlight specific civic tech communities:

Polis | Consul | All Our Ideas | Alaveteli | Parliamentary Monitoring Organizations | Newspeak | Govtech 100 | Association Civic Tech Europe | United Nations | Your Priorities

Drop us a note if you’d like to suggest a new tag or category.

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Published

I wrote 3 pieces for Democracy Technologies magazine:

1. How Italy’s Government is Using AI
2. How Governments Can Fight Disinformation with High-quality Communication
3. 9 Partners Governments Can Team up With to Counter Disinformation

And had a great conversation on the Civic Tech in Africa podcast.

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In Field Guide Friday

We grew our newsletter’s audience by over 20%, to over 2,500 subscribers.

And we published 41 newsletter editions, more than double last year’s count.

Those newsletters included lots of new content, like Who Got the Job, Funded, Jobs, Impact Tracker, New to Us, Field News, Field Guide Updates, and Graveyard Watch.

We embarked on a project to analyze the historic click performance on each section of this newsletter and reorganized the whole thing accordingly.

We rebuilt our email template to make it easier to read on your phone.

And we introduced paid support options for the first time, without which this wouldn’t be sustainable. Thanks to everyone who promoted an open job listing this year!

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On our site

We grew our average monthly unique visitors traffic by 18% (Cloudflare analytics; AI + bots blocked).

We rolled out contact forms, so all those visitors can get in touch with you directly from your listing page. Get one now.

We cracked the 10,000 listings milestone! More importantly, we added countless metadata to existing entries to make it easier to find what you’re looking for.

We added 2,013 new listings, each of which was hand-categorized to keep the collection useful and organized.

Nearly 500 of those were books, creating one of the more complete civic tech libraries in existence!

Plus: we collected 166 new impact metrics, 276 funding rounds, and appended 309 related links to projects.

We also marked the passing of at least 12 projects and organizations this year, and saw the Civic Tech Graveyard grow by more.

We dramatically re-built our:

• Add a listing flow
• Edit listing flow
• Donation form
• Contribute page
• About page
• Claim listing flow
• Features taxonomy
• Screenshotting service
• Tech stack table

And we created ways for you to:

• Share a job
• Schedule your project launch
• Sponsor a job listing
• Share related links
• Share funding rounds
• Share project impact metrics
• Subscribe to this newsletter
• Hire us to do research
• See our product roadmap

Plus we got rid of:

• A bunch of directory bugs
• Google Analytics on our homepage (the Directory is next)

And made improvements like:

• Volunteer sign-up form and on-boarding process
• Community calendar (added locations of events, for example)
• Site accessibility and legibility
• Localizing the names for each country
• Fixing clustering in the Global map of civic tech
• 7 pull requests to our open source directory app
• Expanded our social media presence to 3 more platforms and added more post types (new jobs, new launches, etc.)

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With a heaping of thanks to

Elza, Georgia, Nicola, Anh, Emma, Lucy, Gemma, Gemma, and Edward