The ecosystem

Citizen infrastructure isn’t built by one group. It’s a growing movement of organisations, communities, and networks — researchers, funders, and builders — strengthening democratic participation and collective intelligence. This is a non-exhaustive, generous map of fellow travellers CIBC works alongside.

Funders & foundations

Sitra — the Finnish Innovation Fund: a public future fund operating under the Finnish Parliament, working on sustainability, the economy, and democratic renewal.
AI & Democracy Foundation — a governance-innovation organisation working to ensure democratic capacity can keep pace with advances in AI.
Mediators Foundation — a US foundation that incubates and fiscally sponsors civic-renewal projects, including Better Together America and the Civic Intelligence Infrastructure initiative.
SPRIND — Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation — Germany’s federal agency for “leap” innovations (Bundesagentur für Sprunginnovationen); its SPRIND.Society vertical, led by Social Innovation Commissioner Zarah Bruhn (founder of socialbee), brings disruptive investment to societal and state innovation, including a Taiwan-inspired “presidential hackathon” challenge.
Mozilla Foundation — the non-profit behind Firefox and a long-standing voice for a healthy, open internet; its Democracy & AI incubator backs a cohort of around ten projects building AI deliberately designed to strengthen democratic ecosystems rather than undermine them.
UN Democracy Fund (UNDEF) — a UN fund supporting civil-society-led democracy and participation projects; co-publisher (with newDemocracy) of the Democracy Beyond Elections handbook and a backer of deliberative pilots in Brazil, Malawi and Uruguay.

