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Feature
Digital Civic Infrastructure for Massachusetts Workshop
The Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation and Bloomberg Center for Cities brought together civic technologists, researchers, as well as municipal and state leaders across Massachusetts for a workshop on digital civic infrastructure.
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On October 16, 2025, the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation and the Bloomberg Center for Cities brought together civic technologists, researchers, as well as municipal and state leaders across Massachusetts for a workshop on digital civic infrastructure.
Learning from Existing Digital Civic Infrastructure
The day began with presentations from organizations building digital tools and platforms that enable community connection, civic learning, and meaningful participation in democratic life. Matt Victor from MAPLE shared how their platform has facilitated over 750 testimonies and encouraged users to engage in the Massachusetts legislative process. David Fields shared Northeastern’s AI for Impact Coop program, which connects students to build solutions for the public sector, featuring their engagement with Jen Lyons and the Massachusetts Operational Services Division.
We also learned from compelling platforms doing work across the country. Micah Weinberg shared how Engaged California is piloting a civic engagement platform for California residents, beginning with LA wildfire recovery. The platform uses AI sense-making tools to help synthesize public input. Dave Lesher from CalMatters demonstrated their Digital Democracy platform which provides a searchable database of public hearings, donations, votes, and bills, along with connecting journalists to this information.
From left to right: (Top) Danielle Allen, Micah Weinberg (Bottom) Santi Garces, Secretary Snyder, Meg Ansara
At a federal level, Anne Meeker from POPVOX discussed their work bridging constituent voices to Congress through various tools and case studies such as legislative co-drafting and increasing the intelligibility of constituent data. Laurel Eckhouse, formerly at USDS, shared lessons on how effective digital delivery can support civic trust and reduce administration burden. Throughout the morning, participants shared their insights across local, state, and federal contexts.
Discussing the Landscape of Digital Civic Infrastructure in Massachusetts
The workshop also provided an opportunity to share findings from our ongoing landscape research of digital civic infrastructure across Massachusetts municipalities. Workshop participants offered valuable feedback and helped guide the next stages of our work. The full landscape report is forthcoming in early 2026.
Identifying Best Practices
In the afternoon breakout sessions, participants identified conditions for success when deploying digital civic infrastructure, drawing on their experiences as technology developers and public servants. Some of the conditions for success included:
- Start with the people experiencing a problem, and then match solutions with actual needs. Don’t begin with the solution first.
- Secure committed decision-makers who will actually respond to findings and remain invested in the outcomes.
- Prioritize community buy-in and co-design to ensure you are designing with people, not just for them.
- Dedicate staff time and internal champions within the public sector to deploy digital civic infrastructure effectively.
- Establish clear feedback loops which show how civic input leads to action.
- Define the purpose, outcome, vision clearly from the outset, this is necessary for any digital civic infrastructure effort to succeed.
Participants also shared persistent challenges with the fact that digital civic infrastructure tools can often be easier to incubate and much harder to sustain given funding and resource constraints, as well as the pacing mismatch between technology and government processes.
Moving Forward
The Allen Lab will continue to share findings from our research on digital civic infrastructure. If you’re working in this space or would like to continue the conversation, please reach out to Sarah Hubbard at sarah_hubbard@hks.harvard.edu
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