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.

—-

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

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

Our upcoming General Assemblies will take place March 15th at 9am PST and April 1st at 5pm PST. Meetings for the MetaGovernance Alliance will take place March 11th at 9am PST and Open Protocol Library on March 25th at 5pm PST respectively. Check out the OpenCivics public calendar for the latest events.

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 February 2025.

What’s Inside:

• 🤓 Nerd Out With Us

• 🌐 Network Activities

• 📢 Member Spotlight

• ⚡️ Member Updates

• 🔍 Network Updates

Subscribe now

🤓 Nerd Out With Us

Read

• Fractal Software for Fractal Futures: The Notion Case: This article delves into how Notion's flexible, modular design exemplifies fractal software principles, enabling users to create scalable and self-similar structures that mirror complex thought processes and collaborative workflows.

• Survey on Methodology for Onchain Ecosystem Funding and Impact Assessment: This comprehensive survey examines various methodologies for funding on-chain ecosystems.

• From Liminal to Landed: r3.0 Shifts into Place-Sourced Resilience & Regeneration: This article discusses r3.0's transition in 2024 from a decade-long focus on organizational accountability to a new emphasis on place-based resilience and regeneration.

• Discourse Graphs for Civic Knowledge Commons: This proposal explores how decentralized discourse graphs can enhance collective sensemaking by enabling communities to map and synthesize knowledge collaboratively.

• Assembly Theory x Onchain Capital Allocation - A powerful approach to Allo design space exploration: This post examines the application of Assembly Theory to on-chain capital allocation, proposing a systematic exploration of funding infrastructure by treating it as a modular system, fostering innovation through the combination of simpler components into complex, effective solutions.

• The Collective Intelligence Project White Paper: This white paper introduces the Collective Intelligence Project, an initiative focused on developing new governance models for transformative technologies by enhancing collective decision-making processes.

• Solidarity Networks & Emergency Survival: Created by A Beautiful Resistance, this guide provides a conceptual and practical overview of solidarity networks and their role in community resilience.

• Bioregional Flow Funding Opens New Grassroots Possibilities: The article "Bioregional Flow Funding Opens New Grassroots Possibilities" discusses a decentralized funding model that empowers local communities by entrusting financial decision-making to those most familiar with their ecosystems.

• Planetary Civics Inquiry: The Planetary Civics Inquiry (PCI) is an alliance of researchers, educators, policymakers, designers, and practitioners committed to transforming the structures and processes that shape how we govern our interconnected planet.

Watch

• ActInf GuestStream 070.1 ~ Jerry Michalski: "Practical Collective Sensemaking": In this session, Jerry Michalski discusses methods to enhance group understanding and decision-making processes.

• Towards A Planetary Federation Of Bioregions: This video explores the concept of a federated commons architectures for regenerative and resilient bioregional networks.

• How we're disrupting grantmaking - The Wellbeing Protocol: This presentation introduces the Wellbeing Protocol, an approach aimed at transforming traditional grantmaking by prioritizing holistic well-being metrics.

• Capitalism: In-depth: A comprehensive analysis of capitalism, this video delves into its historical development, core principles, and the multifaceted impacts on global societies and economies.

• Accidental Anarchist - What is the Rojava Revolution?: This documentary examines the Rojava Revolution, highlighting its anarchist principles and the establishment of a self-governed region based on direct democracy and gender equality.

• Good Enough Ancestor (Trailer): The trailer for "Good Enough Ancestor" introduces a feature film focused on Audrey Tang, Taiwanese Minister of Digital Affairs and Movement Leader, and her legacy as an innovator in participatory democracy.

• A Narrative Strategy for the Earth Regeneration Fund: A Narrative Strategy for the Earth Regeneration Fund presents a comprehensive approach to storytelling and communication strategies aimed at advancing the objectives of the Earth Regeneration Fund.

• Planetary Civic Inquiry Launch Recordings: Watch the launch of Dark Matter Lab’s new 10x100 day inquiry into the future of civics in the context of our planetary commons.

🌐 Network Activities

Network Activities are the connective tissue of OpenCivics, 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 that you can participate in.

Gatherings

• CosmoLocal.space: A residency and pop-up marketplace in Amsterdam for builders, creatives, and researchers dedicated to fostering cosmo-localism design through immersive experimentation. Dates:

  • Opening Weekend: April 25–27, 2025

  • Residency #1: April 28 – May 8, 2025

  • Open Market #1: May 9–12, 2025

  • Residency #2: May 19 – June 2, 2025

  • Open Market #2: June 3–5, 2025

  • EthBerlin Popup Market: June 12, 2025

• Intro to Participatory Action Research (PAR): A Primer for Governance Researchers: A MetaGov seminar discussing the principles and possibilities of participatory action research (PAR) through several NYC case studies. Date: March 19, 2025, 16:00–17:00 UTC.

• Learnings from COPIM (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs): A MetaGov Seminar discussing the creation of community-owned futures for open access books by scaling small and co-designing governance. Date: March 26, 2025, 16:00–17:00 UTC.

• Commons Hub Winter Co-Living: An initiative by Commons Hub offering a winter co-living experience centered around community and collaboration. Dates: January 2 – April 21, 2025.

• Hack The Hub: An upcoming event by Commons Hub aimed at collaborative problem-solving and innovation. Dates: April 7–21, 2025.

• Collaborative Finance Gathering: The third annual gathering focused on exploring collaborative finance models and solidarity economy practices. Dates: June 16–20, 2025.

• Ipe City: A pop-up innovation city in Brazil dedicated to participatory experimenting with Network Societies and on-chain communities. Dates: April 22 – May 22, 2025.

• Funding The Commons SF @ Internet Archive: Infrastructures of Resilience: The 12th edition of Funding the Commons confronts the future of AI, Web3, and digital public goods as contested spaces requiring intervention, governance, and resilient alternatives. Dates: March 15–16, 2025.

Grants

• Community Placemaking Grants: Offers grants to support community-driven third spaces for working class and marginalized communities.

• Civic Innovation Challenge: National Science Foundation’s annual competition for civic innovation funding.

• Octant Epoch 7 - Climate Round: Octant, collaborating with Climate Coordination Network and ReFi DAO, are now focusing on climate-related projects.

  • And check out this proposal from OpenCivics’ member, Monty Merlin, about his vision for ReFi DAO 2.0 - A Network Society to Regenerate the Earth

• NGI Zero Commons Fund: Reclaim the public nature of the internet: The goal of this new fund is to help deliver, mature and scale new internet commons across the whole technology spectrum, from libre silicon to middleware, from P2P infrastructure to convenient end user applications.

Maps

• Bonfire: The Open Source Toolkit for Network Societies: Bonfire enables communities to build and manage their own federated digital spaces, emphasizing autonomy, safety, and meaningful interactions.

• Knowledge Commons Design Requirements: An exploration of essential features and best practices for wikis aimed at supporting a living knowledge commons.

• Civic Tech Field Guide: A comprehensive, crowdsourced global collection of projects leveraging technology for public good, serving as a resource hub for civic tech practitioners.

• Playbook Structural Guidelines & Templates: A resource offering structural guidelines and templates to assist in the creation and organization of playbooks for collaborative projects.

• Commons Market Makers: A presentation outlining strategies and roles for individuals and organizations acting as market makers within commons-based economic systems.

• SuperBenefit Knowledge Garden: A living collection of shared understanding, research, and insights from the SuperBenefit community, contributing to the broader knowledge commons.

• BlockGov Knowledge Base: An extensive archive of research papers, articles, and resources focused on blockchain governance, serving as a public good for researchers and practitioners.

• Cursor Rules Framework: A guide detailing the implementation of a structured .mdc rules system in Cursor to enhance AI assistance and project organization.

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.

• How SF Government Works: A civics class offering an in-depth understanding of San Francisco's political system, including its history, legislative processes, and practical guidance on engaging with local governance.

• 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 (OpenCivics Consortium Members Only)

  • Request a link in the Consortium Telegram to join.

• Metagovernance Playground (OpenCivics Consortium Members Only)

  • Request a link in the Consortium Telegram to join.

Alliances

• 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.

📢 Member Spotlight

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.

