Matt Stempeck on the Civic Tech Field Guide and why projects succeed or fail
Matt Stempeck is founder and curator of the Civic Tech Field Guide, which lists civic tech projects from all over the world. With 20 years experience in civic tech, Matt has seen projects passing and persisting in this challenging field. He has a profound understanding of what makes a project successful and what makes it fail.
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Transcript
Welcome to another episode of Democracy Innovator podcast, and our guest of today is Matt Stempek. And, you're working on the civic tech guide. Right?
Yes. The civic tech field guide because it's a field. Field field.
And, thank you for your time. And, it's it's a quite big project. And how did you start? And, yeah, how it is working? Now are you alone? There is a team.
Yeah. Sure. So it's actually this year will be our tenth anniversary, which is very exciting. We know from our collection that not everyone makes it to ten years in this space. It's difficult to sustain so long. So about ten years ago, I was at Microsoft on a civic tech team in New York City. And some of my colleagues at Civic Hall, Mika Sifry and Aaron Simpson, the three of us got together in a room. And just like all of civic tech, we took a lot of post it notes and and put them everywhere, the sticky notes, and we mapped out the field as it was in 2016. Basically, we each had our own little spreadsheets of all the different civic apps that people were launching, and we said, you know, this field is booming, which it was at the time. It was the hot thing in 2015, 2016. And if it's booming, we need a map of the field. And specifically, we wanna help grow the field, but also make people working in this space more effective. So that means knowing who is doing what, who else is out there, you know, if something fails, why did it fail, and what can we learn from it? So, yeah, that was just the initial idea. It started as a Google Sheet, you know, really high-tech. The Google Sheet got really popular by 2016 standards, and people were adding all kinds of projects. And we came up with a taxonomy to sort of organize this field. And just really simply, we split it artificially between the tech and the people. So the tech is all the tools, the data, and what are the functions of things they do for democracy. Right? They send a text message to a voter about the election. Okay. The social side of the field is how we use those tools to make a difference. Right? So that might be a fellowship or a research center or someone that's hiring for a job or a funder who funds us. That's kinda the social side of the field, and they're both really important, but we end up creating all these categories to sort of just organize who's doing what.
And, I I was was curious to know how it changed maybe the concept, about civic tech also compared to, like, I mean, I don't know also if in Microsoft now they still have a civic tech team or, like, yeah. What what did you see during these ten years?
Yeah. It's changed a lot. I think the core definition of civic tech in most people's mind is probably tech that improves the relationship between the people and the government. And so that might be government to people, or it might be a participation platform. I took a pretty broad view. I wrote an essay about this for Civicist back in the day, of civic tech being any tech or innovative methods, including, you know, design, that help us address collective problems. And so that you can separate that there's, like, smart cities, right, that might be about helping your car get through traffic faster. That might be a private problem of you driving around a city. We look at collective problems, like, how might you, you know, reduce accidents and deaths in cities by cars, which is more of a collective issue in a city. So that's one way we just took a broader view of civic tech is it's somewhere more narrow than just tech for good, social good tech, because it's inherently has to involve democracy and power and, you know, the relationship between the governed and the government government. But we we definitely went broader than just participation platforms, which we include, but that's we kinda took a broad view. So the field has changed a lot. Some of the hype went away, which is a good thing and a bad thing. You know, some of the people who were excited about it are now on to other hype areas, hype cycles. But at the same time, the field has consistently grown and grown more impactful. So it's easy to to wonder what impact we're having, and because of that, I started just tracking, you know, who the numbers of who's doing what. You know, Decidium in Brazil has 1,600,000 users last time I looked. That's not bad for a national program. Like, that's a pretty significant impact of people can go on that website and be involved in budgeting and policy making and other important decision making. You know, we haven't won for sure, but also we're beginning to have an impact and be a bit more institutionalized. So that's the other change I've seen is a lot of civic tech started as sort of this outside protest movement, building their own tech, often at meetups or hackathons, and then trying to convince the government to adopt those solutions, which very rarely worked. Government likes to adopt their own solutions. So many of those people who were outside activists actually went inside of government to make the change from within because that's often where it happens. That's where the resources are. That's where the decision making is. So it's kinda funny. You ended up with people that never really dreamed of having a government job going inside the bureaucracy and learning how it all works so that their work can be more impactful.
