Democracy Innovators Podcast · democracyinnovators.com

Matt Stempeck on the Civic Tech Field Guide and why projects succeed or fail

·51 min·3 clips

Stempeck says civic tech now has to defend institutions it once tried to reform.

Matt Stempek joins the show to talk about the Civic Tech Guide, which he describes as a map of the field. The project is nearing its 10th anniversary, and he notes that not every civic tech effort gets that far. About 10 years ago, while he was at Microsoft on a Civic Tech team in New York City, he and his Civic Hall colleagues Mika Sifri and Aaron Simpson sat down with spreadsheets and sticky notes and mapped the field as it looked in 2016. The goal was practical: they wanted to help the field grow and make the people working in it more effective. That meant understanding who was doing what, who else was out there, and why something failed when it did fail. The conversation treats civic tech as a field that should remember its own history. It also argues that new builders should know what came before them. A major thread is sustainability, including the difficulty of keeping a project alive for a decade. The discussion then turns to network effects and the challenge of reaching critical mass when people already have many places to express political interest. Another focus is interoperability between civic platforms. Stempek says that last year he finally saw movement there and that they created a category for interoperability of civic platforms. The category is still small, but it does have a few examples in it. He points to ACTE, the Alliance Civic Tech Europe, as a trade group representing digital participation platforms in Europe at the EU level. He says that kind of representation shows the industry is getting more mature and can help existing EU resources reach participation platforms and programs. The episode also mentions conference collaboration, including a TIC Tech panel in Mechelen, Belgium, where teams such as GoVocal and DeliberAid discussed working together. Those partnerships are treated as signs that the ecosystem is starting to connect itself. The closing message is straightforward: civic tech gets stronger when the field is easy to see, easy to compare, and easy to learn from.

As heard by us

A grounded look at civic tech as a field that needs memory, coordination, and better ways to connect.

The Civic Tech Guide is framed as a practical field map for civic tech, built from sticky notes and spreadsheets and now at its 10th anniversary. It points to a field that surged in 2015 and 2016, yet is hard to sustain over time.

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Why you'd press play

You want a field map of civic tech and a sense of why some projects endure.

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