civic tech
Planted Jul 2021 Tended 5 years ago Linked from 1 note
Contents
“Civic tech is technology that enables greater participation in government or otherwise assists government in delivering citizen services and strengthening ties with the public.” Examples include working directly for or with government agencies to improve services, or using government data (e.g. from data.gov) to independently build tools or analysis to help citizens.
Civic tech differs from the related term “GovTech” in that the former focuses on meeting citizens’ needs, while the latter focuses on improving the operations of government services. I imagine these sometimes go hand-in-hand, since more efficient service delivery can allow government services to be more responsive to their citizens.
How Civic Tech is Different
- accessibility and inclusion are essential: since governments serve all citizens, their software must work for the greatest range of people
Learn More
- The Civic Tech Chat podcast
- The Tech for Good newsletter shares weekly news, projects, and opportunities in the civic and nonprofit tech spaces
- The Government Technology blog
- Civic tech is related to public-interest tech
How to Get Involved
- Open source projects
- Civic tech hackathons (like the Indy Civic Hackathon if you’re local. I had a lot of fun participating in 2015.)
- Work for federal, state, or local government
- Work for consultancies like the nonprofit Code For America or for-profit Ad Hoc that work exclusively for governments