E N G I N E S

O F C H A N G E

WHAT C IV IC TECH CAN LE ARN FROM SOCIAL

MOVEMENTS

A LOOK AT C IV IC TECHNOLOGY IN THE U .S . FROM 2013 – 2015 THROUGH THE LENS OF A

2 1ST-CEN TURY SOCIAL MOVEMENT

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For over a decade, Omidyar Network has been supporting

and investing in the civic tech sector. From the very early

days we have backed the most talented entrepreneurs

who are seeking to use technology to empower citizens or

make government more accessible, efficient and effective.

In this time, we’ve invested nearly $90 million in 35

nonprofit and for-profit organizations around the world.

The experience we have gained over the past ten years has

led us to hold a strong conviction that these technologies

can be used to improve quality of life for millions of

people. We also see accumulating evidence that civic

tech is gaining momentum and is increasingly attracting

investment. And yet, aside from a few moments of

mainstream visibility (think Healthcare.gov), it does seem

as if civic tech hovers continually on the edge of “taking

off” in ways that are both energizing (because of the

potential) and frustrating (because of the pace) for those of

us who have worked in the space for a considerable time.

In order to spur creative thinking about how the civic

tech sector could be accelerated and expanded, we looked

to Purpose, a public benefit corporation that works with

NGOs, philanthropies and brands on movement building

strategies. We wanted to explore what we might learn

from taking the work that Purpose has done mapping

the progress of of 21st century social movements and

applying its methodology to civic tech.

So why consider viewing civic tech using the lens of 21st

century movements? Movements are engines of change

in society that enable citizens to create new and better

paths to engage with government and to seek recourse

on issues that matter to millions of people. At first glance,

civic tech doesn’t appear to be a movement in the purest

sense of the term, but on closer inspection, it does share

some fundamental characteristics. Like a movement,

civic tech is mission driven, is focused on making change

that benefits the public, and in most cases enables better

public input into decision making.

We believe that better understanding the essential

components of movements, and observing the ways in

which civic tech does nor does not behave like one, can

yield insights on how we as a civic tech community can

collectively drive the sector forward.

We hope that this research will be the start of a dialogue

– and debate – that will encourage others to add to and

extend what we have started, ultimately delivering a

stronger, more vibrant and impactful civic tech sector –

creating real engines of change for the future.

Stacy Donohue

Investment Partner, Omidyar Network

FORE WORD

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An emerging sector, civic tech is defined as incorporating

“any technology that is used to empower citizens or help

make government more accessible, efficient, and effective.”

In this research supported by Omidyar Network and

conducted by Purpose, civic tech is examined through the

lens of a social movement to further identify pathways for

growth and deeper engagement within the community. To

conduct this analysis, Purpose’s Movement Measurement

methodology was used which identifies six criteria of

21st-century social movements and analyzes them using a

variety of digital data sources. These include Scale and/or

Growth, Grassroots Activity, Sustained Engagement, Shared

Vision, Collective Action, and Shared Identity. Civic tech

was considered using each of these criteria.

Growth is observed across every type of participation

examined. However, it’s not clear that it has reached

sufficient scale to penetrate the mainstream dialogue.

Exceptions to this include notable civic tech peer-

to-peer platforms like Change.org and major media

moments like the 2013 Healthcare.gov outage and

ensuing national conversation.

Civic tech demonstrates Grassroots Activity, Sustained

Engagement, and Collective Action. It’s geographically

diverse across America and driven by volunteer activity

organized by nonprofit groups like Code for America. It has

a growing committed core of individuals that drive Twitter

conversations and Meetups. Civic tech isn’t just talk, it is a

community of people coming together to create tangible

projects and take action.

EX E CUTIVE SUMMARY

A diverse and diffuse sector, civic tech sometimes lacks

a consistent vision. Open Data and Open Government,

however, are central tenets which may serve as principles

to drive greater alignment within the sector. Similarly, there

also isn’t a strong sense of shared identity between these

disparate parts of the sector, although terms like “civic

hacker” have taken hold to an extent via campaigns like the

“National Day of Civic Hacking.”

If the sector can work together to deliver greater shared

vision and identity, it will help attract more participants

– the more people understand what we mean when we

say "civic tech", the more they may see their work and

interests reflected in it and will be interested to actively

“join the movement”. Shared identity will also be key to

attracting new and different types of capital to the sector

– both nonprofit grant money and for-profit investment

– better enabling investors to understand the collective

impact the sector is seeking to deliver. And finally,

attracting more people and more capital will ultimately

drive greater impact.

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EX E CUTIVE SUMMARY: CALLS TO ACTION

For Organizations:

● Focus on consistent branding across events,

conferences, and convenings to create a more

cohesive shared identity.

● Develop storytelling campaigns for the broader

public focusing on concrete ways civic tech improves

people’s lives (e.g. completed local projects or easier

access to food assistance programs).

● Provide low-barrier ways for new people (especially

non-engineers) to join the sector.

● Create more ways for technology user groups to plug

into civic tech content and actions.

● Seize on rapid response opportunities where related

topics might be in the news (e.g. healthcare.gov

moment).

For Governments and Cities:

Partner and engage deeply with local civic tech

communities to drive growth and interest, especially

given civic tech’s focus on municipalities.

For Practitioners:

● Consider strategies from movement building for

furthering community engagement, including

community forums, and listening tours.

● Create more bridges and opportunities for

collaboration with people working in other parts of the

civic tech sector.

For Startups:

Self-identify as civic tech and as part of the broader

community.

For Investors:

● Consider rapid response opportunities for seed

funding around the issues of the day.

● Highlight investments made in civic tech as civic tech

(and identify them as such in press and associated

funding databases).

These findings prompt a series of strategic opportunities and calls-to-action, which are broken down by audience. A

general theme throughout the recommendations is the existing latent energy within the civic tech sector. The work ahead

involves creating more opportunities for new people to join and for those already involved to deepen their engagement.

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¹Using digital data to understand offline events is inherently limiting. Fully capturing what’s happening without a digital footprint would require additional primary research, which will

be touched upon in recommendations for future work.

²Beyond the methodological detail included in the Appendices, full datasets (raw data or aggregates, as available) are available at bit.ly/omidyar-civic-tech-report-data

This report arises from research undertaken by Purpose and supported by

Omidyar Network in early 2016. The report uses Movement Measurement—a

new methodology that uses big data to analyze social change—to help

understand key drivers, trends, and participatory power within the emerging

civic technology (or “civic tech”) sector in the United States. The goals of

this research are to identify pathways for growth, strategies for increasing

engagement among the existing community, and opportunities for better

coordination. Previously, this process has been used to map out the growth and

changes within established sectors, such as the movement for climate action,

and has contributed to the development of new sector-wide engagement

strategies and prompted further experimentation and optimization.

This report applies Movement Measurement techniques to the civic tech

space. This includes collecting, collating, and analyzing publicly accessible

data about civic tech’s digital footprint in order to (1) understand what’s being

discussed, written about, searched for, shared, and created online, as well as (2)

using online breadcrumbs that reveal a user’s website navigation to see what’s

happening offline¹ in cities and communities across the nation. The reason for

using Movement Measurement to analyze civic tech is to understand to what

extent the space acts as a 21st-century social movement, and how thinking of

it in that way can help inform the creation of effective, responsive products,

projects, and policies. To that end, this report incorporates a “movement test,” the

results of which can identify strategic opportunities for the sector as a whole; an

examination of influence in the sector to inform individual actors’ understanding

of what drives activity; and a look at emerging trends to which future initiatives

might plausibly respond.

The appendices to this report contain additional methodological detail, including

descriptions of how data was gathered; the keyword strings and search terms used

to gather the data from various sources; the data sets used to support the charts,

tables, and other figures that appear in this report; and so forth.² If the primary aim

of this research is to be useful to the civic tech community, a close secondary aim

is to provide the community with a clear view into how we conducted our analysis

and arrived at our conclusions—so our work might be understood and absorbed,

used where most valuable, and improved upon over time.

SECTION II

Section II evaluates the civic tech sector through the lens of the Movement Test, exploring where and how it might act like a 21st-century movement and how this might provide insights for future growth, with a section for each criterion.

SECTION IV

Section IV highlights recommendations for future debate and research.

SECTION I

Section I presents our research methodology as well as a number of working definitions: first of civic tech itself, along with a categorization of topic areas within the sector; then of a social movement. The definitions and terms outlined in the introductory section carry through the remainder of the report.

SECTION III

Section III looks ahead to opportunities for growth for the civic tech sector that emerge from this analysis.

OVE RVIE W: WHAT IS TH IS REPORT?

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I .RESEA R CH PROC ESS :WOR K IN G D EF IN IT IONS AN D M ETHODOLOGY

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“Civic technology” or “civic tech” as a sector is relatively

new—and like many newer terms, its usage and meaning

can vary from person to person, organization to

organization. For the purposes of this research, we have

adopted this working definition: We use the term “civic

tech” to mean any technology that is used to empower

citizens or help make government more accessible,

efficient, and effective. This definition reflects Omidyar

Network’s work supporting the advancement of the civic

tech sector—and, more importantly, current trends in how

the sector has come to define itself. For example, in their

recent “Towards a taxonomy of civic technology,” authors

Matt Stempeck of Microsoft and Micah Sifry and Erin

Simpson of Civic Hall define civic tech simply as “the use

of technology for the public good.”³ These two definitions

are notably similar in their breadth, as is the range of

technologies, tools, use cases, and goals for the “public

good" that they draw in.

With such a broad definition in mind, further

categorization of the sector is helpful for examining its

dynamics and answering questions about areas of interest

within it. To allow for this type of analysis, we first divided

civic tech into three categories:

Each of these categories is then divided into a number

of topics that comprise key activities within civic tech.

