Civic Substrate

A city already is a distributed system. Most civic software just refuses to admit it.

Participatory budgeting is the clearest example: residents propose, deliberate, and allocate real money to real projects. Done well, it's a routing protocol: attention and funds finding the neighborhoods that need them, without a central planner deciding for everyone.

Substrate, not portal

The failure mode is building a portal, one big front door that owns everything. The better frame is substrate: shared, boring infrastructure that many small civic experiments can root into and grow from.