🔗 Citizen Infra Builders Digest
🗓 10 – 25 August 2026

📰 News

Chicago Public Media is launching chicago.com as a network of neighbourhood communities rather than a news site, running on Roundabout, the platform New_ Public has been incubating for a year. Five neighbourhood pilots start this autumn, each moderated by a paid contract "community steward". In Sophie Culpepper's Nieman Lab piece, CEO Melissa Bell is blunt about the distinction: "This is a community platform, not a news site." No profiles, a reverse-chronological feed, and no posts about "suspicious persons". The Sun-Times announcement carries the partnership detail; the domain was a gift from the Chicago Community Trust.

Kaliya Young takes up the Regenerative Tech Project's framework (Jessica Groopman and Danielle Lanyard) and pushes on the layer it leaves unexamined. Their directory of 75+ initiatives catalogues what each tool does, not what it is built on, and her point is that a community tool running on Slack gets enshittified on Slack's timeline no matter how good its mission statement is. Twenty years of protocol work since the first Internet Identity Workshop in 2005 is the substrate she says the movement needs and has not noticed.

@carlomichaelis and @chiocciolab have published six new Democracy Innovators episodes: Ryan Koch on civic innovation, Simon Horton on negotiation and whether AI can help end a war, Gianluca Misuraca on AI in the public sector, Anthony Zacharzewski on democratic infrastructure and power, Alberto Fernandez Gibaja from International IDEA, and Alvaro Oleart on the instrumentalisation of EU participation processes, which Carlo recommends as one of the best ones.

Play for Impact is a serious-games afternoon in Frankfurt on 24 November, tickets from €19, with the 2030 SDGs Game and Climate Fresk in an open-space format. The free online community warm-up is tomorrow, 26 August, 12:30–14:00, and the call for games runs to 31 October. Mostly German, English supported.

📚 Resources

Beautiful Solutions is now a free online toolbox. Nathan Schneider co-edited the book of solidarity-economy stories and announced on 20 August that Beautiful Trouble has put the whole thing online, cross-linked into their existing toolbox: entries like Travel Many Paths, Build for Access and Be Transparent.

School of System Change and PolicySolve are running a two-hour session with Jewlya Lynn on using AI to augment systems change practice on Wednesday 9 September, 14:00 CEST. The framing is "AI in the mix" of relational processes rather than "humans in the loop". Sliding scale £25/£40/£55, enrolment closes 8 September.

🏛 Deliberative Tech

Voice to Vision is the closest thing yet to a paper about the problem we keep circling: community members describing feedback as going "into a void". Margaret Hughes, Cassandra Overney and Deb Roy at MIT built it with Jasmin Tepale and Elizabeth Hamby from the NYC Department of City Planning, five months of design with 21 stakeholders and a field evaluation with 24 people. The split in the findings is the useful part: planners wanted sensemaking tools that find connections across inputs, while community members wanted to see themselves in the record and see the rigour behind the decision.

People Powered, the OECD and Bertelsmann Stiftung have a new report drawing on 50 use cases from 22 countries, mapping nine ways AI is being used in participation and naming the temptation to simulate public opinion instead of consulting the public. Webinar 16 September, hands-on workshop 30 September, limited spots.

Catherine Barnes' Framing Questions for Dialogue and Deliberation (Toda Peace Institute, 11 August) is about designing the guiding question itself, and how it has to change between the dialogue phase, the deliberation phase and collaborative decision-making. Practitioner-facing, free PDF.