Civic Tech Studio
Building technology designed to expand the sovereignty and freedom of individuals as citizens — not as subjects of the state nor as consumers of the market, but as sovereign agents entangled within complex systems.
Why Civic Tech
In an age marked by deep volatility and widening asymmetries of control, civic technologies are essential counterweights to the consolidating power of both state and market infrastructures.
Yet for these technologies to be truly transformative, they must offer more than novel tools or interfaces. They must embody a fundamentally different paradigm — rooted in relationality, not domination; in care, not control.
The civic technologies we seek are built on infrastructures of tenderness, doubt, and attentiveness. They are technologies that honour entangled agency, designed with the humility to listen, the flexibility to adapt, and the resilience to sustain relationships over time.
This is the meaning of civic tech in the 21st century: not merely the digitisation of governance, but the cultivation of infrastructural care.
Our Position
Civic Tech Studio is the craft layer of Dark Matter Labs, born from a decade of prototyping, testing and building digital and physical tools to explore new theories of governance, infrastructure, and value.
Our work supports and tests emerging ideas from across Dark Matter Labs' ecosystem, while staying attuned to the wider technological shifts shaping society — from AI and identity systems to planetary sensing and public trust infrastructures.
We don't see technology as separate from our work on climate, governance, or justice. We see it as a critical enabler and a terrain of struggle, for how futures are shaped, accessed, and governed.
Our role is to intervene at the level of method, architecture, and institution: to prototype, host, and steward technologies that uphold shared infrastructure commons and expand overall sovereignty.
Our Approach
Modular & Protocol First
Building interoperable units with open protocols that enable flexibility, reuse, and collaborative evolution across contexts.
Open Source & Commons-Centric
Creating shared digital infrastructure that remains accessible and modifiable by communities who use it.
Multi-Actor Driven
Engaging diverse stakeholders in design and governance to ensure technologies serve collective needs.
Civic Tech Infrastructure
Sense
From environmental signals to collective behaviours, sensing technologies help us attend to the subtle and the systemic and measure what matters.
Register
Novel ways to store, classify, and manage data. Deeply related to ontologies and what we value, how we order and re-order.
Interface
Creating new affordances for different kinds of interactivity, comprehension, collaboration, and relationships.
Calculate
Computing and analysing complex dynamics to support decision-making, forecasting, and accounting impact.
Current Options
What We're Learning
Impact-led & non-extractive business models
Civic technologies often emerge from ambiguity—they're not solutions to fixed problems, but instruments for exploring what public value means in shifting, complex systems. We've learned that new financial architectures are essential: business models that reward impact and honest discovery, not just delivery.
New ways of working and sharing risk
Traditional project and partnership structures collapse under the weight of uncertainty, especially when responsibilities are split across civic, public, and private actors. To sustain meaningful collaboration, we must design partnership models that allow distributed development without dissolving accountability.
Shared civic tech infrastructure for interoperability and learning
Interoperability is not just a technical feature but a civic commitment. Shared infrastructures allow tools and practices to circulate across contexts, turning individual projects into repositories of collective learning.
Help us build a better future
We're looking for partners, funders, and collaborators who share our vision for civic technology that serves the commons.