Research & governance

Metagov — a research collective building standards and tools for the governance and self-governance of online communities and digital institutions; home of the “Modular Politics” framework, with its board chaired by Nathan Schneider. Building a tool with the Scottish Government to combine many participation tools into one coherent experience, alongside ontology work to give the field a shared vocabulary.
mySociety — a long-running UK civic-tech non-profit (FixMyStreet, WhatDoTheyKnow) and the host of TICTeC, the global conference and research network on the impact of civic technology.
The Consilience Project — works to improve public sensemaking and the information ecosystem so societies can make better collective decisions.
DemocracyNext — an international research and action institute focused on scaling high-quality, empowered, and permanent citizens’ assemblies; convenor of the Connecticut Citizens’ Assembly on Property Taxes, a flagship US assembly.
Collective Intelligence Project (CIP) — an R&D organisation (Divya Siddarth and Saffron Huang) working to make collective-intelligence capacity keep pace with AI; it runs Alignment Assemblies and published a “Democratic AI” roadmap of ways to democratise AI.
AI Now Institute — a New York research institute (executive director Amba Kak) focused on the political economy and concentration of power in AI, pressing for a public-interest frame in which firms must demonstrate AI’s benefits rather than assume them.
One Project — a non-profit building infrastructure for economic democracy: civic technology (its Common deliberation platform), movement partnerships, and the legal frameworks for holding shared resources accountably. Author of a four-part agenda to put the public in charge of AI’s rules, wealth, and ownership, and of the proposed Global AI Assembly (GAIA).
The GovLab & Burnes Center for Social Change — Beth Simone Noveck’s research institute (Northeastern University) on how data and technology can make governance more open and collaborative; publisher of the Reboot Democracy blog and a long-running voice on participatory — and now anticipatory — government.
Swiss AI Initiative — a national effort by EPFL, ETH Zurich, and the supercomputing centre CSCS that built Apertus, a fully open, multilingual public LLM (8B and 70B) trained only on permissively-licensed data.
Public AI Inference Utility — a Metagov-sponsored non-profit hosting public AI models (such as Apertus) behind a free chat and API, aiming to make public AI accessible, accountable, and permanent.
The Society Library — a non-profit (founder Jamie Joyce) building deliberation databases: debate maps that decompose contested issues into every claim, counter-claim, and piece of evidence, steel-manning all viewpoints rather than picking a side.
Internet Archive — Democracy’s Library — the Wayback Machine’s non-profit, whose Democracy’s Library initiative (championed by Brewster Kahle) is collecting the world’s government documents in one open, searchable place — the raw material for accountability and argument mapping.
Arantzazulab — a democracy-innovation lab in Spain’s Basque Country (launched 2020) that catalysed citizens’ assemblies across the region and is bringing sortition into the Mondragon cooperative — DemocracyNext’s leading example of civic infrastructure for scaling deliberation.
We Do Democracy — a Danish democracy-innovation studio designing and running deliberative processes, cited alongside Arantzazulab as civic infrastructure that helps deliberation spread; part of Copenhagen’s Demokrati Garage.
MASS LBP — a Canadian deliberative-democracy practitioner (Toronto) that runs citizens’ assemblies and reference panels across North America (director Sarah Yaffe), and helped originate the long-form “civic lottery” reference-panel tradition.
MosaicLab — an Australian (Melbourne) deliberative-engagement practice (co-founder Kimbra White, co-author of Facilitating Deliberation: A Practical Guide), known for running assemblies with chairs in a close circle and no tables.
DemoLab — a Colombian participation lab (Felipe Rey) that ran some of Latin America’s first random-selection deliberations, including itinerant citizens’ assemblies in Bogotá.
newDemocracy Foundation — an Australian research foundation that designs and operates citizens’ juries and assemblies and advises governments worldwide; piloted Malawi’s first-ever citizens’ juries.
Delibera Brasil — a non-partisan Brazilian non-profit that has run 21+ citizens’ assemblies and mini-publics since 2017, from Fortaleza’s solid-waste council to Amazonian climate assemblies.
Demos — a cross-party UK think tank; co-author (with Involve) of the Citizens’ White Paper and of Everyday Democracy, pressing for participation as a normal part of government.
UK Policy Lab — an innovation team inside the UK civil service experimenting with participatory and human-centred policy methods (film ethnography, design, deliberation).
Sortition Foundation — a non-profit that runs the stratified random selection (the sortition “civic lottery”) behind many citizens’ assemblies, and campaigns for sortition-based houses of government; the selection partner for assemblies from Scotland’s National Performance Framework to Taiwan’s Alignment Assemblies.
Cooperative AI Foundation — a research foundation supporting work on how to make AI systems (and AI-mediated human systems) cooperate well; convenor of a seminar series on collective intelligence and AI.
Iswe Foundation — a foundation building citizen-led democratic infrastructure (knowledge-and-practice lead Claire Mellier); co-creator of the Global Assembly for COP26 and a champion of assemblies as self-legitimating “claimed spaces.”
Nesta — the UK’s innovation agency; its Centre for Collective Intelligence Design runs practical experiments in participation and collective intelligence, and its UK 2040 work probes where the country can find agreement on hard problems.
Involve — the UK’s leading public-participation charity (20+ years); brings innovation-and-practice, capacity-building-and-standards, and advocacy-and-communications under one roof — an example of the interdisciplinary scaling catalyst.
Healthy Democracy — a US non-profit that designs and delivers citizens’ assemblies and Citizens’ Initiative Reviews; delivery partner for the Deschutes Civic Assembly.
Shared Future — a UK community-interest company specialising in deliberative and participatory democracy; facilitator of the first-ever citizens’ jury in a UK museum.
Central Oregon Civic Action Project — an emerging regional scaling catalyst (founder Josh Burgess) building lasting deliberative infrastructure across a divided urban-rural region; convenor of the Deschutes Civic Assembly.
Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab — Stanford research lab in the tradition of James Fishkin’s Deliberative Polling; partners on AI-assisted deliberations including Taiwan’s Alignment Assemblies and Engaged California, and maintains the Stanford Online Deliberation Platform.
Cortico — a non-profit out of MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication (Deb Roy) building “civic listening” tools — the Local Voices Network — that surface community voices through small-group, recorded conversations.
The Computational Democracy Project — the US non-profit that stewards Polis, the open-source opinion-mapping tool behind vTaiwan, the Taiwan Alignment Assemblies, Engaged California, and Bowling Green’s What Could BG Be?; the forerunner of the Community Notes bridging algorithm.
Manchester Metropolitan University — AI-ethics researchers (Dr Annabel Latham, Prof Keeley Crockett) who built the original People’s Panel for AI, a model for citizen scrutiny of public-sector AI.
The Alan Turing Institute — the UK’s national institute for data science and AI; funded the Manchester People’s Panel for AI pilot and works on responsible and public-interest AI.
Council of Europe — the pan-European human-rights body whose deliberative-democracy work (Recommendation CM/Rec(2023)6, and projects like “Strengthening democratic resilience… in Ukraine,” with expert Eva Bordos) backed Ukraine’s first wartime citizens’ assemblies.
Google Jigsaw — a unit within Google working on threats to open societies (disinformation, toxicity); builds pro-social and sensemaking tools, including the open-source Sensemaker that powered Bowling Green’s What Could BG Be? consultation.
Summer of Protocols — an Ethereum Foundation–backed research programme treating “protocols” as a first-class concept across technology, society and culture; source of a growing body of work on protocol studies.
Inner Development Goals — a non-profit, open-source initiative mapping the inner skills people need for outer change, across five dimensions (Being, Thinking, Relating, Collaborating, Acting).
Center for Engaged Democracy — a US academic hub (Merrimack College) that mapped the core competencies for civic engagement.
Institute of Applied Metatheory — a research institute applying “big-picture” metatheory to civilisational challenges, including mapping the ecology of integrative responses to the metacrisis.
KNOCA — Knowledge Network on Climate Assemblies — a European network sharing best practice and research on the design, running, and follow-up of climate assemblies.
Child Rights International Network (CRIN) — a children’s-rights organisation supporting those who commission, design, and facilitate citizens’ assemblies to involve children meaningfully and safely; convenor of a Children and Democracy Network.
National Issues Forums Institute (NIFI) — a US nonpartisan network promoting public deliberation on difficult issues, often hosted in libraries and classrooms.
Institute for Citizens & Scholars — a US institute building civic culture and skills, especially on college campuses.
Berggruen Institute — a Los Angeles think tank developing ideas for fundamental political and social change; its Planetary programme (and projects like the Planetary Compendium and the Multispecies Constitution Project) explores governance at the scale of a living planet.
Dark Matter Labs — a strategic R&D and design studio working on the institutional “dark matter” — the laws, norms, and infrastructures — behind systemic transitions; its Planetary Civics mission and the Planetary Civics Inquiry reimagine governance for a planetary age.
Open Lunar Foundation — a non-profit working toward cooperative, peaceful governance of the Moon; it designs and facilitates lunar-scenario simulations (such as “Between the Craters” at the 2025 International Astronautical Congress) to test how shared rules might work before they are needed.

