🌟 You kept our web traffic at record-matching highs of over 90,000 unique visitors per month!

🌟 We added 265 new listings, 45 of which were new launches.

🌟 23 project owners claimed their pages.

🌟 We created 10 new subcategories to help you find exactly what you’re looking for:

– a new Identity subcategory in the Civic Tech Field Guide, Age verification. Governments around the world are increasingly requiring digital platforms to verify their users’ age to help protect young users from harm online. For example, the open European Age Verification Solution.

– State tech sovereignty: Nation states have realized the critical importance of tech sovereignty. For example, ensuring the open source software their nation state depends upon is secure and unbounded by competing actors. Examples include Indigenous data sovereignty, Sovereign Tech Agency, OpenWebSearch.eu, Maza Coin, and India’s sovereign Large Language Model. (See also the related concept, Open source supply chain).

– Tools for Parliamentarians and Legislators: Tools to support the policy-making legislative work of members of parliaments and legislators (and their staff). For example, Kanishka Kloud, Parlex and Lex, StaffLink, Inter-Parliamentary Union Guidelines for AI in parliaments, and Artificial Intelligence in Legislative Services: Principles for Effective Implementation.

– Public engagement with parliaments and legislatures: To catalog work being done to improve public engagement with and by parliaments and legislatures, specifically. Examples include Public engagement hub, International Parliament Engagement Network (IPEN), and Mapping Public Engagement in Parliaments across the world.

– Personhood: To catalog technologies that establish that the user is a person, and not AI. For example, Personhood credentials: Artificial intelligence and the value of privacy-preserving tools to distinguish who is real online.

🌟 And 10 new tags, like:

– TICTec 25: We created a TICTeC 25 community tag to make a gallery of 35 of the projects that presented at the Impacts of Civic Tech Conference. We also linked to all of the publicly available presentations on their respective Civic Tech Field Guide listing pages.

– Open Government Partnership (OGP) projects. The Open Government Partnership is a multilateral initiative aimed at securing commitments from national and sub-national governments to promote open government, combat corruption, and improve governance.

– Gemini, to catalog civic projects using Google’s AI. For example, the UK’s Extract planning document digitization system.

– CKAN, to track projects using the open source data publishing platform. Examples include Datashades.Info, Data.overheid.nl, and OpenGov Open Data.

– We’ve created a new Signal tag in the Civic Tech Field Guide to catalog projects and resources related to the secure, open source, non-profit messaging platform.
Signal continues to grow more relevant by the month. The platform also now allows users to create usernames to keep your phone number private (documentation). So you can now add your project or organization’s Signal username link to your Civic Tech Field Guide listing(s) if you’d like to make it easier for others to find and message you. Just edit your CTFG listing(s) to add yours.

– The India (Government of) tag catalogs the Indian national government’s tech projects. Examples include the India Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), IndiaAI Mission, cVIGIL, MyGov Innovate, and AgriStack.

– Congestion pricing catalogs policy efforts to improve air quality in cities by reducing car and truck traffic.

🌟 We promoted 17 community events and 11 application opportunities on our community calendar and socials.

🌟 Plus 22 job openings.

🌟 Field Guide Friday subscriptions grew by 652 people!! Thanks for being here.

🌟 We’ve renamed the Freedom of Information category to Access to Information to reflect the more commonly used term. There’s a URL redirect in place, so don’t worry about broken links.

🌟 We’ve updated the Field Guide’s Add and Edit listing forms with all of the social networks and communities (Bluesky, Slack, Discord, Telegram, etc.) fields that we now collect. We’ll be showing these on the front-end soon, too.