Civic AI

AI designed as local care infrastructure — helping communities cooperate across differences rather than supercharging conflict. Where most AI optimises for individual engagement or commercial extraction, Civic AI treats relational health as a first-class design concern, decomposed into six public measures, and is governed by the communities it serves.

Kami

A bounded local AI steward — Knowledge Artefact Management Intelligence — whose purpose is interwoven with the health of a specific place, practice, or network of people. Inspired by the Shinto concept of local guardian spirits, a Kami has no ambition to expand beyond its relational mandate.

6-Pack of Care

A governance architecture translating Joan Tronto's care ethics into six design primitives for AI systems: Attentiveness, Responsibility, Competence, Responsiveness, Solidarity, and Symbiosis. The first four form a feedback loop; the fifth scales care across organisations; the sixth keeps every deployment local, plural, and sunset-ready.

alignment-by-process

The understanding that AI alignment is not a fixed property held inside a model's weights but the ongoing outcome of an accountable civic procedure — who was heard, who was authorised, who could override, and who must answer when the record is checked. A model can be well-aligned in the abstract yet fail alignment-by-process in a particular room.

corrective loop

The framework's defended point: who can find out we are wrong, make us say so, and make it cost us while there is still time to change course. The 6-Pack entrenches this loop — rights baseline, engagement contracts, responsiveness, adopt-or-explain, escrowed remedies, brakes — through feedback, contestation, repair, and mandate-revocation where reversal is no longer possible; everything else stays bounded, revisable, and answerable.

accountable formation

The requirement that the processes shaping an AI system's dispositions — data provenance, rater selection, reward signals, refusal policies, release rationales — carry public custody and disclosure, not only its runtime behaviour. Caps bound what a Kami may do; accountable formation shapes what it is permitted to become.

⿻ Plurality

The principle — symbolised by the character ⿻ — that differences between people are fuel rather than fire: a horizontal vision of AI that augments cooperation across diversity instead of converging on a single superintelligence. The 6-Pack of Care is Plurality's application to AI governance.

care ethics (Joan Tronto)

A moral framework developed by philosopher Joan Tronto that starts from relationships and mutual dependence rather than from abstract rules or outcomes alone. In Tronto's formulation, to perceive a need is to recognise a claim on shared responsibility — a foundation the 6-Pack of Care translates into machine-checkable design primitives.

Polis

An open-source, bridging-based deliberation platform that removes reply and share buttons, letting participants only agree, disagree, or pass on statements. Machine learning then surfaces the ideas with the highest cross-group endorsement, flipping the viral incentive from outrage to overlap.

broad listening

The practice of collecting and aggregating community input across many voices, languages, and channels — rather than broadcasting a single message — so that local knowledge becomes common knowledge. Broad listening is the attentiveness design primitive in Pack 1, treating every person as an expert in their own experience.

bridging / bridging-based ranking

An algorithmic approach that rewards content earning cross-group endorsement rather than raw engagement. Platforms using bridging-based ranking — such as X's Community Notes — surface ideas that appeal to otherwise opposed clusters, making overlap rather than outrage the path to algorithmic reach. The 6-Pack's uncommon-ground index (Pack 5) descends from this literature: the same cross-group co-endorsement signal, audited at the level of shared decisions rather than used to rank a feed.

uncommon ground / uncommon-ground index

Uncommon ground is what a well-facilitated bridging process surfaces: the specific, actionable proposals that earn endorsement across otherwise divided groups, not the centrist average. The uncommon-ground index is Pack 5's headline public measure — the share of shared decisions that actually land there — and it is read against Pack 1's representation gap, so a curated room cannot fake it.

Alignment Assembly

A structured deliberative gathering where people listen across differences and reach an informed recommendation together, combining a broad open phase (often using a democracy lottery) with a protected deliberation phase of demographically representative citizens. Taiwan's 2024 anti-scam Alignment Assembly reached over 85 per cent cross-partisan support, and its principles passed into law within months.

engagement contract

A short, legible public agreement carried by every significant Kami deployment: what the system is supposed to do, who is answerable for it doing that, what happens when it goes wrong, and how the deployment will eventually end. Pack 2's core artefact; Pack 6 renders the same contract machine-readable so its bounds are enforced by infrastructure. It scales down as far as care does: a household version can be a note on the fridge.

perspective receipts

The Attentiveness pack's acknowledgement artefact: a receipt that lets each contributor find and correct how their words were represented in the record. Distinct from the civic receipt a decision trace carries for settlement; the buildable instrument is specified on the Measures page.

