Civic tech

Civic tech is technology, apps, platforms, and tools, built specifically to improve how residents interact with government or participate in public decision-making, spanning things like permit-application tools, 311 service-request systems, participatory budgeting platforms, and tools that make legislation or public meetings easier to follow. It is built by a mix of government agencies, nonprofits, and startups, often relying on data published through an open data portal.

Civic tech differs from the broader term "govtech," which covers any technology government agencies buy or build, including purely internal systems; civic tech specifically emphasizes the citizen-facing or participation side of that spectrum, and much of it is nonprofit or open-source rather than commercially licensed. Shared data standards make it possible for a single civic-tech tool to work across many different cities using the same underlying schema.

The field matters because well-designed civic tech can lower the effort required for residents to engage with government, on service requests, budget input, or fiscal transparency review, which otherwise depends on residents navigating unfamiliar bureaucratic processes. A common pitfall is building a tool for engaged, tech-comfortable users while the residents most affected by a given issue lack reliable internet access or are simply never reached by the project's outreach.