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Citizen Infrastructure

Locality-to-locality spreading

How does community-built technology spread without becoming the very thing it’s reacting against — a single, homogenising platform that flattens every place into the same template? The Relational Technology Project calls its answer locality-to-locality spreading.

A different math of scale

Section titled “A different math of scale”

Platform-builders think in ratios of one developer to a million “users.” Relational tech is “excited about ratios of one to ten, or one to a hundred”: one person sparks a build, ten co-create it, a hundred neighbours are in relationship with it. Success isn’t measured by going from a thousand to a million as fast as possible — it’s measured by relational metrics: Are your needs being met locally? Are you connected to your place?

Remixing, not rolling out

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Instead of one team shipping a finished product everywhere, a tool diffuses by being remixed. Generative AI now lets someone build a rough version of an idea quickly — a “discussion piece” rather than a final product — so a neighbour can take an existing example, adapt it to their own context, share it, gather their neighbours’ ideas, and launch it warm rather than from a cold start. RTP calls this relational remixing.

It can move fast: when a San Francisco tool-sharing app called Community Supplies was written up in the Washington Post, its makers turned it multi-tenant overnight, and about 200 neighbourhoods started their own within three days.

The river and the gardens

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RTP’s metaphor: it is a river flowing into many local gardens, each tended by its own “local gardener.” Gardeners decide if and when they want water from the river. And because a river also carries sediment out of each garden, what people build locally flows back and reshapes the river. The stewards’ only job is to keep the river “healthy and fun to play in.” Small grants help: RTP’s withneighbors.org microgrants (around $100, “a permission slip to invite your neighbours”) seed gatherings across a cohort of towns and cities.

Why it’s here

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This is a practical answer to a hard problem in civic tech: how to reach many places without centralising power or homogenising them. It pairs the spread of relational tech with the commons logic of shared, remixable resources — closer to how seeds and recipes travel than how software platforms scale.

Sources

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