Awesome. And I I wonder like, can we consider civic tech, also like, mainstream social network like, can be Facebook, can be, because it is possible in some way to participate and we have to say that the people mainly are there. And so Sure. Can but it's not specifically for, let's say, governor, problem related to governance. And, For sure. And, yeah, also, like, about the the the difference between, what can be defined as civic tech and the gov tech. Because often, as you say the and it is very interesting government. They want their own solutions. Because in some way maybe there are there are used to a certain way of, of deciding and and governance.
Yeah. What are your ideas about this? Yeah. For sure. That first question is a great one. We actually do track. So the way we framed it a long time ago is there is a civic product, which might be, you know, an app that's just about voting. Right? And then there's then mainstream platforms, like, you know, X, Facebook, Threads, Instagram, TikTok, they're obviously not designed explicitly for democracy use cases. They have externalities that have a huge effect on democracy. Right? If you think about the disinformation environment or influencers gaining power as people in the public sphere. And then also sometimes they build civic features. So I'm this weird place, you know, a lot of us like to be very critical of the big platforms. I've also celebrated where the big platforms help people do things like register to vote, donate their organs if they die, you know, these these kind of prosocial things that they build into their product. They're they're often, you know, not the core focus of the platform. The platform wants to make money. But because they serve billions of users, they can actually have a big social impact that way. So I've always celebrated the teams that are working on those internally at the companies. So if you've got Civic products, Civic externalities, which could be good or bad, and then Civic features. That's sort of how we think about it, and we organize, like, on our civic tech field guide, we have sections for Meta, Google, Amazon, anytime that they're doing something that, you know, directly relates to democracy and decision making. For the second question, the gov tech one, that was something we had to consider at the beginning. Especially at the beginning, we only focused on gov tech if it was about shifting power, you know, helping the the collective governance of a democratic society and helping give give people more power in a democracy, yeah, collectively and more so than individualist. There is a huge sector of GovTech that's just about making bureaucracy work, you know, ideally more efficiently. But many of these companies are vendors, and they're making a lot of money off the government. So we take sort of a values driven approach to GovTech, which is it should be prosocial. That's like, if if we're paying attention to it and spotlighting it, we're interested in it because it's helping people. And part of that is, you know, does the GovTech shift power? Is it not just, you know, for example, one example is, say in the US government, digital teams made web pages work really well on phones and mobile, and they're really well designed now. That's great. The public has more trust in those web pages because they work like any consumer tech company would, and we need the government to have that capacity. But if the content of that website is saying that some people are illegal and we don't want, you know, x group in our country, then I think we haven't won our our battle, you know, even if the page is super modern design and loads fast under your phone. I think the the meaning of what the GovTech is doing is also vital.
And, also I I was thinking that, I mean, a platform that, just help, let's say, bureaucracy to work in a easier way. It is also in some way maybe centralizing power. Mhmm. And so many times I thought that, on one side, it is cool that, we have, like, instead of paper, we have something that works better. So if you, I don't know, you have to deal with the with bureaucracy, it is actually that is something faster. I mean, in Italy, we are, very slow with bureaucracy. And, but at the same time, it it concentrate power and maybe it has to go on parallel with civic tech, because I I think that, civic tech up completely disconnected from institutions. Maybe it doesn't have an effect. And it's cool that people that are came from outside institution go inside institution so they can maybe adopt, certain platform. And so I was thinking about this, union between civic tech and gov tech if, we wanted something really change. Mhmm. And I'm curious to know which platform, if you have any, have success and which fails. If if it is true, I don't know that the one that have success have this connection between GoTek and SwigTech, more hybrid or, like, I don't know. Yeah.
