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 metric 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 bounded, 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.

⿻ 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, measured by a bridge index. 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.

Alignment Assembly

A structured deliberative process — combining a broad open phase (often using a democracy lottery) with a protected deliberation phase of demographically representative citizens — that produces cross-partisan consensus on AI governance questions. Taiwan's 2024 anti-scam Alignment Assembly reached over 85 per cent cross-partisan support, and its principles passed into law within months.

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.

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.

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.