Every city in the world runs on an invisible contract where citizens pay taxes, governments fund agencies, administrators implement policy, and we are provided with public goods and services. The whole arrangement has rested on an assumption that centralized bureaucracies, staffed by professionalized administrators, and exercising discretion within hierarchical structures, are the best available technology for collective action.

For most of human history, that assumption has been correct. From the civil service examinations of imperial China to the progressive bureaucratization of the modern democratic state, the centralization of administrative power has been the engine of collective administration. It built our roads, managed our waste, organized our defense, educated our children, and maintained the fragile equilibrium between individual freedom and communal obligation. It was, and in many domains still remains, remarkably effective.

But there is a set of questions underneath this arrangement that we have been reluctant to ask…is this the only way to coordinate collective administration at scale? 

Are governments the only technology we have at our disposal to standardize methods for public administration?  

If bureaucracy is the only option, then our goal should be optimization, by making existing systems more efficient, more accountable, more responsive. This has been the focus of the last century of public administration theory, beginning with Frederick Taylor’s scientific management through the New Public Management movement that introduced private-sector practices into government operations, and arriving to today’s e-government and privatization movements. 

If, however, there exists potential alternatives to this inherited technology stack, are we prepared to explore it? City/Sync exists to take on that responsibility and build the path forward.

This article describes the full arc of the project as envisioned at this point in time, beginning with our pilot program validating civic-credit mechanics, through the development of focused coordination networks, sovereign local infrastructure, and community-governed endowments. It will illustrate a long-term vision for how cities can govern themselves when citizens are provided the tools to build civic self-reliance through repeatable coordination.

It is a story told in six phases, each building on the last. Each phase represents a stage of development that must be validated before the next begins.

The first phase of this project is the simplest, and the most important. Before anything else can happen…before networks, before local chains, before endowments, before any transformation of public administration, one thing must be proven: that a programmable civic-credit economy works.

The pilot programs propose the development of a public-sector economy centered around the distribution and redemption of civic-credits. This economy is a bounded system for coordinating public work in which civic contributions are recognized through earned credits that can be used and retired inside a local network.

Instead of treating civic-participation as informal volunteerism or relying entirely on taxes and bureaucracy to translate public goals into action, the civic-credit system introduces a structured process that activates latent civic-capacity through incentivized coordination, increasing agency among citizens.

The credits earned can then be redeemed for access to defined goods and services offered by participating local businesses. Credits are not money, they are not convertible to cash, they are not transferable, and they are not designed for speculation. Their purpose is to incentivize participation in coordinated civic-labor that produces public value.  

The mechanics are deliberately simple. Civic-Labor is performed and verified, civic-credits are minted, and civic-credits are burned in exchange for access. Three roles, one lifecycle.

Issuer Organizations — libraries, parks departments, nonprofits, schools, health agencies, etc. Any organization that is local and has the capacity to run a volunteer program can qualify to become an Issuer Organization and create structured civic tasks for participants to claim. After Issuers verify the work was completed, they can release credits to the participant’s wallet.

Value Proposition for Issuer Organizations: the protocol turns volunteer management from an isolated organizational function into a shared coordination layer that increases organizational impact.

Issuers already depend on people showing up to expand their public-service mission, but today they’re forced to manage participation through fragmented discovery channels and expensive subscription software that tracks hours without delivering meaningful recognition or retention to their participants.

City/Sync gives issuers a common infrastructure for publishing structured tasks, verifying completion, and issuing civic-credits that carry real redemptive value. This creates a tangible feedback loop that makes participation easier to sustain. By joining the network, an issuer’s opportunities become discoverable to a broader pool of civic participants beyond their existing mailing lists and social channels, while the resulting activity becomes auditable and easier to measure through standardized task definitions and outcomes.

The protocol simply amplifies what Issuers already do by lowering coordination friction and introducing an incentive layer for expanding their organizational impact.