That's a big question. No. Answer that one first. I do think a lot of civic tech projects that wanted that tried to build something that really the government should be doing, if they try to just build that and then convince the government to take it and use it, that often fails, which is a shame because often the tech the product they build is better than what the government offers. But the government has its own way of building tech. And so because of, like, now almost two decades of this pattern, that's why a lot of people went inside government, and this very unsexy topic of procurement became a a hot topic because procurement is how government buys things, and how government buys technology was fundamentally broken. You know, people inside government thought that they couldn't buy open source technology. They would fight with regulations from one hundred years ago about accepting things for free, which includes open source software. So there was a lot of work just to improve if if you make if you help government be better at buying technology. For example, maybe they can buy from smaller technology companies that are more mobile and agile than some of the big government gov tech vendors that just sell websites for $500,000,000 on some old database. Right? So that's why people focus on procurement. On GovTech, yeah, the it's interesting. You could have issues where alright. There's this this tension always between convenience and privacy and security. Right? I I was speaking somewhere last year where I said, you know, I'm tired of having to enter my birthday every time I fill out a government form. You know, they know my birthday as one example. And someone in the audience took issue, you know, but do you want all the government agencies to have the same data across everywhere? And, you know, I'm an American citizen. The second Trump administration started looking at health records, tax records of their political opponents. That's an obvious area where it could be really treacherous to have your data synchronized across all government agencies. At the same time, this is why regulations exist. And Europe, in my opinion, compared to other places, has done a good job with certain regulations, like GDPR and Italy's data agency has been very active, where you can have things like government services, like a digital ID for government, for example. And then there's legislation and enforcement of not abusing that power. I think that's an important side of it that sometimes gets lost. And identity is a really interesting subset of GovTech because, you know, it's a necessary thing, but it's actually very controversial even on the social good side of things. Some people see it as, you know, helping people without bank accounts or other services get those services, and others see it as a giant violation of privacy and the future of the Orwellian state. And it could be either depending on its execution. Right?
Absolutely. And this is why it's very important to talk about about it, because it can go in one way or the other one. And, I mean, you explained before how, you started the the project, but how did you came up in the civic tech team of Microsoft? Like, what is
My life story. So, basically, I was in Washington, DC for many years because I wanted to change the world, and and I thought The US Capitol was a good place to start. And I got my backgrounds, my first years of working, basically doing online campaigns, you know, including for candidates, but also for issues and causes and for nonprofits. So I fell in with the network of folks from the Howard Dean and Obama campaigns professionally, where we would train other organizations how to, you know, combine big data digital campaigns with traditional old school political organizing. And that was basically the the root of my whole career. I ended up going to MIT Media Lab for grad school up in Boston and Cambridge, Center for Civic Media with this guy, Ethan Zuckerman, who was looking at global attention in the media, and why do we, especially as Americans, not pay attention to certain parts of the world, and could we actually build media tools that track and measure that? And so while I was at the media lab, I started getting interested in, you know, more of this civic tech was emerging, And I actually wrote my thesis, my master's thesis, you have to build something. And so I what I built was all the ways people can help in a disaster. I was really inspired by both man made disasters, natural disasters around the world. When something terrible happens to a community, that community often rallies and tries to help. In the past, we would just ask them for money. And now with digital skills, people can contribute in much more powerful ways. Right? Influencers can donate their attentions of millions of people of their audience. Right? Software developers can build something completely new that maybe the charity didn't know was possible. Right? So I was inspired by that. And then I also came across this concept of civic features of, like, you know, if platforms have billions of users, then they could do a lot of good for the world with the with that attention span and with embedding civic engagement in the product itself instead of asking people to go download a civic engagement app. I think this just makes more sense as a feature sometimes. So that's what drew me to Microsoft. Microsoft had noticed that the civic tech movement was happening and that people were building government technology outside of government. And so as a company that sells a lot of government technology, they thought, maybe it makes sense to be participating in these civic tech communities, which at the time was a a bunch of cities across The US where there was already an active community. Microsoft was smart enough to say, we're not gonna start a community from scratch. Let's just go participate where there is a community. And they built a team, including myself. I joined in 2014, to basically yeah. In New York City, in Boston, Chicago, DC, Seattle, San Francisco, and the Bay Area, all across the country, just kinda show up in different ways, be part of that. And it it it coincided nicely with Microsoft selling cloud services like Azure, because then you could, you know, even run Linux on a large part of Microsoft's cloud. A lot of their revenue is from Linux. So instead of being against open source, it became, you know, kind of a co beneficial thing. I didn't sell anything. It was kind of an outreach engagement team We partnered with New York City, for example, on Vision Zero, which was coming up with, like, real time digital twins of cities to model. If you ever make changes to traffic policy, how could that benefit the city and reduce deaths and accidents? So we work with three cities on that with this, nonprofit you might have heard of called DataKind. Basically, day doing data science for social good. So it was a real it was a really fun job. New York City was a real still is, is a real hive of, you know, active events and energy and people doing new things. And data and society was getting founded, AI Now Institute. We worked with Microsoft Research. So it was a pretty exciting time to be applying all this computational social science towards, like, real on the street issues in cities.
