Civic Technology Research Articles

Technology column: public libraries as civic technology hubs

ABSTRACTCivic technology is used to improve how citizens, businesses, and other groups engage and conduct business with governments. Libraries across the United States are uniquely positioned to be key players in the civic technology movement. Libraries offer community spaces where everyone is welcome and where people can come together, learn about new technologies, access information, and solve shared problems. By bringing our unique attributes and resources to bear, libraries can play a part in developing applications and services that power our communities.

Changing civil society in Spain through transparency and civic technologies

This paper addresses the role of open data in the development of civic technologies in Spain. We have analysed organisations that are using technology as a tool to improve transparency, democracy and citizen participation in public matters. During this research we run through the evolution of the use of technologies by civil society in Spain, we define the concept of civic technologies and propose a set of typologies, paying special attention to the source of data, with the final aim of knowing how often public open data has been used. We conclude by highlighting the need to increase the communication between public and private institutions and the organisations that use data in favour of providing useful information and making easier the development of civic technologies.

The Deliberative Politics of the Consultative Layer: Participation Hopes and Communication as Design Values of Civic Tech Founders

The Deliberative Politics of the Consultative Layer: Participation Hopes and Communication as Design Values of Civic Tech Founders

The design of civic technology: factors that influence public participation and impact

Civic technology needs to be better understood in terms of the factors that promote representative public participation and impact. This paper reports on a mixed-methods study of a civic tech platform that enabled the public to provide feedback on public transport to the service providers. The overall aim of this research was to investigate the public’s use of a leading civic tech platform, FixMyTransport. The key findings were that: an effective and easy-to-use civic technology platform enables broad participation; data and process complexity need to be removed; factual information can be captured in situ with impacts, consequences and opinions added later; emotions (if important) need to be explicitly elicited; feedback to, and a ‘conversation’ with, the users is important for engagement, as is a feeling of being part of a community. These findings can contribute to the future design of civic technology platforms.Practitioner Summary: There is a lack of understanding of how ‘civic tech’ platforms are used and how they may be designed for maximum effectiveness. Multiple data collection methods were used to investigate a well-developed example of civic tech. Effective civic tech can enable broad democratic participation to improve public services.

Civic Technology and Community Building: Interaction Effects Between Integrated Connectedness to a Storytelling Network (ICSN) and Internet and Mobile Uses on Civic Participation

This study draws on communication infrastructure theory (CIT) to examine the extent to which expressive uses of Internet and mobile devices moderate the relationship between integrated connectedness to a storytelling network (ICSN) and offline and online civic participation. Data collected through a Web survey of a U.S. national online panel (N = 1201) reveal that the relationships of ICSN with offline and online civic participation are conditioned by locality-oriented expressive uses of Internet and mobile media. With these findings, this study discusses theoretical insights, policy implications, and practical applications.

Civic Tech and Public Policy Decision Making

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Civic Tech For Urban Collaborative Governance

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From Civic Tech to Civic Capacity: The Case of Citizen Audits

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Soluciones tecnológicas a problemáticas sociales y ciudadanas. El caso de los Retos Cívicos y Públicos en México

El objetivo de este trabajo es presentar el proceso de innovación cívica que, basado en soluciones tecnológicas y en iniciativas abiertas, propone la organización de la sociedad civil Codeando México para la atención y respuesta a problemáticas sociales y ciudadanas en México. Se abordan y describen las iniciativas Retos Cívicos y Retos Públicos como experiencias de innovación en la implementación de estrategias tecnológicas para la solución de problemáticas sociales y ciudadanas. Se reflexiona sobre la adopción cívica de TICs y su irrupción en los procesos de innovación, así como el impacto que tienen en la conformación de un nuevo ecosistema cívico. Por último, se hace mención de las estrategias de Hacking cívico y Comunidades Cívicas que la organización Codeando México promueve como modelo para la vinculación y la participación ciudadana en el marco de la innovación cívica.