These topics, and the language around each, were then

used to determine what data would be gathered for

analysis (see below).⁵

● Citizen to Citizen (C2C): Technology that improves

citizen mobilization or improves connections between

citizens.

● Citizen to Government (C2G): Technology that

improves the frequency or quality of interaction

between citizens and government.

● Government Technology (Govtech4): Innovative

technology solutions that make government more

efficient and effective at service delivery.

WHAT IS C IV IC TEC HN OLOGY?

³This definition was a cornerstone of Stempeck, Simpson and Sifry’s presentation at The Impacts of Civic Technology Conference on April 27 of this year, as well as an associated blog

post published on the same date and viable at: https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2016/04/27/towards-taxonomy-civic-technology/#sm.00012kqw76v9ver2tv02ncs6wmh84

⁴Throughout this report we will use capitalization to distinguish between the publication GovTech.com (GovTech) and this abbreviation (Govtech).

⁵For a list and descriptions of each topic, see Appendix: Data Collection and Methdology.

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Social movements—large-scale, collective human activity

aimed at producing changes in society—are among

the major drivers of global transformation. Of course,

social movements aren’t new phenomena. A range of

landmark social movements took place in the twentieth

century, including the women’s suffrage movement,

the civil rights movement, and the environmental

movement, among others. However, in recent years the

increasing influence of technology, especially digital

advancements in access to information, communications,

and organizing, has brought major shifts in how groups

of people conceive and pursue social change. This

technological influence has shaped and fueled the

emergence of a new kind of social movement—what we

call a 21st-century social movement—which combines

collective human activity in both the online/digital and

offline/on-the-ground realms. Of the most influential

21st-century social movements active today, some have

been sparked by technological influence (e.g. Occupy, the

Arab Spring, #BlackLivesMatter), while others represent

an evolution of existing social movements (e.g. the

expansion of the movement for climate action to include

substantial online activity).

WHY SOCIAL MOVEMENTS MATTER

Social movements have tremendous potential

to make impact by galvanizing and channeling

collective power. For issues that affect many people,

where many people might benefit from societal

shifts, or where many people are showing signs of

motivation and activity, movements can be powerful

vehicles for changing concrete policies (e.g. raising

the minimum wage), for changing cultural attitudes

and perceptions (e.g. embracing same sex marriage),

and also for changing individuals’ behavior at mass

scale (e.g. adopting energy-saving practices). In

addition to being able to produce concrete outcomes,

social movements give individual participants a sense

of empowerment and agency, which can inspire

them to get involved in new issues and/or deepen

their participation over time.

WHAT IS A MOVEMENT?

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Two examples that fulfill these criteria are the fight for

marriage equality and the recent movement against

income inequality, specifically around raising the

minimum wage. The fight for marriage equality relied

on getting more and more people in diverse parts of the

country coming to support marriage rights. This drove

real impact in the form of judges citing widespread public

support as part of their reasoning. And there is no better

example of shared identity than The Human Rights

Campaign’s action to have Facebook users change their

profile pictures to a red equal sign. It truly penetrated the

public consciousness in the form of many Americans

being unable to avoid the clarion call for marriage equality

on Facebook. For income equality, grassroots support

from people who work minimum wage jobs across the

country drove victories in California, New York, and

Washington. And the successful branding of the “Fight for

15” outlined a clear and achievable shared vision.

In order to answer the questions within the Movement

Test, we need to understand the type, level, and relative

importance of the participation happening within the

sector. To do this, we use Movement Measurement’s

five participatory Indicators to track individual types

of activity, which range from the simplest forms of

participation (passive interest) to the most involved

(taking concrete action, affiliating formally, supporting

financially). These include Interest (e.g. Google Trends),

Conversation (e.g. Twitter), Action (e.g. GitHub commits),

Affiliation (e.g. Meetup attendance), and Funding (e.g.

venture capital). More detail about these indicators is

available in Appendix: Data Methodology .

In order to understand 21st-century social movements, we have identified six Movement Criteria:

MOVEMENT CRITERIA GUIDING QUESTIONS

Scale and/or Growth

Has it penetrated the mainstream, such that it is known to and discussed by the public beyond

those working on it? Alternatively, is it growing at a rate that suggests the potential for such

broader awareness in the future?

Grassroots ActivityIs some proportion of its activity pursued or driven by a community broader than the most

committed people?

Sustained Engagement Is active work to advance its goals sustained over time?

Shared VisionIs it associated with a set of specific changes it is trying to make or a set of values it is trying to

spread? Is this vision commonly understood, shared among, or articulated by participants?

Collective ActionHas it attracted a group of people who take active part in creating change—i.e., who do not just

know or talk about it, but who take action?

Shared Identity Do people who discuss, act on, or care about it self-identify an affiliation with it?

HOW D OES M OV EMENT MEASUREMENT TRAC K PA R TIC IPAT ION?

ENGINES OF CHANGE

I I .MOV EM EN T DYNAMIC S : WHAT D OES C IV IC TEC H LOOK L IKE THR OUG H THE LENS OF A MOVEM EN T?

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MOVEMENT

CRITERIAINDICATORS USED ASSESSMENT SUMMARY OF FINDINGS

Scale and/or GrowthInterest, Conversation,

Action, Affiliation, FundingEDGE

Civic tech is growing quickly but is small and has yet to

fully penetrate the mainstream

Grassroots Activity Affiliation YESCivic tech includes substantial, effective self-organized

activity

Sustained

Engagement

Conversation, Action,

AffiliationYES

Civic tech’s community remains committed and active

over time

Shared Vision Conversation, Affiliation NOCivic tech is broad and diverse; shared goals exist but

agendas do not always align

Collective Action Action, Affiliation YES Civic tech has attracted a community that takes action

Shared Identity Conversation NOA small group self-affiliates with civic tech, yet many

active participants do not

Our analysis shows that civic tech is a broad, diverse, and active sector and we find that civic tech achieves several criteria

associated with movements. However, civic tech does not exhibit all the characteristics of a 21st-century social movement

and in particular lacks a comprehensive shared identity and shared vision.

The primary goal of our analysis was to look at civic tech through the lens of a 21st-

century social movement in order to identify pathways for growth and improvement.

For each of the six identified Movement Criteria, we assess whether or not civic tech

exhibits those characteristics. Either it does (“YES”), it is near meeting that criterion

(“EDGE”) or it fails to do so (“NO”).

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Edge: With growth across all participatory

Indicators, civic tech is showing solid growth,

but it hasn’t yet broken into the mainstream.

INDICATORH2 2013 TO H2 2015

GROWTH INDEX

Interest 16%

Conversion 59%

Action 39%

Affiliation 107%

Funding 119%

Interest in civic tech was up 16%, Conversation was up

59%, Action was up 39% and Affiliation up 107%. This

shows that civic tech is garnering only slightly more

attention from the public, while individuals within

the civic tech sector are significantly more active (e.g.

engaging with each other, committing to GitHub, and

holding events). This was driven by spikes in individual

metrics, including 82% growth in Meetup RSVPs, 76%

growth in GitHub authors originating new projects, and

56% growth in people tweeting about civic tech.

The use of “civic tech”- specific language has also

increased. The number of people tweeting using Umbrella

Terms such as “civic tech” or “civic innovation” increased

from 105 per week to 452 per week from H2 2013 to H2

2015– one of the fastest growth rates we saw across civic

tech categories (331%).

GROWTH

Starting with the question of civic tech’s growth, we see

positive changes in each of our participatory Indicators.

From late 2013 through late 2015:

MOVEMENT INDICATORS 2013-2015

0.0

0.5

1.0

1.5

2.0

2.5

Interest Conversation Action Funding

10/1/157/1/154/1/151/1/1510/1/147/1/144/1/141/1/1410/1/137/1/134/1/131/1/13

SC AL E A ND/OR GR OWTH

DE

ME

AN

ED

IN

DIC

AT

OR

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CAPITAL FOR CIVIC TECH

The largest raise from 2013 to 2015 was the San

Ramon-based Accela, which raised $182M Series E

in 2015.After Govtech, the second biggest category

was consumer-facing P2P companies. This includes

Nextdoor’s $81M raise in 2013 and their $110M

raise in 2015, Change.org’s $15M raise in 2013 and

$25M raise in 2014, Brigade’s $9M raise in 2014,

and NationBuilder’s $8M 2013 raise. While there

was only a 6% growth rate from 2013 to 2015, this

isn’t surprising given the relatively small number of

companies involved.

Funding for Open Data grew 75% from 2013 to 2015.

Funding for Open Data work in the U.S. saw 34 NGOs

and governments receiving grants totaling $68M and

22 for-profit companies raising rounds worth $106M.

Open Data is one of the fastest growing topics across

all of our movement Indicators. 73% of all Open Data

venture funds were raised during the last 18 months

of our study. This growth was almost entirely driven

by Q4 2014 and Q2 2015, including Socrata’s $30M

Series C and Enigma Technologies’ $28M Series B.

This combined with the rise in our Indicators shows

momentum for Open Data.

METRIC CIVIC TECH

MOVEMENT FOR CLIMATE ACTION

2015 Weekly Growth

Average, People Tweeting3.8% 3.5%

2015 Weekly Growth

Average, Meetup Events3.8% 7%

2014 to 2015 Meetup

growth49% 5%

⁶As above, this comparison to the movement for climate action is based on existing Movement Measurement analysis of the Conversation around that movement.

Conversation and Affiliation growth rates compare

favorably to how the movement for climate action grew

in 2015 – civic tech meetups grew by 49% while climate

action meetups grew by only 5%⁶. It should be noted

however, that the scale of climate action activity is radically

larger than that of civic tech. In 2015 the movement for

climate action had an average of 150,000 tweeters each

week with a weekly growth rate of 3.8%, compared to

17,000 tweeters per week and a weekly growth rate of 3.5%

for civic tech.

