Growing the civic-tech field

There are thousands of civic-technology tools, and yet the field stays stuck: most tools stay small, many barely survive, and the same barriers recur everywhere. The problem is usually not the technology but the ecosystem around it. A 2026 report by mySociety for Sitra, the Finnish innovation fund — an input to the European Commission’s Democracy Shield — diagnoses why Europe’s “participation tech” underperforms and proposes a lightweight European civic tech hub to help it grow up. It draws on interviews with 19 providers across 12 countries.

Three things holding it back

• Weak demand. Public authorities don’t yet treat participation as a credible governance tool. Without officials who want it, even excellent tools get “readily sidelined.”
• A fragile, fragmented supply. Most providers are small and self-funded, in a European market estimated to be worth under €100 million, and split over whether to be open-source (good for digital sovereignty, but hard to fund) or proprietary (faster, but risking vendor lock-in). They compete for scarce resources while wanting to collaborate.
• Procurement that excludes the small. The certification, paperwork, and compliance costs of selling to government fall hardest on exactly the small builders the field depends on — too small for the big contracts, too undercapitalised to grow past that. One provider called it, simply, “a structural trap.”

The bind the whole supply side is in

“We’re all trying to walk a fine line of being competitors but wanting to collaborate.”

It’s a leadership and power problem, too

The report’s launch discussion added the view from inside government, and it sharpens the picture: the deepest barrier practitioners named was not ignorance but a leadership gap — senior civil servants, not only politicians, unwilling to champion participation — compounded by a perception that digital participation is uniquely risky and uncontrollable (associated with social-media trolling). As one participant put it bluntly, “it’s a power problem. People in power don’t want power to be decentralized.” Officials also carry the procurement burden without the procurement expertise to manage it.

What a hub would actually do

Crucially, the proposed hub is not another platform competing with the tools — it is connective infrastructure. The concrete suggestions are modest and practical: a lightweight “front door” that signposts the resources that already exist (the Civic Tech Field Guide, People Powered, ACTE) rather than duplicating them; authority-facing case studies that show officials how participation delivered, not just that it did; practical interoperability standards; guidance on routes to market beyond public procurement (schools, charities, universities); sandboxes and demo instances so an official can try a tool without a sales call; and, in the long run, procurement reform. The through-line is closing the loop between what citizens contribute and a visible change they can point to.

Where it sits

This is the field-level cousin of why civic tech projects fail (which is about individual projects) and of who builds civic AI (the funding and incumbency forces that shape what gets built). The hub itself is the practical face of interoperability and standards — and it is striking that the same “European Civic Tech Hub” surfaces in a peer-reviewed analysis of civic-tech interoperability and in the EU’s own four futures for democracy. Three independent inputs converging on one idea is a sign the field’s connective tissue is finally being taken seriously.

Sources

• “Supporting Participation: Building an effective European civic tech hub” — Gemma Moulder, Julia Cushion & Alex Parsons, mySociety, commissioned by Sitra (2026): research.mysociety.org
• The report’s launch discussion (mySociety with Sitra), 2026: youtube.com/watch?v=HNpd5Fa-ze8