Hi, I'm Alex. I do research into civic tech as part of a DPhil programme. I'm available for all sorts of work.
Civic tech is a really bad phrase. It is almost better than all the others (tech for good, public technology, govtech, public interest tech etc) but each one of those comes with a slightly different expression of what is at issue. For "tech for good" we can probably read that it is technology for charities or social enterprises. Tech to enable good perhaps. Govtech could equally be a nice WCAG compliant service to fix poverty or it could be sysadmining a box from 1990 that runs a critical national system that is untouchable. These phrases contain multitudes and I'm not here to police or even recommend that we use one over another.
What I want to explore is how the names that tend to get used have created a critical difference between two branches of what in other countries might be lumped together as civc tech, why I think it is important to note that they are different and have grown apart and some suggestions on either leaning into that or repairing it.
The UK has an unusual relationship with the phrase civic tech. For the most part, it is used to refer to private sector attempts to provide civic services, usually free or at cost, to users online. Where this differs from quite a few other countries is in that government is explicitly hived off from this space. Work that happens between the two is often in discrete lots of contracts rather than a collaborative
Where this is different to other countries, to an extent, is that the grey area between what could be described as "state" and what is not
What does this lead to?
It’s something Ive struggled to articulate over the but isn’t it weird that we don’t have better links between what’s in government and what’s outside? The UK had a rush of people join “digital” teams in 2011-15 and it then started to sort of ossify. You get very particular roles and responsibilities that aren’t exactly tradable outside government. And outside government you have an increased reliance on the third sector to provide what used to be government services, but without the resources to build things "right" or the incentives to collaborate. Now, there are plenty of good people who work on that problem and it is genuinely heartening to see things like Catalyst's work on procurement for digital work and both of the lottery funds really examining what can be improved about the concept of grant funding to make infrastructure.
But, think about it slightly differently. What if the centre of civic tech was in the liminal between government and civil society? The centring of user needs as user needs of government rather than user needs of society. And