🔗 Citizen Infra Builders Digest
🗓 June 2 – June 10

📣 CIBC Announcements

We launched the Citizen Infrastructure wiki — a free, public resource for citizens all around the world: citizen-infra.netlify.app. It lays out what citizen infrastructure is, a growing toolkit grouped by the "jobs" citizens need to get done, an Ecosystem of fellow-traveller orgs, and Run Reports on landmark deliberations — the Irish Citizens' Assembly, the French Climate Convention, Iceland's 2010 citizen-led constitution, etc. Built in the open and still growing — take a look and tell us what's missing.

📰 News

A European Civic Tech Hub — Sitra (Finland's Innovation Fund) and Bertelsmann Stiftung argue Europe doesn't lack civic tech, it lacks connection. The companion mySociety report sets out 14 recommendations across three shifts — grow demand, strengthen supply, fix procurement — with a launch recording.

The Marshall Plan for Civic Life — James Plunkett's big swing: Britain's community institutions are depleted (loneliness, strained public services), and patchy local wins in Grimsby and Plymouth need a sustained funding framework, not one-off pilots.

Hey Mamdani, let's make civic tech awesome — A coalition including Mozilla Foundation and RadicalxChange distilled 12 recommendations from an "Open Assembly" event on rebuilding NYC's relationship with technology — the plumbing behind free buses and frozen rents.

An army of citizens building evals — Andy Hall's Stanford students build their own AI evals instead of banning AI — testing models on political bias, logic, and data privacy, turning every citizen into someone who can check whether AI holds their values.

📚 Resources

Blueprints for Democratic Wellbeing — Carnegie UK (co-authored by Oliver Escobar) maps four ways to embed citizens' mini-publics in parliaments, from on-demand panels to a full second chamber of randomly selected citizens.

Test your theory of change — A free Evens Foundation tool (built by Matt Stempeck): paste your strategy and get back a causal chain, hidden assumptions, and historical evidence for and against whether it holds up.

Paolo Spada on scaling democratic innovation — A meaty podcast on why participatory budgeting tends to decline after ~8 years, and why deliberative processes must keep democratic control over their tools instead of leaning on commercial platforms. (shared by @carlomichaelis)

The disciplines of civic renewal — Gavin Freeguard (Kinship Works, JRF-funded) names 15 disciplines across six categories and proposes civic colleges and shared infrastructure to build the capacity. Open call for practitioner input.

Politics Without Politicians — Claudia Chwalisz interviews Hélène Landemore: democracy isn't broken, it's an oligarchy dressed in consent. The French Climate Convention is her model for putting binding decisions in citizens' hands.

Rewiring Democracy — Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders' new MIT Press book on AI and democracy. Sanders' companion essay on Open Knowledge Brasil profiles ML that flags public corruption — and why civic tech keeps dying for lack of sustainable funding.