And, I I was thinking about, what you said, the that Microsoft was smart enough to not try to build their his own community, but, approaching the one that already existed. Because I'm thinking that, this in some way is a problem. Like, now nowadays, it is easy to build a platform. It is not so easy to to convince people to use the platform. And, and so the platform remain empty. And so an approach can be like the one of going where the people are and also to maybe, like, remove the friction because, a lot of times when they tell you, like, hey, register to this new platform and you are, like, okay, another plus.
Yeah. Yeah. And and companies with lots of money have really struggled to even when they build the platform to get people to use it. Right? And network effects are powerful things. And I think we're seeing now the digital sovereignty argument, you know, and it's happening in in Europe and for good reason. But fighting network effects is a difficult thing. You need to everyone to be there. Right? And it's another you asked about, you know, patterns of failure in civic tech and trying to build your own social network just for civic engagement or something like that. It has been a common pattern we've seen where even if they had money, it just fails because telling people to go somewhere and be the first user on a social network is already difficult. And then they have these very narrow views of what people are gonna talk about on that social network. Like, maybe, we want you to talk about democracy, but don't be political. Like, that that that's been a product people have built before. And, like, it doesn't work. Right? People, if they're an interest in democracy, they probably might want to be political, but also they can already do that on 10 different social platforms. So how are you different, and how will you get that critical mass for the network effect has been a real challenge.
Yeah. Absolutely. And I I I was thinking maybe, like on the on your app, there are, like, 100 of different projects. And, and this is a problem. You said it also for big techs. I wonder if like a sort of integration, and this is something very interesting to to talk about, like, interoperability between different projects or maybe, different, APIs connected. So, yeah, I mean, I feel I'm sure you had some idea. Totally.
You mean in this space in general or for our product?
Yeah. I don't know. Like, in the in the space for civic I mean, there are tons of civic tech apps that do not talk each other. Or maybe Maybe one app has 10 user, the other one has 100 users, then there is the the city main browser that has two millions.
Yeah. How to connect all of all of that? Totally. That's actually in in the area where last year, I finally saw some movement, which is exciting. So basically, we put everything like this every discussion like this, we put into another category. So we created a category for interoperability of civic platforms. It's not a huge category. There's, like, seven things in there. Some of the exciting things that are happening, you have Juno ACTI, a c t e. It's Alliance Civic Tech Europe. So they're basically a trade group representing the digital participation platforms in Europe at the EU level, which I think is great because it shows the industry is mature, and it also helps get some of the existing government EU resources to participation platforms and and programs. They had a panel at TicTac, the Impact of Civic Tech Conference last year, last summer, in Mekelen, Belgium, all about they're basically one off individual team ups between different platforms. So, like, GoVocal and Deliberate and some others, like, would work together, and they were acknowledging different platforms are good for different parts of the process, and so let's team up. That was still happening as sort of one off, direct bilateral relationship kind of partnerships. There's also work across in other places to first of all, we should have a standard. There's, like, public code YAML from Italy, and that's, like, to describe a project. We also track digital standards, like, you know, people wanna map all the hiking trails. There's an open standard for that. There should be an open standard for participants and supporters and public action. Right? And there's been some efforts to try to do that. So that's the whole interop space, and there's a standard space. And I'm closely following both because I would love to see more of it. And it's actually a little surprising given how open source and, you know, prosocial all these groups are that we don't have a more coherent one. And and lastly, MediGov is building a tool with Scotland, with the government, to, again, combine a lot of participation tools into one coherent single tool.
Yeah. I know. I'm also I I know that and, I was curious if you knew about the the MetaGov, that is working on the ontology. But I see that's And the ontology. Right. Do do you wanna say more about that? I mean, I'm doing some small experiments with the tools I'm building, using, some of the ontologies that came up from the from that group inside MetaGolf. But, yeah, at this stage just very small experiments. But, I I'm curious to see, yeah, how how to connect all the different tools, because I think it it is needed. And also nowadays, I I think that one of the problem and, and one of the solution, that connecting the tools, in some way will also connect the different teams. Mhmm. And so it will maybe create something, co as union of people that are working on different project in different countries, but at the same time with the same goal. And people that are doing this, it means that they are creating a center of power. I mean, same intentions. It means that, you can build something together. Mhmm. This is, something powerful, I think. Yeah. And I think what this is what we need.
