Something is composting.

Across technology, journalism, philanthropy, and civic organizing, longstanding institutions are going into hibernation. Ethereum is repositioning. Folk Tech and Relational Tech projects are organizing around tools for local resilience. Neighborhood organizers are working alongside bioregionalists to build alternatives that don’t depend on traditional institutions.

This creates an emergence window — and OpenCivics was built for exactly this kind of moment.

Our 2026 Q2 Quarterly Strategy is now live. It’s the first full planning cycle under OpenCivics Phase 02, and it was shaped not just by our stewards but by consortium members who showed up with vision and practical imagination during our March strategy session. Here’s what’s in it — and how to participate.

Read the strategy →

Summary of the strategy below…

The Orientation

The annual theme emerging across our work is “Become the Coordination Failure Response Swarm.”

The cascading crises we face don’t call for a centralized response. They call for a distributed and coordinated one. OpenCivics exists to be the interstitial connective tissue that makes that coordination possible — infrastructure that makes visible, legible, and actionable the relationships of solidarity that already exist but lack meaningful ways to be affirmed.

We’ve spent years building design methodology and network membranes. Now we make them pulse with participation.

The operating principles for this quarter are simple: under-promise, over-deliver. This is our first formal cycle. People aren’t sure about our follow-through. We prove it with action, not promises.

What We’re Doing

Enlivening the Consortium

We’re revitalizing our bi-weekly Network Assemblies with Civic Innovator Sessions — practitioners at the frontier of civic infrastructure presenting to our community. We’re activating our delegate and advisor structures so they function with life, not just form. And we’re shipping the backlog: case studies, foundation materials, website pages, and member applications that have been waiting too long.

We’re also defining genuine health indicators for the organization — not vanity metrics, but measures that reflect whether this work is actually generating the kind of vitality and follow-through that matters.

New this quarter: a documented contributor onboarding pathway. We’ve had people offering to help and haven’t had the capacity to receive it well. That changes now.

Establishing Reliable Rhythms

Connection doesn’t happen by accident. It requires consistent, reliable spaces where people can show up, find each other, and build trust over time.

This quarter we’re launching Open Civic Signals — a regular external-facing pulse that synthesizes what’s happening in the field: who’s doing what, where the gaps are, and who to pay attention to. This includes monthly field notes documenting real-world coordination failures and how communities are responding.

We’re drawing from collective intelligence across the network — not just co-founder curation — and leveraging our existing agentic infrastructure to support knowledge commons ingest and processing. The practice of open civic innovation should be observable. The coordination landscape should be legible.

Building Fundraising Readiness

We’re creating the conditions by which funding can come to us: strategy, story, and social proof. A funding strategy document and fundraising deck grounded in real case studies. Fiscal sponsorship activation through the Buckminster Fuller Institute. Advisor engagement in refining the strategy and opening doors.

But here’s what our members told us matters most: mutualized fundraising capacity. Not just resourcing OpenCivics itself, but creating shared infrastructure that helps everyone in the network resource their work. A shared grants index. Open grant writing office hours. A bounty and contribution board so that participation can generate livelihood, not just governance process.

And our first experiment with a member census (which is also constitutionally mandated) launches this quarter — designed not as a bureaucratic exercise but as a publication-quality artifact that tells the story of our movement and fulfill one of the primary functions of the OpenCivics Network and Consortium.

What Members Surfaced

Our March 26 strategy session brought together perspectives that reshaped the plan in important ways.

Mutualization emerged as the core function. What are the patterns other groups have already figured out? What are the unmet needs of the space between all of us? Shared grants, shared volunteer capacity, shared onboarding, shared knowledge, shared tools. This active sharing of resources and intelligence across the network isn’t just implicit in our convening language — it’s a core function of what we’re building.

Knowledge preservation surfaced as urgent. Organizations entering hibernation risk losing institutional memory. OpenCivics can serve as a knowledge preservation and transfer hub — capturing oral histories and documentation before it’s lost. Funding exists for this kind of work.

Embodied democracy matters. Enlivening civic participation means more than governance process. It means physical community assets becoming sites of democratic practice — people doing democracy by happenstance, through shared activities and shared infrastructure.

The alliance landscape is richer than we name. From Citizens Infra to the Collaborative Technology Alliance to Open Machine’s work on diverse intelligence and cognitive security — there’s a dense web of adjacent communities that deserves mapping and intentional relating, even as we maintain a conservative posture on formalizing new commitments.

How to Get Involved

• Show up. Our bi-weekly Network Assemblies are open to all members. Bring your perspective, your questions, your stories.

• Contribute to the knowledge commons. Share links, field notes, and stories of coordination in action. We’re building collective intelligence infrastructure to make this visible.

• Join grant writing circles. Mutual support for funding — peer review, shared intelligence, coordinated applications.

• Become a contributor. Our onboarding pathway launches this quarter. If you’ve been waiting for the right moment, this is it.

• Share stories of open civic innovation happening in your context — members and non-members alike. We amplify and elevate the practice wherever it’s alive.

What Comes Next

Key milestones this quarter include the first Open Civic Signals broadcast (April 10), a funding strategy planning session (April 14), fundraising deck completion (May 22), the Quarterly Advisor Council (May 28), census launch (June 4), and our Q2 retrospective (June 25).

These dates are loose targets — they represent the sequence and timing that would need to happen for these objectives to land. We’ll adapt as things naturally evolve.

The full quarterly plan is available on the OpenCivics wiki for anyone who wants the detailed objectives, metrics, and session protocols.

—-

We’ve argued that collapse is not merely a threat, but a threshold — and that within the turbulence of the meta-crisis lies a narrow but viable path toward regeneration.

But frameworks and futures alone do not move the world.

At the heart of every civilizational transition is a moment of agency: a choice between disengagement and responsibility, between fear and participation, between leaving the future to inherited systems or taking part in its co-creation.

This final chapter is not a conclusion in the conventional sense. It is an invitation. A turning point. A recognition that while we cannot control what comes next, we can decide how we meet it—and who we become in the process.

What follows is not a command, a demand, or a prescription.

It is simply our choice.

Our Choice

Source: Wiki

“The impossible happens.” — R. Buckminster Fuller

Our collective future remains a mystery. And yet, around the world there is a rising yearning for profound systemic change. Ignored by legacy institutions of politics, media, and technology, this yearning can be harnessed by those who provide a sincere, distributed, and coordinated avenue for direct participation in the reimagining of our world.

We call the bluff of narratives of progress and naive techno-optimism that tell us to stay home on Tik Tok, placing orders on Amazon while the world burns around us and our so-called leaders continue to shred the future of the rising Millennial and Gen Z generations through further extraction, military spending and indebtedness.

While we cannot predict when a large-scale planetary revolution will occur, we can prepare the soil for its optimal success. We envision the next Occupy Wall Street, Arab Spring, or Sunflower Movement occurring with the support of the civic utilities we create today. Instead of protesting corrupted and dying institutions, the defining movements of the 21st century can and must hold a positive image of the future that expands the scope of our imagination and guides our collective action towards creativity and experimentation.

In these uncertain times, civilizational collapse scenarios are abundant. From top-soil degradation and food system collapse to climate mass migration to extreme weather to biological warfare and the looming threat of mass global conflict, we can’t predict when and how our systems will collapse, but we can say with certainty that the long disaster of late stage capitalism has already begun.

As such, it is our responsibility as innovators and as a public to build the lifeboats and parallel systems that can catch humanity as it falls from one social order into another. It is both our ethical duty as well as our transformative opportunity to align, coordinate, resource, collaborate, convene, and learn as a global community developing the civic infrastructures of a world built upon love, care, and mutuality, empowering the public to co-steward and self-determine our collective future, together.

We began and end this series with a dedication: “In Us We Trust.” We end with a choice.

Our collective future remains a mystery. And yet, around the world there is a rising yearning for profound systemic change. This yearning can be harnessed by those who provide a sincere, distributed, and coordinated avenue for direct participation in the reimagining of our world.

We cannot predict when a large-scale planetary revolution will occur, but we can prepare the soil for its optimal success. Instead of protesting corrupted and dying institutions, the defining movements of the 21st century can hold a positive image of the future that expands the scope of our imagination and guides our collective action towards creativity and experimentation.

It is our responsibility as innovators and as a public to build the lifeboats and parallel systems that can catch humanity as it falls from one social order into another. It is both our ethical duty and our transformative opportunity to align, coordinate, resource, collaborate, convene, and learn as a global community developing the civic infrastructures of a world built upon love, care, and mutuality.

In Us We Trust.

Series:

• Chapter 1: In Us We Trust

• Chapter 2: What is a Civilization

• Chapter 3: The Ontological Shift

• Chapter 4: Civic Innovation & Open Civics

• 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 ← This Chapter

Acknowledgements

Source: Wiki

This work is dedicated to all those who have carried the vision of a world grounded in consent, trust, and mutual benefit but did not live to see its ultimate fulfillment.

We extend our deepest gratitude to Timothy Archer, co-founder of OpenCivics. Without his early and significant contributions to the foundational concepts and architectures, OpenCivics may not have been birthed. His visionary work and initial efforts are the basis for many ideas within this thesis, network, and framework. Timothy’s unique role in laying many of its intellectual foundations remains deeply appreciated and honored.

We recognize that we also stand upon the shoulders of countless other individuals who have come before us, holding fast to the dream of a world that works for all. To those alive today who have chosen the challenging path of shifting human civilization toward a life-affirming future, we walk beside you, grateful for your courage and determination.

We are profoundly thankful for the guidance, wisdom, and insights offered by our mentors, peers, and collaborators. In particular, we extend a heartfelt thank you to Spencer Saar Cavanaugh, Richard Flyer, Aaron Brodeur, Charles Eisenstein, Erica Blair, Exeunt, Cameron Murdock, Sheri Herndon, Nathan Suits, Scott Morris, Ted Grand, Tracey Abbott, and Eric Lohela for their early feedback on this document. Their thoughtful input helped refine the ideas presented here, and their commitment to this work has been invaluable.

The current iteration of this document has been drafted, assembled and refined by OpenCivics co-founders Benjamin Life and Patricia Parkinson, who have taken great care to synthesize the multitude of contributions, inspirations, and feedback into what we believe is a seed of a coherent and actionable vision.

We also wish to acknowledge the broader intellectual and activist ecosystems that have informed the originality and creativity of this paper. Special thanks to the Sunflower and g0v Movements in Taiwan, the Democratic Autonomy movement in Rojava, The Pirate Party in Iceland, Partido De La Red in Argentina, Occupy Wall Street in the US, the Ada’itsx / Fairy Creek Blockade and Standing Rock movements, and the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement in Sri Lanka. The influence of Richard Flyer’s work on symbiotic culture, Joanna Macy’s “Great Turning” and the Work That Reconnects, Vandana Shiva’s Earth Democracy, and Buckminster Fuller’s visionary contributions, including Critical Path and Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth, are fundamental to the synthesis this document offers.

We further express our gratitude for the contributions of thinkers and doers that have expanded our understanding of complex design, civic, cooperation, and social systems, including Barbara Marx Hubbard, Kevin Owocki, Michel Bauwens, Sheri Herndon, Jamaica Stevens, Nora and Gregory Bateson, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Forrest Landry, Glen Weyl, Audrey Tang, Donella Meadows, Nathan Schneider, Margaret Wheatley, Christopher Life, Sophia Life, Ferananda Ibarra, Ilya Prigogine, Scott Morris, Toni Lane Casserly, Balaji Srinivasan, Primavera De Filippi, Raymond Powell, Joe Brewer, Samantha Sweetwater, Peter Russell, Adrienne Marie Brown, Nick Farr, David Graeber, Hanzi Freinacht, Ken Wilber, Tyson Yunkaporta, Jordan Hall, Jim Rutt, Exeunt, Elder Bill Jones, Satoshi Nakamoto, Vitalik Buterin, Zarinah Agnew, Christopher Alexander, Jacque Fresco, Joan Halifax, Albert Marshall, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Turquoise Sound, Roxanna Shohadaee, Nicolas Alcala, Ted Nelson, Jaron Lanier, Neri Oxman, Philip Shepherd, Niklas Luhmann, Jude Currivan, E.O. Wilson, Allen Saakyan, Tibet Sprague and Terran Collective, Herman Daly, Paul Watson, Bruce Mau, Otto Scharmer, Barbara Sher, Samantha Power, Edward West, Brandon Quittem, Reiki Cordon, Scarlet Masius, Anima LaVoy, Casey Fenton, Christopher Breedlove, David Casey, Stuart Cowan, Chelsea Restrum, David Sneider, Chris Cassano, Vital Sounouvou, Ashe Oro, Erica Blair, Sterlin Lujan, Marshal McLuhan, Dan Larimer, Brandon Graham Dempsey, Sadie Alwyn Moon, Fritjof Capra, Kevin Kelly, Caitlin Long, Jeff Stibel, Umberto Eco, Martin Keogh, Kenneth Mikkelsen, Richard Martin, Eric Hoffer, Vinay Gupta, Gary Dykstra, Francis Haugen, Dr. Zachary Stein, Nancy Stark Smith, Larry Harvey, Stuart Mangrum, Jordan Siegel, Nate Hagens, Susanna Choe, Gary Sheng, Jeff Emmett, and Phoebe Tickell.

A host of other visionary works and movements have also shaped this project, including the meta-crisis research of Kyle Kowalski, Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics, the Bhutanese Gross National Happiness Index, Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons, and the enduring lessons of the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program. Each of these efforts has helped guide the evolution of the Open Civics Framework.

Their work has enriched this thesis, particularly in areas of peer production, mutualism, pluralism, design science, participatory democracy, systems theory, emergence, integral theory, transdisciplinary innovation, cognitive liberty, metamodernism, speculative futures, collaborative technology, ecopsychology, evolutionary conciousness, voluntarism, digital nations, ontological design, modular civic infrastructures, bioregionalism, all-win civic culture, hyperstructures, anarchist political philosophy, indigenous knowledge systems, value flows, commons governance, cybernetics, complexity science, and our civic renaissance.

For every person and effort named here, we honor and acknowledge the unseen and unnamed people who have contributed in myriad ways to the cultural substrate and scenius from which this work emerged.

Now we arrive at the practical heart of the matter: how do we actually build these systems? What principles guide their design? How do we know if they’re working? And what does it mean to integrate these human systems with the patterns of living systems themselves?

Prefer to read the full thesis? Read a PDF

System Design Principles

Source: Wiki

As civic innovators build and deploy open protocols, civic utilities, and civic stacks that collectively form the civic hyper-structure of an open civic system, the following principles will be vital to ensure the strategic viability of such approaches. These characteristics or qualities are critical to ensure both theoretical and practical alignment with the open civic system design philosophy.

Modular refers to the design principle whereby a system is divided into separate, self-contained units or modules. Each module can function independently but can also be combined with other modules to create a more complex system. This approach allows for flexibility, scalability, and ease of maintenance, as individual modules can be updated or replaced without affecting the entire system. Modularity also empowers local communities to self-assemble their own compositions of various modules to meet their own needs based on their own goals and priorities.

Composable refers to the capability of any modular component of a system to be modified according to various parameters, enabling components to be configured to meet specific needs. In the context of open civic systems, composability allows for the fine tuning of modules to increase their adaptability and customization based on the unique requirements of different communities or projects.

Inclusivity ensures that the system is accessible and usable by all individuals, regardless of their background, abilities, or circumstances. In open civic systems, inclusivity involves designing with diverse user needs in mind, promoting equity, and ensuring that everyone can participate in and benefit from the system. This includes considerations for accessibility, language, and cultural relevance.

Interoperable describes the ability of different systems, organizations, or components to work together seamlessly. In open civic systems, interoperability ensures that various modules or platforms can exchange information and function together effectively, regardless of their underlying technologies or architectures. This is crucial for creating cohesive and efficient civic hyper-structures.

