We're a small nonprofit team building big (free & open-source) things.

Sludge

An Independent Newsroom

Sludge produces investigative journalism on money in politics. Founded in 2018, Sludge's reporting increases public accountability for greater trust in U.S. representative democracy.

Visit Sludge

AskThem

For public accountability

Questions-and-answers with every U.S. elected official and any verified Twitter account. AskThem is different: we're open-source & open-data. Question and petition people in power.

Check out AskThem

Our Principles

Join the Sludge Newsletter!

Make Use of What We Do

Crowdsource Q&A

AskThem supports continual questions to public figures & during events. Issue-based groups, use AskThem to contact elected officials at every level of government. Media companies, partner with us to promote popular questions in your area. Elected officials, sign up as leaders in #opengov.

Remix Our Open Code

We're open-source to the core, contributors to the commons, evangelists for open standards, co-framers of OpenGovData Principles, and activists for liberation of public data. See our wish list, check out our code, and more.

Support Our Public-Mission Work

We're a tiny team with big goals for participatory democracy. Our limiting factor isn't ideas, or a lack of information to make accessible, but rather funding for open-source development. Your support can build amazing new open-source tools. Get in touch.

Our sibling nonprofit is the Participatory Culture Foundation,
working for a fairer, more open, and more democratic media space.

See what we're fighting for

PPF Blog

Existing Open Projects for Digital Public Spaces

This coming week, the New Public Festival will kick off with a phenomenal group of participants examining better, less commercialized, public spaces on the internet. “We believe that the reckless design of our current, privately-owned digital spaces is tearing at our social fabric and poses a grave danger to our ability to collectively identify and solve social problems,” they wrote.

For the past 15 years, non-profit tech projects that have libre software licenses, build open-source code, and liberate open data offerings have shared many of the same principles. While many civic-commons technology projects have achieved traction, they have not received funding support that help them reach modest sustainability. But compared with other public-benefit investments, these projects have the ability to engage more new people, who can use the below tools to meet their information needs and start participating.

Here are five existing tech projects, non-profit and open-source, designed to enhance digital public spaces. They are libre to be remixed by communities for their goals, a fundamental difference from for-profit & closed platforms like Facebook and Nextdoor.

Continue reading
Leave a comment