Concepts

Citizen infrastructure comes with its own vocabulary — sortition, deliberative democracy, citizens’ assemblies, wikisurveys, civic AI, self-governance, and more. This section explains those methods and ideas in plain language: what each one is, how it works, and where to see it in practice.

It’s a living reference that grows over time. Where a concept has real-world examples, it links out to the Run Reports and Stories; where it connects to something you can use, it links to the toolkit.

The case for deliberation

Open democracy A democracy built on citizens governing by lot, not by election.

The epistemic case for democracy Why diverse groups can be wiser than experts.

Civic love The relational bond that makes deliberation work, and precedes its wisdom.

Pre-bunking Inoculating against a lie before it spreads, with a shared point nobody argues with.

Breaking the gridlock The UN's diagnosis of why we can't act on shared problems, and why deliberation is part of the cure.

Sortition & government by lot

The electoral imperative Why the need to win and keep office structurally distorts the agenda, policy, and deliberation — the diagnosis sortition answers.

Sortition (representation by lot) Choosing decision-makers at random.

A people's branch of government A permanent chamber chosen by lot, as a check on the elected ones.

Multi-body sortition What a whole legislature run on the lot could look like: Bouricius's reference design of several specialised random bodies.

Objections to sortition The serious criticisms — competence, accountability, mobs, legitimacy — and the best answers to each.

Sortition in organisations Random selection in workplaces, universities, unions and clubs, not just government.

Investor assemblies Extending sortition beyond the state to the economy.

Democratising finance Sortition mandates for public banks and pension funds, and “Democracy on Fridays”.

Citizens’ assemblies

What is a citizens' assembly The format behind most of our run reports.

How a citizens' assembly is run The practical craft, from setting the question to caring for members afterwards.

Spaces for deliberation The eight spatial qualities of the room itself, and why they quietly shape the work.

Deliberative polling What a population thinks once it's actually informed, and how to measure the change.

Letting citizens govern the assembly Handing real procedural control to the participants, not just experts.

Binding or advisory? Why advisory-only assemblies risk “participation washing,” and how a few got real power.

Institutionalising deliberation Making assemblies permanent, and why some embed while others quietly die.

Participatory policymaking Bringing the public into the everyday work of government, not just the set-piece assembly.

Scaling catalysts The organisations whose job is to make democratic innovation take root, and what makes them work.

Who gets to deliberate

Children & young people's assemblies Bringing under-18s into deliberation, by right.

Intergenerational deliberation 7-to-70 in one room, and stewarding decisions across generations.

Deliberation as enfranchisement Giving a say to those the vote excludes.

Self-governance & power

The Commoning Standard Self-governance as a universal literacy.

The Power Matrix The four forms of power at play whenever people coordinate.

Cargo cult democracy Build the people, not just the democratic “artifact”.

Technology's place is education Why literacy, not tooling, is the bottleneck.

Funding the commons How citizen infrastructure gets paid for without being captured.

Plural mechanisms: quadratic voting, funding & Harberger taxes Market-inspired tools that capture how strongly people care, and share property more fairly.

Network societies (not network states) Keeping communities connected, instead of exiting to found new ones.

Movements, not arguments Why power is shared under pressure, not persuasion, and what that means for democratic innovation.

Deep democracy A facilitation philosophy that finds a group's wisdom in the voice nobody wants to hear.

The commons

The commons (and why it's not a tragedy) What a commons actually is, and why Hardin got it wrong.

Enclosure The fencing-off of shared wealth, from medieval fields to your data.

The OntoShift The mindset shift from isolated individual to web of interdependence.

Relational property Ownership as community-agreed use rights, not absolute dominion.

Parallel polis Building the horizontal alternative now, not just confronting the state.

Online communities & governance

Implicit feudalism Why online spaces default to one all-powerful admin.

Modular politics Communities composing their own governance from interchangeable parts.

Constitutional agents A plain-language constitution interpreted by an AI agent.

Protocol An ancient, neglected form of organising without a central ruler.

Bridging & pro-social media Ranking feeds by what builds understanding across communities, not by what hooks you.

The case for civic AI

Civic AI AI applied to democracy and civic life, and how the field is mapped.

Plurality Audrey Tang's answer to the AI “singularity”: spread capability sideways, steered by communities, turning difference into energy.

Democratising AI Four things people mean by the phrase — use, development, profits, governance — and which one actually shares power.

Public AI AI built and governed as public infrastructure, like libraries or the power grid.

Does AI weaken democratic institutions? The strongest critique, and the case for using AI judiciously.

Scaling deliberation with AI

AI for participation How AI is actually showing up in participation tools.

Can AI scale deliberation? What's gained and lost when you automate the work of deliberating.

Five dimensions of scaling deliberation Out, up, across, deep, in — and why headcount is the wrong thing to optimise.

AI mediation & the Habermas Machine Can an AI draft a consensus statement a divided group prefers to a human mediator's?

Synthetic participation The risk of AI-generated stand-ins for real citizens.

Sensemaking at scale

Civic listening Hearing a whole community at scale through small-group story-sharing.

AI sensemaking Clustering and summarising mass civic input to surface where people agree and split.

Conversation networks The media shape that replaces broadcasting: many small conversations with AI in the background.

Argument mapping Making the full shape of a contested debate legible, every claim and counter-claim.

Uncommon ground Not the bland agreement everyone shares, but the rare point that surprises both sides.

AI reflectors Why “the collective will” can't simply be computed, and a humbler role for AI as a mirror.

The civic tech field

Why civic tech projects fail (and succeed) A decade of patterns from the Civic Tech Field Guide.

Civic products, externalities & features Three ways technology touches democracy.

Connecting the tools — interoperability & standards Making thousands of civic tools talk to each other.

The organizer kit Meeting the under-resourced local organizer where they already are.

The peer-to-peer & decentralized landscape The “decentralized” world citizens keep hearing about, and how to spot real power-sharing.

Civic intelligence infrastructure Connective tissue that makes scattered civic work legible.

Relational tech Technology built with a community to deepen care and trust, not optimise attention.

Locality-to-locality spreading How grassroots tools spread by being remixed, one neighbourhood at a time.

Durable civic infrastructure Why standing local capacity matters more than the one-off assembly: scale down, not up.

Consequence scanning A structured exercise for surfacing a technology's unintended effects before it ships.

The bigger picture

The metacrisis Why some argue today's crises are one interconnected predicament.

Planetary governance Governing the problems that cross every border, at the scale they actually operate on.

Segmented sovereignty How states sometimes cede a narrow slice of sovereignty to face a shared threat (the IAEA model).

More-than-human governance Giving animals, rivers and seas a voice in the decisions that affect them.

More explainers are on the way. Spot one that’s missing? Use the “Edit page” link below.