# civic tech (blogs) — RSS Amplifier Recent posts from the 6 feeds in the RSS Amplifier directory that cover civic tech. Page: Feed: --- ## [Impact beyond the PIT Crew](https://publicsectorjobboard.substack.com/p/nyc-government-tech-jobs-beyond-pit-crew) _2026-08-19 · Rebecca Heywood · #PublicSectorJobBoard_ Only 35 people will land a PIT Crew job. Here's where else to find NYC government tech jobs — city agencies, state teams, civic tech orgs, and GovTech startups. ## [This Week in Public Sector Tech — Aug 14, 2026](https://publicsectorjobboard.substack.com/p/this-week-in-public-sector-tech-aug-a8a) _2026-08-14 · Rebecca Heywood · #PublicSectorJobBoard_ The 91st edition. Jobs and field intelligence from across the civic tech ecosystem — government and the organizations building alongside it. ## [Subscriber Only: Postcard from Dublin](https://thenewurbanorder.substack.com/p/subscriber-only-postcard-from-dublin) _2026-08-13 · Diana Lind · The New Urban Order_ Is the Irish capital that different from American cities? ## [Agent Experience Needs Failure Affordances](https://blog.ronbronson.com/agent-experience-needs-failure-affordances) _2026-08-09 · Agent Experience Needs Failure Affordances · Ron Bronson_ A Model for Dangerous Agent Situations Reading this twitter thread (yeah, I know) about agents and escalation paths, left me thinking more about some earlier posts about the mostly dormant agent experience space and how there should be more content about these paths when they’re discovered. The short version about the thread suggests an alarm call for an agent to relay back that they’ve reached a… ## [Walking Is Being Reinvented](https://thenewurbanorder.substack.com/p/walking-is-being-reinvented) _2026-08-07 · Diana Lind · The New Urban Order_ Cities spent decades curating the pretty walk. People want the unsanctioned one — and now they'll wait in line for it. ## [This Week in Public Sector Tech — Aug 3, 2026](https://publicsectorjobboard.substack.com/p/this-week-in-public-sector-tech-aug) _2026-08-03 · Rebecca Heywood · #PublicSectorJobBoard_ Digital service leaders keep getting promoted into CIO chairs — Colorado, Pennsylvania, Allegheny County, NYC. Plus COGE's final report + NC civil service overhaul with top jobs of the week. ## [Pittsburgh's Evolution, Fast and Slow](https://thenewurbanorder.substack.com/p/pittsburghs-evolution-fast-and-slow) _2026-07-30 · Diana Lind · The New Urban Order_ How the NFL draft helped rebuild parts of downtown in months — and why a 178-acre site is taking decades to redevelop ## [Public Delivery Is Statecraft](https://blog.ronbronson.com/public-delivery-is-statecraft) _2026-07-25 · Public Delivery Is Statecraft · Ron Bronson_ Plane thoughts on multilateral public delivery from 44,000 feet after my most recent trip back from Finland.\* We’ve been going about this work all wrong. Digital Public Infrastructure and “ civic tech” are far closer to statecraft and public works than they’ve been given credit for. For more than a decade, the work has had to fight for crumbs and pray for mandates, making it nearly impossible to… ## [Warhol Left Pittsburgh. Today's Artists Have Good Reason to Stay.](https://thenewurbanorder.substack.com/p/warhol-left-pittsburgh-todays-artists) _2026-07-23 · Diana Lind · The New Urban Order_ Day one in the Pop District: a museum expanding into workforce training, a barge that gives people a reason to linger ## [This Week in Public Sector Tech — July 17, 2026](https://publicsectorjobboard.substack.com/p/this-week-in-public-sector-tech-july-253) _2026-07-17 · Rebecca Heywood · #PublicSectorJobBoard_ The 89th edition. Jobs and field intelligence from across the civic tech ecosystem — government and the organizations building alongside it. ## [Ship software peacefully (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/dIjlNS5DcMrp) _2026-07-17 · **Sponsored**_ Deploy apps from your repo with auto-config, instant previews, scaling, and monitoring. ## [What a City's Outdoor Seating Says About its Values](https://thenewurbanorder.substack.com/p/what-a-citys-outdoor-seating-says) _2026-07-14 · Kat Vellos · The New Urban Order_ Kat Vellos shows us how seating reveals who belongs in public space ## [Forward Deployed Design Is Bigger Than Engineering](https://blog.ronbronson.com/forward-deployed-design-is-bigger-than-engineering) _2026-07-14 · Forward Deployed Design Is Bigger Than Engineering · Ron Bronson_ I’m back on the forward-deployed design beat because I want to make sure that as this practice starts to scale, we’re