Ever wonder what happened to civic tech startups like Vote.com, Voter.com, Hotsoup.com, Speakout.com, Ruck.us, Jumo, ChangeByUs, VoteIQ, or Votizen? Or maybe you’re thinking of starting something new in civic tech and want to learn from past efforts that didn’t succeed? As part of the work on the Civic Tech Field Guide, we’ve been fleshing out a section called the “graveyard” where civic tech projects that had funding, users, press attention and traction--but no longer exist--may be visited, remembered and hopefully learned from. In this piece, Field Guide co-curator Micah L. Sifry offers some fresh news about some recently deceased start-ups, and some larger lessons from graveyard’s denizens.
Sometime this past June, the civic tech crowdfunding platform Citizinvestor quietly shut down. The start-up had...
