35 talks I'm planning to watch: AI agents, civic tech, and digital democracy
· 5 min read
These are the talks I’m planning to watch. Not a retrospective, not a recommendation post — just a snapshot of what’s sitting in my queue this weekend, annotated enough that I’ll remember why I put them there.
Two clusters. The first is software engineering and AI, mostly conferences from 2025. The second is civic tech and govtech, which I’ve been calling “civil tech” but probably should not — the field has a name and the name is civic tech.
Software engineering & AI
The AI engineering cluster runs from very practical (how to build reliable agents) to philosophical (what are we actually doing here). Dex Horthy appears twice because his 12-factor agents framing keeps coming up in conversations and I want to read the source, not the second-hand summaries.
Civic tech / govtech
This is the cluster I’m more interested in right now. I work in public administration in Rondônia and I’ve been thinking about what it would take for accountability data to actually reach the people who should be reading it. The Brazilian videos are where I start. The international ones are where I go for mental models that Brazil hasn’t built yet.
Brazil
Querido Diário: hoje eu tornei um Diário Oficial acessível para todo mundo — entry point to the project: municipal official gazettes made searchable and usable. This is the Open Knowledge Brasil project for extracting and centralizing official municipal gazette data with a public API.
Navegando na API do Querido Diário — the more useful one if I actually want to build something on top of the data.
Navegando no site do Querido Diário — less technical, good for seeing the public-facing UX before diving into the API.
Brasil.IO: Dados abertos para mais democracia — Álvaro Justen — Brasil.IO is a repository of Brazilian public data in accessible formats. A classic of Brazilian open-data infrastructure.
Ativismo digital e tecnologia cívica — Operação Serenata de Amor — older, but important. Serenata de Amor / Rosie used AI to analyze reimbursed parliamentary spending under CEAP and flag suspicious cases. One of the canonical Brazilian civic-tech stories.
DadosJusBr — I’m following the project more than looking for a single video. Highly relevant: structured remuneration and transparency data for the Judiciary and Ministério Público. The kind of thing that should be standard and isn’t.
Abroad
AI Studio: Solving government’s PDF problem with AI — Code for America Summit 2025 — PDFs as the graveyard of public information. Relevant everywhere, but especially in Brazilian public administration where the PDF is load-bearing infrastructure.
Putting policy to work: Guiding AI use inside government — Code for America Summit 2025 — procurement, guardrails, implementation. The better civic-tech version of “AI in government,” without the demo magic.
How Summer EBT is delivering on a new promise for families — Code for America Summit 2025 — concrete benefits-delivery civic tech. GetCalFresh helped 6.2 million people get food benefits from 2017–2025. That is the unit of measurement I want to be using.
vTaiwan: new experiments in digital democracy — Taiwan is probably the world’s most interesting case for civic tech that actually touched governance. The g0v ecosystem is decentralized, transparent, and has shipped things that worked.
How digital democracy can heal polarisation — Audrey Tang — the philosophical version: not just better forms, but different institutional affordances.
Decidim secret sauce: Building an international community — Decidim is a free/open platform for citizen participation. Infrastructure for participatory processes and assemblies.
Scaling Deliberation: Polis and the Computational Democracy Project — one of the most interesting “AI + democracy” lines: Polis tries to find consensus structure rather than maximize engagement. Opposite of social media.
The Department of Government Improvement: Civic Tech and Why It Matters — 18F/USDS framing: government improvement as craft, not ideology.
2025 State of Digital Public Infrastructure Report Launch — the broader “digital public infrastructure” frame: identity, payments, data exchange, public rails. The Digital Public Goods Alliance framing is useful here.
Watch order I’m following
The civic tech sequence matters more than the AI one, so I’m starting there:
- Querido Diário API — Brazilian data liberation, close to home
- Brasil.IO: Dados abertos para mais democracia — the infrastructure that makes the data usable
- AI Studio: government’s PDF problem — where AI meets public administration concretely
- Summer EBT / GetCalFresh — benefits delivery as the unit of real civic-tech success
- vTaiwan — the most complete case study of civic tech that actually changed governance
- Polis / Computational Democracy — the mathematical infrastructure for deliberation at scale
- Decidim — the platform layer for participatory processes
That sequence moves from Brazilian data liberation → public-service delivery → deliberative and democratic infrastructure. It ends at questions I don’t know how to answer yet, which is usually a sign the queue is worth the time.
Related posts
GitHub: a tour of the repositories I maintain (and why they exist)
Sixty-four public repos, grouped by theme. A short tour for whoever lands lost.
Three Hammers Walk Into a Bar
On three professional postures, four alignment properties, and the one property that had to come from elsewhere.
The Agent That Doesn't Invent Verbs
On Cucumber, content-addressing, and an alignment technique that turns out to be older than alignment.
Comments
Comments not configured yet.