writing job descriptions and hiring for the right shapes of folks. One thing that’s bugged me watching this conversation over the last year is how engineering-coded it’s become. I know it’s hard for engineers to believe, but not every important problem is a math problem. Some… ## [The Third Wave of the Sunbelt Boom](https://thenewurbanorder.substack.com/p/the-third-wave-of-the-sunbelt-boom) _2026-07-08 · Diana Lind · The New Urban Order_ A new Sunbelt boom is rising in some of the reddest states in the country. ## [This Week in Public Sector Tech — July 2, 2026](https://publicsectorjobboard.substack.com/p/this-week-in-public-sector-tech-july) _2026-07-02 · Rebecca Heywood · #PublicSectorJobBoard_ Why investment in people matters, what states are risking under SNAP's new penalty rules, and who's actually investing in capacity. ## [This UK Mayor Wants to Remake His Country](https://thenewurbanorder.substack.com/p/this-uk-mayor-wants-to-remake-his) _2026-06-30 · Diana Lind · The New Urban Order_ Andy Burnham's case for devolution is compelling. It also runs opposite to what American cities are learning. ## [Scout Camp](https://tomlee.wtf/2026/06/30/scout-camp/) _2026-06-30 · admin · Tom Lee_ I spent last week with my daughter at Camp Ross , part of the Goshen Scout Reservation . About three hours southwest of DC, Goshen is a large patch of Virginia centered on Lake Merriweather, which is named for Marjorie Merriweather Post, of the Post Foods dynasty, who bequeathed the property to … ## [Closedtab: A Npm Shared Memory for You and Your Ai Agents](https://blog.ronbronson.com/closedtab-a-npm-shared-memory-for-you-and-your-ai-agents) _2026-06-29 · Closedtab: A Npm Shared Memory for You and Your Ai Agents · Ron Bronson_ My latest contribution to your human-agent stack is a very basic but necessary tool for smaller human-agent collaborations that produce a lot of back and forth work. After-action reports are a common tool used in the military as a way to review fieldwork, report what happened and reflect on what we can do better next time. It’s also a useful way for people who weren’t there, to read up on what… ## [Link Sharing (Stuff I Read) 6.28.26](https://blog.ronbronson.com/link-sharing-stuff-i-read-6-28-26) _2026-06-28 · Link Sharing (Stuff I Read) 6.28.26 · Ron Bronson_ Back with another set of articles to share, gathered here in one place. This also helps me find posts faster than the various Are.na and other linksharing places I’ve cobbled together over the years. Still working on a better system, let me know if you have a system that works for you. Financial Times gift article: qualifying, lower-rank tennis, and the grind of making a main draw Financial Times… ## [People Have the Power — How Volunteers Pushed Government into the 21st Century](https://www.zagaja.com/2026/06/civic-tech-volunteers/) _2026-06-24 · {"twitter" =\> "mzagaja"} · Zagaja.com_ On Tuesday nights, in a room we didn’t pay for, I watched a dozen people give away the most valuable thing they had. They were software engineers, data scientists and one patient designer. Most of them had day jobs that paid them well to build software for companies that already had everything. Then they came here, after work, to build software for their community. ## [Everything Is TV Now - Including Cities](https://thenewurbanorder.substack.com/p/everything-is-tv-now-including-cities) _2026-06-23 · Diana Lind · The New Urban Order_ FIFA Fan Fests, NBA Finals and Toy Story 5 show synchronous watching is the new placemaking ## [Trade Bitcoin & Ethereum (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/VWH4RMoxdGGI) _2026-06-23 · **Sponsored**_ Buy, sell and margin trade BTC & ETH with fiat currencies ## [Pittsburgh Is Having a Moment. Let's Go See It.](https://thenewurbanorder.substack.com/p/new-subscriber-event-pittsburgh-in) _2026-06-22 · Diana Lind · The New Urban Order_ Join us for an exploration of placemaking and the innovation economy in Pittsburgh ## [This Week in Public Sector Tech — June 18, 2026](https://publicsectorjobboard.substack.com/p/this-week-in-public-sector-tech-june-309) _2026-06-18 · Rebecca Heywood · #PublicSectorJobBoard_ The 87th edition. Jobs and field intelligence from across the civic tech ecosystem — government and the organizations building alongside it. ## [When Ai Agents Meet Insurance Agents](https://blog.ronbronson.com/when-ai-agents-meet-insurance-agents) _2026-06-17 · When Ai Agents Meet Insurance Agents · Ron Bronson_ State Farm just rewrote the contracts for 19,000 of its