System Design Ethics

Source: Wiki

The end goal of open civic systems is not simply a mental exercise in alternative systems design. Open civic systems are inherently designed to increase the capacity for self-correction that would directly empower citizens to move towards health and wellbeing.

To evaluate the success or failure of any open civic system, a triad of qualitative indicators are necessary as a rubric for a healthy civilization. These heath indicators, or system design ethics, shouldn’t be considered as separate domains but rather as interconnected criteria for holistic evaluation of systemic adaptation and design.

Resilience

Resilience is the state and the capacity for adaptive self-organization sufficient to provide core life support function across changing world circumstances.

As things change over time, resilience ensures we have the ability to adjust and adapt without compromising our essential needs. The philosophy of decentralization is inherent to the philosophy of resilience, because centralized structures are fragile and non-adaptive whereas decentralized structures are modular, adaptive, and redundant to ensure their ongoing function as circumstances stress the integrity of a system. For example, imagine compostable bioplastic 3D printer micro manufacturing to minimize dependencies on international industrial supply chains. The creation of decentralized local infrastructure allows us to more easily meet needs locally and adapt to change.

Examples of indicators of resilience include:

• Diversity

• Redundancy

• Adaptive Capacity

• Interconnectivity

Choice

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.

Designing for choice compels us to design systems that support agency, not constrict or take it away. Systems of self-definition are systems in which agents opt-in and choose how they want to participate. Choice also implies that agents have the ability to assert their will and change their situation if they are not satisfied or fulfilled. In Elinor Ostrom’s foundational work on governing the commons, she states that people who are affected by a governance structure should be able to participate in it and modify it. Choice is fundamental because unless all agents are able to participate in the design and application of our systems, systems designers may leave out critical capacities and inclusions by not consulting or engaging with particular communities, producing unhealthy cultures of dominance.

Examples of indicators of choice include:

• Opt-in and opt-out mechanisms

• Flexible participation levels

• Participatory decision making

• Feedback and conflict resolution mechanisms

• Modularity and composability

• Access to information and data self-custody

Vitality

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.

Vitality is based on the indigenous Quechua principle of Sumak kawsay, which means “I am well because you are well”. This implies that our ecological, communal, and individual thriving are bound together. For truly holistic thriving to occur, a system must concern itself with the all interconnected scales and expressions of wellbeing.

Examples of indicators of vitality include:

• Cultural diversity

• Engagement

• Community vitality

• Ecological diversity and resilience

• Living standards

• Psychological well-being

• Self-reported physical health

• Use of time

• Education

Stigmergy: The Nature Of Open Civic Systems

Source: Wiki

Across the natural world, we can see examples of nature engaging in positive sum feedback loops in which plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, water, light, and soil exchange energy and information for mutual benefit. The sum total of these interactions is the “web of Life,” a nested set of relationships that form a complex adaptive system that is self-regulating, self-healing, self-reinforcing, and continuously evolving.

“The concept of stigmergy has been used to analyze self-organizing activities in an ever-widening range of domains, including social insects, robotics, web communities and human society. Yet, it is still poorly understood and as such its full power remains under-appreciated. This paper… [defines] stigmergy as 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. Thus, stigmergy is applicable to a very broad variety of cases, from chemical reactions to bodily coordination and Internet-supported collaboration in Wikipedia.”

– Stigmergy as a universal coordination mechanism I: Definition and components by Francis Heylighen

Stigmergy is a type of swarm intelligence in which individual agents, taking their own actions, signal those actions to other agents in such a way that other agents can contribute in a positive sum feedback loop. Examples of stigmergy in non-human organisms include ants, termites, bees, flocks of birds, bacteria, and slime mold. In humans, we can see examples of stigmergy in Burning Man, open source software development, Wikipedia, the Occupy movement, and various internet experiments. More akin to jazz music or an improv troupe than an institution or organization, stigmergy uses a simple set of decentralized rules to support individual agents in contributing to mutually beneficial goals. What is lost in terms of the linear clarity derived from centralized planning and control is greatly outweighed by the unplannable complexity and beauty of a swarm contributing their unique gifts towards an emergent structure.

Stigmergy is made possible by the decentralized rule set that all agents choose to abide by, creating the conditions for feedback loops that reward positive sum behaviors. At Burning Man, these rules are the boundaries of the city and the grid of city streets as well as the 10 Principles that are upheld by peer accountability. In jazz, these rules are music theory, rhythm, and tuning. In Wikipedia, these rules are based around editorial review, appropriate citation, grammar, and dynamic linking between related concepts. In improv comedy, these rules are “yes, and,” narrative development, and the building/release of comedic tension.

In all of these instances, the positive sum feedback is mostly driven by contributions and alignment. Contributions that attract more contributions feed back on themselves. These rewards are intrinsic to participation. No one needs to direct or command them to occur. When it is clear how to contribute without stepping on someone else’s toes (literally or metaphorically), humans naturally want to converge around shared efforts in which their participation is meaningful and purposeful. This is a form of participatory commons governance in the sense that it empowers us to collectively steer the ship of a common effort through our contribution instead of through our top down control of others’ agency.

Open civic systems create scaffolding for stigmergic coordination by providing open templates for agent-centric coordination. Institutional functions and all other functions of a society are ultimately based in human coordination, making open civic systems capable of achieving the same outputs as any centralized institution. Open protocols, the DNA or source code for open civic systems, function similarly to the pheromone pattern languages of ants that inform how agents communicate and stack their contributions. In this way, open civic systems integrate human social systems with the patterns of living systems.

In the same way that an ant colony or bee hive can be considered a macroorganism, an emergent whole with its own form of collective agency, a human social organism is the equivalent design pattern for human coordination. Social organisms grow out of a core mission, vision, and culture that is defined in the nucleus of the social organism’s social DNA. This social DNA serves as a north star as it is encoded and reproduced by agents through means of peer accountability, empowering human agents to opt-in to social organisms with whom they align at the fundamental DNA level. This core DNA also informs the functions, roles, flows, and membranes that are required for the social organism to achieve its purpose within its social ecology. Distinct from institutions or corporations that tend to function as a kind of “zombie” or cancerous social organism, never dying or engaging in reciprocal flows with their environment, social organisms are intended to be conceived, gestated, matured, and decomposed as the entire social ecology continues to evolve and transform to reflect the needs and desires of the many generations of agents who animate them.

While this fundamental transformation in human social behavior and structure is profound, it reflects patterns that exist all around us in the natural world. A human civilization based on these fundamental design patterns would represent a truly open civic system, able to easily adapt to changing circumstances, respond to collectively determined needs, and provide cosmo-local feedback cycles in which the collective superorganism of humanity could continuously learn and grow as peers.

Polycentricity: Holons Of Self-Organization

Source: Wiki

Embracing the living systems view of the interrelatedness and complexity present in our ecologies, and perhaps our future human systems, we begin to view components of a system as nested wholes or holons.

“A holon is something that is simultaneously a whole in and of itself, as well as a part of a larger whole. In this way, a holon can be considered a subsystem within a larger hierarchical system” – Wikipedia

This fractal perspective allows us to view the world through the lens of polycentricity, a way of seeing that can contextually shift depending on which holon we’re seeking to understand. Because each component is a whole unto itself within a fractal web of relationships, polycentricity emerges as a way of engaging with the sovereign sphere of each holon while acknowledging that a complex system will contain many component parts which are themselves sovereign wholes. This whole systems approach allows us to engage with and design human systems that reflect the various interconnected holonic scales of a complex system, from the sub-atomic to the molecular, cellular, organismic, social organismic, ecological and biospheric scales. At each scale, the autonomy and healthy reciprocal flows within and across each holon will affect the health of the system.

This living systems understanding is reflected in political philosophy through the principle of subsidiarity, an idea which emerged out of the natural law philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and the neo-Calvinist political philosophy of “sphere sovereignty,” which states that “social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level that is consistent with their resolution.”

Alexis de Tocqueville‘s Democracy in America offers a description of the principle of subsidiarity in early America. Tocqueville observed that “decentralization has, not only an administrative value, but also a civic dimension, since it increases the opportunities for citizens to take interest in public affairs; it makes them get accustomed to using freedom. And from the accumulation of these local, active, persnickety freedoms, is born the most efficient counterweight against the claims of the central government, even if it were supported by an impersonal, collective will.”

While 21st century American democracy has fallen claim to profound centralization and regulatory capture, the same spirit that Tocqueville noted in early America is being revitalized and reimagined in a contemporary context through the reemergence of the bioregional movement. A bioregion is defined as “an ecologically and geographically defined area that is smaller than a biogeographic realm, but larger than an ecoregion or an ecosystem, and is defined along watershed and hydrological boundaries,” and the bioregional movement is an emerging social effort to reorganize our civic participation in the context of a whole systems approach to regenerating our bioregions.

A beautiful living example of a cosmo-local and polycentric approach to whole systems thinking, bioregionalism embraces the holonic nesting of our belonging to and embeddedness within our living systems. Thinking bioregionally shifts our perspective towards the holonic nature of our relationships. Instead of seeding a new kind of nationalism wherein the locus of power and identity is an abstract nation state, bioregionalism sees humanity as part of a single biosphere and global human community while localizing our actions at the scale at which closed loop systems are most needed and relevant. In this sense, bioregionalism and a living systems view of civic infrastructure are one and the same.

Blockchain: Peer To Peer Cybernetics

Source: Wiki

To build the infrastructures of open civic systems that align with this holonic and polycentric view, new technological substrates are needed. Although the early stages of the internet were defined by peer to peer interactions between academic institutions, our digital commons was quickly captured by centralized “web2” entities like Google and Meta who realized that by placing essential internet services on their own servers, as opposed to self-hosted ones, they could extract attention and advertising revenue. What followed was a classic multi-polar trap in which misaligned incentives and the enclosure of our digital commons led to a race to the bottom in which the monetization of our attention became an arms race between increasingly monopolistic tech giants. At the core of these dynamics is the infrastructural failure of the “client-server” model which prevents users from interacting with one another outside of a centrally mediated context.

To both address these dysfunctional system dynamics as well as to create alternative systems, it becomes necessary to develop decentralized technological substrates in which users may interact with one another peer to peer and produce novel forms of autopoetic self-governance that are not possible within centralized technology platforms. Blockchains are one such technological substrate which leverage the power of encryption and competition between nodes in a network to secure an immutable ledger of interactions, maintaining trust between parties without relying on a centralized structure. While not without fault or its own forms of centralized capture, blockchains – and similar P2P technology – represent a significant step towards a technological substrate for civic infrastructure that supports composability and interoperability.

Emergent System Capabilities

Source: Wiki

This design approach to open civic systems is directly connected to the development of open source software, applying the same methodologies for social systems. Coherence and consensus in this stigmergic and evolutionary landscape is determined based on swarm intelligence and the utility of the outputs themselves.

As the system evolves, patterns that produce positive outcomes will be selected, with forking and merging of patterns achieving the same effects as genetic mutation and reproduction. Through an open protocol pattern language, these learnings and evolutionary adaptations can be cosmo-locally shared and integrated, allowing humanity to learn together how best to design and deploy open civic systems.

These types of network effects and swarm dynamics are not possible through centralized approaches, but they are also potentially fragile unless the underlying signaling pathways are clearly defined and mutually established. Consensus is not necessary in the pluralistic approach to specific instances of the pattern, but strong consensus is necessary at the level of the meta-pattern in order for the evolutionary dynamics to take effect.

As civic innovators, patrons, and organizers align and coordinate as a community of practice, novel capacities emerge as the cumulative effects of networked civic utilities are developed. The gravity of this alignment and coordination gradually pulls legacy systems and human attention from one basin of attraction to another. This collective effort also produces the emergent effect of scenius, an acceleration of creative capacity through the dynamic interplay and exchange between aligned innovators. The strength of these feedback loops produces rapid iteration, participatory co-design, and addresses the blind spots created when centralized groups attempt to impose their vision or process on those they intend to serve.

If humanity can align around open civic innovation models, our collective intelligence can be harnessed to collaboratively compose the civilization that we share.

We’ve now traced the living architecture of open civic systems — from their ethical indicators to their stigmergic dynamics, from polycentric holons to peer-to-peer cybernetics. We’ve seen how human coordination, when designed in alignment with living systems principles, can become adaptive, regenerative, and self-correcting rather than extractive and brittle.

What emerges from this view is not a single blueprint, institution, or ideology — but a pattern language for collective becoming. Open civic systems do not prescribe outcomes; they cultivate conditions. They do not centralize control; they scaffold agency. They do not demand belief; they invite participation.

And yet, none of this happens automatically.

Frameworks do not build themselves. Protocols do not enact themselves. Culture does not regenerate itself without choice. At every scale — from the individual to the bioregion to the planetary commons — the future remains contingent upon the decisions we make together.

Which brings us, inevitably, to the only question that truly remains.

Series:

• Chapter 1: In Us We Trust

• Chapter 2: What is a Civilization

• Chapter 3: The Ontological Shift

• Chapter 4: Civic Innovation & Open Civics

• 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 ← This Chapter

• Chapter 11: Our Choice

Now we turn to a foundational question: what actually is a civilization? Before we can transform our systems, we need to see them clearly — including the often invisible agreements that shape every aspect of our lives.

Prefer to read the full thesis? Read a PDF

What is a Civilization

Source: Wiki

A civilization is a collectively and dynamically composed construct. Put simply, our society is the product of the often unconscious and implicit cultural and systemic agreements that we enter into in order to participate. These agreements are shaped by our culture, formalized through our infrastructures, incentives and institutions and enacted through our interactions, which all coalesce to reinforce the particular patterns of production, consumption, and reproduction we call “society” or “civilization.”

Infrastructures can be understood as underlying resource mechanisms like money, energy, supply chains or law that mediate or enable specific types of interactions. Incentives can be understood as reward mechanisms for taking particular actions. Institutions can be understood as the social mechanisms that govern the behavior of individuals within a community. Together, these foundations determine what we can create and what we will be rewarded for creating (production), what we are able to consume (consumption), and what kinds of agency we have to modify and perpetuate these systems (reproduction). The flows of resources, information, and currency move along the river banks created by these institutions which, in our current epoch, perpetually reinforce well worn patterns of rivalry, scarcity, and extraction.

Human civilization is, in effect, a decentralized metabolic process, moving energy around the planet while shifting its form. As a phenomenon, this is neutral. Ants create ant hills. Birds create nests. Foxes create burrows. Humans create civilizations. As fundamentally social, relational beings, hardwired by our evolutionary programming to form tribal groups, we are naturally inclined to reproduce the social constructs of our civilization within the space defined by our infrastructures, incentives, and institutions.

We collectively uphold and signal our alignment with these structures in order to belong to, and survive within, the human social organism into which we are born. As such, we are all responsible for participating in and maintaining the current epoch of human civilization which has produced a particular series of self-reinforcing effects and outcomes that could be called ecocide, technocracy, late-stage capitalism, or the meta-crisis. As a catch-all descriptor for our many concurrent crises, the meta-crisis describes an interconnected set of crises whose common feature is their systemic and self-reinforcing nature.

exponential feedback loops

Self-reinforcing cycles within a system where the output of the system amplifies its own input, leading to rapid and often exponential growth or decline. In these loops, a small change in the initial state can result in significant and accelerating effects over time. This type of feedback is common in various natural and technological systems, such as population growth, financial markets, and viral spread, where the rate of change increases proportionally to the current state of the system.

As Stafford Beer says, “the purpose of a system is what it does.” In our current times, it seems as though the purpose of our civilization is to concentrate wealth and power while externalizing costs to the commons, resulting in ecological and social collapse as centralized power and externalized costs exponentially accelerate. Despite the narratives of “progress” and “democracy,” a simple analysis of the outputs of our current civilization reveal that these narratives are, in fact, window dressing for a system that is failing to produce a healthy biosphere and a thriving quality of Life for humans.

metacrisis

The interconnected and overlapping global crises that collectively threaten the stability and sustainability of our world. It encompasses a wide range of issues, including ecological collapse, economic instability, social inequality, and political dysfunction. At its core, the meta-crisis highlights our systemic inability to address these challenges effectively due to underlying flaws in our perception, understanding, and governance structures. This concept urges us to recognize the interconnected nature of these crises and to seek holistic, integrative solutions that address the root causes rather than just the symptoms.

