Civic Studio provides website design, build, and maintenance services from Vacaville, California.
Software is a garden. 🌱
We can help you tend it.
At Civic Studio, the work we do with organizations and public agencies is driven by the needs of the people within communities. From website development and maintenance to content management systems to custom software integrations; we help distill requirements, craft solutions, navigate organizational complexities, and communicate clearly with political, technical, and community stakeholders.
Civic Studio provides digital strategy and information design consulting in support of people and organizations aiming to improve the world. When small businesses and public service delivery projects need additional creative technical expertise and guidance. We can help.
Here are examples of some of our work.
The City of San Francisco conducts a regular survey regarding the Impact of Arts funding. One of the requirements of the survey was to be translated into Mandarin as well. Civic Studio engaged with city staff and quickly launched an internationalized version of the survey, enabling the city to gather feedback from citizens easily.
Issues are what bring people together. Issues transcend organizational boundaries. Generation Citizen wanted to better understand and share the shared issue interests of program members. The resulting website allows Generation Citizen to manage a list of participating programs and map shared interests in a D3 graph chart, as well as spatially on a Google Map.
A custom CMS to support an education-focused marketing campaign, connecting South American students with American schools, and American students with South American schools.
Jurisdictional was created to explore the idea of a single citizen interface to all of government; local to federal. Jurisdictional is a registry of government entities in the United States.
As a volunteer member of NCDD, I deployed an instance of an open source dialogue platform as part of a conversation that cited technology as a bottleneck to scaled collaborative dialogue. Ultimately, the platform didn't gain much traction. The lack of adoption reimpressed the fact that technology isn't a limiting factor to online collaboration. Coordination is. Existing networks have the advantage that coordination costs are already paid. When dialogue is distilled into an enjoyable game people can play together, we'll see new levels of dialogue, and hopefully higher resolution communication.
Part of the Startup in Residence program, Civic Studio consulted with the San Francisco Arts Commission to develop an application with the Street Artists who participate in the program. The goal of the application was to increase transparency, effectiveness, and efficiency of the lottery selection process. When we started, each artist would arrive at 6am to register for the lottery, using paper slips dropped into a plastic bin. This process was burdensome, inefficient, and subject to complaints regarding unfair practices (latest entries might get drawn first... or vice-versa). Talking to the street artists about their ideas and their complaints about the existing drawing process, we quickly honed in on an opportunity to improve the registration process using a mobile responsive website. All but 3 artists had cell phones at the time, and the Commission provided iPads on site. The resulting process is civicfabric.com, where San Francisco Street Artists were able to register for any lottery occurring in a given fiscal quarter. Results are automatically drawn at a specified time and results are emailed and/or SMS'd to users. This process saved each street artists at least one hour per day in registration times and improved record-keeping and reporting capabilities for the Arts Commission.
Whether you're just getting started or well-into planning and looking for the right partner to get up to speed and deliver ‐ we can help.
