(Re-)Introducing SF Civic Tech

Hello! I’m Francis, a member of SF Civic Tech’s current leadership team. Our organization was founded in 2013 as Code for San Francisco. We were part of the Code for America Brigade Network, a nationwide collection of volunteer groups united by a common goal: leveraging technology to help government work better and tackle local civic issues.

I joined as a volunteer in 2014 and still remember the excitement and energy of those early years, where every week during Civic Hack Night like-minded community members would gather together in-person, sharing food and knowledge and applying them in common purpose towards building new technology for our city.

An early success story was the SF Adopt-a-Drain web app. Still maintained by the SF PUC and Civic Hub, its roots trace back to the Adopt-a-Hydrant app developed for Boston by a Code for America fellow. Not all initiatives found such success, of course, but the skills learned and friendships made during these projects would endure.

At the beginning of 2023, Code for America announced that it would “sunset” the Brigade Network and no longer sponsor nor support the local volunteer organizations it founded. By the end of that same year, Code for San Francisco, like many other stranded brigades across the nation, would find new fiscal sponsorship under the Open Collective Foundation and, per terms dictated by Code for America, rename itself to SF Civic Tech.

We hoped that 2024 would usher in a fresh start. Instead, we got hit with another curveball: the Open Collective Foundation announced that they were shutting down.

This time, we decided to take control of our own destiny and incorporate SF Civic Tech as its own 501(c)3 tax-exempt non-profit organization. April 2024 saw us file Articles of Incorporation with the California Secretary of State and by May we already had our federal IRS determination letter of tax-exempt status in hand.

Since then, we’ve been on a crash course in nonprofit management 101. The organizing team has officially become the initial Board of Directors for the organization and we would like to welcome anyone who’s passionate about shaping SF Civic Tech’s future to join us at our quarterly board meetings.

The road ahead is paved with both challenges and opportunities. The COVID pandemic accelerated a nationwide decline in volunteerism and philanthropy. The cultural shift to remote work transformed our weekly in-person Civic Hack Nights into virtual Zoom gatherings. We’ve lost the impromptu and opportunistic connections that were made around a shared dining table, but we’ve also gained new members from the larger SF Bay Area and beyond. New projects such as Support SF Schools have launched.

Throughout all of this, we’ve remained committed to our mission: uniting community members to build technology that helps our government work better and addresses local civic issues. If that resonates with you, then I hope you’ll join us in crafting the next chapter of SF Civic Tech!