A volunteer-managed home for open-source civic-tech tools we use, love, and refuse to let gather dust in obscure corners of GitHub.
These tools have been used in production across 40+ countries by election monitors, civil society groups, and organizations working in difficult environments with limited resources. They're field-tested software that serves real needs. We help maintain them, improve ease of use and deployability, and keep them accessible to others.
CyberSim
A facilitator app for cybersecurity tabletop exercises that are, against the odds, actually fun. Used with parliaments, political parties, election monitors, civil society organizations, and city halls.
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Apollo
An election data-management system for making sense of reports from observer teams ranging from dozens to tens of thousands of people. Built for the moment when "just use a spreadsheet" has stopped being a plan.
Learn more →About CoCitizen
Who we are
We're a small group of experienced civic technologists — practitioners who've worked alongside nonprofits, elected officials, campaigns, small businesses, and democracy organizations for years. We're not listing individual names here for now, because gestures broadly at the world, but we're real people and happy to talk.
We've been with these tools from their inception, but we weren't the primary builders, and they represent a shared vision. They came out of larger partnerships — with developers, funders, and civic organizations that deserve proper credit. We still use them, still think they're great, and want them to have a better public home than "somewhere in GitHub, probably."
We've deployed these tools in scores of places: in elections, in training programs, with political campaigns, aiding at-risk civic groups, and more. Some of these have been... challenging situations.
CoCitizen isn't a company or a nonprofit. It's a volunteer home for open-source civic-tech software: a GitHub organization and a website that give these tools a public address and make it easier for others to find, assess, and use them.
How we work
These tools are open source under the GNU General Public License v3. Documentation is Creative Commons licensed. Fork them, deploy them, adapt them for your context. Keep the attribution and license intact.
We welcome contributions — code, documentation, deployment notes, issue reports. We respond as time allows. This is volunteer work; there is no support SLA.
While we're not a consultancy, if you need experienced, hands-on support for deployment, customization, training, etc. individual contributors may be available for paid engagements.
Contact
Reach us at contact@cocitizen.com or through our GitHub organization. We're volunteers, so replies may not be immediate.
The kobold in the room
The little creature showing up around the site is a kobold — and a small piece of etymological history. Medieval German miners coined the word "cobalt" after the Kobold — a mischievous underground spirit they blamed for the troublesome blue ore contaminating their silver. The ore turned out to be genuinely useful; it just needed someone to recognize it. Cobalt's atomic symbol is Co — which is also ours. We borrowed the color and the symbol, and somewhere along the way this little critter snuck in with them. Our tools are a bit like cobalt: valuable, just not always easy to find and make use of.