Watch Our Conversation

From Tech for Good to Systemic Regeneration

Andrea began her career in product innovation, working with startups and companies like Mozilla and Change.org. As the founder of Pivotally, a product discovery agency, she helped software companies understand their customers and conduct product experiments. Yet, despite working on projects intended to create positive social impact, she found herself confronting a hard truth: money dictated the priorities. No matter how well-intentioned a project, financial incentives often distorted its goals, leading her to question the very infrastructure she was contributing to.

Her realization? “It all comes down to money.” Every initiative, from public goods projects to digital health tools, was ultimately shaped by an economic model that prioritizes extraction over regeneration. This led her to explore alternative financial models, discovering regenerative economics and new ways of organizing collective intelligence that are not bound by profit-driven constraints.

Bioregional Organizing & Digital Sense-Making

Rather than abandoning technology, Andrea redirected her expertise toward bioregional organizing and collective intelligence systems. She is particularly focused on digital tools that support knowledge ecosystems, helping communities make sense of complex issues and coordinate solutions that align with Earth’s living systems. Her work explores two key areas:

• Bioregional Organizing: Experimenting with community-driven institutions that redefine finance, governance, and decision-making in ways that directly support local ecosystems.

• Sense-Making & Knowledge Commons: Designing digital infrastructures that foster collective intelligence, enabling communities to generate, share, and act upon knowledge in regenerative ways.

The Choiceless Choice: A Personal and Systemic Transition

Andrea’s transition wasn’t purely intellectual—it was deeply personal. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, she suffered a debilitating back injury, a moment that forced her to confront the unsustainable pace of her own life. In her words, “I was extracting value from my own body without giving back, just as our economic system extracts from the Earth.” This realization made her shift inevitable; a “choiceless choice” when continuing on the same path was no longer an option. Letting go of her previous dreams of building a successful product consultancy, she stepped into the unknown, choosing to follow the work that felt most meaningful.

Weaving the Commons: What Comes Next?

Andrea’s work is now deeply embedded in the emerging knowledge commons movement, collaborating on open infrastructures that encourage cooperation rather than competition. As she and her peers experiment with new forms of digital and bioregional organizing, she sees an opportunity to create a decentralized, interwoven landscape of shared knowledge, resources, and governance models.

In her conversation with OpenCivics, Andrea expressed her excitement about breaking down silos and encouraging genuine collaboration: “A true knowledge commons isn’t about competition—it’s about designing tools that dissolve subconscious barriers and create collective intelligence.”

🔍 Network Updates

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

The OpenCivics Network is a community of practice and decentralized solidarity network of civic innovators, organizers, and patrons.

Key Updates:

• Network membership will officially re-open next month after a transition to a new backend membership system.

• Updated website to tell the story of our network and help share resources in the form of activities happening within the network. Please share your resources via the forms on the site or via Telegram to be included in these Monthly Reports and live on our website.

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

Key Updates:

• Open Protocol Library and MetaGovernance Initiatives launched.

  • Meetings will take place every other Tuesday at 9am and 5pm PST respectively.

• A new constitution draft will be circulated this month for member review and feedback.

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

Key Updates:

• Supported A General Forum On Ethereum Localism with backend financial infrastructure and project management tooling.

• Launched Collaboratory.Earth, an open innovation ecosystem for the bioregional movement.

• Engaged with Indigenous Commons to propose an impact funding model based on indigenous principles.

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:

• We’re excited to share that OpenCivics Labs DAO LLC has signed a fiscal hosting agreement with the Buckminster Fuller Institute to support the OpenCivics Network as we raise philanthropic funds to incorporate the OpenCivics Foundation and sustain our network stewardship.

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

In Us We Trust,

OpenCivics Stewards

Uncertainty, Crisis, and the Need for Local Resilience

As we enter 2025, the organizing systems of western civilization are at a breaking point. The intertwined crises of economic instability, ecological collapse, and the rise of authoritarian governments worldwide are reshaping our social and political landscape. The institutions that once promised security—nation-states, financial markets, and global governance structures—are failing under the weight of their own contradictions.

Across the planet, centralized systems of trust that underpin our organizing capacities are unraveling. Governments that once positioned themselves as protectors of public welfare are unable—or unwilling—to meet the needs of their people. Nationalism and fascism are on the rise, feeding on disillusionment and economic precarity. The climate crisis accelerates exponentially, disrupting food systems, displacing communities amidst extreme weather events, and making clear that existing economic models are not just unsustainable but are a form of civilizational terminal trajectory.

And yet, this moment isn’t just one of collapse—it’s also one of immense possibility.

In the face of these systemic failures, local resilience and decentralized coordination are emerging as the lifelines of our time. Across communities, people are rediscovering the power of self-organization. Mutual aid networks, local currencies, bioregional governance experiments, and regenerative economies are stepping in to fill the gaps left by the imploding systems we once relied on.

This is the critical moment for civic revitalization—not just as an emergency response, but as a long-term strategy for building a more resilient, participatory, and vital civilization.

You will find within:

• The Trends We’re Excited About in 2025

• The Evolution of the OpenCivics Network

• Implementing 2024 Learnings

• 2025 Strategic Priorities

• Our Civic Renaissance Ahead

The Trends We’re Excited About in 2025

Emerging Innovations for a Regenerative Future

Despite the chaos of the moment, promising movements and technologies are coalescing that give us hope. The members of OpenCivics are positioning themselves at the intersection of these trends, helping to shape their development toward direct local action and global solidarity.

• Open Innovation Ecosystems to Support the Bioregional Movement The growing bioregional movement is shifting focus away from artificial political boundaries toward governance structures based on ecological systems. OpenCivics members are working to develop collaborative tools, funding models, and governance systems that support global networks of bioregional initiatives, commons-based blueprints and playbooks shared across bioregions, and curricula for implementing eco-credits and other bioregional currencies.

• Peer Learning and Knowledge Commoning Knowledge is a commons, not a commodity. In 2025, we are doubling down on peer-to-peer learning networks, ensuring that the wealth of civic innovation is accessible to all. This includes decentralized education, training, and certification programs, inter-organizational knowledge-sharing protocols that ensure open access to templates and best practices, and a federated network of civic researchers, outsider academics, and practitioners contributing to a shared knowledge base.

• Open Protocol Library: An Inter-Organizational Knowledge Commons To counter the fragmentation of the civic innovation space and of our collective knowledge, OpenCivics members from a range of web3 communities have affirmed their commitment to establishing and contributing towards an Open Protocol Library as a shared, open-source repository of best practices for decentralized governance, community organizing, collaboration, and commons stewardship. This emerging, decentralized, and participatory inter-organizational initiative aims to create real utility for communities by providing actionable frameworks and mechanisms for mutual aid and coordination, community-led governance, resource-sharing and commons-based economic models, and collective sense-making and decision-making practices.

• Local Mutual Aid and Disaster Preparedness With extreme weather events becoming more frequent and centralized disaster response mechanisms proving inadequate, local disaster preparedness and mutual aid networks are now critical. In 2025, members have expressed an intention to develop academy curricula for emergency response networks, blueprints and playbooks for community resilience hubs and local infrastructure, and open-source tools for coordination in times of crisis.

• AI-Enabled DAO Tooling Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) have long promised a new paradigm for collective decision-making, but adoption has been slow due to governance complexity. In 2025, AI-assisted governance tooling is emerging to address these challenges, allowing communities to manage resources, propose initiatives, and reach consensus more effectively. Members are leaning into exploring how these tools can be used to support local self-governance, participatory budgeting, and cooperative ownership models.
  

The Evolution of the OpenCivics Network

Toward Greater Self-Governance and Collective Funding Across Organizing Structures

The Self-Organization Of the OpenCivics Consortium

This year, the OpenCivics Consortium will undergo its most significant evolution yet, transitioning from a network steered by a central stewardship team towards a decentralized, self-governing structure through further progressive protocolization.

Key developments include new mechanisms for collaborative funding, moving away from centrally operated quadratic funding rounds toward community-controlled capital allocation. Governance participation will expand through delegate engagement models that ensure broad-based, participatory decision-making. A formalized governance program will provide structured pathways for members to co-create policies and protocols, steward initiatives, and access shared resources. Aggregating network activities will support emergent coordination, strengthening collaboration among members, partners, and advisors.

