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Raw transcript:
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This was your first town hall in several months (since October/November 2025), bringing together core community members to share updates and explore new opportunities. The meeting had strong attendance from Chris Lunch (InsightShare, France), Megan (Texas), Momcilo (London), Tracy Kunkler (North Carolina), Simone Vagnoni, and Alessandro.
The meeting successfully reconnected the community after a multi-month gap and identified concrete collaboration opportunities that align with CIBC's mission of connecting tool builders with communities needing democratic infrastructure.
Tracy joined as a first-time participant. She's a governance guide who's spent the last 10 years supporting large-scale systems change initiatives in the US, working across sectors, organizations, and networks. She started reaching out to DAOs (first connecting with Artem through RnDAO) because she saw technology as critical for decentralized governance but was concerned about "bad tech ideas" in this space. You expressed interest in having her present at an upcoming Citizen Infrastructure Seminar.
Connect with Tracy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tracykunkler/
Chris traveled to China for a month, reporting surprisingly positive observations about electrified cities (Beijing being cleaner and quieter than expected). He's focused on InsightShare's work using participatory video methodology with marginalized communities globally, and continues coordinating with your community on civic tech tools.
Simone is working on mapping democratic conversation tools, exploring how different deliberative processes integrate with each other. He presented work on framework research connecting traditional deliberative democracy with digital tools, showing a layered visualization that impressed the group.
Momcilo is developing a project called Silo (?), described as combining elements from various tools including Pol.is, with plans to demo it for interested members. He's continuing technical consulting work.
Alex (aoppo) has been making connections in Paris with people working on civic participation projects and exploring interoperability between different civic tech tools.
Chris proposed a significant collaboration opportunity: a closed webinar in March 2026 with human rights activists and NGOs wanting to explore AI tools for their work. The organizations are concerned about security but lack knowledge about available tools. Chris mentioned they weren't even aware of Pol.is or Harmonica.
Interest from the group was strong: Momcilo, Tracy, Alex, and Simone all expressed willingness to participate. This represents a concrete application of CIBC's embedded research approach with a clearly defined community need.
Artem’s Programming Proposal You shared a proposal in the chat outlining CIBC's programming plans, which included: