A handshake is a protocol. So is a board meeting. So is a potluck. So is TCP/IP.

Nathan Schneider — professor at CU Boulder, director of the Media Economies Design Lab, and author of Governable Spaces — has spent years thinking about protocols as a third institutional form alongside governments and corporations: patterns of interaction among agents that could, if cultivated intentionally, help us address climate change, govern online spaces, and rebuild the civic virtues we’ve let atrophy.

In April, Nathan brought us the Protocol Bicorder: a web tool named as a nod to Star Trek’s tricorder, but designed for slowness rather than speed. You enter a protocol, declare your standpoint, and work through a gradient-based questionnaire that surfaces the hidden logic beneath your social agreements. We spent five minutes as a group analyzing protocols we’d chosen ourselves — meeting scheduling, hugging, the McCarthy Decider, reception rituals — and the conversation that followed about how culturally variable even a “simple” protocol like hugging turns out to be is worth the watch alone.

One early finding that’s already emerging from real and synthetic data: there’s a clean cluster distinction between institutional protocols (transparent, trust-built-in-public) and vernacular protocols (opaque, trust-built-through-boundaries). And the most durable protocols appear to carry internal contradictions — some elements rigid, others flexible — as a load-bearing structural feature.

Benjamin closed the session by naming what’s at stake for OpenCivics: 2026 is our year of protocols, focused on disaster response, preparedness, and community sovereignty. A distributed knowledge commoning swarm is planned for May–June to harvest protocols from communities doing mutual aid and disaster relief on the ground. This conversation is the theoretical grounding for that work.

Nathan Schneider is a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and director of the Media Economies Design Lab. His previous book is Governable Spaces (University of California Press). This session was recorded at the OpenCivics Bi-Weekly Network Assembly on April 21, 2026.

If you’ve ever tried to choose a protocol stack for a community tech project — and felt like you were navigating a map with no legend — Brandon Nørgaard has been building the legend.

OpenHaven, incubated under the Collaborative Technology Alliance, is a live protocol navigator: an affordance matrix that lets builders, communities, and funders move from use case (”I care about identity and trust”) to specific tool, with every entry scored on capture risk and interoperability. Brandon demoed it live — walking through Holochain, NextGraph, Bluesky, decentralized storage, compute, and more — and the clarity it brings to an otherwise overwhelming landscape is real.

Alongside OpenHaven, Brandon previewed Civic Intelligence Infrastructure: a back-end interoperability project for the civic hub network of Better Together America. The problem it solves: civic hubs are running on a dozen fragmented tools, generating data that can’t talk to each other. CII normalizes that data and creates an auditable analytics layer across hubs — extending MetaGov’s deliberative-tooling work into the full range of functions real civic organizations actually use.

The animating urgency: ecosystem mapping, data normalization, and integration are the most under-invested infrastructure in civic tech right now. AI has suddenly made this tractable — and Brandon is building it in the public interest before less civic-minded actors get there first.

Brandon Nørgaard is a founder at the Collaborative Technology Alliance and leads Civic Intelligence Infrastructure for Mediators Foundation. This session was recorded at the OpenCivics Bi-Weekly Network Assembly on April 8, 2026.

Jürgen Habermas — who had just passed when Artem joined us in March — spent his career arguing that genuine public deliberation isn’t a luxury. It’s public infrastructure, as legitimate as roads, plumbing, or libraries. Artem Zhiganov took that premise and built a product from it.

Harmonica is an AI-facilitated sensemaking tool that targets the most overlooked bottleneck in democratic practice: the skilled, expensive, irreplaceable work of a good facilitator. Surveys and forums scale, but they surface no depth. Interviews and citizen assemblies have depth, but they don’t scale. Harmonica’s thesis is that facilitation itself can be made composable — modular, deployable, AI-assisted — without losing the qualities that make it work.

In our session, Artem did something brave: he spun up a live Harmonica session on the spot, with the audience co-designing the facilitation prompt, deployed it to a Telegram bot, and had the whole thing running in under five minutes — all via a command-line interface and MCP server, with Opus as an intelligent co-designer. We then explored the broader ecosystem: the Open Facilitation Library (with MetaGov and Lisa Schirch), GovAc for Web3 governance, the Swiss public AI model Apertus, and the DDS.xyz Decentralized Deliberation Standard as potential connective tissue.