Civic Participants earn credits by completing tasks and spend them on goods and services. Credits are non-transferable, non-convertible, and redeemable only through local offerings around a defined set of goods and services.

Value Proposition for Civic-Participants: the protocol turns “wanting to help” into a clear, low-friction participation path that fits real life. Instead of hunting across scattered websites and email lists, participants can discover structured opportunities in one place, choose tasks that match their schedule and interests, and see their effort translated into something valuable. When work is verified, participants earn meaningful local value through civic-credits that can be utilized for personal benefit.  

This creates opportunities where people can contribute consistently without reorganizing their lives around formal volunteering, gain practical benefits they can actually use, and become visible contributors inside a more coordinated public-sector.

Redeemer Organizations — transit agencies, museums, community colleges, childcare centers, recreation departments, movie theaters, local businesses, etc.  Any organization, business, or company can accept credits in exchange for access to their goods or services. Upon redemption, the credits are burned and removed from circulation.

Value Proposition for Redeemer Organizations: a natural question for Redeemer Organizations is why a business would voluntarily absorb civic-credits and accept something other than dollars for the goods and services it provides.

The most immediate benefit is utilization. A transit agency that runs buses at 50% average occupancy is paying full operational cost for half the capacity. Every civic-credit ride fills a seat that was generating zero value. The rider receives a benefit, the agency's utilization metrics improve, and the bus is going to run the route regardless. Nothing is lost, and something is gained.

This logic extends to any potential Redeemer with unused capacity. Empty museum galleries serve no one. Unfilled classes cost the same as full ones. Dormant pool lanes generate maintenance costs without community benefit. Civic-credits convert unused capacity into active participation.

By accepting civic-credits for access to goods and services they already provide, redeemers can fill seats and time slots they are already paying to operate, expand reach to residents who are otherwise priced out, and strengthen legitimacy by visibly participating in a civic recognition system tied to the provision of public value. 

The protocol also generates operational insights, and in many cases, credit-funded visitors also generate secondary revenue through memberships, concessions, parking, or onsite purchases, making redemption a practical way to activate dormant capacity and deepen the institution’s relationship with the community. 

The number of organizations that fit this mold in any given city is surprisingly large.  The more offerings that exist in the redemption universe, the stronger the incentive there is for civic-participants to engage in civic-labor.   

The civic-credit economy is governed by three interlocking controls.

1. The Issuance Cap sets the ceiling on how many credits can enter the system per period, derived from the total redemption capacity within the Redemption universe.

2. Task rates, which determine how many credits each type of civic work earns.

3. Redemption rates, which determine how many credits each type of offering costs.

Together, these controls form the bounded coordination economy, where the supply of recognition is calibrated to the system’s capacity to deliver value.

An equilibrium model tracks four health indicators: whether credits are being used efficiently, whether services have capacity to spare, whether credit balances are accumulating dangerously, and whether participants are staying engaged. 

Governance committees review these indicators monthly and adjust the controls quarterly. The system is designed to self-correct within normal operating ranges and to signal governance when intervention is needed. A more detailed description along with a formal mathematical model can be viewed here in our docs.

Beneath the mechanics, the pilot is testing a proposition about human behavior which declares that more people will contribute toward meaningful civic-labor when given structured recognition that carries real economic weight. This system rejects the idea of charity and the exploitation of altruistic individuals with intrinsic motivations of “making a difference” as the primary driver for coordinating the provision of public value.  While we appreciate the intent, we seek to provide a concrete exchange that states when you contribute to your community, your community contributes back to you.

Neighbors help neighbors. Volunteers show up. Mutual aid networks form in crises. The 2.1 billion people who volunteer monthly worldwide are evidence that the impulse to contribute is not scarce. What is scarce is the infrastructure to recognize, reward, coordinate, and sustain that contribution outside moments of emergency or moral ought.

