Dandelion's long-term vision is to catalyze a more participatory, co-creative culture of civic engagement, both online and off. We aim to do this by providing digital infrastructure, such as our Gatherings feature, that makes it easy and intuitive to organize in decentralized, collaborative ways.

The Gatherings feature was inspired by and developed in collaboration with participatory event cultures like European Burning Man gatherings. It embodies learnings and best practices from these mature co-creative communities, such as:

• Distributed decision-making on membership via community voting on applications
• Decentralized co-creation of activities and focus areas via Teams and Timetables
• Transparent allocation of shared funds via collaborative budgeting powered by cryptocurrencies

Beyond specific functionalities, the core intention of Gatherings is to maximize agency and emergent self-organization of participants. We believe online spaces can and should be sites of, in Nathan Schneider's words, "creative, radical, democratic renaissance".

The long-term civic impact we envision is multi-layered:

1. Empowering individuals with experiences of meaningful co-creation and participation, which they will then demand and replicate in other contexts
2. Proliferating participatory, emergent models of organizing that can out-compete top-down, centralized approaches
3. Enabling the viral spread of bottom-up civic initiatives to reach critical mass and tangibly influence societal directions
4. Prototyping and normalizing participatory innovations that could eventually be adopted into formal democratic institutions

Dandelion is and has always been an open-source project. We believe this infrastructure for participatory organizing should be a fully accessible public good, able to be replicated and built upon by civic innovators everywhere.

Dandelion aims to be an enabling platform for a new generation of civic projects and leaders. Each Gathering is a "Governable Space" in Schneider's sense - a site of applied participatory governance with network effects into wider civic life. As more people have formative experiences of co-creative culture through the platform, it could help participatory organizing become a new default, expected and demanded in communities of all kinds.

We believe co-creation should be the foundation of our civic life - not a fringe phenomenon, but the norm. If Dandelion's Gatherings feature can enable people to viscerally experience the benefits of emergent participation over top-down control, those insights will ripple out and transform what we understand governance and citizenship to mean in the 21st century. Shifting cultural expectations in this way is a key lever for reimagining and reinventing our institutions over time.