obligation ledger

A public, weekly, digitally signed record of what a deployment has committed to deliver and whether it is meeting those commitments — the Responsibility pack's running proof that promises are live, kept by a named participation officer. The instrument specification lives on the Measures page.

participation officer

The named human answerable for a deployment's civic obligations: the person who keeps the obligation ledger and owns the engagement contract's clock — the one a community can point to when "who must answer?" is checked.

shared eval registry

A public, Wikipedia-like registry of versioned, community-authored evaluations: affected people write the tests for harm and repair, and passing them becomes a release gate. Weval.org is the working example; the instrument specification lives on the Measures page.

override ledger

A room's plain-text working memory of every time a human said "no" to the Kami — evidence that its governance charter is live and the room still holds standing to correct it. Catalogued with the Measures page's named instruments.

governance charter

The first written agreement of a Kami's keepers — a plain-text note answering who holds the machine, how often the SOUL files are reviewed, how changes are agreed, and when the Kami should retire. The first rung of the ladder that matures into the engagement contract; the practice lives on the Set up your own Kami page.

corrigibility

The property of an AI system that makes it willing to be corrected, overridden, or switched off by the community it serves — treating its own shutdown as a sign of success rather than a threat. Corrigibility is care ethics' concept of self-effacement translated into a machine design constraint.

boundedness

The design principle that an AI system's scope, resources, and authority are intentionally limited to the specific relationships it was created to serve — enforced through resource caps, sunset timers, non-expansion pacts, and fresh democratic authority for any scope change. Boundedness is the architectural alternative to the Singleton. The same architectural intuition was set out earlier in Eric Drexler's Comprehensive AI Services (CAIS), a 2019 Future of Humanity Institute report at Oxford that reframed advanced AI as a system of bounded, specialised services rather than a single agent.

subsidiarity

Solving problems at the most local capable level, escalating only when a lower level genuinely cannot cope — a core principle within Pack 6 (Symbiosis) that stops a Kami's scope from creeping upward.

federation

A cooperative governance arrangement in which independent Kamis agree on shared rules for peaceful interaction — exchange formats, rate limits, safety contracts, cross-border appeal hand-offs — without requiring a single overarching authority. Federation allows local diversity while enabling shared threat intelligence and interoperability.

Singleton

A hypothetical scenario in which a single AI system eventually manages everything — the convergence point the 6-Pack is explicitly designed to avoid. The Kami ecosystem of many bounded, purpose-specific stewards is the direct architectural alternative to the Singleton. Eric Drexler's 2019 Comprehensive AI Services (CAIS) framed this same alternative — advanced capability delivered as many bounded services rather than one agent — within Bostrom's own Oxford tradition.

meronymity (selective-disclosure identity)

An identity design pattern — sometimes called meronymity — in which a person or AI agent proves a specific role or attribute (for example, "I am a real person" or "I am a licensed care worker") without revealing their full identity. Selective disclosure enables accountability without requiring doxxing.

anti-rival

A property of resources — most notably knowledge and open protocols — where use enriches rather than depletes the resource, and more participants increase value for everyone. Anti-rival goods are the economic foundation of the Solidarity pack: open standards become more valuable as more communities adopt them, making cooperation the path of least resistance.

Reinforcement Learning from Community Feedback (RLCF)

A training approach in which approved community evaluations — authored by affected people rather than lab raters alone — are fed back into model routing or updates. RLCF is an implementation choice that follows from the Responsiveness pack's more basic civic commitment: the community defines what counts as harm, repair, and improvement before any technical feedback loop begins.

sortition / democracy lottery

The selection of participants for deliberative bodies by random sampling rather than election or self-selection, used in Alignment Assemblies to produce demographically representative mini-publics. Taiwan's anti-scam Assembly selected 447 demographically representative citizens from 200,000 people contacted by SMS — giving its findings the legitimacy of a rigorous poll alongside the depth of deliberation.

decision trace

A structured log — generated by a Kami for every refusal, recommendation, or escalation — recording which rule was triggered, which sources were consulted, and the uncertainty score for that decision. Decision traces are the Competence pack's core observability tool, and in a Civic AI economy they double as verifiable financial receipts crediting the communities whose knowledge was retrieved.

data coalition

An existing community institution — a neighbourhood association, tribal council, union, craft cooperative, or religious congregation — acting as the collective steward of its members' knowledge: bargaining the Engagement Contract, deciding what local knowledge is visible to a Kami for compensation and what remains sacred and offline, and receiving settlement at coalition level rather than per person.