As we go looking for “interfaces” I have a rather bleak prediction. My bet is that you will find lots of groups and platforms but that their glory days will be behind them.
I think there are many reasons for it, and I am sure many of them are well understood. But I I have one hypothesis for a partial explanation that I think is often overlooked.
In order to build and maintain open source tools like Decidim and their ilk you need a large enough number of ideologically motivated technologists who are willing to spend their valuable time on developing and promoting them. About 10 years ago this category of builders, that had made things like Decidim, Loomio, Consul and Pol.is, started being sucked up by the DWeb movement - with its blockchains and other such decentralized protocols and ideologies. I’m not saying the same people left for the blockchain space, but that the people who would once have built in the civic tech space now were more attracted to the various strands of decentralized internet anarchism that came with the DWeb space. Platforms like these might be the directions to look into if you want to find communities that alive and kicking.
In contrast to the participatory democracy space, which was usually essentially vaguely left-wing, the DWeb space has projects that range from anarcho-capitalist cyberpunk to syndicalist solar-punk. Because blockchains allow you to do all sorts of strange things on protocol level, like tying financial investments to voting power or enacting experimental strategies like quadratic voting, the ideological divide had real consequences and completely splintered the space.
Consider platforms like Loomio, Decidim or Pol.is. Unless you are fundamentally opposed to democracy, these tools have very vague ideological blueprints. You could envision using these tools regardless of if you wanted to work towards an anarcho-capitalist Network State alá Balaji Srinivasan or an establishment New European Bauhaus.
But the same is not true when you embed your values into the protocols of the tools you build.
CityDAO, influenced by the Network State movement, operates on a membership model where governance rights are typically tied to NFT ownership, allowing members to buy, sell, or transfer their participation. To left-leaning communities seeking wealth redistribution or collective safety nets, it can feel deeply at odds with their values.
FairCoop, on the other hand, is a left-wing blockchain project. Its currency, FairCoin, was designed to discourage speculation and spread value more equally. Governance happens via assemblies rather than token-weighted votes, reflecting cooperative ideals.
Unlike generic civic tech platforms, their built-in ideologies make them far less flexible across the political divide.
These ideological DWeb projects have, I think, captured most of the crowd that would otherwise have built and promoted the use of participatory democracy platforms. What they have not managed to do however is win any significant adoption outside of a small fringe of hackers, hipsters and hippes. DWeb is just way to complicated for most people to use. There are lots of them and they are not interoperable, so the space is increasingly balkanized and nobody gains any momentum that can move the needle.
So if the platforms are not successful at having an impact in the ”real world” - why are there so many of them and so many people building them? Of course, the answer is that the space has been absolutely showered with crypto-cash. People have been able to make a good living building tools for a small cabal. And many inside this bubble, across the ideological divide, started believing that they didn’t need to talk to the muggles at all. They believed (and many still do) that the hegemony of nation states is falling and all they need to do is build and bide their time.
Combine these factors and you have one explanation for why the civic tech space slowed down in the last 10 years.
However, I do see some hope on the horizon for civic tech outside the DWeb. Making tools for the web is no longer as difficult as it once was. Someone with rudimentary technical skills can now build basic software that looks and feels pretty darn good, with the help of AI platforms like Cursor or Lovable. I think this might potentially come to the rescue of civic tech. If all you need is a weekend of free time to build a bespoke community platform for your local cooperative, that looks and feels exactly right for your vibe, that could make things very interesting.