The pilot builds that infrastructure. It starts by recognizing civic work that is already happening by formalizing existing volunteer activity rather than inventing new obligations. The first credits go to volunteers who are already showing up at libraries, parks, nonprofits, etc. 

As we begin to show that we can expand our local civic capacity by incentivizing new participants to engage in civic-labor, and expand the impact of local Issuer organizations, we can then build on top of this substrate to solve more complex coordination problems.  

The pilot validates a general purpose civic-credit economy, where diverse civic tasks are issued across multiple domains, participants choose what to do, and credits flow through the system in a steady, balanced rhythm. This is valuable. It proves the mechanics work. But it does not yet demonstrate the capability that matters most for the long-term vision of the City/Sync protocol, which is the ability to focus an entire community’s coordination capacity on a specific collective action.

Cities need more than generalized civic participation. They need the ability to mobilize around particular goals whether that is disaster preparedness, public health campaigns, neighborhood revitalization, youth mentorship, environmental restoration, etc. These are collective initiatives that require multiple organizations working in concert, participants contributing toward a shared objective, and resources concentrated where they will produce the most impact.

Mass Coordination Events are the mechanism for testing this capability.

An MCE is a time-limited, city-wide civic initiative that layers focused coordination on top of the existing credit economy. Multiple Issuer Organizations collaborate around a specific goal. The task catalog for the event period is designed to serve that goal from multiple angles, and critically, private-sector businesses can create time-limited redemption offerings, expanding the redemption universe with more incentives that increase resident participation and serve as a method for bootstrapping new participants, issuers, and redeemers within the network. 

Let's consider a concrete example of an MCE. A city runs a two-day Mass Coordination Event focused on one visible outcome: reduce neighborhood blight and safety hazards block-by-block in a way residents can see immediately.

The city works with local government and selects a set of priority zones based on 311 data, resident complaints, public works backlogs, etc. that identify illegal dumping hotspots, broken street signage, graffiti corridors, overgrown sidewalks, and unsafe intersections.

Instead of treating this as a slow administrative process within local government, the MCE turns it into a coordinated surge across institutions and neighborhoods with standardized tasks.

Public Works issues tasks for litter and illegal dumping cleanup and staging materials at designated pickup points. Transportation departments issue tasks for crosswalk repaint support and safe intersection audits where participants collect structured observations and photos. The Parks and Recreation department issues tasks for trail cleanup and playground restoration support. Libraries and neighborhood centers issue tasks for onboarding and local outreach. 

What MCEs validate is the core promise and potential of what City/Sync can become. A system where civic effort can be coordinated across many issuers and institutions, verified consistently, and translated into real benefits quickly enough to sustain participation.

It also creates immediate administrative value as the city gains structured hazard data, measurable outputs, and a repeatable playbook for mobilizing community capacity whenever service backlogs spike. Within 48 hours, the city is capable of demonstrating a scalable coordination method that can be repeated monthly, moved between neighborhoods, and improved through data and planning.

MCEs as Evolutionary Pressure

Every MCE generates data that the general purpose system cannot. It reveals whether organizations can actually collaborate around a shared goal or whether institutional silos prevent meaningful coordination. It reveals whether participants respond differently to focused collective action than to individual task selection. It reveals what governance friction emerges when multiple Issuers share a common objective. 

But the most important information an MCE can provide us is which coordination patterns deserve to become permanent?

An MCE that generates massive participation, produces visible civic output, and reveals that multiple organizations can work together effectively around a specific domain is more than a successful event. It is a prototype. It demonstrates that a specific collective action can be coordinated through the civic-credit infrastructure on a sustained basis.

If the pilot is the proof of concept for civic-credit mechanics, MCEs are the evolutionary pressure that produces the next stage of the system’s development. Each MCE tests a different coordination pattern. Some will fail, and those patterns are abandoned. Some will succeed spectacularly, and those patterns become candidates for permanence.

The transition from a successful MCE to a standing coordination network is the bridge between the pilot and everything that follows. It is the moment when City/Sync stops being a volunteer management system with blockchain characteristics and starts becoming infrastructure for collective action.

