Within a period of three weeks earlier this year, four blizzards dumped seven feet of snow and sleet on Boston. Commuters found themselves standing in the cold for more than an hour waiting for MBTA trains with no way of knowing how long their wait would be. With more bad weather on the way, software developers came together at a hackathon organized by Code for Boston, a Meetup group of skilled volunteers who look for technology‑driven solutions to civic problems. The result was MBTA Ninja, a web app that allows commuters to update one another about train delays while they wait. What does this mean for the civic sector?

Civic‑minded innovations like MBTA Ninja are emerging almost daily, drawing on the direct feedback and participation of citizens. These innovations are coming from a rich mix of sources – including nonprofits; national, state, and local governments; informal associations; and private companies – and   are fueled by new technologies.

Here’s a good one: What has suddenly gotten a hundred times cheaper and ten times faster? According to a new study by the Center for Global Development and the World Bank, citizen feedback in poor countries. Because some 75 percent of the world’s population now has access to a mobile phone, it is easier than ever to gather direct feedback. Indeed, working with VOTO Mobile, the center was able to reduce the costs of surveying citizens by more than 95 percent. Social media and the Internet also allow people to interact directly with authorities. The bottom line? New tools like these are bringing us closer to a long‑held dream: societies governed more effectively by and for the people.

“Feedback is another word for that crucial element of democracy which requires public ownership over public decision making,” says Kate Krontiris, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

A number of themes are emerging from these feedback experiments in the civic sector. One is that different contexts call for different tools. Effective feedback loops clarify people’s needs at a deeper level. Beyond surveys, tools may include individual and group interviews, civic games, and visual, audio, or written journals of relevant experiences kept by participants. People and organizations developing solutions based on feedback loops look for evidence of underlying as well as stated needs – for instance, by noticing gaps between what people say and what they do.

Tools must be selected and tailored according to context. For example, to engage the poorest groups in northern Ghana, VOTO Mobile found it necessary to schedule calls carefully, since many mobile phones are shared, and to provide elders with training in how to respond to a mobile survey.

Feedback also needs to be multi‑modal in order to give different groups equal voice. A smart‑phone app, for example, might generate more feedback from wealthier communities or from twenty‑year‑olds. Technological solutions call for a heightened attention to what might be left out or misrepresented.

Another trend is the blurring of lines between official and unofficial solutions. For example, the City of New Haven, Connecticut, created an online system that was designed to let residents flag problems such as potholes and broken streetlights. Instead, the city was inundated with alerts from an independent system designed by a resident, which has since been integrated into the city’s app. And that improved app, SeeClickFix, now serves hundreds of cities.

What makes people decide to fill out a survey or try to solve a civic problem? Research suggests that a person’s belief that his or her actions can make a difference is the greatest predictor of civic engagement. How to increase this sense of “civic efficacy” remains an open question. What is clear is the fact that it is important. Studies show that greater citizen engagement is associated with progress in communities’ ability to make tough decisions and improve quality of life (as indicated by such measures as infant mortality and lower rates of violence). But as Sean Martin McDonald of Frontline SMS notes, this is only the start of what should be a much broader conversation – a conversation about “what communities can (and should) learn from each other, and what our activism looks like in an era where many of us are practically connected, even where governments, laws, economies, and access keeps us apart.” Just beginning to ask a few simple questions brings the possibility of transformative change:

• What do people need to make their lives better?
• Are we helping them get those things?
• If not, how can we change what we’re doing?