Launching the Civic Tech Project & Community Handbook

Earlier this year, I joined colleagues from the g0v community and FNF Global Innovation Hub to launch the Civic Tech Project & Community Handbook. Together with Ya-wei Chou, Isabel Hou, Tiff Lin, Pimrapaat Dusadeeisariyakul, Sonja Fischbauer, and Sung-Eun Lim, we discussed how the handbook summarizes 12 years’ worth of learnings from the g0v community, which has served as inspiration for many of us around the globe.

g0v’s success converting outsider energy to civic institutions has highlighted a critical path forward for the civic tech community. Our sector has had big setbacks, not least of which COVID and the US-driven funding crisis. Given the challenges we face, community has to be the way forward. This handbook is a blueprint.

As always, we used the opportunity reviewing the book to improve the Civic Tech Field Guide’s coverage. That includes a lot of civic tech projects and organizations based and working in Asia that we didn’t previously include.

Thanks to the team for inviting us to be part of the project.

Watch the event:

Here are my remarks from the event:

My name is Matt Stempeck. I curate something called the Civic Tech Field Guide. It’s the largest collection of civic and democracy tech projects in the world. Since 2016 we’ve crowdsourced over 12,000 tools, organizations, and programs that support and upgrade our democracies. It’s all open data, and open source code running our directory. Take a look.

I’m here to celebrate the launch of this handbook because I think it’s more important than ever that we take a global perspective on our work.

This handbook is a great contribution to building our field because it summarizes 12 years’ worth of learnings from the g0v and broader civic tech community.

And the g0v community has been an inspiration, globally. I’ve seen this firsthand, first about ten years ago in NYC, where they taught us how tools like pol.is and the vTaiwan process could more meaningfully include people in co-creation.

I saw it in person at g0v Summit in Taipei, with hundreds of energetic volunteers making the event happen.

And as recently as this year, at the opening reception of the AI Action Summit in Paris, where Audrey Tang drew applause after her every remark, applying the spirit of the g0v manifesto to public AI.

g0v has led the way in community organizing methods that work, in bringing outsider energy to the civic tech movement, and in their success converting that energy into projects that affect public life.

Our mission statement since 2016 has been: Growing the field in a productive direction. It was composed by my cofounder Micah Sifry, if I recall correctly.

And it goes nicely with this line from the g0v manifesto: “We want to have fun and change the status quo.”

Having fun is key to building and sustaining a community. And changing the status quo is how that community becomes much more than a social group.

For many techies, myself included, building software is sometimes easier than building community. Thankfully this handbook gives you g0v’s blueprint of ‘How to build a civic tech community’. The handbook is well-timed because we need to reinvent and reinvest in community again.

Even before our current crisis in democracy, the global civic tech community has experienced setbacks. In the US, Code for America pivoted away from its Brigades program, which had supported scores of local groups.

COVID destroyed a lot of events and community infrastructure, from hacking meetups to the community spaces that hosted them, and even own social behaviors in getting together with strangers on weeknights. Code for All lost its dedicated staff when it lost its funding.

I was heartened to read in this handbook that Code for Korea started as a community response to COVID. It shows that the idea of civic tech is resilient, and that societal problems can spark collective action.

I want to echo Tiff’s presentation, and applaud the g0v sch00l program, because if we want to grow this community, it’s our responsibility to show up throughout the educational system. We track projects creating resources to guide students and support teachers and educators for exactly this reason. Part of our work is to let them know that this field exists, and that it needs their talents and energy.

This handbook also details digital citizenship literacy and programs to engage youth in schools. This is a critical part of growing our field. We consider these twin aims foundational layers of the entire field. Civic tech simply won’t deliver on its mission if its citizen-users lack civic literacy OR digital literacy.

Whenever I get to speak to students, they’re always excited that this field exists. It’s not always obvious how to find a job in this field, but you can, and then you get to apply exciting tech and innovation for our democracies. I feel lucky to get to work in this field that combines exciting new tech with the meaningful fight for our democracies.