$225M

$493M VENTURE CAPITAL FOR CIVIC TECH IN 2015

VENTURE CAPITAL FOR CIVIC TECH IN 2013

FUNDING OF CIVIC TECH

Being both a locus of participatory engagement and

a technology sector, civic tech has seen significant

growth in venture funding. From 2013 to 2015, there was

$870M in venture capital funding for civic tech projects.

Although there was a slight dip in 2014, overall funding for

civic tech companies is on the rise, with a 119% increase

in investments from 2013 ($225M) to 2015 ($493M). This

growth is being driven in part by the Govtech space—

companies that provide innovative technology solutions

to make government more efficient and effective at

service delivery. This was responsible for 67% of the

overall funding.

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SCALE

Breaking into the mainstream implies that a movement

and its issues (1) receive media coverage from more than

just specialized outlets, including the national news

publications and (2) generate ongoing interest from the

public at large. By this definition, civic tech has not yet

penetrated the mainstream to the same extent as other

21st-century social movements, such as #BlackLivesMatter

or the movement for marriage equality.⁷

In the most basic sense, the language most central to

the sector—Umbrella Terms like “civic technology,” “civic

tech,” and “civic innovation”—are not as present in the

public dialogue as language central to other, fully mature

social movements. There were 65,000 total uses of these

terms on Twitter in the U.S. from 2013 through 2015.

Further, media coverage reveals a significant difference

in magnitude in comparison with established social

movements (e.g. civic tech Umbrella Terms have 366

mentions in 2015 while Marriage Equality has 74,869).

Looking at the types of publications that these mentions

reside within is informative. For civic tech, the top source

of articles is the Associated Press and Reuters, often with

municipal coverage of mayors and cities announcing

civic tech initiatives. Many of the top sources, however,

are more government focused like US Federal News.

There are some signs that civic tech is being covered

in mainstream outlets. Specifically, the fifth largest

publication (though only with 25 stories from 2013-2015)

is the Washington Post.

Two specific topics—the Healthcare.gov outage, a

moment when civic tech was squarely in the public

spotlight; and Change.org, a prime exemplar of Citizen

to Citizen (C2C) civic tech—received significantly more

⁷ A fair question is whether civic tech is different from other movements because it is made of a wide range of issues. We argue that this actually isn’t unique to civic tech; many 21st-

century movements also include a range of issues. For example, the movement for Climate Action deals with climate, renewables, and equity.

media coverage than civic tech’s Umbrella Terms (in 2015,

Healthcare.gov received 1,707 mentions, Change.org

received 3,931 mentions while Umbrella Terms received

356 mentions). This suggests that disparate parts of civic

tech are beginning to enter the public dialogue, even as

the language of the sector itself may not be. We also see

these topics garnering coverage in more mainstream

publications.

For the Healthcare.gov outage, we see the Washington

Post with the most number of stories and CNN with

the second highest number. When looking at media

discussion around Change.org, we see top coverage

coming from outlets including the Washington Post,

CNN, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times.

This is underscored by a look at interest data—Google

Trends data on searches for “civic tech” along some of its

components. In 2015, Code for America was searched for

on Google 2.5 times more than civic tech Umbrella Terms;

Open Data was searched 14 times more; and Change.org

was searched for 23 times more.

DOES CIVIC TECH NEED TO BREAK

INTO THE MAINSTREAM?

Not all issues require or are sensitive to mass

participation or the involvement of the public.

It may be that not all of civic tech’s goals will be

responsive to public mobilization and mainstream

awareness (e.g. venture capital funding). However,

as with the Healthcare.gov outage and subsequent

repair, there do seem to be opportunities for greater

responsiveness from those with power when these

issues are discussed in mainstream dialogue.

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Overall, as we analyze the indicators

that describe Scale and/or Growth

of a movement, we see significant

growth in four out of the five

Indicators: Affiliation, Conversation,

Funding, and Action, with Interest

being the only Indicator that is

seeing slower growth. This growth

has been powered by a combination

of higher levels of growth of fairly

small topics (e.g. government

technical talent at 1,086% with an

average of 559 tweeters a week in

H2 2015 and political technology

at 380% with an average of 505

tweeters a week) as well as strong

consistent growth from already

developed topics (e.g. Open Data

at 43%, government technology

modernization with 68%, petitioning

government with 60%). In light of

the breakthrough of several key civic

tech topics in the media mentioned

above and the growth rates

previously mentioned, we classify

Scale and/or Growth as “Edge,” that

is, neither clearly passing nor failing

this prong of the test.

PUBLICATIONS POWERING CIVIC TECH SHARES.

In order to understand what’s being shared, we examined what links people

tweeted using civic tech terminology. We classified these links into three

categories—General/Mainstream outlets, Tech Media outlets, and Civic

Tech-Specific outlets.

Civic tech-specific media is playing a substantial role in the growth of

civic tech—a 23% increase in links (5,616 to 6,943) and a 79% increase in

shares (45,251 to 78,712) from 2013 to 2015. Of particular importance here

are GovTech and GovLoop, which together account for nearly 80% of total

civic tech shares (151k out of 188k shares). These shares were often driven

by prominent civic tech journalists like Alex Howard’s “digiphile,” who has

the highest level of engagement across the entire civic tech community.

Movement-specific media is not an uncommon driver of grassroots

activity; this is true in the movement for climate action with publications

like Grist and ThinkProgress within the progressive movement.

Mainstream and Tech media both showed declines in the number of

articles and an increase in the number of shares. The growth of shares can

be in part explained by the interest in civic tech from notable publications

like TechCrunch. In 2013, seven TechCrunch articles with Umbrella Terms

were shared a total of 301 times. By 2015, this had risen to 36 different

articles with 3,558 shares—a tenfold increase in share activity. Interestingly,

a similar breakdown of Huffington Post-originated links shared in tweets

containing “civic tech” or “civic innovation” revealed substantial jumps as

well—from 21 to 63 links and from 91 to 801 shares between 2014 and 2015.

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TOP CITIES FOR CIVIC TECH MEETUP EVENTS 2013-2015

Yes: Civic Tech is geographically diverse across

America, powered by online-to-offline organizing

largely seeded by Code for America.

An examination of who drives civic tech reveals a high

degree of self-organized, “bottom-up” activity within the

community.

First and foremost, it’s obvious that civic tech has moved

beyond the original centers of San Francisco and New

York. There were civic tech events in 45 states in 2015 (up

from 28 in 2013; Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Arkansas,

South Dakota did not have a civic tech Meetup event

in 2015). More events are launching in cities across the

country that aren’t typically considered technology-

focused. Events were held for the first time in Oklahoma

CITY & STATE EVENTS RSVPS

San Francisco, California 420 10,818

Miami, Florida 265 1,899

New York, New York 180 9,566

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 161 5,411

Oakland, California 154 2,059

Cambridge, Massachusetts 131 4,543

Washington, DC 129 8,350

Denver, Colorado 103 1,190

Salt Lake City, Utah 102 567

Virginia Beach, Virginia 99 797

GRASS R OOTSACTI V I T Y

City, Oklahoma; Columbus, Ohio; and Jacksonville,

Florida; all of which had no events during 2013. There

were 629 events in 2013 and 1,737 events in 2015.

629

1,737 CIVIC TECH MEETUP EVENTS IN 2015

CIVIC TECH MEETUP EVENTS IN 2013

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Civic Tech Meetup events diversified from 2013 to 2015 (larger bubbles represent more events). Among

the top 15 U.S. cities, San Francisco, New York, Philidelphia were dominant with over 150 events over three

years, while San Antonio, Columbus, Phoenix were the cities with the least amount of civic tech activity.

CIVIC TECH MEETUP EVENTS 2013 & 2015

2013

YEAR

2015

EVENTS

1

50

100

127

18

ENGINES OF CHANGE

In addition to geographic diversity, there is substantial

evidence of volunteer activity largely associated with

Code for America (CfA). Five-year-old nonprofit CfA is

one of the larger organizations working to advance civic

tech in the U.S., with a network of Fellows and a portfolio

of programs that have established it as a leader in the

field. 34,616 people attended events associated with or

mentioning CfA from 2013 to 2015. This corresponds to

CfA’s rollout of volunteer-run Brigades across the country,

which provides the venue and opportunity for volunteer

developers to get involved. The Brigades were one of the

primary drivers of the overall geographical diversification

of civic tech as a whole. We also saw substantial CfA-

related activity on GitHub, representing the largest owner

of repositories (6.1% of 1,817) with the largest number of

contributors in the sector (6.9% of 4,136). The National

Day of Civic Hacking, one of CfA’s biggest distributed

volunteer events, brings in the largest number of people

to civic tech throughout the year (4.5% of all RSVPs, 3.5K

of 76K).

However, CfA is not the only organization driving growth;

42,000 people attended Meetups that mention civic tech

in some fashion and aren’t CfA related.⁸ Some examples

of this include a meeting of the New York Robotics and

Maker Tech Group discussing analytics and municipal

government, Data Science KC featuring predictive

analytics about politics, and Ladies in Seattle Tech

featuring transparency through communities.

The data shows that a committed core of people and

organizations within civic tech remain involved over the

long haul.

A strong indicator of the staying power of the civic

tech community comes from an examination of the

conversation around civic tech—specifically, the number

of people who consistently discuss civic tech over time.

To aid in this analysis we use the concept of an “Engaged

Tweeter”—a tweeter who contributes to the discussion at

least twice per week for at least three consecutive weeks.

The existence of Engaged Tweeters is a strong proxy

for the extent to which a cohort exists that maintains

an ongoing active interest in a topic—and in civic tech,

SUSTAI N EDEN GAG EM ENT

such a cohort emerges. Engaged Tweeters encompass a

variety of key stakeholder audiences including individuals

who are prominent within the community (Mark Headd,

former Chief Digital Officer of the City of Philadelphia),

journalists who cover civic tech (Alex Howard of the

Sunlight Foundation), organizations working in the space

(The GovLab), and civic tech companies (SeeClickFix).

