Oct 30, 2026 · @Jon Garfunkel
I consider myself a “civic technologist.” I need to explain it to many people, citizens and public officials alike. A few years ago, I convinced my town to pass a resolution creating a Civic Engagement Advisory Board. We couldn’t actually seat enough volunteers for the board. Not enough people knew what the board was for, or why it mattered.
Now, what is it? A civic technologist helps a government or community group work out how it hears from residents and reports back to them, and which tools it uses for that. Some of us write software, though much of the work is choosing, setting up and reviewing tools that already exist. Often that means digital tools that reach more people than a meeting room can hold.
There’s an assortment of international groups and associations which serve this space. None has kept extensive local chapters.
Civic technologists should be able to find each other and serve their local governments. This proposal describes what that would take. The existing associations would share one directory. A national organization would recognize local chapters, and appointed boards could join on the same terms. Members would adopt common principles and carry a recognized name.
Many governments in America, of every size, have a professional planner, often certified by the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP), and a volunteer advisory board. A municipality too small to support a planner may get one from its county. Together they help plan the physical space of a community to fit whatever strategy the community has set.
Few analogs exist for the virtual infrastructure. Large cities and counties likely have a CIO, but few have a volunteer oversight panel. For example, Westchester County, NY is a county of 1 million residents immediately north of New York City. We have a countywide CIO, but no advisory board on civic engagement (only a Cyber Security Task Force).
How many small governments (counties and towns) have a strategy for their civic systems? It’s unknown. A town too small to have a chief information officer leaves the choice of tools to whoever is doing the work that week. A board might use Google Forms; some may adopt an AI notetaker. Nobody reviews whether any of it works, what it costs, or who it leaves out.
By civic systems I mean the ways a government hears from residents, makes decisions, and reports back. That includes websites, agendas, minutes, public comment, email lists and meeting software.
A few cities and towns have formed volunteer boards for technology or civic engagement. Each was set up locally, under its own name and charter.
Several of the technology boards grew out of cable television oversight. The engagement committees focus on outreach. Few combine the two, and none belongs to a wider association, so each town starts from scratch.
Outside government, a few independent local groups do related work. BetaNYC began in 2008 as a New York City open government meetup and was an early Code for America brigade. It now runs open data and civic technology programs across the city and is a member of the Alliance of Civic Technologists. Groups like it can advise a government, but they hold no appointed seat in it.
How should we measure the impact of these groups? A good measure is the number of active, productive chapters. That is also what a practitioner needs in order to find peers nearby, and what a local government needs in order to find help.
Are there enough professional technologists who could fill such roles? In my town of 20,000, about 1% are regularly engaged in boards, the PTA and volunteer groups. Maybe a tenth of those are interested in how governance works, and a tenth of those have the technical acumen to be a civic technologist. That’s 1 in 10,000. I ought to find 100 such people in my county of a million, or 2,000 across the state. Those in smaller communities would benefit by being members of a larger association.
I also think fewer of these people are connected than could be, and our tools are part of the reason. A statewide group needs local subgroups, so the three people in one county can find each other and work on their own towns. Email lists, Facebook groups and even Slack handle this poorly. Members end up either in one large channel, where local questions get lost, or in many small groups that are hard to find.
No comprehensive set of principles exists for civic technologists. In 2022, New America began work on a code of ethics for technologists generally, and found that earlier efforts had stalled for lack of enforcement, limited buy-in, and no clear sense of who counts as a technologist.
The neighboring professions offer models. The AICP Code of Ethics pairs aspirational principles with enforceable rules of conduct, and its principles apply to advisory bodies as well as to planners. The IAP2 Code of Ethics speaks to public participation practitioners directly. The draft below borrows the AICP shape: principles to aspire to now, with rules of conduct to follow once a body exists to uphold them.
Once chapters exist, members can turn these into rules of conduct, with a way to raise concerns when someone falls short.
I am posting this as a draft and sharing it with people who lead groups in this field. I want to know whether they see the same problem, and which of these pieces they would take on first.
If you do this work, or your town has a board like the ones above, I would like to hear from you. Whether this becomes a new association, or a new role inside an existing one, is still an open question.