It's been a busy few weeks. A quick tour of what's new, an invitation to our next town hall, and — for the first time — a straightforward ask.

What we've been building

• My Community shipped. Our browser extension turns your new tab into a community dashboard — curated links from your communities, popular Bluesky posts from people you follow, upcoming events and deliberations, and a Community Input tab where your community decides together by consent (agree, pass, or raise a blocking objection). Get the latest release — and we'll demo it live at the town hall.
• Allotment is in public beta. Our self-hosted, open-source fair-sortition engine draws a representative mini-public by auditable lottery and hands it to deliberation tools — the selection-to-conversation pipeline many have been waiting for. Try it live.
• The wiki keeps growing. Fresh this month at citizen-infra.netlify.app: a wave of civic-AI research pages (from the "6-Pack of Care" framework to "who builds civic AI"), new Run Reports on real citizens' assemblies (Victoria-Saanich, We the People), and an impact taxonomy for citizens' assemblies. A free, public resource for citizens — browse it and tell us what's missing.
• Funding transparency, done our way. Every open-source tool now publishes a funding.json manifest — avails, allotment, my-community, and the wiki — so the projects are discoverable to funders through the emerging open funding standards. Civic infrastructure should practise the funding models it advocates, so we're dogfooding them.

Town hall — Thursday, July 30

Join us 9:00–10:30 AM EDT (2:00 PM BST · 3:00 PM CEST) on Zoom — register on Luma. We'll welcome new members, ratify proposals under a new process, demo My Community + Community Admin, look at the Roomy unconference, and talk through our Open Collective and fundraising strategy together. It's a participatory session, not a presentation — come with ideas, questions, and energy.

And the ask

Until now this collective has run on almost nothing. Hosting and API costs for the tools are modest but real, and they shouldn't come from one person's pocket. If you value what's being built here:

• Back us at £5/month. Our goal is ten backers — £50/month — which covers hosting with room to grow.
• Sponsor at £100/month if your organisation can support at that level (sponsors are listed on our GitHub).

Back CIBC →

Thank you for being part of this.