CITIZENTECH
Citizentech anchors community co-development in data, ethics, and resilience for product and process developments translatable and adaptable to scale.

What makes Citizentech tech?

What makes Citizentech citizen?
Citizentech develops community-grounded dignity-first solutions. We identify urgent community needs, especially for resilience and adaptation. Then we co-develop right size and right fit solutions:
  • license tech to solve urgent and researched issues
  • explore adoption of tech for new applications 
  • refine processes and systems
  • work deeply with communities to identify issues and right size/right fit solutions.

Product Line A for Adaptation

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Our mobile app interface in process
Problems: 
  • Farmers in the US and globally maintain a highest suicide rate. The anxiety of farming never dies down. In the best of circumstances and the best of worlds, weather can ruin the work of any level or size of farmer.
  • Farmers assume risk that we ask of nearly no one in any other industry, putting themselves, their families, property, prosperity, money on the line, and then waiting to get paid. They assume all the risk of the production, the financing, the infrastructure, the feed, the inputs, and the equipment. And then the markets or weather can turn all of that hard work upside down. 
Our Solution: an analytics platform + hard tech integration
This research-based analytics platform centers decision-making designed for farmers, and others, on the frontlines of escalating weather volatility and transforms reactive behaviors into proactive adaptation strategy and connection.
Status: pilot, expansion, refinement,  licensing, and commercialization​

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Timeline

Winter 2025-2026
Secured participation in Equalize Startups for 2026.
Co-founder added. 
Technical Consultant team secured.
Moving to evaluation and prototype development.

Fall 2025
Citizentech founder accepted as a Phase 1 Fellow for climate tech frontier accelerator Labstart.
Cook Marshall also completes commercialization training through North Carolina Innovation.

Summer 2025
Hard tech and sensors input conceived.
Existent IP identified for evaluation and integration.
Citizentech spinout founded.

Spring 2025
Analytics platform enters MVP.

2024
Hurricane Helene hits, and research team re-calibrates aim of assistance.

Five Co-PIs and research assistants begin research and development. Deep discovery interviews conducted with farmers. Analytics platform in development.

Fall 2023
Hiring and campus-based team activated.

Spring 2023
$650,000 in grant support achieved.

Fall 2022
Cook Marshall assembles research team at NCAT to investigate best fit/right fit for a tool to support farmers/farmworkers in despair from stress/anxiety, especially their #1 stressor--weather.
Citizentech's in-house developed community-based innovation lab (CBIL) works with citizens from urban to rural to identify urgent needs and co-collaborate for defined and actionable tech, material, and process solutions.
​Citizentech centers community-based innovation as the core of community problem-solving.​

Product Line C for Citizen

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Destruction from Hurricane Helene
Hard Tech
Sciences of Dignity
Problem: As the climate is drastically shifted, water, soil, air, and weather analysis must become accessible and on demand for farmers, villages, towns, municipalities, cities, and individuals as they contend with weather events, emergencies, increasing resilience, and being left on their own to respond to and prepare for climate crises.
Our Solution:
An analytics platform + hardtech multi-tool that centers expertise access through hardware democratization.
  • ​Working with university-based research that is researching and adapting licensable hard tech into increasingly smaller and lower-cost accessible sensors and analytical tools for water, soil, air, and weather this research converts elite or inaccessible scientific analysis tech into everyday resilience in-the-hand infrastructure.
  • Citizentech will license and manufacture a multi-tool device to empower farmers, emergency managers, villages, towns, municipalities, and developing communities to track and respond immediately through hard tech and mobile connection to risks like biological water and soil contamination, drought, air quality, and extreme weather.
Status: identification, partnering, off-the-shelf adaptation and mobile tech integration, funding

Community-based Innovation Labs (CBILs)

Citizentech’s community-based innovation mobile labs and model reclaim the promise of maker culture but this time through hyperlocal community-driven adaptations and invention. Through structured participation, communities and Citizentech:
  • co-identify urgent needs
  • co-invent or adapt tools, materials, and processes
Then, 
  • Citizentech partners for fabrication for the community
  • Citizentech works with the community for analysis and potential commercialization.
  • Citizentech partners with researchers, labs, industry and capital to get these hard tech tools to the sites that co-developed as pilots and to market, or when appropriate and affordable, as open source DIY plans. 
Rather than relying on slow-moving, centralized innovation, Citizentech CBILs mobilize grassroots' and grasstops' creativity to solve immediate and urgent material problems, while creating equitable pathways to market, reinvestment, and resilience.
Status: Working in communities in Appalachia and the US South. Citizentech can work with your community remotely or live worldwide!
By working with communities, Citizentech creates a pipeline of adaptation hard tech for faster, lighter-on-its-feet, and broader dissemination. 
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