By the end of 2025, our aim is for the Consortium to be positioned as a participatory network capable of sustaining itself through mutual support, shared governance, and open collaboration.

The Expansion of the OpenCivics Labs

OpenCivics Labs has already begun working with aligned partners who have reached out to work with us as a result of our unique position in the ecosystem. We see our contribution to the broader ecosystem through the lens of impact network capacity building.

This year, we aspire to expand our work to bring our services to aligned partners who want to create impact networks around their theory of change, either starting from scratch or transitioning a traditional organizing structure into a decentralized network or DAO.

OpenCivics Labs also serves critically needed ecosystem functions by helping to convene existing impact networks to collaborate better together via improved coordination infrastructure and collaborative sense-making. We aim to invite and onboard new Labs members, drawing from OpenCivics Consortium members as we develop initiatives and partnerships that could benefit from new contributors. OpenCivics Labs DAO LLC is effectively a cooperatively owned agency for systems change agents who want to pool together their capacities and benefit from shared legal and financial infrastructures.

The Establishment of the OpenCivics Foundation

This year we will be exploring the best path to a legal and operational structure for the OpenCivics Foundation. In the interim, OpenCivics Labs DAO LLC is leveraging the fiscal hosting of the Buckminster Fuller Institute for non-profit activities, related to the project of the "OpenCivics Network".

This year, we aspire to utilize philanthropic donations to this project to fund the research and deployment of our own 501c3 foundation that can provide support to the OpenCivics Network and Consortium, as well as the broader field of open civic innovation.

Implementing 2024 Learnings

Integrating insights from our 2024 Retrospective

Reflections from 2024 have provided invaluable insights, chief among them being the realization that holding structures are critical for sustaining momentum. This year, we saw promising initiatives stall due to a lack of clear stewardship and accountability mechanisms. In 2025, we will implement structured initiatives and alliances with designated stewards, lightweight accountability systems, and clearer milestones to ensure that projects move forward with both flexibility and continuity.

We’re also embracing strategic adaptation as a core principle. 2024 demonstrated that a sweeping and ambitious strategy at the beginning of the year was vastly insufficient for ongoing strategic alignments. This year, we’ll incorporate more dynamic, iterative planning cycles via quarterly strategic reports, ensuring that strategic shifts are informed by tight feedback loops and real-world conditions. This approach will help us balance ambitious vision with practical, phased execution, allowing us to strengthen foundational mechanisms before scaling up larger initiatives.

Finally, member engagement and financial sustainability must be actively nurtured. We recognize that adoption of governance tools and participation in network-wide decision-making requires more than availability—it requires strong onboarding, compelling incentives, and clearer engagement pathways. Additionally, OpenCivics will focus on diversifying financial streams, moving beyond small grants to develop cooperative funding models, sponsorships, and direct donor engagement.

2025 Strategic Priorities

Building the Infrastructure for Regenerative Civic Innovation

• Strengthening Governance and Network Coordination OpenCivics Consortium aims to continue its evolution towards fully decentralized, self-organizing entity with clear decision-making frameworks. Key initiatives include refining the structure of General Assembly bi-weekly meetings to foreground peer learning and more focused inquiries, developing self-governance tools and methodologies, finalizing foundational agreements to streamline new member processes, and expanding delegate engagement to ensure broad participation in governance.

• Expanding the Knowledge Commons and Open Protocols Developing shared tools, methodologies, and educational resources will support modes of decentralized governance and civic collaboration. Priorities include expanding the Open Protocol Library, providing education on designing and executing civic initiatives, mapping and analyzing network-wide initiatives, and instituting structured feedback loops to support iterative learning.

• Building Financial Resilience and Expanding Funding Pathways Ensuring long-term sustainability through diverse funding models is essential. OpenCivics will aim to establish donation facilities and patrons, run targeted fundraising campaigns, and provide financial support for grassroots civic experiments.

• Nurturing Community Engagement and Participation Fostering a thriving, participatory community is central to OpenCivics’ mission. Enhancements include improving pathways for participation and onboarding, showcasing member contributions, strengthening strategic alliances, and deepening collaboration infrastructure.

• Enhancing Communication, Narrative, and Digital Presence Refining OpenCivics' external communications ensures clarity, transparency, and visibility. This includes producing a Theory of Change video, expanding outreach and mobilization efforts, strengthening OpenCivics’ digital presence, and standardizing internal and external communications.

• Advancing Open Civic Innovation and Iterative Experimentation Exploring emerging technologies, tools, and new governance models will help build open civic infrastructure. OpenCivics will aim to experiment with blockchain-based governance and funding models, expand the scope of OpenCivics Labs, develop structured guides for participation in Labs R&D efforts, and convene a global gathering of civic pioneers.
  

Our Civic Renaissance Ahead

“We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.” — R Buckminster Fuller

We stand at the precipice of a profound inflection point in history. The old world—the one built on extraction, control, and limitless expansion—is fraying at its edges, coming apart under the weight of its own systemic misalignments. The institutions that once promised stability now buckle under their inability to meet the scale of our needs in this moment. The social contracts that once tethered individuals to a collective vision are dissolving into distrust, polarization, and the hollow spectacle of politics as theater.

And yet—despite the collapsing systems, despite fires and hurricanes that rage, despite the encroaching shadow of authoritarianism—something new and rich in potential is emerging.

We see it in the places where people refuse to surrender to despair, where communities are not waiting for governments to act but are instead forging their own futures. This is not about resistance—it is about regeneration.

If we do not shape this transition with intention, others will shape it for us. If we do not organize ourselves, we will be organized by the collapsing forces of the old world. If we do not claim the right to govern ourselves, that power will be consolidated in hands that do not serve us.

This is the work ahead. This is the future calling.

In Us We Trust,
OpenCivics Stewards

OpenCivics is a living system, evolving as we experiment, build, and adapt to a changing landscape of open civic innovation. This year was no exception. We grew the network, developed new governance models, and explored new mechanisms for decentralized coordination in the network. At the same time, we encountered friction points, struggled to gain traction in some areas, and had to pivot away from activities that didn’t unfold as expected.

This retrospective captures the wins, the gaps, the hard-earned lessons, and the many hands that shaped this year’s journey. You will find within:

• Key Highlights

• Celebrating our Achievements

• Gaps & Unfulfilled Objectives

• Key Lessons Learned

• Reflections & The Road Ahead

Key Highlights

• 78 new members added – Significant organic growth from web3, regenerative, and civic innovation communities.

• $122,000+ USD distributed in grants – Became a leading partner in Gitcoin’s Community Rounds program, filling a key grant-making niche in the ecosystem for civic projects. Many of the learnings from our grants program can be found in Spencer’s Survey on Methodology for Onchain Ecosystem Funding and Impact Assessment.

• Published key foundational documents – OpenCivics Thesis, Open Civic Innovation Framework, progressive protocolizational plan, and an updated Wiki.

• Website upgraded – A major update to OpenCivics web and digital presence with a new, cohesive visual brand language, wiki, and expanded utility for members and the public.

• Network Activity Index launched – Priming increased visibility and coordination of network-wide activities.

• Incorporated OpenCivics Labs DAO LLC - Our newly formed cooperative R&D DAO launched three Labs projects with partners.

Support us by making a donation

Our full-time work on OpenCivics this year was almost entirely volunteer based.

If you appreciate the contributions we made this year to the commons and the broader field of open civic innovation, please consider us for a donation.

You can view our full on-chain financial history, and we have >$5,000 USD of personally contributed off-chain expenses we hope to reimburse for 2023 and 2024.

Donations can be made via Substack, Stripe, NFT or directly to our wallet.

Thank you for supporting our work.

Celebrating Our Achievements

Transitioning to OpenCivics Phase 02

As 2024 ended, we were starting our transition into OpenCivics Phase 02, introducing foundational mechanisms to enable the network to better self-organize. You can read more about our strategy for progressive protocolization.

The introduction of the Activity Index provided a structured way for members to make their autonomous activities more visible and accessible.

