I’ve spent nearly twenty years working in civic tech.

It feels like with everything going on right now, I should have something to say… This is my attempt to put into words what’s been swirling around in my head during this chaos.

This is my perspective, which I know is just a small part of the picture. In particular, I am focused on the US here, and while I’ve worked with many civic tech nonprofits, journalists, academics, and at commercial civic tech firms, I should note I’ve never been a government employee.

My goal has always been to use technology for positive social change and this is the path that I found. In 2006 that goal led me to Montana to work for Project Vote Smart. Then, in 2007 to the nascent Sunlight Foundation.

The First Wave: ~2005-2016

The Sunlight Foundation would wind up being a key part of the first wave of civic tech.

Sunlight was not the first civic tech organization; it was at least preceded by MySociety in the UK and Josh Tauberer’s govtrack.us in the US, both of which are still going strong, but it did have a tremendous impact. Sunlight’s mission was to “use civic technologies, open data, policy analysis, and journalism to make our government and politics more accountable and transparent to all.”

It was particularly timely, or perhaps trendy. We were building APIs and apps, getting great press, were well-funded and able to build a great team. While a fair bit of our funding came from big tech, we operated without any real interference and were able to do important work on campaign finance, open data, and government accountability & ethics reforms.

This was the beginning of a golden era for civic technology and open data.

In 2009, Obama’s Open Government Directive mandated that agencies publish high value data sets online at known locations.

This was a major win. This open data was a boon to nonprofits, researchers, and businesses that could use the data freely. It also began to prove the case, opening your data was not only the right thing to do, it could create value— the key to getting something done in American politics.

While there were definitely some people within government that were fully on board and instrumental to progress, most of the work was still happening outside of government.

Founded in 2009, Code for America (CfA) was like Sunlight’s younger cousin. Focused on cities, CfA began placing technology fellows within city departments for year-long tours of service. Code for America began to fund its “brigades” in 2012. These were CfA-funded meetup groups of civic technologists looking to do positive work in their cities.¹

The CfA brigades, Sunlight’s developer community, and countless other groups thrived on the tremendous energy of the moment. At every event I attended and spoke at, technologists were eager to contribute their time and expertise to build things that actually helped people instead of showing them ads.

The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) was founded in 2011. It presented a rare opportunity for a fresh start; it was the first new Federal agency in the age of the internet. CFPB built an internal technology team that began doing great civic tech work at a rapid pace.

Big changes followed the Healthcare.gov launch fiasco in 2013. 18F was created as an internal technology team for federal agencies. USDS was a direct response created to allow the government to “hire mission-driven professionals into term-limited ’tours of civic service’”, a way for technologists to serve the goals of simplifying outdated tools and streamlining cumbersome processes.

These were enormous wins for civic tech writ large. Civic technologists now had the opportunity to improve access to government services and information from within.

Around this time, many funders of important private sector work, eager to disengage with US politics, started to considering unfurling the “Mission Accomplished” banner and moving on.²

The Crash

With funding starting to decrease, and a political shift happening in the US, 2015 and 2016 saw major upheaval in the civic tech landscape.

Up through 2015, the Sunlight Foundation and Code for America were the titans of the US civic tech space.

By the end of 2016 Sunlight had lost more than half of its staff and had no choice but to give away or shut down their remaining civic tech projects. The same year, Code for America announced it would cease funding the brigades, sending shockwaves through the civic tech community. A handful of other organizations met similar fates at the same time.

Personally, in 2015, after eight years at Sunlight, I resigned as Director of Sunlight Labs. In light of actions taken by the executive director and the board’s lack of response, the vast majority of my colleagues made the same decision.

As much as I loved the work we did and most of the people there, Sunlight had serious internal issues. Multiple managers were abusive towards staff, the worst of it was directed at women I worked with. The fallout from that mismanagement, and continued board inaction, led to the near-total³ collapse of the organization in 2016.

