🔗 Citizen Infra Builders Links Digest
🗓 24 April – 7 May 2026

📣 Announcements from CIBC Members

Artem launched bookpower.org — a directory of MCP servers and skills built from free / openly-licensed books on commons, facilitation, democracy tech, and OSS, so AI agents can tap them programmatically. The design choice is one-book-per-tool to start, with domain-level bundles (e.g. a future "democracy tech" server pulling from Governable Spaces + Plurality books) only after coordinating with their authors. Looking for suggestions of other CC-licensed or public-domain books worth wrapping.

Nico from Agora Citizen Network started a new W3C Community Group for DDS.xyz — Decentralized Deliberation Stack (renamed from "Standard" because W3C doesn't permit the word in CG titles). After community feedback, DDS has been reframed as protocol-agnostic so it can host multiple profiles — AT Protocol, ActivityPub, and others — around shared abstract building blocks.
• Learn more: https://www.w3.org/community/blog/2026/05/05/proposed-group-dds-decentralized-deliberation-stack-community-group/
• Join: https://www.w3.org/community/dds/join

📰 News & Inspiration

Sitra and Bertelsmann Stiftung published "European Civic Technology and Citizen Participation in the Age of AI" — a 16-page survey of how European civic tech is adapting under AI pressure.
• https://www.sitra.fi/en/publication/european-civic-technology-and-citizen-participation-in-the-age-of-ai/

One Project's manifesto on rethinking AI power: the public must govern the systems shaping our lives, not wait for industry self-regulation.
• https://oneproject.org/how-to-make-ai-serve-the-public/

Trust for Civic Life's six-month sprint on rural and underserved community groups landed three counterintuitive findings: established tools (email newsletters, contact DBs) outperform experimental tech; new tools work only when trusted local orgs deploy them; and digital tools should bridge to offline interaction, not substitute for it.
• https://trustforciviclife.org/online-for-offline-3-key-findings-from-our-digital-learning-sprint/

Threadwork Collective — a UK studio working with communities via Partnerships (consulting) and Stewardships (incubating collectives toward equitable transitions).
• https://threadwork.ing/

📚 Resources

Renaissance Philanthropy's ten playbooks — "a pattern language for high-impact, counterfactual philanthropic giving" — covering commitments, market shaping, field creation, policy entrepreneurship, prize competitions, and thesis-driven funds.
• https://www.renaissancephilanthropy.org/playbooks

Oliver Escobar (University of Edinburgh) and team published the INSPIRE Democratic Capabilities Framework, opening with: why does participation so often fail to be truly inclusive?
• PDF: https://0b2e8ddf-c59b-4939-a759-0de3d29ea8ce.filesusr.com/ugd/a49cde_11c587ed67f84314b3020f2341691825.pdf
• Post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/oliver-escobar-16a4135b_weve-just-published-the-inspire-democratic-share-7455293131651964928-5A0S

David Bollier made the digital + audio versions of Think Like a Commoner freely available (the second edition came out in 2024). The revision reframes commons as a relational social system, not a resource. Our MCP server translates the book into AI language.
• Announcement: https://www.bollier.org/blog/now-available-audiobook-and-digital-versions-think-commoner-second-edition
• MCP: https://github.com/zhiganov/think-like-a-commoner-mcp

Chris Noessel published a new book Designing Assistant Technology: AI That Makes Us Smarter — a framework for building AI assistants that augment human capability rather than diminishing it.
• Book: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/designing-assistant-technology/
• Plus a Rosenfeld podcast episode with the author: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3oFX5iJXxYNMmqR41Dk5RQ