Predictions and hopes for the next decade of civic tech
By: Angelica Quicksey
Tags: Predictions, Civictech, Design, Govtech, Policy

Reflecting on the past and looking toward the future of the field

Image: Design workshop for the City of San Francisco Recreation & Parks Department in 2012 | Source: Author

The second decade of the millennium is well and done, and we are inching our way into the early days of civic technology in 2021. Over the last ten years, the field has certainly grown and become better defined. In Cyd Harrell’s recently published Civic Technologist Practice Guide, she describes civic tech as a “loosely integrated movement that brings the strengths of the private-sector tech world…to public entities with the aim of making government more responsive, efficient, modern, and more just.” This definition simply did not exist ten years ago.

As the movement enters its teenage years, there are fewer one-off hackathons and more sustainable, embedded teams. Traits that concerned me in the early days — disdainful attitudes toward civil servants, a stark lack of diversity, lack of sustainability — have been, if not resolved, then at least acknowledged and acted upon. Below are some of my reflections on those traits, followed by three predictions for the next ten years and three hopes for the future.

Civic tech and civil servants

Early in my career as a civil servant, I interacted with technologists in a certain fellowship program who would parachute into a government agency, bright-eyed and eager to solve intractable problems in 6-to-9 months.¹ I found their enthusiasm and talent impressive. I also remember them disparaging my colleagues.

“Why can’t they just” was a common refrain as folks used to private-sector, VC-backed environments chafed against public sector limitations. The tech folks often attributed slow progress on their projects to laziness, lack of interest or ability on the part of their government partners.² These tired tropes are unfortunately common in the private sector. In one memorable exchange, a technologist I worked with learned how one long-time employee painstakingly typed information about pending Requests for Proposals (RFP’s) into an obsolete CMS to publish to an offshoot of the city website. The techie mused out loud about how a solution might enable the city to cut the government worker’s job. He did not realize that the goal in government is often not to cut jobs but to enable people to shift their attention from menial tasks to higher level work. He also didn’t understand the long-standing power and influence of public-sector unions. More importantly, this technologist simply lacked empathy for a civil servant that had dedicated a career to government work.

Fast forward to 2021 and emotional intelligence or EQ is critical for technologists to be hired into the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) or a local government team. Empathy is table stakes. I saw this when I sat in on a USDS all-hands meeting just as the organization hit 200 people. In that meeting, I distinctly remember the language people used. I remember how Erie Meyer spoke respectfully and generously of the group’s agency partners. Throughout the session, teams provided updates on their work. Even in describing failed projects, they acknowledged the constraints their civil service stakeholders faced and attributed difficulties not to the intractability or lack of imagination of those public servants, but to the environment they all worked in.³ They were all in this together.

Meanwhile, rather than send unfamiliar but tech-savvy volunteers into new communities, Code for America’s latest Community Fellowship provides resources and training to local community members and partners them with their local government to improve service delivery. This community organizing approach — supporting people that are already embedded in their communities — is a radical departure from the technocratic and largely community-agnostic ethos that characterized an earlier era of civic tech.

Diversity

Civic tech as a field has made marginal improvements in inclusion and diversity over the last decade. It is a domain at the intersection of two industries lacking in diversity. In tech, the racial diversity of the big tech companies has barely budged, and women still face pay and other disparities. In government, you’ll find that the population of workers looks more like the American population as a whole. However, the higher you go in any agency, the whiter, more male and monolingual it becomes.

Early on, attending CfA brigade events, govtech conferences, or hackathons organized by the SF Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation, I was often one of few (if not only) people in the room with my background: black, female, the daughter of people without college degrees, and the recipient of many of the public services under discussion. Today, some of the organizations that make up the civic tech ecosystem have made diversity and inclusion an integral part of building out their teams. In particular, I see far more women (some of whom are women of color or LGBT) leading teams and organizations at places like CfA, USDS, 18F, and the San Francisco Digital Service. Government contractor Nava PBC became majority women last year. (Full disclosure: I’m a designer at Nava.) Yet for all the good intentions, the progress in building diverse and inclusive teams is still uneven. Other facets of diversity still require work.

Sustainability

Civic tech is slowly becoming a more sustainable and robust enterprise. Hackathons, prototypes, and volunteer work can only get you so far. (Plus, the early emphasis on volunteerism helped cause the inequities I mentioned above. Who can afford to work for free, in their abundant free time?) Between 2010 and 2021, permanent digital service teams emerged at the federal level and in states and cities around the country, from Colorado to New Jersey. These were not philanthropy-endowed innovation teams — though there were those too. To create and sustain these teams, budgets had to be developed and adopted, new job descriptions written and positions created (no easy feat in the government context). Those teams took on the basics (the website!) as well as the complicated, seemingly intractable wicked problems that will always be at play in government (homelessness, economic development).

The civic tech nonprofits and foundations — from CfA to the Knight Foundation to single-issue groups like the Human Utility — have thrived. They have remained nonpartisan through political upheaval. They’ve helped people access benefits, cleared their criminal records, or paid their utility bills.

On the private side, I recall a lot of hand-wringing early on about the sustainability of the civic tech startup. Govtech and civic enterprises will likely never achieve the kinds of 10X returns expected by Sandhill Road, but the second decade of the millenium did see some major acquisitions that bode well for future exits. Companies like Mark43 and OpenGov successfully raised VC capital as well. And new consulting firms like Nava and Ad Hoc successfully vied for government contracts that enable them to build digital services for veterans, medicare beneficiaries, and the unemployed. It remains to be seen if they can unseat the bigger incumbents and Deloitte of the world.

Finally, these four chaotic years in the executive branch have brought renewed emphasis on the importance of government working, full stop. Whether you want it to be large or small, run by Democrats or Republicans, you at least want it to work. And the pandemic highlighted many of the gaps where our government doesn’t deliver as well as it should. I am hopeful that this desire for an effective government, combined with the knowledge of where it isn’t quite working, will draw more people and resources to all parts of public service, civic tech or otherwise.