Market research of existing Civic Technologies for participation
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.
Methodological approach
For this landscape analysis, we employed a scoping review approach (Arksey & O’Malley, 2005). The main objective for this analysis was structured into three questions:
- What specific features do Civic Tech companies offer to satisfy the needs of citizen engagement?
- How do these features integrate at the different stages of a citizen engagement process?
- How do Civic Tech companies structure their business models?
In order to address these questions, we reviewed the available documentation of all platforms, created coding systems for labelling results, contacted Civic Tech organisations in case of ambiguity, interviewed them in case additional information was required, and triangulated findings within the team to check for coding consistency.
Additionally, we integrate existing assessments and available information to summarise:
- Information regarding the company, contact information
- Assessment of technological maturity of the current version
- Assessment of ethical maturity and openness
These results are directly reproduced from existing work, but we use our general findings and academic scholarship to help interpret the data more holistically.
To identify and select the cases we evaluated three third-party databases of Civic Technologies made by professional organisations with track-record in this space:
After collating the entries of all databases, we chose to ground our database on the People Power Platforms because they are the only alternative that provided transparent information around how platforms were included and additionally, it contained expert assessment that robustly helps assess the complementary information of technological and ethical maturity. We included in this database other exemplary cases of Civic Tech frequently mentioned in the participatory space based on our domain expertise.
We conclude this report by stating our assessment of the design space for fruitful new developments in the area of technology for deliberation.
Contact
Email: tom.wilkinson@gov.scot
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