Weaver
Memory and context
Before a hearing, it can connect older plans, testimony, public records, and unresolved questions—without hiding disagreement.
Contact usAn institution for civic intelligence
Communities should not have to start every consequential decision from scratch.
Neighborhood AI builds community-governed civic memory: the knowledge, relationships, questions, and commitments a neighborhood needs to remember, reason, negotiate, and act together.
Not a chatbot that speaks for a neighborhood.
Knowledge is not neutral. Neither is forgetting.
Why AI / why now
AI can help communities connect the record. It does not get to decide what matters.
Local history, public records, and lived knowledge are often scattered across files, meetings, and people's memories. Used carefully, AI may help people organize what is already there, see patterns, and ask better questions when a neighborhood decision is underway.
It cannot replace judgment, organizing, or community governance. Community members retain authority over the questions, the knowledge that is used, and the decisions that follow.
Read our approach →Why civic memory
Communities are surrounded by information. What they lack is a durable way to connect it.
Plans, testimony, photos, oral history, public records, organizing knowledge, and unfinished arguments do not need to collapse into one account to become useful. They need to remain findable, connected, reviewable, and available when a decision is on the table.
Public record
Lived experience
A promise
Unresolved question
community
memoryis plural
memoryis plural
SOURCE TRAIL
REVIEW STATE
Illustrated composite
Around a neighborhood public process
Each consequential choice should strengthen the community’s capacity for the next one.
- 01Before
Before a hearing, proposal, or public meeting, bring together the source record, lived experience, past commitments, authority, risks, and unresolved questions.
- 02During
During the public process, compare real alternatives with evidence, assumptions, tradeoffs, uncertainty, and disagreement still visible.
- 03After
After a decision, follow promises into implementation: what happened, what changed, what remains incomplete, and what should inform the next public process.
Supporting civic capacities
Technology has a supporting role. Community judgment stays in front.
Wayfinder
People, power, and responsibility
It can help a group see who holds power, who is responsible for the next step, who is affected, and where accountability sits.
Constellator
Alternatives and action
It can help a group compare different ways forward, surface counterdesign options, and prepare action around a public decision.
Shared boundary: AI may help organize and inspect local knowledge. People set the questions, check the sources, keep disagreement visible, and decide what action to take. See the design principles.
Design principles
These principles guide the work before a tool makes a claim.
Source-grounded decision support means people can see the records behind a finding, how the finding was reached, what is uncertain, and what is missing. Community direction emerges through people remembering, organizing, questioning, disagreeing, imagining, and deciding together.
ProvenanceWhere did this come from?
PluralityWhat remains contested?
PermissionWho authorized its use?
RevisionHow can it be corrected?
RefusalWhat should not be retained?
BenefitWho gains—and who may be exposed?
Lineage
Communities have always built institutions that remember.
- 01Memory
Community institutions preserve experience, obligations, and reasoning across generations.
- 02Judgment
Collective learning turns lived knowledge into strategy without flattening disagreement.
- 03Action
Neighborhood AI extends this civic function; it does not claim to replace it, automate it, or speak for the neighborhood.
Community knowledge deserves institutions built to hold it with care.
We are developing Neighborhood AI through neighborhood partnerships, practical prototypes, and shared learning in Boston.
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