Levelling Up Civic Tech with “Civic Hall”
Code for All organizations are looking to NYC’s Civic Hall as a way of bringing the civic tech movement to a larger audience.
By Aaron Wytze
There’s a crackle of anticipation when the group of civic hackers from Taiwan push the door buzzer to enter the Civic Hall working space in New York City’s Flatiron district.
They enter the building, and proceed to cram themselves into the tiny elevator that slowly chugs up to the 12th floor.
As the elevator doors creak open, they walk into a large open space with an assortment of desks, sofas, and swirly chairs dotting the floor, and a low din of conversation in nearly every corner. At one table, there’s a discussion about how to make it easier for military veterans in NYC to find affordable housing in the city. At another, a person scribbles on a notepad about innovations in health service delivery in Eastern Europe.
Civic Hall is adept at getting a diverse set of stakeholders — be they tech worker, government official, entrepreneur, or civic activist — in the same room to hack out potential solutions to civic problems. This is a space designed with co-creation and innovation in mind, but most importantly, it’s a space that embeds empathy and altruism into the core of the organization.
Since its founding in 2015, Civic Hall has facilitated hundreds of events, helped incubate nearly a dozen civic tech businesses and nonprofits, and become a critical node to NYC’s growing civic tech ecosystem.
It’s the final point that’s piqued the interest of the civic hackers from gov-zero (or “g0v”), Taiwan’s largest civic hacking community. Finding a permanent home for civic tech collaboration in Taipei is seen as an important step for growing the local civic tech movement in Taiwan.
As they sit down to talk with Civic Hall’s partnerships manager, the g0v team blast off a rapid fire list of questions about the Civic Hall model.
“We’re not sure whether it’s a good model for Taiwan yet, but we’re exploring ways to enhance engagement for an open, volunteer-based community, and looking to grow the ecosystem around civic tech,” said Wu Min-hsuan, a g0v contributor and Deputy CEO of the Open Culture Foundation.
But the Civic Hall model has already spread its roots to the far corners of the world.
Last year, Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo announced the opening of “Les Halles Civiques.” Meanwhile in the US’s neighbour to the north, the Code for Canada team worked with local partners to launch “Civic Hall Toronto.” There’s even been talk of a Civic Hall in Bucharest by Code4Romania.
“We want to level up collaboration in Toronto, because good things happen when you get people from diverse sectors to work together,” said Shea Sinnott of Civic Hall Toronto.
Civic Hall’s global growth is all the more remarkable in the way it happened. The founders of NYC’s Civic Hall didn’t travel the world promoting their model, it was the world that came to them.
“A lot of people are inspired by visiting us. It must be the fluoride in the water,” jokes Micah Sifry, the co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, as well as Civic Hall NYC.
Establishing a civic tech institution
Civic Hall is both a by-product of its creators, and the conference it grew out of. Hosted annually in NYC, the Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) has become a mecca for progressive-minded technologists, decision-makers, and scholars; a place to reflect on the impact of technology on contemporary politics and society.
PDF’s co-founders, Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry, have worked assiduously in the civic tech and open government space for over 15 years, and stewarded a number of successful progressive tech projects and organizations.
When Rasiej and Sifry (along with Heidi Sieck) announced the launch of Civic Hall in 2014, they were responding to a desire to create a “home base” for people working in the civic tech sector. A “collaborative community centre” where groups could “tackle and solve civic problems at scale.”
Sifry believes that the process of collaboration is kind of technology in itself, and that “tech” is just a word for tools to get something done.”
“We all know that tech is hardware and software. But I think knowing how to get people in the room is a kind of technology. Both are needed, and 80 percent of any good tech project is social,” says Sifry.
In a sense, by widening the definition of technology to include forms of social interaction, the Civic Hall model is lowering the bar to participation, allowing for a diverse mix of actors that doesn’t constrain others based on ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, or profession.
That’s also meant each Civic Hall is by no means a carbon copy of its NYC forebear, and each Civic Hall is designed to face a unique set of local challenges.
Forking Civic Hall
Aside from its role as a gathering point for NYC’s civic tech community, Civic Hall works like many other co-working spaces: You buy a membership, and there are different tiers of access to the space based on how much you pay.
Civic Hall also offers a 6-month residence program to both civic organizers and entrepreneurs for anyone that has a civic tech project in mind, but doesn’t have the financial resources to make it happen. They also have an “R&D arm” called Civic Hall Labs that guides people through proto-typing, design-thinking, and
Civic Hall Toronto is trying something different. The city is home to a massive bureaucracy at both the municipal and provincial level. Despite the greater Toronto area’s self-proclaimed title as “Silicon Valley North,” digital infrastructure and service delivery in the city and province can feel downright archaic.