For those of you who have kept up with my writings and presentations, you can reference my very first presentation on dPAN’s here.  Its worth listening to if you want to better understand where the motivation for this project originated.

When an MCE repeatedly produces a coordination pattern that is effective and where there is reliable verification, sustained engagement, stable redemption behavior, and measurable public outcomes, the protocol treats that pattern as an administrative function that can be formalized and reused.

This is where dPANs emerge. Decentralized Public Administration Networks (dPANs) are modular applications built on top of the City/Sync protocol that coordinate specific public administrative functions through standardized task definitions, rule-based workflows, governance parameters, and transparent measurement. 

In practice, a successful MCE becomes the prototype template for a dPAN, where the event’s task catalog, verification logic, incentive structure, and governance rules are distilled into a reusable module that can be deployed whenever the city needs that function again, whether its seasonally, in response to backlogs, or during emergencies, without rebuilding the coordination from scratch.

Over time, this converts temporary surges into durable infrastructure where a community has access to a library of callable public administration modules that can activate, govern, iterate, and eventually export to other cities as proven coordination patterns.

The pilot runs on existing public blockchain infrastructure. This is appropriate for validation. But as the system scales beyond a pilot, a problem emerges.  A local economy that is facilitating vital local coordination is subject to the governance and evolution of a technological stack they cannot control.  This governance issue/lack of control is a liability for the integration of new primitives within local institutions.  That among many other reasons, is why we are proposing the development of local chains.  

A local chain is a sovereign blockchain operated by and for a specific city or jurisdiction. Its validators are known local entities, Issuer Organizations, Redeemer Organizations, civic institutions, and potentially the city government itself. It runs under a PoA consensus mechanism, where the validator set is curated rather than open, ensuring that the entities securing the network have a direct stake in the community it serves.

A local chain is infrastructure, and serves as the coordination substrate on which the civic economy operates. Just as a city operates its own water system, its own road network, and its own transit system, a local chain gives the city its own digital coordination infrastructure, governed by local institutions under local rules.

The word sovereignty is chosen carefully. It means that the rules of the civic economy (issuance caps, task catalogs, redemption rates, governance procedures, privacy policies, data retention rules, dPANs, etc.) are set by the community, and not by the constraints of a global blockchain protocol.

Upgrades, congestion, MEV dynamics, and spam pressures become part of the operating environment with public chains. That mismatch is tolerable for global commerce, but it is unacceptable for public administration, where predictability, continuity, and statutory compliance are structured legal obligations.

A local chain solves this by making the civic economy governable in the same way a city governs any other essential infrastructure, within bounded risk and clear accountability.

Transactions can be gasless for participants so participation is never hostage to market conditions. Block times and throughput can be tuned to the cadence of civic operations and privacy & data retention policies can be designed around public-sector realities, including archival requirements and freedom-of-information constraints. Most importantly, the validator set can be composed of trusted local institutions such as agencies, nonprofits, universities, and civic orgs that secure the network and are subject to that jurisdictions governance processes. That alignment is the difference between “a dApp deployed somewhere” and a credible administrative substrate a city can actually utilize for procurement, satisfy audit requirements, and remain sustainable across political cycles.

This infra becomes extremely important as Mass Coordination Events harden into permanent dPANs. When an MCE proves a coordination pattern that works, it graduates into a modular administrative application with its own rules, task catalog, governance parameters, and measurement logic. On a local chain, each dPAN is a modular smart-contract suite that encodes domain specific coordination rules while sharing common substrate primitives (identity, credit issuance and burn, governance tools, and data standards) so the system compounds rather than fragments. The general purpose civic-credit economy becomes one module among many, coexisting with dPAN applications that can integrate with existing administrative workflows precisely because the infrastructure is locally sovereign.

In short, local chains are the institutional bridge between blockchain’s promises and government limitations.


