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The Opportunity of Our Time
The case for building a civic commons rests on a fundamental observation about computing economics: the cost of creating, organizing, analyzing, and distributing information has plunged so dramatically that capabilities once reserved for large institutions are now available to individuals and small organizations at negligible cost.
Consider the scale of change. A terabyte of storage that cost over a million dollars in the early 1990s can be purchased today for the price of a decent restaurant meal. The computing power in a modern tablet exceeds what was available to entire space programs just decades ago. Internet bandwidth that was once expensive and scarce is now cheap and ubiquitous.
These are not incremental improvements. They represent a fundamental shift in what is possible, and that shift has profound implications for how governments can serve their communities.
The Gap Between Possibility and Practice
Despite these dramatic improvements in technology economics, government agencies have been slow to take full advantage of the new possibilities. Much of government IT still operates on models designed for an era when computing was expensive and scarce, models that emphasize centralized control, proprietary systems, and custom-built solutions for every agency and function.
The result is a vast gap between what technology makes possible and what governments actually deliver to their residents. Private sector companies routinely provide their users with instant communication, personalized services, and seamless interfaces across devices. Government services, by contrast, often require paper forms, office visits, and weeks of processing time.
Closing this gap does not require massive new spending. It requires rethinking how government acquires, deploys, and shares technology.
The Duplication Problem
Perhaps the most wasteful aspect of current government technology practice is the relentless duplication of effort. Thousands of government agencies across the country need software to handle common functions: managing budgets, processing permits, tracking service requests, publishing public information, engaging with residents. Yet each agency typically builds or buys its own solution independently.
This means that taxpayers fund the development of essentially the same software thousands of times over. The aggregate cost is staggering, and the quality of the result is often lower than what a collaborative approach would produce, because each individual agency has only its own limited resources to invest in development and maintenance.
What Sharing Looks Like
A civic commons addresses the duplication problem by creating infrastructure for sharing. When one city develops a useful tool, the commons makes it discoverable by other cities facing the same challenge. When multiple agencies contribute to the same open source project, the software improves faster and more robustly than any single agency could achieve alone.
This is not a theoretical model. The open source software movement has demonstrated for decades that collaborative development produces high-quality, reliable software. Linux runs the majority of the world’s servers. The Apache web server handles much of the world’s web traffic. Open source databases power businesses of every size. The principles work. The question is whether government can adopt them effectively.
The Role of Standards
Shared software is most effective when it operates on shared standards. Open standards ensure that different systems can communicate with each other, that data can move between platforms without loss, and that agencies are not locked into a single vendor’s proprietary format.
The civic technology community has developed standards for several common government functions. Open311 provides a standardized interface for non-emergency service requests. Open data standards define how government datasets should be published for public access. Budget data standards enable comparison and analysis across jurisdictions.
Each of these standards multiplies the value of every application that implements it by creating a network effect: the more participants, the more valuable the standard becomes for everyone.
Building the Community
Technology alone is not sufficient. A civic commons also requires a community of practitioners, developers, and advocates who share knowledge, contribute improvements, and support each other through the challenges of adoption.
This community includes government technology staff who implement and maintain civic tools, developers who contribute to open source projects, nonprofit organizations that advocate for open approaches, and private sector companies that provide professional services around civic technology.
Building this community means creating opportunities for connection, whether through conferences, online forums, collaborative documentation, or simply telling stories about what works and what does not. Every shared experience reduces the barrier for the next agency considering a civic technology adoption.
Why It Matters Now
The convergence of cheap computing power, ubiquitous connectivity, and a growing community of civic technology practitioners creates an opportunity that previous generations of government technologists did not have. The tools exist. The models have been proven. The community is ready.
What remains is the hard work of adoption: changing procurement practices, adjusting policies, building skills, and demonstrating results. A civic commons supports this work by providing the resources, connections, and shared infrastructure that make adoption practical for agencies of any size.
The potential impact is enormous. Better government technology means better services for residents, more efficient use of public resources, and greater transparency in how those resources are managed. These are outcomes worth working toward, and building a civic commons is one of the most effective ways to achieve them.