The Politics of Building Civic Tech

This chapter evaluates the technical and political trials involved in building a suite of open data tools by charting the development of the Dublin Dashboard. Building a city dashboard is a good way to gain an in-depth knowledge of how civic tech can be created using open data, and the politics and praxes involved. Like the process for creating the original city dashboard, the redevelopment of the Dublin Dashboard and production of the Cork Dashboard involved a significant amount of planning, negotiation, and trial and error. Just as these processes and institutional landscape have an effect on how a dashboard is created, the collective manufacture of dashboards reshapes institutions and their practices. How we design dashboards, and what data are included and how they are displayed, influences what knowledge is learned and how it is applied. Importantly, given that dashboards are a key means by which operators monitor urban infrastructure within control rooms, this mutability directly shapes the nature of data driven urbanism and how our cities are managed and run.