Introducing the Civic Features Collection

http://civicfeatures.tumblr.com/ (also in the top nav)

I’ve been inspired for some years now at the potential social impact of embedding social good and civic features into otherwise mainstream technology platforms. After years of building technology projects in DC that only reached 20% of our email list, the ability to reach millions of regular people in the apps they already use is alluring.

I’ve collected examples over the years to help make the argument and increase the practice internally. The similar examples I’ve collected for my Companies Mobilizing Customers Tumblr, which tracks the politicization of users in mainstream apps, have recently been featured in the New York Times (“The Uber-ization of Activism“) and at Fusion (“Meet the Apptivists: The volunteer lobbyists helping keep Airbnb, Uber, and other startups alive“). Given the attention being paid to in-app political campaigns, I thought it would make sense to also share the public-good civic features in a more visual format. Unlike the Companies Mobilizing Customers Tumblr, I’ll try to provide more context and commentary on the featured features. Today, for example, Facebook’s state-sponsored cyber-attack feature is in the news, because it’s how the State Department learned that individual employees’ social media accounts had been targeted by Iran. Check it out.