OpenCivics Monthly Report / June 2025
A Monthly Snapshot of Network Activities & Updates
Every month, we do our best to gather what we’ve learned, share opportunities for participation, and celebrate our shared progress in building a more vital, participatory and resilient future.
To get more involved, become a member and attend our bi-weekly General Assemblies.
Check out the OpenCivics public calendar for the latest events as well as initiative, alliance, and assembly meeting times.
In the future, we may restrict these reports to Consortium members and patrons. If you appreciate the content here, consider becoming a Citizen, Contributor, or Patron to ensure you’ll keep receiving these resource-dense posts.
Here’s your OpenCivics Monthly Report for June 2025.
What’s Inside:
🗒️ Network Stewardship Note
🤓 Nerd Out With Us
🌐 Network Activities
📢 Member Spotlight
🔍 Network Updates
Network Stewardship Note
Dear Community,
Amidst a climate of rising authoritarianism and institutional centralization worldwide, we paid particular attention to David Brooks’ widely shared op ed in the New York Times calling for a civic uprising. As OpenCivics Stewards, we are exploring how to provide as strategic and targeted support as possible in service of the urgently needed civic infrastructure that would make such an uprising possible. We welcome ideas and feedback.
We’ll be sharing new ways for you to get involved in the coming weeks, but in the interim we want to remind you that we got us. We need solidarity networks now more than ever and OpenCivics was born from the knowledge that these types of decentralized civic utilities would eventually become an existential necessity for communities around the world. We’ve laid out our vision for this type of infrastructure in our thesis and in a talk last year at the Transformative Impact Summit.
As we work towards supporting the grassroots resistance to rising authoritarianism, corporate control, and political violence, we need your support now more than ever.
If you’d like to chip in towards our urgent efforts to launch a practical civic toolkit for these times, we’d be honored to receive your tax deductible donation as a fiscally hosted project of the Buckminster Fuller Institute.
If you’d like to participate in exploring what the most strategic and targeted support may be, in service of the urgently needed civic infrastructure that would make such an uprising possible, join our breakout conversation on telegram.
In Us We Trust,
OpenCivics Network Stewards
🤓 Nerd Out With Us
Read
Cosmolocalism — A Framework for Building Sustainable Network State Economies: This article from Polis Labs, an independent research institute focused sensemaking practices within parallel societies and network states, explores cosmo-localism as applied to parallel society-building.
Ethereum Localism x Regen Coordination: Powering Regenerative Local Economies with Web3: This article from Monty Merlin outlines the potential for collaboration between Regen Coordination and the Ethereum Localism Movement.
What Is Ethereum For?: This essay from OpenCivics co-founder, Benjamin Life, explores Ethereum as a pluralistic design space for civilization-scale digital infrastructure and a home for the protopian imagination of many possible worlds.
Exploring multiscalar networks: What makes networks effective and transformative?: This article summarizes the insights and collective learning of the Network Coordination Commons, a new alliance (see Network Activities below to get involved) exploring capacity building among network coordinators.
The Covenant of Humanistic Technology: You’re invited to read and contribute to human.tech’s distributed manifesto for the development of technology in alignment with human well-being.
Beautiful Solutions — A Toolbox For Liberation: The stories featured in this anthology amplify ancestral and community wisdom to help us all imagine a different way of doing things. From food sovereignty to debt abolition, from folk schools to energy democracy – Beautiful Solutions is a resource for anyone working towards a solidarity economy.
Community Currencies: The Price Of Attention And Cost Of Influence In A Networked Age -or-The Price Of Entry And Cost Of Exit In A Networked Age: This paper by Puja Ohlhaver offers a dual-currency model that separates non-transferable, irrevocable stake for influence from transferable currency for resource exchange and attention.
The Authoritarian Threat: Preparing for the Repression of U.S. Philanthropy & Civil Society: The report identifies threats from President-elect Trump, Congress, state actors, and other key stakeholders, highlighting practical recommendations for funders and nonprofit organizations to mitigate these risks and protect their work in this uncertain environment.
Cultivating a Cultural Shift Toward Bioregional Resilience: This article from Bioregional Earth tells the story of Regenerate Cascadia, a leading bioregional initiative in the Pacific Northwest.
Specifications for Peer-to-Peer Service Syndication: This preliminary specification document from Clinamenic outlines the usage of .xml files to convey service offerings in a machine readable format, with the intention of empowering individuals to programmatically communicate and syndicate their services. See this proof of concept for an example.
Watch
Democracy Innovators Podcast: Check out OpenCivics Citizen, Artem Zhiganov, discuss his project Harmonica, exploring: What is the role of AI facilitation in the future of democracies? How can we improve collective sense-making with GenAI?
