Civic Process

Semantic & Data Protocol

One of four canonical Civic.Social specifications, and the interactive unit of the model. Defines structured, stateful civic processes — voting, participatory budgeting, deliberation — that enable participation between citizens, organizations and institutions. Specifies a process lifecycle (canonical vocabulary plus lifecycle profiles), identity, eligibility and disclosure requirements, integration with the Civic Activity model, and interface contracts for creation, descriptors and actions. A process type is implemented and distributed as a Civic Process Plugin, registered with a host space's process registry; this specification defines the contract a plugin implements, while the companion Civic Plugin Architecture defines how it is packaged, scoped and installed.

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Details

License Documentation only under CC-BY 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt with attribution. No implementation code, licence for implementations, or reference implementation is present in this repository
Dev Status 📝 Draft
Owner Civic.Social — 501(c)(3) nonprofit civic technology initiative; documentation published through the Mosaic Foundation GitHub organization. Individual specifications carry a named document owner in YAML frontmatter
Governing Body Civic.Social (501(c)(3) nonprofit) — single-organization specification authorship; individual documents carry one named owner in frontmatter. No external standards body, multi-stakeholder process or independent editorial board
Country United States (Civic.Social is a 501(c)(3), a US federal tax designation; specific location not published in the repository)
Start Year 2026
Stack Language-agnostic specification; no implementation stack defined in the documentation
Funding Nonprofit — Civic.Social is a 501(c)(3); no specific funder or grant disclosed in the repository. The repository contains case materials explicitly directed at funders and partners
Last Investigated Aug 3, 2026

Use Case Domains

Group Formation & Governance

Affordances

Slow deliberation Dissent pathways

Semantic & Data Protocol Attributes

Origins Civic technology / participatory democracy — motivated by the need for a standard, interoperable model for structured civic participation so that processes are portable across host spaces rather than bound to a single platform
Database N/A — a specification; defines no storage layer
Query Language N/A — no query language defined in the documentation reviewed
Data Formats Process descriptors, action contracts and lifecycle state, integrated with the Civic Activity model; the specification uses RFC 2119 conformance language throughout. Full serialization detail not extracted from the specification
Collaborative Live Editing N/A — specification, not an editing surface
Rich Text Editing N/A — specification
Mobile Support N/A — specification; client support is a matter for implementations
Web Support N/A — specification; no implementation exists to assess
Native Apps N/A — specification
Terms Free / open documentation under CC-BY 4.0; no fees and no registration
Funds Unknown — no figures published
Based On Civic.Social canonical specification set (Civic Space as host, Civic Activity for the emitted activity model, Civic Identity for eligibility and disclosure); Civic Plugin Architecture (companion document governing packaging and installation); RFC 2119 conformance language
Semantic Web Compatibility Indirect — the specification integrates with the Civic Activity model, which the specifications index describes as designed for ActivityStreams 2.0 representability. ActivityStreams 2.0 is JSON-LD based, so process-emitted activities are plausibly RDF-interpretable; the process contract itself is not described as RDF-native
Protocol Maturity / Standardization Working draft (v0.2, frontmatter status 'review') — single-organization specification with no standards-body involvement, no conformance suite and no independent implementation. RFC 2119 conformance language is used throughout, which is more discipline than most early drafts show. Refinement is planned through pilot implementations rather than through a standards process
Vocabulary / Ontology Type Civic participation process — a domain-specific vocabulary covering process lifecycle states, eligibility and disclosure requirements, and action contracts for structured participation formats such as voting, budgeting and deliberation. Not a general-purpose vocabulary
Usage Pattern Embedded in other protocols and applications — the specification defines a contract implemented by Civic Process Plugins, which are registered with a host Civic Space's process registry. It is explicitly a companion to the Civic Plugin Architecture, which governs packaging, scoping and installation