Civic Technology Community Group
Skip to toolbar
Skip
My W3C Account
Civic Technology Community Gro...
Civic Technology Community Group
The Civic Technology Community Group will bring together those interested in civic technology, open government, and artificial intelligence to share information, to discuss these topics, to advance the state of the art, and to ensure that the Web is well-suited for these applications.
Group's public email, repo and wiki activity over time
Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these
conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.
Chairs, when logged in, may publish draft and final reports. Please see
report requirements
Towards a New Journal
Adam Sobieski
Posted on:
April 17, 2026
The Civic Technology Community Group is developing a Task Force to create a new academic journal with the purpose of serving the field’s broad ecosystem by providing it with an urgently needed forum for innovative ideas, discoveries, data, and scholarly communication about civic technology.
While other journals exist today with respect to democracy and community informatics, we still do not have a journal with a primary focus on forefront civic technology and its advancement. A new journal will add value as a forum for articles on these topics.
Further specifics, this journal’s title, summary, aims, scope, and more, are to be determined by the Task Force.
There are and will be opportunities for contribution to this project before, during, and after the creation of this new journal.
If you would like to participate in this Task Force, please message the Group in our mailing list. Thank you!
Civic Technology Regulatory Compliance
Adam Sobieski
Posted on:
April 8, 2026
Civism
is itself a
technology
, to be more precise it is the ultimate
civilizing process
social technology
since ancient times.
Civics
is civism’s
diplomatic technology
to establish the
rule of law (RoL)
under
civic studies
civic culture
, and
civic virtues
Civic education
is civics’s
educational technology (EdTech)
to establish
civic engagement
between citizens, grassroots civil movements, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), governments, international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), and inter-governmental organizations (IGO).
Civic technology (CivicTech)
being under the
civic responsibility
to help in the
standardization
of civic education, civics, and civism; makes it inherently dependent to the establishment of proper
open internet
digital public infrastructure (DPI)
public international law (PIL)
regulatory compliance
and their due
legal technologies (LegalTechs)
and
regulatory technologies (RegTechs)
Civic data
being a currency of
data economy
, so requiring civic technologies (CivicTechs)
fair trade
regulatory economics
, and
markets surveillance
, depend on its
interoperability
which must be standardized under
semantic web (SW)
semantic interoperability
interontological alignment
controlled vocabularies
ontology engineering
The Open Source Semantic Web Ontology (OSSWO)
may be of assistance in this development secure operations (DevSecOps).
Civic statistics
required for proper
open governance
and
open government
metrology
governmental technologies (GovTechs)
may also profit from how semantic web ontology can assist in the regulatory compliance of
algorithms
, their supervised
machine learning (ML)
, and unsupervised
artificial intelligence (AI)
dependency analysis
Civic Technology Community Group (CTCG)
is, because all of that, another imprescindible
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
open science
research group
. It is an honor to co-chair it. Please join us to develop free libre open source solutions (FLOSS) for
e-democracy
linked open vocabularies (LOVs)
, and
public applications (PubApps)
Please visit and add to our new collaborative document:
by
Felipe Ribeiro
linkedin.com/in/operarioribeiro
Welcome to our New Chair
Adam Sobieski
Posted on:
April 6, 2026
I would like to extend a warm welcome to our Group’s newest Chair!
Felipe Ribeiro began working with civic technology in 1998 when he was 14 and started working with a UNICEF programme called School City which allowed them to build free telecentres around São Paulo’s slums and to bring educational technologies like Wiki and Plone to nearby schools. He has since contributed to countless projects with the free libre open-source software (FLOSS) community worldwide to help critically endangered communities, traditional knowledges leadership, and high-tech geeks to find local solutions for emergency cases. Nowadays, he develops civic policymaking at the United Nations.
About
Adam Sobieski
Posted on:
April 11, 2023
Civic Technology and Open Government
According to Wikipedia, “civic technology 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.”
“Open government is the governing doctrine which maintains that citizens have the right to access the documents and proceedings of the government to allow for effective public oversight.”
Measures of Democracy and Civic Engagement
How can scientists and technologists contribute to creating and improving the instruments and tools with which we measure democracy and civic engagement?
Budget and Financial Data Analysis
Recent advancements to artificial intelligence can equip: (1) accountants, auditors, analysts, bureaucrats, comptrollers, public officials, legislators, oversight committees, and members of their staffs, and (2) the public, journalists, and government watchdog organizations, to better make sense of and interact with public-sector data.
