In 2009, in Washington D.C., Jennifer Pahlka founded Code for America with a simple idea: the country's best tech talent could work — even for just one year — alongside local governments to improve public services with digital tools. It was the beginning of a global movement now called civic tech: the use of technology to strengthen civic participation, improve government transparency and empower communities.
Civic tech is a vast field that includes very different tools. There is civic hacking — developers creating applications to solve community problems, like FixMyStreet (for reporting potholes and street issues) or MySociety's TheyWorkForYou (for monitoring parliamentary activity). There is digital participatory budgeting, where citizens decide how to allocate part of the municipal budget. There is civic journalism, with platforms enabling citizens to participate in reporting.
But civic tech is not just software. It is a philosophy centred on a principle: technology must amplify citizens' voices, not replace them. It is not enough to create an app for online voting; we must ask who has access to that app, who is excluded, and whether the process is genuinely more democratic or merely more efficient.
In Europe, civic tech has taken particularly interesting forms. Decidim, born in Barcelona, is an open-source platform for participatory democracy used by hundreds of cities worldwide. Consul, developed in Madrid, allows citizens to propose and vote on legislative initiatives. In Italy, projects like openParlamento make parliamentary activity transparent.
The potential is enormous, but the challenges are real. The digital divide excludes those without access to technology. Platform governance — who decides the platform's rules — can be as opaque as the processes it seeks to make transparent. And there is always the risk of "participation washing": using participatory tools as a facade without genuine transfer of power.
Despite these challenges, civic tech represents one of technology's most concrete promises: not as a tool for profit or control, but as infrastructure for democracy. Relatronica sits in this tradition, creating tools that don't sell attention but channel it towards issues that matter.