These self-destructive phenomena are not so fatalistically bound to human nature as “capitalist realism” would have us believe. They are merely emergent outcomes based on the underlying set of agreements that form our infrastructures, incentives, and institutions, all of which combine to create the enabling structures of ecocidal and anti-social behaviors. These agreements, and the systems they inform, can be modified and transformed. Our history is replete with examples of these shifts occurring, most notably in the formation of the United States of America, a phase transition of power from a monarchic empire into a relatively self-governed nation. The founders of the United States were neither mythic beings with superhuman powers nor evil supervillains. They were, in fact, humans just like you or I, products of their time with the audacity to leverage the power of the word and collective action to invoke a democratic and isonomic social contract.

capitalism

An economic system characterized by private ownership of the means of production, market-based allocation of resources, and the pursuit of profit. In the context of the meta-crisis and exponential feedback loops, capitalism can be seen as both a driver and a product of these interconnected global challenges.

To better understand how we might reform our social contract by fundamentally shifting the underlying agreements of our current epoch, it is critical to describe the often invisible structures that compose our current global order and that have failed to produce wellbeing for people and the planet.

For the last 250 years, the state and the corporation have been the foundations of our species’ first-ever globalized civilization. Implicit in both of these structures are the fundamental agreements of a rivalrous, zero-sum worldview in which hierarchical, bureaucratic institutions and extractive, capital-accumulating corporations govern the majority of human interactions and relationships. While this set of agreements or worldview seem “natural” or inherent to many humans today, prior civilizational agreements have been mediated by religious institutions, royal aristocracies, militaries, mercantile marketplaces, and feudal lords.

This abridged list of civilizational forms is offered merely to illustrate that civilizational forms are not fixed despite such an appearance to those who live within them. The Roman Empire likely seemed eternal to many Romans even as invaders were at the gate. The underlying agreements of our civilization are “like water” in that we are so subsumed by them that we take them for granted as intrinsic, barely even noticeable. But the cracks in the edifice of our current civilization are showing, reminding us that these are no more than collective agreements that can be changed. Shifting these agreements is an inter-generational phase transition, a challenging but necessary process that requires an ontological shift and deep cultural transformation.

emergent

Phenomena that arise from complex interactions and cannot be easily predicted or understood by simply analyzing their individual components. In various contexts, emergent properties or behaviors are those that manifest as a result of the collective dynamics of a system, rather than from any single part of it.

natural

The term “natural” as a culturally constructed concept refers to the idea that what is considered “natural” is shaped by cultural beliefs, practices, and norms. Natural law is a philosophical theory that posits the existence of a set of moral principles inherent in human nature and the natural world, which are discoverable through observation.

Understanding civilization as a collective construct — shaped by agreements that can be changed — opens a crucial door. But changing those agreements requires more than policy reform; it requires a fundamental shift in how we understand ourselves in relationship to each other and the world. In our next chapter, we’ll explore the ontological shift that’s already underway, and why it’s essential to everything that follows.

Series:

• Chapter 1: In Us We Trust

• Chapter 2: What is a Civilization

• Chapter 3: The Ontological Shift

• Chapter 4: Civic Innovation & Open Civics

• 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 ← This Chapter

• Chapter 10: Open Civic Systems — Design Principles & Living Systems

• Chapter 11: Our Choice

But culture change doesn’t happen through manifestos alone. As Buckminster Fuller said, “If man chooses oblivion, he can go right on leaving his fate to his political leaders. If he chooses Utopia, he must initiate an enormous education program—immediately, if not sooner.” The meta-crisis, properly understood as a coordination and adaptation failure, only truly resolves through what Daniel Schmachtenberger calls a “civic renaissance.”

Open Civic Culture

Source: Wiki

“If man chooses oblivion, he can go right on leaving his fate to his political leaders. If he chooses Utopia, he must initiate an enormous education program - immediately, if not sooner.” — R. Buckminster Fuller

Why Civic Culture

Properly understood, the systemic drivers of the meta-crisis make it clear that incremental and institutional solutions are ultimately insufficient in the face of the entrenched, systemic crises we face. The combination of the sluggish rate of adaptation and centralized approaches to change management within institutions calls for a more foundational and participatory strategy.

Understood as an adaptation and coordination failure, the meta-crisis only truly resolves through what Daniel Schmachtenberger has referred to as a “civic renaissance.” Implicit in the term renaissance is the notion of rebirth and revitalization, a return to something that has been lost or degraded. In this sense, a civic renaissance is a return to a shared sense of mutual responsibility and care, rooted in an understanding that there is no “away” and it is within one’s rational self interest to care for the wellbeing of our commons, communities, and planet.

Civic virtue is the personal expression of a broader cultural renaissance, referring to the ennobling choice to rise into stewardship and direct responsibility for the maintenance and embodiment of systems of care.

This type of civic culture is a precursor to the types of distributed coordination required to address the root drivers of the meta-crisis in our local communities and global commons. At the core, this shift revolves around ending our a reliance on centralized institutions to provision core civilizational utilities by restoring our fundamental rights as planetary citizens to self-determine and autopoetically enact our own civilizational systems through self-organizing collective action.

Unlike crises humanity has faced in the past, the complex, existential and all-encompassing nature of climatic shifts, supply chain breakdowns, and food system fragility require distributed, cosmo-local resilience and direct action.

For humanity to truly become a non-rivalrous, mutually responsible species, we must first develop the cultural capacities to effectively navigate prisoner’s dilemma scenarios by choosing to coordinate and cooperate, avoiding lose-lose scenarios by seeing ourselves as mutually interdependent.

Instead of prescribing top down solutions that attempt to correct for the failures of our current systems, a distributed renaissance of civic culture would transform the substrate or soil of our communities, empowering ourselves to coordinate the production of networked and pluralistic civic utilities, from the bottom up.

This foundational cultural transformation may be more difficult than a top down technocratic response, but ultimately it is the basis of the kind of distributed coordination that Schmachtenberger describes as essential to the proliferation of the third attractor. While it may ring hollow to some who might view it as naive or idealistic to presume that such non-rivalrous cultures are possible, such a belief demonstrates reflects an inherent bias towards human nature.

The scientific foundations of the ProSocial model, which builds off of Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom’s study of commons governance patterns by integrating work in the fields behavioral psychology, evolutionary biology, and interfaith studies, demonstrate that “Modern evolutionary science tells us that behaviors and cultural traits evolve based on their consequences within a given context… The science of ProSocial is focused on understanding and fostering social contexts in which individual and group interests are aligned, such that cooperative behaviors are reinforced more than selfish behaviors.” This science is well documented and the ProSocial methodology is a primary cultural toolkit for our civic renaissance.

Regenerating What’s Been Lost

While our commons and ecologies have been ravaged by extractive industries, so too has our social fabric. Accelerated by the attention economy and the influence of social media algorithms, humanity has been pitted against itself at a time when global solidarity is more needed than ever.

Regenerating the social fabric requires a fundamental shift in power dynamics, moving from rivalrous institutions and incentives, towards a pluralistic, polycentric, and prosocial approach to large-scale coordination.

Essential to this process is the concept of imagination activism, coined by the European research and practice centre Moral Imaginations, which brings community members together to empower people to create shared imaginings of the future

This bottom up approach to consensus building and direct collective action brings us out of our filter bubbles into immanent and embodied relationships with the humans and non-humans with whom we share our physical home.

Reliably, when we return to the common ground of shared being and belonging, our attention is directed towards creating safe places for our children and future generations, valuing intact ecologies that support essential ecosystem services, and recognizing the human need for connection, dignity, and purpose.

A key example of this material solidarity is the phenomenon of water stewardship. Across all of our ideological silos and bubbles, our material survival is inextricably rooted in our access to and the quality of our water. Weaving together farmers, residents, hunters, ecologists, indigenous first nations and others, we are compelled by our mutual reliance on clean water to protect and steward water as a sacred civic resource. These areas of mutual alignment are often overlooked within rivalrous social, economic, and political systems because they do not generate the requisite outrage and division upon which those systems thrive.

Therefore, regenerating our ecologies, communities, and commons becomes part of the same regenerative return towards the renewal and revitalization of local stewardship and direct civic responsibility for the systems that shape our well-being.

Transpolitical Solidarity

This expression of civic culture and cosmo-local orientation to stewardship defies the internal logic of the divide and conquer strategies deployed by our rivalrous political factions, invoking a new kind of transpolitical solidarity that is more concerned with quality of life and pluralistic, bottom-up positive sum collaboration.

By embracing a philosophy of pluralism and agent-centricity, we transcend and integrate the best of many different political philosophies as we coordinate at the local level to improve quality of life.

Divisive political ideologies become less relevant in this context as we are focused on the material conditions of our lives and are less concerned with the regulatory state and its top down restrictions or incentives.

Instead of competing to control the state’s violent apparatus, communities can engage in a process of discovery that foregrounds shared alignment and emphasizes creativity and experimentation.

Such a process is measured by the intersubjective metrics of quality of life, determined based on the needs and perspectives of each individual and thus dependent upon a diversity of strategies to improve quality of life from the ground up.

This type of transpolitical ethos is rooted in the practice of commoning, a form of political consciousness that harkens back to grassroots populist movements throughout history. Our contemporary political consciousness has been fundamentally shaped by the forces of capital accumulation and first-past-the-post voting which leverage duopolistic control and lesser of two evils tactics to maintain a firm grip on the types of political orientations that are seen as legitimate. As Noam Chomsky writes, “the smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”

Open civic culture expands the spectrum of acceptable opinion by rooting into an overarching foundation of place-based mutual solidarity while promoting pluralism and consent with regard to the diverse strategies a community might employ to improve its own quality of life. By focusing on grassroots consensus-building instead of top-down technocratic control, open civic culture opens a new topology of innovation and direct action that simultaneously transcends and includes various political orientations and ideologies by de-centering “power over” relationships in service of consensual, “power with” relationships. This type of political orientation is not new. It represents a way of being that has been practiced by place-based communities throughout history. Its renewal is foundational to a movement of mutuality, solidarity, and care.

Enabling Structures

While many examples exist worldwide of communities self-organizing in this fashion, usually under the duress of immediate crisis or institutional collapse, the protocols utilized by those communities are often informal and rarely reproducible from movement to movement.

A very particular subset of the various types of innovation we can engage in as a species, civic innovations are mechanisms that support these self-organizing movements and local community organizing in a pluralistic structure that is more concerned with bottom up coordination than top down control.

The goal of the Open Civic Innovation Framework and the OpenCivics Network is to provision these mechanisms to the public in a structure that can be easily adapted, composed, and forked to meet the direct needs of local community organizers.

As a pattern language for open protocols, the Open Civic Innovation Framework offers a meta-pattern for these types of utilities, enabling them to be easily composed into civic stacks and supporting the alignment of civic innovators as they consider how their innovations might be networked and interoperated.

The OpenCivics Network is a decentralized solidarity network that includes patrons, innovators, and local community organizers in a participatory and non-rivalrous co-design process, supporting coordination, funding, and applied research into systemic interventions that support direct civic empowerment.

By holding the process of civilizational adaptation as a non-rivalrous network, the OpenCivics Network connects civic innovators, organizers, patrons and the public while also providing key coordination functions in the form of formalized templates for impact reporting and project interoperability.

If successful, the collective impact of the framework and network, as a convergence and coordination point for innovators and the public, will give rise to new, open civic systems, animated by a revitalized civic culture, able to support the embodiment of an open civic culture through the design philosophy of open civic systems.

Open civic culture creates the conditions for distributed coordination by regenerating our social fabric, fostering transpolitical solidarity, and providing enabling structures for self-organization. But culture alone isn’t enough — we also need systems. In our next chapter, we’ll begin exploring open civic systems: the design philosophy that transforms institutions into extitutions, extractive incentives into prosocial incentives, and fragmented infrastructure into networked open protocols.

Series:

• Chapter 1: In Us We Trust

• Chapter 2: What is a Civilization

• Chapter 3: The Ontological Shift

• Chapter 4: Civic Innovation & Open Civics

• Chapter 5: Our Crisis is a Birth

• Chapter 6: The Three Attractors

• Chapter 7: A Post-Tragic Protopian Audacity

• Chapter 8: Open Civic Culture ← This Chapter

• Chapter 9: Open Civic Systems — Architecture & Transformation

• Chapter 10: Open Civic Systems — Design Principles & Living Systems

• Chapter 11: Our Choice

This question deserves a serious answer. The vision proposed in this thesis is inherently audacious — it invokes a radical reimagining of human society rooted in love, care, and mutual responsibility. Such audacity is required to shift what’s perceived as possible. But this isn’t utopian fantasy; it’s what we call “post-tragic protopian audacity.”

A Post-Tragic Protopian Audacity

Source: Wiki

This proposed vision of possibility is inherently audacious. It invokes a radical reimagining of a human society rooted in love, care, and mutual responsibility. Such an audacious act of imagination is required to shift the overton window of perceived possibility. One of the greatest tools of manipulation used by systems of power is the belief that our current socio-economic order is a reflection of reality itself. A close examination of the natural world reveals that it is, in fact, cooperation and synergy that defines the success or failure of a species in the evolutionary process. This is also true of the evolution of human civilization.

overtone window

The range of policies and ideas that are considered politically acceptable to the mainstream population at any given time. Named after Joseph Overton, a policy analyst, this concept illustrates how public opinion shapes what politicians can propose and support without appearing too extreme.

The window can shift over time as societal norms and values change, allowing previously radical ideas to become mainstream and vice versa. Essentially, it defines the boundaries of acceptable discourse in the political landscape.

imagination activism

According to Moral Imaginations, imagination activism involves expanding and exercising one’s imagination to broaden ways of thinking and envisioning what is possible and achievable. An imagination activist not only enhances their own imaginative capacities but also equips themselves with tools, questions, and exercises to help others expand their imaginations. This approach aims to shift perceptions and translate new ways of thinking into actionable changes.

This thesis emerged from direct experiences of awakening to a sense of the suffering of our world, a gradual and ongoing process of removing the veils of indoctrination to perceive the massive scale of violence, inequality, and injustice upon which our current society is based. Entering the trough of disillusionment as understanding of the depth of the crisis increases, it can be easy to choose either the path of dissociation and numbing or total annihilating grief. Both choices are entirely reasonable given the scale and profound tragedy of loss of human life and the mass extinction of other species, but a third response, holding the grief and possibility simultaneously, is also available. The post-tragic aesthetic and sensibility emerges through the embrace of our grief and empathy as fuel for our creative action. We are motivated to reimagine our world not in spite of our current tragedies but because of them. Similarly, solar punk and lunar punk as aesthetic and cultural movements have emerged as similar expressions of the dynamic balance between radical optimism and sobering realism in the face of extreme crises.

system equilibrium

In the context of social, economic, and political systems refers to a state where all forces and influences within the system are balanced, resulting in stability and no net change over time.

synergy

The interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects. This concept is often used in business, science, and other fields to describe how collaborative efforts can lead to enhanced outcomes that wouldn’t be possible individually.

The radical reimagining of our human society emerges as an act of rebellion against the prevailing lack of socio-political imaginary that insists that capitalism is the only viable political and economic “forever” system. But unlike utopian claims that are usually driven by a single individual’s imagined design of alternative socio-economic frameworks, the radical reimagining proposed by this thesis instead offers a set of mechanisms and processes by which we may collectively dream and enact a new world into being.

post-capitalist

A hypothetical or emerging state of society and economy that exists after the decline or end of capitalism. In a post-capitalist society, traditional capitalist structures, such as the reliance on private ownership of the means of production and the pursuit of profit, are replaced by alternative systems.

