/ Growing a Movement
We need a Paradigm Shift in Civic Life
Today's civic fabric is thin, fragile, and centralized. We've outsourced responsibility to distant institutions, watched our commons get privatized, and seen trust unravel into polarization. But a different paradigm is emerging — one where civic life becomes more participatory, resilient, and vital through everyday shifts in our values and everyday practices.
Current Reality
Misaligned incentives and the concentration of wealth and power often leads to corrupt and ineffective institutions that neglect the real needs of people and the planet.
Possible Future
Empowered citizens guide our shared futures through direct democracies and local economies, creating the conditions for collective agency, transparency, and accountability.
/ The Shift
From fragile to Fractal Civic Fabric
This shift represents a movement from a thin, fragile, centralized fabric to a vital, resilient, participatory fabric that's fractally practiced everywhere, every day.
Closed Civics
Centralized bureaucracy: Decisions are made far from the people they affect, through rigid structures.
Market-dominated commons: Care, knowledge, and even attention are privatized or commodified.
Fragile social trust: Polarization and institutional failures erode belief in one another.
Episodic engagement: Participation happens in elections, protests, or crises.
Delegated responsibility: Civic life is outsourced to governments, NGOs, and institutions.
Open Civics
Distributed coordination: Open protocols and simple practices allow people to decide and do together across scales.
Regenerated commons: Resources, knowledge, and culture are stewarded openly and shared for mutual flourishing.
Relational trust: Rebuilt through cooperation, reciprocity, and visible acts of local care.
Everyday practice: Civic life is woven daily—tending place, building together, sharing learnings.
Shared responsibility: Everyone has permission to act, starting locally, weaving into a collective fabric of care.
/ Our common vision
post-tragic protopian audacity
We believe in a future in which humanity has successfully moved through our current evolutionary eye of the needle without destroying the substrate of living systems upon which we depend. In such a civilization, our civic culture orients our civic systems towards supporting life-affirming participatory, and resilient ways of being.
Vitality
The embodied state of thriving that emerges from the interconnected levels of well-being and quality of life for individuals, communities, and ecologies.
Resilience
The state and the capacity for adaptive self-organization sufficient to provide core life support function across changing world circumstances.
Choice
The state of respect for the sovereign agency of all beings and the capacity of individual agents to participate and influence their circumstances.
/ Movement Multipliers
What This shift Requires
The transition to an open civic paradigm demands both cultural transformation and systemic innovation. The ecosystem that is nurturing the movement and reflects this shift is composed of parts that play distinct roles but all are interdependent, forming a coherent whole.
Philosophy / Open Civics → A philosophy to coherently guide self-organized practice
Practice / Open Civic Innovation → A practice framework for collaboratively improving civic life
Community / OpenCivics Network → A community of practice demonstrating these principles in action
/ Foundational thinking
A transformative vision for a vital, participatory, and resilient future
Rather than inheriting outdated structures, Open Civics advocates for an open civic renaissance — fostering conditions that enable all people to actively participate in co-creating social, ecological, and economic systems. Discover the foundational ideas that inform this vision.