> “People never leave a sinking ship until they see the lights of another ship approaching.” – R. Buckminster Fuller This paper outlines various transitional strategies which, while ultimately insufficient on their own to produce a life-affirming civilization, provide near-term mechanisms for immediate adaptation. These intermediary processes leverage the aspects of our current systems that can still be salvaged, repurposed or exapted through existing solutions that have already been proven and tested. Despite their systemic failures, the underlying stated purpose of our current institutions is to provision mechanisms for self-governance and collective action. As such, decentralized, systemic, civic innovation has the potential to cut through partisan gridlock and begin to restore faith in our institutions of government as part of our transition towards participatory democracy and local stewardship. This approach can appeal to adherents of all political ideologies by offering a near-term path out of vitriolic and divisive rhetoric towards solutions and innovation.  What follows is a series of transitional interventions that begin the process of introducing elements of participatory democracy into our legacy institutions. ## Self-Governed Institutions Self-governed institutions are the core promise of democratic systems. Currently, our systems of self-governance have been captured by corporate influence. Transitional mechanisms in self-governance would provide for increased transparency, accessibility, and accountability in the democratic process. Civic innovations in this domain are oriented towards improving the existing mechanisms of elections, government budgeting, and collective sensemaking that inform the direct democratic stewardship of our collective resources and ensure that representatives are able to truly represent and are accountable to their constituencies. The following are a list of strategic interventions that would evolve the capacity of institutions to become more sincerely self-governed. **Decentralized voting systems** enable secure, transparent, and verifiable elections that are resistant to fraud, manipulation, and censorship. By using blockchain technology, voters can cast their ballots digitally, securely, and, with the right Zero Knowledge Identity technology components, anonymously, without relying on intermediaries or centralized authorities. Blockchain voting can also reduce the cost and complexity of conducting elections and increase voter turnout and accessibility. **Decentralized identity systems** are essential components of any civic technology, particularly voting, because they enable secure digital identities that can be linked to official government documents while preserving privacy and anonymous voting. Truly decentralized identity can empower citizens to own and control their own digital identities, without depending on centralized entities or intermediaries. By using self-sovereign identity (SSI) or zero knowledge (ZK) protocols, citizens can create and manage their own identifiers and credentials, and share them selectively and securely with others. Decentralized identity can also enhance privacy, security, and trust in online interactions, and enable access to various services and benefits, reducing hate speech and misinformation online. **Decentralized campaigning and advocacy systems** enable more participatory, transparent, and accountable political processes by leveraging the power of web3 and blockchain coordination technologies to engage supporters, volunteers, and constituents in the campaigning process through rewards, badges, and training. By using decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) to coordinate campaign activities, citizens can engage in various forms of political activism, such as shaping policy, donating, fundraising, organizing, petitioning, lobbying, and advocating. Decentralized campaigning can also reduce the influence of money and special interests in politics, and increase the diversity and representation of voices and opinions by making it easier for community leaders to run for office. **Decentralized polling systems and data ownership** enable more accurate, reliable, and timely public opinion surveys, by using blockchain technology and smart contracts. Smart contracts are self-executing code that operate based on predefined rules. This essential civic infrastructure would allow citizens to provide verifiable and trustworthy data sources for various questions and topics, and receive incentives for their participation. Decentralized polling can also reduce the bias and error in traditional polling methods, and increase the responsiveness and relevance of policy-making and governance. This approach is also a critical strategic leverage point to introduce data ownership, allowing the public to manage, license, or sell their data to data cooperatives or other third parties and marketplaces instead of relying on web2 corporate monopolies. **Citizen assemblies** enable more deliberative, inclusive, and representative forms of democracy. By involving diverse citizens, decisions become more informed and representative. Assemblies lead to equitable policies that consider a wide range of perspectives. Amid heightened polarization, citizen participation lends greater legitimacy to government decisions. A well tested mechanism for bridging direct democracy approaches into a representative democracy, citizen assemblies have been integrated into legislative processes around the world. **Open data and data standards**, stored efficiently, privately encrypted, and easily auditable on a