Summary
Civic technology — the design and use of digital tools (open data, participatory platforms, organising apps, transparency dashboards) to strengthen democratic practice and citizen power.
Body
Civic technology — the design and use of digital tools (open data, participatory platforms, organising apps, transparency dashboards) to strengthen democratic practice and citizen power.
Civic tech is the field of designing and deploying digital tools for democratic purposes — from open-data portals and participatory-budgeting platforms to organising apps and transparency dashboards. The Civic Tech Field Guide is the global directory of projects, tools and organisations [source: civic-tech-field-guide]. Ciudadanía Inteligente develops open-source democracy tools (Escazúbarómetro, Del Dicho al Hecho) and publishes the methodological write-ups behind them [source: ciudadania-inteligente]. Wingu trains Latin American CSOs on digital tools and data practice [source: wingu]. Tactical Tech’s broader work on info-activism frames the field as one that combines the technical (data, security, tools) with the political (who controls the data, who benefits) [source: tactical-tech]. The recurring failure mode: a tool built without a constituency — civic tech that no campaign uses is a portfolio, not infrastructure.
Use it for
Choosing a civic-tech tool for a campaign; evaluating participatory-platform design; benchmarking transparency dashboards.
Related
- digital-security
- distributed-organizing
- petitions-and-e-campaigning
- ciudadania-inteligente
- civic-tech-field-guide
- tactical-tech
- wingu
Open Questions
None yet.
Sources & verification
- sources/civic-tech-field-guide — grounding: secondary — RAW (5392 chars)
- sources/ciudadania-inteligente — grounding: secondary — unfetchable
- sources/wingu — grounding: secondary — RAW (1965 chars)
- sources/tactical-tech — grounding: secondary — RAW (588 chars)
Verified 2026-06-23 by llm-qc.