The Civic Tech Field Guide with Matt Stempeck

All right, DJIF. Joe and I are back in the same place. Thanks for our guest host, also our executive producer, for helping us with our interview last time, Mark Androvich. But now we're in the same place at the same time. So great to see you again, Joe.

Happy to be here.

So today I'm really excited because we have a great interview. We're going to have Matt Stimpak, a technologist in residence at Cornell University and curator of the Civic Tech Field Guide join us to discuss this comprehensive collection of tech projects for public interest and democracy. And, you know, this is something that has crossed our radar a number of times, has really been a widely shared resource that's out there. So we're going to talk a little bit about what it is for those of you that may not be aware of it and dig into Matt's story as well. So let's invite to our virtual stage Matt. Thanks, Matt, for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

So, you know, first question for you is I'd love to just learn a little bit more about yourself and some of your experiences leading up to where you're at today.

Sure. Well, first of all, longtime reader and listener, so first-time caller. Really happy to be here. What I tell my friends that aren't in our field is that I use the internet to get people to do stuff like vote or participate in government or volunteer or donate, you know, all these pro-social things. But basically my whole career has been that, and I've tried it in lots of different sectors, whether it's nonprofits in Washington, DC or big tech companies like Microsoft with huge products used by billions of people in academia, the Center for Civic Media. But basically just trying to see in terms of the whole theory of change, what works. And for me, the whole point of using tech is in different battles that we're in, whether they're advocacy battles or public interest fights, we rarely have the most resources. So it's about how can we use newly emerging tech to win when otherwise we might not? How can we be clever about how we use the internet and new technologies? And basically that's taken me on a whole path. I worked with a lot of the people from the Howard Dean and Barack Obama campaigns in DC to take that sort of data-driven campaign organizing model and bring it to more groups in DC for their issue campaigns. And then yeah, I went up to MIT Media Lab where that was the Center for Civic Media with this guy Ethan Zuckerman, who was really interested in at the global level, how does the media system work? How does journalism work or not work? Why do we pay attention to the things we pay attention to? How does the news story we're all talking about, how did that get there? So we actually built tools to reverse engineer and figure out how news stories take off and how they're framed. And also while I was there, thanks to the help of some MIT undergrads who were much smarter than me, we were able to build one of the first misinformation fighting tools. So this is 2013, we launched in 2012, it's called Lazy Truth. And basically it was, you know, pre-social media version. When you get wild emails forwarded to you from your aunt or uncle, in my case aunt, we would debunk it right there in your Gmail. You didn't have to leave your inbox. And we partnered with all the major fact-checking groups back then to sort of put all their debunks in one place and make it easy for end users to go get the right information, the verified information. And then while I was there, I got really interested in these big tech platforms with products used by over a billion people. So after graduating, I started freelancing with Google's social impact team, which is when I started pulling together basically a spreadsheet of civic apps that became the Field Guide later. And then Microsoft actually created a tech and civic engagement team in a handful of major US cities. Basically, the company recognized that if you want to have public sector software and be part of the smart cities conversation, it's no longer just selling to IT departments. It's still that, but it's also very community-driven sort of development of technology. And so I was in New York City and we had colleagues in Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, across the country in different civic tech hubs. And that was a really fun job, basically partnering with the city of New York, with different nonprofits in New York, like DataKind. And yeah, getting to do kind of strategic lighthouse projects. What else? And then while I was there, the company actually created a civic leave policy, which I think I was the second person at the company to get to take advantage of this. You could go for up to a year and go work on a political campaign or an innovation fellowship inside government and come back after and still have your job, which is great for the case of political campaigns. I went to go work with Hillary Clinton's campaign for the past, the last 5 months of the campaign in Brooklyn headquarters on the digital team. Again, building a lot of the tools and running a lot of the programs around helping people register to vote, SMS campaigns, peer-to-peer SMS, broadcast SMS, tools to call voters and help people phone bank from the comfort of their home, all the kind of digital organizing toolset. And then when we lost, still had a job at Microsoft, which was great. And went back there for another year and then thought it might be a good time to try living abroad, which I'd always wanted to do. So I went first to Berlin for 4 years and continued basically freelancing and building the Civic Tech Field Guide and doing research, which we'll get into. And now I'm here in Lisbon, Portugal, which brings us to the present day.

