The State of Civic Tech as Seen from TICTeC 2024

Like everywhere else, the role of AI is the big question. Plus some other updates from the intersection of tech and politics.

As promised last week—I managed to virtually attend six breakout sessions of last week’s international TICTeC conference on the impact of civic tech. Here are my main takeaways.

First, it’s great to see that civic tech—the use of technology for the public good—continues to thrive. Though the buzz around the field in the US may have shifted toward “public interest technology,” which is more oriented around academic institutions (where the goal is to imbue the next generation of computer engineers with a greater awareness of ethics and interest in public service), at TICTeC the scrappy, bottom-up nature of civil society activists using tech in creative ways to address societal issues and crises was still evident.

I learned about a bunch of promising and inspiring projects in that vein, including:

-Kidmapping, a volunteer-driven crowdsourcing project that scrapes open data from across Russia in order to identify where children from Ukraine, many of them orphans or in foster care, have been taken.

-Floodlight, an implementation of the Ushahidi crowdsourcing platform that a group of Pakistani developers who belong to Code for Pakistan put together overnight in response to the devastating floods that hit their country in the summer of 2022.

-WeVis, an open data initiative that started in Thailand in 2019, has drawn inspiration from They Work for You in the UK and GovTrack in the US to develop a series of government transparency sites there, including ParliamentWatch, TheyWorkForUS, LawWatch and Promise Tracker.

-Querido Diario, a Brazilian open government project is making the official records of hundreds of municipalities accessible to the public in an open format.

-Data for Crisis, an open data initiative/partnership of Social Lab and Akadamie, that seeks to amplify marginalized voices during crises, focused on the English- and Arabic-speaking worlds.

I also learned that, in a few countries, enlightened governments are making commitments to support civic tech infrastructure in ways that correlate to analog age investments in physical infrastructure—albeit at a much lower level. So, for example, Taiwan has a whole Ministry of Digital Affairs, which was founded in 2022. It focuses on two things: the infrastructure needed to guarantee digital connectivity as well as public software code built and used by government agencies. It has several departments, including one called the “Democracy Network” which overseas democratic technology software development includes planning and promotion of international civic tech and open source.

In Germany, the Sovereign Tech Fund is putting serious money into open source digital infrastructure. Funded by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action, it’s put about $30 million into efforts like supporting the JavaScript ecosystem, Python and PHP (which underpins the vast majority of websites). “We want to move towards a position where we can reduce the dependence of states, individuals and governments on monopolistic tech structures,” Paul Sharratt, the head of research for the fund, said during his TICTeC panel talk. “Everything we invest in open source and freely available,” he added, noting that one of the fund’s driving ideas is “public money, public code.” And he tied all this back to critical civic tech sites like They Work for You, one of the oldest open government platforms, which tracks all the data and public statements made by members of the UK Parliament. “Crucially,” he noted, “it’s built on PHP.”

Sharratt illustrated his talk with this cartoon from XKCD. It’s worth remembering how much of a digital ecosystem rests on invaluable and under- or non-compensated work of volunteer coders.

AI and large language models came up several times during the panels I watched, which is not surprising. For the most part, speakers emphasized the more mundane ways that they were integrating AI into their civic tech tools. For example, Belgium’s GoVocal (which used to be called Citizen Lab) provides participatory software that hundreds of local municipalities across Europe use to run public consultations. One of the longstanding challenges with mass consultation is that a city manager can’t possibly engage thousands of constituents in a one-on-one way with follow-up, and so people who participate in such processes often complain that they put their answers into a black box and don’t understand how conclusions were reached. So GoVocal is using AI to more efficiently summarize the huge number of comments their systems collect, in order to better close the loop with citizens and let them know how their opinions affected the process.

“Put yourself in the shoes of a city manager, or someone actually running their first consultation,” Irene Peduelo, GoVocal’s head of product, explained during her panel. “Let's say you have not been too ambitious, and you thought you could analyze two open ended questions in a short survey. You get 100 responses, which is not, honestly way below the average of number responses we get. And let's say that you devote 30 seconds to each of their responses, just to see what they say. Just actually reading quickly puts you at an hour and 40 minutes of your time. That’s kind of a lot of time, and this is really the world that they are living in today.” She added that GoVocal had a simple goal with this AI implementation. “Let's get them to close the loop with residents at a higher rate. Can we do that? Because we think that's essential for trust in democracy.”

