At Knight Foundation, we strive to support informed and engaged communities. With the proliferation of technology in everyday life over the past decade, Knight has increasingly funded new technologies designed to improve the health and vitality of cities. Since 2010, Knight has invested more than $25 million in such projects, ranging from government data access platforms to new tools for community planning to online neighborhood forums.

Over the past two years, we’ve witnessed through our work a groundswell of interest at the nexus of technology, civic innovation, open government and resident engagement. Though the terminology may vary, more and more funders, investors and practitioners have joined this emerging “civic tech” field. We began to wonder: How can practitioners supporting civic tech form stronger connections, and how can we gather better insights into the trends in the field?

Knight embarked on an analysis earlier this year to examine clusters of innovation and investment within the field of civic tech. Rather than performing a run-of-the-mill landscape review with stakeholder interviews, we decided to experiment with a new set of research tools. We partnered with Quid, a firm that specializes in data analytics and network analysis, to map the field of civic tech through semantic analysis and private and philanthropic investment data.

This report summarizes key findings and implications from the analysis. We hope this experiment will be valuable to those interested in the field of civic tech as well as organizations looking to advance the use of big data in the social sector. This study is a first foray into analyzing the civic tech landscape but is certainly not an exhaustive analysis. We look forward to continued partnerships with others to advance learning and practice in this field.