The Second Wave

The second wave began before the first fully crashed, with the professionalization of the civic hackers⁴ into civic technologists that worked within government, or for the new agile government contractors that sprung up in the aftermath of Healthcare.gov. The exodus of developers from places like Sunlight was a major boon for these teams, but it also spelled the end of well-funded civic-tech work outside government.

And of course, it made some sense for funders to shift focus when they saw government taking up more of the work.

Since then people have come to associate civic tech in the US with the thousands of dedicated technologists working in federal, state, and local government roles.

While this is on the whole, a positive, it is not without issues:

1. There is a lot of really valuable work that governments either can not or should not be the ones to fund.
2. What if, hypothetically, someone gutted these agencies— disrupting existing civic tech projects within government?⁵ Or used the hiring authority of places like USDS to bring in dangerously incompetent⁶ bigots⁷.

What if working within government means enabling the building of concentration camps?

Unfortunately that is where we are, and many friends and talented public servants are either without work, or soon plan to be.

Towards a Third Wave

I hope most of these civic technologists will find that they can continue their work at the state or local level, but it is likely many will not be able to. In a best-case scenario, civic technologists are going to need to exist outside of government to fill in gaps where they will now exist.

Realistically, there will be a need to build software to help citizens organize and oppose unjust or unlawful government actions.

After all, civic technology is not technology for government, it is technology for people.

I wish I could answer the immediate question of “What can we do right now?” I can’t.

I strongly believe whatever comes next will need to be decentralized but well-organized, focused on building practical tools, with communities at the core. To succeed, the next wave will need to learn from the last twenty years of civic tech, but also plot a new course.

Much of the ineffectiveness of the first wave of civic tech can be attributed to disorganized energy. 2008-2012 saw a ton of developers all building their own version of the same application, and we are still plagued by people building what they think people need instead of actually talking to people. This is the origin of the “build with, not for” mantra that we’d be ill-advised to forget.

Over-centralization left the movement vulnerable as well. A more diverse space would not have felt the same impact of Sunlight’s internal instability, or Code for America’s shift away from funding brigades.

Civic tech can’t be entirely reliant on governments or traditional funders, though I hope some will step up to the plate to help get things off the ground. We will need to be scrappy again; large well-funded teams skew towards complex over-engineered solutions. Civic tech will need to embrace principles of the small web, and small software.

If you have ideas for what comes next, or want to discuss anything, please reach out.

You can connect with me on mastodon or bluesky.

I’m also going to start sharing posts on buttondown, or you can use good old fashioned RSS.

IKEELYA sees you guiding sniper shots for money and then turning your financial gains into snappy designs for your apartment. Barry is an assassin, but he’s not really in love with his...

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From today’s newsletter:

On Instagram, a reader asked me in response to my collages: “How do you balance making fun stuff with doing business? Do you allocate time to simpl[y] make ‘pointless’ things?” I scribbled the image above into my notebook in response, and then I got so worked up thinking about the topic that I scribbled this followup, which I’ve edited slightly:

Read more: Five things on my mind (and in my notebook)

Next Steps for Fired Feds with Federal Student Loans DOWNLOAD DATA (~3 minutes) : Visit studentaid.gov and log-in to “My Student Aid.” Click on your name in the upper right corner and select “My Aid.” Click the “Download my aid” …

Fired Feds: What Now for Federal Student Loans? Read More »

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This week I’m zooming in on the culture of the fediverse, prompted by the Superbowl halftime show. IFTAS announces they’ll run out of funding soon, indicating the challenges with funding Trust & Safety in the network.

On bridging and fediverse culture

Erin Kissane wrote an excellent article this week, about ‘bridging’ (connecting separate networks), fediverse culture, and why this regularly leads to drama and blowups. Kissane gives three explanations as to why this type of drama keeps happening, of which I want to highlight one: ‘Conflicting models of what the fediverse “really” is’. Kissane focuses on two different cultures on the fediverse regarding how connections between different places on the fediverse should be made, and how they should deal with consent.

