We’ve established that transforming civilization requires an ontological shift — from a worldview of separation and competition to one of interbeing and mutual responsibility. Joanna Macy calls this civilizational transition “The Great Turning.” But how does such a vast transformation actually happen?
It begins in small pockets — what some call “islands of coherence” — where new ways of being take root and gradually develop their own culture, institutions, and infrastructures. When networked together, these islands can grow into systems of influence capable of making old systems obsolete. This is the territory of open civic innovation.
Prefer to read the full thesis? Read a PDF
What is Civic Innovation
Source: Wiki
Despite a contemporary connotation with roads, bridges, and arduous town hall meetings, the origin of civics relates to an act of service, the choice to care for the life of another for no reason other than a profound devotion to the web of relationships that make our lives possible. Reclaiming this original spirit in a contemporary context, civics is both the creation and stewardship of civilizational systems of care.
In our contemporary context of centralized bureaucracies and corporations, little is currently expected of citizens with regards to civic service, the stewardship of our commons and communities. Where centralized government agencies do provide a necessary function of scale, they are often ineffective at resource allocation and are vulnerable to corruption and capture. The current role of citizen has devolved into either that of a passive recipient of government services or a voter for various levels of bureaucracy and executive authorities.
Humanity is beginning to remember that, as participants in civil society, we are all citizens of our world, and it is our mutual responsibility as citizens to serve as civic stewards. As civic stewards, it’s up to us to create the conditions of mutually assured thriving. The choice to be a civic steward is to take responsibility for our civilization with courage, creativity, and devotion.
And when our systems of civic stewardship are insufficient to empower the necessary adaptive response to shifting circumstances or crises, some civic stewards rise into the role of civic innovator. The choice to be a civic innovator is to take responsibility for the improvement of civic systems that empower others to be civic stewards.
Civic innovation is the collaborative improvement of civic systems that are important for the public good. Civic innovation seeks to restore and renew the spirit of collective stewardship of our commons and communities by providing novel mechanisms for civic stewardship. When our legacy civic institutions fail to provide such mechanisms for holistic well-being and collective stewardship, it falls to us as innovators and as citizens to define and implement our own solutions.
The scope and scale of civic innovation required to meet our present moment of existential risk and civilizational collapse is unique in the course of human history. While all epoch-defining transitions have been consequential and all-consuming, never before has a globalized human civilization, equipped with existential exponential technologies, engaged in the degree of socio-economic reconfiguration required of us now. And yet, we can take heart in the knowledge that such transitions have occurred, however messily, throughout the history of our species. In each case, the imaginations of the civic innovators of those times were constrained and informed by the civilizational failures that they experienced. In our particular case, we are directly facing a world mired in the disastrous consequences of exponentially centralizing wealth and power. In dialogue with the systemic nature of these outcomes, we can envision a pluralistic society in which our civic infrastructures localize and distribute flows of resources and decision-making authority via open, participatory, and composable mechanisms.
This spirit of responsible civic stewardship as innovators calls for an open civics: a design philosophy for distributed collaboration and civilizational stewardship that engages in the evolutionary adaptation of our core civilizational systems via the direct participation of citizens. This philosophical approach engages the public and all relevant stakeholders in a participatory design process that empowers civic organizers, innovators, and patrons to work better, together. An “open civics’‘ implies an approach to civic innovation that is non-rivalrous, non-enclosable, self-determined, and composable by citizens. These civic innovations can be best conceived as “open protocols,” patterns of human coordination that provide the same civilizational services and utilities as traditional institutions using a networked approach.
stigmergy
a mechanism of indirect coordination in which the trace left by an action in a medium stimulates subsequent actions… [Stigmergy] enables complex, coordinated activity without any need for planning, control, communication, simultaneous presence, or even mutual awareness. The resulting self-organization is driven by a combination of positive and negative feedbacks, amplifying beneficial developments while suppressing errors.
The emerging Decentralized Civics (DeCiv) movement is modeling networked civilizational systems based on the pluralistic and participatory development of open-source software, stigmergic living systems patterns, open standards bodies, the symbiotic intelligence of an artistic or cultural scene, and commons self-governance principles. In an open civic system, institutions are supplemented or altogether replaced by extitutions (external, open organizations), infrastructures by open protocols (open-source, decentralized systems), and extractive incentives by prosocial incentives (rewards that encourage cascading benefits).
A key historical example of extitutional self-organization is the Free Breakfast for School Children Program (or the People’s Free Food Program), a community service program run by the Black Panther Party that provided free breakfasts for children before school. The program emerged in direct response to the inadequacies of the federal government’s under-resourced public school lunches. Run almost entirely by volunteer women from neighborhoods across the United States, this self-organizing pattern was a key political strategy for the black nationalist movement as it revealed the community’s collective power to meet their own needs without relying upon large institutions. The FBI’s COINTELPRO (a syllabic abbreviation derived,American political organizations that the) attacked and defamed the breakfast program and then, in the early 1970’s, Governor Ronald Reagan’s administration created a statewide free breakfast program with an underlying objective to seize the political power the Black Panther Party had gained. By enabling and empowering this type of civilizational stewardship from the bottom up through technological and social mechanisms that are inherently evolutionary, consensual, and adaptive to our current crises, we meet the existential failure modes of our current systems through the development of cosmo-local design patterns.
Cosmo-localism refers to the dynamic interplay between global coordination and hyperlocal participation. The notion of cosmo-localism allows for self-determination at the most local scale of an infrastructure or design pattern while enabling scaling, federation, and nesting into larger social bodies or associations. This pluralistic and composable approach to infrastructures, incentives, and institutions is simultaneously a strategy for enhanced system anti-fragility as well as an evolutionary feedback cycle that preempts the kinds of institutional decay and capture we face today. By designing civic systems according to this design philosophy, we envision an exciting new phase of open civic innovation; a Cambrian explosion of experiments in self-governance and self-determination that transforms the blighted landscapes of our social and ecological commons into a thriving substrate for mutual solidarity and well-being.
