Research
What we learn from auditing the public-data infrastructure and open-source foundations civic tech depends on—and what we build in response.
Oct 13, 2026
Our civic tech map holds 2,487 entries, and we spent a week checking the ones we wrote against their own sources. Along the way the map stopped looking like a directory and started looking like data. Here is what it says about where civic tech lives, who builds it, and what it needs from you.
Oct 12, 2026
The EU's Cyber Resilience Act is now partly in force, and its reporting clock started in September. For most volunteer maintainers and civic-tech teams the answer is reassuring, but the line between community and commercial is drawn more precisely than many people assume.
Oct 11, 2026
Encryption used to be something you bought. Let's Encrypt, the Signal Protocol, SecureDrop and WireGuard turned it into shared infrastructure that a two-person newsroom gets on the same terms as a bank. That only works as long as someone keeps paying for the commons.
Oct 10, 2026
A two-person civic-tech team has no security department. It doesn't need one to get the basics right. The tooling that covers accounts, dependencies, releases, and secrets is open source and free for public repositories, and that is one practical way open source gives back to the communities building on it.
Oct 09, 2026
Open source doesn't make code secure by itself. What it offers is security you can check, which closed code never can. That only pays off when someone does the checking, and a city, a newsroom, or an NGO can be the one who pays for it.
Oct 08, 2026
Someone outside your organization will find the hole in your system before you do. Whether they tell you, and whether telling you is safe, depends on a one-page document most public bodies and civic projects still haven't written.
Oct 07, 2026
Ransomware doesn't only lock a council's files. It forces the council to find out what it actually runs, and whether it can rebuild any of it. What the documented cases say about recovery, where openness helps, and where it doesn't.
Oct 06, 2026
A practical map for small civic-tech teams and independent maintainers: who pays for open-source public-interest infrastructure in late 2026, what each funder actually covers, how to apply, and why the whole map is smaller and shakier than it looks.
Sep 15, 2026
Most civic tech dies when the grant ends or the mayor changes. A handful of open-source projects have survived a decade or more. Decidim, Consul, g0v, mySociety and CKAN have little in common on the surface, but they share a few unglamorous habits.
Sep 01, 2026
Transparency laws decide what a government should share. The tender decides what it legally can. Six things to write into the next software contract, with the guidance and model clauses that already exist to back them up.