Yeah. One one thing I should mention, together with People Powered, which is a global organization of members doing this work, we wrote two versions of this this guide to digital participation platforms. And as part of that, we looked at 30 participation platforms and said, you know, what are the features and can you export the data? That's one place. And then last time, we also looked at interoperability with other tools. That might be an analytics package or it might be another participation tool. And And it's a lot of work, frankly, to go through the hundreds of platforms and see exactly what it does because that also changes over time. But our I should mention, our our collection's crowdsourced, so you can go and adopt your project. And when a company, like a participation platform, adopts and claims their project on the Civic Tech Field Guide, they have an opportunity to say what features they have. That's something we just started doing. It's, you know, a lot of data collection, but if it's your company, it makes sense to say what the things are. And that can include what tools does it interoperate with, which, yeah, I would love to see, you know, not just being able to export the data, but actually having the data work across tools like, you know, other like other platforms do.
Yeah. Then I think there is a lot of also regulations, that is is good that the there are I mean, if we talk about GDPR, but then it also creates some, let's say, friction when you want to pass data Right. Across different tools. Yeah. And so Yeah.
Sometimes I look at, you know, people who are working to destroy things in the world, including GovTech and CivicTech, and they're they're just they they ask, they don't even ask for forgiveness, and they definitely don't ask for permission. And then sometimes in our space, you know, I was at conferences last year where people were saying we can't do access to information and freedom of information because of GDPR. And I was like, sometimes I think we get in the way of ourselves. Maybe we need to be a little more bold sometimes, but while following the law, you know, but sometimes law is also, interpretation.
Yeah. This is, it's also very interesting that you mentioned this. I mean, because law, it is absolutely interpretation. And, I wonder, like, because, let's say, I don't know what the future will look like, about governance and so on. And maybe, I mean, I have some ideas that, of course, are wrong. And, but they saw how let's say, I don't know. Now we have a constitution that maybe can be, I I don't you interpret the constitution. Then, if tomorrow we will have, I don't know, a smart contract, then, it's harder to interpret it. I mean, it's it's more specific maybe. I don't know. If you
and and yeah. Then there's enforcement too. Right? So, I mean, you're a student of history, you know, like, there's the political culture is also a factor in how things are interpreted, understood, executed, enforced are as or more important than the actual letter of the law. And, you know, we're in this unique moment where the twentieth century world order is being torn down or hollowed out. Like, it's still there, but it's being, you know, robbed of its ability to perform as it's supposed to. And we find ourselves in a position where, you know, I I find myself, like, we went into this space to improve democracy, to fix and reform these somewhat broken institutions, and then the institution themselves are actually under threat and being eroded and being destroyed. So then we end up sort of playing defense instead of offense. So then there's a temptation to use some of this participatory tech and, you know, smart contracts and everything else to leapfrog, say, okay, if this institution is failing anyway, what can we come up with that's better than that in the first place? But then we have to we have to have the votes to leapfrog and build something that's better and not worse. Right? So we're in this tricky position right now of defending these institutions that we ourselves wanted to fix and make better, but also a moment where the future is coming whether we like it or not. And how can we use all these innovative methods that we know about to help make that better and maybe, you know, move towards the world we want instead of just defending the twentieth century order, which I would actually be okay with, but we're losing anyway. So then it's like, what do we do?
Yeah. Like, how to because in the past, a lot of time, everything changed, but at the same time, everything remained the same. And so how to not, yeah, how to make it, successful in some way. I don't know.
Yeah. If you look for the opportunity in the current crisis, that opportunity might be that a lot of things we took for granted and things that you thought you couldn't touch are are being messed with. They're already being changed. So it's a malleable moment in the world order. So maybe we can take advantage of the that moment to make things a little better instead of worse. I don't know. It's our work that we have to do.
Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it is true, like, in, when there is a instability in some way, it is also an occasion for, like, a build a new kind of, stability.
Exactly. And and, you know, as a history scholar yourself, when there's a revolution, you have an opportunity for change, but also a lot of people get hurt. And so I think that's why a lot of the people who went inside government stops calling for revolution is they actually gained appreciation for the systems and all the people whose lives depend on those systems, even though they don't might not know it. And that changing those systems can upend people's lives even though those systems desperately need to be upgraded, you know, to do it carefully and responsibly becomes sort of their focus rather than just completely revolutionize everything and and not understand who's gonna get hurt when you completely upend everything.
Yes. Absolutely. And, going back for one second to the to the app, I wanted to ask you, yeah, from a technical point of view, how it, it is, working. And, also, if you disc because you have a sort of database with a lot of information, if you discover something that you were not expecting.
I discover things not expecting all the time. Okay.