Local DAO Summer: As we move into the summer of 2025 in the Northern Hemisphere, we’re remembering just how much incredible content was shared during Local DAO Summer 2024 which featured many OpenCivics Consortium members and allies. We highly recommend revisiting this playlist for some local decentralized community organizing inspiration!
Co-Vibing Workshop: OpenCivics Steward, Clinamenic, offered an introductory workshop for vibe coding (building software with AI) to educate others and empower them to build their own tools. Watch the recording of the session to get started with vibe coding and look out for future sessions to participate in.
Architecting Organizational Knowledge with Michael Zargham: In open source software communities, knowledge organization infrastructure (KOI) — centered around platforms like GitHub — facilitates everything from contribution guidelines to project tracking and artifact management. This session from BlockScience unpacks how to begin your journey with KOI.
🌐 Network Activities
Network Activities are the connective tissue in the field of civic innovation, designed to align, coordinate, and empower civic innovators, organizers, and patrons in their autonomous but coordinated pursuit of a more vital, resilient, and participatory civilization.
Below, you’ll find an overview of upcoming key activities within and around the network that you can participate in.
Gatherings
Gods in the Machine, Commons in the Soil: A Fireside Chat with Nathan Schneider: We've spent the last decade building cathedrals in the cloud—platforms, blockchains, and agent swarms reaching for infinite scale, universal abstraction, and frictionless control. But on the ground, communities are asking a different question: What does it mean to build resilient systems of value rooted in place? Join us for a special fireside chat on sacred systems, digital localism, and the future of value with Nathan Schneider and Crystal Street. Dates: Tuesday, July 15, 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM at Venture X Denver Lodo, Denver, Colorado
Web3 Summit 2025: This is a developer summit for builders, researchers, and hackers who are working on privacy-focused and censorship-resistant technologies. Dates: July 16-18, 2025, at Funkhaus Berlin.
Dweb Cascadia: Co-create the first ever regional Pacific Northwest campout for our DWeb community. Yes, there will be mesh networks, yes there will be awesome shared meals, talks and conversations, yes, there will be camping under the stars, and more… DWeb Camp Cascadia is grounded in the set DWeb principles of human agency, distributed benefits, mutual respect, humanity and ecological awareness. Dates: August 8th-10th, 2025, in Salt Spring Island, BC, Canada
ETHGlobal New York 2025: This hackathon provides an opportunity for people to experiment with web3 technologies and develop new ideas. Dates: August 15–17, 2025, in New York City.
Crypto Commons Gathering 2025 (CCG'25): This is the fifth edition of a gathering that brings together individuals from the web3 ecosystem to explore future technologies and practices. Dates: August 24–30, 2025, at the Commons Hub in Austria.
Festival of Commoning: a celebration of people acting together to build commons of all kinds. Dates: September 12th-13th, 2025
Grants
Bezos Earth Fund's AI for Climate and Nature Grand Challenge: The Bezos Earth Fund has launched a global $100 million grant program called the AI for Climate and Nature Grand Challenge. The initiative aims to use modern AI to help solve critical challenges related to climate change and nature loss.
Gitcoin Grants 24 Strategic Sense-Making Framework: Gitcoin is using a "Strategic Sense-Making Framework" as part of its Gitcoin Grants 24 (GG24) program to ensure capital is allocated to solve critical problems within the Ethereum ecosystem. All Gitcoin community members are empowered to participate in sensemaking and pitch domains for GG24.
NGI MobiFree Grant Program: The NGI MobiFree program provides R&D grants for solutions that offer European citizens and organizations more choice and access to human-centered and ethical mobile software. The program's total grant fund is 670,000 euro.
Filecoin Grant Programs: The Filecoin Foundation and Protocol Labs award grants for various development projects to promote a decentralized, efficient, and robust foundation for humanity's information. The projects must be open-source and dual-licensed under MIT and APACHE2.
Ethereum Foundation Ecosystem Support Program (ESP) Grants: The Ethereum Foundation’s Ecosystem Support Program (ESP) provides grants to support work that strengthens Ethereum's foundations and enables future builders. All funded projects must be open-source or freely available. The grants are separated into different categories, including Project Grants and Small Grants, with different processes and criteria.
Maps
Impact Network Storytelling Playbook: This playbook is designed to help impact networks leverage storytelling as a coordination mechanism and tool for societal and structural change.
Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions: This report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development explores the reasons and routes for embedding deliberative activities into public institutions to give citizens a more permanent and meaningful role in shaping the policies affecting their lives.