Commons & self-governance

The Commoning Standard — a Round Sky Solutions initiative synthesising scattered research and practice into open standards for effective self-governance (“commoning”), treating self-governance as a universal literacy.
Ostrom Workshop — a world-leading research centre at Indiana University on the commons and commons governance, in the tradition of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom.
International Association for the Study of the Commons — the leading professional association (founded 1989) bringing together researchers, practitioners, and policymakers on how communities govern shared resources.
ProSocial World — a non-profit applying evolutionary science and Ostrom’s commons principles to help groups become more cooperative, equitable, and collaborative.
Plurality Institute — an academic research network developing technology for cooperation across difference (the “Plurality” approach).
Democratizing Work — an international initiative (sparked by Isabelle Ferreras’ 2020 manifesto) arguing for democracy inside the workplace, not just the polity.
Platform Cooperativism Consortium — a research and advocacy hub (founded by Trebor Scholz at The New School) for the platform-cooperative movement: worker- and community-owned digital platforms as an alternative to extractive Big Tech, and a home of the “solidarity stack” framing for AI.
P2P Foundation — Michel Bauwens’ research network on commons-based peer production, and a primary source of thinking on how to fund the commons (“peerfunding” and “transvestment”).
Schumacher Center for a New Economics — a US institute advancing commons-based economics; home of David Bollier’s Reinventing the Commons Program and issuer of the BerkShares local currency.
Karya — an Indian non-profit data cooperative (founder Manu Chopra) that pays rural workers over 20× the Indian minimum wage to build AI datasets and gives them de-facto ownership of the data they create, earning royalties on every resale — a working example of democratising AI’s development and profits.

