> “If man chooses oblivion, he can go right on leaving his fate to his political leaders. If he chooses Utopia, he must initiate an enormous education program - immediately, if not sooner.” > > **— R. Buckminster Fuller** ## Why Civic Culture Properly understood, the systemic drivers of the meta-crisis make it clear that incremental and institutional solutions are ultimately insufficient in the face of the entrenched, systemic crises we face. The combination of the sluggish rate of adaptation and centralized approaches to change management within institutions calls for a more foundational and participatory strategy. Understood as an adaptation and coordination failure, the meta-crisis only truly resolves through what Daniel Schmachtenberger has referred to as a “civic renaissance.” Implicit in the term renaissance is the notion of rebirth and revitalization, a return to something that has been lost or degraded. In this sense, a civic renaissance is a return to a shared sense of mutual responsibility and care, rooted in an understanding that there is no “away” and it is within one’s rational self interest to care for the wellbeing of our commons, communities, and planet. Civic virtue is the personal expression of a broader cultural renaissance, referring to the ennobling choice to rise into stewardship and direct responsibility for the maintenance and embodiment of systems of care. This type of civic culture is a precursor to the types of distributed coordination required to address the root drivers of the meta-crisis in our local communities and global commons. At the core, this shift revolves around ending our a reliance on centralized institutions to provision core civilizational utilities by restoring our fundamental rights as planetary citizens to self-determine and autopoetically enact our own civilizational systems through self-organizing collective action. Unlike crises humanity has faced in the past, the complex, existential and all-encompassing nature of climatic shifts, supply chain breakdowns, and food system fragility require distributed, cosmo-local resilience and direct action. For humanity to truly become a non-rivalrous, mutually responsible species, we must first develop the cultural capacities to effectively navigate [prisoner's dilemma](https://youtu.be/mScpHTIi-kM?si=tIYmB7u4qMGy0iF2) scenarios by choosing to coordinate and cooperate, avoiding lose-lose scenarios by seeing ourselves as mutually interdependent. Instead of prescribing top down solutions that attempt to correct for the failures of our current systems, a distributed renaissance of civic culture would transform the substrate or soil of our communities, empowering ourselves to coordinate the production of networked and pluralistic civic utilities, from the bottom up. This foundational cultural transformation may be more difficult than a top down technocratic response, but ultimately it is the basis of the kind of distributed coordination that Schmachtenberger describes as essential to the proliferation of the third attractor. While it may ring hollow to some who might view it as naive or idealistic to presume that such non-rivalrous cultures are possible, such a belief demonstrates reflects an inherent bias towards human nature. The scientific foundations of the ProSocial model, which builds off of Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom's study of commons governance patterns by integrating work in the fields behavioral psychology, evolutionary biology, and interfaith studies, demonstrate that "Modern evolutionary science tells us that behaviors and cultural traits evolve based on their consequences within a given context… The science of ProSocial is focused on understanding and fostering social contexts in which individual and group interests are aligned, such that cooperative behaviors are reinforced more than selfish behaviors.” This science is well documented and the ProSocial methodology is a primary cultural toolkit for our civic renaissance. ## Regenerating What’s Been Lost While our commons and ecologies have been ravaged by extractive industries, so too has our [social fabric](https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public/). Accelerated by the [attention economy](https://www.humanetech.com/youth/the-attention-economy) and the [influence of social media algorithms](https://hls.harvard.edu/today/the-algorithm-has-primacy-over-media-over-each-of-us-and-it-controls-what-we-do/#:~:text=As%20ethicist%20Tristan%20Harris%20argued,it%20controls%20what%20we%20do.%E2%80%9D), humanity has been pitted against itself at a time when global solidarity is more needed than ever. Regenerating the social fabric requires a fundamental shift in power dynamics, moving from rivalrous institutions and incentives, towards a pluralistic, polycentric, and prosocial approach to large-scale coordination. Essential to this process is the concept of imagination activism, coined by the European research and practice centre [Moral Imaginations](https://www.moralimaginations.com), which brings community members together to empower people to create shared imaginings of the future This bottom up approach to consensus building and direct collective action brings us out of our filter bubbles into immanent and embodied relationships with the humans and non-humans with whom we share our physical home. Reliably, when we return to the common ground of shared being and belonging, our attention is directed towards creating safe places for our children and future generations, valuing intact ecologies that support essential ecosystem services, and recognizing