Excellent piece! Everything you mention is part of civic tech. But I and others believe it also includes people and communities using tech to empower themselves and solve shared problems they may have, not solely in relation to the formal systems and institutions of government. For example, a Change.org petition is civic tech, even if it’s aimed at getting Bank of America to drop an onerous new user fee, as opposed to petitioning an elected official.

And I think you might agree that civic tech didn’t start in America in 2008, but probably goes back to mySociety’s efforts in the early 2000s to use the web to make Parliament more accessible (see theyworkforyou.com). Certainly they were part of the inspiration for the Sunlight Foundation’s founding in early 2006 (hey, why no mention of Sunlight, which gave Code for America its first grant?) where a lot of civic tech people also got their start.

Speaking of resources, Matt Stempeck, Erin Simpson and I have been building a giant catalog of civic tech tools, platforms, companies, and processes at the Civic Tech Field Guide, and we’re well on the way to a much expanded version of that guide. We’ve got more than 2,200 entities in there now, classified across more than 100 functions. We’ll add your timeline to it, and when we have some time, we’ll add more to the timeline as well if you’re open to that.