Click to read the poster · Navigate opens the interactive map

Deliberative Liquid Holacracy

The civic operating system of Rubania

What Civic OS Is

Civic OS is the human coordination layer of Rubania. It exists because settlements need more than land and infrastructure: they need a people system capable of organizing work, deliberation, contribution, trust, and long-term institutional memory. Rubania frames this as a civic operating system rather than a simple governance app.

Its purpose is to connect resource allocation, transparent deliberation, economic justice, and personal development inside one coherent software and protocol layer. In practical terms, it aims to make visible what most communities leave invisible: who contributes, how decisions are made, what skills exist, what tensions are unresolved, and how collective life can remain legible without collapsing into bureaucracy.

Core Logic

The top-level governance chain is simple: topic navigation, deliberation, decision, execution. A person enters through a topic cloud, moves into shared reasoning, and participates in legitimate decision pathways that can eventually translate into coordinated action. This is why C.O.S. should not be understood as a forum, a poll app, or a spreadsheet. It is meant to be a complete civic architecture.

Rubania also treats anonymity, identity, and multi-persona participation as design variables rather than accidents. People may deliberate through different expressive layers, but formal decision power remains anchored to verifiable identity. This allows expressive freedom without surrendering institutional trust.

Seven Functional Modules

The conceptual Civic OS includes several interlocking modules: valued effort, crypto accounting, argument maps, engagement with difference, initiative launch, conflict recognition, and a political orientation that combines individual freedom with social responsibility. Around these, other major systems appear: Praxion, Criterion, Devotio, Liquid Democracy, role-based governance, and immutability layers such as Bitcoin checkpoints.

The underlying wager is that community failure is often a technology problem as much as a moral problem. Pen and paper cannot carry the complexity. Spreadsheets cannot model civic life. A serious settlement needs a more explicit coordination layer.

“We need to set about, in an orderly, sensible, and cooperative way, a system of replacing power-centred politics and political hierarchies with a far more flexible, practical, and information-centred system responsive to research and feedback, and with long-term goals of stability.”
Bill Mollison

How does it actually work

From topic navigation to collective intelligence to coordinated action

C.O.S. is not a chat room, a voting app, or a task board. It is Rubania's civic operating system, a decision architecture designed to turn scattered discussion into structured collective intelligence, and structured collective intelligence into coordinated action.

A participant begins by navigating a living network of topics. From there, they enter a shared deliberation space where premises, objections, clarifications, and supporting reasoning can be mapped in relation to one another. When a matter is mature enough, it moves into a decision layer. Approved resolutions can then generate coordinated work inside the broader operating system.

1

The system connects navigation, deliberation, decision, and execution

Civic O.S. is built as a continuous chain rather than a collection of disconnected tools. Topic discovery, argument mapping, voting, and execution belong to the same civic loop.

The point is not simply to let people talk. The point is to create a path by which an issue can be discovered, understood, debated, resolved, and translated into action.

👤User
☁️Topic CloudFind an issue
🗺️Debate MapExplore reasoning
🗳️Decision LayerVote when mature
⚒️PraxionTurn resolution into work
From topic discovery to deliberation to voting to coordinated execution.
2

Topics are organized as a living network, not a rigid tree

Most knowledge systems force reality into a single hierarchy. C.O.S. does not. In Rubania, a topic can belong to multiple parent topics at once, because real systems overlap.

For example, an inverter can belong inside solar power, copper connectivity, and energy control systems at the same time. That is not an error. It is a more faithful representation of reality.

💧Water
Energy
🌱Irrigation
☀️Solar Panels
🐟Aquaculture
🍃Biomass
🔗Copper Connectivity
🖥️Control Systems
🔥Gasifier
🏠Construction
〰️Invertersone node — three parents
🪟Glass Tiles
🎋Bamboo
Topics can have multiple parents. The structure is a directed network, not a single vertical tree.
3

Topics lead into one shared deliberation map

A topic does not open an isolated discussion thread. Instead, it acts as an entry point into a common deliberation space.

This matters because the same premise may be relevant to several parts of the system at once. Instead of duplicating debates across disconnected pages, Civic O.S. aims to preserve reasoning in a shared argument structure where relationships remain visible.

Topic Cloud
Shared Debate Map
〰️Inverters
🛡️Need redundant inverters
🔥Gasifier
📍Gasifier location and integration
🌊Canals
〽️Canal layout and boulevard
Topics are gateways into a shared reasoning structure, not separate fragmented conversations.
4

Users move from discovery to contribution to decision

The user journey begins with navigation. A participant explores a domain, opens a topic, and sees whether there is already an active deliberation connected to that issue.

If there is, they can enter the map, read the existing reasoning, and contribute. If the matter reaches sufficient maturity, it can enter a voting phase. Once resolved, the decision can feed downstream systems of coordination and execution.

🌐Open C.O.S.
📂Browse a domain
📋Open a topic
Active debate?
Yes
Enter debate map
No
Read reference content
What do you do?
📖Read existing reasoning
Add a contribution
🧩Add structured reasoning
Voting phase open?
Yes
🗳️Vote
No
👥Deliberation continues
⚖️Resolution approved or rejected
⚒️Approved outcomes can generate work
A participant moves from topic discovery to shared reasoning to resolution and execution.
Systems Resources Technology / Outputs Governance Decision point

Civic O.S. Components

How the pieces fit together — effort, quality, voice, trust, and rhythm
Component

⚡ Praxion

Effort

Multidimensional action vectors. Every task tagged by Domain, weighted by scarcity, adjusted by quality. Three core dimensions: Cognitio (mental), Sympathia (social-emotional), Labor (physical). Your contribution identity as a 14-dimension map.

Component

📊 Criterion

Quality

Epistemic scoring for deliberation contributions. Badge-gated delegation eligibility, influence decay, anti-gaming validation through anonymous peer review. Short cycles incentivise reaching consensus faster — the best deliberators are those who resolve, not those who prolong.

Component

🗳️ Liquid Democracy

Voice

Delegate your vote per Domain to trusted experts. Your Energy delegate may differ from your Health delegate. Expertise accumulates political influence within competence areas.

Component

🌐 14 Domains

Structure

Universal namespace organising all activity: Energy, Land, Water, Construction, Produce, Animal Husbandry, Health, Education, Governance, Economy, Culture, Logistics, Constitution, and Architecture.

Component

🎖️ Badges

Competence

Percentile-based skill recognition: 🟢 Apprentice (>10th), 🔵 Practitioner (>50th), 🟣 Master (>90th). Gates role eligibility, enables mentorship tracking, and unlocks task tiers across domains.

Component

🎁 Devotio

Gift & Sacrifice

Three-dimensional sacrifice layer mirroring the action vector: Vocation (opportunity cost), Health (physical well-being), Society (family and social bonds). Bidirectional curves that push you out of your comfort zone — and pull you back when you drift too far.

Component

🔄 Missions

Accountability

Accumulated minute-debt triggers mandatory mission assignments — intense, unscheduled volunteer tasks. You can't repay debt with routine actions. Designed to create healthy aversion to falling behind while preserving daily flexibility.

Component

🌙 Cycles

Rhythm

Lunar-phase cycles (new moon / full moon) for contribution accounting. Solstice and equinox super-cycles for community festivals and seasonal rebalancing. Each season has its gathering; each cycle its reckoning.

Component

🔍 Anonymous Auditing

Trust

Self-assigned effort weights are validated by unexpected, anonymous, always-different auditors. Corrections use historical standard deviation — like neural network weight updates — to converge on fair valuation over time.