#CivicTech With, Not For:

LET’S GET STARTED

Translated to prose from tweets, originally for

I said it before, and I’ll say it again: The time has come for us to decide (and to decide through action, not words): is community technology part of the sector we call civic technology?

If so, we need to shake things up — and to step things up.

Last month,

I spoke at the Code for America Summit and was stunned to hear echoed, over and over again, throughout countless presentations, a phrase I coined earlier this summer: “Build with, not for.”

The idea is old. There are entire fields committed to community-built tech, public deliberation, communal resilience, user-led design, and cooperative decision-making. Inside and out of technology, there’s an enormous, international legacy to collective action, to barn-raising, to the ways in which we humans work WITH.

But our work (civic tech) is new. Our work mashes up the civic space, encompassing, in theory, the entirety of the public sphere — including both government technology and community technology. Yet, over the last few years, we’ve put all our emphasis on creating, reconfiguring, and hacking the former, while only bothering to use the language of the latter.

To be clear, this isn’t to say there’s not a community within civic tech. Civic hackers are real and their (our!) presence is important. But we are only one part of a much, much bigger ecosystem. Knowing our place isn’t about diminishing our impact. It’s actually about maximizing it.

Like I said: there’s already whole field of community tech out there. We self-identifying civic-techies don’t have to be jamming on every aspect of to lift up this work and bring it into the fold.

Civic tech doesn’t have to (just) be a platform for creation; it could be the platform for connection…

…uniting all of us who work in the civic space — urban planners, parents, civic hackers, government officials, journalists, food desert fighters, rural residents, suburban commuters, policy minds, small business owners, church leaders, firefighters, you name it. “Civic tech” can (should) be the hub where once disparate fields working across the spectrum of “civic” and “tech” activity come together.

For years now,

the existing civic tech community has told ourselves a story that we were doing just that: creating a platform for connection. Bringing out the potential of our communities through technology. But the only folks who ever felt connected were…ourselves.

We’re a young field. It’s understandable that we haven’t been mindful. We’ve had so much growing and exploring to do — important steps for developing our skills and our creative muscles. But when we’re stacking rooms with hundreds and hundreds of people, when we direct the budgetary spending of real public dollars through our influence on governments of every scale, when organizations are being born or changing brands or mission to follow our wake, we no longer get the innocent little kid pass. We’re growing up.

Like a good teen on the verge of young adulthood, the time has come for us to do a bit of active introspection. The time has come to look at ourselves, our skills and our capacities, and talk about power—because, though we may feel powerless against bureaucratic and monolithic social structures, Civic Tech is immensely powerful.

Dear Civic Tech, your choices matter. YOU matter.

Being technically savvy and civicly empathetic at the right place and the right time (this very minute), you — we — opened the door to incredible power for such a young field.

Among the various and sundry imprints of our muscle, tops among them is the fact that the mere promise of and excitement in our work moves financial mountains. This part is really important: Today, civic tech players across the country influence not only foundations and venture capitalists, but the budgets of governments at every level (town/city, county, state, federal). Today we influence both human capital (the dreams of young college students) and the spending portfolios of the most influential financiers in the world. We’ve changed the investment landscape for decades. The ripples of our influence, even during this highly experimental time, stretch out far beyond comprehension.

And yet, we continue to act like there are no consequences.

There is some purity, some necessity to this approach—all humans deserve space for unbridled creativity—but at the same time, we come to the field of social impact technology because we crave More. We are in the game to watch the world transform: We crave not just any impact, but social impact. We give our evenings to civic hack nights, our weekends to hackathons, our brainpower to debating whether civic hack nights and hackathons are worthwhile because we really are wrestling with how best to use our skills and ourselves to serve and to contribute to societal progress.

We are in it for the right reasons, but we have a lot of learning to do. A lot we can learn from history, from social science, and from other’s lived experiences.

And so I ask you:

Civic Tech, what will you do with your power?

What will the world look like when you’ve seen your work through?

Most Americans, most people, don’t get to answer these questions knowing that the answers will be taken seriously. But, Civic Tech, we are privileged. Our dreams are on track to come true. So it is important — vital — that we dream with intentionality, that we learn all we can, that we listen.

It is important that understand:

• When we decide to wear a community instead of being part of it, participating in it, it matters.
• When we highlight cities as the unit of change above other levels of community—when we ignore the towns and rural areas and suburbs, etc….that we grew up in, that we may even still live in—it matters.
• When we limit “tech” to web and mobile apps, to software, it matters.
• When we chose experts and leaders, let alone who we collaborate with, it matters.
• When we champion our skills as central or primary to societal impact at scale, it matters.
• When we tell ourselves that impact = scalability, it matters.

It all matters, Civic Tech. Our choices matter.

This isn’t a finger wag. It’s a rub on the shoulders. I want you to be pumped, Rocky-style, for what’s to come, and I want you to really think about how you want to “fight.”

You see, we control the narrative. We control the canon, the stories that define who we are and why we do what we do. Which projects we take on, what we elevate and imitate, the intention we pour into our work, the time we take to be critical — it adds up fast into real world impact.

With all this in mind, you might be thinking: How do we move from where we are to where we could (or should) be? Let’s find out.

Starting in the next few weeks,

I’m going to be working with my communities (for there are so many!) here in Washington, DC to start turning these words into action. This is the hard part, for there is no perfect map of the road ahead. But, we’ll never make progress if we don’t try—and if we don’t share our mistakes, along with our successes. So, as we journey forth, your civic tech kin here in DC promise to share our work.

In kind, we ask that you to do the same. If you’re out there wrestling with what it means to really build with and not for — or if you’ve been doing it (for days, weeks, months, years), even from outside the civic tech space, we want your help. The more frank we can be about the challenges we face and our thought processes and trials in dealing with these challenges, along with the experiments we hatch to solve them, the more we’ll learn and the better we’ll do.

So, let’s get practical. Let’s get literal (literally: working together, taking the time to identify who should be at the literal table, you get the idea). And let’s get started.

The future of civic tech is 100% what we make of it.

If you want to connect directly to share your work or get involved, reach out via Twitter @elle_mccann or email: hello@curiouscitizens.com.