Sustainability of Civic Tech for Citizen Participation

2Civic Tech is defined as "any technology that is used to empower citizens or help make government more accessible, efficient, and effective.? In the last years, Civic Tech has raised a great interest among entrepreneurs, innovators, and investors with different degrees of success. Market research data on civic technologies dedicated to improving governments suggest that they are quite successful. They are generating many benefits and high revenues by simplifying bureaucracy and improving internal processes in the public administration. However, civic technologies dedicated to empowering citizens have not fully taken off yet. These technologies include platforms to enable communication between governments and citizens, or to support community organizing. Evidence suggests that, even though ventures that support citizen participation raise early investing funding, they often struggle to survive in the long term. Based on empirical and desk research carried out at MediaLab Prado in Madrid (Spain), in this report, I argue that the sustainability of civic tech is not only a technical but mainly a societal challenge. In this context, sustainability refers to the ability of a business to be able to maintain itself over a sustained period of time. Following this premise, this report proposes three objectives for Civic Tech initiatives, which are based on empirical data and desk research, namely: Collective Action, Civic Efficacy, and transparency. These objectives and their guiding questions are meant as a tool for supporting business modeling activities of civic tech start-ups. In addition, the report contains a list of risks that are specific to civic tech ventures, along with a list of questions. These questions are meant as a tool for risk assessment of civic tech start-ups. The report provides recommendations to civic innovators and entrepreneurs. Finally, the case studies and analysis included in this report can be useful to those interested in exploring the challenges and opportunities related to the sustainability of civic tech for citizen participation. The objectives and recommendations can be useful to start-ups in the Civic Tech market, to public innovators who want to improve and the public administration, or to citizen laboratories that want to play a role in improving the sustainability of citizen participation through hybrid technologies