Protopia, a term coined by futurist Kevin Kelly in 2009, refers to a society based on incremental and mutually determined progress. By taking incremental steps forward together, grounded in our direct experience of reality and the collectively determined needs of our immediate communities, we are carving out alternative, imaginal spaces in which we can collectively dream and create a different kind of society together. Instead of proposing a utopian vision of how human society should organize itself, this thesis offers the OpenCivics Innovation Framework as a methodology for the distributed and collective process of civilization-scale transformation.

This transition will likely take place across a multi-generational time span before we arrive at a new, stable, system equilibrium, and it is a near certainty that the process will be disruptive and tenuous at points, but our audacity to dream of a more beautiful world as our current civilization degrades around us is the first step in that multi-generational process.

post-tragic

The term post-tragic refers to a state or condition that emerges after experiencing a tragic event. Unlike the concept of post-traumatic, which often focuses on the lingering negative effects and trauma, post-tragic emphasizes a transformative process. It involves moving beyond the initial suffering and finding meaning, growth, or a new perspective as a result of the tragedy. This concept is often used in literature, psychology, and philosophy to describe how individuals or societies can evolve and find resilience after profound loss or hardship.

Our hearts have been broken thousands of times as we have felt and been transformed by the suffering of our world. The impulse to care and respond to this suffering is a natural response as empathic and social beings, a response that has been denatured by our social conditioning, wounding, and reliance on bureaucratic institutions to care for the collective on our behalf. Liberating this natural impulse to care for humanity and our world is the great work of these challenging times. Our choice to open our hearts after being let down again and again by our leaders and systems is a courageous one, but a more beautiful world can only emerge when we rise up together as a human species, facing the suffering of our world with compassion and wise action. We have the tools, methods, and frameworks ready at hand. From that place, an open civics is a call to awaken the spirit of care and compassion in the public and encode the spirit of non-rivalrous coordination among civic innovators, such that humanity can rise up together to collectively reimagine our world.

Opening our hearts after being let down again and again by our leaders and systems is a courageous choice. But a more beautiful world can only emerge when we rise up together, facing the suffering of our world with compassion and wise action. In our next email, we’ll explore open civic culture — the foundational cultural transformation that makes distributed coordination possible. This isn’t just about building new systems; it’s about regenerating the social fabric itself.

Series:

• Chapter 1: In Us We Trust

• Chapter 2: What is a Civilization

• Chapter 3: The Ontological Shift

• Chapter 4: Civic Innovation & Open Civics

• Chapter 5: Our Crisis is a Birth

• Chapter 6: The Three Attractors

• Chapter 7: A Post-Tragic Protopian Audacity ← This Chapter

• 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

But understanding the problem isn’t enough. We need to understand where current dynamics are leading us. Drawing from chaos mathematics and game theory, we can identify the “basins of attraction” toward which our complex systems are moving — the probable futures that emerge from present conditions. There are three.

Prefer to read the full thesis? Read a PDF

systemic failure modes

The ways in which a system can fail due to inherent flaws or vulnerabilities within its structure, processes, or interactions. These failures are not isolated to individual components but arise from the complex interdependencies and interactions within the entire system. Identifying systemic failure modes involves analyzing how different parts of the system can collectively lead to failures, often requiring a holistic approach to understand and mitigate these risks.

To design whole systems alternatives that avoid reproducing these failure modes, it becomes necessary to review the game theoretic probable outcomes driven by these current systemic dynamics. Only with a sufficient understanding of the impending collapse scenarios that loom on the horizon can we successfully generate anti-fragile coordination mechanisms that are sufficient to meet the crises we face. Schmachtenberger refers to the three probable outcomes from current runaway feedback loops as “the three attractors.” The phrase “attractor” is a reference to chaos mathematics, a field of study regarding complex systems in which the number of and interactions between variables make linear models and predictions impossible. Attractors, or basins of attraction, refer to the bounds of a system which can be known even when the specific outcomes within those bounds are unknowable. While we can’t predict the exact outcomes of the nested and complex systems that are driving the meta-crisis, we can make a reasonably informed prediction of the future systemic equilibria that may emerge as these feedback loops reach the exponential curves that we are now approaching or, in some cases, have already entered. The three probable attractors that Schmachtenberger predicts based on his game-theoretic study of current dynamics are chaos, authoritarianism, and distributed coordination.

game theory

A branch of mathematics that studies strategic interactions where the outcomes depend on the actions of all participants. It provides tools for analyzing situations in which players make decisions that are interdependent, meaning each player’s strategy depends on the strategies of others. This field is widely used in economics, political science, psychology, and computer science to model and predict competitive behaviors and outcomes.

attractor

A reference to chaos mathematics, a field of study regarding complex systems in which the number of and interactions between variables make linear models and predictions impossible. Attractors, or basins of attraction, refer to the bounds of a system which can be known even when the specific outcomes within those bounds are unknowable.

In chaos theory, attractors are sets of numerical values toward which a system tends to evolve, regardless of the starting conditions of the system. These attractors represent the long-term behavior of a dynamical system.

The chaos attractor is defined by the collapse of institutions and centralized authorities under the weight of a plurality of distributed crises that fracture those institutions’ ability to maintain legitimacy and control. In the absence of a new, mutually accepted social order, systems devolve into tribalism and neo-feudalism with different clusters of actors vying for power, legitimacy, and control, likely at the regional scale. This attractor implies a high likelihood of not only civilizational collapse but potentially human extinction.

The authoritarian attractor is defined by a techno-fascist crack down on individual agency in order to retain a sense of social order in the face of accelerating breakdowns and crises. We see early stages of this attractor emerging with online censorship and the rise of both globalized corporate authoritarianism as well as hyper-nationalist elected leaders who have leveraged xenophobia and a strongman ethos to gain power and influence. While both of those expressions of authoritarianism position themselves as antagonists to one another, they are mirror expressions of the same authoritarian attractor. Elites around the globe likely prefer this attractor as it allows them to retain power and wealth as collapse scenarios accelerate.

Lastly, the distributed coordination attractor is defined by emergent, agent-centric self-organization that is able to provide localized resilience to rapidly changing circumstances through decentralized mechanisms. Schmachtenberger calls this system equilibrium “the third attractor,” a reference to the narrow path of systemic adaptation that simultaneously addresses the failure modes of our current systems while increasing the probability of avoiding the other two attractors. This attractor would result in a vast redistribution of wealth and agency, making it unappealing to elites but demonstrably more equitable, regenerative, and life-affirming than the other two possible attractors.

decentralized vs distributed

Decentralized systems distribute control and decision-making among multiple independent nodes without a central authority, exemplified by blockchain technology. In contrast, distributed systems spread tasks and data across multiple nodes that work together, often with a central coordinating authority, as seen in content delivery networks (CDNs). While both involve multiple nodes, the key difference lies in the presence or absence of central control.

self-organization

A process where some form of overall order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system. Sometimes referred to as spontaneous order in the social sciences.

A process where a system spontaneously forms an organized structure or pattern without external control. This phenomenon occurs through local interactions among the system’s components, often driven by feedback mechanisms. Self-organization is observed in various fields, including physics, chemistry, biology, and social sciences. Examples include the formation of snowflakes, flocking behavior in birds, and the emergence of market dynamics.

agent centric

A perspective or approach that emphasizes the role, experiences, and motivations of individual agents within a system. In the context of systems design, this can mean designing systems that orient around the behaviors and interactions of individual agents within a larger system, while providing mechanisms understanding how their actions influence and are influenced by the system as a whole.

In this context, it becomes an ethical and strategic necessity to orient humanity’s collective agency towards defining, designing, and deploying civic systems that create the enabling conditions for the third attractor.

Such systems would require three design principles to guide the development of modular, composable, and interoperable civic systems that optimize for the third attractor and avoid unintentionally reproducing the self-destructive qualities of our current civilization. Our critical path towards a life-affirming civilization is defined by self-correcting feedback loops, aligned incentives, and civic culture.

Self-correcting feedback loops refers to truly participatory democracy paired with a sufficiently educated public able to interpret the holistic impact of our collective agency. Distributed, powerful, collective agency is required to ensure that any unhealthy feedback loops that may emerge at any point in our collective future can be addressed and mitigated holistically. This can be achieved through direct democracy mechanisms, citizen assemblies, strong public education, traditional ecological knowledge and open socio-ecological data.

Aligned incentives refers to an incentive landscape in which individual self-interest is aligned with the collective interest of humanity and all Life on Earth. Pro-social incentives reward forms of value that create cascading benefits for humanity and the planet. Unlike our current incentive landscape which rewards extraction and enclosure of value, prosocial incentives reward contributions to the commons and markets that produce holistic well-being and mutual thriving. This can be achieved through an economic structure organized by a diverse array of different strategies like democratically governed worker-owned cooperatives, nature-backed currencies, and evaluative metrics like Gross National Happiness.

regenerative

The ability or tendency to regrow, renew, or restore, especially after being damaged or lost. This term is often used in various contexts such as biology, medicine, and environmental science. For example, regenerative medicine focuses on repairing or replacing damaged tissues and organs, while regenerative agriculture aims to restore soil health and ecosystem balance.

Civic culture refers to the revival of a commonly practiced culture of mutual stewardship and responsibility. Renewing our sense of mutuality and solidarity is a critical precursor to any of the downstream behavioral and socio-economic shifts described above. Deconstructing the weaponized culture war dynamics that are currently being leveraged to reduce collective agency by pitting identity groups against one another can be effectively achieved through the lens of bioregionalism. Bioregionalism represents a philosophy of mutual belonging to the places, watersheds, and biosphere we call home as a fundamental basis for solidarity. Civic utilities like informal solidarity networks, connected locally and globally, that share resources and provide grassroots coordination infrastructure for mutual benefit are among the tools that directly support this civic cultural renaissance.

Put together, these underlying systems design principles reflect what could also be called a “life-affirming civilization.”

living systems principles

The fundamental characteristics and behaviors of living organisms, viewed as complex, open systems. These systems are self-organizing and interact continuously with their environment, maintaining themselves through the flow of information, energy, and matter. Key principles include order, sensitivity or response to the environment, reproduction, adaptation, growth and development, homeostasis, energy processing, and evolution. These principles help to define what makes something “alive” and illustrate how living systems sustain and evolve over time.

Thus, this thesis attempts to offer a sketch of this design philosophy for distributed coordination, the basis of an open civics. This paper proposes an underlying participatory design methodology for self-organizing processes and resilient, place-based and cosmo-local infrastructures that provide the enabling conditions for a fundamentally post-capitalist and even post-nation-state human civilization. By providing an initial methodology that provides a process ontology for the fundamental elements, functions, and processes of distributed coordination, this thesis outlines both the core mechanisms of the OpenCivics Network as a set of emergent capabilities, as well as the Open Civic Innovation Framework as a coherent, overarching meta-framework for a participatory process of civilizational adaptation. By linking the many commons and peer-to-peer efforts to revitalize the civic design space, this framework provides a foundation for a fully distributed process, governed by those who engage in it.

This model is not intended to be complete or final in any sense, rather it offers a schelling point, a point of convergence and a starting point from which we might collectively, to coordinate the process of systemic adaptation and co-evolution.

This model is not intended to be complete or final in any sense, rather it offers a schelling point, a point of convergence and an underlying schema, to coordinate the process of systemic adaptation and co-evolution.

The third attractor — distributed coordination — represents humanity’s narrow path through the eye of the needle. It requires self-correcting feedback loops, aligned incentives, and a revitalized civic culture. But choosing this path isn’t naive optimism; it’s what we might call “post-tragic protopian audacity.” In our next chapter, we’ll explore what it means to hold grief and possibility simultaneously — and why imagination activism is essential to shifting what’s perceived as possible.

Series:

• Chapter 1: In Us We Trust

• Chapter 2: What is a Civilization

• Chapter 3: The Ontological Shift

• Chapter 4: Civic Innovation & Open Civics

• Chapter 5: Our Crisis is a Birth

• Chapter 6: The Three Attractors ← This Chapter

• 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

Now we must look directly at why this work is so urgent. As futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard said, “our crisis is a birth.” The systemic breakdowns we face aren’t random misfortunes — they’re the labor pains of a civilization giving birth to something new. But birth requires active participation. Understanding the depth and interconnected nature of our crises is essential to understanding what’s actually required of us.

Prefer to read the full thesis? Read a PDF

Our Context is Crisis, Our Crisis is a Birth

Source: Wiki

As renowned futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard said, “our crisis is a birth.” The systemic breakdowns we face necessitate the emergence of entirely new systems and ways of being, reconstituting, renewing and reimagining ancient cultural foundations at a planetary scale for the first time. Never before in our history has our existential self-destructive capacity forced us to understand at the planetary scale how to explicitly align the underlying agreements and mechanisms of human civilization with living systems principles. We have had the freedom, throughout our adolescent history as a species, to explore many different expressions of how civilization could be organized. Now, our exponential technologies, driven by rivalrous dynamics to the brink of total species annihilation, are offering us a choice. We can either learn how to design and bind the underlying agreements of our cultures and systems in alignment with living systems principles and the holistic stewardship of the well-being of our planet, shifting the fundamental context of our modes of production, consumption, and reproduction, or we will destroy ourselves. While this proposition seems daunting, this alignment is materially the only viable path through the eye of the needle available to us as a species due to the runaway feedback loops of exponential technologies.

Looking at the world around us, it isn’t difficult to see that we live in a world in crisis. Ecocide, biodiversity collapse, climatic shifts, extreme weather, mass climate migrations and refugees, catastrophic topsoil degradation and food system collapse, homelessness, mental health epidemics, ideological fragmentation and escalating polarization, chronic illness, wealth inequality and economic centralization, national and personal debt crises, inflation, the potential of peak oil, the rising costs of energy, resource extraction, genetically engineered bioweapons, the truth and meaning crisis, and severe social transformations and risk as Artificial Intelligence progresses are among the many runaway crises we face as a species. These converging crises are an existential threat to human civilization. At this stage in the exponential curve of multiple runaway crises, a collective fundamental phase-shift is extremely urgent. Interoperable transition methods and a shared sense of global human solidarity are critical to our species’ longevity and survival.

Underlying these seemingly distinct expressions of civilizational decay and collapse are a shared set of systemic dynamics reinforcing the exponential feedback loops that drive these anti-social and ecocidal patterns. As a whole, these patterns can be referred to as wicked problems, the polycrisis, or the meta-crisis. The self-referential quality implied by the term meta-crisis refers to the particular self-reinforcing quality of systemic feedback loops whose path-reinforcing dynamics make self-correction more and more difficult as time passes.

For example, in democracies around the world, the complex feedback loop of “regulatory capture” produces dynamics that undermine the public’s ability to utilize the mechanisms outlined in constitutional frameworks for representative self-governance. Many elected officials, even well-intentioned ones, are elected into office to make change, but by the time they have the power to make that change, they are often already so influenced or inhibited by the incentives of corporate campaign finance and duopoly institutional entrenchment that they cannot effectively represent the will of the people who elected them. These elected officials may make some nominal or superficial gestures toward transformational change, but ultimately they are beholden to the already-captured institutions that provision them with access to power.

regulatory capture

When a regulatory agency, established to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or special interests of the industry it is charged with regulating. This phenomenon happens when the regulated entities exert significant influence over the agency, leading it to prioritize their interests over those of the general public. As a result, the regulatory body may act in ways that benefit the industry rather than ensuring fair and effective regulation.

From the race to Artificial General Intelligence to the attention economy to military spending, multi-polar traps are system dynamics in which mistrust and rivalry force competing corporations and governments to continuously accelerate their tactics without regard for the consequences for and negative externalities to society. The behavioral dimension of a multi-polar trap is driven by the belief that “if I didn’t do it, someone else would.” This self-fulfilling logic, driven by an economic system that rewards these behaviors regardless of their existential risks they generate for humanity, creates a “race to the bottom” which risks the continuity of Life on Earth in favor of short term profits.

multi-polar traps

Situations where multiple actors, each pursuing their own self-interest, collectively contribute to a harmful outcome that none of them individually desire. This concept, rooted in game theory, illustrates how individual rational actions can lead to collectively irrational results. For example, in a competitive market, businesses might engage in practices that are detrimental to the environment or society to stay ahead, resulting in overall negative consequences.

tragedy of the commons

An economic theory that describes a situation where individuals, acting in their own self-interest, overuse and deplete a shared resource, leading to its eventual destruction. This occurs because each person benefits directly from using the resource, while the costs of overuse are distributed among all users. The concept was popularized by ecologist Garrett Hardin in his 1968 essay, where he illustrated it with the example of communal grazing lands.

