2012 was quite a year for civic innovation. Still a relatively young field, civic innovation thrived in 2012, thanks in large part to the strengthening of the entire civic innovation ecosystem. It begins with citizens identifying challenges in their cities and being empowered to create solutions to these challenges through hackathons and online engagement platforms like ImproveSF. This idea of citizen engagement has been around for a couple of years, fueled by the rising popularity of Open Data and Open Government. But what made 2012 different was the realization of the full civic innovation ecosystem. These solutions that citizens create have the ability to create new jobs. Products and companies are being born from hackathons or being built on Open Data, and civic accelerators and crowdfunding platforms are arising to meet this new demand.
To read the original article: The civic innovation ecosystem blooms in 2012. What’s next? | InnovateSF