Then, I mean, something interesting for you that can
Sure. So technically, I have to give a shout out to my friend, Devin Balkan, who helped us kind of evolve. We started as a Google Sheet, then we became a WordPress website with a small grant in 2018 from Knight Foundation, where we basically did, like, a directory theme on WordPress. And then we evolved, and Devin helped us build, an Airtable database that then populates a directory app website. And so the directory app is open source, and our Airtable database is completely open data. It's just Creative Commons. We just ask for attribution. So, you know, we basically all the time, like, a a team from Taiwan just reached out for project information about Taiwan. A team reached out last week or two weeks ago about funding information in Latin America. And we're never, like, completely comprehensive, but we can give what we have, and I can slice and dice and, you know, filter the data for people so it's useful. And it's important to us that it's open and it's free. There are much larger collections of nonprofit data, for example, that are very expensive. So we're not always the best in a given area, but we are open and free and crowdsourced. And anytime I I do freelance research to subsidize my own living off this. And every time I learn something, I put it back in. So the work I did with People Powered, for example, all that data on participation platforms is back in the field guide, like, from the very beginning. Likewise, I worked with Code for All on disinformation projects around the world. And as part of that project, refined our collection of, I think, over just hundreds, maybe 500 disinformation fighting projects. In that work, there's this interesting so then I started doing a newsletter to, you know, having 11,000 things in the database is great, but it's overwhelming. Right? So the newsletter is week to week special coverage or areas we've improved or spotlights on things that I find interesting as a curator. So that's basically in our newsletter. I kind of write up what are the trends that are emerging, like the interoperability conversation we had, of course, following AI, and specifically, like, where is AI showing up, how is it being used on a participation platform, for example. So that news that has been really helpful for basically and this year, we're actually gonna do even more of this is detecting trends in, you know, social, political, civic technology as they emerge. And I think there's a sweet spot of once a trend once there's, like, a few examples of that thing in the world, that that trend, helping others learn about it. If it's if it's something effective that seems to be working, helping get it to more groups sooner can help all of us do our work better. Right? There's that famous quote about the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. So, like, if a new technique or a technology or method is proving to be really effective, we should help distribute it faster so that social good organizations can make use of it faster. Because I think there's also this flip side of that that when you're too late, everyone's doing it, and you no longer have a really, asymmetric advantage by doing that technique. You're just another person doing that thing that you kinda have to do.
And so I was curious about something that maybe you are working on, I don't know, the next part of the of the app.
Sure. I can do sneak peeks. Alright. So one thing I started doing is using this no code app building platform called Softr, s o f t r. We still have our open source web app, but frankly, we just didn't have money last year to improve it. It still works, but we we don't have funds for a developer right now. So we started using Softr, which is actually kind of fun. I can it's basically, like, these building blocks modular way that we can interlink everything. And that way, when you're looking at a job page, you can see, you know, the city it's based in and all the civic tech there or the the hiring organization and all their projects from the job page, and everything can be interlinked very easily. They also roll out new features that we don't have to pay to develop, which is nice. So for example, they added a button for an AI chatbot. I'm still testing that button. So far, it's not that great, but we also didn't spend any money to build it. So, you know, an LLM bot based on our knowledge base is an obvious idea that we haven't done yet because I wanna make sure it's done well. But it'd be nice, you know, people currently search our database or we serve things up in a newsletter, but it would be nice to be able to ask an LLM about it in a way that limits hallucination, maybe, you know, retrieval augmented generation. So that's one area. And then on the social side, we're always trying to expand. We have a collection of volunteer curators around the world, an assembly of curators that basically help us see what's happening where they are. So we have someone in Venezuela, in Thailand, also within different, categories, like, for example, drones. And they can help share what they're seeing so that our team doesn't have to be, you know, omnipresent. And that way, we can know what's happening around the world. And I guess the third thing, there's always more data to integrate, and that's both, you know, projects about and data about products we already have. So I like, for example, I've been embedding this very podcast on profile pages so that those profile pages now have a video explaining the project instead of just some text. But also, like, the Gov Zero team has thousands of Taiwanese civic tech projects that we don't have. And that gets into another thing. We need to do much better job localizing and translating the languages, which we're we're hoping to get some resources for that soon because it it's currently we use the original language that a project describes itself with, but overall, the overall thing is very English centric. And that's obviously we're trying to be a global collection. That's a pretty limiting factor.
