🔗 Citizen Infra Builders Digest
🗓 3 – 12 July 2026

📣 CIBC Announcements

Two wins to open with. Mozilla Foundation named the ten projects in its Democracy × AI Cohort — picked from 1,073 applications across 114 countries — and the Open Facilitation Library is one of them. OFL, which Artem instigated inside Metagov in early 2025, works to define and teach what good facilitation looks like for both people and AI systems in public deliberation; it runs on two open-source elicitation agents, Comhairle (agentic RAG) and Harmonica (embedding-clustering). Convoca, further down, is a fellow cohort member.

And My Community shipped. The CIBC extension we've been building these past weeks replaces your new tab with a community dashboard — curated links from your communities, popular Bluesky posts from people you follow, upcoming events and deliberations, and a built-in tab manager (save with Alt+S, sort into collections, all stored locally). The latest release, v0.3.5, closes the consent loop: a Community Input tab where your communities decide together by consent — agree, pass, or raise a blocking objection with a reason. Silence counts as consent, and a decision ratifies when its window closes with no objection. Sign in with email or Bluesky; install from the GitHub releases.

🏛 Deliberative Tech

Convoca — one of the Mozilla cohort's ten — makes sense of large volumes of community input, surfacing recurring themes and tracing every synthesized insight back to what residents actually said, from sticky notes to recorded dialogue. Co-designed with New York City planners and North Carolina organizers, by a team out of the MIT Media Lab.

📰 News

Participatory democracy kept finding institutional footing this fortnight. The Decidim Association signed an MOU with the New York City Civic Engagement Commission on 24 June, making NYC the first local government outside Catalonia to formally partner with the open-source platform — signed during UN Open Source Week.

Connecticut has convened a 100-member citizens' assembly, drawn to mirror the state's geographic and demographic mix, to set funding priorities for local public services and property taxes. Sessions run July to September, with recommendations going to the state legislature.

And Erika Benke reports for the BBC on Finland's libraries: Helsinki's Oodi lends sewing machines and 3D printers, over half of Finns visit a library each month, and the piece argues their real worth is civic — trusted, neutral spaces that help hold a society together.

📚 Resources

Frameworks and reading for building civic tech, and for measuring it. Audrey Tang and Caroline Green (Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI) set out Civic AI — bounded local agents a community can own, inspect, correct, and switch off — governed by a "6-Pack of Care": attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness, solidarity, symbiosis. Grounded in Taiwan's Alignment Assemblies against AI-enabled scams.

Lisa Schirch and Beth Goldberg make a companion argument in Visualizing "We the People": binary us-versus-them graphics deepen polarization, while distribution-focused "opinion landscapes" surface hidden consensus. Their case is the Jigsaw × Napolitan Institute deliberation that engaged 2,400+ Americans across all 435 congressional districts.

Maggie Appleton distills fifteen years of hosting into Gathering Structures — practical formats like Seven Minute Demos, rotating ad-hoc hosts, fishbowls and unconferences, plus a case for selective invitations and starting small.

And the Center for Blue Democracy's Democratic Fitness Indicator scores a country's democracy from 0 to 100% across seven categories, from citizens' assemblies to the ability to change the constitution. Applied so far, even Norway and the USA came out weak.