Civic continuity
FractaVolta is primarily an infrastructure project: energy, compute, cognition, and operations.
The civic layer enters when a community wants its deliberation tools to run on infrastructure it can inspect, operate, and outlive.
The relevant platform is Inseme: an open-source civic stack for participation, consultation, deliberation, and democratic transparency. FractaVolta can host or operate this layer on local-first energy and compute infrastructure when a deployment requires it.
Deep product and developer documentation belongs in the inseme repository. This page only explains the FractaVolta interface.
What can be deployed
Inseme Agora
A direct and liquid democracy tool for physical or remote assemblies:
- proposals;
- motions;
- votes;
- topic-specific delegation;
- digital gestures;
- replayable event records.
Kudocracy.Survey
A consultation and engagement platform:
- citizen consultations;
- collaborative wiki;
- citizen gazette;
- social café;
- multi-instance deployment for communes, campuses, associations, or territories.
Ophélia
Ophélia is the AI mediation layer. It can help participants formulate, summarize, compare, and clarify positions.
It must not:
- decide for citizens;
- impose a political position;
- absorb human responsibility;
- make binding choices invisible.
When hosted on FractaVolta infrastructure, Ophélia can run on sovereign or local inference backends where appropriate.
Optional civic extensions
Depending on the site, the civic layer can connect to:
- local knowledge bases;
- citizen science;
- biodiversity observation;
- public dashboards;
- issue tracking;
- deliberation archives;
- Cogentia continuation records.
Why this matters
Software for democratic participation is often weakened by three dependencies:
- Vendor lock-in. The platform owner can change terms, extract data, or shut the service down.
- Opaque AI mediation. Summaries and recommendations can become politically consequential while remaining technically invisible.
- Centralised hosting. One server or provider failure can interrupt many communities at once.
FractaVolta's answer is infrastructural:
- Own the instance. Each community can run its own deployment.
- Audit the process. Events, summaries, objections, and decisions should be inspectable.
- Federate without centralising. Communities can interoperate without surrendering control.
- Separate epistemic assistance from political authority. AI may help produce knowledge; living humans alone govern.
Rule 0
The civic layer follows a strict boundary:
AI agents may participate in epistemic production. Binding political decisions belong to living humans.
This is not a slogan. It is an architectural constraint. The system should preserve who proposed, who voted, who delegated, who objected, who summarized, and who decided.
Relation to FractaVolta
FractaVolta contributes:
- local energy continuity;
- sovereign or local compute when useful;
- deployment and operational discipline;
- audit trails through Cogentia-style continuations;
- infrastructure that can host civic tools without depending on opaque SaaS providers.
Inseme contributes the civic applications themselves.
Cogentia contributes the method for preserving reasoning, objections, continuations, and derived products.
How to use it
As a citizen using an existing instance:
- visit your community's instance;
- participate in consultations, votes, and deliberations;
- read the public records and audit trails where available.
As a community looking to deploy:
- start from the inseme repository;
- review the multi-instance pattern;
- consider whether local energy, local compute, or audit trails are required;
- if the deployment should be full-stack, see For deployers.
As a developer:
- read the COP Manifesto;
- review the BRIQUE_SPEC;
- contribute through issues, forks, or pull requests.
Ethics and neutrality
Inseme is designed as neutral civic infrastructure. It should not finance, promote, or support a specific party, campaign, candidate, or list.
The tool layer may assist deliberation. It must not replace democratic responsibility.
Any deployment involving AI mediation, personal data, public consultation, or political participation requires explicit governance, data protection, and auditability.
Contact
For full-stack civic deployment on FractaVolta infrastructure:
For Corsica-based field projects, see FractaVolta en Corse.