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Citizen Infrastructure

Civic products, externalities & features

When people argue about “tech and democracy,” they often lump very different things together. Matt Stempeck’s Civic Tech Field Guide uses a clean three-way distinction that makes the conversation sharper — and it’s a useful lens for anyone trying to figure out where a given tool actually sits.

Three ways technology touches democracy

Section titled “Three ways technology touches democracy”
  • Civic products — technology built explicitly for democratic use. A tool for voting, a participatory-budgeting platform, a consultation app. Democracy is the point.
  • Civic externalities — mainstream platforms (X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok) that were not designed for democracy but have enormous effects on it anyway. These can be bad (the disinformation environment, influencers accumulating public-sphere power) or good. Because they serve billions of people, their side-effects on democracy are unavoidable.
  • Civic features — the pro-social things big platforms build into their mainstream products: register-to-vote prompts, organ-donor sign-up, election-information panels. Not the platform’s core focus — the platform wants to make money — but at billion-user scale, even a small feature can move millions of people. Worth celebrating the internal teams who fight to ship them.

The Field Guide tracks all three, with dedicated sections for what Meta, Google, and Amazon do whenever it directly touches democracy and collective decision-making.

It’s not just whether — it’s whether it shifts power

Section titled “It’s not just whether — it’s whether it shifts power”

The same lens applies to gov tech (technology government uses to run itself). A lot of gov tech just makes bureaucracy more efficient — useful, but it can also quietly centralise power. Stempeck takes a values-driven view: the test isn’t “is it well-designed?” but “does it shift power toward people?”

His sharpest example: a government can build a beautifully modern web page that loads instantly on your phone and earns the public’s trust — but if the content of that page declares that some people are “illegal” and unwelcome, the polish hasn’t won anything. The meaning of what the technology does matters as much as how well it works.

This is a companion to why civic tech projects fail (and succeed) and to the broader map of the field in Civic AI.

Sources

Section titled “Sources”