Civic stewardship is our shared responsibility to care for our fellow humans and the nested levels of wellbeing that connect individuals, communities, and ecologies.
Civic innovations can be infrastructure, technology, social processes, educational curricula, or initiatives available to all members of a society.
By providing these utilities, the goal of civic innovation is to promote citizen engagement in governments and collective stewardship of the commons and our communities.
OpenCivics utilizes three core pillars of civic innovation that can be used to frame the distinct areas of focus of particular civic innovation projects. Below is a brief summary of each pillar as well as general areas of application.
It’s important to note that commons stewardship, local economies, and direct democracy are interrelated. As such, these pillars shouldn’t be considered as separate domains but rather as interconnected criteria for holistic systemic adaptation and design.
Civics is not politics. Politics utilizes civic systems to elect representatives and enact policy. Civics is an operating system for collective stewardship upon which politics is merely a single application. Civics is the substrate for civilization’s core functions, the underlying framework for coordination between actors in the commons and in communities. OpenCivics does not engage in explicitly political work, although our civic innovations may be utilized by political movements or leaders to enact change. We are politically neutral while holding strong to the values of care and stewardship that are designed into the systems we create and deploy. As such, OpenCivics does not fund, represent, or engage in any political activities.