Civic technology for education: Analysis and evaluation of selected initiatives

Civic Technology is defined (in general) as the use of information technology to engage local government and community residents in behaviors that improve the quality and accountability of public services, facilitate resident-driven improvements to local quality of life, and deepen participation in public decision-making and infrastructure maintenance. The drivers of Civic Technology in communities include technology-business entrepreneurs, civic hacking and local government efforts such as labs or think tanks. Authors present what civic tech actually is and confront theory with civic tech initiatives in education field. The main goal of the article is to explore the links between Civic tech and Education.

Developing transparency through digital means? Examining institutional responses to civic technology in Latin America

A number of NGOs across the world currently develop digital tools to increase citizen interaction with official information. The successful operation of such tools depends on the expertise and efficiency of the NGO, and the willingness of institutions to disclose suitable information and data. It is this institutional interaction with civic technology that this study examines. The research explores empirical interview data gathered from government officials, public servants, campaigners and NGO's involved in the development and implementation of civic technologies in Chile, Argentina and Mexico. The findings identify the impact these technologies have had upon government bureaucracy, and the existing barriers to openness created by institutionalised behaviours and norms. Institutionalised attitudes to information rights and conventions are shown to inform the approach that government bureaucracy takes in the provision of information, and institutionalised procedural behaviour is shown to be a factor in frustrating NGOs attempting to implement civic technology.

Solutions and frictions in civic hacking: collaboratively designing and building wait time predictions for an immigration office

Smart and data-driven technologies seek to create urban environments and systems that can operate efficiently and effortlessly. Yet, the design and implementation of such technical solutions are full of frictions, producing unanticipated consequences and generating turbulence that foreclose the creation of friction-free city solutions. In this paper, we examine the development of solutions for wait time predictions in the context of civic hacking to argue that a focus on frictions is important for establishing a critical understanding of innovation for urban everyday life. The empirical study adopted an ethnographically informed mobile methods approach to follow how frictions emerge and linger in the design and production of queue predictions developed through the civic hacking initiative, Code for Ireland. In so doing, the paper charts how solutions have to be worked up and strategies re-negotiated when a shared motivation meets different data sources, technical expertise, frames of understanding, urban imaginaries and organisational practices; and how solutions are contingently stabilised in technological, motivational, spatiotemporal and organisational specificities rather than unfolding in a smooth, linear, progressive trajectory.

The Quantified Community and Neighborhood Labs: A Framework for Computational Urban Science and Civic Technology Innovation

Instrumentation of the urban environment is not by itself sufficient to have a meaningful impact on the quality, sustainability, and resilience of cities – or more broadly on urban policy and planning. Understanding the social, economic, and cultural dynamics of urban life requires both an appreciation of the social sciences and a substantive engagement with communities across neighborhoods. The “Smart City” messaging is replete with claims of the potential for sensors and information and communication technologies (ICT) to re-shape urban life, although such rhetoric ignores the practical realities and constraints of urban decision-making and the social and distributional concerns of policy outcomes. Rather, significant progress could be achieved at the neighborhood scale by focusing diverse, intensive, and persistent real-time data collection and analysis on a “Quantified Community” (QC). The QC—a long-term neighborhood informatics research initiative—is a network of instrumented urban neighborhoods that collect, measure, and analyze data on physical and environmental conditions and human behavior to provide a rich resource to better understand how neighborhoods and the built environment affect individual and social well-being. The resulting unique experimental environment provides a testing ground for new physical and informatics technologies, policies, and behavioral interventions, allowing for unprecedented studies in urban planning and design, urban systems engineering and management, and the social sciences. Focusing on the neighborhood scale also allows for meaningful interaction with, and participation by, the people who live, work, and play in that space and shifts the emphasis of data-driven design away from top-down routinization to a human-centric problem-solving. This paper presents the conceptual framework and justification for the QC, built on the lessons learned from three initial deployments in New York City, and a networked experimental environment of neighborhood labs.

