Civic Technology, and the Difference Between Being Seen and Being Heard

Civic technology is a phrase that covers a great deal of ground, from genuinely useful tools to things that are little more than a press release, so it helps to begin with what it is for. At its simplest, it means digital tools that sit between people and the institutions meant to serve them. Some of these tools try to make government easier to see into, prying open its data, its spending, and its decisions. Others try to help people organize among themselves without waiting on government at all. Open-data sites and the small apps that let you report a broken streetlight and watch whether it gets fixed belong to the first kind. Neighborhood forums, mutual-aid networks, and participatory budgeting belong to the second.

The clearest success in the whole field is older than the internet, and it is worth dwelling on because it cuts against the usual story. Participatory budgeting began in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1989, when the city handed residents real authority over how part of the municipal budget would be spent. Which projects, which neighborhoods, which priorities won was put into ordinary people's hands. The idea spread to thousands of cities, including New York, which now runs one of the largest programs in the United States. For years it ran on paper and public meetings, with no software at all, and it worked anyway. The technology, when it eventually arrived, was the least important part of it. What made it matter was that the decision being handed over was a real one, with money attached.

That points at the distinction that actually sorts this field, and it is not new versus old, or online versus off. It is the difference between being able to speak and being able to be answered. A great deal of civic technology lets you speak. You can file the complaint, read the dataset, leave the comment, mark your preference on a form. Far less of it changes whether anyone on the other side has to respond, or what happens if they do not. A complaint portal that drops your message into a queue you can now watch in real time has given you the feeling of being heard without any of the substance. This is the quiet failure of much of the genre. The interface performs participation while the machinery that actually decides things carries on untouched, and a slicker interface does nothing to change that. A voting feature inside a body that ignores the vote is not democracy. It is set dressing.

So the part of the field worth caring about is the part that touches where decisions are actually made. That is where Showra is built to work, and it is the harder part, not reporting potholes or publishing spreadsheets but the thing underneath them, helping a large number of people work out among themselves what they actually want, and putting it in a form specific and credible enough that the institutions on the other side have trouble pretending they never heard it.

Two ideas sitting beneath all of this get their own posts: the older and more demanding kind of democracy these tools are reaching back toward, in Democracy Was Never Just Voting, and the trick that lets a single person hear thousands at once, in How to Read a Crowd Without Flattening It.

Whether civic technology as a whole is repairing democracy or merely decorating it is still an open question, and the honest answer differs from one tool to the next. The way to tell is to ignore how a thing looks and ask a blunter question of it: when people use this, does anything they decide actually have consequences. Most civic technology fails that test. The tools worth building are the ones that pass it.

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Sources and further reading: the UN Development Programme on civic tech (https://www.undp.org/asia-pacific/civic-tech); the Participatory Budgeting Project, on the Porto Alegre model and how it spread (https://www.participatorybudgeting.org/); and mySociety, the British nonprofit behind FixMyStreet (https://www.mysociety.org/).