In the contexts of socio-economic, technological, and military industrial systems, the system dynamics of multi-polar traps, the tragedy of the commons, and recursive accumulation of wealth and power form a nearly impenetrable mess of misaligned incentives and runaway feedback cycles. In an ideal world, democracies would provide a countervailing influence on unrestrained, centralized corporate power, but the same forces that drive extractive and anti-social behaviors in the corporate sector have overtaken our democracies.

Seen in this context, the meta-crisis is a coordination and adaptation failure, a civic crisis stemming from the long term effects of separation, rivalry, and the consolidation of wealth and power on the public’s ability to govern itself effectively. If markets, governments, and multinational corporations are systemically incapable of coordinating a response to the interconnected crises we face, it becomes self-evident that reformist efforts are ultimately insufficient to address our crises at the root. In actuality, despite the techno-optimism that occurs in elite conferences around the world, corporate-driven reformism not only distracts from the underlying system dynamics but also prolongs the perceived legitimacy of legacy institutions. While holding actions can slow the progression or reduce the harm caused by these systems, the systemic and self-reinforcing nature of these runaway processes implies that much deeper transformational actions are required to preserve the continuity of human civilization and perhaps even Life on Earth.

In short, the meta-crisis represents a nested set of feedback loops that not only drive exponential acceleration of existential risks but increasingly undermine our collective capacity to address those risks within the internal processes of our captured systems. In both our democracies and economies, these systemic drivers of runaway crises have consumed and undermined the capacity of elections and markets to mitigate them. Thus, we as a public have no choice but to formalize our own civic systems that address the failure modes of our current systems.

whole systems design

An approach that considers all components of a system and their interrelationships to optimize overall performance and sustainability. It involves understanding how different elements within a system interact and influence one another, aiming to create synergies and leverage points for improvement. This method is often used in fields like architecture, engineering, and environmental planning to ensure that all parts of a system work together harmoniously.

The meta-crisis is, at root, a coordination and adaptation failure — a civic crisis stemming from the long-term effects of rivalry, separation, and the consolidation of wealth and power. If markets, governments, and corporations are systemically incapable of coordinating a response, it becomes self-evident that we must formalize our own civic systems. In our next chapter, we’ll explore the three probable futures that emerge from current dynamics — and why the “third attractor” of distributed coordination is humanity’s narrow path through the eye of the needle.

Series:

• Chapter 1: In Us We Trust

• Chapter 2: What is a Civilization

• Chapter 3: The Ontological Shift

• Chapter 4: Civic Innovation & Open Civics

• Chapter 5: Our Crisis is a Birth ← This Chapter

• 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

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 1: In Us We Trust

• Chapter 2: What is a Civilization

• Chapter 3: The Ontological Shift

• 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

But recognizing that agreements can change is different from knowing how to change them. The transformation we face isn’t merely political or economic — it’s ontological. It requires a fundamental shift in how we understand what it means to be human on this planet. This shift is already underway.

Prefer to read the full thesis? Read a PDF

The Ontological Shift

Source: Wiki

ontology

A branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being, existence, and reality. It seeks to understand the fundamental categories and relationships of entities within the universe.

An ontological shift can be seen as a transition from one way of understanding what exists or what it means to exist, to another, potentially radically different way of seeing and being. Changing one’s ontology involves moving from one conceptual framework about reality to another, which can have profound implications for how we understand and interact with the world around us. The existential crises we face today offer us an initiatory challenge and opportunity to transmute collapse into rebirth, an opening to reflect on and evaluate the ontological basis of our current civilization. And through this free fall between epochs of history, we are liberated to heal the wounds of humanity’s past and re-integrate ancient and nearly-forgotten ways of knowing ourselves and the world; a profound socio-cultural transformation from a worldview of fragmentation and separation to a worldview of interbeing and mutual interdependence; from a worldview of dominance and competition to a worldview of harmony and co-creation.

existential risk

Any event or scenario that has the potential to cause the extinction of humanity or the irreversible collapse of human civilization. These risks are characterized by their severity and the scale of their impact, which could prevent humanity from achieving its long-term potential. Examples of existential risks include nuclear war, catastrophic climate change, pandemics, and uncontrolled artificial intelligence.

interbeing

The understanding that our relationships are what make us possible, and that the health of these relationships determines the health of the whole.

A philosophical concept rooted in Zen Buddhism, notably proposed by Thich Nhat Hanh. It emphasizes the interconnectedness and interdependence of all elements of existence. According to this concept, nothing exists in isolation; everything is interwoven and mutually dependent. This understanding informs ethical living, mindfulness, and compassionate actions, highlighting that our well-being is intrinsically linked to the well-being of others and the environment.

zero sum

A situation in which any gain by one party is exactly balanced by a loss to another party. This means that the total amount of resources, benefits, or wealth remains constant, and one person’s gain is another person’s loss. Zero-sum scenarios are often used in game theory and economics to describe competitive situations where the interests of participants are directly opposed.

This ontological shift is already underway all around the world, despite the appearance of stagnancy driven by the media and legacy institutions. Legacy institutions will hold onto their ontological assumptions far longer than the general public as the result of the massive edifices and sunk costs embroiled in the foundations of our current epoch, motivated by intrinsic incentives to maintain a status quo that disproportionately benefits those who have already enclosed and are extracting from the commons we share. But if you look beneath the surface into emerging subcultures around the world, a new ontology is already emerging and traditional indigenous ways of being and knowing are being revitalized. Those who undertake this courageous cultural transformation have already begun to discover new ways of being that integrate different cultures and value systems to meet the converging challenges of our present context.

Joanna Macy describes this transition as “The Great Turning,” a civilizational phase transition from an industrial growth society into a life-affirming society. Amidst this transition, Macy notes the three dimensions of The Great Turning as holding actions that slow the damage, analysis of structural causes and the creation of structural alternatives, and shifts in consciousness. While this thesis focuses more explicitly on an analysis of structural causes and the creation of alternatives, shifts in consciousness are often where deeply transformative changes first begin.

At the core of this ontological shift is a new story of what it means to be human on the planet we call home. While our most recent epoch of human civilization was formalized upon the underlying agreement that we are rational actors engaged in a zero-sum competition for scarce resources and dominance, contemporary biological, sociological, psychological, metaphysical, and complexity sciences tell a different story. These new and ancient understandings reveal that our relationships are what make our lives possible, rich and meaningful – and that the health of these relationships determines the health of the whole. An equally material and metaphysical insight, akin to the Buddhist notion of interbeing or the Zulu philosophy of Ubuntu, our collective futures are inescapably bound together.

“In a real sense all life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be...This is the inter-related structure of reality.” ― Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

Within this emerging ontology, humans reimagine themselves as intrinsically part of and responsible for the vitality of our planet, our communities, and our commons. We are transformed from passive citizen-subjects and consumers into active citizen-participants and stewards. Our sense of personal well-being, once limited to the lens of the isolated and fragmented individual, nuclear family, nation or ethnicity, is being challenged by our current existential civilizational crises to evolve into a more holistic perspective.

Civilization-scale decay, made visible through the crises of homelessness, addiction, mental health epidemics, wealth inequality, ecocide, and the proliferation of potentially dangerous exponential technologies like AI and gene editing, reveal that there is no refuge, no place in our globalized civilization that is insulated from the risks and impacts of existential civilizational collapse and deteriorating quality of life. While our fates have always been bound together, these runaway existential risks make our mutual interdependence visceral, obvious, and un-ignorable.

This realization is the basis for a kind of sacred civics as a transcultural, transreligious, and transpolitical understanding of our mutual belonging and mutual responsibility. This emerging civic virtue exists at the immanent substrate of our material reality, not needing to leverage any metaphysical claims to bind our culture and systems to an ethical foundation of care, reciprocity, and mutuality. Scientifically and spiritually, our individual survival and thriving are increasingly bound together by either the game theoretic lose-lose or all-win reality of the meta-crisis’ runaway feedback loops. While many of our current systems reinforce an ontological frame of anti-social and ecocidal competition, our capacity for self-destruction, accelerated by the emergence of exponential technologies, requires a transformation in our fundamental relationships between self and other to reflect our new understanding of the interdependent nature of reality. By facing the reality that “rivalrous dynamics, multiplied by exponential technology, are inherently self-terminating,” we confront the existential mandate for humanity to evolve into a non-rivalrous, mutually responsible planetary species.

Drawing inspiration from the Buen Vivir movements in Bolivia and Ecuador as well as the Gross National Happiness Commission in Bhutan, we can see systemic implementations of this ontological shift towards inter-being and commons stewardship. Particularly in the Buen Vivir model, institutionalized in the Bolivian and Ecuadoran constitutions, well-being is described through an indigenous understanding of the mutually reinforcing relationships and scales of well-being, integrating individual, familial, communal, and ecological health. While these constitutional and governmental applications of an ontological shift have been difficult to reinforce due to the lingering effects of extractive multinational corporations, they offer a vision of an alternative approach to systems of governance and economy based on a new way of being.

civic virtue

The personal qualities and behaviors that contribute to the effective functioning of a civil and political society. It involves the dedication of citizens to the common welfare of their community, often prioritizing the public good over individual interests.

commons

Resources that are shared by a community and accessible to all its members. These resources can be natural, such as air, water, and land, or cultural, such as knowledge and public spaces. The concept of commons emphasizes collective management and stewardship, often involving informal norms and practices that ensure sustainable use and equitable access.

Ontological shifts begin within an individual’s beliefs, coalescing into social agreements and norms. Thus, no one can choose to make an ontological shift on our behalf. A new world only emerges when we choose a different way of being, courageously stepping outside of the confines of the unhealthy societal agreements that define many aspects of our current paradigm. Beginning in small pockets or “islands of coherence” which evolve into “systems of influence” through network effects, this emergent worldview will gradually develop its own culture, institutions, incentives, and infrastructures that “make the old system obsolete.” As such, embedding this ontological shift into explicit new social agreements, formalized through the design of new open civic systems aligned with the life-centric principles of pluralism and mutually interdependent collective agency, becomes an existential imperative for the continuity of human civilization and perhaps Life on Earth. This simultaneously cultural and systemic intervention is an essential strategic leverage point or “trim tab” to shift our planetary macro socio-economic order. In this context, civic innovation can be viewed as the emergent creative impetus driving us to imagine and build the foundations of what could be called a “life-affirming civilization.”

islands of coherance

Small, localized areas or systems within a larger, chaotic environment that exhibit a high degree of order, stability, and functionality. These “islands” can influence the broader system by serving as models of coherence and potentially catalyzing wider systemic change. The concept is often used in discussions about social, ecological, and organizational systems to highlight how pockets of stability and innovation can drive transformation in larger, more complex systems.

network effects

The phenomenon where the value or utility of a product, service, or platform increases as more people use it. Essentially, the more users there are, the more beneficial it becomes for each user. This can create a positive feedback loop, where increased usage attracts even more users, further enhancing the value.

trimtab

Buckminster Fuller used the term trim tab metaphorically to illustrate how small, strategic actions can create significant change. Just as a trim tab on a ship or aircraft can adjust the course with minimal effort, individuals or small groups can act as trim tabs within larger systems to influence and steer them in new directions.

The ontological shift from separation to interbeing isn’t abstract philosophy — it has practical implications for how we design and build civic systems. In our next chapter, we’ll explore what civic innovation actually means in this context, and how “islands of coherence” can grow into “systems of influence” capable of making old systems obsolete. We’ll also introduce the emerging Decentralized Civics (DeCiv) movement and the concept of cosmo-localism.

Series:

• Chapter 1: In Us We Trust

• Chapter 2: What is a Civilization

• Chapter 3: The Ontological Shift ← This Chapter

• Chapter 4: Civic Innovation & Open Civics

• 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

Now we turn to a foundational question: what actually is a civilization? Before we can transform our systems, we need to see them clearly — including the often invisible agreements that shape every aspect of our lives.

Prefer to read the full thesis? Read a PDF

What is a Civilization

Source: Wiki

A civilization is a collectively and dynamically composed construct. Put simply, our society is the product of the often unconscious and implicit cultural and systemic agreements that we enter into in order to participate. These agreements are shaped by our culture, formalized through our infrastructures, incentives and institutions and enacted through our interactions, which all coalesce to reinforce the particular patterns of production, consumption, and reproduction we call “society” or “civilization.”

Infrastructures can be understood as underlying resource mechanisms like money, energy, supply chains or law that mediate or enable specific types of interactions. Incentives can be understood as reward mechanisms for taking particular actions. Institutions can be understood as the social mechanisms that govern the behavior of individuals within a community. Together, these foundations determine what we can create and what we will be rewarded for creating (production), what we are able to consume (consumption), and what kinds of agency we have to modify and perpetuate these systems (reproduction). The flows of resources, information, and currency move along the river banks created by these institutions which, in our current epoch, perpetually reinforce well worn patterns of rivalry, scarcity, and extraction.

Human civilization is, in effect, a decentralized metabolic process, moving energy around the planet while shifting its form. As a phenomenon, this is neutral. Ants create ant hills. Birds create nests. Foxes create burrows. Humans create civilizations. As fundamentally social, relational beings, hardwired by our evolutionary programming to form tribal groups, we are naturally inclined to reproduce the social constructs of our civilization within the space defined by our infrastructures, incentives, and institutions.

We collectively uphold and signal our alignment with these structures in order to belong to, and survive within, the human social organism into which we are born. As such, we are all responsible for participating in and maintaining the current epoch of human civilization which has produced a particular series of self-reinforcing effects and outcomes that could be called ecocide, technocracy, late-stage capitalism, or the meta-crisis. As a catch-all descriptor for our many concurrent crises, the meta-crisis describes an interconnected set of crises whose common feature is their systemic and self-reinforcing nature.

exponential feedback loops

Self-reinforcing cycles within a system where the output of the system amplifies its own input, leading to rapid and often exponential growth or decline. In these loops, a small change in the initial state can result in significant and accelerating effects over time. This type of feedback is common in various natural and technological systems, such as population growth, financial markets, and viral spread, where the rate of change increases proportionally to the current state of the system.

As Stafford Beer says, “the purpose of a system is what it does.” In our current times, it seems as though the purpose of our civilization is to concentrate wealth and power while externalizing costs to the commons, resulting in ecological and social collapse as centralized power and externalized costs exponentially accelerate. Despite the narratives of “progress” and “democracy,” a simple analysis of the outputs of our current civilization reveal that these narratives are, in fact, window dressing for a system that is failing to produce a healthy biosphere and a thriving quality of Life for humans.

metacrisis

The interconnected and overlapping global crises that collectively threaten the stability and sustainability of our world. It encompasses a wide range of issues, including ecological collapse, economic instability, social inequality, and political dysfunction. At its core, the meta-crisis highlights our systemic inability to address these challenges effectively due to underlying flaws in our perception, understanding, and governance structures. This concept urges us to recognize the interconnected nature of these crises and to seek holistic, integrative solutions that address the root causes rather than just the symptoms.