I agree with Kissane’s observation, both that these competing models exist, as well as that a lack of acceptance that there are different models leads to conflict. Just last week I wrote about two separate cases of drama between various people about fediverse software that deals with these conflicting models on what the fediverse really is. In general I think that it is highly important to have a good understanding of what the fediverse truly is, and not only what people want the fediverse to be.

This Sunday was the NFL Super Bowl, with the halftime show by Kendrick Lamar. Lamar made some powerful visual statements in his show, such as a flag of America that consists entirely of Black men. Browsing both the fediverse and Bluesky this Monday morning served as a good indication of how different the cultures of these two networks are.

On Bluesky, 20 of the most liked 25 posts of the entire network ¹ discussed the Super Bowl, and of those 20, 12 were specifically about Lamar’s halftime show. Shortly after the end of the show, network traffic spiked to almost double the traffic for a short period as people logged in to talk about the show.

On the fediverse, I had a hard time finding any posts discussing the Super Bowl. I saw one post on the trending page of mastodon.social. Browsing through all posts made with the hashtag #superbowl gave me more than five times as much superb pictures of owls as it gave me posts about the halftime show.² There is a long tradition of posting pictures of owls with the tag SuperbOwl, that far predates the fediverse.

It shows two social networks with very different cultures: one as a place to discuss mainstream cultural events, and one as a place for counterculture and the subversion of mainstream culture. I do not think this difference is an anomaly either, in general I see significantly less conversations about pop culture on the fediverse. This specific example with the Super Bowl halftime show is just a clear example of a larger trend that the fediverse is less interested in mainstream pop culture.

To be clear here: this is not a criticism of the fediverse, nor is it a call for the fediverse to change and suddenly start posting about Lamar. The reason I’m highlighting these difference is to show what the fediverse actually is. There is a significant group of people that have an interest in the fediverse for the potential that it can be. This group frames the fediverse as an alternative to platforms like X, as a way to build social media platforms that are welcoming for everybody. This is a laudable goal to strive for. The ongoing coup in the US illustrates the urgent need for social platforms that are not owned by the oligarchy. But I also think that working towards such goals requires a good understanding what the fediverse currently actually is.

That is why I’m placing this observation in the context of Kissane’s post, who notes that people having ‘conflicting model of what the fediverse “really” is’ leads to conflict, and hampers potential for change in the fediverse. To me, how the fediverse responded to the Superbowl is a good illustration of the current culture of the network. What the fediverse currently is, is a countercultural network with little interest in mainstream pop culture. This is an absolutely fine identity to have! But for the people who are working to bringing the fediverse into the mainstream, it is important to realise that this countercultural identity clashes with with bringing a mainstream cultural identity to the fediverse.

The News

IFTAS has announced that they are running out of funding, and that barring new funding sources that will come through this month, the organisation will have to scale down their activities significantly. IFTAS says that they are currently focused on getting funding for their Content Classification Service (CCS). CCS is an opt-in system which helps fediverse server admins with CSAM detection and reporting. Running a social networking server comes with a fair amount of requirements regarding reporting CSAM, which are difficult to do for fediverse admins. CCS is intended to help with that, but IFTAS describes it as an “a ridiculously expensive undertaking, far beyond what the community can support with individual donations”. If IFTAS cannot secure funding by the end of the month, they will have to suspend the operation of CCS and its CSAM detection service. Other work that IFTAS will have to halt if no funding comes through is giving policy guidance, like their recent work for server admins on how to navigate the new UK Online Safety Act.

Funding Trust & Safety has been a major challenge for the fediverse. Recently, Mastodon tried a fundraiser for a new Trust & Safety lead, where Mastodon only managed to raise 13k of the aimed 75k. It is a concerning situation for the fediverse. One of the selling points of the network is that it can be a safer place for vulnerable people. But it turns out that actually funding the work that can make the fediverse a safer place is a lot harder than it should be.

