The manifesto
We, the citizens, must help our towns better serve us. A town is a shared undertaking. Its institutions depend on our attention, our participation, and our willingness to build things together. We have a responsibility to help shape the tools through which our community understands itself and makes decisions.
We already know what care for public life can look like. We see it in a welcoming library, a park that is cared for, a school that brings families together, and a recreation center where neighbors meet. These places make participation easier. They give people somewhere to belong. Our digital public spaces deserve the same care.
For decades, the work of sharing information and organizing town life has been digital. Yet towns have too often had to assemble that work from scattered websites, email chains, document archives, and disconnected services. Residents struggle to find what matters. Officials spend time answering questions that good tools could help people answer for themselves. Towns and the people working in them have needed better tools for a long time.
The era of digital autonomy is here. Communities can build, understand, host, and improve their own software. We should be able to decide where our information lives, who may access it, and how the systems we depend on work. Essential services, including AI, should be able to run on infrastructure the community controls. The ability to exercise that control should belong to every town.
We will no longer accept paying for insecure systems or settling for poorly designed tools because they happen to be open. Security, accessibility, privacy, and thoughtful design belong together. Open source gives a community the right to inspect and improve its tools. Good design makes those rights useful to the people who actually need them. Both are part of a public responsibility.
A town’s digital public space should be organized around the things that give its life structure: its schools, services, recreation centers, libraries, public places, and the people responsible for them. Each should have a clear home for relevant information, questions, decisions, and discussion. A resident should be able to follow what matters to them and understand where to take part.
Those spaces need a meaningful sense of participation. Discussion around a school should serve the families, educators, staff, and others engaged with that school. A service should connect the people who use it, provide it, and help oversee it. Access to a discussion should reflect a person’s relationship to its subject, with clear rules for joining and responsible stewardship. Public records should remain available to the public; access to a particular conversation can have its own boundaries.
Communication must be safe and contextualized. People should know where a conversation belongs, who can read it, and what will happen when they contribute. A question should remain connected to the place, service, document, or decision it concerns. Shared expectations, useful context, and accountable moderation can make room for disagreement while protecting people from harassment and the exposure of private information. Safety needs people who take responsibility for the space as well as software that supports them.
AI must serve the people. It should help elected and appointed officials understand the needs of their constituents, find relevant information, explain decisions, and provide better service. It should also help residents understand the institutions that act on their behalf. Its value should be measured in the time it gives back, the understanding it creates, and the quality of service it makes possible.
We want a single AI chat interface through which a person can ask questions across the town’s public records and the private information that person is authorized to access. A resident could ask about a public meeting, find the source of a policy, or understand the status of their own request in one place. Signing in must never open someone else’s records. Permission boundaries must be enforced whenever information is retrieved, including in summaries and responses.
That interface should show its sources, distinguish a record from an interpretation, and make uncertainty visible. People need to be able to check an answer and reach the person responsible for a decision. Elected and appointed officials remain accountable for their work. Residents retain their judgment, their voice, and their right to question what a system tells them.
These tools should be delightful to use. The care we put into a public building’s entrances, signs, gathering spaces, and accessibility should also shape a screen. Clear language, calm layouts, useful defaults, and reliable behavior help people feel welcome. Someone using an older phone, a keyboard, or assistive technology deserves the same attention as anyone else. Everyday public tasks should feel easy.
A town must never be beholden to a software provider. Dependence puts public information, security, and budgets at risk when a provider changes its terms, raises its prices, or disappears. A town should control its data, hold usable copies, and be able to move to another operator. It should have the source code, the documentation, and the practical ability to keep its systems running. Providers can earn a town’s business through good service while the town retains the freedom to leave.
Core use cases
School calendars and shared participation
School calendars show why this matters. Calendars are shared publicly, but the information they contain can vary widely between schools. One may publish detailed descriptions, locations, and instructions, while another offers little more than a date and a title. A shared standard for event information should make the essentials dependable: when and where something happens, whom it affects, what has changed, and how to take part.
Having a child at a school should connect a parent or caregiver to that school’s calendar automatically through their membership in its community. Families should find the relevant calendars already available in their account, without hunting for links, rebuilding schedules, or tracking down separate invitation lists. The public identity of a school does not make every part of its community public. In this platform, its calendar, events, and organizing discussions belong to people with a verified connection to that school. Public source records remain available at their original publishers.
An event record should also be a place to take part. Questions, volunteer needs, plans, and decisions should stay attached to the event they concern. Today, that work is scattered across WhatsApp groups, email chains, and phone calls. Organizers must repeat information across tools, and the people affected have to know whom to ask or which group to join. Keeping discussion and organizing with the event makes it easier for people to coordinate, understand what is needed, and participate.
Food miles and local food systems
Food should also be part of a town’s digital public space. Where it is grown, how it reaches us, who can afford it, and how people can help are shared concerns. Local farms and community gardens show how public land and community initiative can work together, helping residents grow food close to home.
People should be able to discover nearby farms, gardens, markets, and food-access programs in one place. They should be able to find what is in season, where food was grown, when a pickup or market happens, and what an organization needs. Food miles can help make the journey from grower to table visible where the origin is known. How food is grown, affordability, and waste should be visible alongside distance. Existing organizations should be able to keep their own information current, and residents should be able to follow the efforts they care about.
A harvest day, a volunteer shift, a school visit, or a surplus-food collection should each have a clear home for its schedule, tasks, questions, and updates. A person who can help for two hours should be able to find a useful task and understand what committing to it involves. Organizers should be able to show what is still needed and what has been covered. Participation in food assistance must remain private; receiving help should never require someone to announce it to their neighbors.
Making more of this possible takes sustained support. Residents should be able to propose new growing projects, gather interest, and understand the permissions, water, soil, funding, and stewardship they would need. Documented land opportunities should have a clear owner and decision process. Communities should be able to see collective results: growing space maintained, food shared, volunteer needs met, and affordable access expanded. When people can see a concrete way to contribute and what their contribution makes possible, it becomes easier to support an existing effort and build the next one.
This is why we are building MyTown ERP. Residents can sign up, choose a name, and talk with one another about the places and things they share. Standalone conversations are public. Calendars and their discussions are available through a verified connection to the school or other entity they serve. During this pilot, a trusted community steward checks each connection before approving it, and that approval expires unless renewed. Access to private service records, AI, and official town participation are part of the broader infrastructure we want to build toward. We can earn trust through useful work, careful stewardship, and tools that people enjoy using.
What works here should be available to other towns. Public money and volunteer effort should produce improvements that communities can share, adapt, and maintain together. Every town deserves excellent tools and the ability to govern them. We can start by helping our own.