Municipal Counter-Automation Strategy: How Communities Reclaim Software Infrastructure
- the Institute
- Dec 18, 2025
- 9 min read
Updated: Jan 3
Available on Spotify after February 9, 2026
Between 1600 and 1874, the British East India Company controlled trade across the Indian subcontinent—not through superior products, but through monopoly charter granted by the British Crown. The Company didn't just buy and sell goods; it collected taxes, maintained armies, and governed territories. When Indian textile manufacturers produced cotton cloth, they sold it to the Company or they didn't sell at all. The Company set prices, controlled distribution, and extracted wealth from every transaction. By 1800, India's share of global GDP had declined from 23% to 16% while the Company's shareholders grew rich. The monopoly ended not because the Company failed, but because the extraction became unsustainable—the 1857 rebellion forced the British government to dissolve the Company and assume direct control.
Today, fire departments across America face a similar structural trap—not colonial governors, but software vendors. In 2024, venture capital firms acquired several fire department software companies. Subscription costs jumped from $800 annually to over $5,000. Some departments now spend more on software coordination than on equipment maintenance. When public services pay rents to distant shareholders, that's not enterprise pricing—that's technofeudalism. Tax revenue flows upward to Silicon Valley investors instead of circulating within communities.
This pattern isn't unique to fire departments. Electronic health records, municipal infrastructure management, court case management—everywhere software coordinates public services, venture capital has identified rent extraction opportunities. The playbook is consistent: acquire the dominant platform, increase prices, and wait for the switching costs to seem insurmountable.
NTARI's Municipal Counter-Automation Strategy breaks this cycle through six integrated steps that transform extractive software monopolies into cooperative digital infrastructure. We're deploying it first with COER—the Community-Owned Emergency Response system—but the framework applies wherever software has captured public services.
The Six-Step Counter-Automation Process
1. Clean Room Software Development
Before writing a single line of code, NTARI assembles two separate teams. Team One studies the existing commercial software—not its underlying code, but its functionality. What features does it provide? How do users interact with it? What workflows does it enable? They document every visible behavior without ever examining how the software accomplishes these tasks.
Team Two receives this documentation and builds new software from scratch, implementing the same functionality through their own architecture. The two teams never share code or technical implementation details. This is clean room design—the legal protocol that allowed Phoenix Technologies to create IBM-compatible BIOS in the 1980s without IBM's permission, breaking the PC monopoly.
The result: software that does what communities need without reproducing proprietary code, eliminating any legal barrier to deployment.
2. Janus-Facing Architecture: Turning Citizens into Collective Intelligence
A fire breaks out in a residential neighborhood. A resident calls 911: "Fire at 1247 Elm Street." The fire department springs into action—loading equipment, routing trucks, coordinating response. They're the community's immune system against fire. But from the moment the call comes in until the fire truck arrives, the department operates blind. Did the fire spread to the neighboring house? Did residents evacuate? Is it an electrical fire or a kitchen grease fire requiring different suppression approaches?
The real first responders aren't firefighters—they're the people on scene who report the emergency. They see the fire growing. They know which rooms are occupied. They watch it jump to the neighbor's roof. All that intelligence currently gets broadcast to TikTok, Facebook, or neighborhood message boards. The person with the most critical real-time information has no way to transmit it to the incident commander racing toward the scene.
During the 1950s civil defense era, communities established networks of volunteer observers who could report bomber sightings or nuclear incidents directly to coordination centers. The architecture was simple: citizens broadcast observations inward to experts; experts broadcast instructions outward to citizens. The technology was primitive—telephone trees and radio networks—but the topology was sound. Distributed observers feeding centralized expertise created an immune system faster than any single agency could operate alone.
COER's Janus-Facing Architecture updates this pattern for networked software. Every citizen with the app becomes a potential intelligence node. When fire breaks out at 1247 Elm Street, residents open COER and broadcast status updates directly to the incident commander: "Flames visible from second story window." "Garage has propane tanks." "Elderly resident on first floor, mobility limited." These aren't social media posts—they're intelligence packets routing to the person who needs them most, the commander making decisions en route and on scene.