This group of committed users is small but is growing

over time, with 60% more Engaged Tweeters in 2015 (210)

than there were in 2013 (130).⁹ As a point of comparison,

the movement for Climate Change (“Climate Action”)

action has 6,500 Engaged Tweeters. However, the ratio

of Engaged Tweeters to total tweets is 1:50, which is an

Yes: Central to Civic Tech’s growth is a

committed core driving conversations

and Meetups.

⁸ There were 2,252 events related to CfA and 1,330 events not related to CfA.

⁹ Note: The chart tracks the number of tweeters entering the “Engaged Tweeter” cohort; as a result, the absolute number of active Engaged Tweeters is actually larger than the level

displayed in the graph at any given point in time.

19

ENGINES OF CHANGE

NEW VOICES IN THE CIVIC TECH

CONVERSATION

There are some early signs of a diversification away

from a committed core. While the average reach per

engaged tweeter has remained constant, their share

of total reach has decreased by 33%. This indicates

that infrequent participants who have greater reach

are joining the conversation. These new participants

include regional actors like The Boulder Chamber

of Commerce, media outlets like the Chicagoist,

universities like San Jose State University and the

University of Chicago, individuals with a tangential

interest in civic tech like suzieboss—an author and

advocate in the education space, and organizations

weighing in like Startup Seattle. This speaks to

an opportunity to continue encouraging further

engagement from municipal groups and media,

universities, and higher education, and individuals

with large followings who may only engage in a

sector that touches civic tech.

¹⁰ This comparison to the movement for climate action is based on existing Movement Measurement analysis of that movement. That analysis included Conversation data from Twitter

gathered and analyzed in equivalent fashion to the analysis of civic tech described herein.

¹¹ The Obama campaign’s network of super-volunteers has been well documented, originally by Zack Exley in “The New Organizers” in The Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.

com/zack-exley/the-new-organizers-part-1_b_132782.html

equivalent ratio for Climate Action during 2015.¹⁰ While

making up only 1% of the people who tweet about civic

tech, Engaged Tweeters write over 10% of the total number

of tweets about civic tech.

We also see signs of sustained engagement when looking

at Meetup groups that hold at least two events every

quarter. Again, a small but committed core of event hosts

is responsible for a disproportionate share of events, with

58 groups holding over 300 events every quarter, with

5,400 attendees.

Code for America (CfA) is responsible for a sizable

segment of this committed core, with 63% of 1,645

civic tech events on Meetup and 45% of 35,948 RSVPs.

CfA’s core also contributes to other parts of the civic

tech community; of the full group of 555 authors that

contributed to CfA-owned GitHub repositories, 245 of

them (44%) also contributed to non-CfA-owned civic tech

repositories.

As noted in the comparison with the movement for

climate action, a small, committed core of individuals

driving much of the conversation is not unusual. More

broadly, super-activists playing a large role in movements

are very common. This has been especially evident in the

public eye around both of President Obama’s campaigns,

where a relatively small percentage of overall volunteers

and “Neighborhood Team Leaders” drove a vastly

disproportionate percent of the activity and reach on the

ground.¹¹

Given that we do see a group of individuals sustaining

engagement in the sector over time and given the

favorable comparison to the movement for climate

action, civic tech fulfills the Sustained Engagement

criteria. It is worth noting that these overall numbers are

quite small. Focusing on ways to increase the number of

people entering the civic tech funnel and creating new

low-barrier ways of people to engage in the sector are

absolutely critical.

20

ENGINES OF CHANGE

SHAR E DVI S I ON

If there were a shared vision for civic tech, we would

expect to see people who talk about one area also

discussing other aspects of civic tech. This would show

that the movement is composed of people with aligned

interests rather than a disparate and disconnected set

of communities. For every topic within civic tech, we

examined the percentage of people who at a different

point in time also mentioned a different topic. For

example, 38% of the people who tweeted about civic

hacking tweeted about open data at another time. Given

that people are more likely to discuss and read about civic

tech using specific topic language rather than Umbrella

Terms¹² (e.g. mentioning open data without mentioning

civic tech), the percentages of people who talk about

multiple topics gives an indication of the cohesiveness of

the movement.

#BlackLivesMatter serves as an example of a movement

that has brought together separate strands of activism

into a unified coalition of voices. The guiding principles

of BLM (Diversity, Restorative Justice, Queer Affirming)¹³

make it clear that many interests lead to the core

affirmation of the movement, and that having this

overarching message makes each of the strands stronger

in their own right.

The sector of civic tech is fairly diffuse: More than 50% of

people only discuss one topic. There are multiple points

of strong alignment, however, especially around four

topics in particular: Government Transparency (with

30% overlap across all topics), Open Data (29% overlap),

Citizen Communication & Engagement (25%), Petitioning

Government (24%). Government Transparency and Open

Data are particularly resonant with the entire community;

nearly all topics have at least a 25% community overlap

with Government Transparency and nearly all have

at least a 20% community overlap with Open Data.

Transparency and Open Data are frequently discussed

by those talking about Private-Sector Tools to improve

government service delivery, a sign that these topics are

discussed by companies in the civic tech sector.

WHAT’S TRENDING IN CIVIC TECH?

By H2 2015, Open Data, Petitioning Government,

and Citizen Communication and Engagement all

had at least 1,000 people tweeting every week and

300 people attending Meetup events a week. These

topics are not only comparatively large, they also

are growing at a fast pace: From H2 2013 to H2 2015,

people who tweeted about Citizen Communications

and Engagement grew 75% (average of 1,328/week in

H2 2015), Petitioning Government grew 60% (4,104/

week) and Open Data grew 43% (1,290/week).

Petitioning Government is a topic of particular

interest. Even only looking at petitions targeted at

government officials on Change.org (a small subset

of overall Change.org petitions) and We The People,

over 4,000 Americans a week shared petitions. From

2013 to 2015, there was a 150% increase in shares of

petitions to government officials via Change.org and

a 10% increase in shares from We the People.

No: Civic tech is a diverse and diffuse sector that lacks a consistent

vision, with Open Data and Government Transparency as two of the

components around which the most alignment currently clusters.

¹² Only 4% of civic tech terms contain Umbrella Terminology.

¹³ http://blacklivesmatter.com/guiding-principles/

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ENGINES OF CHANGE

Further, of people who tweet using civic tech keywords,

43% also tweet about Government Transparency, 46% also

tweet about Open Data, and 38% also tweet about Civic

Hacking. The remaining topics average less than 15%

overlap with civic tech keywords.

In order to better understand what topics are trending

and overall alignment within the sector, we ran an

unsupervised cluster analysis on Twitter data.¹⁴ Cluster

analysis uses an algorithm to review a data set and create

a specified number of clusters of data—in this case eight

groups of tweets—that are similar in size and grouped

based on their being more similar to one another than to

others in terms of language used.

TWITTER COMMUNITY OVERLAP ACROSS CIVIC TECH TOPICS

The community overlap between topics is strongest for Gov Transparency, Open Data, Citizen to Government and

Petitioning Government. This shows the share of people who have tweeted about a topic (vertical) who have alspo tweeted

about a second topic (horizontal).

One major theme across all clusters is that civic tech

has a local focus and a good portion of the sector comes

to life in cities and communities. Experimentation and

innovation are happening at the municipal and local

levels, and these efforts are being shared and discussed

throughout the sector.

Secondly, data continues to be a centerpiece of the civic

tech community. Discussion of data and its uses, and of

Open Data especially, appears across clusters. In some

ways open data may be one of the most intuitive stand-

ins for the idea of civic tech as a whole.

¹⁴ All clusters are described within the Appendix.

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ENGINES OF CHANGE

product, and “the how” alongside “the what.” This presents

a significant opportunity for civic tech to more clearly

define both the stakes and potential impact for its work, as

well as forming deep partnerships with communities to

build and create meaningful solutions to hard problems.

This can in part be accomplished through efforts to

further outline and clarify a shared vision for how civic

tech serves the community.

Overall, the data suggests that there is general alignment

throughout the broader community around the goals of

opening up government and data—a positive sign of a

shared vision. Still, most other parts of the community

are more weakly aligned with one another (and in some

cases, are barely overlapping at all). This suggests that

there is room for civic tech to grow in aligning actors

around an overall agenda or narrative against which the

community as a whole can orient and organize itself.

Each area of civic tech can potentially achieve its goals

without further progress on this front. However, there

is work to do to leverage some of the powerful network

effects that other 21st-century social movements enjoy

(e.g. having people from one part of the movement join

in during big moments). The data suggests a first step of

using broader frames that incorporate Open Government

and Open Data to discuss relevant smaller and less well-

integrated parts of the movement.

Finally, this analysis revealed calls-to-action across

clusters. While the largest and most central terms tend

to stand for large ideas, many clusters are marked by the

primacy of verbs—join, build, bring, engage, live, invest,

and so on. Conversation in the sector seeks to bring more

people into the fold.

Broader insights emerge beyond these themes, especially

when examining trends. The first is that the sector is

markedly forward-looking, as typified by the Future of

the Sector and Startups & Data clusters—themes that not

only span a quarter of the conversation but are also the

fastest-growing topics. The Startups & Data cluster reflects

the growth of civic tech as a whole; focused in part on

money and funding in the sector, the cluster has grown in

size from 2013 through 2015 from 9% to 12% of the twitter

conversation.¹⁵

A second and perhaps more striking insight comes

from the pairing of two likewise similar clusters: the

Community Inclusion & Engagement and Empowering

People groups. These clusters represent a focus less on

technology itself and more on how and by whom civic

tech is built, the people it empowers and benefits, and

the communities that surround it. These clusters are also

growing—by 2.6% and 4%, respectively—and seem to

reflect a growing shift on focusing on process alongside

“DISCUSSION OF DATA AND ITS USES, AND OF OPEN DATA ESPECIALLY, APPEARS ACROSS CLUSTERS. IN SOME WAYS OPEN DATA MAY BE ONE OF THE MOST INTUITIVE STAND-INS FOR THE IDEA OF CIVIC TECH AS A WHOLE.”

