Landscape ¶
Overview ¶
Among the Project Index team activities, we want to see and possibly analize which other services are out there that provide a list of Open Source Civic Tech projects. It is challenging to list (and provide search capabilities) open source projects given a lack of standardize description and search criteria. Some of the websites that we identified are global, some are focused on a location (like the USA or France) and some are focused on an issue (like Covid).
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DemocracyLab ¶
DemocracyLab is building online infrastructure to empower the civic technology movement by creating an online hub for civic innovation that uses marketplace dynamics to allocate effort, resources, and attention. Our initial product seeks to optimize the connection between skilled volunteers and technology-for-good projects. Later offerings will focus on the needs of donors, institutions, and citizens. It has a curated list of projects and groups that anyone can create. Projects and groups are well categorized on issue, technology, location and more criteria. http://democracylab.org
Civic Tech Companies & Organizations ¶
An airtable list of 148 (as of Dec 2020) civic tech companies and organizations mostly in the US covering “advocacy”, “gov tech”, “voting” and “generic”. To correct an organization information or suggest to add one is done via email. It provides organization level information only (mission, location, size), nothing about projects (although sometimes the organization is the project itself like ActBlue). https://airtable.com/universe/exp8LkpapvedfTi6k/civic-tech-companies-and-organizations?explore=true It almost seems part of https://airtable.com/universe where there are lists of airtable based projects, some within the civic-tech realm https://airtable.com/universe/expAvHxkW4rRwtVab/covid-19-resources-and-projects
Civic Issue Finder ¶
UNMAINTAINED. An embeddable widget to find issues on the Code for America API https://github.com/codeforamerica/civic-issue-finder
Civic Hub ¶
Civichub is a 4-month pre-acceleration program happening on 6 weekend sprints in the volcanic region of La Garrotxa (Girona, Spain), where +20 startups, social movements, cyber activists, corporate and government teams co-live, boosting and cross-pollinating their projects on civic innovation, distributed governance and decentralized technologies. This happened in Jan-March 2020. It doesn’t seem to have a list of projects or organizations nor to be active after that period. https://www.civichub.org
Civic Tech Hub ¶
CivicTechHub is a non-profit organization aimed at promoting collaboration and open innovation between individuals and organizations. We’re problem solvers and creative innovators connected across the globe. It offers a smart search on 7,000+ projects. If user start typing for example “Democracy” it is presented with a dozen of matching (?) tags, selecting “E-Citizens” returns however a list of 677 projects together with two lists of filters, categories and technologies. These lists however don’t seem very accurate as in technologies you can see “proteins”, “psycology”, “seaweed”, “italia”, “ingles” and in categories you can see “stay close to your customers”, “gather” and “demonstrate purpose”. It seems mainly geared towards European initiatives around Covid crisis. https://civictechhub.org
Civic Tech Guide ¶
The Civic Tech Field Guide is a crowdsourced, global collection of tech for good tools and projects. It’s your place to find and be found. Thousands of civic tech practitioners from over 100 countries around the world have contributed more than 4,000 projects to this catalog. In addition to projects and tools, the catalog lists also conferences, funders, awards, design principles and playbooks. Anyone can add a project providing a project description, location, social media profiles and associating it with multiple categories (from a large multi-level taxonomy). This large taxonomy is also available as CSV download https://civictech.guide/causes/ and provides a mapping to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The tool provides a worldwide graphical map of projects, a multi-level logical grouping of projects (which makes it easier to find them), a list of defunct projects (useful to repeat deadly mistakes or at least learn from them). The projects seem mostly valid, if present they show their twitter feed and if available the contact information. The projects seem mostly for “consumption” than for collaboration. https://civictech.guide
Help With Covid ¶
Civic Graph ¶
From Microsoft,it should have more than 600 nonprofit, private and public sector profiles. It doesn’t seem to work as of now (Dec 2020). According to https://www.govtech.com/Microsoft-Civic-Graph-Charts-the-New-World-of-Civic-Tech.html it wants “to allow people, organizations and governments to easily know essentially the who’s who and what’s what of civic tech”. Anyone can add an organization (not sure whether it would be vetted) providing information such as type of entity, area of influence, number of employers, data in and out, finance. https://www.civicgraph.io
JOGL ¶
Just One Giant Lab (JOGL) is a France based research and innovation laboratory operating as a distributed, open and massive mobilisation platform for collaborative task solving. JOGL aims at using Open Science, Responsible Innovation and Continuous Learning, partnering with academic labs, companies, startups, foundations, NGOs and public services to tackle Health, Environmental, Social and Humanitarian issues within the spirit of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). https://jogl.io The projects repository https://app.jogl.io/search/projects lists 257 projects (as of December 2020) with filtering on programs, challenges, technologies and SDG. Healthcare and Covid are the prevalent areas, projects seem to search collaborators and some have a detailed roadmap.
Govbase ¶
An open, crowdsourced database of tools and projects in online governance. To get started, visit https://github.com/thelastjosh/govbase This is part of the Metagovernance Project, it seems fairly active and looking to contributors (it seems mostly not technical except [data] mapping). As of December 2020, it lists 318 open source projects, 262 active and 55 inactive as well as 229 organizations (among which Wikipedia, Alphabet, Governments). https://airtable.com/shrgnUrj0dqzZDsOd/tblvk3EFzcoCFvXXi/viwTisATNcua7os4y
Govlaunch ¶
The free wiki for local government innovation Find the tools, inspiration and resources you need to build a smarter government. 100s of projects across a dozen countries, good filtering and categorization, intuitive “like” and bookmarking of a project. https://govlaunch.com
Solve for Good ¶
Ovio ¶
Ovio matches developers with the right project, the right task, and the right community, so that everyone feels empowered to become an active open source contributor. It seems not particularly focused on civic or social projects, although on their homepage they feature 3 collections (Covid, Civic Tech and Social Impact). There is a good filtering by topic, technology, last_activity and it clearly proposes to create a user profile to find a project to collaborate to. Selecting “Civic Tech” shows 98 projects listed by last_activity, projects show a number of friendly issues, clicking on a project it displays a fancy interface on top of Github. Nice feature of showing “similar projects”. https://ovio.org