The Governance Program was modeled, conceptualizing our initial mechanisms for structured participation pathways, including elected roles and treasury allocations, to enhance decision-making.

Another major milestone in the launch of Phase 02 was the website relaunch, which consolidated OpenCivics’ digital presence into a single, more navigable hub.

The publication of the Open Civics Thesis & Open Civic Innovation Framework marked our most significant milestone. These documents outline the network’s philosophy, theory of change, and practice frameworks in a new markdown-based wiki. Publishing these works is intended to be among our final foundation-building work as Network Stewards, expanding accessibility to our operational vision and creating the conditions for greater co-development of contributions from across the network.

Complementing these efforts, membership roles were expanded to match the further developed architecture of the network, expanding participation pathways through new Consortium Delegate and Partner roles. These mechanisms, taken together, provided a more structured and open foundation for the network to deepen its self-organizing capacity.

Strengthening Organizational Foundations

A major focus of 2024 was solidifying OpenCivics' operational strategy. This included:

• Drafting an operational strategy and Theory of Change outlining the functions of the OpenCivics Network, Foundation, Labs, and Consortium.

• Expanding OpenCivics brand identity to weave all aspects of the OpenCivics Network into a cohesive visual language that represents each organizational structure in the network.

• Incorporating OpenCivics Labs as a DAO LLC in the state of Wyoming.

• Nurturing a fiscal sponsorship relationship with the Buckminster Fuller Institute.

• Developing a detailed financial forecast to support our upcoming fundraising efforts.

These steps have helped clarify our internal architecture, making it easier for members to understand how different pieces fit together and where they can plug in to participate.

Expanding Our Community & Strengthening Partnerships

In 2024 we onboarded 78 new members—individuals drawn to OpenCivics’ vision for open collaboration, decentralized governance, and regenerative civic engagement.

View a list of members that joined in 2024.

More than just increasing numbers, this growth was about cultivating meaningful engagement and relationships—people stepping forward to contribute, experiment, and take ownership of distinct but connected pieces of the puzzle.

At the same time, we grappled with the perennial challenge of balancing open participation with effective coordination. How do we create enough structure to support meaningful action while maintaining the openness that makes our network dynamic? This tension was a recurring theme throughout the year.

Recognizing the need for more structured governance rhythms, we re-launched General Assemblies in April, shifting from ad-hoc calls to a bi-weekly cadence. This commitment created a more predictable and accountable forum for network members to engage in open-space dialogue and trust building. While participation varied throughout the year, the consistency of these assemblies helped strengthen the network’s ability to self-organize and deepened our sense of solidarity.

As we grew, we realized that new engagement pathways and role types would be necessary to activate and expand the functions of the network. Towards those ends, we formally engaged Network Advisors and Partners as two critical new role types. Our advisors are among the most well respected leaders in the civic, regenerative and web3 movements, providing critical insights and support to Network Stewards as we grow. We also added a Consortium Delegate role which we hope will expand leadership within the Network to include engaged members who want to take on tasks and provide input on the strategic direction of the Consortium and Network. Lastly, we designed and launched a whole set of roles for OpenCivics Labs, a research and development cooperative of systems thinkers, facilitators, designers, and researchers.

While our internal Governance Program won't be fully established until early 2025, OpenCivics Steward, Clinamenic, won a prize in the HATS protocol hackathon for the innovative design of future OpenCivics Network onchain governance structures. As the network continues to grow and evolve, we're well positioned to deploy new tools and governance mechanisms throughout the year.

Our Activity Indices offer a web2 mechanism for indexing the many autonomous activities happening within and around the network. After several months of development late in 2024, these indices were carefully crafted to help the network self-organize around activities of mutual interest like grants, gatherings, initiatives, alliances, courses, and maps.

Hosting Key Convenings & Engaging the Public

One of the most dynamic aspects of our year were the in-person convenings that brought people together to imagine and connect over new civic possibilities. Some of the most notable include:

Planetary Regeneration Alliance (PRA) - Costa Rica

In January, we (OpenCivics Stewards) facilitated sessions for the Planetary Regeneration Alliance in the Diamante Valley in Costa Rica. This gathering was a turning point in refining our theory of change, as we found ourselves being sought out by impact networks looking for guidance in participatory impact network governance design.

Initially invited to support with facilitation, it became clear that our deeper contribution was in modeling new ways of structuring collective agency. However, this experience also surfaced critical lessons about the importance of relationship-building before structure-building, which we’ll return to later in this retrospective.

"Imaginal Futures" - Civic Imagination Activation - Salt Spring Island

In June, we hosted Imaginal Futures on Salt Spring Island in Canada, a civic imagination event featuring powerful women leaders from across local, bioregional, and global networks.

This gathering created space for visionary thinking—exploring what regenerative futures could look like and how OpenCivics might support those futures coming into being. The format of this gathering would evolve to become a model currently being prototyped for organizing local “Community Commons” as place-based spaces to self-organize and coordinate around shared visions for civic stewardship and innovation. Imaginal Futures invited participants to envision their version of a more beautiful world and “find the others” who shared similar visions to collaborate. Salt Spring Commons and Boulder Commons have both emerged since then as ongoing spaces for these types of inquiries.

"Golden Seed" - Regenerative Imagination Activation - Mexico City

In Mexico City, we hosted Golden Seed, an intimate gathering focused on life-centric imagination activism. This event brought together visionaries, creatives, and builders to explore new paradigms of civic engagement and regenerative futures.

The format emphasized storytelling, inspiration, and kinship, creating a space where participants could weave together diverse perspectives on a thriving, life-affirming world. This event laid the groundwork for further bioregional collaborations and deeper engagements with local stewards.

Speaking Engagements: Expanding Public Discourse

Throughout the year, we amplified OpenCivics’ work through public talks and convenings. Key engagements included:

• Earth Commons – Proposing interoperable commons architectures and civic utilities as a central strategy for planetary regeneration and federations of bioregional organizers.

• DWeb – Exploring open protocols as a mechanism for community-led civic engagement.

• Onchain Giving Summit - Discussing on-chain public goods funding and the role of network-driven grant-making models.

• Transformative Impact Summit – Sharing insights on scaling regenerative civic ecosystems through participatory governance.

Advancing OpenCivics’ Grants Program in 2024

Throughout the year, OpenCivics ran two grant rounds aimed at supporting emerging open civic innovation and community-driven governance activities, distributing $122,00 USD in grants.

In June, OpenCivics facilitated Consortium Grant Round, which provided grant funding to OpenCivics Consortium members experimenting with new forms civic utilities as public goods. This round focused on tangible, implementable projects aimed at expanding participatory governance frameworks, creating new economic models for civic collaboration, and improving access to digital infrastructure for decentralized coordination.

The Collaborative Research Round, held in August, focused on funding open-source research on key civic innovation areas. This initiative supported independent researchers and working groups exploring governance models, community resilience strategies, and open collaboration protocols. The findings from this round will provide rich foundations for the OpenCivics knowledge commons and Open Protocol Library.

In 2024, we submitted a grant proposal to the Arbitrum Grants Accelerator in collaboration with Flow State (formerly GeoWeb). This proposal sought to explore pluralistic grant-making mechanisms, including streaming quadratic grants and UBI-like matching pools.

The vision was to drip funding to consortium members, with allocations based on ranked-choice quadratic voting. Though we did not receive the grant, this process clarified our commitment to decentralized, participatory funding models—an area we continue to refine in our network design efforts.

Beyond OpenCivics' own grant-making activities, we also supported a third funding round for our partner, The BioFi Project. The BioFi Pathfinders Grant Round brought together bioregional organizing teams from around the world, equipping them with resources to develop new infrastructures for regenerative economies, grant funding mechanisms, and impact-tracking tools. By supporting this initiative, we were able to empower a whole new demographic of change makers with participatory grantmaking tools and web3 knowledge. The round successfully onboarded cutting edge regenerative organizations into the Celo, Glo Dollar and Allo Protocol ecosystems.

The success of these grant rounds demonstrated the power of community-led funding in supporting decentralized civic innovation. Moving into 2025, OpenCivics will build upon these efforts by refining and publishing its existing grant-making processes in the form of a "community grant-making playbook" and by integrating these funding rounds into the broader governance framework of the network.

