What’s “civic tech” got to do with a cheap Buddha statue that managed to stop people from dumping trash on a city street? Civic tech, after all, is technology used for civic benefits that usually entails data and software.
I thought of civic tech while I listened to the Buddha story on an episode of the Criminal podcast. “He’s Still Neutral” told a series of stories about what I suppose could be called “city hacks” — which sounds to me like the soul of civic tech.
Civic tech usually comes from the ground up. Unlike top-down, enterprise-scale smart cities laid upon cities by the likes of Google, Siemens, and Cisco, most civic tech is the work of lone coders and small ad hoc groups.… Read the rest “The soul of civic tech”