Civic Tech DC · Archive Dig
Ideas Graveyard
Thirteen years of Code for DC and Civic Tech DC left behind nearly a hundred repositories. Most went quiet; some held genuinely good ideas that ran out of runway. This is the records room: files worth reviving, projects alive right now, and an empty drawer for the idea you haven't filed yet.
Why files end up here
Four patterns from thirteen years of stalled repos. Read them before you file a new idea.
Tied to one cycle
Projects built for a single election, budget year, or event stalled the day it passed. Design for the second cycle from day one.
Infra outlived the team
Self-hosted stacks rotted once the one person who ran them moved on. Choose boring, cheap hosting.
No path to the data
Projects that depended on a dataset or partner that never materialized stayed prototypes. Secure the data source before writing code.
One maintainer deep
When the initiating volunteer left, the project followed. Recruit a co-owner early, not after the first stall.
No files match that search.
How this was made. On 24 July 2026, a swarm of 97 AI agents (one per repo) read each repository's README and metadata and scored the underlying idea for revival potential. This is a scouting report on ideas, not a code review — treat every assessment as a lead to verify, not a verdict. Stall reasons are inferred from repo evidence unless stated otherwise. In August 2026 a web scan checked every dormant file against current official and public tools; superseded files record what replaced them. This public version is curated: private repositories, empty placeholders, mirrors of external tools, and internal infrastructure repos are omitted from the full scan.
Tiers. Revive files are dormant but worth a second life. Active repos were pushed within the last year — join those instead of starting fresh. Superseded files record what replaced them.
Filing a new idea. New proposals get added by the organizers. Bring yours to a project night or start a thread in Slack, and if it finds legs it gets a folder here with your name on it.
Repository names link to GitHub · github.com/civictechdc