This document is offered openly to the commons. This work claims no author; those who have contributed to the various streams present in the following pages are many. You might even say we are legion. Because, despite our unique geographic, historical, and cultural contexts, we are speaking with a unified voice. This voice moves through us. We hope it will move through you also as you take in these words and find whatever is good and true and and beautiful and useful to you among them. This document has been created for civic innovators, organizers, and patrons as an argument for the decentralization of civic innovation and revitalization of civic systems in service of the transition towards a life-affirming civilization. It makes the case for the urgent creation of new coordination mechanisms in response to the existential mandate for humanity to evolve into a non-rivalrous, mutually responsible civilization. We offer these words as a clear and simple prayer, that we might embrace the all-encompassing sobriety of collapse with an all-encompassing love for our fellow human beings and their sovereign rights to vitality, resilience, and choice. We do not claim to have invented these rights, rather we see them as intrinsic to the nature of love and interbeing, a sacred foundation of mutuality that is rooted deeper than any religion, culture, or creed. OpenCivics is not a brand or business; it is a spark to ignite a renaissance of civic participation and stewardship, a recognition of our shared belonging to and responsibility for our world. OpenCivics is an invocation of a broader movement *towards an open civics* — a collective and evolving field dedicated to reimagining civic systems through participatory design. While the words in this document are already dead, flattened expressions, they point to something alive, a spirit that lives within all of us that yearns for a more beautiful world. This document is a seed, published under a copyleft open-source license as an invitation to all to adapt, expand, and evolve its contents, fueling an ongoing exploration of what it means to enact an open civics. It serves as a “living blueprint,” designed to spawn new ideas, respond to emerging challenges, and address societal needs through collective input and iterative development. We are here to collectively imagine and dream a different kind of future into being, and, if you’re reading these words, that journey has already begun within you. The whispers of that future live in the words that follow. These words are dedicated to all those who have carried the vision of a world based in consent, trust, and mutual benefit – but did not live to see its ultimate arrival. Their dream now lives within us to carry forward. To connect the words within these pages with your own as nodes in a web of co-evolution, we suggest adopting the document naming convention : towards-an-open-civics_YYYYMMDDHH Find and fork this work from : [go.opencivics.co/wiki](http://go.opencivics.co/wiki) and [github.com/opencivics/wiki](http://github.com/opencivics/wiki)