¹⁵ 88,866 tweets that used the term “civic tech” or “civic technology” were used for the clustering analysis.

23

ENGINES OF CHANGE

21st-century social movements aren’t just talk, people

take action to further their goals. For example, in addition

to the surge in conversation around gun safety and gun

rights, there has been a corresponding level of action

being taken on both sides of the issue (driven in large part

by advocacy organizations). Another good example of

this is the rise of the Tea Party, a movement that captured

national attention while organizing a series of ongoing

protests and rallies across the country that strengthened

their cause.¹⁶ Growth in civic tech Twitter discussion

is correlated with the growth in GitHub contributions

to civic tech projects and related Meetup events.¹⁷ This

shows that people are not just talking about civic tech

more, but they are also working to solve problems.

RATES OF CHANGE OF GITHUB CONTRIBUTIONS AND TWITTER CONVERSATION

Github ContributionsTweets

7/15/13 9/15/13 11/15/13 9/15/141/15/14 11/15/143/15/14 1/15/155/15/14 3/15/157/15/14 9/15/15 11/15/15

CO L L E CTIV EACTI ON:

Yes: Civic tech is a community of action;

we are seeing growing conversations and

meetings driving action.

¹⁶ “Do political protests matter?” by Madestam, Shoag, Vueger and Yanagizawa-Drott (2013) showed that offline organizing by the Tea Party had “significant consequences for the

subsequent local strength of the movement, increased public support for Tea Party positions”.

¹⁷ More than 60% of significant variations from the mean across the two series are colocated.

30%

25%

20%

15%

10%

5%

0%

-5%

-10%

The data tells a clear story of civic tech attracting not only a

growing conversation, but also a growing and accelerating

community of action. The creation and maintenance

of civic tech open source projects on GitHub (although

perhaps non-traditional in the context of other social

movements) show the civic tech community’s willingness

to not just talk, but create. Online activity is moving offline;

there is fast growth in people organizing online via tools

like Meetup to discuss, plan, and hack offline.¹⁸

24

ENGINES OF CHANGE

This type of online to offline activation is a hallmark of

many 21st-century social movements. Dating back to

the Dean campaign in 2004, small, distributed events

organized using tools like Meetup have the effect of

creating an offline community to mirror an online one.

This has been successfully leveraged in the movement

for climate action by groups like 350.org who organized

a series of distributed national events around the Paris

COP21 negotiations.

In the three-year period examined, 8,510 people made

466,408 commits¹⁹ to 4,254 GitHub civic tech repositories,

started by 2,969 owners. The number of authors on

GitHub grew by 30% from the end of 2013 through the end

of 2015 (from 3,180 to 4,136), and its growth accelerated

from 10% from 2013-2014 to 17% in 2014-2015. Though

this is not a large number of people, its growth and

commitment show that the people who engage with civic

tech are willing to act and work to contribute to the sector.

This accelerating growth over two years demonstrates an

influx of new developers contributing to the civic tech

space (from 10% change in 2013-2015 to 17% from 2014-

2015). These projects created on GitHub are often usable,

maintained software, and come from a variety of different

actors. For example, Neighbor.ly has created an open

source fundraising toolkit for civic projects; The Sunlight

Foundation has built an app to make it easier to contact

elected officials; The Department of Veterans Affairs

released an open source version of vets.gov.

Meetup data underscores the point that the people who

are involved in civic tech are willing to make collective

actions. Meetup shows substantial activity, with 76,624

RSVPs to 3,582 events organized by 574 different hosts in

179 cities from 2013 to 2015.

¹⁸ 170% growth in events from 2013 to 2015.

¹⁹ A GitHub Commit is an “individual change to a file (or set of files)” in a software project. A GitHub repository is a “project’s folder.” Repositories “can have multiple collaborates and can

be either public or private.” See https://help.GitHub.com/articles/GitHub-glossary/. A repository owner is the GitHub user or organization that controls the project.

CODE FOR AMERICA’S NATIONAL

DAY OF CIVIC HACKING

The greatest, most reliable surges in field-wide

activity each year happen around Code for America’s

National Day of Civic Hacking (NDCH), held

annually each June since 2013. NDCH’s events are

important potential moments for bringing together

different parts of the civic tech community, allowing

individuals to hack on political technology, open data,

transparency, etc.

Overall, NDCH events account for 4.5% of all RSVPs

(3.5K of 76K) to civic tech Meetups from 2013 through

2015—more than any other single effort. NDCH

causes clear surges in activity across the board (going

from 706 RSVPs in the 3 months before to 1,640

during NDCH), with an influx of events, people, and

the inception of new work.

While it’s not necessarily practical for CfA to hold

these events with greater frequency, there does

show a pent-up demand for technologists to engage

around these issues. Institutions like Civic Hall

have seized on this with abundant civic technology

programming in New York City. Possible paths

forward could include organizations outside of CfA

holding more localized events (e.g. more localized

technology and politics events) or creating more civic

tech dedicated spaces in cities with growing civic

tech populations around America.

Critically, the pace of people coming together offline is

accelerating, with year-over-year growth in RSVPs of 21%

from 2013-2014 and 49% from 2014-2015. While there

is some seasonality to the data (e.g. a decline at the end

of 2015 around the holidays), we find it likely that civic

tech-related Meetup events will continue to grow and

potentially accelerate. By comparison, the growth rate for

climate change Meetups is less than 5% from 2014 to 2015.

25

ENGINES OF CHANGE

HACK EVENTS VS. GITHUB PROJECTS, 2013-2015

Hack Events and GitHub Civic Tech Projects correlated with greater than 90% confidence

H A C K E V E N T S

GIT

HU

B P

RO

JE

CT

S

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24 26 28 30 32 34

50

45

40

35

30

25

20

15

10

5

0

In particular, there is a specific subset of Meetup events

that is growing impressively: hack events. Of all civic

tech-related Meetups in the sample, well over half were

hack-related—55% in 2013, 68% in 2014, and 69% in 2015.

And hack events are not only common, they generate

tangible projects. In fact, hack-related Meetups correlate

highly with the creation of new civic tech projects on

GitHub.

As shown above, the number of hack events on Meetup

is a reasonable predictor of the number of new civic tech

repositories. As a result of this, the number of civic tech

projects created in a week is typically two to three times

the number of hack-related events that happened that

week. And the weekly growth rates of hack events and

new projects follow similar paths.

The number of GitHub authors in a week also tracks to

this same relationship—further underscoring the healthy

interaction between Affiliation and Action.

It might be tempting to wonder whether the activity from

these hack events is short-lived, each event resulting in

a “flash in the pan” with little follow up. While it’s beyond

the scope of this report to assess these projects’ efficacy,

we can say that the lifespans of the projects originating

from hack events turn out to be just as durable as other

projects. There is no relationship between the number of

GitHub projects created in a given week and the lifespan

of those projects. This is a particularly positive finding for

the sector given how much variance there can be in the

number of new projects—especially during the annual

National Day of Civic Hacking.

26

ENGINES OF CHANGE

SHAR E DIN D E NTITY

Separate from but related to a shared vision is the

notion of a shared identity between members of that

community. Shared identity need not take one form, and

in fact differs substantially across different movements. A

movement identity (e.g. environmentalist, climate activist,

progressive, conservative) says something about one’s

values. Organizational identity (e.g. Amnesty International

member, NRA member, Sierra Club member) shows a

level of shared ownership and community. Having either

a movement identity or accepted organizational identity is

important to the extent that it helps promote collaboration

and identification of participants in the movement. Many

leading multi-issue advocacy organizations that exist

at the intersection of different movements have found

membership language to be helpful in creating genuine

community while sustaining engagement over time.

First, we assessed the term “civic tech” as a candidate for a

shared identity. Civic tech Umbrella Terms only appeared

No: There isn’t a strong shared identity between disparate

parts of the sector. Shared identity could bring a sense of

shared purpose and promote cross-sectoral collaboration.

● December of 2013, when the Knight Foundation report

The Emergence of Civic Tech20 was published;

● September 2014 with the Launch of Govtech Fund;

● April 2015, during Omidyar Network’s Civic Tech

Ignite Event at Civic Hall; and

● June 2015 with the National Day of Civic Hacking.

²⁰Patel et al, “The Emergence of Civic Tech.” Knight Foundation, December 2013. Available at http://www.knightfoundation.org/media/uploads/publication_pdfs/knight-civic-tech.pdf

in 4% of overall tweets (19,006 tweets in H2 2015). We did

see this term rise during major spike moments when civic

tech is discussed as part of an event or publication. Over

the last three years, these included:

These events have residual effects beyond the initial spikes.

The percentage of total tweets using these Umbrella Terms

is, on average, 22% greater in the three months after a spike

than in the three months before the spike, indicating that

these spikes have helped to propel increases in the use of the

term “civic tech” on social media.

27

ENGINES OF CHANGE

Next, the number of people that self-identify as being

workers in or fans of “civic tech” in Twitter biographies

and Meetup events was examined. Over three years, only

89 people self-identified on Twitter as being fans of or

members of civic tech in their bios. This expands to 169 if

we include a broader set of terms including “Civic Hacker”

and “Civic Innovation.” Although small, this cohort was

prolific and drove civic tech conversation on Twitter,

tweeting an average of 31 times more about civic tech

than others. Looking at civic tech topics, 290 people self-

identify as being a fan of “Open Data” within our data set,

391 self-identified with “Transparency.” Again, this displays

the centrality of civic tech’s topics to self-identification

rather than the Umbrella Term of “civic tech” itself. On

Twitter, 0.3% of all people discussing climate change self-

identify as climate activists or environmentalists in their

biographies. In contrast, 0.03% of all civic tech participants

self-identify with any civic tech Umbrella Terms.

Looking at organizational identity at Code For America,

one of the space’s most prominent organizations, there

is a modest increase in the number of Twitter bios that

mention either Code for America or one of its brigades

(230). Code for America is often associated with the

terminology “Civic Hacker” or “Civic Hack,” which appears

in 28% of all civic tech events from 2013-2015 (1,009

events). Given the relative diffuseness of terminology

within civic tech, this high percentage is particularly

noteworthy.

There is ample evidence that a sense of shared movement

or organizational identity can be incredibly powerful in

getting grassroots participants engaged in collaborating

and working toward a common goal over time. For

example, the Tea Party movement has exercised power

and influence in part because of the large and ideologically

diverse group of individuals who have identified as “Tea

Party Members.” Civic tech’s Umbrella Terms do not

appear to be a powerful beacon of identification. However,

especially when looking at Meetups across the country,

Code for America has promoted a sense of identity with

localized brigades and robustness to the term “Civic

Hacker.” These conclusions also show that when major

events occur that are explicitly branded as civic tech,

there is greater than expected adoption of the term in

the following months, indicating that major civic tech-

branded reports and events can have a possible effect of

creating more shared identity in the space.

NYC MAYOR’S OFFICE OF TECHNOLOGY AND

INNOVATION: IN TOUCH WITH A GROWING

COMMUNITY OF CIVIC HACKERS

In civic tech as a whole, we see examples where

institutional support drives participation in the local

community. New York City’s Office of Technology

and Innovation was consistently tweeting and

driving conversation whenever there was a spike of

Meetup RSVPs. While promoting civic tech Meetups

is relatively low-barrier, other cities didn’t show the

same connection between communication from

these offices and RSVPs for Meetups in their cities.

I I I .LOO K IN G AHEAD: STRATEGIC OPP ORTUNIT IES AND CA L LS TO AC TION

29

ENGINES OF CHANGE

As our findings from the movement test suggest, civic

tech is still developing a shared identity. Organizations can

help refine that shared identity by focusing on integrating

civic tech Umbrella Terms into the branding of major

convenings and events. Two great examples of this include

the New York-based Civic Hall, which brings together

a diverse grouping of different topics under the civic

tech umbrella, and CfA’s National Day of Civic Hacking,

promoting the term “Civic Hacker” while bringing new

citizens into the civic tech fold.

Another approach that complements a shift in branding

and helps to address the challenges around shared vision

is an additional focus on storytelling for the general

public. Creating content around concrete, resonant stories

can ground civic tech in clear, real-world examples for

people less drawn to or familiar with civic life in general

or technological innovation. Simply put, more people

intuitively understand and are drawn to specifics that they

recognize from their own lives—such as completed local

projects or easier access to food assistance programs—than

they are to conceptual ideas about system-wide efficiency.

Finding improvements in how government and citizens

interact that can be captured in stories will naturally lead

toward a more publicly accessible narrative.

Another area of potential growth in the future is further

refining the process by which citizens get involved with

civic tech. As noted in the findings, CfA’s brigades provide

a powerful mechanism for people to get involved. Building

on this success, there are several ways to build and

experiment with the on-boarding process to civic tech:

ORGAN IZATIONS : BR AN DING, STORYTELL ING , AND IMPROV ING THE C IV IC TECH FUNNEL

The findings outlined in the preceding sections tell a story about the state of civic tech

through 2016: Civic tech has grown substantially in the past three years and is growing

still. It is bringing together an increasingly large community that communicates with each

other, takes action, funds innovative companies, meets offline—and certain aspects are even

starting to break into the mainstream. These findings—and an examination of lessons from

21st-century social movement building—suggest a number of strategic opportunities for civic

tech to increase its potential for impact and sustainability. In general, a theme throughout the

following recommendations is that there is already latent energy within the civic tech sector,

and the work ahead involves creating more opportunities for new people to join the sector and

deepen the engagement of those already involved.

30

ENGINES OF CHANGE

● Provide even easier ways to join civic tech (especially

for non-technical people): While events are a great

way to bring people in, they also are typically not the

first rungs on the ladder of engagement. Starting to get

involved with understanding civic tech should be as

simple as signing a Change.org petition.

● Given the finding showing that technology user

groups provide a significant entry-point to civic

tech, there is an opportunity to double down on

this. Specifically, providing toolkits for leaders of

technology associations, Meetups, and local groups on

how to integrate civic tech content into their meetings

could help grow the number of new people interested

in and joining the sector.

● A low-barrier way for joining should be paired with a

focus on continuing to deepen an individual’s level of

engagement once they join a list or attend an event

for the first time,²¹ potentially including encouraging

people who are already established in the community

to communicate with those who are relatively new.

● Movements tend to experience some of their greatest

growth by being great at rapid response, responding

to what’s happening in the world at key moments.

This was evident around Healthcare.gov, causing

it to be one of the biggest spikes in procurement

conversation and driving several Meetup events

discussing what could have gone better. Creating

a better rapid response apparatus has the potential

to draw connections between topics of mainstream

interest and the civic tech sector and also mobilizes

for action resulting in tangible solutions—to problems

that are already known to and resonant with the public

at large. While this can take many forms, one path is

ongoing hack days around major civic tech topics in

the news (similar to what has been happening around

the refugee crisis).

²¹ There seems to be a particular opportunity here, as we didn’t see a residual impact on Meetup RSVPs in the immediate months after a major national hack day.

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Our findings show a critical link between cities and

practitioners. Civic tech is not a sector that has been

driven forward entirely outside of governmental

systems. Rather, it has been built in partnership with key

stakeholders inside and outside government (e.g. 18F,

The White House Presidential Innovation Fellows, The

USDS, the first U.S. Chief Technology Officer, cities like

Philadelphia and New York City embracing civic tech).

As such, the branding and storytelling recommendations

for organizations also apply to many cities around the

country—owning civic tech’s brand and telling the story

of why it’s important.

Above and beyond that, the example of New York City’s

support of the civic tech community points to the

possibility that when cities focus on the local civic tech

community, we see a corresponding rise in local activity

and engagement. This is especially important as civic

tech spreads across the country and more cities are

hiring Chief Technology Officers, Chief Digital Officers,

Chief Innovation Officers, etc.—all potential liaisons to

the civic tech community.

GOVE RNM ENTS A ND C IT IES : EN GAG ING WITH THE LOCAL C I V I C TECH COM MUNITY

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The cluster analysis reveals an emphasis within civic tech

as a whole on striving for ongoing, authentic community

engagement, a prominent topic within the sector for

some time. This is shown via the conversation centered

around Laurenellen McCann and the Smart Chicago

Collaborative,²² with a focus on “building with, not for”

communities.

Strategies from movement building are particularly

relevant to furthering community engagement. Such

activities can include events such as community

forums; “listening tours” that catalyze conversation

across multiple communities; direct research, such as

longitudinal surveys or focus groups; and the use of

online engagement tools of exactly the kind pioneered

throughout the civic tech sector. Further strategies

and methodologies are discussed and used in the work

of McCann herself—who not only convened cross-

sectoral events to compare notes between disparate local

stakeholders, but who connected with so-called “tech

organizers,” individuals whose mandate was to foster

engagement between both citizens and practitioners, the

two halves of the civic tech world.

In addition to thinking about how civic tech gets built

and who it is trying to serve, there’s a great opportunity

to create bridges between practitioners working in

different parts of civic tech. Events like the annual

Personal Democracy Forum and the Code For America

Summit help to do this, bringing together people who

wouldn’t necessarily cross paths but all touch civic

tech in some way. Practitioners can make a lot of

progress in developing the shared vision of civic tech

by collaborating and connecting with practitioners who

work in other aspects of civic tech. Success on this front,

measurable by an increase in the number of people who

talk about multiple topics on Twitter or contribute to

projects of different topics on GitHub, will help to make

civic tech a more unified sector, increasing the chance of

seeing network effect supported growth throughout the

movement.

PRAC TIT IONERS : FOC US ING ON “THE HOW” AND “THE WHO” A LONGSIDE “THE WHAT” ; FORGING IN TE R -DISC IPL INARY COLLABORATIONS

²² McCann, Laurenellen; O’Neill, Daniel X., editor. Experimental Modes of Civic Engagement in Civic Tech: Meeting people where they are. Smart Chicago Collaborative, September 2015.

Available at http://www.smartchicagocollaborative.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/experimental-modes.pdf.

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As shown in the section on Emerging Trends, civic tech

startup funding has risen significantly from 2013 to 2015.

But it’s not always clear that these companies are in fact

part of the civic tech community. We’re not arguing that

self-identifying as a player in the civic tech movement

will necessarily make companies more successful or grow

faster, but we do believe that this would give citizens (and

perhaps even some practitioners) a more holistic sense

of what defines civic tech. There is recent precedent for

Much of what has been recommended within

organizations and practitioners can be assisted by

philanthropic funding in order to support the growth and

development of the sector. In particular, there is a sizable

opportunity for funders to provide more responsive

funding to the biggest issues of the day. Such seed

funding, reactive to events in the world that get people

excited about civic tech, can help to generate more

projects that are well attuned to current needs.

As seen in the data, people don’t often refer to work in

civic tech as civic tech. Both grantmakers and investors

can support the movement by specifically calling out

this, as Accela—a more established actor in the space and

the company that raised the largest amount of money

of any civic tech company from 2013 to 2015—has fully

embraced the terminology. Their tagline is “Embrace the

Power of the Civic Platform.” This also raises a potential

risk of a shared identity without a shared vision. If civic

tech doesn’t have clear values, then any company that

could benefit from the association could easily claim the

mantle for the purposes of marketing.

that they are investing in or giving to civic tech. On

CrunchBase, the service we used to identify funding

in the sector, sectors as diverse as elder care and

edtech were listed as such while civic tech had no such

demarcation. By making it clear that an investment in

a company creating SaaS for government operations,

or a grant to an organization that advocates for greater

government transparency using technology, is an

investment or grant to civic tech, these actors will help

to codify the identity of civic tech. This will in turn make

it easier for companies and organizations to collaborate

with each other in developing new projects and ideas.