Of all the talks I saw, the one that resonated most deeply for me as an American observer came from an old friend, Marci Harris. She’s been toiling at the intersection of technology, democracy and Congress for close to 20 years. She titled her talk “Overcoming the Red Queen problem: ensuring democracy keeps pace with emerging technologies.” That’s a reference to Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen, who teaches Alice that “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” Harris, a former congressional staffer, has been building and running PopVox, a nonpartisan congressional listening tool, and the PopVox Foundation, a platform for research and development of similar services, for more than a decade. So not only is she running fast, she’s a long-distance runner.

Between Silicon Valley and Congress, she told the TICTeC audience, “I have never seen the two worlds further apart in what they think the future is going to be,” referring to the rise of generative AI. “In Silicon Valley,” she said, “there is hair on fire. Nothing is going to be the same. This absolutely changes everything. They're talking about AI but they're also talking about genomic editing, they're talking about new energy and lots of technology innovation. And in DC, there's a lot of ‘we've been here before--there was social media, whatever happened to crypto or blockchain, you know, is this really such a big deal?”

From her point of view, government changes at a linear pace while digital technology moves at an exponential clip. “That means that every year, government policy is falling further and further behind. It's the Red Queen, we've got to run faster than ever before, to, to make any kind of progress.” This was not to say that Congress is as hidebound as it used to be about tech. “But there is a huge knowledge gap on how society is changing, and how policymakers are understanding it, and how quickly they can act and how well the resulting policies work.”

The PopVox Foundation works to address this gap by holding training and networking events, creating working groups, placing tech fellows in congressional offices, publishing researching and testifying. In January, it published an initial overview of how legislatures are starting to incorporate AI into their workflows. Soon, the foundation will release an augmented AI that building on top of Congressional Research Service reports. By prototyping new innovations, Harris hopes that PopVox can help Congress run a little faster. Amen to that!

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To learn more and stay on top of the field: The Civic Tech Field Guide's weekly Friday update shares gems from across the global field of civic tech. Each issue features new product launches, upcoming funding deadlines, and hand-picked top jobs. You can check out last week's issue here and subscribe for free here.

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In other news from the intersection of tech and politics:

—Users of Hustle, the mass texting tool, may want to think about the fact that its owner, Chamath Palihapitiya, just co-hosted a high-profile $300K per person fundraiser for Donald Trump in San Francisco. Palihapitiya, an early employee of Facebook who is now at the heart of the tech-bro right in Silicon Valley, bought Hustle in 2020, back when he was still a Joe Biden fan. Among Hustle’s customers: the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (which paid Hustle $344K in February), Planned Parenthood Votes (which pays it roughly $40K per month), BlackPAC, Elizabeth Warren for Senate, EMILY’s List, the Human Rights Campaign, SEIU, and RAICES. Palihapitiya is an active leader of the company, not just a passive investor, as this tweet from him shows.

—Here's a great summation of how the crypto industry has conquered Washington, pouring more than $94 million into federal candidate and party coffers since 2023. Among the new players, Fairshake, a superPAC backed, Bloomberg’s Bill Allison reports, with millions from venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who’ve each given Fairshake $9 million; billionaire twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who each donated $2.5 million; and Coinbase Global Inc. Chief Executive Officer Brian Armstrong, who contributed $1 million. His company also gave $20.5 million while Ripple Labs donated $20 million. Fairshake “pummeled” California Rep. Katie Porter with $10 million worth of negative ads, helping to deflate her Senate bid. Now it’s put $2 million into the pile-on against Rep. Jamaal Bowman.

—NewsGuard has found that the top ten leading AI chatbots give users Russian disinformation narratives 32% of the time. For example, the bots presented as fact false reports about a supposed wiretap discovered at Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence and a nonexistent Ukrainian troll factory interfering with U.S. elections.

—ProPublica, the investigative journalism nonprofit, has launched a new searchable database covering 527s, tax-exempt political organizations that are allowed to spend unlimited sums to influence politics.

—The Teamsters and the upstart Amazon Labor Union have joined arms to launch a new effort to organize Amazon warehouses, Noam Scheiber reports for The New York Times. The ALU will have an exclusive right to organize warehouses in the NYC area, he reports, and the fledgling union has supposedly ironed out internal squabbling over its founder, Chris Smalls, and his leadership style. We shall see.

—Apply: The Ford Foundation’s Technology and Society Program is looking to hire a program officer to join its illustrious team.

End Times

I’m working on one more post about the congressional primary here in my home district (NY-16). Early voting started last Saturday; Election Day is a week from today. Thank goodness it’s almost over. If you have tips or questions, leave a comment or email me!