Put slightly differently, if we want civic hackathons to produce ideas that improve society, we need to more deeply and sincerely shape choices, thought processes, and activities that might make technology civic.

Civic hackathons have been hotly debated in recent years. Critical studies scholars have lambasted civic hackathons for aligning with middle-class citizenship(Irani, 2015)and co-opting participant labor (Gregg, 2014a). Silicon Valley is often the fait accompliin these perspectives, bringing a flawed ideology that seduces organizers and participants into transposing technological language onto civic issues (Also see: Barbrook & Cameron, 1996; Morozov, 2013). In this paper I refer to this perspective as an “imposed civic ideology.” The second perspective comes from design scholars interested in material participation (Marres, 2012) as cohering publics to work on particular social issues. Lodato and DiSalvo (2016) suggested that civic hackathons served two purposes. First, they help people think through civic issues using props — “objects, services, and systems that engage with issues” (p. 16). Second, they cohere ephemeral proto-publics for short-term engagement on issues of public concern. As they summarized, "what is important is not the inventiveness of a particular prototype product or service, but rather, how the event fosters opportunities for collaborative or collective issue articulation" (p. 15). They drew attention to how outcomes of civic hackathons may more likely be social and cultural than functional material objects. I refer to this design perspective as an “emergent civic subjectivity.”

The baroque succeeded because it expressed something all Latin American people (Indians, Africans, mestizos, and even sons and daughters of Spaniards born on the con-tinent) had in common: the rejection of the domineering and distant center. Carpentier (1995) explains that to understand “Why is Latin America the chosen territory of the baroque?” we must look at the people and processes that allowed them to finally own the continent: “Because all symbiosis, all mestisaje engenders the baroque. The American baroque develops [...] with the self-awareness of the American man [...] the awareness of being Other, of being new, of being symbiotic, of being a criollo” (p

Might “utopian realist” be applicable to the practices of civic hackers, intertwined with particular repertoires, technologies, and affective publics? McKenzie Wark (2014) sug-gests that the relationship between utopian and realist might be mutually constitutive rather than dialectical. He re-frames utopia as a realizable fragment or diagram that re-imagines relations. From this perspective, civic hacking gets traction not because they were ever intended to be the sole “solution” to a problem, but they are ways of acting and creating that are immediately apprehensible. Prototypes capture the imagination because they are shards of a possible future and can be created, modified, and argued about (Coleman, 2009).

Civic hackers might be most appropriately described as utopian realists (Giddens, 1990: 154), a term Giddens employed to capture how assuaging negative consequences in a risk society required retaining Marx’s concern of connecting social change to insti-tutional possibilities while leaving behind his formulation of history as determining and reliance on the proletariat as change agents. He positioned utopian realists as sensitive to social change, capable of creating positive models of society, and connecting with life politics.

Data activism and advocacy ranges from civic engagement (Putnam, 2001) to more oppositional activism (Jordan, 2001). In this sense, it is a spe-cific association of technologically mediated participation with particular political goals (Lievrouw, 2011) resulting in a wide range of tactics. Although open government data is still evolving and is constrained by predictions for economic growth and self-regulation, I argue it enables civic hackers to participate in civic data politics. This is particularly important because data-driven environment is often distanced from pro-viding individuals a sense of agency to change their conditions (Couldry and Powell, 2014). Data activism and advocacy can take place through organizing on related top-ics, online through mediated data repositories such as Github, and in-person events such as hackathons.

Civic hacking can broadly be described as a form of alternative/activist media that “employ or modify the communication artifacts, practices, and social arrangements of new information and communication technologies to challenge or alter dominant, expected, or accepted ways of doing society, culture, and politics” (Lievrouw, 2011: 19). Ample research has considered how changes in technology and access have created “an environment for politics that is increasingly information-rich and communication-inten-sive” (Bimber, 2001). Earl and Kimport (2011) argue that such digital activism draws attention to modes of protest—“digital repertoires of contention” (p. 180)—more than formalized political movements

Organizations such as Code for America (CfA) rallied support by positioning civic hacking as a mode of direct partici-pation in improving structures of governance. However, critics objected to the involve-ment of corporations in civic hacking as well as their dubious political alignment and non-grassroots origins. Critical historian Evgeny Morozov (2013a) suggested that “civic hacker” is an apolitical category imposed by ideologies of “scientism” emanating from Silicon Valley. Tom Slee (2012) similarly described the open data movement as co-opted and neoliberalist.

Successive waves of activists saw the Internet as a tool for transparency. The framing of openness shifted in meaning from information to data, weakening of mechanisms for accountability even as it opened up new forms of political participation. Drawing on a year of interviews and participant observation, I suggest civic data hacking can be framed as a form of data activism and advocacy: requesting, digesting, contributing to, modeling, and contesting data

It doesn’t work if we think the people who disagree with us are all motivated by malice, or that our political opponents are unpatriotic.  Democracy grinds to a halt without a willingness to compromise; or when even basic facts are contested, and we listen only to those who agree with us.