8 Civic Tech Initiatives That Make a Difference
Civic tech is no passing fad or tech du jour.
It might even be more profound than, say, social media, mobile telephony, robotics or the blockchain because it goes straight to the essence of community, the public life that binds us all.
Just think about it before you say no 😉
Barriers to entry are low, access and reach globally disseminated, financing and interest increasingly abundant, and effects almost instant. It goes straight to the core of Democracy and serves, by means of widely available software, the interests of the many, not the few.
This is precisely what is so exciting about the emergence of a global civic technology scene, and this is also why we are so happy to organise, on behalf of the European Union, the civictech4democracy global contest. It is a unique, and moving, opportunity to see how democratic values are shared across cultures and regimes and how it all just works.
Civic tech, indeed, is about civil society taking its destiny in its own hands and figuring out how to plug holes in democratic processes to ensure better accessibility and representation, higher transparency, or distributed and fair accountability: technology adapted to the democratic needs of the people, by the people.
It is a collective endeavour that only requires a minimum of software literacy and a lot of imagination. Civic tech is a true global movement that demonstrates the impressive power, determination, creativity and impact of the general will.
As such, and as the first projects we have received so far demonstrate, it heralds an era of massive, if gradual, change in the ways we manage, monitor and handle the public life that concerns us all.
In Tunisia, for instance, Imen Ghedioui, founder of the Laboratoire d’Appui Aux Transformations des Politiques Publiques, is proving how public policy, decision-making in particular, can considerably be accelerated and enhanced with chatbots, dramatically increasing impact. Building on the insight that a more complex world slows policy-shaping down and makes for more tedious parliamentary work, she shows how AI and crowdsourcing better structure access to information and improves representatives’ performance.
Complexity also begets corruption as the Philippines Center For Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) has tried to demonstrate since 2016. Better tracking and collating contracting data about ongoing governmental projects (looking for inconsistencies and gaps) PCIJ has developped a highly original expertise in data consistency and disclosure that is promising to increase governance’s visibility and transparency paving the way for true Open Contracting in the Philippines and better accountability.
From another angle, the quality of information on procurements and contracting is also Tanzania Media Foundation’s primary focus. By designing a six-month-long Fellowship Program to train business editors and senior journalists to this seemingly arcane field (and the software tools needed to see through its depth) the Foundation is laying the cornerstones of a more transparent civil society, more proficient, and better informed.
Elsewhere, in Senegal, at the Observatoire Citoyen de l’Assemblée Nationale du Sénégal, the ASUTIC association is acting on the insight that availability of information about the legislative process in Parliament (Commissions’ agenda, for instance, or attendance data) is likely to dispel negative perceptions in the public and grow the interest of the people, and its willingness to participate in policymaking.
Another strategy, called Parliament Watch, devised by the Center for Policy Analysis in Uganda, is using social media to grow people’s participation and engagement in the legislative process, discovering that, besides better and more relevant information, people also yearn for easier access to their representatives, something they are often ill-equipped to handle, which in turn requires training, slowly but surely improving the democratic interface.
Tapping on the affordances of mobile technology Making All Voices Count, has managed, over the past four and a half years to temper and channel everybody’s excitement about civic technology in 12 African and Asian countries. A one-of-its-kind collaborative challenge for development across the Indian Ocean, MAVC has led to scaling 38 innovative projects such as ‘Una Hakika’ (Kenya) against misinformation, or ‘Game My Village’, an app improving data collection about village infrastructures (Indonesia).
In The Gambia, DCDA Rural Road identifies that poor infrastructure quality accounts for many social and medical woes in rural areas, and uses the organisational powers of civic technology not only to bring this critical problem to the authorities’ attention, thus ensuring better State commitment, but to act and compensate for public shortcomings, saving more lives by reducing time and distances, and broadening community awareness and inclusiveness.
In The Philippines, Layertech Software Labs has developped a similarly hybrid approach to bridging the gaps between civil society and the State, mitigating typhoons effects with an easy to understand cloud-based information system designed to empower vulnerable communities to improve disaster management. Since its creation their Balangay program has officially been adopted by the municipality of Legazpi, in recognition of its usefulness.
What these, and other great initiatives currently being reviewed, show us is that civic technology delivers on its promises in a fascinating variety of ways and, most importantly, that it works.
Scale and money do make a considerable difference in a project’s success, but it is mostly fuelled by social energy, courage, the determination to change, to participate, to correct, to fix, to tinker and experiment everyday to make the system better for you, for them, for everyone.
Civic tech is proof that to make a difference, one just needs to act, tool up and engage other citizens and strengthen the ties that weave the fabric of a healthy and strong polity in the interest of all.
Please visit us at www.civictech4democracy.eu and, more importantly, submit initiatives of your own, or projects you’ve heard about that you deem relevant and enter our competition.
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The more initiatives, the merrier…
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CivicTech4Democracy is a competition for all initiatives that have successfully used digital tools to advance democracy in non-OECD countries. Want to participate and get a chance to pitch your existing initiative in front of international donors in Brussels? Apply here.
