An exploration of computer-network architectures as civic structures.
Modular Politics: Toward a Governance Layer for Online Communities
Governance in online communities is an increasingly high-stakes challenge, and yet many basic features of offline governance legacies--juries, political parties, term limits, and formal debates, to name a few--are not in the feature-sets of the software most community platforms use. Drawing on the paradigm of Institutional Analysis and Development, this paper proposes a strategy for addressing this lapse by specifying basic features of a generalizable paradigm for online governance called Modular Politics. Whereas classical governance typologies tend to present a choice among wholesale ideologies, such as democracy or oligarchy, Modular Politics would enable platform operators and their users to build bottom-up governance processes from computational components that are modular and composable, highly versatile in their expressiveness, portable from one context to another, and interoperable across platforms. This kind of approach could implement pre-digital governance systems as well as accelerate innovation in uniquely digital techniques. As diverse communities share and connect their components and data, governance could occur through a ubiquitous network layer. To that end, this paper proposes the development of an open standard for networked governance.
Civic Tech Toronto | A space to learn and collaborate
Civic Tech Toronto is a vibrant and diverse community of Torontonians engaged in understanding and creating solutions for civic challenges through technology, design, and other innovative means.
JamiiAfrica
Deploying Africa’s Civic OS—a decentralized, secure, and AI-driven digital infrastructure that enables citizens to hold authorities accountable while giving institutions credible, data-backed incentives to respond
Civic Tech Field Guide
A rich, crowdsourced collection of thousands of tech for good projects from around the world.
Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media
Decentralizing the governance of social computing systems to communities promises to empower them to make independent decisions, with nuance and in accordance with their values. Yet, communities do not govern in isolation. Many problems communities face are common, or move across their boundaries. We therefore propose designing for "inter-community governance:" mechanisms that support relationships and interactions between communities to coordinate on governance issues. Drawing from workshops with 24 individuals on decentralized, community-run social media, we present six challenges in designing for inter-community governance surfaced through ideas proposed in workshops. Together, these ideas come together as an ecosystem of resources, infrastructures, and tools that highlight three key principles for designing for inter-community governance: modularity, forkability, and polycentricity. We end with a discussion of how the ideas proposed in workshops might be implemented in future work aiming to support community governance in social computing systems broadly.
Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media | Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Collaborative and social computing theory, concepts and paradigms
The Politics of Open Infrastructures: Power, Governance, and Justice in Digital Knowledge Practices
This volume examines how openness is designed, governed, contested and lived in contemporary digital knowledge infrastructures. From open source software and internet standards, to citizen science platforms, public sector data systems and alternative computing practices, the book shows that infrastructures are never neutral technical backbones.
Reclaiming the Computing Commons
Resisting the commodification of information is a political struggle, not a technical one.
From ZK-first to AT Protocol — our path to DDS | Agora Citizen Network
We've been building Agora — a platform for public deliberation using Polis-style clustering — for a while now. Along the way, we've written about what we think about Nostr, AT Protocol, Polis, Community Notes, and protocol interoperability. Those posts are somewhat outdated now. This one describes w...
CivicPulse
CivicPulse is a nonpartisan nonprofit seeking to promote more effective local and state governance through improved access to reliable data and research.
PARA
Civic social infrastructure for communities, governance, and public participation.
How to Make Sense of Any Mess
Information Architecture for Everybody. Based on a book by Information Architect, Abby Covert.
Civic Health Project
Technology can connect or divide us. At Civic Health Project, we're dedicated to advancing massively scalable solutions to society's dangerous divisions.
New and useful vocabulary to learn here: "Information Civics, a marriage of software engineering and civic design." 👇👇
Paul Frazee
New blogpost about atproto It's not federation, it's not a p2p mesh. It's a secret third thing: practical. pfrazee.com/blog/practical-decentralizati…
