Examples of our work with small businesses and civic organizations
Software is never finished — it evolves alongside the people who use it. We build in small, shippable increments so you can see progress every week, gather real feedback, and adjust course as we learn, in the market. Each project below represents a relationship and the pursuit of delivering business value to users, not a one-time delivery.
Website for Napa Valley StreamFest, a reimagined film festival featuring live podcasts, screenings, and creator meet-and-greets in downtown Napa.
Open source platform for managing public feedback forms across government agencies, with centralized dashboards for publishing forms and monitoring responses.
Public database of machine-readable eligibility rules for government programs, with an interactive rules engine and community contributions via GitHub.
Website for Backyard PE Sacramento, providing physical education and fitness programs in the Sacramento area. Features program information, scheduling, and registration capabilities for families seeking quality PE instruction.
Platform for managing digital displays in retail and community spaces, connecting neighborhoods through dynamic content and community tools.
Transforms a construction report .xlsx file to a different .xlsx format, to better interface with other financial modeling and forecasting software. And automate the process.
Decentralized autonomous organization platform enabling transparent governance and community decision-making. Experimenting with smart contract voting mechanisms, proposal management, and token-based participation.
Weekly cross-sector working group documenting blockchain use cases in government, tracking legislation, and producing guidance like the Blockchain Playbook.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.