insurance agents to fit AI into the work, and it’s making me think more about Agent Experience . The word “ agent” carries the tension on purpose. In software, an agent acts. In insurance, real estate, law, talent, and public service, an agent is a person authorized to act for someone else, holding authority, accountability, and trust. We… ## [What I Said to New York City's Commission on Government Efficiency](https://publicsectorjobboard.substack.com/p/what-i-said-to-new-york-citys-commission) _2026-06-16 · Rebecca Heywood · #PublicSectorJobBoard_ On why New York City struggles to hire the technologists it needs to build or buy technology well ## [Skill Issue Is Not a Product Strategy](https://blog.ronbronson.com/skill-issue-is-not-a-product-strategy) _2026-06-13 · Skill Issue Is Not a Product Strategy · Ron Bronson_ Why Llm Products Need Someone to Own the Response Experience When the old webmasters and information architects became user experience designers — and some split off into content design and content strategy — it was fine. The lineage held. The people doing the work still had some connection to where it began and why the specialization happened. And because you’d worked across those areas before,… ## [I Built a Claude Skill for After-Action Reviews on Ai Agent Work](https://blog.ronbronson.com/i-built-a-claude-skill-for-after-action-reviews-on-ai-agent-work) _2026-06-11 · I Built a Claude Skill for After-Action Reviews on Ai Agent Work · Ron Bronson_ Over the past six months, I’ve been really prolific about building software & web projects that was too time-consuming for investing in. One of the ways I’ve been trying to keep track of AI agent behavior and judgment is using after-action reports. After-action reviews are a standard practice in military and emergency operations — you debrief after the fact, reconstruct what happened, surface what… ## [Links I Read (9 Jun 26)](https://blog.ronbronson.com/links-i-read-9-jun-26) _2026-06-09 · Links I Read (9 Jun 26) · Ron Bronson_ As an internet denizen of sorts, I have seen lots of folks returning to the old ways of the intenet — blogrolls, webrings and that sort of thing. Some of the ideas are more aspirational, but seeing people posting links made me think “ oh I can just do that.” I really like what Ethan is doing , and look forward to my weekly emails from Dense Discovery , Soft Labor and the totally rad, Perfect… ## [The Great Aesthetics Debate of 2026](https://thenewurbanorder.substack.com/p/the-great-aesthetics-debate-of-2026) _2026-06-07 · Diana Lind · The New Urban Order_ The Obama Presidential Center arrives at just the right time ## [This Week in Public Sector Tech - June 5, 2026](https://publicsectorjobboard.substack.com/p/this-week-in-public-sector-tech-june) _2026-06-05 · Rebecca Heywood · #PublicSectorJobBoard_ The 86th edition. Jobs and field intelligence from across the civic tech ecosystem - government and the organizations building alongside it. ## [Colorado Said the Quiet Part Out Loud](https://publicsectorjobboard.substack.com/p/colorado-said-the-quiet-part-out) _2026-06-02 · Rebecca Heywood · #PublicSectorJobBoard_ Government IT fails constantly. It almost never admits it. Colorado just did. ## [Every Channel. One Login. (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/UcxYJxuRxoOv) _2026-06-02 · **Sponsored**_ 17,000+ live channels, movies and sports on any device. Free trial, no IP lock. ## [The Knowledge Worker At The End of the Universe](https://tomlee.wtf/2026/05/27/knowledge-worker-at-the-end-of-the-universe/) _2026-05-27 · admin · Tom Lee_ The Pope's encyclical has elicited fascinating reactions from some AI experts. Most eye-catching has been a reflexive opposition to Leo's suggestion that these models are not truly conscious: So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through … ## [This Week in Public Sector Tech Jobs - May 21, 2026](https://publicsectorjobboard.substack.com/p/this-week-in-public-sector-tech-jobs-27c) _2026-05-21 · Rebecca Heywood · #PublicSectorJobBoard_ The 85th edition. Jobs and field intelligence from across the civic tech ecosystem - government and the organizations building alongside it. ## [Technologist Is Not a Job](https://blog.ronbronson.com/technologist-is-not-a-job) _2026-05-18 · Technologist Is Not a Job · Ron Bronson_ I’ve had a lot of conversations with people directly in or formerly part of the civic tech community and I’ve been sharing something that’s become apparent to me in the 14 months since 18F was shut down . Technologist isn’t