The critical question — raised by Tim in Q&A — is one worth sitting with: how transparent should the prompts in AI-facilitated civic processes be? Who audits the supply chain of the facilitation itself?

Artem Zhiganov is the founder of Harmonica. This session was recorded at the OpenCivics Bi-Weekly Network Assembly on March 17, 2026.

Two and a half years ago, Savannah Kruger moved into a neighborhood in Boulder, Colorado, looked around, and asked a simple question: why aren’t these people talking to each other?

What started as door-to-door introductions has become the Neighborhood Village Project — a growing movement, a free cohort-based course, and an emerging body of practice for turning fearful, atomized streets back into villages. Over 120 alumni. 22 neighborhoods in Boulder alone. Participants as far away as Perth.

The method is deceptively simple: train “first movers” — one per block — to show up with patient, unconditional love and slowly build the connective tissue their street is missing. Potlucks. Walks. Real friendship. No apps. No programming. And crucially: not organizing a neighborhood for people, but empowering people to share their own gifts with the neighbors they already have.

Savannah frames this as both a cultural lever and a spiritual practice. Her reflection on working across difference — practicing that this person was once a tiny, vulnerable baby — is one of the most quietly radical things said in our assemblies all year. And her point about including “the old white man who loves to golf” as part of the revolution will stick with you.

Savannah Kruger is the founder of the Neighborhood Village Project, based in Boulder, Colorado. This session was recorded at the OpenCivics Bi-Weekly Network Assembly on March 4, 2026.

In February, fresh off ETH Boulder — where “knowledge commoning” had just emerged as one of the hottest topics in the decentralized space — Darren Zal of Symbiocene Labs came to our Network Assembly to share something quietly revolutionary: two AI agents, one built for the Salish Sea and one for the Cowichan Valley, already in conversation with each other via the KOI protocol.

Darren’s work weaves together three threads: bioregional organizing (coordinating 10+ groups across Cascadia to map shared assets, problems, and solutions), knowledge infrastructure (the KOI protocol — “duct tape and WD-40 for knowledge management” — built with BlockScience and Regen Network), and a community of practice on how to abstract place-based wisdom into patterns that can travel across bioregions without flattening local context.

The deeper question underneath all of it: how do you build a knowledge commons that supports a genuine plurality of worldviews — that nests from the personal to the city to the bioregion to the inter-bioregional — without forcing everyone onto the same ontology? Darren calls this the challenge of ontological commoning, and the Salish Sea agent he demos live is an early, working answer.

If you care about bioregionalism, decentralized knowledge infrastructure, or what agentic AI looks like in service of place-based community — this one is for you.

Darren Zal is co-founder of Symbiocene Labs and an organizer with Regenerate Cascadia and the Greater Victoria Seed Group. This session was recorded at the OpenCivics Bi-Weekly Network Assembly on February 17, 2026.

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.

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.

This month, we turn our spotlight to Josh Spector, a community organizer, network coordinator, and intersectional weaver whose professional and personal efforts span Ethereum Localism, bioregional organizing, down to his local soil and water conservation district where he serves as a non-voting board member and Associate Director. Josh brings his infectious sincerity and kindness across the sectors and movements he participates in, helping to create the enabling conditions for communal self-determination and grassroots systems change.

As Josh remarks towards the end of our conversation, for him, blockchains aren’t tools for speculative assets, they are collectively governed networks that can provide the public infrastructure of the 21st century, enabling direct civic participation and collective direct action.

This month, we turn our spotlight to Andrea Farias, a researcher and designer dedicated to shaping digital tools and knowledge ecosystems that support the transition to a regenerative civilization. Andrea’s journey is one of deep transformation—shifting from the tech startup and corporate innovation world to bioregional organizing and digital sense-making. As a recent OpenCivics Collaborative Research Round grantee, her work will soon be published in the upcoming Ethereum Localism book alongside leading thinkers like Michel Bauwens.