Advancing our Knowledge Commons & Open Protocol Library

2024 saw the early scaffolding of what could become one of OpenCivics’ most valuable contributions: an open protocol library documenting the best practices and methodologies for collaborative governance and community self-organization.

This effort was driven by the recognition that many groups in the web3 space have powerful tools or frameworks to offer local organizers but education and onboarding is universally lacking across initiatives. Many local groups across the civic and cooperative landscape are experimenting with similar challenges—how to distribute decision-making, manage shared resources, and sustain collective action, and many web3 groups have tools that can serve those ends but their frameworks and tools are scattered across many different knowledge bases. By putting out the call to create a shared knowledge commons, we’ve begun weaving with organizations like ReFi DAO, Super Benefit DAO, Bloom Network, Token Engineering Commons, Metagov to contribute to a shared knowledge commons that extends beyond our own networks.

Though this initiative is still in its early stages, the groundwork has been laid, and we anticipate it becoming a more central focus in the coming year.

Lastly, we published the OpenCivics Thesis, Open Civic Innovation Framework and Theory of Change on our own customized Obsidian Wiki. Using custom interface design, we were able to present all of OpenCivics' founding and essential documents in an engaging and interconnected structure. We hope this wiki provides a source of truth within the emerging and pluralistic field of open civic innovation.

Evolving Our Infrastructure: Refining Coordination Tooling

The way we communicate and collaborate shapes our work just as much as our ideas do. Early in the year, we recognized the need for a shift in our coordination spaces, transitioning from Discord to Telegram while also exploring Hylo as a more effective collaboration tool.

This shift was about reducing friction—many of our members found Discord overwhelming or disjointed, while Telegram offered a more streamlined and accessible way to stay connected. However, as we experimented with new tools, we realized that technology alone couldn’t solve the deeper challenges of coordination. Tools provide the scaffolding, but culture and shared rhythms are what create coherence.

For example, a Consortium initiative planning A General Forum On Ethereum Localism in Boulder utilized our Notion dashboard interface to store relevant collaborative documents, notes, and roles. We look forward to continuing this trend by providing coordination infrastructure via dashboards, Google Groups, shared calendars, Telegram bots and collaborative workspaces.

Engaging within the Emerging Global Bioregional Movement

In 2024, we explored how bioregionalism could support global coordination efforts through direct engagement with the United Nations Ambassador from the Bahamas, discussing bioregional frameworks for climate resilience. We were hosted by our friend and advisor, Susanna Choe, alongside Representatives from GloCha, an NGO working at the intersection of local and global civic action.

This experience at the United Nations HQ reinforced the need for multi-scale governance partnerships across international, national, bioregional, and technological organizations —bridging local innovation with global frameworks and coordination mechanisms.

Our collaboration with Regenerate Cascadia became a foundational aspect of our bioregional development strategy. This partnership focused on aligning regenerative governance models with localized civic infrastructure. Through this work, we gained deeper insight into the interplay between bioregional identity, network governance, and regenerative economies, informing our broader strategic direction.

Establishing a DAO LLC as a primary legal structure

Incorporating OpenCivics Labs as a Wyoming DAO LLC was a significant milestone in our legal and governance strategy. Through this process, we:

• Developed a custom DAO governance and project management framework.

• Established OpenCivics Labs as a non-traditional consultancy, forming dynamic partnerships with mission-aligned partners.

• Created financial and legal infrastructure capable of providing critical intermediary functions to the OpenCivics Network and Consortium.

By formalizing the OpenCivics Labs DAO LLC, we were simultaneously creating a DAO for research and development partnerships while also creating critical intermediary infrastructure that will allow us to receive tax deductible funding via our fiscal host. The funds we raise this year through our fiscal host will empower us to conduct the legal research necessary to incorporate legal entities for the OpenCivics Foundation and OpenCivics Consortium late 2025 or early 2026.

Formalizing the OpenCivics Theory of Change

A key internal effort in 2024 was the development of OpenCivics’ Theory of Change. This process involved:

• A deep mapping exercise with a strategic consultant.

• The creation of a structured framework outlining OpenCivics’ governance and impact model.

• Refining our Network structure, including the Foundation, Labs, and Consortium.

This work laid the foundation for future governance iterations, creating the conditions that support our efforts remaining aligned with long-term systemic transformation.

Gaps & Unfulfilled Objectives

While we're content with and celebratory of all we accomplished in 2024, upon reflecting on our original 2024 vision and strategy, it's not hard to see that our ambitions were bigger than our capacities. We're integrating the learnings from these shortfalls in a redesign of our annual strategy setting and a more realistic set of goals. Moving forward, we'll be publishing a broad vision for the year with trends and themes and quarterly strategy reports with more granular, specific, and achievable milestones.

Collaborative Protocols & Initiatives Stalled

2024 began with a strong intention to focus on the development of collaborative protocols for the network. And although we had early-stage conversations on this topic, this work didn’t fully solidify into a distinct initiative. Much of this came down to capacity and competing priorities, but also the intention behind the effort transmuted into other forms, primarily, the OpenCivics Thesis, Open Civic Innovation Framework, OpenCivics Wiki, and progressive protcolization plan.

One of the intended collaborative initiatives that didn’t gain traction as expected was a prospective collaboration with a number of key governance organizations in the civic innovation ecosystem. The vision was compelling—a structured yet dynamic space for testing and evolving governance models. However, we lacked a clear champion to steward the initiative's inter-organizational coordination. This underscored a larger pattern we observed: when projects lack a clear holding structure and well-resourced primary champion, they struggle to sustain momentum.

The Civic Innovation Summit Didn’t Happen

Another major initiative that was planned but never materialized was the Civic Innovation Summit.

This was partly a question of strategic focus and alignment—as the convening’s planning unfolded, we realized we weren’t in as close of alignment with our developmental partners as we would have liked and that our network likely wasn’t quite ready for a large-scale convening of this kind. Instead, we chose to focus on smaller, more organic gatherings where relationships could deepen before moving into bigger public-facing initiatives.

Delayed Implementation of On-Chain Governance

One of the more ambitious goals in our 2024 strategy was to test and roll out on-chain governance mechanisms, including the use of Snapshot for member voting and treasury allocations. While governance experimentation did progress with the structuring of the Governance Program and role expansion, the implementation of on-chain tools for decision-making was delayed due to capacity and technical hurdles. While Snapshot was technically deployed, it was not yet tested in an official proposal process, meaning that fully decentralized governance structures are still in development.

Network Fundraising Campaign Did Not Commence

While OpenCivics successfully conducted two grant rounds in 2024 (Collaborative Research Round & Consortium Round Two), and supported one other (BioFi Pathfinders Round), the more operationally fundamental fundraising campaign planned for 2024 did not commence. Patron outreach has not yet begun, meaning that the network stewards continue to be reliant on consulting income while working on OpenCivics pro bono, delaying development significantly.

Looking ahead, we are finally prepared to set up fundamental financial infrastructure to begin scaling our donation campaigns. This new focus on fundraising will correlate to an increase in dedicated time per week to update our public financial records to remain as transparent and accountable as possible.

Key Lessons Learned

Every experiment, whether successful or not, surfaces valuable lessons. As we reflect on 2024, several key learnings stand out—lessons that will shape how we move forward in the coming year.

Holding Structures Are Essential for Initiative Sustainability

One of the biggest takeaways from this year was that good ideas alone are not enough—for an consortium initiative to succeed, it needs a clear holding structure and accountability framework that extends beyond network stewardship.

We saw this play out in multiple initiatives, which had strong initial enthusiasm but lacked a clearly defined stewards or working groups to carry it forward. Without a designated person or team responsible for moving things along, the efforts fizzled.

Similarly, in conversations about collaborative protocols, we recognized that this kind of deep research and development work requires a more structured commitment than just loose, exploratory discussions – and adequate financial resourcing to support these commitments forming.

