Research / durable questions
six durable areas / relationships made explicit
ROCSI works across six durable research areas that overlap in practice. They describe the questions and system qualities we keep investigating even as individual projects change state, mature, pause, or retire.
Research is the persistent layer. Current Work is the concrete layer: systems and experiments that let us test assumptions, observe constraints, and generate new evidence.
01 / Research areas
Select an area to inspect its direct relationships and the Current Work projects that currently exercise it. The map is intentionally relational: ROCSI rarely treats one area as an isolated discipline.
Select a research area
Selected research area: Civic Technology.
Selected area / 01
Tools that help people participate, understand public information, and engage with the decisions shaping their communities.
Related fields
Related current work
Platforma Civică
Active development
Questions we keep asking
01 / Civic Technology
Tools that help people participate, understand public information, and engage with the decisions shaping their communities.
02 / Trust & Information Integrity
Systems and methods that help people assess information, provenance, evidence, and trust in digital environments.
03 / Open Digital Infrastructure
Open, maintainable, and interoperable digital infrastructure built for long-term public usefulness.
04 / AI & Applied Intelligence
Applied intelligence that makes complex information more accessible while keeping human judgement and accountability in view.
05 / Cyber & Digital Resilience
Research and engineering for digital systems that remain understandable, dependable, and resilient under pressure.
06 / Emerging Technologies
Experimental technologies explored for their practical value, constraints, and possible role in resilient digital systems.
02 / Applied research loop
ROCSI treats implementation as part of the research method. A useful prototype creates evidence; deployment exposes constraints; observation changes the next question.
01
Frame the uncertainty, public-interest problem, or system constraint precisely enough to investigate.
02
Turn assumptions into a prototype, interface, data flow, simulation, or other bounded test.
03
Engineer the parts that survive the experiment into something usable enough to meet real constraints.
04
Inspect behavior, failures, user friction, operational cost, and evidence produced by the system.
05
Refine the question, discard weak assumptions, and carry forward what the evidence supports.
question → experiment → implementation → observation → iteration
03 / Methods
The method changes with the problem, but the work should leave enough evidence to explain what was tested, what changed, and what remains uncertain.
01
Make assumptions tangible early enough that they can fail cheaply and inform the next decision.
02
Use operational or user-facing contexts when appropriate so constraints are observed rather than imagined.
03
Prefer evidence about behavior, reliability, usability, and trade-offs over claims made from architecture alone.
04
Expose code, decisions, notes, or reproducible evidence when openness materially improves inspection and reuse.
05
Treat technical, civic, organizational, privacy, and operational constraints as parts of one system when they interact.
04 / Research in practice
Current Work is where durable questions meet concrete systems. Each project connects several research areas and can change lifecycle state without changing the research themes it informs.
A beta/demo civic-tech platform for participation, public visibility, and the relationship between citizens and institutions. It brings together public announcements and consultations, civic reports and complaints, polls and referendums, an institution map, and assisted tools for explaining documents and preparing official requests.
An open-source WordPress connector that synchronizes Cardano and Solana project and token data from NMKR Studio through the NMKR API, stores it locally, and exposes it through responsive shortcodes.
Privacy-preserving telemetry attestation research using zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) to prove narrowly scoped properties of vehicle telemetry without exposing the underlying sensitive data. The documented work is simulation-first and vehicle/drone-oriented, including autonomous-vehicle contexts, while explicitly excluding flight control, command authorization, and autonomous decision execution.
05 / Collaboration
ROCSI is interested in research and implementation contexts where a real problem can be framed, tested, observed, and improved with collaborators who value useful and inspectable outcomes.
Explore collaboration →