We've been asked why Agora is still a side project rather than a funded startup. The honest answer: this problem punishes haste. Every civic tech project that scaled fast hit the supply problem, officials who couldn't stay responsive, before the product was ready to handle it.

The civic tech world has built an impressive set of tools. GovTrack. VoteSmart. OpenSecrets. Hundreds of transparency portals. If you want to know how your representative voted on anything in the last decade, you can find out in minutes.

Verification is a constraint, not a gatekeeping choice. The goal isn't exclusion. It's honest weighting. A constituent's view on their school district's budget should land differently than the same view from someone three states away. That distinction is the product.

A question we get often: how do you know a citizen is actually from the district? We use public voter registration data, address verification, and a few additional signals. Not perfect. But meaningfully better than "anyone with an account." The bar is constituent, not citizen.

The form letter problem isn't limited to federal agencies. Any public comment system that accepts unconstrained input becomes a volume game. Organized groups win volume games. Individual constituents don't. The design has to make that impossible, not just harder.

During the FCC's net neutrality comment period, the agency received millions of submissions. Most were identical. Individual citizens who wrote genuinely had no way to know if their comments registered at all. That's not a civic system. That's a lottery.

NYC has 51 city council members, 65 state assembly members, 27 state senators, 26 members of Congress. Plus borough presidents, mayor, comptroller. Most constituents have zero interaction with them between elections. That's the civic gap, in numbers.

Brigade tried to build civic social networking. Got traction. Didn't survive. The postmortem is worth reading carefully.

The hardest design problem in civic participation isn't how to let citizens be heard. It's making being heard feel real. That means acknowledgment, reference, and follow-through. Not every input gets a custom reply. But every input deserves a structured one.

What participation looks like from the citizen side: A council member posts about a proposed rezoning in your neighborhood. You see it. You weigh in through a structured mechanism. Your input is aggregated with other verified constituents from the district. You find out if it moved anything.

An open comment section on a bill gives everyone an equal voice. A constituent in the district. An activist from another state. A bot. A coordinated campaign. All equally weighted, all equally visible. That's not participation. That's noise with a comment box.

The official inbox problem isn't a staffing problem. You can hire more people to read more emails. What you can't do is turn a form letter into a constituent. The problem is upstream. It's a design problem.

One official showed me their inbox. Thousands of emails. Most were identical form letters routed through advocacy organizations. A handful were real constituent stories. No way to separate them. They weren't ignoring constituents. They couldn't find them.

Citizens can also initiate discussions on Agora. But they can't post at each other. That's the design distinction. Social media is citizens posting at citizens. Agora is citizens and officials in the same structured space, anchored to something governmental, something accountable.

The question we hear most: if officials anchor the platform, don't they control the agenda? The weighting is the answer. Their post, their actual constituents respond, and the signal comes back as a read on their specific district, not a popularity contest. They can't curate who they hear from.

Two years ago I started asking officials: what would useful constituent input actually look like to you? The answer was consistent: less volume, more signal. Fewer form letters, more real stories. A way to know who's actually from the district. That's the spec we're building to.

Town halls work, technically. They happen in one room, at one time, and they're dominated by whoever is loudest and most available. A parent with two kids and a job has no realistic way to be part of that conversation. That's not democracy failing. That's infrastructure failing.

The first question every official asks when I describe Agora: "Is this going to be another place I get yelled at?" The answer is no. That's actually the design, constituent signal, weighted by district. Structured input, not open comment. The signal-to-noise problem is the product.

We're building Agora from outside the usual places. Different countries, different backgrounds, no political affiliations.

A representative considering a vote next week can't afford a poll.The tool exists. The reach doesn't. That's the gap that has to be closed — not for one representative, but as infrastructure.

There's a pattern in every civic tech postmortem I've read. A platform launches with good intentions. Gets traction from one political community. The other side stops trusting it. The first side doesn't need it, they already agree with each other. Partisanship isn't rhetorical. It's structural.

Most civic disengagement isn't apathy. Spend time talking to people who actually tried to participate; they stopped because the channels didn't work. They wrote. They showed up. Nothing moved. That's not apathy. That's a rational response to broken infrastructure.

1/ Voting was supposed to be the beginning of the conversation. For most of us, it's the end of one.

For two years I've been asking elected officials what they'd actually want from a constituent platform. The answer is always some version of: not more messages. Better signal. We finally wrote down what we think that means.

It is so good to be back on BlueSky. What did I missed?

Sometimes strategy is just saying: “This doesn’t serve me anymore,” and walking away without making noise.

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