Exploring An Innovative Approach to Democratic Governance: A Funder’s Guide to Citizens’ Assemblies: Produced by Democracy Funders Network and New America, this guide explores the potential opportunities and challenges citizens' assemblies present for building civic power at the local level for authentic civic engagement within communities.
Courses
A Learning Journey for Organizing Bioregions: This course from the Design School For Regenerating Earth offers a transformative learning journey that explores how to cultivate regenerative, place-based governance and economic systems by aligning human communities with the ecological realities of their bioregions.
How To DAO Fundamentals: This foundational course demystifies Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), blending theory and practice to equip participants with the knowledge and skills necessary to navigate and leverage this innovative organizational model.
Designing Resilient Regenerative Systems: An innovative Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) series that combines sustainability science, systemic design, and transformative action, providing participants with tools and networks to engage in systemic innovation of complex systems.
Technological Metamodernism Course Notes: A course exploring the intersection of technology, philosophy, design, and game theory, advocating for a nuanced approach that transcends the simplistic "tech good" versus "tech bad" dichotomy.
Initiatives
Open Protocol Library
A collaborative process across impact networks to generate interoperable knowledge commons that support solidarity and learning. Request a link in the Consortium Telegram to join.
Metagovernance Playground
A group of OpenCivics members iteratively exploring the governance design space within a sandbox for experimentations that could evolve into Consortium governance protocols. Request a link in the Consortium Telegram to join.
Oral History Project
A collaborative process oriented towards anthropological documentation of community knowledge as a source for AI-assisted peer to peer learning. Request a link in the Consortium Telegram to join.
Alliances
The Network Coordination Commons: An open working group for network coordinators, this collaborative research and capacity-building alliance is hosting regular conversations, producing network coordination playbooks, and publishing research on network coordination methods and technology. To participate, attend a call.
Bioregional Mapping Guild: Part of the Design School For Regenerating Earth, this guild supports bioregional mappers with technical and design support.
AI Facilitation Library: This closed alliance, hosted by MetaGov, is exploring structured data for human and AI-augmented facilitation and process design. To contribute towards OpenCivics contribution to the Alliance, please contact via the OpenCivics Consortium Telegram.
Interspecies Mutualism Reading Circle: A Telegram-based community dedicated to exploring and discussing interspecies mutualism, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue on cooperative interactions between species.
Open Mutualism Archive: A repository of humanities research focused on mutualism within the context of open web values, emphasizing decentralization, peer production, and institutional disaffiliation.
Collaborative Technology Alliance: The Collaborative Technology Alliance exists to facilitate collaboration, coordination, and community among platform designers, developers, and stewards who are committed to building social technology that benefits both people and planet.
📢 Member Spotlight
Member Spotlight: Josh Spector
Josh Spector didn't set out to become a bridge between blockchain and grassroots organizing. But somehow he ended up, still in his late twenties, serving on his local soil and water conservation district board while simultaneously helping communities understand how DAOs might solve some of their thorniest problems. Josh is playing by his own rulebook, meeting people where they are and supporting them with tools that directly empower subsidiarity and self-determination while supporting localism, mutualism, and regeneration.
Finding His Path
Josh's journey started early. A sixth-grade teacher opened his eyes to systems thinking and the interconnected crises facing our world. That spark led him to study geographic information science, imagining he'd tackle climate change through technology and data. He graduated in 2019, ready to make his mark in GIS and remote sensing.
Then 2020 happened. Like many young people, Josh watched the world shift dramatically just as he was beginning to find his way in it. Embracing the urgency and immediacy of the moment, Josh left his professional post-college job and dove into political organizing with the Sunrise Movement. While still an ally to the movement, Josh began to see firsthand through his organizing work the slow pace of governments and reform-based institutional change movements, a far cry from the rapid and systemic change he felt was needed. As the social movements of 2020 unfolded, Josh found himself more and more drawn to mutual aid work, supporting Portland's houseless community and working with currently or formerly incarcerated people.
The Problem with Good Intentions
Working in mutual aid taught Josh something important: even well-intentioned groups struggle with transparency and resource management. Most people were trustworthy, but structural problems still emerged. Where was the money going? Who was making decisions? How could communities ensure accountability without suffocating bureaucracy?
Then he saw ConstitutionDAO in action—thousands of people transparently pooling resources toward a shared goal. The mechanics were visible to everyone. The governance was participatory. Something clicked.