Going forward, we need to ensure that new consortium initiatives have:

• A clear steward or working group responsible for continuity

• Defined milestones and a lightweight accountability system

• The right mix of structure and flexibility to keep momentum alive

Trust & Relationships Must Precede Systems & Structures

At OpenCivics, we often talk about protocols and governance models, but 2024 reinforced the idea that no system or framework can succeed without strong relational foundations.

Our experience in Costa Rica with the Planetary Regeneration Alliance (PRA) was a prime example. While we had hoped that our governance modeling would help cohere the group, we underestimated the role of pre-existing social dynamics and unspoken histories present.

A critical lesson emerged: before trying to develop coherence around a governance model, we need to first cultivate coherence in relationships and shared agency.

This means prioritizing trust-building, deep listening, and shared sense-making—especially in collaborations where we are entering an existing ecosystem rather than creating something from scratch.

Strategic Adaptation is Key

Not everything we planned at the start of the year unfolded as expected. Some efforts, like the development of a network white paper, evolved into a broader set of knowledge artifacts instead of a single publication – and took many months longer to develop than originally anticipated.

Initially, this shift felt like a deviation from our original goal. But in hindsight, it was a natural evolution—allowing the work to take the shape it needed rather than forcing it into a predefined structure.

This highlighted an important lesson: it’s okay to pivot when new insights emerge, as long as the core intention remains intact.

Rather than seeing deviation from an initial plan as a failure, we should embrace emergent strategy—continuously sensing, adapting, and refining based on real-world conditions. This embrace of emergence also corresponds to tighter feedback loops in quarterly strategic planning, ensuring we balance dynamic evolution with forward progress and integrity.

Resilience is Built Through Localized, Direct Civic Action

2024 was a year of deepening bioregional awareness, reinforcing that regenerative civic innovation must be rooted in tangible, place-based work.

While we engage in broad, networked conversations about governance and collaboration, we also need to ensure that our work is led by real-world, on-the-ground insights and needs.

One of our ongoing challenges is ensuring that OpenCivics remains grounded in lived realities, not just theoretical discourse. Looking ahead, we aim to strengthen our support for local initiatives and bioregional collaborations, ensuring that our frameworks are informed by practical, place-based experimentation.

Socialization & Adoption Barriers

One of the biggest challenges of 2024 was the underutilization of key tools and governance mechanisms. While the Activity Index, Open Protocol Library, and Governance Program were all introduced, many members did not integrate these systems into their workflows. This lack of adoption suggests that launching a tool is only half the battle—the other half is ensuring that members understand its purpose, see its value, and make it part of their regular engagement. Moving forward, OpenCivics must prioritize stronger onboarding, clearer documentation, and incentives for participation to bridge this gap.

Balancing Vision with Execution

Ambition has always been a defining trait of OpenCivics, but 2024 revealed the importance of aligning vision with available capacity. The Open Civic Innovation Summit, while an exciting idea, ultimately proved too ambitious given the network’s current infrastructure and engagement levels. The postponement of this event underscores the need to focus on strengthening foundational mechanisms first before taking on large-scale convening. By ensuring that governance processes, funding models, and participation pathways are solidified, OpenCivics will be better prepared to execute high-impact events and initiatives in the future.

Ensuring Financial Sustainability

Sustained financial health is critical for any decentralized network, and 2024 demonstrated both successes and shortcomings in this area. While the Grants Program successfully funded multiple rounds of projects, our broader fundraising campaign did not transpire into reality. A key takeaway from this experience is that relying solely on small grants is not enough. Moving into 2025, OpenCivics must build a more diversified financial model that includes donor engagement, sponsorships, and cooperative funding mechanisms to ensure long-term sustainability.

Iterating on Governance & Decision-Making

The shift to progressive protocolization required refining governance structures in real-time, and 2024 reminded us the extent to which governance is an iterative process. While the Governance Program and Delegate engagement structures were introduced in a soft way in the last month of the year, many members remain unclear about their roles or unsure about how to engage. Strengthening governance in 2025 will require more than just refining processes—it will require ongoing education, facilitated engagement, responsive adaptation, and resourcing incentives to ensure that self-organization thrives across the network.

Scaling Participation & Member Engagement

Membership engagement was another area where 2024 provided valuable lessons. While OpenCivics saw an increase in new members, many did not become deeply engaged in governance or knowledge-sharing activities. This suggests that simply onboarding members is not enough; they need structured pathways to actively participate. Strengthening participation in 2025 will require a mix of structured opportunities, recognition mechanisms, and community-driven initiatives that allow members to see the impact of their contributions. We also did not nurture further growth of membership (and even have stalled member applications since October), pending an upcoming rollout of updates to the network’s constitution.

By integrating these lessons, OpenCivics is poised to take the next step in its evolution. As we move into 2025, these insights will shape a more resilient, participatory, and adaptable network that can effectively steward an emboldening of the open civic innovation ecosystem.

Reflections & The Road Ahead

2024 was a year of experimentation, adaptation, and learning in motion: stabilizing our core.

Looking back, we see a year filled with bold convenings, deep strategic refinement, and the evolution of our knowledge ecosystem. We also see the friction points and gaps that emerged—places where structure was lacking, where energy dispersed, and where pivots were needed.

As we move into 2025, we carry forward these learnings with clarity and intention:

• Ensuring that new initiatives have strong holding structures from the start.

• Prioritizing trust-building as a prerequisite for governance innovation.

• Embracing emergent strategy, allowing activities to evolve naturally while honouring the core intentions established.

• Grounding our work in local civic action, ensuring real-world impact.

This retrospective is us looking back before we continue onward—harvesting the insights that will shape how we navigate the road ahead.

In Us We Trust,
OpenCivic Stewards

Entering into our second year, our focus in 2024 will be oriented towards operationalizing the core infrastructure of the OpenCivics Foundation and Consortium that was initially scaffolded and prototyped in 2023. We’ll be honing in on the areas below which are defined in greater detail in the following sections.

• We will be formalizing a 501c3 non-profit foundation that will serve OpenCivics’ mission and empower us to begin fundraising for the network and supporting activities.

• We’re also focusing in on two key private collaborative initiative ecosystems to begin facilitating, researching, and publishing our flagship white paper on agent-centric collaborative protocols. These closed collaboratives, composed of some of the highest leverage organizations in the worlds of governance and bioregional regeneration, will create an applied research context for our study of collaborative protocols, the decentralized rule set that will enable a healthy, participatory network.

• As stewards, we’re committed to researching, documenting, and deploying this scaffolding as we move ahead on our progressive decentralization roadmap from phase one (driven by stewards) into phase two, a hybrid model that will increasingly empower decision making and coordination activities by the network. Throughout this process, we will continue to grow membership and expand opportunities for members to connect, collaborate, and convene.

• As the year progresses, we’ll transition our focus from facilitating, researching and publishing research on collaborative protocols to deploying a new collaborative initiatives each quarter.

• By the end of the year, we want the network to feel humming and alive with self-organization and a will of its own. We’re committed to taking clear steps in the coming months to create the game board and game rules that will empower our members to bring their leadership and vision into a more and more decentralized version of OpenCivics.

Below is a more granular breakdown of our strategic goals for 2024. If you’d like to skip ahead to how you can engage with OpenCivics in the coming months, jump to the end of this post to learn about all the different ways we can work together.

Legal Establishment

• We will register the OpenCivics Foundation as a US legal entity that can receive funding from various sources and will support the consortium as a service-provider. We will continue to explore the formation of an Unincorporated Non-Profit Association or for-benefit cooperative association as a legal wrapper for the OpenCivics Consortium DAO.

• We will establish administrative support teams to handle the accounting, legal, tax, and other operational aspects of advising the network. We will also develop policies and procedures to ensure transparency, accountability, and compliance.

• We will enter into a fiscal hosting agreement with an aligned non-profit that can provide OpenCivics with interim financial infrastructure to support our initial fundraising efforts for administrative costs and early collaborative initiative funding.

Theory of Change

• We will publish a theory of change white paper that further articulates our thesis as well as frameworks for collaborative protocols, showcasing our learnings from two private, early-stage collaborative initiatives. The white paper will serve as a communication tool to engage with potential partners, funders, and stakeholders and will provide a backbone for the technical and social implementation of phase two in our progressive decentralization plan.