a job. The catch-all term for people working in civic tech, it’s really meant to encapsulate all of the non-technical people who built a mission and vocation into an industry… ## [The Revolution Starts Now — Reflections on Civic Tech’s Early Days](https://www.zagaja.com/2026/05/the-revolution-starts-now/) _2026-05-11 · {"twitter" =\> "mzagaja"} · Zagaja.com_ I am barely a footnote in the movement you might call Civic Tech. While folks like Mikey Dickerson were rescuing Healthcare.gov in 2013 I was running a mayoral race in New Haven, Connecticut. After my candidate dropped out of the race I did not get a job fixing Obamacare, I ended up enrolling in it. Unemployed, with more swagger than skills, I walked into the offices of SeeClickFix on Chapel St… ## [What Forward Deployed Design Actually Looks Like](https://blog.ronbronson.com/what-forward-deployed-design-actually-looks-like) _2026-05-07 · What Forward Deployed Design Actually Looks Like · Ron Bronson_ I appreciated both Roger Wong and David Hoang ’ s blog posts about Forward Deployed Design. Reading them, I kept thinking about my time at 18F , where we employed this model without calling it ’ forward deployed.” This operating posture is how most civic technology firms work too, though everyone has their own flavor and some models are more decentralized than others. There are lots of reasons for… ## [Better Technology for Cruelty (Or Administrative Burden As a Service)](https://blog.ronbronson.com/better-technology-for-cruelty-or-administrative-burden-as-a-service) _2026-05-03 · Better Technology for Cruelty (Or Administrative Burden As a Service) · Ron Bronson_ The current gold rush in civic tech is around HR1 work requirements implementation . Vendors are pitching states on systems to help them comply with the new federal mandates. The pitch sounds like operational efficiency, reducing burden on caseworkers, helping eligible people stay on benefits through the new verification gauntlet. What’s being built is administrative burden as a service. A… ## [A Musical Retrospective With Python & D3.js](https://blog.ronbronson.com/a-musical-retrospective-with-python-d3-js) _2026-03-28 · A Musical Retrospective With Python & D3.js · Ron Bronson_ I’ve done lots of random music analysis over the years — Spotify Wrapped, Last.fm charts, playlists for every occasion — but never anything quite like this. The result is Ron’s Listening Journey — 21 years of scrobble data, 468,910 plays across 45,647 artists, visualized with genre breakdowns, top songs by year (with 30-second previews), my vinyl collection cross-referenced with my listening… ## [Multisided Problems & a Lack of Posting](https://blog.ronbronson.com/multisided-problems-a-lack-of-posting) _2026-03-26 · Multisided Problems & a Lack of Posting · Ron Bronson_ Reading this Atlantic piece on the multisided problem that is War & AI in 2026. We’re not yet talking about how it impacts pensions and make 2008 look like small potatoes, but this will help cement why you ought to be thinking that way. One of the goals I had for this part of 2026 was writing more, even daily. The problems for why are a bit time related, but the real reason is 1) people don’t read… ## [I Built a Power Ranking for Oregon High School Tennis](https://blog.ronbronson.com/i-built-a-power-ranking-for-oregon-high-school-tennis) _2026-02-04 · I Built a Power Ranking for Oregon High School Tennis · Ron Bronson_ I’ve owned oregontennis.org for five years. For most of that time, it hosted All-State team archives and not much else. It’s not that I didn’t want to build something more comprehensive. I’d tried before — multiple times. But building statewide tennis rankings meant collecting data that didn’t exist in any central place, designing formulas that accounted for the weird structure of high school… ## [On Anti-Delegation](https://blog.ronbronson.com/on-anti-delegation) _2026-02-01 · On Anti-Delegation · Ron Bronson_ Thinking about anti-delegation as a retort to a world that’s fascinated with giving away all of its thoughts. We’re rapidly encasing private knowledge inside of self-storage units we don’t own. If there’s anything about self-storage, we know how many units get abandoned and left behind to be sold off. This is entirely different, but anti-delegation feels like a term I want to sit with and it feels… ## [Default Apps, 2026](/posts/2026-default-apps/) _2026-01-27 · jpt.sh_ I wound up doing some nice tool upgrades this year. The biggest improvement– I’m now using Linux again for most things. Below