CityOS | A Policy Diffusion Tool
OVERVIEW
Innovation and technology often follow an exponential curve due to cumulative knowledge and network effects. Yet the public sector lacks the tools to support these dynamics, keeping progress linear. This widens the gap between available innovations and city policies, which can be thought of as the 'DNA' of civic life, determining what can be done, where, and how. CityOS aims to solve this metabolic mistmatch.
CityOS proposes reimagining public policy as modular, open-source "code" that is remixable, forkable, and shareable. Imagine a GitHub for cities, a transparent platform where local governments can both trial new policy and civic innovations locally, but also easily share, test, and iterate on them collaboratively by adapting proven solutions. Add to this real-time performance and sensing data, targeted funding incentives, and standardized implementation tools, and we have an opportunity to upgrade institutional operating systems into a globally networked, locally-grounded innovation lab.
The end goal: Rebooting the Urban Operating System
CityOS is building a policy-sharing protocol that lets cities treat public policy like open infrastructure to trade, remix, and scale civic solutions through shared data, tools, and delivery systems. By introducing collaborative market dynamics into the public sector, CityOS helps effective innovations scale faster and more reliably. The platform shifts trust away from fragile political cycles and eases the load on centralized instituitions toward verifiable, community-driven governance, improving accountability, efficiency, and long-term impact.
Motivation
This applied research, first incubated under the Ethereum Foundation Summer of Protocols arm, explores smart contracts as enabling infrastructure for open and adaptive urban governance. With CityOS we aim to provide a mechanism for cities to rapidly refine policies and their effectiveness in response to evolving real-world conditions and ensuring governance remains transparent and closely aligned with local realities.
The goal is to establish city-level governance as an open-source ecosystem, where traditionally rigid municipal policies, ineffective enforcement, and policy refinement through bottom and tp down input are broken down into flexible, interoperable components; effectively "lego-like" building blocks of policy modules, funding, and data that other cities with similar challenges can openly refer to, refine, remix and deploy.
We work at the policy level because funding, programs, and civic innovation delivery at scale run downstream of this main bottleneck.
We work at the city level because cities are small enough to be agile and responsive to new ideas and change, yet large enough to wield political power and deliver meaningful impact.
CityOS aims to formalize the often ad-hoc process of policy diffusion and create more efficient, revenue-positive mechanisms for governmental capacity sharing and policy implementation.
- Cities face a metabolic mismatch: Civic innovation grows exponentially, while policy evolves linearly. CityOS acts as “civic middleware” to bridge this gap.
- Policy replication is broken and underleveraged: Copying policies is difficult and when it is done, it often fails without context-specific adjustments and adequate institutional capacity.
- Trust is stuck in bureaucracy: Citizens distrust slow, opaque processes and political will is fickle. Data-driven feedback loops shift trust to technologic infrastructure, proven precedent and measurable outcomes that can demonstrate the viability of a policy across jurisdictions.
- Informal policy sharing already exists: Adding structured and trusted replication tools to this ad-hoc, manual process can help cities become more responsive and adaptive to changing needs and available innovations.
- A bet that the institutions of the future will look more like networks than hierarchies
Vision
The CityOS vision borrows practices from the world of open source software, while also recognizing that government and laws are slow to change for good reason.
Open source developers globally share, fork, and improve code, building on each other’s work and collectively contributing to the maintenance of code repositories. There is a culture of freely and collaboratively sharing and integrating what works, while improving and fixing what doesn’t. Code is seen as a public good, where everyone benefits from its diffusion, transparency and accessibility.
By applying this collaborative ethos to policymaking and governance, CityOS aims to open source governance and speed up the adoption of vetted public sector innovations where they are most needed by:
- Aligning Incentives: A Great Lakes coalition automatically allocates funds to clean water projects based on real-time pollution sensors.
- Forking Legislation: Adapt Barcelona’s superblocks or Oslo’s carbon budget with one click.
- Tracking Iterations: See how Seoul modified Vienna’s social housing model for high-density needs.
- Pooling Resources: 100+ cities jointly fund R&D for high-risk, high-reward policies and innovations to slash costs.
- Sharing Capacity: Jakarta’s flood management team “contracts” expertise to Vancouver for disaster resilience projects.
Roadmap
Open Source Policy Sharing and Querying Tool: Establishing an open-source platform and ecosystem enabling cities to easily share, search, and query proven policy models
Data-Linked Policies and Infrastructure Marketplace: Policies on the platform are enriched with performance data and outcomes, alongside a marketplace for cities to access standardized delivery infrastructure solutions
Funding and Implementation Marketplace : Introducing structured funding mechanisms where cities pool resources to co-fund and co-implement civic innovations, streamlining resource allocation, reducing costs, and facilitating rapid policy scaling.
Cross-City Collaboration and Continuous Policy Adaptation: Establishing structured collaboration channels where cities continuously refine policies through shared insights, experiences, and best practices. Transparent benchmarking and feedback loops facilitate ongoing improvements, enabling quicker adoption of successful innovations across the network.
Use Case Scenarios
Policy as Reusable, Remixable Protocols
Policies act as “legos” for rulemaking, enabling cities to stack predefined rules (e.g. zoning limits, emissions thresholds) or create custom ones. Smart -contracts support compliance to make governance logic transparent, executable and auditable, while structured replication tools standardize what works, while enabling local customization.
- A mid-sized city exploring “15-minute city” policies uses CityOS to instantly access Barcelona’s superblock model—including cost data, resident feedback, and air quality results. They adapt the blueprint to their grid layout, avoiding a $2M consultant study and rerouting funding to focus on unique local factors that need to be taken into account.
New Revenue via Administrative Markets
Cities monetize proven policies and implementation expertise by licensing them to others via inter-governmental agreements. This creates incentives for bureaucracies to refine and implement good solutions while also generating revenue to support local public goods and infrastructure.
- Signapore’s congestion pricing team earns revenue by licensing their tolling algorithms and public outreach playbook via CityOS. New York City pays a fee to access these tools, cutting 3 years off their rollout timeline. NYC’s implementation is recorded and tracked in CityOS, with data and policy improvement contributions rewarded by the platform as they contribute to a shared data trust.
Shared Procurement Pools
Cities jointly negotiate contracts for shared needs like software and infrastructure, reducing costs, avoiding vendor lock-in, and ensuring transparency through shared performance data. CityOS accelerates this existing process by enabling rapid participation in existing agreements between partner municipalities, eliminating redundant procurement processes.
- Helsinki, Toronto, and Barcelona jointly procure air quality monitoring sensors via CityOS, achieving 50% savings and leveraging shared performance metrics to quickly identify and address equipment reliability issues and areas of improvement.
Interagency Budget Integration
Cities pool funds from traditionally separate budgets (transportation, housing, climate) into cross-cutting projects. CityOS uses smart contracts to auto-allocate resources based on predefined KPIs such as emission reductions and timely delivery, unlocking stranded funds, and transparently tracking ongoing performance to quickly reallocate resources if KPIs are unmet.
- Los Angeles merges housing, transit, and climate budgets via CityOS for a transit-oriented housing initiative, unlocking $200M in stranded funds, accelerating completion by 8 months, and exceeding equity and emissions targets through transparent, continuously updated KPI dashboards.
Curent Phase: Policy Modules Pilots Next ︎︎︎ MVP & Ecosystem Building Contact: rithikha@v6acolab.org