311 is a special telephone number supported in many communities in Canada and the United States. The number provides access to non-emergency municipal services. The number format follows the N11 code for a group of short, special-purpose local numbers as designated in the North American Numbering Plan.
Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) is a Washington, D.C.–based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organisation that advocates for digital rights and freedom of expression. CDT seeks to promote legislation that enables individuals to use the internet for purposes of well-intent, while at the same time reducing its potential for harm. It advocates for transparency, accountability, and limiting the collection of personal information.
mySociety is a UK-based registered charity, previously named UK Citizens Online Democracy. It began as a UK-focused organisation with the aim of making online democracy tools for UK citizens. However, those tools were open source, so that the code could be redeployed in other countries.
Causes is a for-profit civic-technology app and website that enables users to organize grassroots and public-awareness campaigns. Causes is a website that gives summaries of breaking news, new laws, and popular topics. Users can respond, comment, share, or contact their representatives about an issue. Users can also create their own "Cause" and seek support from other users.
Citizen sourcing is the government adoption of crowdsourcing techniques for the purposes of (1) enlisting citizens in the design and execution of government services and (2) tapping into the citizenry's collective intelligence for solutions and situational awareness. Applications of citizen sourcing include:
Google+ was a social network that was owned and operated by Google until it ceased operations in 2019. The network was launched on June 28, 2011, in an attempt to challenge other social networks, linking other Google products like Google Drive, Blogger and YouTube. The service, Google's fourth foray into social networking, experienced strong growth in its initial years, although usage statistics varied, depending on how the service was defined. Three Google executives oversaw the service, which underwent substantial changes that led to a redesign in November 2015.
Nextdoor Holdings, Inc. is an American company that operates a hyperlocal social networking service for neighborhoods. The company was founded in 2008 and is based in San Francisco, California. Nextdoor launched in the United States in October 2011. It is available in eleven countries as of May 2023. In 2024, the company claimed to have 88 million "neighbors" as members.
WeChat or Weixin in Chinese ; lit. 'micro-message') is a Chinese instant messaging, social media, and mobile payment app developed by Tencent. First released in 2011, it became the world's largest standalone mobile app in 2018 with over 1 billion monthly active users. WeChat has been described as China's "app for everything" and a super-app because of its wide range of functions. WeChat provides text messaging, hold-to-talk voice messaging, broadcast (one-to-many) messaging, video conferencing, video games, mobile payment, sharing of photographs and videos and location sharing.
Civicplus is a web development & android apps business headquartered in Manhattan, Kansas, United States. It specializes in "building city and county e-government communication systems." It was first developed by programming company Vanyon, a division of Networks Plus Foundership community.
PublicStuff is a digital communications system for residents to submit real-time requests in their neighborhoods. Accessed by traditional web browser, smartphone app, phone, or SMS, residents can use the system to submit issues, such as road maintenance or waste management, and create an issue tracking ticket.
A Civic application is an application software designed to encourage users to participate in and learn more about government.
Civic technology, or civic tech, enhances the relationship between the people and government with software for communications, decision-making, service delivery, and political process. It includes information and communications technology supporting government with software built by community-led teams of volunteers, nonprofits, consultants, and private companies as well as embedded tech teams working within government.
FixMyStreet is a map based website and app by mySociety that helps people in the United Kingdom inform their local authority of problems needing their attention, such as potholes, broken streetlamps, etc. It is the UK instance of FixMyStreet.
Brigade Media, also known as Brigade, was a civic technology platform that was formed on June 4, 2014, and founded by James Windon, Jason Putorti, John Thrall, Matt Mahan, and Miche Capone. The platform was intended to help users connect with others who share the same or similar views and to voice their opinions, create debates, or organize petitions. This process was intended to make the users' concerns more visible to and influential towards the United States policymakers. In early 2019 the engineering team at Brigade was acqui-hired by Pinterest. The remaining company assets and IP, including the Causes assets, were purchased by GovTech app Countable.
Countable Corporation is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company based in San Francisco. The company was founded in 2013 by its CEO Bart Myers.
Citizen is a mobile app that sends users location-based safety alerts in real time. It allows users to read updates about ongoing reports, broadcast live video, and leave comments. The app uses radio antennas installed in major cities to monitor 911 communications, with employees filtering the audio to generate alerts. The app is currently available for iOS and Android devices in the United States covering over 60 cities, including New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, Indianapolis, Phoenix, Cincinnati, Chicago, Minneapolis, Saint Paul, and Cleveland.
The Information Technology Rules, 2021 is secondary or subordinate legislation that suppresses India's Intermediary Guidelines Rules 2011. The 2021 rules have stemmed from section 87 of the Information Technology Act, 2000 and are a combination of the draft Intermediaries Rules, 2018 and the OTT Regulation and Code of Ethics for Digital Media.
The iOS mobile operating system developed by Apple has had a wide range of bugs and security issues discovered throughout its lifespan, including security exploits discovered in most versions of the operating system related to the practice of jailbreaking, bypassing the user's lock screen, issues relating to battery drain, crash bugs encountered when sending photos or certain Unicode characters via text messages sent through the Messages application, and general bugs and security issues later fixed in newer versions of the operating system.
Wiki surveys or wikisurveys are a software-based survey method with similarity to how wikis evolve through crowdsourcing. In essence, they are surveys that allow participants to create the questions that are being asked. As participants engage in the survey they can either vote on a survey question or create a survey question. A single open-ended prompt written by the creator of the survey determines the topic the questions should be on. The first known implementation of a wiki survey was in 2010, and they have been used since then for a variety of purposes such as facilitating deliberative democracy, crowdsourcing opinions from experts and figuring out common beliefs on a given topic. A notable usage of wiki surveys is in Taiwan's government system, where citizens can participate in crowdsourced lawmaking through Polis wiki surveys.
Find It, Fix It is a mobile app developed by the city of Seattle to report non-emergency issues.