What Local Governance Looks Like

The governance model that emerged during the pilot, which consists of polycentric authority distributed across role-based committees, scales naturally onto a local chain. Each committee’s authority is encoded in role-based access controls.

Issuance caps, rate setting boundaries, accreditation, and parameter changes require committee approvals. No single entity can unilaterally alter the system.

Governance proposals can be submitted, debated, voted on, and executed onchain, creating a transparent, auditable record of every decision the civic economy’s governing bodies have made. 

For participants, the local chain makes the civic economy’s governance legible in a way that traditional municipal administration is not. A resident can see exactly how many credits were issued last month, by which Issuers, for which tasks. They can see how many credits were redeemed, at which Redeemers, for which services. They can see the governance proposals that were submitted, the votes that were cast, and the parameter changes that resulted.

One particular feature of the Pilot that was omitted is the use and distribution of the $VOTE token. It was omitted until now, because the goal of City/Sync is to develop the governance process naturally over time and without putting too much focus on participant governance during the early stages of the pilot.  The distribution of $VOTE is issued to civic participants in a 1:1 manner with the distribution of $CITY (also, note that $CITY is just a placeholder ticker for a city's unique civic-credit. Berkeley - $BRKY, Mexico City - $CDMX as examples). 

The principle guiding the $VOTE token is this: governance power is earned and is directly related to the degree of contributions an individual has made to their city.  The use of $VOTE by civic-participants will be rolled out incrementally over time, most likely starting with MCE proposals and refined through dPAN development. 

$VOTE may eventually become the method for making decisions within dPANs and may eventually become a signaling tool for local government engagements.  A fully articulated desire for what we believe $VOTE could become would be irresponsible to provide at this moment, as there are many variables that will influence the governance of local chains and the infrastructure built on top of them. 

At City/Sync we are dedicated to running governance experiments, but we do not want to lock participants into governance patterns that are difficult to change either technically or socially until the full picture of what these earlier developments evolve into become clear.

Every phase described so far operates within a realization that the limitation of the civic economy is that it still needs real-world resources and fiat to function. Emergency backstops need money. Technology infrastructure costs money. During the pilot, these costs are covered by city budget allocations, grants, external capital sources, and sponsorship. That is appropriate for an experiment, but it is not sustainable for permanent infrastructure.

The question that must be answered before the civic economy can become truly durable is where does the money come from, and how do we ensure that the funding mechanism is as resilient to political capture as the coordination mechanism itself?

I have to give a shout out here to our good friend @Durgadas, who seeded the original idea that we built upon for this proposed concept.

A City Vault is a set of smart-contracts that hold donated interest-bearing assets (initially we are proposing ETH) in a permanently locked endowment. For those of you in the Web3 public goods industry, you can think of this as an Octant Vault for cities, but where the principal is never withdrawn.

Donations to the vault generates yield through staking or other low-risk, protocol-level mechanisms. That yield flows to local chains to fund operational costs such as dPAN procurement functions, governance administration, technology maintenance, onboarding infrastructure, and any other expenses the coordination infrastructure requires to function.

The vault is governed by the same polycentric governance structure that manages the civic-credit economy. No single donor, no mayor, no council member, and no administrator can unilaterally redirect the capital or alter the yield allocation. The principal is locked by code. The yield flows through code. The allocation decisions are made by governance structures and executed through onchain transactions. The entire operation is auditable and resistant to the political capture that plagues traditional municipal endowments.

We all complain about taxation. We complain about how taxes are spent, who decides the allocation, how much is wasted, how little transparency exists in the process, and how poorly the outcomes match the investment. These complaints reflect a legitimate structural problem where the current mechanism for funding collective goods and services are through mandatory taxation administered by centralized bureaucracies.  This system is deliberately opaque, politically captured, and persistently insufficient for the scale of public need.

