Market research of existing Civic Technologies for participation

Conclusion: The design space for new Civic Tech

In this review, we have explored some of the technical and financial dimensions of the Civic Tech space for citizen engagement. There is a common sentiment that the space is saturated (Jordan, 2021) or that the market is about to face a consolidation (García, 2023). However, our review shows that at least in terms of functionality, saturation is only apparent if you consider that a lot of the tools are tackling the same user requirements, but not all of the user requirements.

A lot of the saturation effect may be explained by the fact that many tools can sadly indulge in inflated marketing claims (Meylan-Stevenson et al., 2024) that distract from comparing the actual features and functionalities of the software. Our experience shows that these tools are not necessarily complex from the technological point of view, but rather, that their complexity is that they need to adapt to the different methodologies and characteristics of client's projects.

Moreover, we also observed how much of the saturation effect is also explained by the lack of collaboration and interoperability among the tools, which leads to duplication of function and, as Meylan-Stevenson et al. (2024) point out, to lack of mutual learning.

Against this background, we conclude that there is still much opportunity for development. In particular, we assert the need for the following kinds of projects:

• Developing for reflective design: Beyond adapting to the participatory approaches that clients bring with them to projects, there is a need to help them think through the design decision in an informed manner. Also, in a manner that goes beyond reading material.
• Developing for impact and translation: Beyond social media integration, there is a gap in socio-technical support for helping translate the outputs of engagement into change during the policy cycle. This could mean helping policy-makers navigate results, create accountability features, and creating opportunities for participation throughout the policy cycle, among other possibilities.
• Developing for interoperability: There is a gap in articulating existing solutions and promoting learning across projects.
• Developing for robust ethics: There is a gap in solutions that help participants and organisers navigate the ethical implications of participation. We did not find strong solutions for helping clients navigate ethical challenges, nor completely robust ethical reasoning behind most of the projects themselves.
• Developing for informed participation: As mentioned in the introduction, deliberative engagement is characterised by the need for reasoned dialogue which requires the availability of quality knowledge, expertise and experience. We did not find good solutions for integrating knowledge into the engagement platforms.

These results also resonate with existing research. For instance, the recent review by Shin et al. (2024) also concluded that existing Civic Tech provide plenty of opportunity for citizen input, but lacks feedback loops and mechanisms to make implementation more transparent. This general observation was also mentioned by (Mellon et al., 2022) when they claimed that user experience was typically valued over political impact in this space. This is why we believe policy translation could constitute a priority area for new developments.

Another critical area of development stems from the current intermix between online participation and digital technologies for participation. Not all digital technologies for participation need to serve online participation. There is much support we can provide to off-line participation, which is still dominant, especially in deliberative mini-publics. These are related to dimensions of development we just enunciated; from helping reflective design to helping actors navigate ethical challenges, to helping participants navigate information and knowledge, there are plenty of development opportunities. Moreover, we found that there is an opportunity to develop Civic Tech for low-tech contexts that tend to be ignored by the current landscape.

For many of these advanced design challenges, AI could play a supporting role. For example, the ability of LLMs to allow for more flexible content searches could be leveraged to help citizens find new information and critically assess existing sources. Chatbots could help participation designers challenge and expand their designs. Algorithms can be developed to automatically or semi-automatically monitor the impact of solutions. However, all these applications need to be responsibly designed considering well-known limitations of current models and statistical techniques (for instance, the case of hallucinations in generative AI) but also, being able to distinguish between actual benefits and hype in the AI market.

Finally, significant limitations of this review must be kept in mind. As we mentioned, re-constructing what the available documentation says about how tools are meant to be used without systematic research about their use in practice will always lead to an incomplete and reduced understanding of their possibilities and limitations. As we have observed in our testing and conversations with actors, this space operates to a great extent through customisation and tools that are flexible enough to accommodate specific clients imposing specific participatory methodologies. A more complete review should explore how well the interplay between participatory methods and digital tools affordances play out in practice. Previous reviews, such as the Solonian Democracy Institute’s Digital Democracy report (Fuller & Jakovljev, 2024) include client feedback, but only in satisfaction metrics and not qualitative changes through use.

Declaration of conflict of interest

The members of the review team hereby declare that we have no business affiliations or familial relationships with any of the Civic Tech organizations included in this review.