Well, that's great. You just mentioned the Civic Tech Field Guide. What is it and why'd you create it?

Great question. So basically, if you're using tech or trying to improve democracy in some way, the Civic Tech Field Guide's your Wikipedia. It's your place to find others and be found yourself. It's used by funders to see what's out there. It's used by builders to take and fork open source code. And it's used by people inside government who want to open up government and make more— make it more participatory, which is always a word I struggle to pronounce in this field. But yeah, that's basically it. And we want to help the field be more effective, right? So this work is super important. We want to grow the field. I think democracy has so many challenges facing us around the world and in the US. And so we need more people doing this work. And then I also think we need people working more effectively. So if we've tried something a bunch of times and it hasn't worked, let's learn from that and level up.

Yeah, I love that.

Now, I, you know, there's been a lot of attempts over the years for others to try to create these bodies of knowledge and, you know, different platforms that have curated these things. So, you know, how does this differ from some of those other previous attempts?

Well, for the one point is that we're still online. We definitely, we track other civic tech catalogs, we link to them too, you know, others do better jobs than us in different ways, we're happy to link out and share. It's a hard thing to fundraise for. First of all, I think a lot of funders want very direct impact projects, and we're doing a meta-level supporting the whole field and trying to make the whole field more efficient. So it's not as direct as some other projects. We're also different. Let's see, we have a global outlook, which being American, being from the US, I know we often think within our borders in terms of, because there's lots there, frankly. And there's also big oceans and language barriers to exploring elsewhere. But we've always thought it's important to learn from what's happening elsewhere, especially with code where you can actually take and use that stuff. Another way we're different, if you think of things like GuideStar and Charity Navigator, we never set out to just list all the organizations. We wanted to be at the project level, because if you're looking for a tool to make a map or something, you don't wanna just find a list of civic engagement nonprofits, right? There's like thousands of those. They don't always say what they do exactly on their website. So we kind of hand tag— I hand tag every single entry to make sure it's listed for what it actually does and not just what they say they do, because sometimes that language is very flowery and abstract and not as useful to the end user.

Yeah, agreed. A quick follow-up to that, you know, because you've got some guiding underlying principles and would love to learn a little bit more about that and maybe how crowdsourcing is also factored into the creation of this guide.

Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. The guide's been crowdsourced since day one. You know, you'll appreciate this probably. We started with a room full of Post-it notes all over the office. So that was with Mika Sifri, co-founder of Civic Hall, and Aaron Simpson, who was at Civic Hall at the time. And the 3 of us just got together and we said, rather than like invent our taxonomy view of the world, let's start with all the examples that we know we consider civic tech. And we posted those all over the walls and glass and everything. We need 3M sponsorship, I think. And from there we then imposed categories and we broadly, we said, okay, here's all the tech tools, the data, the code, and here's all the people, the meetups, the funders, the fellowships, the conferences, because the people is a big part of this field too. And then we just subdivided within that. But a lot of the initial dataset, especially we started it initially as a Google Sheet, which was very easy for people to add to.

Yeah.

No one destroyed it, which was great. It was open editing and everyone played along nicely and added to it. And then, so it was really crowdsourced from day one. And then to this day, now we're a little more sophisticated. We have an Airtable backend and an actual website, but to this day, people can add their projects and people can claim their projects if they're already in there.

So earlier you talked about this global outlook and your global coverage, despite the oceans that you referenced, the differences in governmental structure and culture, Why do you think it's important for people to note what's going on around the world in the space of civic tech?

Yeah, there's bright spots in different areas depending what you're interested in. And so the US is the best at a lot of things when it comes to civic tech, but not everything. So Taiwan is doing incredible participatory democracy work where they bring together rival groups like taxi drivers and Uber drivers and consumers, And they all, they figure out where there's consensus and develop regulation based off that conversation, right? In Estonia, I got to show around the former CIO one day in New York and he showed me how he does his taxes. And as an American, I was pretty upset because it was like a 3-minute, you know, 2-factor authentication text message that the government did his taxes and he just approved them. And especially as an American abroad now, just the number of hours I spend doing taxes, like, so I think it's just, it's great to learn, you know, beyond our current confines of nationality, like who's doing the best at something so we can emulate it. And they might be emulating us too, which means, you know, we need to communicate the work we're doing.