Networks & communities

People Powered — a global hub for participatory democracy, helping organisations and governments expand people’s power to shape public policy around the world.
Democracy R&D — a global network of organisations and practitioners advancing deliberative democracy and citizens’ assemblies (co-founded by sortition advocate Terry Bouricius); publishes the annual Year in Deliberation review and “living guidebooks” on institutionalisation, the Global South, and difficult issues.
Mehr Demokratie — Germany’s leading direct- and participatory-democracy NGO; its LOSLAND project (with the RIFS sustainability institute) brings citizens’ assemblies to municipalities, and it curates a public catalogue of good-example assemblies and their real policy outcomes.
OpenCivics — a community of practice and solidarity for open civic innovation, providing scaffolding for civic innovators to coordinate, align, and find funding. Its Civic Innovator Sessions spotlight emerging projects across the open-civic ecosystem.
Newspeak House — the London College of Political Technologists: a community and residency supporting civic technologists and the tech-and-politics community in London.
Civic Tech Field Guide — the largest open, crowdsourced directory of democracy-tech tools, organisations, and programmes (11,000+ entries, open data), mapping civic tech and civic AI so practitioners can find and learn from one another. Founded in 2016 by Micah Sifry, Erin Simpson, and Matt Stempeck at Civic Hall in New York; it organises the field into “the tech” (tools and data) and “the people” (fellowships, research, jobs, funders), and runs a trend-spotting newsletter.
Association Civic Tech Europe (ACTE) — a Brussels-based trade association of civic-tech and gov-tech companies (founded 2019) representing participation platforms at the EU level — a sign of a maturing sector.
g0v (gov-zero) — a Taiwanese grassroots civic-tech movement and community that has produced thousands of open-source projects, a model for citizen-led technology worldwide. The seedbed for the Sunflower Movement and vTaiwan, and the place Audrey Tang’s public work began.
garden3d — a worker-owned creative collective experimenting with civic technology; ran the “Hey Mamdani!” project in which 100 New Yorkers used Polis to produce 12 civic-tech recommendations for New York City, captured in a participatory documentary.
Ushahidi — a Kenyan non-profit (executive director Angela Oduor Longe) whose open-source crisis-mapping and election-monitoring tools have been used in 160+ countries to surface citizens’ lived experience and hold power to account.
International Network of Sortition Advocates (INSA) — a global network connecting activists who promote sortition and deliberative democracy, with a focus on including non-Western and Global-South voices.
Democracy Without Elections — a US movement advancing sortition as a real alternative to elections; notably, it selects its own board by lot, practising what it preaches.
Nordic Deliberation Network — a partnership of So Central (Norway), Sitra/DigidemLab, and We Do Democracy, sharing practice on deliberative democracy across the Nordic countries (backed by the Nordic Council of Ministers).
Lewis Deep Democracy — a global network teaching the Lewis Method of deep democracy, a facilitation toolbox for inclusive decision-making and conflict resolution developed in 1990s South Africa by Myrna and Greg Lewis.
CivicLex — a Lexington, Kentucky non-profit building local civic infrastructure: plain-language explainers of city government, civic education, public-input projects (its On the Table conversations), and the Lexington Civic Assembly.
Rewrite LA — a coalition that convened the Los Angeles City Charter Civic Assembly, pairing cultural storytelling, deliberative technology, and a sortition-based civic assembly to widen participation in the city’s charter reform.
Public Democracy LA — a civic-engagement organisation in the Rewrite LA coalition, building public-input and storytelling infrastructure to connect Angelenos to local government.
Sortition USA — a US organisation advancing sortition and citizens’ assemblies; a partner in the Rewrite LA coalition.
Innovation Engine — a Bowling Green, Kentucky strategy firm that led the BG 2050 initiative and its What Could BG Be? mass consultation on behalf of Warren County.
Manchester City Council “Doing Digital Together” — the council digital-strategy team that adopted the People’s Panel for AI at city scale, centring residents most at risk of digital exclusion.
RadicalxChange — a global movement and non-profit (inspired by Radical Markets by Glen Weyl and Eric Posner) advancing mechanisms like quadratic voting and funding, plural property, and the plurality agenda; Audrey Tang is among its leaders.
Project Liberty — Frank McCourt’s initiative (and the Project Liberty Institute) building a more responsible internet: a people-owned data architecture and a high-profile bid for TikTok’s US operations to run on a pro-social model.
Code for All — a global network connecting local civic-tech organisations so they can share ideas, tools, and impact across borders.
Collaborative Technology Alliance — an alliance of decentralized- and collaborative-tech projects committed to interoperability across their platforms; incubator of the OpenHaven protocol navigator.
Life Itself — an organisation exploring new cultural, social, and economic paradigms, working toward a wiser, weller world.
Mutual Aid LA Network — a connector and information hub for mutual-aid groups, people, and resources across Los Angeles, including a searchable directory of local efforts (The Dispatch).
Connective Tissue — Sam Pressler’s newsletter and community “on the connections, communities, and commitments that bind us together”; it incubated the Relational Tech Project and runs the withneighbors.org neighbour-gathering microgrants.
Civic Joy Fund — a San Francisco non-profit (co-founded by Manny Yekutiel of the café/event space Manny’s) that funds public joy — night markets, free celebrations, artists painting utility boxes — and partners on neighbour-gathering microgrants.

Bridging & community building

Braver Angels — a citizens’ organisation uniting “red” and “blue” Americans in a working alliance to bridge the partisan divide and depolarise the country.
Better Together America — a nationwide, nonpartisan network of local and state “civic hubs” building community resilience and problem-solving, incubated by the Mediators Foundation; the intended beta partner for the Civic Intelligence Infrastructure initiative.
The Harwood Institute — equips communities to “turn outward” and become a collective force for change.
National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) — a long-running US civic-life organisation (founded after WWII) that convenes leaders and groups around active citizenship; behind the American Conversation Project.
National Civic League — a century-old US civic-engagement organisation (home of the All-America City Award) supporting inclusive, collaborative local problem-solving.

Relational & civic-tech projects

Relational Technology Project — a nonprofit (Deborah Tien, Josh Nesbit, Sadev Parikh) supporting builders of “relational tech”: small, village-scale tools that help neighbours care for each other and build trust. It stewards a commons of hundreds of neighbouring projects plus open tools — a chat-driven “Studio” for remixing them, an MCP server, and neighbour-gathering microgrants — and helps them spread “locality to locality.”
New_ Public — a nonprofit product studio reimagining community and conversation online, building digital public spaces where people can thrive and connect.
Folk Technology — a movement to build technology designed for regular folks, not “users” or “consumers.”
Citizen Infrastructure Builders Club (CIBC) — the collective of people building technology for collective action that stewards this wiki; the public body of knowledge lives here, the club itself lives elsewhere. See the about page.

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