Local community matters. Interactions between neighbors, participation in civic life, collective trust, and norms of reciprocity are key to the prosperity of American towns. Unfortunately, as Robert Putnam explained in his seminal book Bowling Alone, over the past fifty years, there has been a steep decline in local community engagement in America. Unless we develop new civic institutions to re-connect us to our neighbors and our towns, we will lose that civic spirit that makes our democracy work.

The civic technology industry aims to develop such new civic institutions. Unfortunately, 90% of civic tech built to date suffers from bad tech. Well-intentioned projects, plagued by poorly designed user interfaces and a lack of credible theories of user acquisition and retention, has led to a sprawling graveyard of once-promising civic apps.

Equally unfortunate is that most of the good tech online today has had bad civics. Facebook nailed user experience, but fails to connect us to our neighbors. Craigslist is a successful place-based clearinghouse, but it fails to build local trust and neighbor-to-neighbor connections. NextDoor knows how to build a platform, but its for-profit, Silicon Valley, growth-minded nature is raising red flags among community groups.

Indeed, civic tech doesn’t work like magic: like every other civic institution, it requires engaging design, a theory of member retention, and on-the-ground, real-world community organizing.

Local civic life used to be held together by local information infrastructures: town newspapers, post office bulletin boards, and well-attended community meetings. Today, these single access points for community engagement are in decline. Unfortunately, the civic tech industry has yet to build an adequate replacement, opting for a flurry of single-purpose apps (one for events, one for babysitters, one for news, etc.) that often fail to reach a critical mass. American towns still await the 21st century town bulletin.

In 2011, while students of Putnam at Harvard, we built CommonPlace, a web platform for local community engagement that fulfilled our vision for a modern local community information infrastructure. From 2011-2013, we sent community organizers to a dozen towns to pilot it. It worked: CommonPlace helped thousands of people get more from the places they live in. Neighbors used CommonPlace to ask for help, find bike riding buddies, report lost animals, form playgroups and much more. Leaders used CommonPlace to find volunteers, promote events, publicize emergency updates and answer questions about town initiatives. In Warwick, NY and Falls Church, VA we had more residents using CommonPlace than Twitter. In 2015, we formed a non-profit, the Laboratory for Civic Technology, to revive this model and take it national.