What is civic tech?

Activity in which citizens use technology with their own hands, working with government, to solve local and social problems and make it easier to take part in politics. Code for America in the United States, g0v in Taiwan and Code for Japan are leading examples.

In a disaster, you want a map of what is short where. You want government procedures to be easier to understand. There is a movement that, rather than leaving such problems to government alone, sets out to have citizens solve them with their own technical skills. That movement is civic tech.

In short

Civic tech is a word combining "civic" and "technology". It refers to activity in which ordinary citizens use technology to solve problems in their own towns and society, or to make it easier to take part in government [1].

It is not only engineers who are involved. Government staff, designers, local residents and many other people take part [1].

For example

sinsai.info and Code for Japan (Japan, 2011 onward). According to Plurality, Haruyuki Seki (called Hal Seki in the book), "a leader in Japan's Civic Tech movement, led the creation of sinsai.info, a data collection and visualization platform developed after the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, and later founded Code for Japan" [2].

Seki recalls having originally been an engineer with no interest in social issues. Working on sinsai.info led Seki to ask whether technology really makes people happy, and to think that the way open-source projects (published in a form anyone can use and improve) are run was exactly what local governments needed [3]. Code for Japan also built the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's COVID-19 information website as open source [1].

g0v and the mask map (Taiwan, 2012 onward). According to Chinese Wikipedia, the leading example of civic tech in Taiwan is g0v (pronounced "gov-zero"). It is known for efforts to make the government budget visible, and for the "mask map" during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, which let people check pharmacies' stocks of masks [4].

According to Seki's report, as of February 8, 2020, g0v's website listed 28 map apps, 14 LINE apps and more. The foundation for this was that the government published, every 30 seconds, sales data it gathered through the IC chips of national health insurance cards [5].

Code for America (United States, 2009 onward). In his commentary on the Japanese edition of PLURALITY, Ken Suzuki sums up that Code for America was founded in the United States in 2009, and that under its influence Code for Japan was born in Japan in 2013 and Code for Germany in Germany in 2014 [6].

How it works

Civic tech and GovTech

Seki's FAQ (2021) describes civic tech as activity in which citizens themselves solve problems with technology, activity that promotes citizen participation in public life, and activity that improves democracy itself with technology [1].

It is distinguished from "GovTech", in which government uses technology to improve its own work. The two overlap a great deal, and Code for Japan also does GovTech work, such as training for government staff [1]. Chinese Wikipedia likewise writes that the recipients of civic tech are citizens and those of GovTech are governments, but that both aim to strengthen interaction between citizens and government [4].

In 2025 slides, Seki sums up that the "tech" in civic tech is only a means. The real aim, according to the slides, is to achieve a better democracy in which everyone takes part. Digital technology has simply lowered the effort of taking part so much that new ways of doing things have become possible [7].

Links across countries

g0v's official FAQ lists similar organizations abroad, including mySociety in the United Kingdom and Code for America and the Sunlight Foundation in the United States [8]. In a 2017 interview, Kao Chia-liang (clkao) of g0v said that Taiwan is part of "Code for All", a network of civic tech organizations in many countries. Because g0v is a loose community that cannot hold votes, a separate foundation served as its point of contact, he said [9].

Japan's version

According to Seki, there are more than 70 local "Code for ___" groups in Japan. Seki writes that only the United States and Japan have so many (the 2021 FAQ gave the number as more than 90) [10][1].

Ten years ago, Seki recalls, people said it could not work in Japan because Japanese people have a weak sense of themselves as citizens and a strong habit of leaving things to government, but it has taken root in a Japanese way. Seki argues that civic tech is not a technology or a business model, but a "culture" from below that cannot be created by orders from above [11]. Engineers make up about 30 percent of participants [1].

A new wave — digital democracy

Seki also reports a new current. There have appeared Kouchou AI, born in the citizens' group DD2030; Decidim, a citizen-participation tool born in Barcelona, Spain; broad listening (listening widely to many voices and organizing them); and more. People interested in discussion and dialogue, a different group from the earlier layers of civic tech, have begun to gather, Seki says [10]. Such citizen-participation tools are also starting to become business ventures [10].

