What is citizen infrastructure

Citizen infrastructure is technology that ordinary people build and use to act together — to organise, decide, share, and care for the things they hold in common. Think of it as the digital equivalent of the roads, water, and public squares a community relies on: not owned by a distant landlord, but held and shaped by the people who use it.

From subjects to consumers to citizens

The big platforms most of us use every day cast us in a passive role. First we were subjects — governed, counted, administered. Then we became consumers — served, targeted, monetised. Citizen infrastructure is built for a third role: the citizen.

A citizen is agentic and artisan. You don’t just use what you’re handed; you take part in fixing shared problems — a polarised democracy, a heating planet, a neighbourhood that has lost its commons. The point isn’t to consume a slightly better app. It’s to have a hand in the tools your community actually runs on.

Technology for collective action

That’s the north star: technology for collective action — where technology, democracy, and solidarity meet. The aim is plainly stated and a little defiant. We don’t want to be serfs of a handful of big tech companies. We want the tools citizens genuinely need — and where they don’t exist yet, we want to build them.

This resource is a guide to that idea and to the tools themselves: what citizen infrastructure is, why it matters, and a growing toolkit of things you can use today.

→ New here? See how to use this resource.