We're building a public, inspectable ranking of civic and political technology projects — the kind of tools that help citizens understand institutions, participate in democracy, and hold power to account.

The Political Technology Awards is an open evaluation exercise run by the 2025–26 Newspeak House fellowship cohort. We're building a public, inspectable ranking of civic and political technology projects — the kind of tools that help citizens understand institutions, participate in democracy, and hold power to account.

Our evaluation process is iterative and transparent. We use a scoring algorithm that evolves over time. Each version applies different heuristics and produces a ranked list. The algorithm lives in a public GitHub repo; you can inspect the code, the pull requests, and the rationale for every change. We may add written assessments per project as the evaluation matures.

Rankings are political. By making our process transparent and iterative, we hope to surface both strong projects and the tradeoffs inherent in any evaluation framework. A simple tool that empowers marginalized communities ranks higher than a technically impressive platform that reinforces existing power structures.