Open Austin Asks: What’s with You and Civic Tech?
A seemingly simple question refuses to settle on a fixed answer. The most recognizable names in civic tech all have their own answers to “what is civic tech?” It’s unclear whether or not these answers coincide with images the average Austinite conjures up when you explain that Open Austin uses “design, technology and open data to improve the quality of life in our city.”
Outside the small community of civic tech enthusiasts, our fellow citizens have difficulty seeing across the chasm between open data and their day-to-day. So what’s your story? Why do you do civic tech?
As you think through your answer, consider the approaches already shaping this converation…
Outcome Oriented: Better Government
The answers cooked up by leaders in the field focus on what civic tech makes possible. We can use technology to improve government, especially government services for the people who need them.
Code for America aims to “help government work for the people who need it most.”
Micah Sifry at Civic Hall boasts an approach allowing for a “big tent” where tools and platforms designed “primarily for a civic purpose” rest comfortably alongside “big apps or platforms that have civic effects.” Govtech’s efforts to “upgrade government’s use of technology” is in too. There’s also room for the political technology of campaigns and issue-driven organizations.
Others have argued that an “app for that” approach has limited the reach of civic tech. Writing for TechCrunch, Lorelei Kelly refers to the awkward challenge to “identify and scrutinize apps to nowhere.”
“There are many apps to nowhere, like that platform to match donors with needy classrooms that fails to address the underlying issue of why taxes aren’t paying for science books. Or that fitness app on your wrist that tells you how many calories you just consumed, but not whether the food is safe or if the locations in its supply chain respect human rights.”
Form &Function: Working for Citizens
The transformative potential might instead reside in the match-up with our form of government, democracy itself. Reflecting on the Open Government Partnership global summit in Paris, a French volunteer organization, Regards Citoyens, argues that the civic tech loses its way by failing to respect the “very basic principles of democracy.”
Regards Citoyens calls for civic tech to avoid the dogmatic and authoritarian models of startups that exempt themselves from democratic values. These businesses risk cultivating “cronyism, conflicts of interests” with a crowd of “actors who only want to enrich and empower themselves.” The antidote requires understanding the historical necessity that tools of democracy, “such as the collaborative counting of votes, official newspapers and public deliberations” worked for citizens by ensuring “a minimum of transparency and equal access to public life and to provide a sufficient level of trust.”
This is the approach that underpins the commitment to open data and open government. The crux of the Regards Citoyens argument is..
“An urgent need to reaffirm that any democratic digital project needs to be based on open source code, ensuring diversity, transparency, participation and collaboration.”
Civc tech that proceeds without these principles risks collapsing under a heap of buzzwords.
So what’s your story? Why do you do civic tech?
Your commitment might rest squarely in one of the zones articulated above or it might be best understood as some sort of hybrid. Perhaps there’s a story in your past or something you understand about the future that explains your willingness to show up for hackathons, policy forums and public meetings.
Why does civic tech matter to you? What’s your best case as to why it matters for the rest of us?
