Market research of existing Civic Technologies for participation

Executive Summary

Technologies to support citizen deliberation and participation form a growing market. This work has been commissioned to support the development of new technologies aimed at enhancing and scaling the use of the Scottish Government's Participation Framework for data governance. In this landscape review, we explore 31 of the most established players in the Civic Tech landscape for public engagement. For this purpose, we draw on the list of platforms included in the 2024 People Powered rankings. Our analysis is structured into four stages. Firstly, an analysis of the concrete technical features offered by these platforms. Secondly, an analysis of how these features are distributed across the engagement cycle. Thirdly, an analysis of the business models of Civic Techs for engagement. Finally, an exploratory analysis of the technical and ethical maturity of these platforms. Overall, our review finds that:

• Idea generation features and platform management features are dominant across platforms. In practice, idea generation features are operationalised through open text spaces for citizens to state opinions. In that sense, most Civic Tech, especially those that are for general purpose, are technically set up as online forums with some credentialed access.
• Most features are designed to support the enacting of participation and deliberation, with very little substantive support for other stages of the engagement cycle, such as reflective design, in-depth analysis of public opinion, and importantly, support in translating outputs into political or policy change.
• The Civic Tech landscape is split between tools that draw from the idea of digital commons and endeavour to adopt open-source and free-to-use access and those that are set up as more traditional Software-as-a-Service companies. Among revenue streams, structuring features in tiers with differentiated pricing is a common strategy. Upselling consultancy and technical support are also widespread. In all cases, financial sustainability is a challenge for the sector, especially for smaller-scale organisations
• Through our testing and conversations with Civic Tech organisations, we find that customisation is a key strategy, especially for smaller companies. Customisation in practice means that the specific features offered to clients will depend on their needs and the technical feasibility. It also correlates with the desire to be methodologically agnostic and hands-off regarding substantive definitions of “good engagement”. Bigger organisations tend to rely on “off-the-shelf” solutions instead, which can be problematic for contextualisation.
• Both in the rankings and platforms, ethics is mostly operationalised as data regulation compliance. We observe that more robust ethical considerations, such as democratic governance of technologies, collaborative design through interoperability and participatory design with citizens are still incipient.

We conclude our review by proposing how the design space for new Civic Techs for engagement could be framed and the limitations of our study.