Civic Engagement App, Change By Us, Enters the Commons

Change By Us was a civic-engagement web platform originally built for the New York City Mayor's Office in 2010 by the Local Projects design studio (best known later for the 9/11 Memorial Museum's media work) in partnership with CEOs for Cities. The platform let New Yorkers post local-project ideas, find collaborators, and connect with the city resources and councilmembers who could help shepherd a project through. Philadelphia adopted it next, then several smaller deployments followed.

The October 2011 release of the Change By Us codebase under an open-source licence was significant for civic technology because municipally-funded software, even when philosophically committed to openness, rarely actually shipped its code in a form other cities could deploy. Putting Change By Us into the commons was a deliberate move to lower the cost of the next adopter and to test whether a single platform could serve many municipalities — the same hypothesis Code for America's fellowship work was probing from a different angle.

The platform's individual deployments are no longer live, but its underlying playbook — citizen-proposed projects, structured collaboration, light city integration — anticipated much of what the participatory-budgeting platforms (Decidim, Consul, Your Priorities) and the early-2020s neighbourhood-civics tools would later build at larger scale.