The tagline at the top of this page reads "Open-Source Visioning for a U.S. Democracy Movement." Central to the "open-sourcedness" of the Citizen Now project is that the Statements that lie at the heart of the project are provisioned with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License. Creative Commons, for its part, maintains on its Web site — as a resource for those who are considering using a Creative Commons license — a "library" of Case Studies. This online library, which includes 373 studies as of this writing, is intended to demonstrate — "for inspiration, business models, or precedents — the... Continue reading

Washington Monument under construction, 1859, with exterior building blocks of white marble The starting point for this Citizen Now project is the following series of "Draft Guiding Statements for a Community Convening a Democracy Movement for the United States" — consensus-developed from August 2010 to January 2012 by the Principles and Purpose Working Group, in conversation with nearly 2,000 of their fellow citizens. (For more on the founding history of this project, please click here.) These draft Statements are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license, which you can view here. Draft Guiding Statements For a Community Convening a... Continue reading

Starlings in flight Spring and early summer 2010 saw the emergence in the United States of a new political group known as the Coffee Party. The founders of this group outlined a compelling vision of a new approach to political discourse and problem solving — an approach anchored in civility and shared values rather than party and ideology. This initial vision was oriented less towards developing traditional policy positions than towards building a citizens movement capable of ushering in the structural reforms that are necessary to secure the full and equal participation of every U.S. citizen in their own self-governance,... Continue reading