So the Civic Hall Toronto project provides a space for government workers to learn about examples of civic tech and innovation, and gives them a tool kit of ideas on how to improve technology or design that the public needs to interface with. Some of these tools include workshops on human-centered design, the agile development process, or introductions to using UI and UX design on government websites.
For Shea Sinnott, a member of the Code for Canada team and program manager at Civic Hall Toronto, the local challenge is breaking the silos between government officials, tech workers, and entrepreneurs.
“There’s so many organizations in this city, but it doesn’t seem like anyone talks to each other. Civic Hall Toronto is a way to empower these different groups, so they share, learn from each other, and create solutions together,” said Sinnott.
That sentiment is shared by Bogdan Ivanel, a co-founder of Code for Romania.
“NGOs, state institutions, and companies don’t know each other, and don’t talk to each other. If we don’t speak to each other and don’t cooperate, then development will be slower,” said Ivanel.
Over the past four year, the streets of Romania’s capital Bucharest have seen a huge uptick in political demonstrations against government incompetence and corruption. According to Transparency International, perceptions of corruption in Romania are some of the worst in the EU.
For the team at Code for Romania, the question becomes, how do you collaborate with a government that is perceived as volatile, personalized, and not responsive to the needs of the public?
“We want to work with institutions, without working with institutions. If we can do something with them, we will. But we’re not going to focus all of our efforts with them, because we’ve found that NGOs are quite open to cooperation,” said Ivanel.
By strengthening engagement with civil society groups, Civic Hall Bucharest wouldn’t only be an opportunity to collaborate with diverse stakeholders on civic problems, it could act as a pathway to deepening democracy in Romania.
In Taiwan, where the civic tech community already enjoys a water-tight relationship with civil society, OCF’s Wu Min-hsuan ponders what role a Civic Hall in Taipei could have in creating a factory-line of sustainable civic tech businesses.
“Civic Hall’s co-working space model has the potential to incubate more projects, they could even become civic tech startups,” muses Wu.
A global success story?
Regardless of how each Civic Hall pans out, Sifry of Civic Hall NYC stresses the need of local leadership if the platform is to be successful.
With the spread of the Civic Halls to the four corners of the world, how much should we read into the tea leaves? With so many cities looking to give their respective civic tech communities a “home base,” is civic tech getting ready to “level up” to a mainstream audience?
Sifry is more pragmatic about Civic Hall’s global appeal. “I think it tells us that many countries have the same raw ingredients and desires at work here. You have a lot of people who have technological skills, and who want to use it for good. They sense that being isolated makes their work harder, and that convening will make things easier.”
Whatever is happening, Civic Hall has struck on a model for collaboration that works like a tool, where anyone can grab hold, and get to work with their community.
Appendix 1: Spaces to collaborate on civic tech called “Civic Hall”
- Civic Hall: Situated temporarily between Chelsea district and the Flatiron district, Civic Hall bills itself as “the home for civic tech in New York City.” Civic Hall has experienced enormous growth in a short period of time, and will move to a new home at Union Square in the near future.
- Civic Hall Toronto: Based in Toronto’s Old Chinatown area, Civic Hall Toronto looks to enable technologists, government, industry and residents to “share, learn, and build solutions together.” Civic Hall Toronto is a program of Code for Canada, working with partners at the Centre for Social Innovation, the city of Toronto, and Civic Hall.
- Civic Hall by Code4Romania: Currently in the development phase, the Code4Romania team looks to base their Civic Hall project in the capital city of Bucharest.
- Les Halles Civiques: With two location in Paris — “Halle Civique à Belleville” and “Halle Civique Superpublic” — Les Halles Civiques are spaces “dedicated to citizen, public, and democratic experimentation.”
Appendix 2: Other spaces to collaborate on civic tech that are not called “Civic Hall” (not an exhaustive list)
- Civic Tech House: Located in Barcelona, Civic Tech House is the newest civic tech collaboration space inspired by progenitors like Civic Hall.
- Center for Civic Innovation: Based in sunny Atlanta, Georgia, CCI bills itself as “a community-driven space with a mission to inform, engage, connect, and empower people to shape the future of their city.”
- The Open Gov Hub: Hosting over 40 groups, the Open Gov Hub has become the central annex for civic tech, open data, and open government advocacy in Washington D.C.
