By 2030, it's estimated that more than 5 billion people will live in urban settings. Therefore, it's imperative for cities to integrate technology into their infrastructure so that metropolian areas can sustain this rapid growth in population.

With hackathons and app challenges, we've seen the emergence of civic startups, like SeeClickFix, and we're now seeing the rise of "civic accelerators."

We all know startup accelerators like Y Combinator and 500 Startups — they've given rise to game-changing companies like Dropbox, Airbnb and Wildfire Interactive, which was acquired by Google earlier this year.

Civic accelerators, on the other hand, hone startups that are focused on leveraging technology and government data to make cities run better. The organization putting the biggest stake in the ground is Code for America, launched in 2009 by Jennifer Pahlka, who describes it as "a Peace Corps for geeks."

"Technology is making it possible to fundamentally reframe the function of government in a way that can actually scale by strengthening civil society," says Pahlka in a TED talk (below). The web enables neighbors and fellow citizens to easily connect, but for cities to benefit, the government needs to get involved to, as Pahlka explains it, "architect the systems the right way." CfA's fellowship program is a step in that direction.

Thus far, CfA's 26 fellows — who average 28 years old — have developed 21 apps for the cities of Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle, Austin, Chicago and more. And most are pretty simple. One app asks people to adopt a fire hydrant in Boston and make sure it's usable 24/7 (i.e. not buried in snow) in case of an emergency. The idea was adapted by the City of Honolulu, but tweaked so that citizens could adopt tsunami sirens (batteries are often stolen). These are simple ideas that would cost the city a lot of tax dollars to do by itself, but with the collective power of the web, a few good citizens and built-in game dynamics, the citizens are empowered to look after their own city. So when a fire breaks out in Boston or a tsunami threatens the Hawaii's shores, the city — and citizens — knows it's ready for it.

While civic technology might not be the sexiest sector, it's an area that's ripe for innovation. All that bureaucracy everyone chides has had a wonderful byproduct — it's collected a lot of data over the years. Were that data to be digitized and made actionable through APIs and innovative apps, our cities could reach a new level of efficiency, saving millions or billions of taxpayer dollars in the process — a welcome break in the face of budget cuts.

And so taking the program a step further, Code for America announced a civic accelerator in June; more than 235 startups applied. The teams behind these 235+ ideas know that technology and innovation have an important role to play in government, and seven startups were selected. The program is winding down, and the startups will demo their products on October 30. Mashable spoke with a few startups in the accelerator and the program's director and strategist to discuss how the accelerator is paving the way for better cities through technology.

The Civic Accelerator

Prior to the launch of the accelerator, civic startups existed — many of the seven selected had been around for a while, as had SeeClickFix, one of the advisers in the accelerator. But there was a tremendous lack of visibility of the space. "The term 'civic startup' hasn't yet crept into the Silicon Valley vernacular," says Abhi Nemani, the CfA's director of strategy and communications. "We're hoping to change that."

"There is something very big starting to happen at the intersection of the consumerization of the enterprise and government."

The seven startups in the four-month program are Aunt Bertha, LearnSprout, Captricity, Measured Voice, Mindmixer, Recovers.org and Revelstone, and they each receive a $25,000 seed grant, mentoring in the Gov 2.0 space, marketing help, and networking with investors, government officials and civic leaders, who are fully aware of the potential role of technology in modern government. The selection committee was comprised of investors, entrepreneurs and government leaders, who selected the seven startups based on their product, team, traction and business model, market opportunity and civic impact, explains Nemani. In other words: How these companies can make our cities work better.

And that's an important clarification — because "civic startup" isn't yet a fully recognized term, its meaning can often be confused with "social entrepreneurship" or "social enterprise," which accelerator director Ron Bouganim says is "more often associated with companies that do important work for the benefit of society, but are often not highly profitable enterprises." That's not the case with many civic startups, Bouganim says, adding that several of the accelerator companies are seeing double-digit monthly usage growth, and one is seeing 100% quarter-over-quarter revenue growth in the millions of dollars and has already received funding from prominent Silicon Valley VCs. "This is an entirely new class of enterprise SaaS software businesses that happen to have chosen government — and the massive new opportunities there — as an important vertical," says Bouganim. "There is something very big starting to happen at the intersection of the consumerization of the enterprise and government."

