Context

Coming up with ideas to improve a community is easy. Planning and implementing these ideas is not. To bridge this gap, Open Austin and the City of Austin wanted to create a Business Model Canvas focused on Civic Tech innovation.

My role

I designed this canvas with my amazing designer friend Vanessa Sanchez.

Solution

Our design team distilled down the Business Model Canvas into its fundamental principles and applied them to Civic Tech projects to create a canvas planning tool. I helped make the canvas intuitive by adding prompt questions for each section and a canvas box flow that made sense. The Problem Statement came first as it is the first thing to be defined before discussing solutions. Then a Solution proposition is thought out with Users and those Impacted in mind.

Outcome

The Civic Tech Canvas has been used at Code Across Austin events since 2015. Its reach has also gone global with its use in other civic tech communities across the US and Japan.