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Civic Tech Chat is a podcast about the civic technology movement. We seek to harness the power technology has to improve the delivery of public services to people everywhere.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Ryan Cook makes civic design legible as a craft whose smallest technical decisions can alter people's encounters with public institutions.
Civic Tech Chat follows Ryan Cook into the choices hidden inside public technology: how a form loses people, how an accessibility standard changes a service, or how an organization turns design research into daily practice.
An unwritten office rule sends you looking for the person who owns the whole process.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A practical case for specs first, with AI doing more of the build and civic-tech details keeping it grounded.
Mark Head and Ryan Cook make a strong case for a more deliberate way to build software: start with a detailed specification, then let AI tooling take on more of the implementation work.
A sponsored but practical case for open-source civic software, grounded in delivery work and reusable infrastructure.
This sponsored Civic Tech Chat episode with Ryan Cook, Ed Mullen, and LP from NAVA stays strongest when it moves past platform talk and into the work itself: grants portals, Medicaid reporting, and SNAP payment error rate reduction.
A careful look at how design leadership shapes public services.
The piece treats civic tech as a sequence of practical choices: who leads design, how research is protected, and how teams are arranged to keep public work humane.
A thoughtful look at public services that keeps the people behind the forms in view.
Civic Tech Chat makes a solid case for why government forms matter well before anyone hits submit. Amanda Renteria and Ryan Cook keep circling a practical question: what is the real goal, and who ends up carrying the work?
A measured look at civic storytelling, where listening and anonymity shape the song.
Civic Tech Chat centers on a project that pairs a federal worker with a songwriter, with anonymity available for storytellers who do not want their names tied to the songs.
A clear case for accessible public services and the standards that support them.
Mike, a Drupal core accessibility maintainer and open standards lead at Civic Actions, brings Civic Tech Chat a steady, practical view of accessibility as a public-service issue.
A calm, practical look at bureaucracy that makes the advice easy to use.
Civic Tech Chat returns to episode 84, "Hack Your Bureaucracy," with a clear-eyed take on how bureaucracy works when people have to live inside it.
A thoughtful look at how civic technology becomes politics, organization, and public habit.
Politics here is framed less as a scoreboard than as a story system, with Ryan Cook and R. Schrock showing how technology, policy, and persuasion shape civic life.
Long-form Apple talk with sharp product judgment and deep tech history.
Weekly film, music, and arts criticism from Monocle 24's Midori House studio in London.
Two product designers talk Figma workflows, button sizing, and AI design tools weekly.
Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert dissect CSS, CMS workflows, and AI coding agents weekly.
Stack Overflow's Ryan Donovan interviews founders and engineers on AI agents, protocols, and dev tools.
This episode explains supply chain attacks and why they matter for anyone working with technology in the public sector.
Mark Head starts with service delivery.
Strata is framed as shared civic plumbing for government software.
The episode discusses website accessibility for people with disabilities with a guest from AudioEye.
In 2025, the Dutch government invoked a 73-year-old famine-prevention law to seize control of Nexperia, a semiconductor company owned by a Chinese conglomerate, after U.S.
Design leadership gets treated like systems.
Forms are public infrastructure.
An interview with Brett Farron about traffic calming devices and data collection for civic improvement.
An episode of Civic Tech Chat featuring a sponsored conversation with NAVA Labs about their work in prototyping policy and systems changes for government services.
A songwriting project turns into a civic tech conversation with some real weight behind it.
An interview with Amanda Renteria, CEO of Code for America, discussing how technology can modernize government service delivery.
This episode explores the design pattern of infinite scrolling, its user experience impacts, accessibility concerns, and ethical implications.
Accessibility starts with what government chooses to buy.
Bureaucracy starts with hidden rules.
Host Ryan Cook introduces the podcast and interviews Sarah Schott about her work in open government, civic tech, and data policy.
Stories run politics.
Christopher Whitaker starts with a network.
An interview with Brian Whitaker, founder of Humans of Public Service, discussing his organization's mission to highlight public servants and his personal drive to do good.
This episode discusses the global CrowdStrike IT outage on July 19th, its impact on flights, businesses, and hospitals, and the systemic weaknesses it reveals.
Host Ryan Cook interviews Greg about his work in civic tech, including data analysis, GIS, and consulting for public benefit corporations.