But complaining about taxation without providing an alternative is a useless grievance. The City Vault is designed to be the alternative (not for all public expenditures, but for the significant category of civic coordination, community services, and public goods delivery that currently consumes substantial portions of municipal budgets and is chronically underfunded despite that spending).

The success of the proposed mechanism relies on passing a legislative provision that allows individuals to donate assets to a qualified City Vault and in return, they receive an annual tax deduction based on the documented civic value their donation produced.

This differs from traditional charitable giving in two critical ways.

First, the benefit is ongoing, not one-time. Under current tax law, a charitable donation produces a single deduction in the year it is made, regardless of what the money produces afterward. Under the vault mechanism, the proposed legislation allows a donor to receive an ongoing annual deduction for as long as their locked capital generates yield that funds documented civic outcomes. The benefit continues as long as the capital produces results.

Second, the allocation is community-governed, not donor-directed. A traditional donation to a nonprofit or foundation gives the donor significant influence over how the money is spent. A City Vault donation gives the donor a tax benefit but no governance authority. The yield allocation is decided by the civic economy's governance structures. The donor's capital serves the community's priorities, and not the donor's preferences.

This creates an extraordinary alignment of incentives. Donors are motivated to fund vaults in cities with effective civic governance, because effective governance produces better outcomes, which produces better tax benefits. Philanthropic capital flows toward cities that govern well rather than toward cities with the best fundraising operations. Cities are motivated to govern their civic economies effectively because the quality of their governance directly determines the capital they attract.

The City Vault does not eliminate taxation. Public goods that require centralized expertise and universal provision such as water treatment, energy infrastructure, core transportation networks, emergency services, the court system, etc. will all continue to require tax-funded government agencies.

But if City Vaults demonstrate that they can fund civic coordination more effectively than tax-funded bureaucracies, with better outcomes and greater transparency, the political argument for shifting public expenditure from mandatory taxation to voluntary vault contributions becomes pretty powerful.

The progression might look something like this: a city funds its infrastructure on a mix of city budget and vault yield. Over several years, the vault grows as donors see documented results.

The city's municipal budget allocation to civic services decreases as vault yield picks up the load. Eventually, the provision of public goods and services is fully funded by the vault, and the city reallocates the freed budget to functions that genuinely require government administration. Taxpayers see their civic services improve while the tax burden on those services decreases.

This is a structural argument that some categories of public expenditure are better funded through community-governed endowments rather than through centralized tax-and-spend. The vault relieves the government of burdens it was never well-equipped to carry, and funds them through a mechanism that is more accountable and more directly connected to community outcomes than any municipal budget process.

The radical proposition here is that citizens should have a choice. Pay taxes for services administered through traditional bureaucracy, or contribute to a vault that funds civic coordination governed and implemented by the community itself. The two systems can coexist. Over time, the one that produces better outcomes attracts more resources. The competition between the two becomes empirical rather than ideological.

It would be easy, at this point, to mistake the City/Sync vision for an anti-government project. It is not. This is a project that takes government seriously and to the degree that we are able to distinguish between what governments do well and what they struggle with, and to propose that the latter can be addressed without dismantling the former.

What governments do well: maintain legal frameworks, enforce contracts, protect rights, provide universal utilities, coordinate large-scale infrastructure, manage emergency services, and serve as the institutional anchor of last resort when all other systems fail. These functions require centralized authority, specialized expertise, and the coercive power of the state. No decentralized network can replicate that, and City/Sync does not attempt to.

What governments struggle with: coordinating civic participation at scale, recognizing and rewarding non-wage contribution, responding to the diverse and granular needs of local communities, maintaining public trust in the allocation of shared resources, and adapting administrative practices to changing conditions without requiring the entire apparatus of legislation, regulation, and implementation that makes government action slow and expensive.

These struggles are limitations of architecture. Centralized bureaucracies are designed for standardized, repeatable, accountable administration. They are not designed for distributed, adaptive, participatory coordination.

