The Making of a Civic Tech Community
Most communities don’t realize how much they know until they try to write it down.
Civic Tech DC has been organizing technologists, designers, policy thinkers, and curious newcomers in the DMV area since 2012, first as Code for DC, a local brigade affiliated with Code for America, and since 2023 under its current name after the national brigade program dissolved. Over that decade, the organization has quietly accumulated institutional knowledge of both the successes and challenges of what sustains volunteer-driven technology.
That knowledge has mostly lived in people’s heads, passed informally from organizer to newcomer. In a volunteer community, that loose structure works because people want to learn from others face-to-face, not read documentation. But it has its limits, and lately I’ve been running into them directly from both the basic, logistical work to the more significant, like the history behind a partner relationship. And as the community grows, people are starting to ask us for that information too.
Adaptability to change is essential, and prompted by the new partnerships we are building and the impact of the community, I am building an openly maintained, community-editable playbook to give that knowledge a structure that grows with us.
Two types of people show up
One of the more consistent observations from my conversations with folks is that people can be categorized into two broad orientations. There are those who want community in preferring the structure of a team and a defined problem to work on alongside others. And there are those who are self-directed and want to independently act on an idea.
This distinction shapes the playbook’s framework, and there will be resources for both. Also, people are not one or the other. Many, especially those who are getting their footing within Civic Tech DC, start as contributors and over time find their own direction they want to pursue. As such, these two modes are less fixed identities than different entry points.
Good ideas need more than enthusiasm
The second observation is about what self-starters actually need to succeed. It’s easy to think of an idea and, with the rise of AI, design and deploy an app in minutes. Yet most people unintentionally miss the essential design thinking aspect of figuring out who the user actually is, what problem they actually have, and whether the solution will hold up in practice. Without validation and a committed partner who will genuinely use what gets built, the gap between idea and action is very hard to close.
Civic Tech DC has always had an incubator model to help ideas turn into projects, but it has been informal and loosely structured. In an organization that prioritizes structure where it’s needed, the incubator stage is the most critical to formalize. By defining a clearer path from pitch to launch, the playbook is intended to make it easier for self-starters to go from “I have an idea” to “I have a plan with milestones.”
The playbook is still in development, but it will represent one of the outcomes of my independent research into what sustains voluntaristic open technology communities. Rather than the traditional research outcome of a paper, it is an re-interpretation of research in tangible action or one that can be applied and adapted to the community it studies. Excited to share its release soon.