Civic Signals
A small public feed experiment for making useful digital government updates easier to notice across teams, disciplines and organisations.
Civic Signals is a small public feed experiment for people working in and around digital government.
It collects useful public updates from blogs, weeknotes, reports and other digital government sources into one simple feed. The first version is deliberately small: a static website, a list of sources and an automated feed refresh.
What it is for
People working in digital government often rely on fragmented networks, newsletters, Slack groups, blog subscriptions and social media to keep up with what is happening.
Civic Signals tests whether a simple, maintainable feed can make useful public-service work easier to notice across organisations, disciplines and communities of practice.
It is intended for people working across boundaries, including service design, content design, user research, delivery, policy, architecture, local government, central government, arm’s-length bodies, consultancies and civic technology organisations.
What makes it a Lab
This is not only a feed. It is a small experiment in civic knowledge infrastructure.
The core question is whether public digital government learning can be made more visible without turning the project into another generic news aggregator, marketing channel or high-volume information stream.
The source list is the heart of the project. It decides which kinds of work, voices and signals become visible.
Editorial stance
Civic Signals is intentionally biased towards:
- public value over commercial noise
- practice over branding
- useful detail over thought leadership
- openness over gatekeeping
- breadth over clique dynamics
- accessibility and inclusion as core quality
- simple, maintainable technology over unnecessary platform complexity
The goal is not to decide who is important. The goal is to make useful public-service work easier to notice.
What the prototype currently does
The prototype currently includes:
- a public feed of recent digital government updates
- a curated source list managed in YAML
- source status for active, review and paused sources
- automated ingestion and validation
- generated data for latest updates
- early signal and weekly-theme views based on recent public links
The signal views are cautious. They should be read as browse aids, not rankings, claims of importance or official interpretations of what the sector is doing.
What it is not
Civic Signals is not trying to be comprehensive.
It is not a publishing platform, sector authority or automated judgement system. It is a lightweight way to surface useful public signals from public-service practice.
Why it connects to the wider work
Civic Signals sits next to Civic Design Intelligence, but it has a different job.
Civic Design Intelligence is about structuring needs, evidence, pain, outcomes and decisions. Civic Signals is about noticing public evidence of practice: what teams are writing, sharing, learning and making visible across the digital government ecosystem.
Together, they point to the same broader question: how can useful civic knowledge become easier to find, inspect and reuse?
Next questions
- Which sources add genuine public-service signal rather than noise?
- How should the source list stay open to contribution without becoming unmanageable?
- How should AI-assisted signal summaries stay cautious and evidence-bound?
- What should be automated, and what should remain editorial judgement?
- Could the feed help people discover practice outside their usual institutional or social network?