OWN YOUR GOVERNMENT, LLC

Describe the product or program that is the focus of your proposed LEAP project.

Targeted Beneficiary:

Families in every geographic community and their children. We say that it takes a village to raise a child, and that we build the communities that later shape our lives. Access to helping children in this project will be through their parents and others in their extended families and other role models from whom they learn curiosity, autonomy, love, responsibility, self-esteem, self discipline and principles of behavior.

Problem Solved:

We are tasked with preparing the next generations to meet challenges of climate change and uniting people of diverse cultures to reverse global warming, resolving inequalities and preserving individual freedom and national sovereignty.

How to Bridge the Learning Gap:

It begins with broad understanding of the gap in manifold local contexts; it entails designing technology that people in diverse communities must use in  day-to-day activities in which they define how climate change directly affects their lives, and develop strategies for interdependent action. It involves civil discourse in physical forums, extending online over a decade.

Brief Summary:

There is a bias inherent in distinguishing children as "underserved" that we must learn how to avoid. Learning gaps for "underserved" populations are extensions of knowledge gaps throughout a population. Historically, we view children in poor communities as unable to afford benefits available to the wealthy: they are "underserved" by a lower quality of services. This is very real but leads to a mistaken conclusion that the solution involves a transfer of wealth. While this may be helpful and humane in various ways, knowledge isn't automatically achieved through better formal education and the ability  to separate fact from belief is easily subverted by social media. Ultimately, we can't serve the ability of any children without including them in addressing the contextual relevance of their education to their circumstances.We solve this by incorporating their own views of their personal circumstances and their communities in a process, which is accountable to each child for the result that they themselves produce.

Top-down solutions to equality of opportunity are generally limited to principles that apply across an entire population. During the last century, there has been a global reduction in the number of impoverished people and a broad increase in literacy and opportunity, but the pandemic showed that we are by no means able to declare such problems solved. Meanwhile, we are also seeing historic levels of violence and unethical behavior. Economic Darwinism has been normalized in global exchanges. Children targeted in this project are a product of this global development. Educating the underserved isn't a worthy goal if it means merely making them more successful competitors or training them in moral flexibility, better at self-dealing, predation and pragmatic force. These are the antecedents of aggressiveness and victimization.

Data technology has supported scaling of centralized government, commercial and infrastructure systems. The software that manages large, complex systems can explain and measure many problems, but scaling depends on rounding out that loses information about local circumstances, even when a problem has a common cause.

Select the key characteristics of your target population. Select all that apply.

• Women & Girls
• Infants (birth to 1 year)
• Pre-primary age children (ages 1-5)
• Primary school children (ages 5-12)
• Youth and adolescents (ages 12-24)
• Rural
• Peri-Urban
• Urban
• Poor
• Low-Income
• Middle-Income
• Refugees & Internally Displaced Persons
• Minorities & Previously Excluded Populations
• Persons with Disabilities
• Other

In which countries do you currently operate?

• United States

In which countries do you plan to be operating within the next year?

• United States

How have you worked with affected communities to design your solution?

Surveyed over 36,000 school children over three years.

What is your theory of change?

Theory of Change

Every attempt to change a dysfunctional system is more likely to cause its persistence than result in a change. The successful process renders the dysfunctional system obsolete by a new, efficacious system.

The dysfunctional status quo is a system in which there are things happening about which individuals feel powerless to change because they are powerless. Every other year, they are invited to vote for people they don't know to do things on their behalf about problems they don't understand. Children, who don't get to vote may be told that this system is democratic, and yet they bear (usually silent) witness to the stark reality and sometimes act out their frustration with the dichotomy with "delinquent" behavior.

Our project provides inclusive technology that supports autonomy in communities, informing and building consensus and taking effective action. While not attempting to replace the existing political system of elected representation, it provides a parallel form of direct democracy and rewards participation.

How are you currently using evidence within your theory of change?

We are not academics, we are software and community development leaders. Although this is a professional, not an academic project, the complexity of relationships within and between communities require self-referencing aspects built into the technology to constantly and dynamically keep it on course. We begin implementation by engaging people in several separate and unrelated communities in defining priorities and goals consistent with satisfying primary objectives. Rules governing the use of the technology are ubiquitous and are designed to help keep the project on course and prevent manipulation and co-opting. But even these rules are subject to constant evaluation and may be modified as necessary or to better fit the individual community.

Part of our request of MIT is to integrate concurrent studies to provide levels of evidence for rapid and efficacious scaling. We are happy to provide more information about how we have arrived at initial designs and implementation plans.

How are you currently tracking and measuring your solution’s impact?

N/A

One-line project summary:

Own Your Government provides an ecosystem to communities for direct democracy, accountability, transparency and inclusive participation in the decisions of government that affect their lives.

People will see how their efforts produce the results they desire.

What is your solution’s stage of development?

Pitch your LEAP project: How and where would integrating evidence (or stronger evidence) into your theory of change increase your organization’s impact?

The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) has given us 12 years to reverse global warming. Since, there isn’t time to sufficiently amend constitutions, reform industries and re-educate 300 million people, not to mention achieving global unity, how can we use technology to accomplish this goal? How do we resolve conflicts between multiple competing agendas, not only within and between communities, but between our environmental goals and long-established commercial, political and economic hierarchies?

Part of the answer is that we can reduce global warming in ten years, and improve quality of life in the process by repurposing technology now used primarily for Bitcoin, Twitter, advertising and entertainment to provide communities with tools they need for social responsibility. We are building Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) for geographic communities. This strategy places problems of global warmings and inequality in the hands of individuals, whom it also tasks with defining the problems and solutions in their own contexts. Since it also renders campaign finance obsolete, what happens to those who benefit from the status quo?

We assert that (aside from miracles) the only chance we have to reverse global warming, with human resources, is in the digital technology that can influence  but be protected by the technology from corrupting interference of established political and/or economic institutions. 

The DAO that we provide to each community is an instance of a decentralized autonomous network that community members use to inform, define and mobilize consensus within the community for priorities that are also defined by consensus of community members, free of interference from interest organizations and government agencies that have evolved within established political and economic hegemonies. However, community residence verification is crucial, and since the IPCC forecast suggests we must introduce the technology and quickly register a quorum of bonafide residents. It would be helpful if a Leap project could position us to obtain voter registration and similar residence data.