These self-destructive phenomena are not so fatalistically bound to human nature as “capitalist realism” would have us believe. They are merely emergent outcomes based on the underlying set of agreements that form our infrastructures, incentives, and institutions, all of which combine to create the enabling structures of ecocidal and anti-social behaviors. These agreements, and the systems they inform, can be modified and transformed. Our history is replete with examples of these shifts occurring, most notably in the formation of the United States of America, a phase transition of power from a monarchic empire into a relatively self-governed nation. The founders of the United States were neither mythic beings with superhuman powers nor evil supervillains. They were, in fact, humans just like you or I, products of their time with the audacity to leverage the power of the word and collective action to invoke a democratic and isonomic social contract.

capitalism

An economic system characterized by private ownership of the means of production, market-based allocation of resources, and the pursuit of profit. In the context of the meta-crisis and exponential feedback loops, capitalism can be seen as both a driver and a product of these interconnected global challenges.

To better understand how we might reform our social contract by fundamentally shifting the underlying agreements of our current epoch, it is critical to describe the often invisible structures that compose our current global order and that have failed to produce wellbeing for people and the planet.

For the last 250 years, the state and the corporation have been the foundations of our species’ first-ever globalized civilization. Implicit in both of these structures are the fundamental agreements of a rivalrous, zero-sum worldview in which hierarchical, bureaucratic institutions and extractive, capital-accumulating corporations govern the majority of human interactions and relationships. While this set of agreements or worldview seem “natural” or inherent to many humans today, prior civilizational agreements have been mediated by religious institutions, royal aristocracies, militaries, mercantile marketplaces, and feudal lords.

This abridged list of civilizational forms is offered merely to illustrate that civilizational forms are not fixed despite such an appearance to those who live within them. The Roman Empire likely seemed eternal to many Romans even as invaders were at the gate. The underlying agreements of our civilization are “like water” in that we are so subsumed by them that we take them for granted as intrinsic, barely even noticeable. But the cracks in the edifice of our current civilization are showing, reminding us that these are no more than collective agreements that can be changed. Shifting these agreements is an inter-generational phase transition, a challenging but necessary process that requires an ontological shift and deep cultural transformation.

emergent

Phenomena that arise from complex interactions and cannot be easily predicted or understood by simply analyzing their individual components. In various contexts, emergent properties or behaviors are those that manifest as a result of the collective dynamics of a system, rather than from any single part of it.

natural

The term “natural” as a culturally constructed concept refers to the idea that what is considered “natural” is shaped by cultural beliefs, practices, and norms. Natural law is a philosophical theory that posits the existence of a set of moral principles inherent in human nature and the natural world, which are discoverable through observation.

Understanding civilization as a collective construct — shaped by agreements that can be changed — opens a crucial door. But changing those agreements requires more than policy reform; it requires a fundamental shift in how we understand ourselves in relationship to each other and the world. In our next chapter, we’ll explore the ontological shift that’s already underway, and why it’s essential to everything that follows.

Series:

• Chapter 1: In Us We Trust

• Chapter 2: What is a Civilization ← This Chapter

• Chapter 3: The Ontological Shift

• Chapter 4: Civic Innovation & Open Civics

• 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

This isn’t a blueprint for a perfect utopia. It’s an invitation to imagine, together, what a life-affirming civilization could look like — and to build the civic infrastructures that might carry us there. We hope these words move through you as they have moved through us.

Prefer to read the full thesis? Read a PDF

In Us We Trust

Source: Wiki Link

This document is offered openly to the commons. This work claims no author; those who have contributed to the various streams present in the following pages are many. You might even say we are legion. Because, despite our unique geographic, historical, and cultural contexts, we are speaking with a unified voice. This voice moves through us. We hope it will move through you also as you take in these words and find whatever is good and true and and beautiful and useful to you among them.

This document has been created for civic innovators, organizers, and patrons as an argument for the decentralization of civic innovation and revitalization of civic systems in service of the transition towards a life-affirming civilization. It makes the case for the urgent creation of new coordination mechanisms in response to the existential mandate for humanity to evolve into a non-rivalrous, mutually responsible civilization.

We offer these words as a clear and simple prayer, that we might embrace the all-encompassing sobriety of collapse with an all-encompassing love for our fellow human beings and their sovereign rights to vitality, resilience, and choice. We do not claim to have invented these rights, rather we see them as intrinsic to the nature of love and interbeing, a sacred foundation of mutuality that is rooted deeper than any religion, culture, or creed.

OpenCivics is not a brand or business; it is a spark to ignite a renaissance of civic participation and stewardship, a recognition of our shared belonging to and responsibility for our world. OpenCivics is an invocation of a broader movement towards an open civics — a collective and evolving field dedicated to reimagining civic systems through participatory design.

While the words in this document are already dead, flattened expressions, they point to something alive, a spirit that lives within all of us that yearns for a more beautiful world.

This document is a seed, published under a copyleft open-source license as an invitation to all to adapt, expand, and evolve its contents, fueling an ongoing exploration of what it means to enact an open civics. It serves as a “living blueprint,” designed to spawn new ideas, respond to emerging challenges, and address societal needs through collective input and iterative development.

We are here to collectively imagine and dream a different kind of future into being, and, if you’re reading these words, that journey has already begun within you. The whispers of that future live in the words that follow.

These words are dedicated to all those who have carried the vision of a world based in consent, trust, and mutual benefit – but did not live to see its ultimate arrival.

Their dream now lives within us to carry forward.

To connect the words within these pages with your own as nodes in a web of co-evolution, we suggest adopting the document naming convention : towards-an-open-civics_YYYYMMDDHH

Find and fork this work from : go.opencivics.co/wiki and github.com/opencivics/wiki

This is Not a Manifesto

Source: Wiki Link

History shows us that manifestos can give rise to monolithic, centralized movements, form in-group and out-group dynamics, and lead to forms of social organizing that are far too easy to topple or capture. Instead of a call simply to rise up and overthrow a system of power over others only to replace it with a new one, this is a call to root down into the places we call home and rise up together into a new epoch of shared power and shared responsibility.

This is also not a fully formed schematic of a perfect utopia. Utopias are neither real nor useful. We are protopian systems thinkers, more concerned with systems of care and a culture of profound empathy that help us to incrementally move forward together as one pluralistic and polycentric social body and planetary superorganism. This process will continue far after we die and will take countless shapes as our descendants determine for themselves what constitutes a more beautiful world.

We draw our inspiration from the Sunflower and g0v Movements in Taiwan, the Democratic Autonomy movement in Rojava, the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement in Sri Lanka, the compelling research and community organizing of thinkers and activists like Buckminster Fuller, Vandana Shiva, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Nora Bateson, Michel Bauwens, Forrest Landry, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Joanna Macy, Audrey Tang, Glen Weyl, Nathan Schneider, Richard Flyer, as well as organizations like Radicle Civics, RadicalxChange, Design Science Studio, Moral Imaginations, and The BioFi Project.

In earnest, we are imagination activists and pragmatic futurists, unwilling to accept the status quo of a sick planet and a sick humanity, driven to methodically adapt human civilization from the ground up.

systems thinking

An approach to understanding and solving complex problems by viewing them as part of an overall system, rather than in isolation. It involves recognizing the interconnections and relationships between different components of a system and understanding how changes in one part can affect the whole. This method emphasizes looking at patterns and dynamics over time, rather than static snapshots.

protopia

A term coined by futurist Kevin Kelly to describe a state of society that is continuously improving, rather than aiming for a perfect utopia or falling into a dystopia. Unlike utopia, which represents an ideal and often unattainable perfect state, protopia focuses on incremental progress and ongoing positive change. It acknowledges that while perfection is impossible, we can always strive to make things better, even if only by a small margin each day.

pluralism

A system in which multiple groups, principles, or sources of authority coexist and interact within a society. It emphasizes the acceptance and coexistence of diverse cultural, religious, ethnic, and political groups, allowing them to maintain their unique traditions and identities while contributing to the broader community.

polycentric

A system or structure that has multiple centers of control, authority, or importance. In a polycentric system, power and decision-making are distributed among several distinct entities or locations, rather than being centralized in a single point. This concept can apply to various contexts, such as governance, urban development, and organizational management.

superoganism

A group of synergistically interacting organisms of the same species that function together as a single, cohesive entity. This concept is often applied to social insects like ants, bees, and termites, where the colony operates as a unified whole with specialized roles and division of labor. Individual members of the superorganism cannot survive for extended periods on their own, as their survival and functionality are deeply interconnected with the group.

In our next chapter, we’ll explore a fundamental question: What actually is a civilization? Understanding the invisible agreements that shape our current epoch is the first step toward transforming them. We’ll examine how infrastructures, incentives, and institutions combine to produce the world we live in — and why that matters for everything that follows.

Series:

• Chapter 1: In Us We Trust ← This Chapter

• Chapter 2: What is a Civilization

• Chapter 3: The Ontological Shift

• Chapter 4: Civic Innovation & Open Civics

• 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

Before we share multiple significant updates and ways you can re-engage with the OpenCivics community in 2026, we want to share our new Theory of Change video (7 minutes) that summarizes the foundational thinking and approach behind OpenCivics.

This overview video for the movement is intended to be complimented by deeper dives into our philosophy, practice, and network (coming soon). We hope the video leaves you feeling inspired and aligned with the shared work ahead.

Please share it with someone you think needs to see it.

The Great Turning Underway

Across the planet, people are already building what comes next. In kitchens and community centers, on Discord servers and in watersheds, people are experimenting with new ways to coordinate, govern, and care for each other.

This work is often invisible. It happens in fragments, isolated peers that don’t know about each other, reinventing wheels and unnecessarily starting from scratch, patterns that never get shared.

Today’s civic fabric is thin, fragile, and centralized. We’ve outsourced responsibility to distant institutions, watched our commons get privatized, and seen trust unravel into polarization. But a different paradigm is emerging — one where civic life becomes more participatory, resilient, and vital through shifts in our values and everyday practices.

The OpenCivics Movement is emerging to change that. To support shifts from a thin, fragile, centralized ‘closed’ civic fabric to a vital, resilient, participatory ‘open’ civic fabric that’s fractal and practiced everywhere, every day. To create the conditions where open civic allies, innovators, organizers, and patrons can better find each other, build and learn together, and share what’s working.

OpenCivics’ development began in 2022 with the Network soft launched (live but not amplified) at the end of 2023. Over the course of the Network’s first year, we onboarded over 70 members and distributed several hundred thousand dollars in grant funding. As the Network grew, it became clear that we needed to more thoroughly define the core underlying design philosophy and theory of change we wanted to channel the collective efforts of the Network towards. We also knew that we needed a progressive protocolization plan to decenter ourselves as Stewards and support self-organization across the network. Through that process, we also discovered that we needed a Labs to advance the field of open civic innovation through strategic collaborations and open source knowledge creation.

At the end of 2024, we published our progressive protocolization plan and began working on the foundational building blocks for the Consortium and Labs. We paused membership applications under the pretense that this process would be relatively concise. It ended up taking about a year.

During this time we are happy to share that we have nurtured a thriving Labs and we’ve methodically developed the conceptual and functional foundations needed for the next phase of the Consortium’s collaborative work. Important groundwork, but still largely concept exploration and ideas on paper.

That’s ready to change now. We’re in the midst of crossing a threshold. What we refer to as phase one into phase two. The foundations are set, the infrastructure is live, and the network is ready to function as more than a vision.

Open civic innovation is becoming a living, community-led practice.

From Concept to Practice

When we launched OpenCivics, we knew a small stewardship team could spark something, but a movement that lasts has to be able to organize itself.

We’ve spent this past year building what that actually requires: not just ideas, but infrastructure. Not just philosophy, but pathways for participation. Not just a thesis, but the rituals and rhythms that let a distributed community coordinate, learn, and act together.

The scaffolding is in place. Now we need to bring it to life together.

Completing this transition requires more three steps:

1. Re-engage our community — Reconnect with members, welcome new ones, and activate the relationships that make a network more than a mailing list.

2. Start our new rhythms — Host assemblies, councils, and gatherings that create consistent opportunities to connect and collaborate.

3. Resource our efforts — Sufficiently fund the infrastructure, populate the knowledge commons, and build the capacity to sustain this work.

None of this happens without you. Here’s where we are and how to plug in.

What This Transition Into Phase 02 Means For You

OpenCivics is a community of practice and solidarity network, not another organization that takes up all your time.

1. The vast majority of your time and attention as you engage with OpenCivics stays on your own work — the projects, activities, and efforts you’re already engaged in. OpenCivics exists to support, connect, and resource your existing life’s work.

2. A smaller slice of your time engaged with OpenCivics goes toward connecting with peers, sharing what you’re learning, and finding collaborators.

3. And an even smaller slice, if and when it calls to you, goes toward evolving the field and helping the network run well.

The goal is that engaging here gives you energy and connection. If it starts feeling like another obligation draining your attention, we’re doing it wrong.

Step One: Re-Engage Our Community

A network is only as alive as the people participating in it. We’ve built infrastructure, but infrastructure without relationship is just empty scaffolding.

What we’re asking:

• Reconnect. If you’ve been on the periphery, now is the time to weave back in. Explore what’s new. Lean into what resonates. Share your own updates.

  → Subscribe to our Luma Calendar and Substack

• Update your membership. Help us know who you are and what you’re working on so we can connect you with the right people.

  → Resubmit membership form

• Make your work visible. Index your activities, peers, and resources so opportunities for collaboration can emerge.

  → Add to the commons

• Invite others. We’re ready to onboard new members. If you know someone who should be here, point them our way.

  → Invite someone to join

What we’ve developed to support this:

• WEBSITE — A redesigned website with clear entry points and the full story of what we’re building
  → opencivics.co

• WIKI — A wiki organized around our foundational documentation: thesis, concepts, framework, and network
  → wiki.opencivics.co

• PORTAL — A private workspace for Consortium members to coordinate, collaborate, and connect
  → portal.opencivics.co

• COMMONS — A living map of what’s happening in the field
  → commons.opencivics.co

• FORUM — A place to discuss Consortium proposals with clear posts and threads to guide the dialogue. Available to consortium members (requires invite).

  → forum.opencivics.co

• BROADCAST — Our primary broadcast channel for sharing network updates, case studies, civic innovator spotlights, reports, and notes from the field.

  → broadcast.opencivics.co

Step Two: Start Our New Rhythms

Connection doesn’t happen by accident. It requires consistent, reliable spaces where people can show up, find each other, and build trust over time.

We heard clearly that members want this. So we built the scaffolding to more effectively support it.

The core rhythms we’re launching:

• Bi-weekly Network Assemblies — Open to all network members. Designed for connection, peer learning, & finding collaborators. It’s where we amplify you and your efforts through open civic innovator sessions and open space.

• Monthly Delegate Council, Governance Sessions & Quarterly Advisor Council — For those going deeper into network coordination.

• Quarterly Strategy Reviews — Transparent check-ins on where we’re headed.

• Annual Summit — A gathering to share critical work across the field.

What we’re asking:

• Attend an Assembly. They are every two weeks, rotating for timezone. Put it on your calendar. Even if you just listen, your presence matters.

• Bring something to share. A question you’re sitting with. A project you’re working on. A pattern you’ve noticed. These gatherings are peer-driven.

• Commit to consistency. The magic happens when people keep showing up. Relationships deepen. Collaboration emerges.

What to do:

→ Subscribe to Calendar
→ Join Community on Telegram

Step Three: Resource Our Efforts

The developmental work of the past two years has been almost entirely volunteer. Patricia and Benjamin have been building towards this vision pro bono while sustaining themselves through external projects, and more recently, Labs consulting work. This model is not sustainable, and it limits what’s possible. We’ve been waiting until our asks and offers are clear, to have demonstrated the value of the ecosystem, and established mechanisms to support consistent flow funding.

As of today, OpenCivics has helped to distribute over $360,000 USD in community-led grants from over a thousand donors. We have convened a network of over 190 open civic allies, innovators, organizers, and patrons and that represent over 200 organizations. We’ve hosted gatherings and catalyzed collaborations across three continents.

But for this movement to fully mature, it needs to be supported by sufficient resource flows. That means securing initial financial funding, but it also means populating the knowledge commons with the resources and directories that make open civic innovation reproducible, to demonstrate possibility in action and further support this emerging field by making the value of our work more visible.