Back to our mission statement. Our mission is not just to make this work popular, but for the work to have meaning. We must grow the field in a productive direction.

That means learning from what works and what doesn’t.

This handbook covers how to initiate a civic tech project, and the benefit of hackathons, and more mature product development processes.

This handbook arrives at an important moment in our crisis of democracy. The very systems and institutions we sought out to reform and improve are being eroded and attacked.

If we want to save them, or much less upgrade them, we’re going to need to be much more effective operators. We need to shift from inspirational examples to projects that address the acute urgency and rapid response needs of our world today.

We need to find a better balance of the insider / outsider tension in civic tech, which is discussed in the update on civic tech in Taiwan. This tension is where we’re either stuck improving and defending broken systems from within or more freely innovating and advocating from outside, but usually with less connection to impact.

We need to figure out and scale programs that connect outside civic tech groups with good government partners.

Now, the US is not the whole world, fortunately. Not every country’s democracy is in an acute crisis at the moment, thankfully. But the ripple effects of what’s happening in my country are real. Especially in multilateral institutions, where the US is leveraging its donor status to force changes in the work.

We need to mobilize now. There’s shrinking space for free discussion. Not just cutting and disrupting funding in the sector, which is already having disastrous effects. But also direct attacks on groups that do work for social good, on efforts to conduct basic journalism, to establish the core facts of reality that collective decisions depend upon.

Frankly, if you’re working to address and progress any of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, you’re likely now a target. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

It is a time for courage. This isn’t a time to sit on the sidelines or hide.

Consider: What if you have the most power that you will have, right now? How would that change what you do?

We need courage and we need more effective strategies to win again.

This handbook provides a timely snapshot of the current status of civic tech communities in several key countries. It takes a multinational perspective and a comparative view of civic tech. I’m grateful to be at this event with my colleagues and peers from Taiwan, Korea, Germany, and Thailand. And to the Friederich Foundation for convening us.

It’s something we try to do in the Field Guide, too, with our global curator program.

But if we’re busy fighting fascism at home, why should we look outside our own country? Why be curious at a time like this?

There are many benefits to comparative civic tech. First of all, because it can help you on a very practical level. We can find open source code to run a platform. Or detailed cases of projects that worked really well, that we can port locally.

It also offers inspiration on how to get the job done. If you’re looking to be effective, it’s worth looking to your peers who are at the top of their game in that department.

For example, the world has looked to Taiwan for a golden example of a protest movement that directly informed collective participatory policymaking processes.

Estonia has been a pioneer in effective e-government and the digital state.

Spain’s city-level digital participation platforms have sparked international collaboration to invest in open source ecosystems that overcome national and linguistic divides.

We look up to Brazil for not just inventing participatory budgeting, but also driving massively scaled modern, digital versions of it.

To name just a few.

A global perspective offers very real practical linkages that can help make our efforts more effective.

Lastly, but not least, on an immaterial level, these regional and global connections offer us camaraderie.

It’s sometimes indirect but nevertheless vital to our sustainability over time. This work can be lonely, fighting entrenched systems, and getting no thanks for it. Knowing there are others in the same fight is a spiritual boon to our efforts. Even better when we get to spend time together.

This handbook lays out in rich detail how to do both these things: How to build and maintain a civic tech community.

And how to interface our efforts with sometimes uncaring governments, sometimes actively antagonistic governments.

Compared to many of the centralized powers we fight, whether autocrats or tech monopolies, we are inherently decentralized. Or as Isabel put it, ‘polycentric’. I like that word, because de-centralized doesn’t mean we’re un-networked.

As someone who signs up for basically every newsletter he finds, I’ve long admired that the g0v community, through its international task force, has been one of the absolute best at international outreach, translating their work so it can reach more of the global community,
traveling to show up on other continents, staying up late at online events like this one to share in other timezones. These efforts do not go unrecognized.

This handbook is a great resource to help the rest of us learn what’s working, and how to do it ourselves. I look forward to helping get it into more hands, and expanding and refining it over time.

And seeing that it’s open source, maybe we can all even contribute our own chapters on what works in the years ahead.