So in addition to those bright spots, you know, sometimes it's been difficult to surface or kind of keep keeping these things surfaced, the failures that have happened in our market. And you've kind of indicated the need to advocate for a postmortem culture in civic tech. And I'd love for you to maybe shed a little bit more insight on why you think it's also important to track those projects that weren't so successful.

Yeah, it's not always popular, you know, when people's projects don't work, they don't always want it online anymore, but fortunately we have the Internet Archive. So in this Civic Tech Field Guide, we have a graveyard section where you can go pay your respects to the projects that are no longer with us, and the goal with that isn't to shame anyone, you know, you tried something, it didn't work, that's great, let's learn from it, and that's where especially if the founder or an independent journalist or govtech, you know, wrote up why it didn't work, we always include that too, so we can start building on it. And I'll just give you one example. This is less the case now, but for a while there were a lot of projects that foundations would fund where it said, okay, we're going to have a social network, not one of the big ones. We're going to have our own social network and it'll be just to be civically engaged on. But also we don't want anyone to be too political. There should be nonpartisan civic engagement social network. And those never work. They've launched with resources, they've died, and there's been multiple versions of this. And it's like, let's learn that maybe that exact approach doesn't work and modify it to find something that does work. So the graveyard's a popular section of our site. And it's always tricky because I actually worked at an organization that had an award for most valuable failure and no one would nominate themselves. So we had to rebrand it as most valuable experiment. But I think it's beginning to take hold just in the past week. I know there was a workshop at Code for America Summit about this, and then there was also at the CHI conference, Computer Human Interaction, just a week or two ago, there was a workshop on this. So like learning from failure in civic tech. Yeah.

So you keep a directory of civic tech projects, you've got a calendar of conferences and events, but you're also conducting regular research. So as someone who's a bit of a research nerd, maybe you could share with our audience a little bit of some of your recent learnings?

Yeah, it's this nice virtuous loop where I'm basically a freelancer, you know, in addition to curating the Field Guide, and I subsidize the projects by doing freelance research work on civic tech. And, you know, our database is open, anyone can come use it. I'll give you an Airtable link, you can come take the data. And likewise, I take the data and I'll jumpstart the research. So if a group like People Powered wants to produce a guide on all the digital participation platforms out there, you know, ways that citizens can be more involved in government, especially local government, then we can jumpstart it with all the entries we have already and then just do the additional work, in this case writing a guide for someone in government of what to consider around, you know, cybersecurity and setup. The nice thing about this is that all that data goes back into the field guide, so all my research just improves the database. It's this nice virtuous loop. In terms of what we found, we've done graveyard research, We did the inverse of graveyard research where we took, you know, as many groups as we could find that have actually survived for over 10 years in civic tech. Not as, not that many. And we talked to all the founders. We said, how'd you do it? And the short answers were, I think, in my opinion, strong founders with good product vision, willingness to pivot when necessary. And the founders tend to have strong relationships with their funders that help them survive, you know, pivots and downturns. And then, so yeah, the Guide to Digital Participation Platforms. And then most recently I worked with Code for All, which is basically a network of Code for America type groups, but around the world. And it was initially started by Code for America. And that project was on how civic tech is fighting disinformation around the world. And actually came in fairly skeptical because I think just fact-checking alone is not enough to turn the tides in the big disinformation battles. But it was pretty cool. I interviewed a lot of groups around the world that were doing much more advanced stuff these days, including, you know, hiring a corporate digital forensics consultant full-time to figure out the roots of disinformation campaigns and how they were being coordinated across different countries and regions of Africa. So instead of just fighting one-off fact checks, which they're still doing, they would use that data to then unearth the roots of who's spreading this stuff. And then likewise, in civic tech, you guys are a major publisher, you don't have this problem as much, but a lot of civic tech efforts fail to distribute their work and market their work and reach audiences despite the tech being good. And so I was heartened to see several groups had major media partnerships. Code for Africa works with, I think, hundreds of newsrooms across the continent. So those newsrooms help distribute and popularize their campaigns, and then they can focus on the civic tech and disinformation fighting.