Funding Pathways

• Donate to OpenCivics Consortium to support Network stewardship, operations and developmental activities → Make a Donation

• Engage with OpenCivics Labs in a direct collaborative engagement → Book a Call

• Partner with OpenCivics Fund to direct flow funding to Network activities and resources → Book a Call

Why Funding This Work Matters

With your support, OpenCivics is set to grow into a vital network capable of responding to the rising crises of our moment by:

• Coordinating the research, documentation and sharing of critical and urgently needed open protocols for community-led resilience and local organizing.

• Supporting facilitation, templates and coordination for distributed, community-led colabs, swarms of self-organized activity to meet real local needs.

• Providing compensation for Network Stewards, Delegates, and Contributors to provide network coordination and infrastructure support to the movement.

• Hosting digital and physical convenings to strengthen the open civic innovation domain and contribute towards shared efforts in bioregional organizing, local resilience, and community-led infrastructure design.

What we’ve built to support this:

• Fiscal Sponsorship from Buckminster Fuller Institute — Allowing us to receive tax deductible donations today to sustain our work coordinating systems-scale innovation.

• Updated Consortium Constitution & Participation Pathways — Clearer membership roles from Ally → Citizen → Contributor → Delegate → Steward, plus Partner roles for organizations and Advisor roles for individuals.

• OpenCivics Labs — Our cooperatively-owned consulting guild, which has been practicing open civic innovation with partners like Buckminster Fuller Institute, Indigenous Commons, Center for Ethical Land Transition, and Regen Network.

• New Theory of Change Series — Content walking through how the philosophy, practice, and community compose the movement (coming soon).

What We Learned Through Labs

Over the past year, OpenCivics Labs served as our applied R&D environment. We didn’t just theorize about open civic innovation — we practiced it, working with partners like Buckminster Fuller Institute, Indigenous Commons, Center for Ethical Land Transition, and Regen Network.

Those collaborations let us test our methodology in real contexts.

Labs continues as a cooperatively-owned consulting guild for partners who want support designing networks, governance systems, or coordination infrastructure.

Over the coming weeks we’ll be beginning to public open source resources in the commons and publish case studies from nearly a dozen experiments in the field.

The Invitation

The movement is coming alive. But a movement isn’t something that happens to you, but through you. Here’s how to participate in this moment of transition.

Re-engage:

• Explore the Website and Wiki

• Visit the Member Portal

• Update your membership

• Index your activities by posting them on Telegram

Show up:

• Come to a Network Assembly

• Join the conversation on Telegram

Resource the work:

• Donate to support network infrastructure

• Contribute to the Knowledge Commons

• Apply as a Partner to fund something together

• Talk to OpenCivics Labs about building something together

Spread the word:

• Invite someone who should be in the Network

• Share our Theory of Change video

What’s Next

The foundations are set. Now we’re bringing them to life together.

We’ll keep you posted through regular updates. And we want to hear from you, what’s working, what’s confusing, what you need.

We’re glad you’re still with us on this journey after all these years of building toward this moment, a moment when the world needs us to work together more than ever. The path ahead won’t be easy as we respond to the long disaster of collapsing systems and rising authoritarianism, but it will be possible because we’re together.

In Us We Trust,
Patricia & Benjamin, OpenCivics Stewards

In this thought-provoking session, Jeff explores the concept of “psilocybernetics” - the use of psychedelics like psilocybin and cybernetic principles to design more responsive and adaptive institutions. He discusses how psilocybin’s ability to promote neuroplasticity could be leveraged for institutional change, and proposes using “intents” to introduce productive entropy into networks, allowing them to self-organize in novel ways. Drawing on ideas from viable systems models, sympoiesis, and fluid democracy, Jeff challenges the group to rethink the future of civic and economic systems using biomimicry and psychedelic insights.

The Unraveling and the Emergence

Something’s shifting. You can feel it if you’re paying attention.

The old systems — the ones we’ve depended on for decades — are straining under their own contradictions. Institutions that once felt permanent are revealing themselves as brittle, disconnected from the lived realities of the people they claim to serve. Meanwhile, at the edges, something else is taking root: experiments in community-led support, neighbors organizing mutual aid networks, bioregional experiments in self-governance finding their footing, local economies reconnecting producers with communities, people designing new civc systems of community care, because the old ones have stopped working.

This isn’t collapse. It’s emergence. The two happening simultaneously.

The future of civilization doesn’t depend on better technology or smarter policy from above. It depends on whether communities can recover — or rediscover — their capacity to coordinate, govern, and care for themselves. The tools matter, but only insofar as they strengthen relationships rather than replace them. Infrastructure means nothing if it doesn’t serve real people in real places doing the patient work of sustaining life together.

This is why we’re helping steward the Localism Fund — a new experiment that weaves together our commitment to nurturing the field of open civic innovation with Ethereum’s coordination infrastructure to support place-based organizing at scale.

What We’re Building

The Localism Fund launched with $155,000 USD in initial funding from our partners Celo Public Goods, Gitcoin, Ma Earth, and Ethereum Everywhere to support local hubs, networks, and place-based groups worldwide. But this isn’t another grant-making program where distant funders decide what communities need. It’s an experiment in subsidiarity — a design principle that says decisions should sit at the most local level capable of making them well. We’re honored to be working with Regen Coordination and a network of expert peers to bring this vision to fruition.

Two pathways are open now:

🌿 Local Grant Programs | Round 01

Design and run your own local funding round rooted in political, economic, cultural, or ecological localism.

Matching Pool: $125,000 USD

Apply: localism.fund/round-01

Localism Fund Expert Network

Join as a peer-validated expert in grant-making, Web3 coordination, or localism. Evaluate, mentor, advise.

Compensation: $5,500 USD + 10,000 CELO

Apply: localism.fund/expert-network

Why Localism Matters

For generations, we’ve watched decision-making authority concentrate in institutions increasingly detached from place. The problems we face — democratic fragility, economic brittleness, cultural erosion, ecological decline — all manifest locally. They’re experienced in watersheds, neighborhoods, bioregions. In the commons that sustain us.

Localism is the simple recognition that those closest to a challenge are usually best positioned to solve it. It’s about rooting governance, economic activity, and cultural practice in relationship to place and to each other.

This takes different forms depending on context:

Political localism looks like participatory budgeting, neighborhood assemblies, municipal innovation — decentralizing authority to the people living with the consequences of decisions.

Economic localism means building local ownership through cooperatives, community currencies, shorter supply chains — keeping value circulating where it’s generated rather than extracting it elsewhere.

Cultural localism is strengthening the stories, heritage, and practices that root people in place — the foundation of resilience when everything else becomes uncertain.

Ecological localism means stewarding the watersheds, forests, and soil systems that actually sustain life — governance grounded in bioregional reality rather than arbitrary political boundaries.

Ethereum localism uses blockchain-based tools — payments, attestations, governance mechanisms, open data — to help communities coordinate without centralized middlemen extracting value from every interaction.

These aren’t separate categories. They’re overlapping expressions of the same core principle: communities need the capacity to organize themselves adaptively across changing circumstances. This is what civic resilience actually looks like.

How It Works: Polycentric by Design

The Localism Fund operates as a learning network rather than a traditional funder. We’re building what could be called a “polycentric architecture” — a system where global resources meet local knowledge through iterative cycles, and everyone gets smarter together.

Think of it as two flows moving in opposite directions:

Resources flow down:

Capital, tools, frameworks, and mentorship move from people with domain expertise → the Fund → regional networks → local hubs → community activities on the ground.

Learning flows up:

Stories, impact data, attestations, and hard-won wisdom flow back, informing future rounds and helping the whole system adapt.

The result:

A dynamic ecosystem where what works spreads, credible hubs attract more support, and the network evolves based on what communities actually need rather than what distant funders think they need.

Here’s the practical piece: local hubs receive matching funds to run their own grant programs. They decide priorities, select projects, distribute resources, and report back on what happened. We provide matching capital to amplify their fundraising, expert mentorship to strengthen program design, coordination infrastructure for transparency, and network learning so insights travel across contexts.

This is what subsidiarity means in practice — governance sitting at the most local level capable of identifying real challenges and organizing local collective action, supported by shared scaffolding that helps coordinate across scales without imposing uniformity.

Who’s Involved: Weaving Partners Together

The Fund itself is an experiment in collaborative stewardship. Co-stewarded by Patricia Parkinson and Benjamin Life from OpenCivics and Monty Merlin Bryant from Regen Coordination and Celo Public Goods, our joint effort is already weaving together a range of aligned partners, each bringing different capacities:

Stewardship:

OpenCivics brings civic innovation and network coordination. Regen Coordination brings regenerative finance strategy and ecosystem weaving.

Funding:

Gitcoin, Celo Public Goods, Ma Earth, and Ethereum Foundation / Ethereum Everywhere are backing this experiment.

Infrastructure Support:

Karma GAP handles application management. TrustGraph / WAVS provides peer attestation and decentralized reputation.

Round 01: Funding Local Funding

Our first round, Local Grant Programs, funds something unusual: we’re not funding individual projects. We’re funding locally-led funding programs — giving communities the capacity to run their own grant rounds using Ethereum coordination tools.

Who should apply:

Local hubs, chapters, coalitions, bioregional nodes ready to launch a grant round in early 2026.

What we’re looking for:

Programs that strengthen community coordination — political, economic, cultural, or ecological — while piloting practical uses of blockchain tools for governance, resource flows, and transparent decision-making.

Grant range:

$5,000–$20,000 per program (matched)

Total pool:

$125,000 USD

More details: localism.fund/round-01

Building Trust Through Peer Recognition

Here’s a problem that plagues traditional grant-making: evaluation happens behind closed doors, by people often disconnected from the communities and tools they’re assessing. Trust becomes opaque. Credibility becomes impossible to verify.

The Localism Fund Expert Network takes a different approach. We’re seeding a peer-attested network of practitioners with lived experience in localism, Web3 coordination, and community-led grant-making.

Experts contribute by:

• Evaluating applications using a shared rubric developed transparently

• Mentoring local hubs through program design and operations

• Providing feedback on the tools we’re using — making them better for everyone

Instead of credentials issued by distant authorities, experts vouch for each other through on-chain attestations using TrustGraph — a governance tool that makes trust more visible and verifiable. As peers attest to each other’s contributions, reputation grows dynamically using an algorithm similar to how Google’s PageRank works. Trust becomes living, adaptive, grounded in real collaboration rather than bureaucratic gatekeeping. Calculating TrustScores using on-chain attestation data is made possible through verified off-chain computation provided by WAVS.

Participation is flexible — from light evaluation work to deeper mentorship — with compensation ranging from $200–$1,200 USD plus CELO rewards and on-chain recognition.

This is what it looks like to build open civic systems rooted in peer relationships and transparent reputation rather than opaque hierarchies.

The Longer Arc: Cultivating Open Civic Renaissance

We talk sometimes about fostering an open civic renaissance — a renewal of the cultural capacity that allows communities to thrive together. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s about rediscovering ancient practices of mutual care and reciprocity while wielding new coordination tools that amplify, rather than replace, local agency.

The Localism Fund is one experiment in what this looks like: resources flowing through trusted networks to support local action, with learning flowing back to inform the next cycle.

Over time, we’re cultivating an ecosystem where:

- Local hubs operate with genuine autonomy, supported by shared infrastructure rather than controlled by it.

- Expert networks provide credible evaluation grounded in peer trust and transparent contribution rather than opaque authority.

- Open-source tools let communities coordinate without middlemen capturing value from every transaction.

- Knowledge commons ensure patterns that work can travel and adapt across different contexts.

- Bioregional coordination strengthens as effective models replicate and connect across places.

This is the work of civilizational renewal — not through grand transformation from above, but through patient cultivation of adaptive, self-organizing systems capable of sustaining life together as circumstances change.

Your Role in This

Whether you’re organizing community resilience where you live, designing new coordination tools, or looking to resource regenerative systems — there’s a place for you in this work.

For local organizers:

Run your own community-led funding round connecting local needs with blockchain coordination tools.

→ localism.fund

For practitioners:

Join the Expert Network to evaluate, mentor, and earn recognition for contributing to this movement.

→ localism.fund/expert-network

For partners:

Help us launch new rounds and extend this architecture to more regions and contexts.

For everyone:

Join the conversation, ask questions, help refine these experiments in place-based coordination.

💬 Community: t.me/localismfund

✉️ Contact: support@localism.fund

The future we need won’t emerge from centralized powers or abstract promises. It will grow from communities rediscovering their capacity to coordinate, care for each other, and govern themselves. This is scaffolding for that emergence.

Let’s build it together. 🌱

City/Sync reimagines local governance by blending historical perspectives on how societies organize with practical blueprints for the future. The core thesis is that governments are a kind of technology—tools for coordination, trust, and legitimacy—that must evolve in response to new scales of human organization, from villages to digital networks.

https://paragraph.com/@city-sync
https://x.com/natesuits

Speaker John Ash reflects on past errors and prescient voices, showing how technology can help us stay open to continuous reflection. This is an invitation to rethink trust as a function of memory and explore how we can use technology to ensure attention, influence and even power itself flows to those who consistently help others see clearly.

https://medium.com/@speakerjohnash
https://www.byjohnash.com/
https://x.com/speakerjohnash

Daniel Lindenberger’s Metachrysalis is a playful framework for engaging in bioregional work while building community, nourishing participants, and snowballing flows and commons of permaculture capital. Emerging from a six-month fellowship on ‘Mycelial Approaches to the Metacrisis,’ this open-source ‘game’ gives people the freedom to experiment with regenerative approaches in the real world. Every ‘move’ in the game is a tangible project, recorded as part of a living portfolio that supports organic mentorship via micro-credential "skill trees", and the ability for changemakers to both find and be found by others—and to attract resources to the work they are focused on.

Roxanna Shohadaee presents on a Portal to Regen·era: Design Science Studio Evolutionary Collective x Black Rock City and 2025-2026 Incubator DSS CoheART 4 ~ during an OpenCivics General Assembly Civic Innovator Session.

To get more involved, become a member and attend our bi-weekly General Assemblies.

Check out the OpenCivics public calendar for the latest events as well as initiative, alliance, and assembly meeting times.

In the future, we may restrict these reports to Consortium members and patrons. If you appreciate the content here, consider becoming a Citizen, Contributor, or Patron to ensure you’ll keep receiving these resource-dense posts.

Here’s your OpenCivics Monthly Report for June 2025.

What’s Inside:

• 🗒️ Network Stewardship Note

• 🤓 Nerd Out With Us

• 🌐 Network Activities

• 📢 Member Spotlight

• 🔍 Network Updates

Network Stewardship Note

Dear Community,

Amidst a climate of rising authoritarianism and institutional centralization worldwide, we paid particular attention to David Brooks’ widely shared op ed in the New York Times calling for a civic uprising. As OpenCivics Stewards, we are exploring how to provide as strategic and targeted support as possible in service of the urgently needed civic infrastructure that would make such an uprising possible. We welcome ideas and feedback.

We’ll be sharing new ways for you to get involved in the coming weeks, but in the interim we want to remind you that we got us. We need solidarity networks now more than ever and OpenCivics was born from the knowledge that these types of decentralized civic utilities would eventually become an existential necessity for communities around the world. We’ve laid out our vision for this type of infrastructure in our thesis and in a talk last year at the Transformative Impact Summit.

As we work towards supporting the grassroots resistance to rising authoritarianism, corporate control, and political violence, we need your support now more than ever.

If you’d like to chip in towards our urgent efforts to launch a practical civic toolkit for these times, we’d be honored to receive your tax deductible donation as a fiscally hosted project of the Buckminster Fuller Institute.

If you’d like to participate in exploring what the most strategic and targeted support may be, in service of the urgently needed civic infrastructure that would make such an uprising possible, join our breakout conversation on telegram.

In Us We Trust,

OpenCivics Network Stewards

🤓 Nerd Out With Us

Read

• Cosmolocalism — A Framework for Building Sustainable Network State Economies: This article from Polis Labs, an independent research institute focused sensemaking practices within parallel societies and network states, explores cosmo-localism as applied to parallel society-building.

