OpenHaven & Civic Intelligence Infrastructure with Brandon Nørgaard

The connective tissue of pro-social technology

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

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

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

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

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

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