Contribute — OSS Citizenship & Civic Tech
Give back — OSS funding, license selection, foundations, contributor agreements, and civic-tech tools used by governments, journalists, and the public interest.
Give back — OSS funding, license selection, foundations, contributor agreements, and civic-tech tools used by governments, journalists, and the public interest.
For other areas of the site see Build, Make, Self-Host, Live, or Contribute. Cross-cutting picks: Self-Hosted Picks Index.
OSS Citizenship
- OSS Funding & Sponsorship Platforms — GitHub Sponsors, Open Collective, Liberapay, ko-fi, Patreon — where individual maintainers get paid.
- License Selection (MIT, Apache, GPL, MPL) — Pick the right license for your project — permissive vs copyleft vs weak copyleft.
- Source-Available vs FSF/OSI Open — BSL, SSPL, FSL — what counts as "open source," and the BSL/SSPL relicensing wave.
- CLA vs DCO for Contributors — Why DCO has won for community OSS, and when CLAs still make sense.
- Foundations & Fiscal Sponsors — Linux Foundation, Apache, Eclipse, OpenJS, Sovereign Tech Fund — homing your project.
- SCA & DIY Scanners — Scancode, FOSSology, OSV-Scanner — auditing your own dependencies for license + vuln.
Civic Tech
- Civic Tech Overview — The landscape of free / FOSS / self-host-first technology built for governments, journalists, and the public interest in 2026.
- Public Consultation & Participatory Democracy — Decidim, Consul, CitizenLab — software for participatory budgeting and citizen assemblies.
- Field Data Collection (Mobile Surveys) — KoboToolbox, ODK, SurveyCTO — mobile-first survey tooling for humanitarian and field work.
- FOIA & Public Records Tools — MuckRock, WhatDoTheyKnow, FOIA Machine — software for filing public-records requests.
- 311 & Report-an-Issue Apps — FixMyStreet, SeeClickFix, CitySourced — apps for reporting potholes and broken streetlights.
- Open Data Portals — CKAN, DKAN, Socrata — the platforms behind data.gov and most major open-data portals.
- Elections Data & Voter Information — OpenElections, OpenStates, BallotReady, Vote.org — FOSS election data and voter info.
- Call-Your-Rep & Citizen Action — 5 Calls, Resistbot, Phone2Action, Quorum — contacting elected officials and advocacy campaigns.
- Government Design Systems — USWDS, GOV.UK Design System, Canada.ca, Australia.gov — surprisingly mature gov design.
- Court Records & Legal Data — CourtListener, RECAP, Justia — accessing US court records and federal case law.
- Budget & Spending Transparency — OpenSpending, USAspending.gov, Where Does My Money Go — visualizing public budgets.
- Civic & Humanitarian Mapping (OSM, HOT) — OpenStreetMap, Humanitarian OSM, iD, JOSM, Mapillary.
- Investigative Journalism Tools — Aleph, DocumentCloud, Datasette, Hunchly — used by OCCRP, ICIJ, ProPublica.
- Civic & OSS Grant Funding (Government) — Sovereign Tech Fund, NLnet, NSF POSE, DARPA — where civic tech actually gets paid.
- Civic Tech Organizations — Code for America, mySociety, OKFN, EFF, Public Lab.
- Volunteering & Getting Involved — Brigades, hackathons (NDoCH), GitHub orgs, first contributions.