The City/Sync vision does not remove government from this picture. It shifts government’s role from sole administrator to anchor institution. The city government sets the legal framework. It authorizes the pilot through ordinance. It can accredit Issuers and Redeemers if desired. It can provide backstop funding during the early phases. It serves as the regulatory body that ensures the civic economy operates within the bounds of labor law, public finance law, and welfare policy. And it retains the authority to sunset the experiment if results do not justify continuation.

What the city government does not do is administer the day-to-day coordination of civic labor. That function is distributed across the organizations and participants that collectively manage the system.  The implications of this may seem minor to US residents, but they have significant implications for autocratic countries.

The history of public administration is a history of discretion, where the authority of individual administrators are able to exercise judgment in how policies are implemented. This discretion has been both the strength and the vulnerability of centralized governments.

City/Sync proposes a complementary approach. For the domain of civic coordination, replace some of the reliance on individual discretion with protocol-level rules that are auditable and enforced by code. The Issuance Cap is derived from a formula. Task approval follows documented criteria. Credit issuance is triggered by verified task completion and executed by smart-contract.

Human judgment is not removed from the system. It is channeled into governance processes that are structured and documented and live downstream from policy intent. The execution of policy decisions is handled by infrastructure that cannot be corrupted by individual actors.

The result is a shift from governance-by-discretion to governance-by-protocol with human oversight. The protocol handles the mechanics. The humans handle the values. Both are necessary, and neither one isolated is sufficient.

Everything described so far happens within a single city. But cities do not exist in isolation. They share metropolitan regions, economic labor markets, environmental challenges, transportation networks, and cultural communities. 

A Disaster Preparedness dPAN that works in Berkeley is not just a Berkeley program. It is a coordination application that has a specific configuration of smart-contracts, task catalogs, governance rules, and verification procedures that encodes a proven pattern for how a community organizes disaster readiness through civic-labor.

That application is open source. Its code is public. Its governance documentation is available. Its outcome data is onchain and auditable. Any city in the world can examine it, evaluate its results, fork it, and deploy it on their own local chain, adapting the task catalog to local conditions, adjusting the governance parameters to local institutional cultures, and running it within their own sovereign infrastructure.

This is peer-to-peer public administration. Cities learning from each other through shared, auditable, forkable coordination infrastructure. A youth mentorship dPAN deployed in Mexico City, adapted from a Berkeley original, producing outcomes that inform a version deployed in Nairobi, whose innovations are incorporated back into the Berkeley deployment.

This is institutional isomorphism operating through open source. When one city develops a better way to coordinate civic-labor, every city in the network can adopt it immediately.

This is where we need to get. 

The speed and effectiveness of collective action at this level unlocks unlimited potential for creating public value and it distributes the control of coordination systems into an inherently democratic anti-capture system of public administration.  

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City/Sync is building coordination infrastructure for the 21st century. 

Our path is deliberate: Prove the primitive. Discover the patterns. Build the substrate. Capitalize the system. Transform the institution. Connect the networks.

Each step validates the last and enables the next. Nothing is assumed. Everything is tested.  This is where we are headed, regardless of how long it takes.

The radical proposition underneath all of this is not about blockchain or cryptocurrency or smart-contracts. It is a belief that when cities are able to source the combined talents and abilities from their entire pool of local citizens, they become more effective than traditional systems of public administration in coordinating the provision of public goods and services.

We have continuously iterated and built extraordinary tools for commerce. They are succeeding at everything they were designed to do, and we hope that City/Sync can finally confront the things they were never designed to do.  

Coordination solves everything.

This is what City/Sync hopes to build. This is a loose roadmap. I guess you can call it a roadmap of intentions, but as you can see with all of the previous writings, this project will continue to evolve, adapt, introduce new ideas, and speculate on what comes next. But we will figure it out. We are moving forward with our pilot program, and we will keep everyone informed on our efforts! If you have a desire to contribute, please do check out our Website, X, and Discord.

Thanks for Reading!