118 ways a person can take part in self-government, arranged like the elements. Columns are families of participation that share a character. Rows go from spark to institution: each step down a column asks more of you and gives you more leverage. Tap any element for what it is and the tools that help.
Rows 1–7 move from a first spark through awareness, voice, participation, collective action, power, and finally institutions you build or hold. The two detached rows at the bottom, like the lanthanides and actinides, are families large enough to need their own shelf: holding public office and serving the state, and the democracy that happens in workplaces, co-ops, and shared resources rather than at the ballot box.
The numbering is a reading order, not a ranking. A great democracy needs plenty of hydrogen. For the ladders, typologies, and theories this table borrows from, and a short reading list, see Sources & lineage.
Turn on “Show AI impact” and each tile gets a dot in its top-right corner: empty means AI adds nothing because the point is a person doing it (voting, jury service, protest, holding office); half-filled means AI can draft, research, or organize but a person still has to show up or sign; filled means the output could be produced largely by AI with a person checking it (records requests, watchdogging, policy analysis, documenting meetings). The pattern is the interesting part: the filled dots cluster in the information and oversight columns, and almost nothing below row 5 is filled. Power and office still have to be held by someone.
Turn on “Show initiatives” for a strip of real American civic projects, movements, platforms, and government programs, from the League of Women Voters to America.gov. Tap one and the table dims to the elements it actually uses. The point is to make comparisons visible: Occupy and the Tea Party light up neighboring tiles in Direct Action but diverge at the Electoral column; DOGE and participatory budgeting both touch oversight and spending with opposite theories of who should hold the pen. A filled dot is a live effort, an empty ring is a past one, and a dashed ring is a proposal. Each element’s detail panel also lists who has tried it. The mappings are a starting set and arguable; corrections and additions are welcome.