• We will update our theory of change video to reflect our current research, vision, mission, and values. We will seek funding to produce a high-quality video that can reach a wider audience and inspire more people to join the consortium.

Research & Publishing

• We will conduct and publish cutting-edge research on stigmergic collaborative protocols, social and technological processes for multi-stakeholder swarm collaboration that includes system mapping and mechanisms for playing infinite games. These protocols aim to enable large-scale collaboration and coordination among diverse and distributed actors who share a common purpose.

• Our private collaborative initiatives on bioregional regeneration and governance will provide an applied research context for our study of collaborative protocols. By starting our research with closed collaboratives between a small group of organizations already engaged in deep trust relationships, we’re creating the conditions to study what is already working and experiment on new approaches in a context supported by existing trust and alignment. A collaborative initiative focused on collaborative protocols research will be convened to process the learnings from these collaboratives and contribute to a broader decentralized research process.

• We will use Obsidian, a digital knowledge garden, to conduct collaborative research and document our insights and findings. Obsidian is a powerful tool that allows us to create, link, and organize notes in a networked way. We’ll explore publishing the knowledge repository on GitHub and Obsidian Publish to enable a decentralized wiki for civic innovators.

• We will begin visualizing the network (and relationships to other networks!) to surface new opportunities for collaborative match making, sense-making and research. We will use data analysis and network science to map the patterns and dynamics of our network and identify the opportunities and challenges for collaboration. We will also develop tools and platforms that can facilitate the discovery and connection of relevant collaborators and resources.

In-Person Convenings

• We will co-organize our flagship summit in May 2024, in partnership with other leading organizations and networks in the field of civic innovation. The summit will be an invite-only, large-scale event that will bring together policy makers, builders, community organizers, and other stakeholders from around the world. The summit will feature keynotes, panel discussions, workshops, and networking sessions. The summit will also showcase the outcomes and impacts of our collaborative initiatives, connect builders with funders and policy makers, and invite participants to form new collaborative relationships.

• We will also organize and participate in other in-person convenings throughout the year through side events at larger conferences like ETH Denver and SXSW.

• We also look forward to planning smaller in-person gatherings for our members to convene for a week at a time at retreat centers for collaborative deep dives and high level strategic alignment.

Network Governance

• We will update our constitution to reflect our current functions and roles within the network as well as our roadmap for progressive decentralization with key milestones and deliverables that will inform our transition into further decentralized leadership. Our constitution is currently a non-binding, interim document intended to provide an initial context for collaboration and formalization of network governance. As we proceed with our research on collaborative protocols and experiment with various methods of progressive decentralization, our goal for this year is to formalize a binding version of the constitution that explicitly defines the DAO’s use of collaborative protocols and technical solutions for governance, and articulates the formal relationship between the OpenCivics Foundation (501c3 service provider) and the OpenCivics Consortium (fully decentralized organization).

• We will map our phase two hybrid strategy that moves more authority into the network while maintaining core stewardship functions. As we articulate and deploy the strategy, we intend to seek network feedback. Our hybrid strategy is a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches to network governance. It balances the need for direction and alignment with the need for autonomy and diversity. It also leverages the strengths and resources of both the core team and the network members. We will solicit feedback and suggestions from our network members on how to improve and implement our hybrid strategy.

• We will prototype our hybrid strategy for approximately one year, from 2024 to 2025, testing and iterating our hybrid strategy in real-world scenarios using a combination of Hats Protocol, DeWork, and multi-signaturewallets to experiment with a combination of tools in smaller, focused contexts. We will also monitor and measure the performance and health of the network using various indicators and metrics before transitioning into full decentralization in phase three. Our initial experiments in the hybrid strategy will focus on decentralizing our Grants Program and decentralizing a collaborative initiative focused on researching collaborative protocols.

• Over the course of the year, we’ll adapt our research on collaborative protocols into a white paper that will inform the full socio-technical, on-chain implementation of collaborative protocols.

Collaborative Initiatives

• Our development of collaborative protocols is intended to foster the culture of collaboration and self-organization within the network. Once our research is published, we’ll encourage and support our network members to initiate and lead collaboratives based on mutual alignment. We’ll also provide guidance and scaffolding in the form of social and technical tools for agent-centric network activities.

• As we begin researching collaborative protocols and processes by facilitating collaboration within ****two private collaborative initiatives focused on governance and bioregional regeneration, we’ll share updates on our early case studies and invite members to engage in collaborative protocols research.

• We will aim to launch and sustain three collaborative initiatives between Q2 and Q4 that leverage the benefits gleaned from our Q1 collaborative research. These initiatives will be open to all network members and will utilize the collaborative protocols published in Q1.

Developing Partnerships

• We will establish and maintain strategic partnerships with other organizations and networks that share our vision and mission. These partnerships will enable us to leverage our collective resources and capabilities and to amplify our impact and reach.

Leadership & Strategy

• We will publish monthly strategy roadmap updates and quarterly financial reports.

• We will establish an advisory board that will meet annually to provide strategic guidance and advice to our core team and network. The advisory board will consist of experts and leaders from various fields and backgrounds who have relevant experience and knowledge across a diverse spectrum of civic domains. The advisory board will support with strategy, funding, and outreach.

• We will onboard one or more new members into our co-stewardship team. The co-stewardship team is the core team that operates and supports the network. The co-stewardship team is responsible for articulating the vision, strategy, and goals of the network, as well as maintaining the infrastructure for operations, finances, and governance of the network. The co-stewardship team is also accountable to the network members and the advisory board. We will look for candidates who have the passion, skills, and commitment to join our co-stewardship team and to contribute to our network's success and growth.

• We will decide on the approach for our legal Board of Directors for the OpenCivics Foundation. The Board of Directors will serve on the board of the legal entity that provides services and fundraising for the network. The Board of Directors is also liable for the legal and financial risks of the non-profit foundation that supports network activities. We will explore different options and models for our Board of Directors, such as a traditional board, a stakeholder board, a dynamic board, or a tokenized board.

• We intend to rebuild our website and streamline our web presence. We’ll continue to redesign and update our website to reflect our current identity, activities, and achievements. We’ll also refine our brand assets and onboarding materials. We will also consolidate and integrate our web presence across different platforms and channels, such as social media, newsletters, blogs, podcasts, and videos.

Sustainable Funding

• We will secure funding for our initial collaborative initiatives and one year of administrative costs and steward salaries. We will seek funding from various sources, such as grants, donations, and sponsorships. We will also diversify our funding streams and reduce our dependence on any single source of funding. We will also ensure that our funding sources are aligned with our vision, mission, and values and that they do not compromise our autonomy and integrity.

• For our internal administrative fundraising goals, we aim to raise a minimum of $10k per month to compensate stewards for their full time contributions to the network and to cover our core administrative technology costs.

• Over the course of the year, we aim to raise between $1 million and $20 million for our collaborative initiatives. We will use these funds to support the development and implementation of our collaborative initiatives and direct funding to member organizations through grants and decentralized governance of the consortium treasury. We will also allocate a portion of these funds to create a reserve treasury fund that can provide financial stability and security for our network and will be democratically governed by citizens of the consortium.

Development Lab

• We will explore a model for spinning off cooperatives formed by innovators in the consortium. We will investigate the potential and feasibility of creating cooperatives that can offer products and services related to the core mission of OpenCivics. These cooperatives will be owned and controlled by the innovators themselves, who will share the profits and benefits of their work. These cooperatives will also adhere to the principles and values of our network and contribute to our common vision and mission.

• We will launch an initial cooperative oriented toward ecosystem facilitation and systems mapping services. We will pilot a cooperative that can provide consulting and training services to other organizations and networks that are interested in applying open and participatory innovation methods and tools. We will also create a business model and a governance structure that can sustain and scale our cooperative.

Network Engagement

• We will hold regular meetings across the network and the collaboratives to increase touch points for relationship building, peer support, collaborative match making. Open calls for all members will begin in mid-January and will continue indefinitely.

• Participation in early collaborative initiatives revolving around the Grants Program and Collaborative Protocols research will begin at the end of January.

