🔗 Citizen Infrastructure Links Digest
🗓 Week of March 16, 2026

Governance protocols, cooperative AI, broad listening, and the democracy of doing — this week's links span the full stack of citizen infrastructure.

📰 News

G7 GovAI Grand Challenge — Impact Canada's challenge for AI in government has announced its recipients. CIBC's own @Stocastico96 is among the winners with the Deliberation Knowledge Graph — connecting deliberative process datasets and ontologies (EU Parliament debates, citizen participation platforms, Supreme Court arguments) into a unified framework for studying democratic deliberation.
• Challenge & recipients: https://impact.canada.ca/en/challenges/g7-govAI#recipients
• Simone's project: https://dkg.svagnoni.linkeddata.es/
• Italy recipient spotlight: https://youtu.be/euk72RTer2I?si=vHBfVrc_luYkp0a4

Public AI Switzerland — a newly formed customer-owned cooperative providing Swiss-made AI (the Apertus model). CHF 100/year for ownership, democratic governance, and Swiss data residency.
• https://publicai.ch/

📚 Resources & Ideas

Beyond the Ballot Box: The Democracy of Doing — a report from Town Team Movement, cofounded by Jimmy Murphy. 182 Town Teams across Western Australia doing stuff — street festivals, art installations, community asset buyouts. Their Streets Alive programme unlocked road safety budgets to deliver 100+ community projects, mobilise 4,100+ volunteers, and unlock over £1M in additional funding. The core argument: as trust in institutions falls, communities that don't wait are the alternative.
• https://www.townteammovement.com/the-democracy-of-doing/

Neighbourhoods of Care — a Citizen Network strategy to reorient care policies toward citizenship and inclusive neighbourhoods.
• https://citizen-network.org/library/neighbourhoods-of-care1.html

The Purpose of Protocols — whoever builds critical infrastructure gains control, regardless of theoretical openness. Every open social protocol generates shared resources, but none has produced a governance framework adequate to those resources.
• https://connectedplaces.online/the-purpose-of-protocols/

Powers v0.4 Litepaper — a modular governance protocol treating institutional design as composable primitives. Instead of custom-coded DAOs, organizations configure role-restricted smart contracts called "Mandates" — moving from governance by forking to governance by composition. (via @chiocciolab)
• https://powers-docs.vercel.app/for-developers/litepaper

Broad Listening Book — Digital Democracy 2030's upcoming book on how generative AI enables visualization and analysis of public opinion, with case studies from Japanese elections.
• https://github.com/digitaldemocracy2030/broad-listening-book

🛠 Tools

Potluck — simple coordination for shared events: create a potluck, share it, let everyone claim what to bring. Built by @omniharmonic from OpenCivics.
• https://www.potluck.exchange/