STARTUPS : SE L F- I DENTIFY ING AS C IV IC TECH

PHI L ANTHR OPIC FUNDERS AND IN VE STO RS : FUNDING C IV IC TECH A ND C A LL ING IT BY ITS NAME

ENGINES OF CHANGE

IV.FUTUR E RESEARC H AN D LESSON S

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USING SOCIAL DATA TO CATALOG GOVERNMENT SERVICE CHALLENGES

While analyzing social data, we consistently observed

cases of people using Twitter and other social platforms

to discuss the challenges in interacting with government.

Whether it’s a complaint about a process at the DMV or

the IRS, Americans weren’t hesitant to voice complaints.

By properly analyzing and tracking this data, there’s

the potential to understand where there might be

opportunities for civic tech to have a greater impact in the

future.

CAPTURING MORE OFFLINE DATA

Future research could incorporate data from membership

organizations and municipalities about offline events

which might not be captured via Meetup. Other examples

of ways to incorporate offline information include in-

depth interviews and focus groups of practitioners.

BETTER ORGANIZING NONPROFIT GRANT DATA

This project further exposed a well-known problem, the

lack of a clear and up-to-date source of information about

grants from foundations to nonprofits. We thank the

Foundation Center for working closely with us to identify

the data that was available. With the IRS working to make

990 data more open, there is hope for this to improve in

the future.

ANALYZING CIVIC TECH GLOBALLY

This project focused on civic tech in the United States.

But civic tech isn’t just a local phenomenon, it has spread

across the world. This project could be conducted just

looking at the differences between what’s happening in

the U.S. vs. other countries. Does the community around

civic tech operate differently in other regions?

UNDERSTANDING THE PUBLIC’S VIEWS ON CIVIC TECH TOPICS

This project focused in part on analyzing social data,

which is not a good proxy for understanding the

public’s opinion on different civic tech topics. To further

understand public opinion on civic tech would require

survey research and potentially focus groups. Additional

work here would nicely complement the findings

presented here.

In order to produce this report, three years’ worth of civic tech data was collected, organized,

and analyzed. Over the course of conducting this project, there were several additional paths

for future research that were identified but not executed on. We include these to encourage

others to pursue these paths in the future.

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ENGINES OF CHANGE

AP PENDIX

37

ENGINES OF CHANGE

Movement Measurement is a set of tools and methods for

better understanding 21st-century social movements and

participatory engagement. Upon collecting, organizing,

and analyzing a broad and diverse set of quantitative

information from the web, we look for trends and deviations

from trends in order to understand what is happening

within a movement both online and offline. Such a

framework enables us to define falsifiable hypotheses that

can be experimented with to optimize campaigns and

interventions meant to grow and strengthen participatory

power within a social issue space. Movement Measuring

results in data-driven strategy recommendations and impact

assessments of interventions.

A BOUT OM IDYA R NETWORK AND PURPOSE

● Start our own movements: We create new organizations

and ventures where mass participation and collective

action can unlock meaningful change.

● Work with others: As a strategy consultancy and creative

agency, we collaborate with progressive companies,

nonprofits, and philanthropies—helping them put

purpose and participation at the core of what they do.

● Create crowd-based tools: We develop cutting-edge

technology and digital platforms that enable people

around the world to build their own power.

OMIDYAR NETWORK

Omidyar Network is a philanthropic investment firm

dedicated to harnessing the power of markets to create

opportunity for people to improve their lives. Established

in 2004 by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam,

the organization invests in and helps scale innovative

organizations to catalyze economic and social change.

Omidyar Network has committed more than $947 million

to for-profit companies and nonprofit organizations that

foster economic advancement and encourage individual

participation across multiple initiatives, including

Consumer Internet & Mobile, Education, Financial Inclusion,

Governance & Citizen Engagement, and Property Rights. To

learn more, visit www.omidyar.com, and follow on Twitter @

omidyarnetwork #PositiveReturns.

At Omidyar Network a critical part of our mission is focused

on strengthening governance by increasing people’s access

to information and public participation in government

decision-making. To achieve this, we support a wide range

of activities to improve transparency and accountability—in

particular in the sectors of open data, fiscal governance,

independent media, and civic tech.

Purpose moves people to remake the world. Driven by

people, enabled by technology: Purpose builds movements

and new power models to tackle the world's biggest

problems.

A certified B Corp, we create and launch our own ventures,

collaborate with the world's leading organizations, and

develop technology, tools, and content that move millions to

remake the world.

PURPOSE

From climate change and global LGBT rights to the food

system and gun violence in America, we’ve launched

some of the biggest and most successful experiments in

movement-building and mass participation in recent years.

Past and present partners include Habitat for Humanity,

Oxfam International, Everytown, the ACLU, The Rockefeller

Foundation, Ben & Jerry’s, and Google.

How we do it:

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ENGINES OF CHANGE

DATA COLLECTION A ND METHODOLOGY

CITIZEN TO GOVERNMENT (C2G)

• Citizen Communication &

Engagement

• Crowdsourcing Problems & Solutions

• Government Transparency

• Open Data

• Petitioning Government

• Service Delivery Improvement/Tools

• Tech Access (e.g. municipal wifi)

GOVERNMENT TECHNOLOGY (GOVTECH)

• Data & Analytics

• eGovernment

• Election Administration

• Infrastructure

• Innovation & Modernization

• Procurement

• Talent & Hiring

CITIZEN TO CITIZEN (C2C)

• Civic Hacking & Hack Events

• Engagement & Organizing

Platforms

• Political Technology

• Innovation Prizes & Challenges

CIVIC TECHNOLOGY (CIVIC TECH)Umbrella Terms

(e.g. Civic Tech, Civic Innovation, etc.)

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WHAT ARE THE PARTICIPATORY INDICATORS?

INDICATOR DATA SOURCE DESCRIPTION DATA GATHEREDCOLLECTION

METHOD

INTEREST

The extent to which

people care or are seeking

information about an issue

Google TrendsPortal for accessing information on

Google searches

Scale and/or

Growth

Google Trends Web

Tool (Search Terms)

CONVERSATION

The extent to which people

are talking about an issue.

Twitter

News Database

HackerNews

Social media network for personal

microblogging

Database for searching mainstream

news articles

News and community website for

information on digital technology

• Tweets

• Tweeters

• Links

• Articles

• Publications

• Articles

Twitter Firehouse

(Keyword Strings)

Factiva (Search

Terms)

via Paid Subscription

Web searches

(Keyword Strings)

ACTION

The extent to which people

are doing concrete work to

advance and issue’s goals

GitHubSoftware community and platform

for software development

• Repositories

(i.e., projects)

• Commits

(i.e., code updates)

• Authors

API (Keyword

Strings)

AFFILIATION

The extent to which people

are identifying with or

gathering around an issue

in an organized way

MeetupOnline network for organizing local

events and groups

• Events

• Organizers

API (Keyword

Strings)

FUNDING

The extent to which an

issue is being supported

financially by individuals or

institutions

Crunchbase

Foundation

Center

Platform and database for accessing

information on companies

Database for searching information

on non-profit grant funding

• Dollars

Invested/Raised

• Funding

Rounds.

• Dollars

Invested/Raised

API (Keyword

Strings)

via Paid Subscription

Foundation Directory

Online (Search

Terms)

via Paid Subscription

+ Supplemental Desk

Research

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MOVEMENT CRITERIA INDICATORS USED IN ANALYSIS

Scale and/or Growth Interest, Conversation, Action, Affiliation, Funding

Grassroots Activity Affiliation

Sustained Engagement Is active work to advance its goals sustained over time?

Shared Vision Conversation, Action, Affiliation

Collective Action Action, Affiliation

Shared Identity Conversation

These Indicators were used to answer questions within the Movement Test, both individually and in

conjunction with each other, so that we were able to see trends around movement up the ladder of

engagement. To evaluate each criterion, we used the following Indicators:

The findings of this report are based on analysis of a data set created for the purposes of conducting

Movement Measurement research on civic tech in the United States. To conduct this analysis, data on civic

tech from the beginning of 2013 through the end of 2015 was compiled from several sources using a variety

of methods.

Regardless of the source-specific method, data collection proceeded in a similar fashion: A set of specific

keywords, keyword strings, or search terms was created for each of the topics within civic tech, and data

was gathered according to the presence of language within those topic-specific keyword or search terms.

As a result, data was generally categorized according to the civic tech topic (e.g. Open Data) as well as the

corresponding higher-level category (e.g. Citizen to Government).²³ We also collected a small but central set

of Umbrella Terms—such as “civic technology,” “civic tech,” and “civic innovation”—standalone phrases that

we used to gather data (in lieu of more complex strings of keywords).

This report uses data from Twitter, Meetup, GitHub, Hacker News, Factiva, Google Trends, CrunchBase, and

The Foundation Center. Data is collected with a set of matching rules that describe civic tech and further

device the field into smaller topics. These rules can be found at bit.ly/omidyar-civic-tech-report-data. After

collection and sorting using these rules, we pass the data through a proprietary relevancy filter.

WHAT DATA WAS ANALYZED IN THIS REPORT AND HOW WAS IT GATHERED?

²³ As a result of using keyword strings to gather data—and as a result of many topics within civic tech being closely related to one another—there is some overlap in data gathered. In

nearly all cases this overlap is insignificant when compared to the overall sample sizes. One exception is in the Conversation data related to Open Data and Government Transparency,

two particularly aligned topics.

