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CityOS |  A  Policy Diffusion Tool



OVERVIEW
Innovation often follows 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' or rules determining what can be done, where, and how. 

CityOS proposes reimagining public policy as modular, open-source "code" that is remixable, forkable, shareable. Imagine a GitHub for cities, a transparent platform where local governments don't just research and trial new policy and civic innovation in isolation, but share, test, and iterate on them collaboratively. Add to this real-time performance data, targeted funding incentives, and standardized implementation tools, and we have an opportunity to upgrade institutional operating systems into a vibrant, globally networked innovation lab. No more wasting precious resources endlessly re-vetting and reinventing, instead, cities can focus on adapting proven solutions, refining them for local contexts, and scaling effective innovations at pace with the challenges and opportunities of the times.


The end goal: Rebooting the Urban Operating System

CityOS aims to develop policy markets where cities can share civic experiments, established policies, and associated data and delivery infrastructure. The protocol enables effective innovations to scale through collaboration, introducing the advantages of competitive market dynamics into the public sector to better support public-interest goods and innovation. An open-source, transparent platform serves to shift trust from short-term political will and centralized institutions and processes to verifiable, community-driven governance, fostering greater accountability, efficiency, and collective impact.

MOTIVATION 
This applied research and proposed platform 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

BThe CityOS vision borrows from the world of software, while also recogniing 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.

A similar approach is starting to be seen in the civic and public sector. For example, the Linux Foundation’s Public Health (LFPH) initiative standardized health IT tools like COVID-19 exposure apps, creating interoperable standards for digital identity in a healthcare context deployed rapidly across Canada, Ireland, and multiple U.S. States.

Los Angeles County’s shared IT platform was able to cut costs by 30% across 88 cities and U.S. intergovernmental service agreements led to shared 911 systems, regional fire departments, and joint procurement initiatives, resulting in hundreds of millions in annual savings by pooling expertise, risk and resources.



Yet these models remain fragmented, limited to one-off deals or single sectors and regions.


By applying this collaborative ethos to policymaking and governance, CityOS can curate cross-jurisdictional “policy repositories” where cities:

  • Fork Legislation: Adapt Barcelona’s superblocks or Oslo’s carbon budget with one click.
  • Track Iterations: See how Seoul modified Vienna’s social housing model for high-density needs.
  • Pool Resources: 100+ cities jointly fund R&D for high-risk, high-reward policies and innovagtions to slash costs.
  • Share Capacity: Jakarta’s flood management team “contracts” expertise to Vancouver for disaster resilience projects.
  • Align Incentives: A Great Lakes coalition automatically allocates funds to clean water projects based on real-time pollution sensors.




Product & User Flows



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.





Research Areas



Protocolized Policy turns legislation into modular, executable code using tools like smart contracts and computational law frameworks, which translate legal rules into machine-readable logic. Imagine a city encoding its building codes into a “policy app” that auto-approves permits if designs meet safety specs or flags violations in real time. These digital policies can also self-update: if Barcelona improves its noise ordinance, Bogotá’s system suggests adopting the changes, much like a smartphone app update.

AI-Enabled Neutral Assessment Engines blend predictive analytics with autonomous AI agents to pinpoint solutions tailored to a city’s unique needs. Machine learning models cross-reference demographics, budgets, and real-time sensor data (e.g. traffic patterns, housing vacancies) to rank global policies by fit). AI agents then simulate outcomes in a city’s “digital twin,” testing how Barcelona’s superblocks would impact local air quality or how Helsinki’s housing model could affect rent prices. These agents flag risks (e.g. “Policy X requires 3x your current transit budget”) and suggest customizations.

Interagency Liquidity Pools dissolve bureaucratic silos by merging budgets from departments like transport, housing, and energy into blockchain-based “smart contracts.” These contracts act as vending machines for public funds: money is automatically released only when projects hit predefined goals. For example, a transit-oriented housing development might draw from housing budgets once 100 affordable units are built, from transit funds when ridership hits 5,000 daily riders, and from climate budgets after carbon emissions drop by 15%. This ensures accountability and aligns spending with outcomes.


Privacy Preservation and Verification technologies can now be leveraged through commercially available cryptography: zero-knowledge proofs (ZK proofs), fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), and multi-party computation (MPC). Cities can prove policy outcomes (e.g. emissions reductions, equitable toll pricing) without exposing sensitive data. Imagine a city validating that its congestion pricing system didn’t disproportionately burden low-income drivers by using ZK proofs to confirm an equity formula’s integrity while keeping individual incomes encrypted. Cities can jointly audit policies (e.g. homeless shelter utilization rates) without sharing raw datasets. This shifts compliance from opaque, manual audits to automated, math-based trust where citizens and regulators see proof of results, not just promises.



Business Models 


CityOS blends public-good mission with sustainable revenue. Revenue grows as cities succeed, replacing costly consultants with scalable, outcome-aligned tools. 

  • Tiered SaaS/Network Membership: Free access to all tools with tiered annual memberships
  • Marketplace Fees: 1–5% cut on policy licensing (e.g. Stockholm’s congestion pricing) and 5% on expertise-sharing.
  • Impact Partnerships: Grants/outcome-based bonds (e.g. $5M bond repays investors if heat-related ER visits drop 20%).
  • Data Insights: Transaction fees from sales made by cities on the platform selling aggregated data to trusted vendors.



Curent Phase: Concept, Validation, & Implementation Research           Next ︎︎︎ Experiments, MVP & Initial Team             Contact: rithikha@v6acolab.org