The Civic Commons Access to tools for building community where you live

Reciprocal Commons License v1.0

Most entries in the Civic Commons — every entry marked RCL-1.0 — are shared under the Reciprocal Commons License v1.0, published by the Relational Technology Project. It protects the commons as a commons: freely available to neighbors, communities, and place-based organizations, with restrictions on commercial extraction by platforms, professional services, and AI systems.

This is not a standard open-source or Creative Commons license. Read it carefully.

Entries from the civic-media collection that derive from the Civic Media Cookbook remain the work of their original publishers — each of those pages names and links its original source, which governs its terms.

1. Intent

This work exists so that neighbors can strengthen the social fabric of their communities. It was created by practitioners, not for a market. This license ensures the recipes stay available to the people they were written for, while preventing their enclosure by commercial platforms, consulting firms, or AI products.

The guiding principle: if your use brings these practices closer to a neighborhood, you are welcome. If your use extracts value from them without reciprocating to communities, you need permission.

2. Definitions

  • Work means the contents of this repository: recipes, frameworks, guides, and all associated text and structure.
  • Steward means the Relational Technology Project (RTP), or any successor body RTP designates in writing.
  • Community Use means use by individuals, neighborhood groups, mutual aid networks, cooperatives, nonprofits, educational institutions, libraries, faith communities, civic associations, or any place-based organization — regardless of whether that use involves the exchange of money for physical materials or local events.
  • Commercial Service Use means incorporation of the Work into a product, service, workshop, training, course, or consulting engagement offered for payment, where the Work forms a material part of the value delivered.
  • Platform Use means making the Work or substantial portions of it available through a software platform, application, website, or digital service that is operated for commercial purposes.
  • AI Use means ingesting the Work into a machine learning training dataset, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline, or any automated system that produces outputs derived from the Work, where that system is operated for commercial purposes.
  • Derivative Work means any adaptation, remix, translation, or restructuring of the Work.

3. Freedoms — what is always allowed

The following uses require no permission, no fee, and no approval process. You simply do them.

  • Read, share, print, and distribute the Work in any format.
  • Fork, adapt, translate, and localize the Work for your community.
  • Use the Work in Community Use contexts, including selling printed booklets, zines, or other physical materials at any price.
  • Host local events, gatherings, and workshops using the Work, whether or not participants pay to attend, as long as the event is organized by a community-based group (not a commercial services firm).
  • Quote, cite, and reference the Work in journalism, academic research, and criticism.

4. Restrictions — what requires permission

The following uses require written permission from the Steward before proceeding. Permission may be granted freely, conditionally, or denied. Contact the Steward at the address listed in Section 7.

  • Commercial Service Use. Incorporating recipes into paid workshops, consulting engagements, training programs, or professional services requires permission. This includes solo practitioners, firms of any size, and independent consultants.
  • Platform Use. Making the Work available through a commercial digital platform, app, or SaaS product requires permission.
  • AI Use. Using the Work in commercial AI training datasets, RAG systems, embedding databases, or any automated system that generates outputs derived from the Work requires permission. This restriction applies to the commercial operator of the AI system, not to individual users who paste a recipe into a conversation with a general-purpose AI assistant.
  • Sublicensing. You may not sublicense the Work or grant others rights that exceed your own under this license.

Clarification on AI: An individual neighbor asking a general-purpose AI assistant about a recipe from this book is Community Use. A company building a "community building AI coach" that ingests this corpus to generate advice for paying customers is AI Use requiring permission.

5. Conditions — for all uses

Whether your use falls under Freedoms or requires permission, the following conditions always apply.

  • Attribution. Credit the Relational Technology Project and, where individual practitioners are named in a recipe, preserve their names. A reasonable attribution looks like: *"From Neighboring Recipes by the Relational Technology Project. reciprocalcommons.org"*
  • Share-Alike. Derivative Works must be published under this same license (RCL v1.0) or a Steward-approved equivalent. You may not apply additional legal terms or technological measures that restrict others from exercising the freedoms in Section 3.
  • Practitioner Credit. The recipes describe practices developed by real people in real places. When a recipe names its source, keep that name. This is not just a legal requirement — it is a relational one.

6. Stewardship

  • The Steward of this license is the Relational Technology Project.
  • The Steward may grant permissions under Section 4, update the license for future versions, and designate a successor steward.
  • Changes to this license apply only to future releases of the Work. Existing forks retain the license version under which they were forked.
  • The Steward's role is custodial, not proprietary. The Steward holds this responsibility on behalf of the practitioners and communities whose work appears here.
  • Known limitation: This compilation was assembled from publicly available practitioner knowledge. The original practitioners were not consulted about these specific license terms. Any practitioner whose work appears in the Work may request corrections, modifications, or removal by contacting the Steward. The Steward commits to evolving toward a governance model that includes practitioner voice, not just practitioner credit.

7. Contact

To request permission for uses under Section 4, to ask whether your intended use requires permission, or to request changes to how your work is represented:

The Relational Technology Project

Email: commons@relationaltechproject.org

Web: https://relationaltechproject.org

8. Disclaimer

THE WORK IS PROVIDED "AS IS," WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. THE STEWARD AND CONTRIBUTORS ARE NOT LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES, OR OTHER LIABILITY ARISING FROM USE OF THE WORK. THIS LICENSE DOES NOT CONSTITUTE LEGAL ADVICE.

9. Why this license exists

Standard open-source and Creative Commons licenses were designed for a world where maximum distribution equals maximum benefit. That assumption breaks when platforms can extract and monetize community knowledge at scale without reciprocating.

This license draws a different line. It asks: does your use bring these practices closer to a neighborhood, or further away? The freedoms are broad for the first case. The restrictions exist for the second.

The recipes in this book were developed by neighbors, for neighbors. This license keeps them there.

The canonical text of this license lives in the Neighboring Recipes repository, where it was first published. Questions about whether your use needs permission: commons@relationaltechproject.org.