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What is CivicOS?

CivicOS is an open-source civic engagement platform where citizens report issues, sign petitions, follow their representatives, answer consultations, fund local work, and see what actually gets done — with everything on a public record scoped to the community it affects.

Today (MVP release) it runs as one deployment covering Nigeria's 36 states + FCT and 774 LGAs.

The three types of people who use it​

  • Citizens — the majority of users. Verified email accounts. They report issues in their primary community, sign petitions, comment, upvote, follow representatives, respond to consultations, and donate to community funding campaigns.
  • Representatives — elected officials whose applications have been approved by a platform admin. Their public profile carries a response-rate metric that's visible to voters.
  • Organizations — public bodies, agencies, NGOs, or utilities with approved applications. They take responsibility for issues, run projects, post announcements, log progress updates, run consultations, and — once verified and with a payout account connected — raise money through Community Funding.

Behind them, platform admins review applications, verify organizations, and moderate content — every action they take goes on the audit log.

What makes it "community-scoped"​

Every issue, petition, and representative belongs to a community — a state + LGA pair. Citizens have a primary community (their home constituency, where they can create things) and an active community (what they're viewing/acting in for signatures, comments, upvotes).

Community scoping does two things:

  1. Keeps signal local. People in Enugu East don't get their feed drowned out by chatter from Lagos Island.
  2. Prevents vote-stacking. You can only create issues in your primary community, and you can only change primary community once every 30 days.

What it is not​

  • Not a social network. No follows-for-follows, no algorithmic feed optimized for engagement. Content is community-scoped and time-ordered with an explicit tier system (community → LGA → state → country).
  • Not anonymous, with one exception. Comments, upvotes, signatures and reports all carry a verified account's name — anonymity works against accountability. Donations are the exception: a donor can give without appearing publicly, because naming someone who gave ₦2,000 to a flood appeal holds nobody to account. The donation is still recorded and reconciled.
  • Not a replacement for the ballot box. Elections still matter. CivicOS is what happens between them.
  • Not a hotline. Reports are public. They go on the record, not into a private queue.

Money, and what CivicOS is not doing with it​

Organizations can raise funds for specific pieces of work — a borehole, a culvert, relief after a flood. One fact shapes the whole feature: CivicOS is not the merchant of record. Donations settle straight into the organization's own bank account. The platform never holds the money, cannot withdraw it, and cannot verify how it was spent.

What CivicOS provides instead is a durable public record: what was asked for, what came in, what the organization says it did with it, and what it has not accounted for. That record is real and permanent. It is not the same thing as a guarantee, and the product says so everywhere it shows a number.

The shape of the platform​

CivicOS is four Go microservices behind a single API gateway — identity, community, organization and CivicAI — plus two React apps (citizen web, admin console) and this documentation site. The whole platform is described declaratively in a single render.yaml — one Blueprint deploy brings it all up.

If you're a developer curious about the internals, see the Developer Guide. Everything from the DI conventions to the SSE notification hub is documented there.

How to try it​

Local development is fully covered in Running locally. In production, CivicOS runs at civicos.ng (custom domain — pointed at a Render deploy in front of managed Postgres + Redis).

Where to next​