Yeah. I was thinking also about the the refresh the people and the tech. How you you said that at the beginning and the fact that, often, it could be that there are several projects, with just, I don't know, few people of founders that are maybe struggling because they have to wear multiple hats. And so it could also be helpful, like, to if to if people discover that they are actually working on the same thing, they could also work together on the same thing.
Totally. And, Along those lines, well, first of all, anytime you have an application deadline for something, we all we share it in our calendar and across our socials. That's basically how we use our social media is just to share other people's opportunities, events, and applications for things like a fellowship or a job or a program, a training. Like, that's all we use our social media for is to share other people's, you know, opportunities like that. And then something we built a couple years ago that we now have hundreds of projects using, I wanna get I want more, is contact forms on the page. So, you know, this is opt in, but you give us info at your project dot com, and we can have a contact form embedded where people can then reach out to you. And that came about because I started receiving messages trying to buy a certain technology that we had a profile about in our directory. So, yeah, we're not the team, but I can connect you to the team. We we always link to the website and their contact pages, but having it right there on the profile can help interconnect the field a bit more. Yeah.
Yeah. I'm thinking also about new ideas.
Yeah. Please give your brainstorm.
Yeah. No. Something is, could be interesting is because, at the moment, it is just, I mean, our people that are inserting new, I don't know, they discover a new tool, a new event, a new podcast, and they manually insert it in the in the database. Right? Okay. I was thinking also about, maybe, because I was also experimenting, about, let's say, collecting the links or this is what I tried to connect to collect all the links with a bot, like a Telegram bot, this bot. So then if you have, like, because it happened to me a lot of time to to see that there was an event, I don't know, three months ago, and I didn't know about it. And also also, if I'm a part of several community that can be met, I go over the other Discord group, the Telegram group, the Web three group, and so on, then it's impossible to to to to see all the communities to to stay updated. Yeah. And so I think that this is something that also can be useful. Because I I see that there is like an event page, that is basically collecting all the, events in the next future. But I was thinking also about this, possibility of using technology by itself to collect things. But then it's also connected to power and so on. Do we want a bot that spy us?
I mean, for me, the bigger concern is will it work in a way that is compelling. Right? Like, first of all, like, for just dropping a link, I think, you know, messaging app bots work really well. I teach at Newspeak House in London. It's a political technology college. And, you know, I ask the students every year to add projects to our Airtable, and there's a form. You don't yeah. The only required field is a link. But socially, it's much more interesting for people to be in a channel where they do that together and share things. And then I can always just grab those links from that channel. So it's just a matter of time sorting and aggregating things. But the other thing is people build solutions like this that, like, maybe automate some of this, but then you lose the part where you have a person saying, this is important because or I think this is important. Right? Which is sort of a fundamental part of sharing something with the community, even on social media, is I think this is important. And bots can certainly do that, but then you, you know, we have 11,000 records, and there's many more we don't have. If it was just that, automatically, we'd have to figure out how why it's compelling for someone to look at and be worth their time. Right?
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Like, I was wondering about the possible cons,
of bots. No. Let's build one. Let's experiment.
Yeah. No. I built one. I I would send it to Right. And, yeah, then I I wanted to ask you, like, something about how do you imagine, like, the a possible future where, like, yeah, I don't know in ten years or twenty years if you're optimistic, pessimistic, Like newspaper nowadays, I'm like yeah. And, also from a governance point of view, like, let's say, if then people really start using, let's say let's call them social networks, civic tech app, or or whatever, but, like, they they they really want to participate, like, in the political, local life, and so on. How do you think it is it going to happen when?
So I guess someone from local level wants to get politically engaged?