When networked together in the spirit of mutual solidarity through processes of consensual alignment at global and local scales, these experiments enable the development of dual power in place and network effects online, which can be leveraged to adapt or replace legacy institutions. Highly localized experiments in alternative civic systems which neglect the design imperatives of global interoperability may face an existential threat, remaining insular and vulnerable to cooptation or out-right destruction by legacy institutions and incentive models if they lack networked support, legitimacy, and funding. If successful, this distributed movement of alternative civic systems, modeled on the underlying ontology of interbeing, will form the foundations of a parallel society, a fork of our current civilization that will gradually draw energy, resources, and attention from our legacy systems. Investments in these parallel systems offer a pathway to compost capital through close loop value chains, removing our need for continuous non-profit funding by creating alternative economies that shift the incentive landscape from the grassroots to bioregional to planetary scales.
dual power
The creation and coexistence of two competing political frameworks within the same space. This concept involves the establishment of alternative, autonomous structures and institutions that operate outside of and in opposition to existing state and capitalist systems. The goal is to build a liberatory power that can eventually replace the dominant power structures, fostering a society based on self-organization, mutual aid, and direct democracy.
Historical examples of similarly innovative civic experiments range from the Zapatista Movement in Mexico to the Sunflower Revolution in Taiwan and the Democratic Autonomy Movement in Rojava. The Democratic Autonomy movement in Rojava arose in the context of institutional collapse during the Syrian Civil War, filling a power vacuum created by the conflict. Their anarcho-socialist parallel society prevails amidst these precarious conditions. While the Zapatistas have maintained their own social contract for decades without being captured by the Mexican federal government, they have failed to leverage their dual power to influence their legacy institutions to the same degree that the Taiwanese Sunflower Movement achieved. The Taiwanese protest movement culminated in a negotiated deal that successfully asserted new forms of participatory civic innovation into their existing institutions through the vTaiwan and g0v programs and methodologies. These contrasting approaches reveal the strategic necessity to assert influence and develop dual power for the success of nonviolent social movements.
DeCiv also draws inspiration from the decentralized science movement, or DeSci, which posits that the scientific method can be applied through egalitarian, decentralized means, effectively opening the process of scientific discovery beyond the boundaries of large academic institutions. Similarly, decentralized civics is a field of applied research conducted by citizens, technologists, and community organizers to develop and deploy novel civic systems as open-source, participatory public protocols that provide for critical civilizational functions.
We envision a future in which open civic innovation evolves into a widely recognized and well-compensated field of prosocial socio-technical design, in which all citizens are empowered to listen to the needs of their communities and develop new civic systems that directly improve their community’s quality of life.
To formalize, engage, and ethically steward this emerging field of practice, we feel it is necessary to form the OpenCivics Network, a community of practice and coordinating body for civic innovators, community organizers, and patrons in the civic domain. Similar to the role the Token Engineering Commons has played in the emerging field of token engineering by providing legitimizing and scientific grounding, we feel a responsibility to ensure an ethical and coordinated effort amongst civic innovators to create foundational utilities that empower civic stewardship and serve collective well-being.
The applied field of civic innovation and civilization system design has many antecedents and draws from many related disciplines, new and old. To catalyze a revitalization of the field and empower a more distributed approach to civilizational design while maintaining a shared ethical foundation, this thesis proposes three civilizational health indicators. These indicators offer lenses through which we can evaluate and understand the outputs of any open civic system that we may contribute towards as innovators:
Vitality is Life’s capacity to create more Life, the embodied state of thriving that emerges from the interconnected levels of well-being and quality of life for individuals, communities, and ecologies.
Resilience is the state of and the capacity for adaptive self-organization sufficient to provide core life-support function across changing world circumstances.
Choice is the state of fundamental respect for the sovereign agency of all beings and the capacity of individual agents to express their agency and influence their circumstances.
These principles have been derived and distilled from a combination of systems thinking and first principles outlined by thinkers like Donella Meadows, Elinor Ostrom, and Daniel Schmachtenberger. In particular, Daniel Schmachtenberger’s insights on the systemic drivers of the crises we face have provided a critical set of design criteria for new systems, new infrastructures, institutions, and incentives that are sufficient to effectively respond to and address what Daniel calls “the meta-crisis.”
We’ve now mapped the territory of open civic innovation: the emergence of islands of coherence, the principles of cosmo-localism and dual power, and historical examples from the Black Panthers to Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement. In our next chapter, we’ll confront our current moment directly: the convergence of crises that Barbara Marx Hubbard described as “a birth.” Understanding the depth of our predicament is essential to understanding why distributed coordination isn’t optional — it’s existential.
Series:
Chapter 4: Civic Innovation & Open Civics ← This Chapter
Chapter 5: Our Crisis is a Birth
Chapter 6: The Three Attractors
Chapter 7: A Post-Tragic Protopian Audacity
Chapter 8: Open Civic Culture
Chapter 9: Open Civic Systems — Architecture & Transformation
Chapter 10: Open Civic Systems — Design Principles & Living Systems
Chapter 11: Our Choice
Brilliant! I've sent this on to Eric Liu from Citizen University who I've mentioned a number of times. https://citizenuniversity.us/. I want him to read the series and finally reached out and wrote a note. We need this....I love that you've resurrected the bright light of the Black Panthers who were doing their best to support their communities. Cointelpro took them down and turned them into the enemy. We need to highlight the deeper history, so thank you. I look forward to reading the other chapters :)
And I love the graphic, a new kind of sacred geometry through the eye of the needle.