AI Commons
Shared AI infrastructure for communities that want access, privacy, and control.
Most organizations approach AI as a subscription decision — which chatbot, which API key, which vendor. AI Commons is a different question: what happens when AI access is treated as civic infrastructure — something a community governs, allocates, and monitors together, the way it already does with utilities, libraries, and public transit?
This is a working proof-of-concept exploring that question: a platform where cities, libraries, schools, nonprofits, and public agencies share trusted AI access, track usage transparently, and vote on how shared resources get allocated — rather than each institution buying its own disconnected tools.
What it demonstrates:
This build exists to show a specific kind of thinking: AI systems design that goes beyond prompting and app wrappers, into the governance, equity, and infrastructure questions organizations will actually face as AI becomes embedded in daily civic life. Every screen is built around a real operational question — not “can AI do X,” but “how does a community manage AI doing X, fairly and transparently, at scale.”
What’s inside:
- Dashboard — real-time view of community-wide AI usage, cost savings, and infrastructure health
- Organizations — ten participating institutions (library, school district, food bank, legal aid, and more), each with its own allocation, usage, and privacy tier
- Model Marketplace — eight AI models spanning cloud, community-hosted, local, and air-gapped deployment, each matched to appropriate use cases
- Credit Allocations — usage-based flags for capacity pressure, underutilization, and equity review, so allocation decisions are visible rather than opaque
- Privacy & Routing — a five-tier privacy framework mapping real use cases (legal aid intake, emergency planning, resume support) to the right level of data handling
- Infrastructure Monitor — live-style health tracking across community GPU nodes and cloud overflow capacity
- Governance — actual proposals (new hardware, model approvals, allocation changes) with votes, risk levels, and community benefit framing
- Use Case Library — ten real civic applications, from multilingual resource guides to disaster readiness communication
A note on scope:
This is a proof-of-concept built on realistic mock data, not a production system with live model routing or GPU infrastructure. The goal is to prove out the governance and operations layer a real version would need — the interface, the logic, the decision-making patterns — as a foundation for what civic AI infrastructure could look like in practice.
Launch AI Commons →