AI Agents 401: Agents That Run Themselves
White Rabbit Clubhouse
Workshops & Learning
White Rabbit presents
For a hundred years we've governed with documents. What happens when we can govern with models?
Everyone can feel that the ground is shifting under how we govern our communities. Almost nobody has a story for what comes next.
For a hundred years we've governed with documents. What happens when we can govern with models?
White Rabbit
Here's ours, in one sentence: we're moving from documents to models. For a century, civic life has run on documents. Reports, budgets, ordinances, studies that pile up faster than anyone can read them. Models are different. You can poke at a model. You can ask it: if we don't raise water rates, are we deferring maintenance or surcharging businesses? What does this housing policy actually do in ten years? It's the reason people love SimCity: choices and consequences, made visible.
This isn't a new idea for us. It's what White Rabbit was founded on, and what we've been working through for years in the Rogue Valley AI Lab, which lives here. Earlier this month, futurist Toshi Hoo (ten years at the Institute for the Future) put it sharply in a talk at our space: the working unit of human collaboration is shifting from documents to models, from reading about our communities to running them as living simulations we can question together. Watch Toshi's talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dygQw3ZBnP8
The salon brings together three kinds of people who mostly don't know each other: the folks inside government (elected, appointed, or otherwise in the machine), the advocates, organizers, and visionaries pushing for new civics ideas, and the people building the new tools. Two and a half hours, dinner in the middle, and working sessions that mix all three. We'll ground it in housing, one of the few challenges everyone in this valley agrees is real, with a look at what people here are already building.
Here's the shape of the evening. We'll open with quick introductions so the room can see who's in it, then a short framing of the moment we're in, including a live look at a working model built around one of our own local systems. From there, the housing showcase: the people building these tools showing what's already underway. Then small mixed conversations about where this could take us, with dinner woven through, and we'll close by mapping what we want to keep working on together.
We'll arrange dinner for everyone. If you'd like to chip in toward the meal, we'll gladly accept voluntary contributions at the event, but please come regardless. The point is having you at the table.
One house rule: the conversation is off the record. What we make together can be public; how we get there stays in the room.
This evening is not a one-off. It's the next step in an ongoing exploration of how we evolve our community and its systems for a new technological era, and the conversation continues after the salon.
New officeholders arrive in January 2027. They'll inherit the old toolkit. Let's figure out the new one.
This salon is by invitation. If you'd like to be there, request an invitation and we'll be in touch.
Thursday, July 30, 2026 at 5:30 PM
5:30 PM - 8:00 PM
