Initially at least, civic hackathons were initially positioned as a form of public outreach for civic hackers, a loose-knit community interested in applying technology for social good. James Crabtree (2007) defined “civic hacking” as “the development of applications to allow mutual aid among citizens rather than through the state.” In particular, he suggested an extra-institutional definition, thatcivic hacking filled in where e-democracy had failed. The meaning of “civic” at this stage leaned towards a libertarian perspective, which remains a persistent critique of hacking among critical studies scholars (Golumbia, 2013).

Since the rise of early sites of computer hacking like the Chaos Computer Club, a German technology collective founded in the 1980s promoting open information infrastructure, the term hacking has fit aspirational ideals of technical cleverness and creativity perpetuated by engineer-ing cultures. Women-operated hackerspaces have opened an alternate view: enliven-ing connections between hacking and histories of women’s craftwork rooted in a feminist politics of fracture (Barad 2007; Haraway 1988).

In conclusion, these articles highlight elements of a broader story of increasing democ-ratization of hacking and making. This plurality will likely continue to grow and confront global, structural, and technological challenges worldwide.

In the early 1990s, govern-ment transparency became something of a fad, spawning similar legislation overseas. Leading transparency activists started to view the potential of the Internet for increasing accessibility as a natural extension of this freedom of information movement. The efforts of Carl Malamud and the Sunlight Foundation applied right to information principles to the Internet, facilitating public access to vital information on law and government before individuals requested it. They took a more overtly ecological perspective on openness where information could be integrated into as-yet unforeseen processes

First, FOIA provided accessible tools to put abstract ideas into practice. Everyday citizens started to attach various political notions to these activities. Second, information flowed into a journalistic ecosystem that was prepared to process and interpret it for everyday citizens. Information obtained through FOIA was being interpreted in stories that changed public opinion (Leff etal., 1986). Third, ability for individuals to request information led to alternate uses for activ-ists, public interest groups, and non-profit organizations.

FOIA was only strengthened after Nixon’s resignation in 1974 when it was amended over Ford’s veto. Even afterward, it didn’t match with the complete vision of ASNE. At times requests to comply stretched well beyond 10days and requests are still frequently denied. Despite claiming to embrace openness, Obama’s presidency has been notoriously secretive, with record numbers of whistle-blower cases and FOIA requests being denied or censored.

Harold L. Cross to write The People’s Right to Know. Cross concluded that “there is no enforceable legal right in public or press to inspect any federal non-judicial record.” This text was published in 1953 and circulated mostly at the federal level, promoting the idea of freedom of infor-mation within and outside of journalist circles as being beneficial to the public good. Congressman John Moss’ commission then garnered the attention for President Johnson to sign FOIA into law on 4 July 1966.

Journalism historians Stoker and Rawlins (2005) extended Brandeis’ metaphor of light to describe this as a move from “searchlight to flashlight”—a narrower and less powerful beam that only illuminated what corpora-tions wanted. Yet they also critiqued progressive beliefs that publicity was synonymous with purification and backers such as Adams for placing “too much faith in information’s power to produce public action” (p. 186)

In 1902’s What is Publicity? political professor Henry Adams described publicity as “an essential agency for the control of trusts” (p. 895).

Open government data therefore provides a specific lineage to compare and contrast with the multitude of “open” concepts in circulation, including open standards (Russell, 2014), open source (Coleman, 2012a), and open systems (Kelty, 2008: Chapter 5). While the open government data movement in the United States is kin to these other lineages, it is conceptually and historically distinct. It also bears mention that this history is con-fined to the United States. Practices with openness have been differently interpreted by grassroots participants across the world, from Asia (Lindtner, 2012) to the global South (Chan, 2013).

Yet, the natural equating of “openness” or government transparency (Hood and Heald, 2006) with accountability increasingly became dubious (Tkacz, 2012). The move to “open data” was often an imperative that didn’t make clear where the levers were for social change that benefited citizens (Lessig, 2009). Still, I argue that civic hackers are often uniquely positioned to act on issues of public concern; they are in touch with local communities, with technical skills and, in many cases, institutional and legal literacies. I conclude by connecting the open data movement with a specific set of political tactics—requesting, digesting, contributing, modeling, and contesting data.

Coleman suggested scholars consider the diverse range of ways individuals organize, mobilize, and act politically. This move toward how political notions evolve within specific collectives can also be seen in Nathanael Bassett’s (2013) writing on activist hackathons and Molly Sauter’s (2014) work with online civil disobedience. Their mode of inquiry, and the one I follow here, focuses on a specific collective with a specific and traceable history with attendant tools, practices, and tactics.

Two overall framings of hackers’ engagement with the political have dominated discussion: “hacktivists” or activists who leverage instrumental uses of online technologies for direct political action such as protest and disruption (Jordan and Taylor, 2004), and geographically distributed communities of practice where principles of openness enable forms of political action (Coleman, 2004). Gabriella Coleman (2012a) argues that pragmatism enables action on issues related to informational freedoms and reflects liberal democratic tenets such as freedom of speech. According to Coleman (2004), explicit involvement in “politics” in a formalized sense is distasteful to free and open-source hackers, as it is viewed as “buggy, mediated, and tainted action clouded by ideology” (p. 513). Civic hacking represents a third mode of participation among a group that often explicitly engages with political causes through designing, critiquing, and manipulating software and data to improve community life and infrastructures of governance. Civic hackers therefore have distinct histories, con-tours, and conflicts from other genres of hackers, even as they share a certain family resemblance (Wittgenstein, 1953).

economic vision didn’t seem to hold water, while a cultural perspective seemed insufficient to explain hacker and maker spaces as a particular genre of participatory organization. Recent ethnographic inquiry on hackerspaces grounded in social and material interactions provides a way forward. While hackerspaces may be inspired by online peer production, the transfer of this ethic to offline space is often imperfect due to the nature of physical things

economic vision didn’t seem to hold water, while a cultural perspective seemed insufficient to explain hacker and maker spaces as a particular genre of participatory organization.

Maxigas (2012) used political ideologies to claim a differences between overtly politicized lineage of European hack labs and only partly political hackerspaces. By his reading, hackerspaces either came from a lineage of activism or had activist potential that had yet to be fully activated. Others have taken a middle-ground, using cultural approaches to hackerspaces