What is debated

The expectation that citizens will solve things for us is an illusion. Seki flatly calls this expectation, heard many times from local government staff, an "illusion", based on 13 years of experience. Seki writes that Code for America was able to launch because of large funding from foundations, and that Code for Japan kept going because it could put the profits from its work for local governments into the activities of its members. Seki also writes that while prototypes of tools can be built by volunteers, volunteers cannot keep operating them at the level of a company [10].
What happens when government takes the lead. Seki's slides say that when government leads, a budget is easier to secure, but the means tend to become the end, citizens become passive, and things tend to stop when the budget runs out or the person in charge is transferred. They also say that citizens must not be seen as tools for solving government's problems [7].
It is not only an activity for engineers. In Japan, Seki says, many people hold back from taking part or taking on leadership because they are not engineers. In organizations abroad, leaders are often not technologists, and Seki says one should start from thinking about what the town ought to be like [10].
How to measure results. Seki points out that expectations of new services being created are too high, and that there is no way to evaluate improvements in how work is done or the building of trust [10].

Where it fits in Plurality

Chapter 3-3 of Plurality, "The Lost Dao", describes the "GovTech" and "Civic Tech" movements as "perhaps most closely connected to our own paths to ⿻" [2]. It positions them as movements "to revive the public and multisectoral spirit and ideals of the early internet by strengthening the digital participation of governments and democratic civil society". It explains that they "have harnessed OSS-style development practices to improve the delivery of government services and bring the public into the process in a more diverse range of ways" [2].

As leaders, the same chapter names Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America; Beth Simone Noveck; and Haruyuki Seki [2]. But it also writes that despite their important impacts, it has been "challenging for these examples to have the systemic, national and thus easily traceable macrolevel impacts that g0v had in Taiwan" [2].

Chapter 2-2 describes g0v as symbolizing the civil-society foundation of Taiwan's digital democracy, and calls its founders "civic hackers" [12]. Taiwan's path is covered in the articles on digital democracy in Taiwan and vTaiwan.

Sources

Haruyuki Seki, "シビックテックに関するFAQ:2021年版" (FAQ on civic tech, 2021 edition) (2021-12-25, in Japanese) — https://note.com/hal_sk/n/na288b92863f5
Plurality, 3-3 "The Lost Dao" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/3-3/eng/ ［CC0］
Haruyuki Seki, note.com article on agile governance and civic tech (2021-07-10, in Japanese) — https://note.com/hal_sk/n/n4d4e7003b1b9
Chinese Wikipedia, "公民科技" (Civic tech) — https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E5%85%AC%E6%B0%91%E7%A7%91%E6%8A%80 ［CC BY-SA 4.0］
Haruyuki Seki, article on Taiwan's mask map (2020-02-08, in Japanese) — https://note.com/hal_sk/n/nd5d71fa9ff5d
Ken Suzuki, commentary on the Japanese edition of PLURALITY (in Japanese) — https://note.com/digitaldemocracy/n/nb8b59a6b775d
Haruyuki Seki, "日本におけるシビックテックの歩みと課題" (The path and challenges of civic tech in Japan) (2025-09-26, in Japanese) — https://speakerdeck.com/hal_sk/ri-ben-niokerusibitukutetukunobu-mitoke-ti
g0v official FAQ — https://github.com/g0v/g0v.tw/blob/master/md/zh-tw/about/faq.md
Kao Chia-liang, full text of an interview with CommonWealth Magazine (天下雜誌) (2017-11-08) — https://medium.com/@clkao/cw-interview-73848141ac5
Haruyuki Seki, "シビックテックは次のステージへ進めるか" (Can civic tech move on to the next stage?) (2025-10-10, in Japanese) — https://note.com/hal_sk/n/ne58a76fa25a8
Haruyuki Seki, "シビックテックとは文化である" (Civic tech is a culture) (2023-12-08, in Japanese) — https://note.com/hal_sk/n/nab06fa3794f8
Plurality, 2-2 "The Life of a Digital Democracy" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/2-2/eng/ ［CC0］

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