“Partner Organization Runs First-of-Its-Kind AI Democracy Experiment: 1,000 Residents, a Community Treasury, and the AI Agents That Helped Govern a California Village”
Executive Summary
We propose that Partner Organization join Community Event 2026 as the anchor sponsor of a month-long governance experiment that puts AI-assisted decision-making tools into the hands of ~1,000 real people making real decisions with real money.
The experiment gives every attendee a personal AI governance agent and runs two parallel tracks: community deliberation on programming and village design, and a capital allocation experiment that A/B tests funding mechanisms (quadratic funding, conviction voting, AI-agent-recommended allocations) with a predominantly non-crypto-native population. This is a first-of-its-kind integration of AI agents, real financial stakes, privacy-preserving voting, and longitudinal data collection.
The initiative runs for the full month of June 2026, which is where the real community value accumulates. Dedicated programming, including public talks, working groups, a design sprint, and the formal governance experiment tracks, would be concentrated in the final two weeks (approx. [Mid-Month]June 14–27ndash;[End-Month]), timed to coincide with Partner Organization team availability following [Major Tech Conference], [Industry Conference], and related regional activations.
Beyond the core experiment, we propose due diligence tracks across the partner's four strategic focus areas: Sovereign Digital Public Infrastructure, AI & Crypto-Native Public Goods Funding, Crypto-Native Governance & Democracy, and Decentralized Climate Infrastructure. Each track pairs a the partner ecosystem project with the event's community for a live field test at $XX,XXX per partner experiment, partner-funded, co-sponsored, or self-funded by the partner teams. We are already in active conversation with teams across all four verticals.
Why This, Why Now, Why Here
The technology is ready.
AI deliberation tools, broad listening platforms, and zero-knowledge voting have all matured enough for field deployment. Personal AI agents can compress complex governance decisions into simple choices, making participation accessible to anyone — no crypto wallet or governance expertise required.
The community exists.
Community Event brings ~1,000 people together for a month in [Region]. It's a real community with real decisions to make: how to schedule programming, how to allocate shared resources, how to shape the village. This isn't a simulation. The decisions matter.
The timing is right.
Multiple teams working on AI governance, deliberation tools, and public goods funding are looking for a real-world testbed with a non-crypto-native population. Community Event is large enough to generate meaningful data, small enough to iterate fast, and culturally open to experimentation. With Partner Organization team members likely on the East Coast for [Major Tech Conference] and [Industry Conference] in early-to-mid June, the final two weeks of Community Event offer a natural window for concentrated on-the-ground programming.
The Experiment
Every attendee receives a personal governance agent. Through a short onboarding conversation, the agent learns their priorities, surfaces relevant decisions, and enables participation in 30-second increments. You always retain final authority: the agent recommends; you decide.
Over the month, the community governs real decisions across two tracks:
Track 1: Community Deliberation
AI-assisted deliberation on real community decisions: open programming slots, event formats, community priorities, and village design. The agent summarizes what's being decided, shows where the community stands, and makes participation a 30-second action. This track runs throughout the full month.
Track 2: Capital Allocation
A $XX,XXX+ governance pool is introduced. Community members propose projects and the community allocates funds. The experiment tests multiple allocation mechanisms across rounds, enabling direct comparison of approaches such as quadratic funding, conviction voting, and AI-agent-recommended allocations that humans ratify.
This track is specifically designed for A/B testing funding mechanisms with a primarily non-crypto-native population — directly addressing some of the hardest problems in public goods funding: How do you onboard non-experts into funding decisions? How do you compare allocation mechanisms with the same population? How do you evaluate impact and feed it back into future rounds?
Programming Timeline
The initiative runs for the full month of Community Event 2026 (June 2026). The AI governance agents and community deliberation tools are live from day one, building a longitudinal dataset across four weeks. Dedicated, intensive programming is concentrated in the final two weeks when the Partner Organization team can be on-site.
Weeks 1–2: Foundation (Full Month Begins)
Governance agents deployed to all attendees. Onboarding conversations and baseline data collection. Community deliberation on programming and village design begins organically. Light-touch facilitation by Our Organization team.
Weeks 3–4: Intensive Programming (the partner On-Site)
Partner Organization team arrives. Public talks, working groups, and a design sprint where partners finalize experiment parameters.
- Week 3: The governance pool opens. Projects are proposed. Community allocates funds using the first mechanism. AI agents help people understand what they're voting on.
- Week 4: Same pool, new proposals, different mechanism. Direct comparison against Week 3. Community synthesis, impact evaluation, and meta-governance reflection.
What We Need to Build
Minimum Viable Experiment
- A deliberation platform for voting on programming and resource allocation decisions.
- A real governance decision with real money: the $XX,XXX+ pool, raised with partners, allocated by the community.
- An AI summary layer: LLM-powered summaries of proposals and community sentiment.
- Two allocation mechanisms tested: different methods in consecutive rounds, with measurable comparison.
This is deployable by June with existing technology and committed funding.
Stretch Goals
- Full AI agent deliberation: an AI "senate" that reads proposals, discusses, and makes recommendations before human voting.
- Sovereign compute: governance agents running on local open-source models, provably not controlled by any single AI lab.
- Invisible crypto wallets: every attendee gets a wallet without knowing it. On-chain voting settlement.
- Impact certificates: funded projects receive impact certificates. Evaluation feeds back into future rounds.
- Mass deliberation methodology: generating data comparable to global-scale deployments.
Potential Partners
Several teams have expressed interest in collaborating. Not all would necessarily be involved, but the interest signals that the technical pieces exist:
- Deliberation Research Lab (DRL): Mass deliberation methodology, AI-native governance. Working with major AI labs on participatory AI governance. DRL is extremely well-connected with a leading AI lab, so this could be a great way to loop them in.
- Open Deliberation Platform: Open-source deliberation-style deliberation platform with LLM integration and zero-knowledge privacy voting. Potential execution partner for the core deliberation UX.
- Partner Organization R&D (with Research Partner): AI agent deliberation system (AI Deliberation System), broad listening tools, and hypercerts for impact evaluation. Currently running a pilot experiment in SF.
- Allocation Lab / Governance Framework Team: Governance accountability frameworks and allocation mechanism design. Deep expertise in comparing funding models.
What Makes This Different
Most governance experiments fail for one of three reasons: they're simulations with no real stakes, they preach to the converted (crypto governance enthusiasts governing crypto things), or they're one-off events with no time to iterate. This experiment avoids all three:
- Real stakes: Real money ($XX,XXX+), real programming decisions, real community impact.
- Non-crypto-native population: 60% of attendees have no crypto background.
- Month-long iteration: Four weeks means we can A/B test mechanisms, learn from early rounds, and generate longitudinal data.
Precedents
- National Deliberation Project: XXX,XXX+ participants across 28+ policy consultations. 80% led to government action.
- Major AI Lab's Collective Constitutional AI: ~1,000 participants used mass-deliberation platform to define behavioral norms for an AI model. The publicly-designed model showed less bias than the internally-designed one.
- Participatory Budgeting (NYC): XXX,XXX+ participants over 10 years, allocating $XXXM.
- Research Partner FtC SF Pilot ([Month] 2026): $XXK experiment where AI agents deliberate on proposals. Results directly informing this design.
What's new here: none of these combined AI agents + real financial stakes + privacy-preserving voting + a month-long timeframe + a non-crypto-native population. Each element exists in isolation. The integration is the experiment.
Budget & Sponsorship
As anchor sponsor, Partner Organization' contribution covers the core infrastructure of the governance experiment and positions the partner at the center of a high-visibility, first-of-its-kind initiative at the intersection of AI, governance, and public goods funding.
| Category | Allocation |
|---|---|
| Governance Pool (community-allocated funds) | $XX,XXX |
| Platform Development & Integration | $XX,XXX |
| Attendance (5x Edge tickets) & Sponsorship (Anchor Tier) | $XX,XXX |
| On-site Programming (talks, workshops, design sprints) | $XX,XXX |
| Operations & Logistics (2-week intensive) | $XX,XXX |
| Marketing, Promotion & Content | $XX,XXX |
| Research & Evaluation | $X,XXX |
| Total | $XXX,XXX |
Additional partners (Allocation Lab, DRL, Open Deliberation Platform) may contribute supplementary funding or in-kind technology, expanding the scope toward the stretch goals outlined above.
Anchor Sponsor Benefits
- Primary branding across all governance experiment communications, signage, and publications.
- Co-authorship on research outputs and datasets.
- Keynote and speaking slots during the two-week intensive programming block.
- Direct input into experiment design, mechanism selection, and partner coordination.
- Access to raw, anonymized participation and allocation data.
Due Diligence Tracks
Beyond the core governance experiment, Community Event offers Partner Organization a unique opportunity to field-test portfolio projects across each of the partner's four strategic focus areas. We propose running dedicated experiment tracks — each paired with one or two projects from the partner's ecosystem — that serve as live due diligence: teams build, demo, and stress-test their work with a real community over 2–4 weeks, generating the kind of signal that pitch decks and whitepapers can't.
Each track includes two tickets for the partner team, hands-on support from Our Organization in designing and running their experiment or residency at Esmeralda, and a structured output (report, demo, dataset, or community feedback) that the partner can use to evaluate further funding.
$XX,XXX per partner experiment. Each partner team defines the scope and format of their track — whether that's a residency, a live experiment, a summit, or a build sprint. the partner can fund any combination of these directly; alternatively, partner teams that are independently interested can self-fund or co-sponsor their track, with the partner providing the strategic endorsement and Our Organization providing the operational scaffolding. We are already in conversation with all of the teams listed below.
