🔗 Citizen Infra Builders Digest
🗓 June 21 – July 3

📣 CIBC Announcements

🎟 Our very first Demo Day is TODAY — Fri July 3, 11:00 AM EDT / 5:00 PM CEST (Zoom, free). Five builders show tools for community deliberation and citizen-owned systems. It will be recorded and uploaded to the Citizen Infrastructure channel on YouTube → register on Luma.

🌱 Allotment is in public beta. Our self-hosted, open-source fair-sortition engine draws a representative mini-public by auditable lottery (maximin) and hands it to deliberation tools — the selection-to-conversation pipeline many have been waiting for. Try it live.

📰 News

One of our favourite topics: can AI support democracy? Jigsaw's Sensemaking AI marked its first year turning scattered public comment into policy. The tools are open-sourced now and have run in Kentucky and Oklahoma, with a live round gathering input in Chattanooga. Andy Hall's Teaching the New Loop comes at AI from the other end: the skill worth teaching, he argues from a Stanford course, is writing your own evals, so people rather than vendors define what "good" looks like.

The Basque ethic of auzolan behind the Mondragón cooperatives gets a fresh read from CU Boulder's MEDLab, and Places People Change follows a cross-sector partnership building neighbourhood belonging in Allentown, PA, with a free engagement toolkit on the way. Two conversations round it out: Nate Hagens assembled a roundtable on why everyone wants a village but nobody wants to be a villager, and Alice Casiraghi was interviewed by Democracy Innovators Podcast: designing regenerative public services.

Ukraine is running one of the least likely experiments in deliberative democracy anywhere. Its first two Citizens' Assemblies, in Zvyahel and Slavutych, were convened in 2024 by mailing 4,000 invitations to randomly selected households and seating a panel chosen by lot (45 members in Zvyahel) — sortition under martial law. Both city councils now plan to write the assemblies into their statutes; as Slavutych's mayor put it, "certain instruments of democracy do not work during the war, so mechanisms of deliberative democracy… are extremely important today." The OECD's governance review documents the rest: participatory budgeting still operating locally, most ministry consultations pushed online (255 of 306 in late 2024), and a new Law on Public Consultations — drafted with OECD, OSCE and EU input — that deliberately won't take effect until a year after martial law ends.

And False Parameters, a systems-change studio from Berlin, has launched a new website: their commissions include Trees as Infrastructure (urban trees reframed as living public infrastructure, not a municipal cost) and In the Name of Public Good, an interview series poking at the unquestioned "sacred cows" in how social-impact work assumes change happens.

📚 Resources

The EU's Joint Research Centre published a foresight study, Futures of EU democracy, that runs four scenarios — from AI-Facilitated Direct Democracy to a Big Tech Power Grab — to surface the tension between efficiency and real citizen agency. A companion JRC survey put a number on the appetite: 97% of the public bodies across 20 countries that tried citizen engagement said they'd do it again.

Murmurations' CoBot now indexes 20,000+ co-ops, commons and community organisations across 130 countries in one searchable directory.

The OECD's mapping of 40+ area-based initiatives traces how economic, social and physical development braid together in one place, while the C4 centre's social infrastructure agenda asks the plainer question of who maintains the libraries, parks and third places that hold communities together.

And two pieces stake out the optimism spectrum: Beth Simone Noveck's new Yale book Reboot makes the hopeful case for AI in democratic renewal, while the FAccT paper Connective Democratic Tissue, drawing on Metagov's interoperability cohorts, makes the harder structural one, that civic tools need "second-order" plumbing before they can actually talk to each other.

🏛 Deliberative Tech

On the build side, Ideas for Change keeps things refreshingly concrete: residents post and vote on local ideas, the ones with the broadest support graduate to community dialogues, and the resulting proposals go to city leaders — a full share-to-decision loop already running across several US cities.

And what happens when the participants in a deliberation aren't all human? A new paper on Habermolt, a live experiment of Joseph Low and Oscar Duys, frames it as "AI-delegated deliberation": not AI summarising a crowd, but AI agents arguing on your behalf, tested across representation, aggregation and revision. Gemot.dev explores agents-deliberating-with-agents: an MCP server that turns real published positions into synthetic agents and hunts for the cruxes that actually divide them, with anti-sycophancy checks that reject fake convergence.