Grassroots organizations often struggle to balance short-term fixes with long-term goals. Technical communicators supporting these under-resourced groups face a similar challenge: they must navigate between short-term tactical communication and the development of resilient, socially durable writing infrastructures. This article proposes user enfranchisement as a way for grassroots organizations to make quick, tactical interventions while simultaneously building the infrastructure to make strategic, long-term changes within their sphere of influence. Enfranchising tactics may be understood as rhetorical maneuvers that provide immediate, albeit provisional, access to participation within an institution or system, giving individuals agency and building a foundation for systemic change. Drawing on the case study of a street design manual created for urban areas, the article demonstrates how user enfranchisement: performs boundary/identity work, is intended to be conspicuous, expands the agential capacity of the user by building the social capital of the communicator, and serves as a bridge to longer-term infrastructural strategies with the capacity to create change in the world.

The concept of a public—a group of strangers drawn together through their mutual attention to a text—has historically been tied to the notion of human intentionality. The recent popularization of artificial intelligence (AI) large language models (such as ChatGPT) destabilizes this connection. When large language models generate text, they may inadvertently form stochastic publics—groups pulled together through the randomization of biased data patterns drawn from AI training material. This exploratory study draws on a three-phase dialogue with OpenAI's ChatGPT 4 to identify the risks of stochastic publics and suggest human-originated interventions grounded in feminist care ethics.