Working for a future where information & technology equitably serve the public
👏🏻👏🏼👏🏽👏🏾👏🏿Civic Software Foundation is a nonprofit organization that brings together vision, technology, and collaboration to build transparent knowledge systems that enable a free and just society.
CIVIC Data Library
CIVIC is creating the CIVIC Data Library as a novel public data resource, grounded in social justice, that centers data constituents through participatory collaboration. The Library's story begins with its creation, and you are invited to help us ask and answer key questions as we build a new public data community space with an integrated context life-cycle.
Unlike data portals and dashboards, the CIVIC Data Library requires that every dataset represented include the context of the data: what information it includes, who worked on it, and who else was involved — as well as who was left out and what wasn't recorded. To do this, CIVIC brings together a team of dataset constituents and contextualization specialists to work with data publishers and collect the context for each dataset.
The Library is a hub for a community that spans disciplines, lived experiences, regions, and cultures to engage the stories told and untold by data.
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A platform for people, not profit
The CIVIC Platform is open technology infrastructure for public data that embeds the principles of equity and impact with uncommon transparency into the process of data science, design, and visualization. Industry-grade technology, built for scale and owned in the public interest.
CIVIC Platform
Collaboration as an art form
We bring together teams across disciplines, organizations, and backgrounds to tackle complex information challenges. We bring intense care, attention, and resources to curating collaborative environments that support our contributors and deliver real-world outcomes.
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A sustainable economic model for civic tech
The CIVIC ecosystem is based on the cyclical flow of resources between our growing contributor network, pipeline of institutional data projects, and investment in common technical infrastructure.
Pathways from volunteering to paid work
When you become a CIVIC contributor, we invest in your training, onboarding, and continuous support in a production environment. That means teams of talented people, worthwhile projects to work on, and a realistic plan for delivery and success.
Even for experts, contributing starts with a volunteer experience in our unique collaboration environment. But we know that volunteering isn't sustainable forever, especially for people who want to expand their participation.
That's why we created CIVIC Master Builders, a peer-nominated network of experienced contributors. We look to this network first for paid CIVIC team roles, from project-based consulting to part-time and full-time positions.
Become a Contributor
A cycle of projects and reinvestment of resources
For institutions who are custodians of data in the public interest, we can create specialized teams to take your vision into production.
Every project we take on benefits from CIVIC's vast contributor network and extensible technical infrastructure. Individual projects are supported by a vast body of knowledge created over years of interdisciplinary work.
Each project improves our interconnected systems. This then accelerates future development and the adaptation of data models and tools across the nation and disparate focus areas, which has the added benefit of making this technology increasingly faster, more reliable, and cost efficient to build over time.
Start the Cycle
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