• Ethereum Localism x Regen Coordination: Powering Regenerative Local Economies with Web3: This article from Monty Merlin outlines the potential for collaboration between Regen Coordination and the Ethereum Localism Movement.

• What Is Ethereum For?: This essay from OpenCivics co-founder, Benjamin Life, explores Ethereum as a pluralistic design space for civilization-scale digital infrastructure and a home for the protopian imagination of many possible worlds.

• Exploring multiscalar networks: What makes networks effective and transformative?: This article summarizes the insights and collective learning of the Network Coordination Commons, a new alliance (see Network Activities below to get involved) exploring capacity building among network coordinators.

• The Covenant of Humanistic Technology: You’re invited to read and contribute to human.tech’s distributed manifesto for the development of technology in alignment with human well-being.

• Beautiful Solutions — A Toolbox For Liberation: The stories featured in this anthology amplify ancestral and community wisdom to help us all imagine a different way of doing things. From food sovereignty to debt abolition, from folk schools to energy democracy – Beautiful Solutions is a resource for anyone working towards a solidarity economy.

• Community Currencies: The Price Of Attention And Cost Of Influence In A Networked Age -or-The Price Of Entry And Cost Of Exit In A Networked Age: This paper by Puja Ohlhaver offers a dual-currency model that separates non-transferable, irrevocable stake for influence from transferable currency for resource exchange and attention.

• The Authoritarian Threat: Preparing for the Repression of U.S. Philanthropy & Civil Society: The report identifies threats from President-elect Trump, Congress, state actors, and other key stakeholders, highlighting practical recommendations for funders and nonprofit organizations to mitigate these risks and protect their work in this uncertain environment.

• Cultivating a Cultural Shift Toward Bioregional Resilience: This article from Bioregional Earth tells the story of Regenerate Cascadia, a leading bioregional initiative in the Pacific Northwest.

• Specifications for Peer-to-Peer Service Syndication: This preliminary specification document from Clinamenic outlines the usage of .xml files to convey service offerings in a machine readable format, with the intention of empowering individuals to programmatically communicate and syndicate their services. See this proof of concept for an example.

Watch

• Democracy Innovators Podcast: Check out OpenCivics Citizen, Artem Zhiganov, discuss his project Harmonica, exploring: What is the role of AI facilitation in the future of democracies? How can we improve collective sense-making with GenAI?

• Local DAO Summer: As we move into the summer of 2025 in the Northern Hemisphere, we’re remembering just how much incredible content was shared during Local DAO Summer 2024 which featured many OpenCivics Consortium members and allies. We highly recommend revisiting this playlist for some local decentralized community organizing inspiration!

• Co-Vibing Workshop: OpenCivics Steward, Clinamenic, offered an introductory workshop for vibe coding (building software with AI) to educate others and empower them to build their own tools. Watch the recording of the session to get started with vibe coding and look out for future sessions to participate in.

• Architecting Organizational Knowledge with Michael Zargham: In open source software communities, knowledge organization infrastructure (KOI) — centered around platforms like GitHub — facilitates everything from contribution guidelines to project tracking and artifact management. This session from BlockScience unpacks how to begin your journey with KOI.

🌐 Network Activities

Network Activities are the connective tissue in the field of civic innovation, designed to align, coordinate, and empower civic innovators, organizers, and patrons in their autonomous but coordinated pursuit of a more vital, resilient, and participatory civilization.

Below, you’ll find an overview of upcoming key activities within and around the network that you can participate in.

Gatherings

• Gods in the Machine, Commons in the Soil: A Fireside Chat with Nathan Schneider: We've spent the last decade building cathedrals in the cloud—platforms, blockchains, and agent swarms reaching for infinite scale, universal abstraction, and frictionless control. But on the ground, communities are asking a different question: What does it mean to build resilient systems of value rooted in place? Join us for a special fireside chat on sacred systems, digital localism, and the future of value with Nathan Schneider and Crystal Street. Dates: Tuesday, July 15, 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM at Venture X Denver Lodo, Denver, Colorado

• Web3 Summit 2025: This is a developer summit for builders, researchers, and hackers who are working on privacy-focused and censorship-resistant technologies. Dates: July 16-18, 2025, at Funkhaus Berlin.

• Dweb Cascadia: Co-create the first ever regional Pacific Northwest campout for our DWeb community. Yes, there will be mesh networks, yes there will be awesome shared meals, talks and conversations, yes, there will be camping under the stars, and more… DWeb Camp Cascadia is grounded in the set DWeb principles of human agency, distributed benefits, mutual respect, humanity and ecological awareness. Dates: August 8th-10th, 2025, in Salt Spring Island, BC, Canada

• ETHGlobal New York 2025: This hackathon provides an opportunity for people to experiment with web3 technologies and develop new ideas. Dates: August 15–17, 2025, in New York City.

• Crypto Commons Gathering 2025 (CCG'25): This is the fifth edition of a gathering that brings together individuals from the web3 ecosystem to explore future technologies and practices. Dates: August 24–30, 2025, at the Commons Hub in Austria.

• Festival of Commoning: a celebration of people acting together to build commons of all kinds. Dates: September 12th-13th, 2025

Grants

• Bezos Earth Fund's AI for Climate and Nature Grand Challenge: The Bezos Earth Fund has launched a global $100 million grant program called the AI for Climate and Nature Grand Challenge. The initiative aims to use modern AI to help solve critical challenges related to climate change and nature loss.

• Gitcoin Grants 24 Strategic Sense-Making Framework: Gitcoin is using a "Strategic Sense-Making Framework" as part of its Gitcoin Grants 24 (GG24) program to ensure capital is allocated to solve critical problems within the Ethereum ecosystem. All Gitcoin community members are empowered to participate in sensemaking and pitch domains for GG24.

• NGI MobiFree Grant Program: The NGI MobiFree program provides R&D grants for solutions that offer European citizens and organizations more choice and access to human-centered and ethical mobile software. The program's total grant fund is 670,000 euro.

• Filecoin Grant Programs: The Filecoin Foundation and Protocol Labs award grants for various development projects to promote a decentralized, efficient, and robust foundation for humanity's information. The projects must be open-source and dual-licensed under MIT and APACHE2.

• Ethereum Foundation Ecosystem Support Program (ESP) Grants: The Ethereum Foundation’s Ecosystem Support Program (ESP) provides grants to support work that strengthens Ethereum's foundations and enables future builders. All funded projects must be open-source or freely available. The grants are separated into different categories, including Project Grants and Small Grants, with different processes and criteria.

Maps

• Impact Network Storytelling Playbook: This playbook is designed to help impact networks leverage storytelling as a coordination mechanism and tool for societal and structural change.

• Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions: This report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development explores the reasons and routes for embedding deliberative activities into public institutions to give citizens a more permanent and meaningful role in shaping the policies affecting their lives.

• Exploring An Innovative Approach to Democratic Governance: A Funder’s Guide to Citizens’ Assemblies: Produced by Democracy Funders Network and New America, this guide explores the potential opportunities and challenges citizens' assemblies present for building civic power at the local level for authentic civic engagement within communities.

Courses

• A Learning Journey for Organizing Bioregions: This course from the Design School For Regenerating Earth offers a transformative learning journey that explores how to cultivate regenerative, place-based governance and economic systems by aligning human communities with the ecological realities of their bioregions.

• How To DAO Fundamentals: This foundational course demystifies Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), blending theory and practice to equip participants with the knowledge and skills necessary to navigate and leverage this innovative organizational model.

• Designing Resilient Regenerative Systems: An innovative Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) series that combines sustainability science, systemic design, and transformative action, providing participants with tools and networks to engage in systemic innovation of complex systems.

• Technological Metamodernism Course Notes: A course exploring the intersection of technology, philosophy, design, and game theory, advocating for a nuanced approach that transcends the simplistic "tech good" versus "tech bad" dichotomy.

Initiatives

• Open Protocol Library

  • A collaborative process across impact networks to generate interoperable knowledge commons that support solidarity and learning. Request a link in the Consortium Telegram to join.

• Metagovernance Playground

  • A group of OpenCivics members iteratively exploring the governance design space within a sandbox for experimentations that could evolve into Consortium governance protocols. Request a link in the Consortium Telegram to join.

• Oral History Project

  • A collaborative process oriented towards anthropological documentation of community knowledge as a source for AI-assisted peer to peer learning. Request a link in the Consortium Telegram to join.

Alliances

• The Network Coordination Commons: An open working group for network coordinators, this collaborative research and capacity-building alliance is hosting regular conversations, producing network coordination playbooks, and publishing research on network coordination methods and technology. To participate, attend a call.

• Bioregional Mapping Guild: Part of the Design School For Regenerating Earth, this guild supports bioregional mappers with technical and design support.

• AI Facilitation Library: This closed alliance, hosted by MetaGov, is exploring structured data for human and AI-augmented facilitation and process design. To contribute towards OpenCivics contribution to the Alliance, please contact via the OpenCivics Consortium Telegram.

• Interspecies Mutualism Reading Circle: A Telegram-based community dedicated to exploring and discussing interspecies mutualism, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue on cooperative interactions between species.

• Open Mutualism Archive: A repository of humanities research focused on mutualism within the context of open web values, emphasizing decentralization, peer production, and institutional disaffiliation.

• Collaborative Technology Alliance: The Collaborative Technology Alliance exists to facilitate collaboration, coordination, and community among platform designers, developers, and stewards who are committed to building social technology that benefits both people and planet.

📢 Member Spotlight

Member Spotlight: Josh Spector

Josh Spector didn't set out to become a bridge between blockchain and grassroots organizing. But somehow he ended up, still in his late twenties, serving on his local soil and water conservation district board while simultaneously helping communities understand how DAOs might solve some of their thorniest problems. Josh is playing by his own rulebook, meeting people where they are and supporting them with tools that directly empower subsidiarity and self-determination while supporting localism, mutualism, and regeneration.

Finding His Path

Josh's journey started early. A sixth-grade teacher opened his eyes to systems thinking and the interconnected crises facing our world. That spark led him to study geographic information science, imagining he'd tackle climate change through technology and data. He graduated in 2019, ready to make his mark in GIS and remote sensing.

Then 2020 happened. Like many young people, Josh watched the world shift dramatically just as he was beginning to find his way in it. Embracing the urgency and immediacy of the moment, Josh left his professional post-college job and dove into political organizing with the Sunrise Movement. While still an ally to the movement, Josh began to see firsthand through his organizing work the slow pace of governments and reform-based institutional change movements, a far cry from the rapid and systemic change he felt was needed. As the social movements of 2020 unfolded, Josh found himself more and more drawn to mutual aid work, supporting Portland's houseless community and working with currently or formerly incarcerated people.

The Problem with Good Intentions

Working in mutual aid taught Josh something important: even well-intentioned groups struggle with transparency and resource management. Most people were trustworthy, but structural problems still emerged. Where was the money going? Who was making decisions? How could communities ensure accountability without suffocating bureaucracy?

Then he saw ConstitutionDAO in action—thousands of people transparently pooling resources toward a shared goal. The mechanics were visible to everyone. The governance was participatory. Something clicked.

Building and Rebuilding

Around that time, Josh met and became friends with James and Brett, fellow decentralized governance nerds who lived nearby, and their early conversations about mutualism and DAOs would eventually spark the creation of PDX DAO, initially envisioning a city-wide organization that would help local groups adopt blockchain tools. This early solidarity kicked into action as James, Brett, and Josh catalyzed and organized alongside others to help spur Bridgespace, a radical experiment in community-led third spaces that served as a hub for mutual aid, community, and movement building. But as they dug deeper and their founding team grew, they realized a monolithic approach contradicted everything they believed about decentralization. Why create another centralized structure when the goal was to distribute power?

So they did something radical: they killed PDX DAO and started over. Ethereal Forest emerged with a different mission—not to be the DAO for Portland, but to nurture conditions where many smaller, community-specific DAOs could flourish and connect.

Making Connections

The approach resonated. When Ethereal Forest hosted their first General Forum On Ethereum Localism (GFEL), community figures like Scott Morris, Jeff Emmett, Kevin Owocki, and Christina Bowen showed up. More importantly, so did local organizers who'd never touched crypto before.

Josh has a unique credibility in these spaces. His background in mutual aid and grassroots work gives him a kind of cred that pure tech evangelists often lack. When he talks about DAOs, people listen—not because he's selling them on getting rich, but because he's genuinely trying to solve problems they recognize.

The Bigger Picture

For Josh, this isn't really about blockchain technology. It's about subsidiarity—the idea that decisions should be made at the most local level possible, by the people most affected by those decisions. Current governance systems, he argues, have become too distant from the people they're supposed to serve. The result is polarization and broken trust.

DAOs offer tools for rebuilding that trust by giving communities more direct control over their resources and decisions, not as a panacea but as a tool in the toolkit for local organizers and social movements.

Bridging Worlds

Josh has also been a keen observer of the natural connections between the bioregional movement and decentralized governance. Both seek alternatives to extractive systems. Both emphasize participatory decision-making. Both work to fill gaps where traditional government and markets fall short.

Josh brings the depth of his work with Ethereal Forest, hosting Local DAO Summer, GFEL, and a Guest Season of the Green Pill Podcast on ETH Localism, and pours that wealth of knowledge and connections into Regenerate Cascadia as a landscape organizer in the Willamette Valley, establishing frameworks for local organizers. Even closer to home, Josh’s role at the West Multnomah Soil and Water Conservation District consistently keeps him engaged with the entirely over-50 community of traditional conservationists and elders. Josh lives and breathes these intersections daily. Through his connections in Portland, he's also keen to explore how the Portland Clean Energy Fund might distribute resources using participatory budgeting. These intersections are at the heart of what OpenCivics aims to serve, applied research and participatory design for local self-determination, resilience, and ecological health.

Addressing the Skeptics

Josh gets why people in organizing circles are skeptical of blockchain. The association with scams and speculation is real and understandable. But he consistently frames the technology differently: as collectively owned infrastructure that sits outside traditional government or corporate control.

"It's a third way," he explains. Not government, not private companies, but something else—networks that communities can own and govern themselves. Once people understand this framing, the potential often becomes clear.

What's Next

Josh continues weaving connections between the OpenCivics community and on-the-ground bioregional organizing in Cascadia. Whether he's supporting the BioFi Cascadia Summit, catalyzing and stewarding community-led third spaces, or farming on permaculture sites around Portland, he's demonstrating how blockchain and local organizing can work hand in hand together to help communities care for each other and lift each other up.

The work isn't flashy. It's a long and difficult path of building trust and showing up with humility. Josh lives according to those values, not as a techno-optimist schilling solutions but as a sincere and gentle ally of ecological flourishing and human dignity.

🔍 Network Updates

The OpenCivics Network is composed of organizing structures that connect and support members: the Consortium, Labs, and Foundation.

The OpenCivics Consortium is a coordination body of network citizens self-organizing around the creation of open civic systems.

Key Updates:

• Exploratory DAO sandbox for the Consortium is live on Colony.io

The OpenCivics Labs is an applied research and development cooperative offering networks facilitation and design.

Key Updates:

• Exploratory DAO sandbox for the Labs is live on Colony.io

• OpenCivics Labs wrapped a knowledge management support contract with the Center For Ethical Land Transition

• OpenCivics Labs is finalizing contracting to co-lead the Regen Commons development process alongside Greater Than and the broader regen web3 community.

The OpenCivics Foundation is a non-profit effort focused on enhancing civic participation by supporting the growth of the OpenCivics Network and the field of open civic innovation in the public interest.

Key Updates:

OpenCivics Network is a fiscally hosted project of the Buckminster Fuller Institute and will provide non-profit donation facilities through OpenCivics Labs until the OpenCivics Foundation is incorporated and registered as a 501c3 at a future date.

As always, OpenCivics thrives through shared stewardship. Thank you for all that you contribute.

In Us We Trust,

OpenCivics Stewards