Yeah. Like, let's say, nowadays, if they want to do something in the town, the town where I live, they do not really consult me. How? So I imagine, I don't know, in the future, but also now it is possible. I don't know if a direct democracy, if a sort of hybrid direct democracy and representative democracy or maybe
yeah. Totally. I'm I'm excited about that question. I was, brainstorming about this last year with Liz Berry from MediGov, and we we wrote up a pitch that we tried applying for a couple of things, but funding has been difficult the past couple of years. But I'd love to see someone do this. It's like, what's the version zero of an organizer kit? Right? Many of us or some of us, even in this field, we get people who come to us and they just wanna work in their town, but they're looking for a tool. And they're basically they're hungry and they're, you know, they're talking to people and they're organizing. Right? And they're trying to get maybe they have a WhatsApp group. Right? Maybe they just are managing a campaign from their iPhone. What's the initial kit we can give them that helps supercharge what they're doing? And how do we support them also? Because there's some, like, training and programmatic element of supporting people like that. And these are the people that are actually making the change at the local level and actually applying a lot of what we're doing. We're aggregating or building platforms, but they're the ones actually using those platforms in a political context to do something. But often, they're disconnected from this national or global conversation, and they're also under resourced. They might not have the formal background to know what a CRM is, for example, but they're actually organizing people and talking to people. So I think that's an unsolved challenge to do this locally and support them at the local level in a way that, like, works with how they work, but also maybe bring some of the benefits of digital technology, for example. Yeah. I'm I'm super interested in that that challenge. And then sort of at our level, I'd like to institute more community governance of the project. It's, yeah, I mentioned you can claim your profile, and, like, we love feedback, and we exist to serve. And when people say it's useful, that's, like, the best feedback we can get. But long term, the project I've been in this place that people sometimes find themselves with independent projects where, like, I've been the one keeping the lights on, making sure this stays alive for ten years. And so then it's hard to let go because I'm not I usually would love people contributing to decision making and power. That's not it. It's more like making sure this doesn't get diluted or stop running or not available. And basically, we made a promise at the beginning, because there were other crowdsource projects like this, and there have been many over the years, but they last, like, a couple years online. They ask everyone to create a profile and enter data and aggregate the community, and then they go offline two years later. I have to say the EU is really bad at funding projects like this, where, like, they two years and one day after the grant, the website, the domain doesn't work anymore. So like, not only is it not active, you can't even access the resources they collected with all these events they did. And that drives me crazy. If we're gonna ask the community to to enter data and create a space, then we should make sure it's long longevity and sustainable. And for a long time, we joked about our project just being too cheap to fail. You know, we didn't have much headcount. We we were a Google Sheet for a long time. It's our WordPress budget was pretty small. But then we always wanna make it a stronger resource for people. So I think this year, we're gonna be thinking a lot more about the community governance of this resource and where, you know, there's there's some clear actors around the world like GovZero, Acti, some of the ones I mentioned already that are leading this field that would be great to involve in the governance of this resource.
And do you have any message for the people in the civic tech, space?
I don't know if it's anything they haven't heard, but, the number one hardest thing everyone struggles with when building technology is, like, talk to your intended users sooner and spend as much time with them as possible before building the thing, and before getting too excited about building the thing because it's always, a sobering experience to watch someone use what you built. And and it's still a problem that we build things of what we want to build instead of what people actually use and need. And if we can solve that, then the thing is more sustainable. Yeah. That might be my main thing for for the builders of civic tech.
Thank you. And, if if you'd like to to say anything else,
I wanted to thank you for doing this podcast. And the reason for that is, there's a lot of amazing stuff happening in this field, and we're not always good at communicating beyond the choir of people who are already interested in democracy or technology or both. So I'm a big fan of efforts to communicate what people in this space are doing to get us to sit down for an hour and talk about what it is and explain it so that we can get more people doing this work. Because I think we need many more people doing democracy work right now and improving, upgrading, and defending our democracies. Anytime I talk to students, which is a fair amount, either high school or college or graduate students, like, they're excited this this thing we call civic tech exists. But they didn't know about it, even if they're researching something similar. Maybe they're lucky enough to have their teacher or professor bring someone in to talk to them, but other than that, they didn't know this field exists. So we have a lot of work to do to communicate that this is here and how to get a job in it, and can you get a job in it, and funding, and and and how to apply these things to make our democracies better in in a really vital time. Like, this work is so important, so it's important that we do it well. And and that's our mission, and that's I'm really grateful that you're, you know, actually helping publicize and make people sit down and explain the cool stuff they're doing. So thank you.
Thank you a lot, really. And, it is true what you say. Like, I some, it happened to me, but also, to other people that and all that, you start building something, and you also didn't know you don't know anything about civic tech, about the field that Alright. You just think, okay. This app can be helpful. Okay. I can.
Yeah. And it's not that you shouldn't still do it, and and maybe you have a new approach that's better, or maybe the timing is better. You never know. But, also, it wouldn't hurt to know what came before and where they went wrong. Maybe there's open source code you can take, you know, just to benefit from that that kind of collective knowledge over time is great. And the more we can do to help that be easy to find, even better.
Thank you a lot again. Thanks, Allison. It was really a a pleasure, Matt. Likewise. Thanks, Allison.
