
My failures: Civic technology ideas that didn’t quite work (2015) - kick
https://medium.com/@joshuatauberer/my-failures-civic-technology-ideas-that-didn-t-quite-work-c73ecf730032
======
showerst
Disclaimer: I've been involved in the us government data world for about a
decade, I'm a core contributor to the openstates project, and I co-founded and
help to run a (for profit) company in this space. I've met Josh in passing,
and am super impressed by what he's done with Govtrack.

The core mistake people make with almost all government data tools and
projects is assuming if they build it at an MVP level, people will come. The
market of people who actually want the underlying stuff being offered, will
pay for it with money or at least attention, don't need an SLA or dedicated
account manager for it, and are ok with starting out with less than 100% data
coverage is really small.

It seems logical that there would be a ton of people, from journalists to poli
sci professors who are interested in the sorts of projects josh is
highlighting. In reality, most of those people are on a shoestring budget and
OK just going to the original source, OR they're betting their job on it, so
they need production quality, and consistent coverage of every <whatever X
you're doing>. Most everyday people aren't actually interested in looking up
the text of the bills they see argued about on CNN, or what chain of PACs
their rep takes money from. The paid products are way upmarket from an
individual, and tend to include substantial training and account management
services, a focus on things like fancy reporting, CRM features, and preemptive
alerting.

In reality most of the well known US government data projects (openstates,
opensecrets, govtrack) are more like traditional startups, they succeed on a
combination of having (had) a stable source of funding, good marketing, and
sometimes the sheer force of will of one or more people.

There's nothing wrong with building tools that aren't _for_ anyone specific,
but it's important to know going in that you might be the only one who thinks
they're super valuable.

------
freehunter
My side project is based on civic technologies and personally I feel the main
problem here is the focus on federal government and nationwide policy.
Congress members are too far removed from normal citizen, and national policy
is hard. There's too many competing services at the national level (CNN,
CSPAN, FiveThirtyEight, etc), and federal policy is ephemeral for most
Americans.

Starting at the local level is closer to home, it has more of an impact. "Rep
Smith was one of 300 members of congress who voted for Bill 1234" doesn't have
the same impact as "Mayor Williams wants to remove the crosswalk signal in
front of the middle school that your kids attend".

Tell people what's happening in their backyard because they probably don't
know. Everyone knows what's happening at the national level and very few care.
No one knows what's happening locally because local news has been absolutely
gutted over the last 20 years. If you want to disrupt government and create
citizen interest, it has to start locally where people care but no one is
reporting.

~~~
showerst
I think this is right in the sense of "a project for an individual to make a
local difference".

A lot of people have gone down this road trying to build major projects,
especially 8-10 years ago when hyperlocal was the next big thing (remember
everyblock?). They all sort of petered out, presumably because it was just too
hard to scale with tech as opposed to having people on the ground. Us nerds
tend want projects based on data feeds, not on people sitting in city council
meetings and interviewing people, and most journalists I know are more
interested in working for the Washington Post than being the only reporter on
the nowheresville tribune.

------
slx26
I first read about this guy from a link currently on xkcd to another of his
medium posts, titled "So you want to reform democracy" [0] (it has been posted
a few times here, but it never got many comments).

I'm personally very interested in using tech to make a better society, spread
good ideas and all that. Not necessarily "civic technology" like this, but you
get the idea.

To be completely honest, this guy has been going at it for a long time and had
some success, but every time I look at something he worked on, I feel the
ideas are poor and the execution is poor. I don't mean to dismiss his work at
all, but this impression makes me wonder if there's other people working on
similar areas and having more success (not necessarily from an economic
perspective, obviously).

I feel the focus of his ideas are too broad and flawed at a fundamental level.
Truth is fundamental to society, but these ideas seem to focus too much on
just giving a lot of info. My experience tells me that people who wants to
learn and be critical and find out what's going on will more or less get there
anyway, relying on many different sources. And most of people will simply not
be interested in that. When I was a kid, I always kinda asked myself something
similar: do we need people to be nicer, or do we need them to be more clever
and informed? The binary choice was pretty childish. Nowadays I try to focus
more on how to get the two aligned. For example, in the case of a programmer
like me, instead of unconsciously letting tech make the world even a bigger
mess, try to minimize its use unless it can really bring something positive
for someone. But it gets really tricky. Getting a bit out of topic, so I'll
stop for the moment and see if it sparkles some discussion.

[0] [https://medium.com/civic-tech-thoughts-from-joshdata/so-
you-...](https://medium.com/civic-tech-thoughts-from-joshdata/so-you-want-to-
reform-democracy-7f3b1ef10597)

~~~
cyberbanjo
Reminds me a bit of
[https://www.reddit.com/r/CitizenPlanners/](https://www.reddit.com/r/CitizenPlanners/)
the way you describe it.