Sovereign Digital Public Infrastructure
A residency track exploring what sovereign digital identity and privacy-preserving infrastructure looks like when deployed in a real community. Possible experiments: deploying decentralized ID or Privacy Compute Lab's fully homomorphic encryption tools for privacy-preserving credential verification across Community Event, e.g., anonymous proof of attendance, encrypted reputation scores, or private voting infrastructure that feeds into the governance experiment. Similar in spirit to the Decentralized Tech Residency at Community Event South America, but focused specifically on sovereign compute and digital public infrastructure.
AI & Crypto-Native Public Goods Funding at Nation-Scale
This track runs naturally alongside the core governance experiment's capital allocation track. Partner teams deploy and compare their specific funding mechanisms, Funding Platform's quadratic funding rounds, Allocation Lab's allocation models, using the same community and the same pool of proposals. The result: the first direct, apples-to-apples comparison of public goods funding mechanisms with a non-crypto-native population at meaningful scale. Public Goods Convening could anchor a 2-day convening during the intensive programming weeks, similar to how Partner Week operated at Community Event 2024.
Crypto-Native Governance & Democracy
A governance residency where teams building civic tooling live in the community they're trying to govern. Governance Framework Team brings governance accountability frameworks; the broader Network State Community ecosystem bring experience running popup and network cities with onchain governance. The track could test governance tooling across real village decisions, resource allocation, conflict resolution, community rules, and produce comparative data on which tools actually increase participation and satisfaction. This extends the lineage of the Science Summit and Decentralized Tech Residency into governance-native tooling.
Decentralized Climate Infrastructure & Finance
Climate Protocol is demonstrating that DePIN can coordinate real renewable energy at scale. At Esmeralda, a climate track could involve deploying Climate Protocol's solar protocol on-site, instrumenting the venue's energy infrastructure, running a live carbon-offset market among attendees, or prototyping community-owned solar credits. This mirrors the hands-on, build-in-public ethos of previous Our Organization tracks (like the Science Summit's Pitch Day) but applied to climate infrastructure, giving Climate Protocol a live testbed and the partner a front-row seat to evaluate real-world DePIN performance.
Each partner experiment includes 2 tickets for the partner team and full operational support from Our Organization. the partner can fund any combination of these directly. Partner teams can also self-fund their $XXK track or co-sponsor it with the partner. The model is flexible. Together with the $XXXK anchor sponsorship, all four tracks would bring the total to $XXX,XXX if fully partner-funded, but the actual cost to the partner depends on which tracks partners cover themselves.
| Focus Area | Potential Partners | Cost per Partner |
|---|---|---|
| OS1 - Sovereign Digital Public Infrastructure | Identity Lab, Identity Org, Privacy Compute Lab | $XX,XXX |
| OS2 - AI & Crypto-Native PGF at Nation-Scale | Public Goods Convening, Funding Platform, Allocation Lab | $XX,XXX |
| OS3 - Crypto-Native Governance & Democracy | Governance Framework Team, Network State Community, Community DAO | $XX,XXX |
| OS4 - Decentralized Climate Infrastructure | Climate Protocol | $XX,XXX |
| Total (all four tracks) | $XXX,XXX |
Appendix: Our Organization × Partner Organization — Previous Collaborations
- Partner Week at Community Event 2024 ([Location], California). Partner Organization hosted Partner Week Field Building from [Event Dates], 2024, at Community Event. The week addressed four tracks: Science Track A, Science Track B, Science Track C, and Science Track D, bringing together researchers and builders from the the partner network and the broader Community Event community. example.com/event-recap
- Science Summit at Community Event 2025 ([Location], California). A 2.5-day summit ([Event Dates], 2025) for founders, researchers, and builders working at the frontier of neural interfaces and NeuroAI. Featured deep dives into brain-computer interfaces, neural modeling, and cognitive augmentation, including a Pitch Day with $XXK–$XXXK awards. example.com/event-review
- Decentralized Tech Residency at Community Event South America 2025 ([Location], South America). From [Event Dates], 2025, the Decentralized Tech Residency brought together builders working on DAO governance, onchain collective intelligence, pathogen detection, Sybil-resistant token allocation, and more. Grounded in decentralized tech principles, residents worked on projects spanning digital identity, reputation, governance, and cultural currencies. example.com/event-review-2
Next Steps
- Alignment call between Our Organization and Partner Organization teams to refine scope, confirm timeline, and discuss which the partner team members would be on-site.
- Partner coordination: Confirm which additional partners (Open Deliberation Platform, Allocation Lab/Governance Framework Team, DRL) will participate and in what capacity.
- Experiment design sprint: Finalize mechanism selection, governance pool parameters, and evaluation framework.
- Platform development: Begin integration work with selected deliberation platform (target: ready for deployment by late [Month] 2026).