Reflections from the Citizen Infrastructure seminar with Mat Mytka
We build tools for coordination, governance, and collective decision-making. We design voting mechanisms, token systems, and deliberation platforms. But what if none of them work without something more fundamental already in place?
This was the provocation Mat Mytka brought to our recent CIBC seminar—and it's one that's been sitting with me since. Mat, a researcher studying human coupling and nervous system coherence from Sydney, Australia, made a case that what he calls "low tech infrastructure" needs to come before the high tech stuff we tend to obsess over in civic technology circles.
His thesis is deceptively simple: the quality of our collective intelligence emerges from the coherence of our relational intelligence.
Mat opened with an image that stayed with me: a milk crate outside his house, filled with whatever his garden has produced that week—lemons, bananas, sweet potatoes, sometimes mangoes if the fruit bats haven't gotten to them first.
For five years, he's been filling this crate. Neighbors take what they need. Sometimes they leave something back—an avocado, a note, a bunch of bananas from their own garden. He doesn't know most of these people by name. There are no strong ties, no deep relationships. Just this tiny ritual creating a steady pulse of what he calls "relationality."
This isn't the kind of infrastructure that shows up when we're mapping governance systems or designing decision-making workflows. But it completely shapes how a neighborhood feels—and, more importantly, how resilient it becomes.
The sociologist Mark Granovetter made a distinction decades ago that our field keeps rediscovering: the difference between strong ties and weak ties.
Strong ties are your close relationships—family, close friends, the people you'd call at 3am. They're essential for intimacy, support, and trust within tight-knit groups.
Weak ties are different. They're your interactions with the barista, the neighbor you wave to, the person you smile at on your morning walk. Casual. Undemanding. Easy to overlook.
Here's what Granovetter found, and what subsequent research has confirmed: weak ties are more important for connecting networks together. Strong ties matter within a network. But it's the weak ties that enable cross-pollination between different clusters of people.
In practical terms: weak ties are what make communities resilient. They're correlated with wellbeing. They help communities adapt to shocks and crises. And they require almost nothing to cultivate—just presence, acknowledgment, a smile.
As Momcilo put it during our planning session: "With weak ties, everything is a bonus because people don't expect anything at all. When you get something, you're just happy."
Here's where Mat's analysis gets uncomfortable for those of us building civic technology.