THE CYBERNETIC SOCIETY LIVE · NORTH GOA

The AI village for a better India.

Indian societies work best when self-contained, high-trust and local. Can we extend that trust to the taluka, state and nation? We think so.

See it live in Goa How it works
01 · What already works

India runs on small societies that work.

The village. The women's self-help group. The dairy cooperative. The temple and festival committees. The resident welfare association. The chit fund. Long before any app, Indians built groups that take a little from everyone, decide together, and get what no one household could get alone.

Self-contained

Empower a small group.

The money in a self-help group is its members' own savings. The cooperative's plant was paid for with its members' milk. The money and the decision sit in the same room, so nothing waits on a signature from far away.

Kerala's Kudumbashree federates neighbourhood groups into area and community societies that run on their own funds.
High trust

Everyone sees the budget.

Who paid, who was paid, and what for, read out at the meeting. Trust here is not a feeling. It is what you get when a small group can check every line.

A village festival committee publishes its accounts on the wall. Nobody asks it to.
Local

The decisions stay local.

The people who will live with a decision are the ones who make it. They know what a borewell or a drain costs here, not in the capital. That is why the gram sabha is written into the Constitution.

About a hundred million women in India belong to a self-help group. Most meet weekly.

The limit is size. A village can run its own fund. A state has thousands of villages, and no government can sit in every meeting or read every ledger. Coordinating that many local groups has always been too hard. Can AI help us coordinate?

02 · Goa, now Live experiment

The shops of North Goa are voting on a ₹5 lakh common fund.

A common fund, a kitty, for things the shops of one lane can use together: a shared delivery scooter, one bulk order of bags and boxes, one person who does the licence paperwork for all of them. Think of a village well. No one shop can dig it; every shop drinks from it. The shops vote on who digs it.

Map of North Goa with the registered businesses as dots, joined into one Commons
₹0in the fund, from private money
0shops in, 5 verified
0ideas on the board
₹0asked for so far
asked for ₹2,58,000left ₹5,00,000paid ₹0 · approved ₹0
  • Sign-up opensEach shop says what it needs. Where two needs rhyme, the AI writes a draft and names the scheme that could carry part of it.
  • First round closesnextVotes counted, plan approved, the first things bought.
  • Second round closesIf money is left. Same steps, shorter.
  • Final reportThe shops say what it did for them. Every rupee on the public board.
BOARD.LIVE · NORTH GOA
  1. 01
    Shared packaging and branding orderAI draft
    ₹45,0001
  2. 02
    Shared staff trainer and training systemAI draft
    ₹40,0001
  3. 03
    Shared licence and panchayat liaisonAI draft
    ₹48,0001
  4. 04
    Shared content creator for the laneAI draft
    ₹50,0002
  5. 05
    Shared CRM and marketing setupAI draft
    ₹50,0002
  6. 06
    Lane joint discount campaignAI draft
    ₹25,0001
Live Goa business community funding proposalslistening
The AI digital twin behind it

Two heavy words for a simple thing. A digital twin is a model of a real place, kept up to date, that you can ask questions of before you spend. Think of the sand model an engineer builds of a dam before building the dam, except this one is alive and answers back.

Goa's twin holds every one of its 203 villages and towns and 770 state schemes. It reads what the shops need and writes the first draft. It never decides. People do. How a round runs, from sign-up to the result →

Enter the Commons The deck for Goa's ministers
03 · Two old ideas

AI digital twins? Participatory budgeting?

The formal name for letting people vote on a sum of public money is participatory budgeting. In plain words: the festival committee's kitty, run by a city. Everyone can see the sum, everyone the money is for gets a vote, and the vote binds. It is thirty-seven years old and has run in more than eleven thousand places. Cities have run digital twins for a decade too. Nobody has yet let the twin write what the people then vote on.

TWO.HALVES
SHARED BUDGETING a known sum · the people vote · it binds on the ballot KITTY ₹5,00,000 one member, one vote 6 votes · plan approved drafts AI DIGITAL TWIN a model of the place · asks what is possible MandremMorjimPernemSiolimMapusa 203 villages · 770 schemes · every shop's needs Shared trainer ₹40,000 · scheme: SHG training · AI draft
← people vote on a known sumthe twin reads the needs and writes the draft →
WRITE.TO.US

One place, one sum, one officer.

A few lines is enough. Tell us the place, roughly the sum, and who to call. It comes straight to us.

Sent.

We have it. Nothing matters more to us than a place that wants to try this. You'll hear from us.
04 · Who did this before

Communities around the globe.

12 examples of local and state governments using shared budgets and digital twins. Goa is the first to put both together.

Participatory budgeting
The riverfront of Porto Alegre
Porto AlegreBrazil · 1989
A houseboat on the Kerala backwaters
KeralaIndia · 1996
The gate of Shaniwar Wada, Pune
PuneIndia · 2006
Paris from the Tour Saint-Jacques
ParisFrance · 2014
Midtown Manhattan at dusk
New YorkUnited States · 2015
Edinburgh from Calton Hill
ScotlandUnited Kingdom · 2017
AI digital twins
Marina Bay, Singapore, at dusk
SingaporeVirtual Singapore · 2014
Senate Square, Helsinki
HelsinkiFinland · 2019
The Landungsbrücken, Hamburg
HamburgGermany · 2016
The market square of Herrenberg
HerrenbergGermany · 2020
Boats at sunrise on the Ganga, Varanasi
VaranasiIndia · 2024
A street in Fontainhas, Panaji
GoaIndia · 2026
Read the evidence, with sources

Each of these is remembered by name for the official who started it, and none began larger than a taluka. People who voted on money once turned out again at the next election, the young and the poor most of all. And where they voted, more of the same budget went to drains, water and clinics. Three studies, twenty years of data, and the failures too.

Photographs from Wikimedia Commons, CC BY and CC BY-SA: Porto Alegre · Kerala · Pune · Paris · New York · Scotland · Singapore · Helsinki · Hamburg · Herrenberg · Varanasi · Goa.

05 · Questions

Common questions.

What would a department actually have to do?
Pick one place and a sum, and send a line inviting its members. The software, the vote and the public page already exist. What we ask, and what it gets back →
Does the AI decide anything?
No. It writes drafts from what members said they need, prices them locally, names the scheme that could help, and signs them as drafts. People lead, back, vote and approve. How a round runs →
Has this worked anywhere before?
Both halves have, for decades: people voting on a known sum from Porto Alegre to Kerala and Pune, and governments running models of their cities from Singapore to Varanasi. Pairing them is the new part. The evidence, with sources →
What if it fails?
The sum is small and the dates are fixed. Every rupee and every vote stays on a public page either way.
Can a village join a taluka without being overruled?
That is the design. A bigger plan goes ahead only when every group it touches says yes by its own rule, and votes count heads, not money. How that works →
Who are you, and who pays for Goa?
A small group of citizens and volunteers working from North Goa. The Goa round is paid for by one of us, from their own savings: no grant, no donor, no company behind it. Completely open-source →
06 · Notes

Learn more.

2 November 2026 · Goa Business CommonsWhat is a digital twin, and why pair it with a shared budget?Digital twins in Singapore, Helsinki, Hamburg and Varanasi; shared budgets from Porto Alegre to Kerala, Pune and Paris; what the studies found; and what the Commons takes from each.Read it → 3 November 2026How a round runs, from sign-up to the resultFor the officer who would run one: the five steps, the two heavy words explained, the calendar, and what your office has to produce.Read it → 3 November 2026What we ask of a department, and what it gets backThree asks in rising order, what each needs from you, what each returns, and which institutions it fits.Read it → 3 November 2026How a village joins a taluka without losing its sayThe one new idea: nesting dolls, the four things a group says, the three rules that keep the small one in charge, and the questions still open.Read it → 30 October 2026 · Goa Business CommonsSimulating a thousand businesses before the first real oneBefore the first real business registered, we put a thousand simulated ones through the real software and ran whole funding rounds. What we did, what broke, and the one thing no rule can fix.Read it →