Building and Rebuilding
Around that time, Josh met and became friends with James and Brett, fellow decentralized governance nerds who lived nearby, and their early conversations about mutualism and DAOs would eventually spark the creation of PDX DAO, initially envisioning a city-wide organization that would help local groups adopt blockchain tools. This early solidarity kicked into action as James, Brett, and Josh catalyzed and organized alongside others to help spur Bridgespace, a radical experiment in community-led third spaces that served as a hub for mutual aid, community, and movement building. But as they dug deeper and their founding team grew, they realized a monolithic approach contradicted everything they believed about decentralization. Why create another centralized structure when the goal was to distribute power?
So they did something radical: they killed PDX DAO and started over. Ethereal Forest emerged with a different mission—not to be the DAO for Portland, but to nurture conditions where many smaller, community-specific DAOs could flourish and connect.
Making Connections
The approach resonated. When Ethereal Forest hosted their first General Forum On Ethereum Localism (GFEL), community figures like Scott Morris, Jeff Emmett, Kevin Owocki, and Christina Bowen showed up. More importantly, so did local organizers who'd never touched crypto before.
Josh has a unique credibility in these spaces. His background in mutual aid and grassroots work gives him a kind of cred that pure tech evangelists often lack. When he talks about DAOs, people listen—not because he's selling them on getting rich, but because he's genuinely trying to solve problems they recognize.
The Bigger Picture
For Josh, this isn't really about blockchain technology. It's about subsidiarity—the idea that decisions should be made at the most local level possible, by the people most affected by those decisions. Current governance systems, he argues, have become too distant from the people they're supposed to serve. The result is polarization and broken trust.
DAOs offer tools for rebuilding that trust by giving communities more direct control over their resources and decisions, not as a panacea but as a tool in the toolkit for local organizers and social movements.
Bridging Worlds
Josh has also been a keen observer of the natural connections between the bioregional movement and decentralized governance. Both seek alternatives to extractive systems. Both emphasize participatory decision-making. Both work to fill gaps where traditional government and markets fall short.
Josh brings the depth of his work with Ethereal Forest, hosting Local DAO Summer, GFEL, and a Guest Season of the Green Pill Podcast on ETH Localism, and pours that wealth of knowledge and connections into Regenerate Cascadia as a landscape organizer in the Willamette Valley, establishing frameworks for local organizers. Even closer to home, Josh’s role at the West Multnomah Soil and Water Conservation District consistently keeps him engaged with the entirely over-50 community of traditional conservationists and elders. Josh lives and breathes these intersections daily. Through his connections in Portland, he's also keen to explore how the Portland Clean Energy Fund might distribute resources using participatory budgeting. These intersections are at the heart of what OpenCivics aims to serve, applied research and participatory design for local self-determination, resilience, and ecological health.
Addressing the Skeptics
Josh gets why people in organizing circles are skeptical of blockchain. The association with scams and speculation is real and understandable. But he consistently frames the technology differently: as collectively owned infrastructure that sits outside traditional government or corporate control.
"It's a third way," he explains. Not government, not private companies, but something else—networks that communities can own and govern themselves. Once people understand this framing, the potential often becomes clear.
What's Next
Josh continues weaving connections between the OpenCivics community and on-the-ground bioregional organizing in Cascadia. Whether he's supporting the BioFi Cascadia Summit, catalyzing and stewarding community-led third spaces, or farming on permaculture sites around Portland, he's demonstrating how blockchain and local organizing can work hand in hand together to help communities care for each other and lift each other up.
The work isn't flashy. It's a long and difficult path of building trust and showing up with humility. Josh lives according to those values, not as a techno-optimist schilling solutions but as a sincere and gentle ally of ecological flourishing and human dignity.
🔍 Network Updates
The OpenCivics Network is composed of organizing structures that connect and support members: the Consortium, Labs, and Foundation.
The OpenCivics Consortium is a coordination body of network citizens self-organizing around the creation of open civic systems.
Key Updates:
Exploratory DAO sandbox for the Consortium is live on Colony.io
The OpenCivics Labs is an applied research and development cooperative offering networks facilitation and design.
Key Updates:
Exploratory DAO sandbox for the Labs is live on Colony.io
OpenCivics Labs wrapped a knowledge management support contract with the Center For Ethical Land Transition
OpenCivics Labs is finalizing contracting to co-lead the Regen Commons development process alongside Greater Than and the broader regen web3 community.
The OpenCivics Foundation is a non-profit effort focused on enhancing civic participation by supporting the growth of the OpenCivics Network and the field of open civic innovation in the public interest.
Key Updates:
OpenCivics Network is a fiscally hosted project of the Buckminster Fuller Institute and will provide non-profit donation facilities through OpenCivics Labs until the OpenCivics Foundation is incorporated and registered as a 501c3 at a future date.
As always, OpenCivics thrives through shared stewardship. Thank you for all that you contribute.
In Us We Trust,
OpenCivics Stewards