Greetings RadicalxChanger,
Inside every act of public participation lives a question: what does this system assume I’m capable of?
For most of the democratic systems we live with, the answer is a quiet, structural not very much — sometimes just one bit of information, every few years. But to give no trust, as Audrey Tang often quotes from the Tao Te Ching, is to get no trust. We can’t expect people to give their best to systems that do not ask it of them.
This month, two pieces of work in our orbit are trying to ask more.
The first is a new book. Finding Light Through the Cracks: Reinventing Democracy with Audrey Tang, by Martin Rausch with Tom Atlee and Jenna Büchy, distills a decade of co-creative governance experiments in Taiwan into something vivid and hopeful. Their launch essay walks through three different democracies and their regulatory responses to the introduction of Uber. The differences, they show, reflect deeper theories of who citizens are, encoded as institutional architecture, and over time they teach us what to expect of ourselves.
The second is a new pilot project in New York City. From May 9–17, Community Week NYC will convene over 600 community builders from across the city — the organizers, hosts and quiet connectors doing the relational work that holds neighborhoods together. RxC is partnering with Community Week to ask them, directly, what that work needs to thrive. Community builders are civic infrastructure in the truest sense: the scaffolding that unlocks individual agency and turns it into collective capacity. Resourcing them well is one of the more direct ways a city can widen the channel through which people feed back into the systems that shape their lives. On May 15, Jack Henderson will present the findings at a public event, with the goal of feeding the results into advocacy with the city — and, we hope, earning the attention of the Mayor’s Office and the new Office of Mass Engagement.
From Around the Pluriverse
→ ⿻ Pluralität is now in German! And available for purchase on Amazon.
→ Host a Plural Event: A Global Conversation on Deliberative Democracy
→ Safeguarding Sovereignty with Data as Soil
→ How Reverse Game Theory Could Solve The Housing Shortage
→ Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation: Call for Contributions due May 25
→ The Protopian Prize | Fiction Contest
Where To Meet Us Next
May 6, Virtual: You’re invited to our May 2026 Community Call tomorrow, on Wednesday, May 6 at 9 am ET (UTC-5) | 3 pm CET (UTC+1). Please note the call time. Use this Typeform to add agenda items, and we’ll see you there!
Live long and prosper,
The RxC Team