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● Twitter –Tweets and all metadata are collected using Twitter’s fire-hose. Tweets are tagged with a topic

using GNIP rules and then aggregated.

● Meetup.com – Meetup data is collected using Meetup.com’s API. Data is collected using matching rules

on group and event description and then aggregated.

● Hacker News – the entirety of the Hacker News corpus was collected via API. It was then classified with

civic tech rules and aggregated.

● Factiva – Data was collected using the Factiva search engine.

● Google Trends – Google Trends data was collected using the Google trends search engine.

● CrunchBase – CrunchBase data was collected using the CrunchBase API. Company descriptions were

passed through filters to identify civic tech businesses. Multiple checks by hand were completed to

ensure as unbiased a sample as possible.

● Foundation Center – Data was collected using the Foundation Center’s API. The grants were filtered by

rubric by hand.

There are several types of activities that we are not able to fully understand using this methodology. Perhaps

most critically, any offline events that don’t have an identifiable public digital footprint are not available.

Furthermore, any events or discussions that were made available online but in non-public forums are not

captured. In particular, Facebook Groups or Google Groups are both likely key sources of discussion about

the future of civic technology and were not included as part of this report because many of these groups are

private. While public GitHub projects were captured, private repositories were not, nor were any civic tech

projects or apps hosted using another service.²⁴

This project didn’t encompass new public opinion surveys or interviews with people working in the sector.

Trends were calculated using ordinary least squares. This simple process was selected so that all time series

would have trends calculated in the same way, making them more straightforward to compare. Errors of the

OLS trends were normal indicating that trends were not biased. Seasonality was not accounted for in the

trends.

Spikes are defined as any point two or more standard deviations above where expected along the trend line.

We searched for breaks in the data using moving Dickey Fuller tests across various time spans. Relationships

in the report are tested using Pearson’s t tests.

WHAT DATA WAS NOT CAPTURED OR AVAILABLE?

HOW WAS THE DATA ANALYZED?

²⁴ This was a result of GitHub’s dominance in the marketplace and focus on open source repositories.

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Clustering tweets was done through a multi-step cleaning and data summary process before feeding it in

to an unsupervised topic clustering algorithm. To clean, every word in each tweet was stemmed and then

tokenized with the exception of hashtags and handles which were maintained as is. We then converted the

tokenized tweets into a vector representation (i.e., each tweet becomes a vector in a vector space defined

by the full set of tokens for the entire corpus of tweets) before passing through a term frequency–inverse

document frequency transform. Next for the unsupervised clustering we used latent Dirichlet allocation

(LDA) at multiple cluster sizes to explore key topics that best told a narrative of the data. After multiple trials,

we settled on eight total clusters. Finally, to help visualize the results we created word clouds from the most

unique words attributable to each of those eight clusters.

Data can be found at: bit.ly/omidyar-civic-tech-report-data

WHERE CAN I FIND THE DATA?

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A. TOP-10 OVERALL INVESTMENTS IN C IV IC TECH, 2013 -2015

COMPANY TOTAL USD RAISED ROUNDS CATEGORY

Accela $223,500,000 Private equity in 2013, Series E in 2015 Govtech

Nextdoor $191,600,000 Rounds B & C in 2013, Round D in 2015 Consumer facing P2P

Mapbox $62,600,000 Round A in 2013, Round B in 2015 Govtech

Socrata $48,000,000 Round B in 2013, Round C in 2014 Open Data

OpenGov $44,000,000 Venture raises in 2013, 2014 & 2015 Govtech

Change.org $40,000,000 Round B in 2013, Round C in 2014 Consumer facing P2P

Enigma Technologies $33,800,000Seed in 2013, Round B in 2014, Round C in

2015Open Data

Everyone Counts $27,309,767Venture rounds in 2013, 2014 & 2015, Debt

Financing in 2015Election Administration

MindMixer $21,000,000 Round B in 2013, Round C in 2014Crowdsourcing ideas and

solutions

FiscalNote $18,231,500Convertible Note in 2013, Seed in 2013,

Round A in 2014, Round B in 2015Govtech

RE F E RENCE TA BLES A ND C HA R TS

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B. CLUSTER DETAILS

COMMUNITY INCLUSION & ENGAGEMENT

FOCUS ON CITIES

GOVERNMENT INVOLVEMENT

PROMINENT VOICES

EMPOWERING PEOPLE

FUTURE OF THE SECTOR

LOCAL INNOVATION

STARTUPS & DATA

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C. TOP 10 STATES FOR MEETUP EVENTS

STATE EVENTS RSVPS

CA 965 20700

FL 314 2737

VA 259 3203

NY 209 10191

MA 186 5611

PA 177 5699

NC 172 1697

CO 137 1591

TX 137 2758

MO 130 1157

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D. TOP 10 TWITTER ACCOUNTS BY ENGAGEMENT SCORE—UMBRELLA C IV IC TECH KEYWORDS

The Twitter engagement score is calculated by weighting retweets as having five times the sway of favorites.

TWITTER ACCOUNT ENGAGEMENT SCORE

codeforamerica 8,306 Code for America

digiphile 4,663 Alex Howard, Senior Analyst, The Sunlight Foundation

knightfdn 4,581 Knight Foundation

MSNewEngland 4,424 Microsoft New England

Living_Cities 4,118 Living Cities

participatory 3,971 Taigo Peixoto, Governance Specialist at the World Bank

MicrosoftNY 3,245 Microsoft New York

BetaNYC 3,018 BetaNYC

MicrosoftSV 2,753 Microsoft Silicon Valley

mheadd 2,746 Mark Headd, Former CDO of Philadelphia

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E . TOP 10 TWITTER ACCOUNTS BY ENGAGEMENT SCORE—OPEN DATA

TWITTER ACCOUNT ENGAGEMENT SCORE

WorldBank 45,265 World Bank

SunFoundation 32,936 The Sunlight Foundation

digiphile 24,962 Alex Howard, Senior Analyst, The Sunlight Foundation

mheadd 22,821Mark Headd, Former Chief Data Officer for the City of

Philadelphia

usdatagov 14,169 Data.gov

AidData 11,743 AidData

socrata 9,993 Socrata

OpenGovHub 9,382 OpenGovHub

tkb 8,353Tariq Khokhar, Global Data Editor at World Bank &

World Bank Data

DataCoalition 7,957 Data Coalition

The Twitter engagement score is calculated by weighting retweets as having five times the sway of favorites.

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F. TOP 10 TWITTER ACCOUNTS BY ENGAGEMENT SCORE—EGOVERNMENT

TWITTER ACCOUNT ENGAGEMENT SCORE

FedTechMagazine 3,321 Fed Tech Magazine

StateTech 3,184 State Tech Magazine

codeforamerica 1,870 Code for America

unpan 1,859 UN Public Administration Network

Liberationtech 1,828 Liberation Tech, CDDRL Stanford

stowns57 1,793Steve Towns, Editor of Government Technology

Magazine

GovtechFund 1,314 The Govtech Fund

Carahsoft 1,247 Carahsoft

whymicrosoft 1,182 Why Microsoft

SFCityCIO 1,157 Miguel A. Gamino Jr., CIO of San Francisco

The Twitter engagement score is calculated by weighting retweets as having five times the sway of favorites.

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G. TOP 10 PUBL ICATIONS FOR C IV IC TECH UMBRELLA TERMINOLOGY

SOURCE MENTIONS FROM 2013-2015

The Associated Press—All sources 42

Reuters—All sources 38

US Fed News 35

Business Wire—All sources 25

Washington Post—All sources 25

Louisville Business First Online (Ky.) 18

Journal of Engineering 17

U-Wire (University Wire) (U.S.) 17

Boston Business Journal Online 15

Dow Jones Newswires—All sources 10

The New York Times—All sources 10

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H. TOP TWITTER SHARES BY C IV IC TECH PUBL ICATION

HOST SHARES

Govtech 84,564

Govloop 29,277

TechPresident 7,383

FedScoop 4,318

NextCity 3,127

State Tech Magazine 2,730

Govexec 2,201

Civic Hall 1,967

Govfresh 2,651

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I . TOP TWITTER SHARES BY TECH PUBL ICATION

HOST SHARES

TechCrunch 20,677

Mashable 16,067

The Net Web 11,206

The Verge 8,644

Wired 8,522

VentureBeat 7,950

Boing Boing 7,299

ZDNet 7,016

Engadget 5,883

InformationWeek 5,658

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Omidyar Network is pleased to sponsor this report, and while the conclusions, opinions, and points of view expressed

in the report were a collaborative effort, the data analysis and methodology are solely those of the authors.

Page 1. Photo by Fito Senabre, CC BY-SA 2.0

Page 6. Photo by WOCinTech Chat, CC BY 2.0

Page 8. Photo by David Shankbone, CC BY 2.0

Page 10. Photo by Mstyslav Chernov, CC BY 2.0

Page 15. Photo by Nick Thompson, CC BY NC SA 2.0

Page 26. Photo Courtesy of Civic Hall

Page 28. Photo Courtesy of Civic Hall

Page 31. Photo by Diego Velo, CC BY 2.0

Page 34. Photo by Sai Kiran Anagani, CC0 1.0

Page 52. Photo Courtesy of Civic Hall

This report is the culmination of a great of effort from

both Purpose and the Omidyar Network. Thanks to Josh

Hendler, Ori Sosnik, Gustin Prudner, David Chernicoff,

John McCarthy, Oliver Ree, Jessica McGhee, Emma

Bloomfield, and Mariana Ribeiro from Purpose. Thanks to

Stacy Donohue, Alissa Black, Jim Peacock, Sara Saadeh,

and Christopher Keefe from the Omidyar Network.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PHOTOGRAPHS

Version 1.1: Incorporates 7 Meetup groups (under 1%) omitted due to a defect in the ingestion process.