the human need for connection, dignity, and purpose. A key example of this material solidarity is the phenomenon of water stewardship. Across all of our ideological silos and bubbles, our material survival is inextricably rooted in our access to and the quality of our water. Weaving together farmers, residents, hunters, ecologists, indigenous first nations and others, we are compelled by our mutual reliance on clean water to protect and steward water as a sacred civic resource. These areas of mutual alignment are often overlooked within rivalrous social, economic, and political systems because they do not generate the requisite outrage and division upon which those systems thrive. Therefore, regenerating our ecologies, communities, and commons becomes part of the same regenerative return towards the renewal and revitalization of local stewardship and direct civic responsibility for the systems that shape our well-being. ## Transpolitical Solidarity This expression of civic culture and cosmo-local orientation to stewardship defies the internal logic of the divide and conquer strategies deployed by our rivalrous political factions, invoking a new kind of transpolitical solidarity that is more concerned with quality of life and pluralistic, bottom-up positive sum collaboration. By embracing a philosophy of pluralism and agent-centricity, we transcend and integrate the best of many different political philosophies as we coordinate at the local level to improve quality of life. Divisive political ideologies become less relevant in this context as we are focused on the material conditions of our lives and are less concerned with the regulatory state and its top down restrictions or incentives. Instead of competing to control the state’s violent apparatus, communities can engage in a process of discovery that foregrounds shared alignment and emphasizes creativity and experimentation. Such a process is measured by the intersubjective metrics of quality of life, determined based on the needs and perspectives of each individual and thus dependent upon a diversity of strategies to improve quality of life from the ground up. This type of transpolitical ethos is rooted in the practice of commoning, a form of political consciousness that harkens back to grassroots populist movements throughout history. Our contemporary political consciousness has been fundamentally shaped by the forces of capital accumulation and first-past-the-post voting which leverage duopolistic control and lesser of two evils tactics to maintain a firm grip on the types of political orientations that are seen as legitimate. As Noam Chomsky writes, “the smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” Open civic culture expands the spectrum of acceptable opinion by rooting into an overarching foundation of place-based mutual solidarity while promoting pluralism and consent with regard to the diverse strategies a community might employ to improve its own quality of life. By focusing on grassroots consensus-building instead of top-down technocratic control, open civic culture opens a new topology of innovation and direct action that simultaneously transcends and includes various political orientations and ideologies by de-centering “power over” relationships in service of consensual, “power with” relationships. This type of political orientation is not new. It represents a way of being that has been practiced by place-based communities throughout history. Its renewal is foundational to a movement of mutuality, solidarity, and care. ## Enabling Structures While many examples exist worldwide of communities self-organizing in this fashion, usually under the duress of immediate crisis or institutional collapse, the protocols utilized by those communities are often informal and rarely reproducible from movement to movement. A very particular subset of the various types of innovation we can engage in as a species, civic innovations are mechanisms that support these self-organizing movements and local community organizing in a pluralistic structure that is more concerned with bottom up coordination than top down control. The goal of the Open Civic Innovation Framework and the OpenCivics Network is to provision these mechanisms to the public in a structure that can be easily adapted, composed, and forked to meet the direct needs of local community organizers. As a pattern language for open protocols, the Open Civic Innovation Framework offers a meta-pattern for these types of utilities, enabling them to be easily composed into civic stacks and supporting the alignment of civic innovators as they consider how their innovations might be networked and interoperated. The OpenCivics Network is a decentralized solidarity network that includes patrons, innovators, and local community organizers in a participatory and non-rivalrous co-design process, supporting coordination, funding, and applied research into systemic interventions that support direct civic empowerment. By holding the process of civilizational adaptation as a non-rivalrous network, the OpenCivics Network connects civic innovators, organizers, patrons and the public while also providing key coordination functions in the form of formalized templates for impact reporting and project interoperability. If successful, the collective impact of the framework and network, as a convergence and coordination point for innovators and the public, will give rise to new, open civic systems, animated by a revitalized civic culture, able to support the embodiment of an open civic culture through the design philosophy of open civic systems.