Civic Tech

Civic technology (“civic tech”) describes a government’s information and communication systems built by civilians including individuals, volunteers, corporations, and non-governmental organizations. These government systems range widely from public benefits registration interfaces to voting software. Civic tech is meant to enable greater participation in government from the public while simultaneously assisting the government in developing new technology beneficial for its citizens.

Term Derivation

Civic tech is a form of e-government, or information and communication technologies used to provide public services. Civic tech falls under the government-to-citizen category of e-government. Projects under the government-to-citizen category include open government initiatives such as voting, data access and transparency, and mapping and community action initiatives such as peer-to-peer sharing, civic crowdfunding, and neighborhood forums.

Broadly, civic tech is a unifier that aims to bring people together who may not otherwise interact. Uniquely, civic tech applies skills and approaches seen in modern design and traditional tech companies to government and community building.

National Day of Civic Hacking

The National Day of Civic Hacking occurs every year on September 18th. Created by the Code for America Brigades, the US Small Business Administration, Secondmuse, and various other federal agencies, the nationwide day challenges people to volunteer and carry out a number of civic tech challenges.

Many companies including Code for America release projects on this day every year and have thousands of volunteers sign up. In 2021, Code for America’s project on improving 911 and emergency response services saw volunteers across 25 countries and 49 states resulting in 2,500 hours of work completed that day. The results included 384 public service answering points reviewed, 17 case studies, 16 data analysis projects, and 9 prototype projects.

The Civilians of Civic Tech

While anyone can technically participate in civic tech as projects are usually public in nature, a few key players have made significant strides in the space.

Code for America

One of the most famous players, Code for America, has built a civic tech community that organizes people into teams that tackle local government projects. Local government, often lacking funding and tech talent, has been able to utilize Code for America in projects including revamping California’s food stamp application.

Ad Hoc

After its initial launch in October 2013, HealthCare.gov, a health insurance exchange website operated under the Affordable Care Act, encountered many technical issues. Only 1% of interested people were able to enroll in the site during its first week causing major public disapproval. AdHoc, a software design and engineering agency has established itself as one of the most successful civic tech firms after rescuing the website.

coUrbanize

CoUrbanize is an online community engagement platform connecting municipality residents with real estate developers. Given consequences of historical redlining and new trends of gentrification, new developments are often controversial among residents. Through CoUrbanize, project information becomes easy to share and comment on with features such as a blog and message board.

OpenGov

Providing cloud software built for government budgeting, operational performance, and civic engagement, OpenGov aims to power more effective and accountable government. Currently, 48 states and over 2,000 public agencies have leveraged their tools to improve performance and operations.

Ethical Concerns

AI in Civic Tech

Artificial intelligence is becoming a more common tool to utilize within civic tech solutions. Since AI has the ability to synthesize information and scale routine tasks, solutions have been utilizing the technology to create more automated processes. However, as AI becomes more common and tools like machine learning, natural language processing, predictive analytics, deep learning, and recommendation engines further government systems, civilians that use those systems can face the same vulnerabilities that AI in other areas such as Big Tech has posed on consumers.

As usage and development have expanded, AI algorithms have raised ethical concerns. For example, in an analysis of job board recommendations, 40% of black respondents noted that they had experienced recommendations based on their identities rather than qualifications and 63% noted their academic recommendations made by the platforms were lower than their current academic achievements. In banking practices, Goldman Sachs utilized algorithms that discriminated against women when determining credit card limits. Since AI algorithms have proven to hold biases, bringing these predictive models to civilian-facing systems could cause significant concerns. Experts such as Robert Cheetham, founder of mapping company Azavea and civic-tech leader, have already expressed concern for bringing this technology into policing, justice, and human services solutions – common civic tech projects. He states concern regarding false legal accusations and unfair settlements.

In order to mitigate these potential risks, civic hackers such as Cheetham suggest requiring greater transparency and scrutiny from developers. Before increasing usage of AI into government solutions, the government and civic hackers say they must ensure the algorithms learned from a diverse set of training data and has been tested on a diverse set of users.

One ongoing initiative to ensure algorithms are equitable and transparent to even the harshest critics is previous New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Automated Decision Systems Task Force. After appointing 14 experts including researchers and professors in tech law and public policy in 2018, de Blasio was able to identify where racial biases may exist in algorithms the city government was using. After a few years of investigation, the Force was able to provide the city government with recommendations and guidelines to ensure biases are eliminated in algorithms used in government processes as best as possible.