Tapestry is a new iOS app by Iconfactory, who once made the popular Twitter client Twitterific. Tapestry is a combination of a news reader and a social media site. It allows you to combine many feeds into a single timeline. Tapestry supports social feeds like Mastodon, Bluesky and Tumblr, as well as RSS, YouTube, and more. The app was funded via Kickstarter last year. In a review, David Pierce from The Verge describes Tapestry as a ‘timeline app’, in a similar category as apps like feeeed and Surf. In his review, Pierce describes how timeline apps are about consuming information and new in a different way, and help manage the information overload that social media feeds present us with. I think that is also why I find these types of apps interesting, as they also frame the fediverse in a different way. Most popular fediverse software like Mastodon and Pixelfed are wired around social interaction. However, they follow the same patterns as the Twitters and Instagrams that came before, and over the last 15 years society has reshaped itself so that platforms like Twitter became not only used for talking, but also as a way to distribute news. So far, the fediverse is repeating this structure; Mastodon is used both for organisations that just want to send out a link to their news article as well as for people to chat with their friends. Timeline apps like Tapestry help split out these use cases, and allow people to take one part of the interaction pattern of Mastodon (following news and updates) without the other pattern (chatting with friends).

The Links

Some more videos of fediverse presentations that happened at FOSDEM last week were published online:

• Fediscovery – Improving Search and Discovery on the Fediverse – David Roetzel (Mastodon)
• Castopod & Web Monetization on the Social Web – Benjamin Bellamy (Castopod) & Jeremiah Lee (Web Monetization)
• Presenting ActivityBot at FOSDEM – Terence Eden
• Fediverse Fighters – The Role of Public Institutions – Melanie Bartos

The Brazilian Institute for Museums, a Brazilian government agency, is hiring two people to expand their integration with ActivityPub.

Flipboard has published more information and a schedule for Fediverse House, a conference about the social web. It will be held in Austin, Texas, on Sunday March 9th and Monday March 10th.

And some more links:

• Trunk & Tidbits, January 2025, Mastodon Engineering’s monthly update.
• A Brief History of Alternative Social Media Scholarship – Robert W. Gehl
• Pixelfed Crowdfunds More Open Source Social Alternatives for the Fediverse – David Cassel/The New Stack
• Release candidate 0.18 for GoToSocial with a wide variety of new features.
• Lemmy is working towards a 1.0 release with breaking changes in their API.
• This week’s fediverse software updates.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!

1. I checked at 6am PST, and looked at the past 12 hours. ︎
2. Also checked on 6am PST, and checked all posts made with that hashtag as visible from the mastodon.social server. I saw 61 pictures of owls, and less than 10 pictures by non-automated accounts of the show by Lamar. I’m saying less then 10 here because there were some automated bot accounts in there who mirror posts from news websites. Due to the size difference in userbase between Bluesky and Mastodon I’m less interested in the absolute numbers as in the relative difference between them. ︎

As has been widely reported, the government of the United Kingdom has secretly ordered Apple to build a back door into iCloud to allow ‘blanket capability to view fully encrypted material.’

Assuming the UK doesn’t back down, what are Apple’s options? This is my personal take: if I’ve missed something, I’d love to hear about it.

Option 1: Comply

Most companies would just comply with the order, but Apple is not most companies.

That’s not just because they have marketed themselves as privacy and security conscious, although that presumably factors into their decision. From what I’ve seen from interacting with their engineers and observing how they behave (both in technical standards bodies and in their products), this is a commitment that goes much deeper than just marketing.

More significantly, Apple will be considering the secondary and tertiary consequences of compliance. So far, every democratic country around the world has refrained from making such an order; for example, Australia’s widely debated legislation that mirrors the UK “Snooper’s Charter” has an explicit provision to disallow “systemic weakening” of encryption like we see here.

