Civic Coordination Infrastructure
City/Sync builds the digital infrastructure that enables cities to coordinate civic activity, public services, and community participation as a unified system of public administration.
Context
Local governments are responsible for maintaining infrastructure, delivering services, responding to crises, and supporting the everyday functioning of communities. Yet the systems used to coordinate this work were designed for a world with far less information, far slower communication, and far fewer participants.
At the same time, cities are filled with untapped civic capacity. Residents volunteer, support public institutions, organize local initiatives, and contribute to the health of their communities in countless ways.
But this civic capacity exists largely outside the systems that govern cities.
Public administration and civic participation operate as parallel systems that rarely integrate with one another.
City/Sync exists to bridge that gap.
The Problem
Three structural limitations make it difficult for cities to coordinate civic participation alongside formal administration.
Cities depend on volunteer efforts and community participation, but most of this work is not tracked or integrated into public systems. Without shared infrastructure for measuring civic activity, institutions cannot fully understand or coordinate the contributions happening across their communities.
Local governments are structured around formal employment, procurement, and regulated service delivery. These mechanisms are effective for certain types of work, but poorly suited to coordinating large networks of citizens who want to contribute in flexible ways.
Most public administration structures rely on centralized authority and top-down execution. This creates bottlenecks that limit responsiveness, slow coordination across agencies, and make it difficult to mobilize community participation when it matters most.
As cities grow more complex, these limitations become increasingly difficult to manage.
The Solution
City/Sync provides infrastructure that allows institutions, organizations, and communities to coordinate civic activity through transparent and programmable systems.
Organizations publish opportunities for civic participation. Contributions are verified and coordinated across networks of institutions.
Contributions are recognized through civic credits — a mechanism that allows participation to be measured, coordinated, and integrated into public systems.
Over time, cities move toward a model where institutional authority and distributed civic participation operate within a shared coordination network.
The Credit Layer
The credit layer is not the end goal — it is simply a mechanism that allows participation to be measured, coordinated, and integrated into public systems. The goal is a new model of public administration, not a new currency.
How It Works
Citizens engage in civic opportunities offered by organizations in the network.
Contributions are verified and recorded through the platform, making participation measurable.
Participants receive civic credits representing verified contributions to the community.
Credits are redeemed for access to goods and services offered by organizations in the network.
This creates a feedback loop where civic participation becomes visible, measurable, and interoperable with public administration systems. As the network grows, institutions gain new tools for coordinating collective action across communities.
Who It's For
Residents gain new ways to participate in the life of their city and contribute to public initiatives that matter to their communities — with participation that is recognized, recorded, and rewarded within the civic network.
Nonprofits and community organizations gain infrastructure for coordinating volunteers, tracking participation, and integrating their work into broader civic networks — without expanding administrative overhead.
Cities gain a new layer of coordination that allows them to integrate community participation into public administration — mobilizing civic capacity alongside formal governance systems while maintaining institutional accountability.
City/Sync provides a living laboratory for exploring new models of governance, coordination, and civic infrastructure — generating empirical data on how decentralized coordination mechanisms function in real urban environments.
The Pilot
City/Sync is launching its first pilot programs in Berkeley and Mexico City. These pilots will test how civic coordination infrastructure can operate within real urban environments, working with local organizations and institutions to coordinate participation and integrate civic activity into public systems.
The goal of the pilot phase is to study how new coordination mechanisms can strengthen the capacity of cities to mobilize civic participation while maintaining institutional accountability.
Organizations and community members interested in participating in the pilot are invited to join the network and help shape the future of civic infrastructure.
About
Cities are entering a period where traditional governance structures face increasing pressure from complexity, technological change, and rising expectations from citizens. At the same time, communities continue to generate enormous civic capacity that remains difficult for institutions to coordinate.
We believe the future of governance will require new infrastructure that allows institutions and communities to operate within shared coordination networks.
City/Sync is building and testing the systems that could make this possible.
Long-Term Vision
Our long-term vision is the development of dPANs — interoperable coordination systems that allow cities to integrate civic participation, institutional governance, and public resource management into transparent and programmable infrastructure.
The pilot programs are the first step toward understanding how these systems can operate in real communities.
The Team
City/Sync is being developed by researchers, technologists, and governance designers exploring new models of civic coordination. Our work draws from public administration, distributed systems, institutional design, and civic technology.
We believe the next generation of cities will require new infrastructure capable of coordinating collective action at scale.
Get Involved
We are seeking cities, civic organizations, researchers, and technologists interested in participating in the pilot program and contributing to the development of decentralized public administration systems.
If you would like to collaborate or learn more, we invite you to get in touch. Together we can build the coordination infrastructure for the next generation of cities.