• By the end of 2024, one of our most critical goals is to create a sense of self-organization throughout the consortium which we will support through sequenced deployment of protocols, tools, and governance. The best way to stay abreast of these developments is to

Grants Program

• Building on a successful Genesis Grant Round, in 2024 we’ll focus on growing the matching pools for our upcoming grant rounds. By growing the matching pool, we’ll be able to include more projects in the round while ensuring that each project receives meaningful funding for their work.

• We’re exploring collaborative relationships with additional matching fund sponsors to expand the matching pool through partnerships.

• We’ll be inviting the consortium to participate in a progressive decentralization experiment with the Grants Program collaborative initiative by exploring electing consortium members as round managers and compensating members through bounties for decentralized action on application review and round promotion.

How You Can Get Involved

There are several ways in which you can more deeply participate in OpenCivics as we roll out our progressive decentralization roadmap and open up formal pathways to collaborate on key network activities. In no particular order, these pathways for engagement include:

• Attending weekly open member calls (beginning late January)

  • During our weekly calls, you’ll be able to meet other members working on related areas of interest, build new collaborative relationships, learn about compelling initiatives, and seek feedback for your project or organization.

  • Subscribe to the OpenCivics Calendar (click the link in the bottom right corner to add it to your Google Calendar)

• Attending conference side events, retreats, and our flagship summit this Spring

  • Subscribe to our email list for updates

• Participating in Collaborative Protocols research (beginning late January)

  • Jump into our Discord and Telegram

• Participating in the next round of the Grants Program (either in the form of applying for a grant, running for an elected round operator position, or supporting the round through taking on bounties for round promotion and grantee outreach)

  • Keep an eye out for email invitations to apply

For all of these types of engagement, you’ll need to be on our Discord or Telegram to receive regular updates and have completed your membership application and onboarding. We’re excited to see you there!

Conclusion

OpenCivics is a network of innovators that aims to transform the way we steward our society. We believe that collaboration and innovation are keys to solving the wicked problems of our times and creating a more vital, participatory, and resilient world.

In 2024, we have set ambitious (yet, we believe) realistic goals that will help us achieve our vision and mission. We will focus on strengthening our legal, operational, and financial foundations, as well as expanding our research, publishing, and convening activities. We will also foster a culture of collaboration and self-organization within our network and launch impactful and innovative collaborative initiatives. We’ll also build and maintain strategic partnerships with other organizations and networks that share our values and goals. We’ll also explore and experiment with new models and methods of network governance and cooperative development.

We invite you to join us on the journey. Whether you are an innovator, a researcher, a practitioner, a community organizer, or a supporter, you have a role to play in creating a more beautiful world.

In Us We Trust,

Patricia and Benjamin

OpenCivics Stewards

2023 was the year OpenCivics was birthed into the world. Moving into our second year as an organization, with so many early developmental milestones accomplished, this year is poised to be the year in which our theory of change is fully activated and accelerated. Below you’ll find our reflections on what we accomplished in 2023 and our vision for 2024 and beyond.

Co-founding and Collaboration

• In September 2022, collaboration on OpenCivics was initiated by co-founders Timothy Archer and Benjamin Life, after a deep dive immersion with Gary Sheng and Susanna Choe, fellow civic innovators working at the intersections of ecological stewardship, civics, and systems change.

• In October 2022, Timothy and Benjamin officially began working together, bringing together their complementary skills and experiences in civics, web3, community building, and systems thinking.

• In November 2022, we hosted our first launch call, inviting friends and allies to join us in co-creating OpenCivics.

• In December 2022, we welcomed Patricia Parkinson as a co-founder, adding her expertise in civics, web3, community building, and systems thinking also to the team.

Design and Development

• In January 2023, we explored our theory of change, mapped a vision, and designed our brand identity, creating a cohesive and compelling narrative for OpenCivics.

• In February 2023, we spent two weeks in a design sprint in Mexico City, prototyping and mapping the components of the DAO and non-profit ecosystem. We returned to the US to host Federated Futures, an ETH Denver side event, and to speak at Schelling Point.

• In March 2023, Benjamin and Patricia engaged in a three-week in-person design, strategy, and content sprint on Salt Spring Island, BC, refining and iterating on network prototypes and onboarding materials.

• In April 2023, we published the version 1 of the OpenCivics constitution, outlining our core values, principles, and governance model. We also published the collaborative initiative specification template as well as documentation for our first three collaborative initiatives, focusing on citizen assemblies, a governance toolkit SDK, and bioregional governance.

• In May 2023, we designed and minted our membership NFTs, creating a unique and verifiable way for members to access and contribute to OpenCivics. We also created our Discord server, with various channels and plugins to facilitate communication and collaboration among members. We also created our membership application and outreach backend, the core infrastructure for launching a decentralized network and consortium.

• In June 2023, we began prototyping our membership onboarding experience with key friends and advisors, gathering feedback and insights on how to improve and enhance the process before going live with our entire network. We also created and refined our membership onboarding materials, providing clear and engaging information and guidance for new members. Benjamin presented OpenCivics at the Dweb Camp, hosted by the Internet Archive, spoke with Sir Tim Berners Lee (founder of the internet), and built friendships with other decentralized/peer to peer technologists working in the civic space.

• In July 2023, we continued to prototype and improve our membership experience, incorporating the feedback and insights from their early testers and advisors. We also worked on developing and integrating new features and functionalities like decentralized project management, multi-signature wallets, and collaborative knowledge management.

• In August 2023, we completed our prototype testing for the membership experience, identifying areas for improvement and innovation. We also published our Theory of Change and ‘What Is OpenCivics?’ videos, explaining our mission, vision, and approach in a concise and captivating way. We were also approached by Lobby3 / DeCiv Fund, a web3 fund for civic innovation, to conduct a quadratic funding grants program, leveraging our consortium and network to distribute funds to impactful civic projects. We also published documentation for a fourth collaborative initiative, focused on the quadratic funding grants program.

Launch and Establishment

• In September 2023, we opened our membership, inviting anyone who shares this vision and values to apply to join OpenCivics and co-create the future of democracy and society. We also published the version 2 of the OpenCivics constitution, incorporating the feedback and suggestions from our members and advisors, and subtly updating our governance model. Benjamin presented OpenCivics’ theory of change and vision for bioregional governance at the Regenerate Cascadia Bioregional Summit, connecting with other bioregionalists and activists in the Pacific Northwest.

• In October 2023, we published specifications for our fifth and sixth collaborative initiatives, focusing on collaborative protocols and food sovereignty networks, honing our scope toward local prototyping and creating a pattern language for collaboration. Benjamin also spoke at the Ethereum Localization Forum, sharing his insights and learnings on how to localize web3 technologies and solutions for different contexts and cultures.

• In November 2023, we launched our grant program and genesis round, distributing $33,000 USD to 15 civic innovation projects, with allocations made by the public through quadratic voting. Our grant round finished in the top three crowdfunded community rounds on the Gitcoin platform.

• In December 2023, Benjamin spoke with Senators and Representatives on Capitol Hill as part of the Stand With Crypto Delegation, advocating for civic innovation and the role of web3 in democracy. He also shared the success stories and best practices from OpenCivics and its grant recipients, demonstrating the potential and value of web3 for civic engagement and empowerment.

New Members

Since opening membership to our immediate friends and allies this fall, we’ve been amazed by the caliber of innovators who have already aligned as OpenCivics members. Click the link below to meet all of our members who joined the consortium in 2023!

Year One (2023) Conclusion

We are proud and humbled by what we have accomplished in the past year, and we are excited and optimistic about what lies ahead. We are grateful for the support and collaboration of our members, advisors, funders, and allies, who have made OpenCivics possible and meaningful. We are also inspired by the passion and creativity of our grant recipients, who are working on innovative and impactful civic projects around the world.

To those who joined the consortium this year, thank you! We’re honored to have such incredible innovators, builders, and visionaries as part of OpenCivics. To meet the other members who joined last year, head over to our wiki to see the profiles of other Citizens and Contributors. The intellectual, social, and leadership capital already present in this emerging network is truly astounding.

To read more about what’s to come in the year ahead, read our 2024 Strategic Vision.

In Us We Trust,

Benjamin and Patricia

OpenCivics Stewards