But the information flow works both directions. The incident commander broadcasts back through the same network: "Evacuate houses within 100 feet." "Turn off gas mains if safe to do so." "Medical staging area at corner of Elm and Oak." Every resident within the incident radius receives expert guidance in real-time. The hub-and-spoke topology turns the neighborhood into a coordinated response network—experts at the center processing distributed intelligence, citizens at the periphery acting as sensors and responders.
Now scale this pattern beyond active emergencies. Fire departments need to understand fire risk across their jurisdiction—which buildings have outdated electrical systems, which neighborhoods have dense wooden construction, where fire hydrants are obstructed. Currently, they conduct periodic inspections, but fire marshals can only visit a fraction of buildings annually. COER enables distributed voluntary fire safety inspections: residents examine their own homes and businesses using standardized checklists built into the app. "Working smoke detectors: yes/no." "Electrical panel accessible: yes/no." "Flammable materials stored properly: yes/no."
Each inspection broadcasts anonymized data to the fire department. Individually, these observations are merely interesting. Collectively, they're actionable intelligence. The department can map fire risk across the city, prioritize inspections, target safety education programs, and allocate resources based on statistical models built from thousands of voluntary reports. Citizens become distributed sensors gathering intelligence that would be impossible to collect through centralized inspection alone.
This is Janus-Facing Architecture: experts at the hub surrounded by deputized citizens broadcasting intelligence inward and receiving guidance outward. The fire department remains the trained immune response, but they operate with distributed awareness that transforms reaction time and coordination accuracy. Instead of departments as isolated data sources pushing information up to corporate platforms, communities become intelligent networks where expertise and observation flow in multiple directions simultaneously.
The pattern extends beyond emergency response. Public health departments could receive distributed symptom reporting during disease outbreaks. Transportation agencies could gather real-time traffic observations. Environmental protection could aggregate water quality testing from thousands of volunteer monitors. Every domain where expert coordination depends on distributed ground truth becomes a candidate for Janus-Facing Architecture.
This is how we build collective intelligence: not by replacing human expertise with algorithmic aggregation, but by expanding expert capacity through coordinated citizen participation. The fire department doesn't need to see everywhere—they need distributed eyes connected to central coordination. The network topology determines whether individual intelligence becomes collective intelligence or just noise aggregated on social media platforms.
3. AGPL-3 Release
COER launches under the GNU Affero General Public License v3. Here's what that means in practice: any fire department can download, modify, and deploy the software. If they improve the code—adding features, fixing bugs, optimizing performance—they must share those improvements with other users.
AGPL-3 prevents the original problem from recurring. No company can fork COER, add proprietary features, and sell the enhanced version as a service without broadcasting the source code back to the commons. Every enhancement becomes available to every department. The software evolves as a shared resource, not as competing proprietary versions.
This is how Linux conquered servers—not through corporate control, but through license terms that made every improvement shareable. AGPL-3 extends that principle to network-accessible software.
4. Mesh Development: Hardware Independence
Where does all this software run? Not on Amazon Web Services. Not on Google Cloud. NTARI is fundraising to purchase thousands of small servers designed to sit in fire station offices, city halls, or department garages.
Each device stores local department data and connects to neighboring devices, forming a mesh network that doesn't require centralized data centers. When Oakland's server communicates with Berkeley's server, data travels between them directly—no route through Virginia data centers required. Processing happens locally. Storage remains distributed. Internet connectivity enables synchronization, but doesn't dictate architecture.
Over time, as departments deploy these devices, they create alternative infrastructure. Instead of paying Amazon $3,000 monthly for cloud computing, departments can offer limited hosting capacity to each other—or to local small businesses, schools, and nonprofits. Revenue that once flowed to Seattle tech companies now circulates within municipal economies.
The servers themselves become infrastructure—like fire hydrants or street lights—maintained by the communities they serve.
5. English +5 Multilingual Broadcasting
NTARI doesn't release software just in English. Our English +5 policy requires simultaneous translation into the five most widely-spoken languages on the internet: Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, and Arabic. Together, these six languages reach over 4 billion people—more than half the world's population.