Is There an App for Everything? Potentials and Limits of Civic Hacking

The present article analyzes potential and limits of crowdsourcing software (mobile and web applications) as tools for civic participation. Based on an empiric study of six Russian and French civic applications, developed in response to a particular public problem (corruption, electoral falsifications, police violence and urban problems), the article proposes to address the problem of digital asymmetry from the perspective of pragmatism, STS and software studies The author focuses on the phase of design, coding and testing, and analyzes the procedures of standardization and classification necessary for developing the interfaces. While standardization seems inevitable from the technical point of view, it produces a particular form of asymmetry between the lived experience of a “trouble” and the categorical grid. Developing a civic application, coders propose a certain definition of a public problem and rectify it in the interface. The article argues that an active participation of users in the improvement of the application may help to overcome the limits and asymmetries.

Data Literacy projects in Canada: Field notes from the Open Data Institute, Toronto node

Open data is flourishing in Canada, but there are few formalized data literacy initiatives. Civic technology organizations such as the Toronto Node of the Open Data Institute (ODI Toronto), in partnership with public institutions and advocacy groups, are helping to fill the gap in data literacy through workshops and accessible hackathons. These organizations are collaboratively pursuing the goal of ensuring that open data benefits more than just a minority of technologically privileged Canadians.

Police Service Crime Mapping as Civic Technology

It is increasingly common for municipal police services in North America to make online crime maps available to the public. This form of civic technology is now so widely used that there is a competitive private sector market for crime mapping platforms. This paper considers the crime maps made available by three Canadian police forces using platforms developed by U.S.-based private sector corporations. The paper considers how these crime maps present particular narratives of crime in the city, evaluates the quality of the mapped data, and explores how laws shape and constrain the use and reuse of crime data. It considers as well the problems that may arise in using off-the-shelf solutions – particularly ones developed in another country. It asks whether this model of crime mapping advances or limits goals of transparency and accountability, and what lessons it offers about the use of private sector civic technologies to serve public sector purposes.

The diffusion of civic technology and open government in the United States

Civic technology is a nascent force in the relationship between governments and communities. Elements of the civic technology ecosystem include open data, related information and communications technology (ICT) innovations and the organizational boundary-spanning practices of civic technology. This paper reports the results of an exploratory study of civic technology adoption by local governments in the United States. The research compares the 113 U.S. city governments recognized for their exemplary fiscal year 2012 popular annual financial reports (PAFRs) with the 49 municipalities in the U.S. state of Delaware that operate websites. Results suggest that a long term commitment to citizen involvement in government data and the size of the community are important predictors of adoption.

The Application of Using Geospatial Information through Civic tech Toward Local Community Problem-Solving in Japan

The Application of Using Geospatial Information through Civic tech Toward Local Community Problem-Solving in Japan

Civic hacking as data activism and advocacy: A history from publicity to open government data

The civic hacker tends to be described as anachronistic, an ineffective “white hat” compared to more overtly activist cousins. By contrast, I argue that civic hackers’ politics emerged from a distinct historical milieu and include potentially powerful modes of political participation. The progressive roots of civic data hacking can be found in early 20th-century notions of “publicity” and the right to information movement. Successive waves of activists saw the Internet as a tool for transparency. The framing of openness shifted in meaning from information to data, weakening of mechanisms for accountability even as it opened up new forms of political participation. Drawing on a year of interviews and participant observation, I suggest civic data hacking can be framed as a form of data activism and advocacy: requesting, digesting, contributing to, modeling, and contesting data. I conclude civic hackers are utopian realists involved in the crafting of algorithmic power and discussing ethics of technology design. They may be misunderstood because open data remediates previous forms of openness. In the process, civic hackers transgress established boundaries of political participation.

'Useful' civic hacking for environmental sustainability:knowledge transfer and the International Space Apps Challenge

Civic hackathons have become a popular, experimental process through which to promote public access to open government data and enable innovative civic uses for the information. The International Space Apps Challenge, led by NASA, is a high-profile event, promoting the use of space-derived data with the aim of contributing solutions to 'grand challenges' such as environmental sustainability. Central to the civic hackathons are the concepts of 'stewardship,' and 'usefulness'. The study explores the promises and realities of civic hacking through analysis of the aims of the organisers, perspectives of participants and the event's outcomes, concluding that hackathon peer processes promote networks for knowledge transfer.