Civic IQ Open Intelligence Framework
Open Intelligence is Civic IQ’s collaborative framework for understanding challenges, aligning people and roles, experimenting through design sprints, and turning what is learned into useful tools, action, and measurable change.
Find Your Lane and Find Your Domain are the orientation tools that establish where the work begins.
The framework
Open Intelligence brings lived experience, community knowledge, organizational capacity, and accessible technology into a shared process of orientation, experimentation, creation, measurement, and continuous learning.
Understand your position, role, issue, community, and partners.
Practice, play, and reflect to understand possibilities and constraints.
Use design sprints to create tangible, testable artifacts.
Determine whether the work contributed to meaningful change.
Make the learning, tools, and methods available for others to adapt.
Bring what was learned into the next cycle.
Shared learning returns to orientation and begins the next cycle.
01 — Orient
Before creating a solution, participants examine two connected questions: How are we positioned to contribute, and where can that contribution be most useful?
Orientation tool
How are you equipped and positioned to contribute?
Perspective + capacity + role
Explore Find Your LaneOrientation tool
Where does the work need to happen?
Field + issue + community + partnership
Explore Find Your DomainLane–Domain alignment
The starting point becomes clear when perspective, capacity, and role meet a real issue, community, and partner ecosystem.
02 — Explore & Build
Alignment moves into an iterative process where participants apply what they know, experiment with what might be possible, and reflect on what they learn.
Design sprints
Time-bound collaborative cycles give the work enough structure to move without controlling the learning.
Begin with what people already know, do, and have available.
Create room to experiment without prematurely committing to a final solution.
Examine what happened, what changed, and what should happen next.
Practice → Play → Reflect → Repeat PPR — “Pepper”
A shared definition of what the sprint is intended to explore or accomplish.
Enough structure to coordinate action without limiting learning.
A clear rhythm and endpoint for the sprint, with room to adapt.
The Open Intelligence principle
Civic IQ does not treat the intelligence generated through this process as a proprietary product. The framework is designed to strengthen local agency, shared learning, and the ability of people and organizations to continue the work within their own systems.
Where it can be used
Clarify roles, capacity, priorities, and strategic direction.
Move from community need to testable programs and interventions.
Align organizational readiness, funding opportunities, and funder fit.
Establish shared roles, issues, partners, and decision-making structures.
Build tools communities can understand, control, and adapt.
Guide groups from orientation through experimentation and measurable action.
Begin the next cycle
Use Civic IQ’s Open Intelligence tools to clarify your role, understand your domain, and move shared learning into action.