Why does emergency response software need global translation? Because fire departments in São Paulo face similar vendor lock-in as departments in Sacramento. Because Mumbai's disaster coordination challenges resemble Miami's. Because when Chengdu develops better resource allocation algorithms, Chicago should be able to learn from them. Network effects work in reverse too—the more departments worldwide that deploy COER, the stronger the cooperative alternative becomes, the harder vendor monopolies are to sustain.
Translation isn't charity—it's strategic network expansion. Every language unlocks a new regional network of potential contributors and adopters.
6. Broadcast Preservation Policy
Software that exists in only one place can disappear. COER's source code gets archived across multiple repositories: GitHub, GitLab, Internet Archive, university research libraries, and government preservation systems. We register it in Software Heritage—the permanent archive for open-source code. We submit documentation to DPLA (Digital Public Library of America) and international equivalents.
If NTARI dissolves, if our GitHub account gets compromised, if a corporate acquisition attempt targets our repositories—the code survives. It exists in dozens of locations worldwide, retrievable by anyone who needs it. This is how LibreOffice survived when Oracle acquired OpenOffice. This is how Mastodon proliferated when Twitter's corporate governance became unstable.
The broadcast preservation policy treats software as cultural heritage—too important to depend on any single organization's survival.
The Compound Effect
These six steps work together, creating compound resilience. Clean room development eliminates legal barriers. Janus-facing architecture transforms citizens into collective intelligence. AGPL-3 keeps improvements cooperative. Mesh hardware removes cloud dependency. Multilingual release expands the network. Broadcast preservation ensures permanence.
The result: fire departments that spent $5,000 annually on software subscriptions now pay $0 for software and $200-400 for hardware amortized over five years. The difference doesn't disappear—it converts to firefighter salaries, equipment upgrades, and training programs. Multiply that across 30,000 fire departments in America, and hundreds of thousands globally.
But the strategy isn't limited to emergency response. NTARI can deploy it wherever software extracts rents from public services:
Electronic health records: Where Epic Systems charges hospitals 2-3% of annual operating budgets
Court case management: Where Tyler Technologies monopolizes municipal legal systems
Infrastructure monitoring: Where Esri's ArcGIS dominates urban planning software
School administration: Where Blackboard captures education management systems
Every monopolized software category becomes a candidate for counter-automation. Every community service paying rents to distant shareholders can redirect those funds back into local infrastructure. The six-step process scales—not just technically, but economically and legally.
This is how communities reclaim digital sovereignty: not through aggressive competition with tech giants, but through patient construction of cooperative alternatives that prove more sustainable than extractive platforms. The British East India Company fell not because consumers revolted, but because the structural advantages of monopoly became unsustainable when confronted with popular resistance and governmental intervention. NTARI's counter-automation strategy applies the same principle through technical architecture rather than colonial rebellion.
The monopolies won't collapse overnight. But every fire department that deploys COER, every hospital that adopts cooperative health records, every municipality that chooses mesh hardware over cloud subscriptions—each decision fragments the extractive model a little more, proves the cooperative alternative viable, and accelerates the transition.
Learn More
Clean Room Development:
Cooperative Software Infrastructure:
Collective Intelligence and Network Topology:
Technofeudalism and Rent Extraction:
Municipal Digital Infrastructure:
Join the Counter-Automation Movement
The six-step municipal counter-automation strategy won't execute itself. We need developers who understand clean room methodology, designers who can build Janus-facing interfaces that turn distributed observers into collective intelligence, translators who can maintain English +5 documentation, and strategists who can identify which monopolized software categories to tackle next.
If you've read this far, you recognize that software monopolies aren't inevitable—they're architectural choices we can remake. Join NTARI's technical community in our Slack workspace where we're building COER and planning the next counter-automation deployments: https://ntari.org/sds
Or support the research, development, and hardware manufacturing that makes cooperative municipal infrastructure possible. NTARI operates as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit—we answer to communities, not shareholders. Contribute at https://ntari.org/donate
Every line of code we write, every server we manufacture, every municipality that deploys cooperative software, every citizen who becomes part of a collective intelligence network—it all accelerates the transition from extractive platforms to community-owned digital infrastructure.
For press inquiries, partnership opportunities, or general questions about NTARI's counter-automation work, contact us at info@ntari.org.
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