SEE ALSO: Twitter and Airbnb Founders Want to Build a Smarter City

Revelstone is a cloud-based software company that helps local governments manage better with performance analytics, benchmarking and peer learning. It's currently implemented in several New Jersey towns and Wyoming, Ohio, and it shows promise as a tool for data-driven government. Mark Nelson and his Revelstone co-founder spent the last 20 years in the private sector, implementing performance management systems at Fortune 500 companies. "As the economy became challenged over the past few years, we started to realize that governments lacked the tools and more importantly, information about their performance, to make difficult budget decisions that impact services to citizens," he says.

Revelstone launched last year and had a few city clients on board before joining the accelerator, but Nelson lauds the CfA experience for, as it set out to do, accelerating civic innovation. "On most days, we’ve had the chance to work with CfA mentors, who are some of the Silicon Valley tech rock stars, like Tim O’Reilly and Caterina Fake," he says, adding that the program lets his team work “on” the business, instead of “in” the business.

“The old way of doing business needs to change."

The intersection of civic organizations and tech startups is an exciting frontier. As Jay Nath, chief innovation officer of San Francisco tells Mashable, "We're no longer simply collecting taxes and providing a service." He says government ought to do more, transparently working with and engaging constituents to solve the challenges that face society with innovative ideas. Captricity CEO Kuang Chen agrees, saying, "There's growing, if not already widespread, recognition within government agencies that the old way of doing business needs to change, if nothing else to meet new constraints around shrinking budgets."

One step governments can take to modernize is to digitize data, which is precisely what Captricity does. Earlier this month, Captricity launched an Open Data Portal that enables governments to digitize, redact and share their datasets with the world. Chen says the accelerator connected his startup with decision-makers at various levels of government, from local brigade leaders to state politicians, helping to spread his vision and the idea that digitization is key for civic innovation. Chen says the political figures he's met through the accelerator are in favor of such innovation, and they understand the value and power of leveraging technology and open data to develop government as a platform.

With just seven startups, the accelerator class is pretty small, enabling personalized attention and more collaboration among the startups and with government officials. "We are all focused on municipal governments, and our experiences are relevant for each other," says Nelson. "We have shared and discussed our strategies about business models, marketing strategies to sales compensation."

Chen agrees that the resources available to CfA accelerator startups are unparalleled, especially in the civic space, where the potential of technology hasn't been fully realized. "Accelerator companies have the opportunity to bounce ideas off Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, as well as connect with the forward-thinking individuals quietly changing government from the inside, like John Tolva, the CTO of Chicago," says Chen.

And the open dialogue the accelerator fosters between startups and government insiders are appreciated by both sides of the conversation. Jay Nath, who's working with the CfA accelerator, tells Mashable, “I think it’s really important that the government reflect our citizens and the ethos and values that they have. In our culture, it’s about agility, it’s about leanness — it’s really about [being] scrappy. And we expect government to be the same way.”

Nemani agrees, and he and the CfA team have held these beliefs for a while. Back in May 2011 — more than a year before the accelerator was announced — he told Mashable about the importance of integrating tech into government: "Leveraging technology is not just a nice or ‘cool’ thing to do — it’s critical if governments are going to cut costs while still providing core services."

Conclusion

Nemani says that in the next three to five years, we should see a "real startup ecosystem for the civic space," with entrepreneurs developing new ideas, VCs investing in them, media covering their developments and governments clamoring for more innovative ideas. "The pieces are starting to come together, but we need more support from every sector to make that vision real," he says.

Many governments are adapting to modern times, and they know tech is a solution for many civic problems — New York brought on Rachel Haot as a Chief Digital Officer last year, Nath is San Francisco's Chief Innovation Officer, and even Rhode Island — a state that might not evoke startups and tech innovation — recently brought on a chief digital officer.

Cities large and small are exploring what tech can do for them, and a few, like Philadelphia, Chicago and Seattle, are learning that buttressing civic startups breeds civic innovations, which create better cities for everyone. And unlike most things concerning government, better cities is something we can all agree on.