are my defaults, if I switched to it in the last year, I’ve also listed the tool it replaced. web email : Fastmail todo : tweek ( my own tool, tt ) calendar : Fastmail, Fantasical rss : miniflux , self-hosted git : codeberg ( GitHub ) hosting : bunnyCDN… ## [The Carrying Costs of Everyday Life](https://blog.ronbronson.com/the-carrying-costs-of-everyday-life) _2026-01-23 · The Carrying Costs of Everyday Life · Ron Bronson_ I’m back at the University of Michigan again, this time as a part-time faculty member in the Urban Technology program. I’m teaching two classes this term, Service Design & Urban Needs and a new elective called Public Mechanics. The Public Mechanics course was devised from my own writing over the past few months, reflecting on years of work in the public sector and thinking about systems work and… ## [The Aesthetics of a Vibe](https://blog.ronbronson.com/the-aesthetics-of-a-vibe) _2026-01-18 · The Aesthetics of a Vibe · Ron Bronson_ The other day, I stumbled onto a video of DJ set from the artist & producer KAYTRANADA . He was playing in an elevator, the set is marked by people coming in and out of the elevator to dance at different times. In all honesty, the set is electric and I was like “ oh this is fun.” The design itself is really just everyone doing their own versions of Tiny Desk meets Boiler Room, where you create a… ## [Who Holds the Pen? Why Ai Agents Need a Manager, Not Just a Manual](https://blog.ronbronson.com/who-holds-the-pen-why-ai-agents-need-a-manager-not-just-a-manual) _2026-01-15 · Who Holds the Pen? Why Ai Agents Need a Manager, Not Just a Manual · Ron Bronson_ Today, in our rush to kill backlogs and modernize services, we are liquidating the human loop. We see a win when New Jersey uses AI to sign up 100,000 kids for summer benefits, or when an agency uses a chatbot to deflect thousands of calls. These are genuinely good outcomes. One hundred thousand children got access to food assistance they were already eligible for but couldn’t easily claim. That… ## [What I Read in 2025](https://blog.ronbronson.com/what-i-read-in-2025) _2025-12-31 · What I Read in 2025 · Ron Bronson_ Not all are new books, most for research, several for my podcast with Joel , a handful of fiction and at least one cookbook. I’ll do better next year. I didn’t enjoy all of them, obviously. Political Economy & Labor Our Lives in Their Portfolios , Brett Christophers Fictions of Financialization , Nick Bernards Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management and the New Struggle for Control at Work ,… ## [Govtech in the Era of Claude Code](https://tomlee.wtf/2025/12/29/govtech-in-the-era-of-claude-code/) _2025-12-29 · admin · Tom Lee_ Andrej Karpathy notes that "people who aren’t keeping up even over the last 30 days already have a deprecated world view" about using LLMs to write code and that devs must "rapidly progress through their grief cycle" to find their new place in the profession. I think he's right … ## [One Last Silly AI Thing](https://tomlee.wtf/2025/12/17/bosch-washed/) _2025-12-17 · admin · Tom Lee_ My Spotify Wrapped was less embarrassing than it could have been--I am frozen in time in the late aughts, but that's fine with me. But it reminded me to take on one more "if only I had the time" project. My beloved dishwasher is internet-connected (of course). Mostly, this affords … ## [Addiction by Design](https://tomlee.wtf/2025/12/16/addiction-by-design/) _2025-12-16 · admin · Tom Lee_ In the spirit of losing less writing output to Twitter , here's something I posted last week that got a surprising amount of attention. It seems very likely to me that we're in the early days of a new temperance movement for online gambling . The ferocious pace at which the industry … ## [treelemetry](https://tomlee.wtf/2025/12/16/treelemetry/) _2025-12-16 · admin · Tom Lee_ The blog update is not the only project that AI coding has allowed me to pursue with wild abandon. Three years ago I bought a small rangefinding module from Adafruit, attached it to a wifi-capable microcontroller, and pointed it at the water in my Christmas tree stand. Since then, adding … ## [a fresh coat of paint](https://tomlee.wtf/2025/12/15/a-fresh-coat-of-paint/) _2025-12-15 · admin · Tom Lee_ I have been writing a personal blog since 2006, apparently! I fell in love with technology because I feared scarcity, and because, in this world, digital technology is the only real cure for it. Never having to throw anything away is a close corrolary. So it's unsurprising that each time …