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Status active
Type 🔬 research
Country 🇺🇸 US
Website civictech.guide
Concepts Meta Organisation E Government Democracy
Last activity 2026-08-07 manual
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Civic Tech Field Guide

The Civic Tech Field Guide is a crowdsourced directory — "the world's most complete collection of projects, tools, and organizations using tech for democracy."1 It was conceived in early 2016 by Micah Sifry (co-founder of Civic Hall), Matt Stempeck (then Director of Civic Technology at Microsoft), and Erin Simpson, starting life as an open spreadsheet before Stempeck built it into a full directory in 2018 under Civic Hall, with funding from the Knight Foundation, Luminate, and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation.1 Stempeck spun it out independently in 2020; it's now fiscally sponsored by Superbloom Design (a US 501(c)3), with National Endowment for Democracy support since 2022.1

What it does

The Field Guide exists to connect democracy advocates, builders, students, job-seekers, funders, and researchers to the tools, organisations, and people already working in this space — explicitly so people don't have to rebuild what already exists before they can start. It now serves over 50,000 people a month.1 The directory is open-source and community-driven: entries can be submitted, claimed, and edited by the organisations they describe, under editorial curation.

A meta-organisation at scale

Founded the same year as DOD (2016), the Field Guide runs on a similar premise — that most civic-tech efforts are reinventing something that already exists somewhere, and a shared, findable directory reduces that duplication — just at a much larger scale: thousands of listed projects and tens of thousands of monthly users, backed by a fiscal sponsor and multiple institutional funders, rather than a volunteer discussion forum. See Meta-Organisation for how DOD's own version of this idea compares.

See also

  1. "About the Field Guide", Civic Tech Field Guide. ↩↩↩↩