People will soon be able to ask natural-language questions and engage in multimodal dialogues about large-scale, public-sector financial, accounting, and budgetary data, receiving responses comprised of language, mathematics, charts, diagrams, figures, graphs, infographics, and tables.
Meetings Analysis
People will soon be able to ask natural-language questions and engage in multimodal dialogues about public-sector meetings, their minutes and transcripts.
Opinion Polling
Artificial intelligence systems, virtual opinion pollsters, can perform structured, semi-structured, and unstructured surveys, questionnaires, and interviews across a number of communication channels.
Virtual opinion pollsters can perform open-ended questions, e.g., follow-up questions which might explore explanations, rationales, justifications, and argumentation of respondents’ previous answers.
In addition to being able to perform predefined lists, or sequences, of questions, virtual opinion pollsters can traverse interactive scripts, larger trees or graphs of questions, with paths branching, or varying, based upon respondents’ answers.
Comment Analysis
In the United States, the federal government publishes tens of thousands of documents each year in the Federal Register, with over 800,000 total documents since 1994. These documents draw millions of submissions and responses from the public.
Public-sector agencies have a legal obligation to consider all relevant submissions and responses including those which would require a change to a proposed rule. To discern relevance, significance, and disposition, human review is presently needed. The capacity for human review often can’t meet the demand for comment analysis.
Artificial intelligence, in particular natural-language processing technologies, can enable, enhance, and expedite governments’ comment analysis.
Decision-support
Important scenarios to consider include, but are not limited to, providing decision-support for people preparing to vote and for users preparing to select a city to relocate to.
Public-sector Websites and Services
Award-winning government websites include those of
Mississippi
, which provides a dialogue system on its front page, and of
Utah
, which provides live chat support.
There are opportunities to contribute to the modernization of other government websites and services, e.g.,
data.gov
performance.gov
, and
usaspending.gov
Welcome
The new Civic Technology Community Group will bring together those interested in civic technology, open government, and artificial intelligence to share information, to discuss these topics, to advance the state of the art, and to ensure that the Web is well-suited for these applications.
In order to
join the group
, you will need a
W3C account
. Please note, however, that
W3C Membership
is not required to join a Community Group. Joining is fast, free, and easy to do.
Interested group participants are also invited to consider entering the group’s election processes to serve as Chairs.
Thank you. Please consider forwarding this information to any others interested in these topics.
Call for Participation in Civic Technology Community Group
W3C Team
Posted on:
April 5, 2023
The
Civic Technology Community Group
has been launched:
Artificial intelligence is already having a big impact across domains, including government services. Users will soon be able to ask natural-language questions and engage in multimodal dialogues about large-scale public-sector financial, accounting, and budgetary data while receiving responses which include language, mathematics, charts, diagrams, figures, and graphs.
This Community Group will bring together those interested in civic technology, open government, and artificial intelligence to share and discuss how to ensure that the Web is well-suited for these applications.
Initial topics of interest may include chatbot interoperability, responsive design (e.g., to handle dynamic responses from chatbots), notification models (e.g., when there are updates to backing data), the sharing of chatbot responses on the Web, and the role of linked data in connecting artificial intelligence to the Web.
In order to
join the group
, you will need a
W3C account
. Please note, however, that
W3C Membership
is not required to join a Community Group.
This is a community initiative. This group was originally proposed on 2023-04-04 by Adam Sobieski. The following people supported its creation: Adam Sobieski, Kim Duffy, Daniel Hernández, Tibor Katelbach, Ravinder Singh, Eric Sembrat. W3C’s hosting of this group does not imply endorsement of the activities.
The group must now
choose a chair
. Read more about
how to get started in a new group
and
good practice for running a group
We invite you to share news of this new group in social media and other channels.
If you believe that there is an issue with this group that requires the attention of the W3C staff, please email us at
site-comments@w3.org
Thank you,
W3C Community Development Team
Tools for this group
Learn about available Community Group tools and how to configure a group's site to include links to tools on w3.org or elsewhere.
Mailing List
@ public-civics
@ internal-civics
IRC
RSS
Contact This Group
Get involved
Learn more about how to join a group.
Anyone may join this Community Group. All participants in this group
have
signed the
W3C Community Contributor License Agreement
Join or Leave this group
Chairs
Adam Sobieski
Felipe Ribeiro
Participants (
23
View
all participants
Archives
April 2026
April 2023
Categories
Announcements
Footer Navigation
Standards
Groups
Get involved
Resources
News & Events
About W3C
Contact W3C
Contact
Help
Support us
Legal & Policies
Corporation
Systems Status
W3C Updates