If the UK successfully forces Apple’s hand, every other government in the world is likely to take notice and consider making similar (or even more extreme) demands. CSAM scanning will just be the start: once access to that much data is available, it’s open season for everything from Lèse-majesté to punishing activists and protesters to policing sexual orientation, abortion, and other socially motivated laws. Even if a particular country doesn’t make the same demand of Apple, arrangements like Five Eyes will allow one agency to peer over another’s shoulders.

As I’ve written before, no one should have that much power.

In the tinderbox that is politics has become in many parts of the world, this is gasoline. I’d pay good money to be a fly on the wall in the meetings taking place with the Foreign Service, because they of all people should understand the potential global impact of a move like this. Of course, in a world where USAID is shut down by Elon Musk and some teenagers, nothing is off the table – and that’s why we should be so concerned about this outcome.

Option 2: Leave

Apple’s second option is to leave the UK. Full stop.

Close the Apple stores, online and retail. Stop providing iCloud, stop selling iPhones and all the other various i-gear. Close the beautiful new UK HQ at Battersea, and lay off (or transfer overseas) around 8,000 employees (reportedly).

This is (obviously) the nuclear option. It puts Apple outside the jurisdiction of the UK,¹ and at the same time orphans every UK Apple user – their phones and computers don’t quite become bricks, but they will definitely have limited utility and lifetime.

Given that along with Apple’s claim to support 550,000 UK jobs, it’s likely to be effective – these consequences would make the government extremely unpopular overnight.

However, this option is also massively expensive: reportedly, total Apple revenue in the UK is something like £1.5bn. Add on top the one-time shutting down costs, and even Apple’s balance sheet will notice.

Perhaps more importantly, this is also a strategically worrisome direction to go in, because it plays into the narrative that Big Tech is more powerful than sovereign nations. Other countries will take notice, and may coordinate to overcome Apple’s reticence. Apple will now have to choose the markets that it operates in based on how it feels about those country’s commitments to human rights on an ongoing basis – hardly a situation that any CEO wants to be in.

Finally, this option simply won’t work if one of those countries is the United States, Apple’s home. I’ll leave it to you, dear reader, to decide how much you trust your predictions of its actions.

Option 3: Open Up

Apple’s third option is to remove itself as a target in a more subtle way than option two.

The UK is presumably interested in Apple providing this functionality because iCloud’s design conveniently makes a massive amount of data convenient to access in one location: Apple’s servers. If that data is instead spread across servers operated by many different parties, it becomes less available.

In effect, this is the decentralize iCloud option. Apple would open up its implementation of iCloud so that third-party and self-hosted providers could be used for the same functions. They would need to create interfaces to allow switching, publish some specifications and maybe some test suites, and make sure that there weren’t any intellectual property impediments to implementation.

There could be some impact on Apple revenue here, but I suspect it’s not huge; many people would continue to buy iCloud for convenience, and for non-storage features that Apple bundles in iCloud+.

Think of it this way: Apple provides e-mail service with iCloud, but doesn’t require you to use it: you can use your own or a third party provider without any drama, because they use common protocols and formats. Why should file sync be any different?

This isn’t a perfect option. Orders could still force weakened encryption, but now they’d have to target many different parties (depending on the details of implementation and deployment), and they’d have to get access to the stored data. If you choose a provider in another jurisdiction, that makes doing so more difficult, depending on what legal arrangements are in place between those jurisdictions; if you self-host, they’ll need to get physical access to your disks.

What Will (and Should) Apple Do?

It should be no surprise that I favour option three. While Apple is notoriously a closed company, it’s not completely averse to collaborating and working in the open when doing so is in its interests – and, given its other options, that’s arguably the case here.

Conceivably, Apple might even be forced into taking the “decentralize iCloud” option if regulators like those implementing the Digital Markets Act in the EU decide that doing so is necessary for competition. Apple has been designated as a gatekeeper for the ‘core platform service’ provided by iOS, and while that designation currently doesn’t include file synchronisation services, that might change.²

Of course, the UK government may back down. However, the barrier to some other government taking similar steps is now smaller, and Apple would do well to consider its longer term options even if action turns out to be unnecessary right now.