Lessons for innovators — current or future, private or public — with a focus on getting the job done, based on lectures at the University of Chicago, Code for America, and cities around the world.
Working with City Hall
Guides to the politics and operations of local government
2025-2026 GovTech Forecast
Headwinds and Tailwinds shaping the market.
GovTech Market Sizing
How to build realistic models for valuations in local government technology
Data and Dashboards
Dashboards, Performance Management, and the Trouble with Different Kinds of Data
Building Open Data Products
Key design principles for meaningful transparency tools
Data-Driven Policy Making
Myth versus Reality in two slides
Civic Tech Career Resources
Whether you're breaking into civic tech or building the next wave of government innovation, start here.
GovTech Buyer Trends
Overview of the structural enablers for technology innovation, and the new buyers driving change
Ecosystem Map: Permitting
An example how to map the full value chain within agency workflowsUniversity of Chicago Civic Technology Lectures
Part theory, and part technical, with a focus on the characteristics unique to public interest tech, this graduate-level course was designed and delivered in 2019 for the University of Chicago Masters in Computational Analysis and Public Policy (MS-CAPP) program, where I was a visiting lecturer. There were 16 lectures total delivered between April and June 2019. Slides from each class are posted here for viewing, sharing, or downloading, per a Free Culture license.
- Lecture 1: What is Civic Tech?
- Lecture 2-3: Empathy and the GovTech Ecosystem
- Lecture 4-5: Applying Lean Principles to Civic Technology
- Lecture 6: How Civic Data Works
- Lecture 7: Why and Where Open Data - The Value Proposition and Accessibilty of Open Civic Data
- Lecture 8: Which and How Open Data - The Mechanics of Open Civic Data
- Lecture 9: Optimizing Open Data - Best Practices in *Publishing* Open Data
- Lecture 10: Open Data, Simply Seen - Best Practices in *Visualizing* Open Data
- Lecture 11: Digital Services, an Introduction
- Lecture 12: Digital Services, Where and How
- Lecture 13: Growth and Adoption - Getting to Users
- Lecture 14: Procurement, Challenges and Opportunities
- Lecture 15-16: Application and Impact Sustainability
Case Studies
SPIDRTech: How GTM Research Shaped Product Strategy: Starting with a simple text reminders, SPIDR Tech's platform now enables realtime communication and feedback between the community and government
Putting Sacramento On the Map: Case study on building an economic development strategy to level-up a city's innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem
Enabling Data-Driven Decisions in LA: How building a showpiece unveiled the real challenges of PerformanceStat
NJ State Attorney General: Turning Procurement Around to Leverage Existing Tools: Data collection problems can stifle reform efforts that rely on data, such as the New Jersey effort to create an "early warning" system for abuse
Letting governments build their own workflows on CityGrows: Accessible and affordable workflow automation for local governments to replace paper forms and pdfs in minutes
ZenCity: Focusing on the User: Helping a a groundbreaking data science company understand 'where to play' and 'how to win'
Abhi Nemani