blockchain, enable government services and information to be more transparent and accountable to the public. By integrating regulatory frameworks into data architectures and easily audited decentralized ledgers, the provisioning and efficacy of government services could be expanded while reducing costs and enabling intergovernmental collaboration. Moving government data onto blockchains would empower government contractors, non-profit organizations, and bureaucrats to more effectively provide services and make bids for contracts. **Participatory budgeting experiments** have been successfully carried out in local and county jurisdictions worldwide. Platforms like Ethelo offer a clear and transparent mechanism for communities to sense into their collective priorities, move through conflicts around budget goals, and allocate government budgets through direct citizen engagement as opposed to the influence of corporate lobbyists or career bureaucrats. Participatory budgeting not only improves transparency and accountability with regards to the use of government funds, it also directly engages a community to self-determine their own needs and goals, pushing sensemaking to the edges of a community to gather critical insights around the direct needs of citizens. **Debate mapping and context checking** organizes the arguments, claims, evidence, and opinions from all points of view into a formal debate. This approach to decision making ensures that public debate is held to a standard of good faith dialogue on verifiable claims as opposed to ad hominem attacks and appeals to authority. Context checking applies a similar methodology to online discourse. Unlike “fact checking” which presumes a single set of facts instead of embracing the complex and often self-contradictory nature of different perspectives, context checking seeks to expand shared understanding by revealing important related pieces of information for any given online dialogue. ## Cosmo-Local Modular Infrastructures Cosmo-local infrastructures are infrastructures that support participatory stewardship of our local communities. Massive bureaucratic institutions have minimized civic participation and created social services infrastructure that repeatedly fails to serve the direct needs of local communities. Communities that unleash the latent collective action potential of local civic stewardship will be inherently more resilient, sovereign, and self-determined than those who externalize systems of care to massive bureaucracies. The following are a list of cosmo-local infrastructure design patterns that allow for local communities to directly steward the shared infrastructure required for mutual benefit. **Decentralized neighborhood and community networks** can enable more local, autonomous, and cooperative forms of governance and organization, by using peer-to-peer and blockchain technologies to connect and coordinate citizens at the grassroots level. By using decentralized autonomous organizations and peer to peer social networks, citizens can create and join various types of local groups and communities, such as cooperatives, mutual aid networks, and neighborhood associations. Decentralized neighborhood and community networks can also enhance the social and economic well-being of citizens by empowering community members to sense the needs of their community and self-organize around strategies to address those needs.. **Community hubs** are physical “third spaces” for community wellness, skill training, and coordination. By protocolizing shared physical space, communities can provision themselves with the physical infrastructure required to host community events, provide job training and business development education, and share resources like tools, knowledge, and mutual aid services. While these types of spaces already exist in many local communities, expanding the services they provide and the vision they hold for direct civic engagement invites a renewal of civic culture. **Tool libraries** are a proven mechanism to pool resources for mutual benefit. By creating clear mechanisms for resource sharing and accountability using distributed ledger technology, this timeless practice can be evolved into the 21st century. Tool libraries make it possible for citizens to have access to tooling that any one individual would be unable to access and reduce the redundancy of multiple households in a community purchasing the same tools, only to use them very infrequently. By increasing trust and accountability through distributed autonomous organizations and non-fungible tokens, tool libraries can be expanded to provide costly tools through pooling of funds to purchase them as a community. **Food sovereignty networks** take a networked approach to food system resilience by linking farmers, consumers, and food service businesses together in a solidarity network. These networks pool resources to promote local food production and can also provide a catalytic force for community currencies that incentivize local production and consumption. By pooling the buying power of consumers and businesses together in service of expanding the local food system, communities can become more resilient and self-sufficient. **Experimental innovation jurisdictions** offer larger physical locations for experimentation on the solutions that could eventually become the foundation for a new kind of society. By creating jurisdictions that are not exposed to the same regulatory environment as existing states, counties, and cities, innovation can be rapidly accelerated as new kinds of urban and rural infrastructures are piloted and tested. These jurisdictions are not intended to be entirely self-sovereign micro-nations. Rather, they are zones in which innovations are tested before being formally integrated into existing city, county, state, and national policy.  ## Incentives Aligned With Wellbeing **Economic interventions** that bind the negative externalities of unregulated capitalism and align the outputs of our economies with living systems boundaries are critical near-term solutions to mitigate the collapse of biodiversity and address the negative effects of massive multinational corporations on communities and ecologies. Additionally, by moving economic decision making into the hands of workers who are directly accountable to the communities where they live, in stark contrast to large multinational corporations whose incentives are oriented towards externalizing as much as possible to the commons and paying regulators’ fees which amount to small percentages of their gross profit. Creating alternative models of currency and markets with values aligned with holistic well-being can also create a transition from extractive economic conditions towards regenerative ones. **Decentralized worker cooperatives and local economies** can enable more equitable, democratic, and sustainable forms of production and consumption, by using web3 and blockchain technologies to support various forms of economic cooperation and innovation. By using Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), citizens can create and join various types of worker cooperatives and local economies, such as platform cooperatives, social enterprises, community-supported agriculture, and local exchange trading systems. Decentralized worker cooperatives and local economies can also enhance the economic security and prosperity of citizens, and increase the resilience and diversity of local economies. **Decentralized unions** can enable more effective, transparent, and accountable forms of collective bargaining and representation, by using blockchain technology and smart contracts to facilitate various forms of labor organization and action without having to choose between corrupt institutions or a lack of collective power. By using DAOs, citizens can create and join various types of unions, such as freelancer unions, platform worker unions, and digital labor unions. Decentralized unions can also improve the working conditions and rights of workers, and increase the bargaining power and voice of labor through transparent, accountable, and democratic processes. **Decentralized sense-making and education systems** can enable more accurate, relevant, and accessible forms of knowledge creation and dissemination, by using web3 and blockchain technologies to peer-to-peer validate and facilitate various forms of learning, research, and content moderation. By using DAOs, citizens can access and contribute to various sources of information and education, such as open data, open science, open education, and open journalism. Decentralized sense-making and education can also enhance the cognitive and creative abilities of citizens. **Nature-backed currencies** and externality pricing can enable more responsible, sustainable, and regenerative forms of environmental management and conservation by using web3 and blockchain technologies to facilitate various forms of ecological action and innovation without relying on government overreach. By using DAOs, citizens can access and contribute to various forms of environmental goods and services, such as carbon credits, renewable energy, biodiversity, and waste management. By pricing environmental externalities and creating compensation mechanisms for rewarding stewardship of ecosystem services, decentralized ecological stewardship can enhance the environmental quality and health of citizens and increase the resilience and diversity of natural ecosystems. **Community currencies** and commitment pooling are part of a longstanding tradition in the US and around the world as a mechanism for communities to directly shape and influence the flows of value in their community. Embracing a pluralistic approach to currency, communities can engineer their values and needs into the design of their local currencies, offering discounts for shopping at locally owned businesses and ensuring resilience when fiat currencies are devalued, inflated, or restricted. Commitment pooling is a mechanism for community currency that backs a medium of exchange using the collective commitments of a community, bootstrapping a new medium of exchange with purely the social capital of a community. Direct public goods funding shifts the production of public goods from bureaucratic decision-making processes towards a self-determined process for communities. By directly funding developers of open source technologies and educational curricula with pools of shared resources, communities can self-determine what kinds of public goods they would like to see created or retroactively compensate public goods builders for creating utilities that benefit their communities. **Rights of nature** provide a framework for integrating the personhood of living systems into governance processes. By formally provisioning living systems with a voice in decision-making processes, democratic institutions at city, county, state, and federal scales can be bound to ecological health and well-being. These frameworks have been adopted in counties all around the US and in jurisdictions in Europe and Asia. Emerging innovations in self-sovereign ecologies are less well-tested but provide a mechanism for ecologies to vote directly instead of relying upon appointed representatives.