Tal Roded

Case study · Directory and network

A public map of 329 organizations working to make government work

Civic tech nonprofits, academic labs, think tanks and government teams all work on state capacity, with no shared map of who does what. With my co-organizers, I built one.

329organizations in the directory
4co-organizers
Dailyautomatic refresh from the directory

A directory, search and network map on one site

Henry Grunzweig curates the State Capacity Ecosystem directory, and I co-organize the network with him, Jeremie Ponak and Sourabh Chakraborty. I built statecapacityecosystem.com on top of the directory: search in plain language, a page for every organization, an affinity map of which groups work on similar things, and a hub for the network's hackathons, demo nights and salons.

The site rebuilds itself from the directory every day

  • A daily automated job pulls the latest directory export and rebuilds every page, so a new organization appears the day after it is added.
  • Search matches plain-language questions to organizations by what they do, beyond keyword matches.
  • The affinity map scores how closely organizations' work overlaps and draws the network, with the method published on the site.

Coalitions and funders can see their whole field

A coalition, funder or membership network that keeps its members in a spreadsheet can have the same thing: a public or private directory with search, profiles and a network map, rebuilt automatically from the spreadsheet you already maintain.

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