Architecture firm
File Transformer
Transform a construction report .xlsx file to a different .xlsx format, to better interface with other financial modeling and forecasting software. And automate the process.
Full-stack civic engagement.
Software is a garden. 🌱 We can help you tend it.
Use technology for good
Civic Studio provides website design, development, and maintenance services based in Vacaville, California. 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 can help distill product requirements, create and maintain software, navigate organizational complexities, and support effective communication with political, technical, and community stakeholders. How can we improve business operations by working smarter with technology?
Help each other help each other
Civic Studio offers digital strategy and information design consulting in support of people and organizations aiming to improve their communities. When small businesses and public service delivery projects need additional strategic and technical guidance, we can help.
Projects
Here are some examples of our work.
San Francisco Arts Commission
Street Artist Lottery App
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.
Afomi
Jurisdictional
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.
Generation Citizen
Civic Landscape Visualization
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.
National Coalition for Deliberative Dialogue
NCDD
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.
City of San Francisco
Arts Impact Endowment Poll
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.
Business Process Modeling
See how value flows
Embrace the socio-technical nature of organizational technology.
How people interact with software can be described using
Business Process Models.
Orchestrate human and IT resources by modeling workflows and value streams.
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Document
- Create a Business Process Model of the current state of some part of your organization's operations. Consider a registration process, a sales lifecyle, a digital product change request lifecycle, or a purchasing process.
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Analyze
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Assess volume, business impact, lead times, queue times, failure paths, and throughput.
What business questions do you plan to ask of your data systems? -
Model
- Based on the initially documented current state model, redesign the process or service with desired changes.
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Automate business processes
- Once you've modeled some number of processes, there will likely be opportunities to use software to automate some portion of the intake, record-keeping, processing, and reporting.
Working on a civic innovation project?
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.