Love that. Now, from the perspective of someone who's kind of looking at this landscape from a global standpoint, what are some of those current trends you think are going to have a positive impact on this landscape?

Yeah, I think just to the digital participation platforms example, you know, you guys will be familiar with this, but there's much more we can do as citizens than vote every election cycle, which yes, we should do. But I think technology is making it much more plausible to be engaged in a fuller way. And a lot of the digital democracy groups have been working on this for years, but there's more and more platforms. And that's both, you know, open source free platforms like Consul and Decidim, both out of Spain, but different cities around the world contribute to keeping them going. And then there's also SaaS, you know, software as a service companies offering these platforms, which I'm also for, because if you're just the only person in your government office and you want to open up decision-making to citizens, it might be helpful to have someone who's taking care of the cybersecurity and the accessibility and the design, right? But I think technology's making it much more easy to invite people in to do more, to co-author legislation that maybe eventually turns into something to help with urban planning. The Be Taiwan example, or Polis, where you can actually— AI can help find areas of consensus that we didn't know existed between rival groups. That was one of those moments of like, oh wow, technology continues to surprise me with new things it can do. And then of course, you know, in that same trends thing, AI is obviously a double-edged sword. I think it's going to be very helpful for citizen feedback. You know, a lot of people inside government might get thousands of comments or thousands of pages of citizen feedback, and they couldn't really read that before, and now we might be able to summarize it. Of course, we're going to want, you know, some transparency and know how this is summarizing and make sure that it's equitable. But I think that's an advantage for being able to invite more participation more often. And then at the same time, AI is increasingly able to generate spoof and fake participation. So even before this current crop of cheap, easy, and credible generative AI, we had the FCC net neutrality public comment period where it was basically spammed. I think that's going to be a major challenge and we're going to need to do work to shore up our public participation processes so that we can, you know, keep them going in an era where it's just all too easy to stuff the ballot.

Yeah, technology's definitely unlocked a lot of things, good and bad, but it is exciting to see that civic tech has evolved from just, you know, having people come to a public meeting at a specific time and place to do a specific function now into all these new tools and capabilities and kind of initiatives that you've been curating that are saying, hey, you can redefine What civic participation and that civic experience looks like. So final question that I have for you is around, you know, are there aspects of civic tech today that are not currently attracting the attention that you think it deserves that our audience should know about?

When I think about that, it's interesting. A lot of civic tech started as sort of an outsider movement. A lot of reformers and people honestly throwing rocks at governments in terms of, you should be better, it should work better, the website's really ugly. And then to its credit, to their credit, a lot of the leaders of those groups went inside government to fix things. And they sort of, in some senses, are less visible now because they're inside the institutions and they're working to improve things inside and they aren't maybe as vocal as they used to be because they're figuring out how things actually work. But I think their work is incredibly important and I'm grateful for their work because they're building the foundations of how it should be done inside government to sustain this stuff. You know, in the US, the government budgets was not really the issue with technology. We always had a decent IT budget and tech budget. It's more like how we spent them and how decisions were made. And are people able and willing to, you know, open up, you know, decision-making power, for example. And I think some of the people that have gone inside government to create things like US Digital Services and 18F and others at the local level are really doing that hard work and often pretty anonymously, you know, because they're government staff and they're not gonna try to build their profile on it.

So Matt, where does our audience go to learn more about your work?

Yeah, thanks for asking. civictech.guyd, G-U-Y-D, I can't spell, G-U-I-D. That's the homepage. And the real home of the data, if you— from there you get— it's our directory. So directory.civictech.guide. That's where you'll see over 7,500 projects. That's where you can claim your work if it's in there and add it if it's not, which we definitely invite. And then like I mentioned, we've got the open data in Airtable. So I'll share that link in the show notes so that we can, you know, people can just take that data and use it.

Awesome. Well, Matt, thanks so much for joining Dustin and I this week on In Case You Missed It.

So glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Have a wonderful weekend, everyone.