Civic Hacking

Today, government and public life is being reimagined and reconfigured by a new generation of civic engineers. Only instead of using concrete and steel, they’re using data and code. Some come from inside government, where they’re opening up public data to outsiders and inviting developers to work with them on new kinds of services and apps. Others aren’t waiting for government to act, and they’re hacking on the public space using data that they scrape from government sites along with bottom-up data that the public itself generates and shares. Together they’re building new ways of identifying problems and solutions, connecting the public and government, and making things work better. Meet the civic hackers.