How Van Buren and St. Joseph Counties are building a sovereign AI architecture for local government. How Van Buren and St. Joseph Counties are building a sovereign AI architecture for local government. This document describes where we are headed. It…
The Lessons of the Digital Parcel Map In the 1980s and 90s, counties across the country took their first serious steps into digital GIS. Parcel maps that had lived comfortably in filing cabinets for decades were transformed into tidy digital…
Why Local Governments Must Build Their Own AI Knowledge Infrastructure – What new research reveals, and why it matters for counties like ours A state-of-the-art artificial intelligence system was recently tested on 14,782 questions about U.S. counties, questions about local…
When OpenAI announced Frontier this week, most of the commentary has clustered around safety, scale, and the familiar sense that the future has arrived slightly ahead of schedule. Frontier is framed as a serious attempt to govern increasingly powerful AI…
We are excited to announce a new strategic partnership between the Digital Innovation Collaborative Exchange (DICE) and Western Michigan University (WMU) for the Spring 2026 semester. This collaboration brings a fresh, academic perspective to our mission of shared digital services through WMU’s “PADN 4700 –…
When a government staff member uploads a document into ChatGPT, NotebookLM, or the latest AI tool their IT department has cautiously approved, something remarkable appears to happen. You upload a file. You ask a question. You get an answer. It…
This is the final article in a series on AI Sovereignty and the Knowledge Layer. The earlier pieces explored the risk of cognitive lock-in and sketched an architecture for a sovereign stack. What remains is the least theoretical question of…
Note: this is part of an ongoing series about a little understood but critical issue for local governments in the intelligence era: owning the institutional mind. Local government administrators are connoisseurs of professional pain. They live with the fifteen-year-old permitting…
Building Toward Governable AI, One Drawer at a Time Local governments do not suffer from a shortage of AI tools. Vendors arrive weekly, armed with slick demos, confident timelines, and the reassuring promise that this time, truly, the transformation will…
Note: This is the third article in a series about the need for local governments to control how AI accesses and understands public data. I. The Definition Trap In local government, the phrase “AI sovereignty” is often misheard as an…
