If you want prosperity, fund peace.

PEACE AND PROSPERITY IN A ZERO SUM WORLD

Prosperity evokes an experience of abundance, opportunity, generosity,  independence, no constraints due to lack of resources, enjoyment of inclusive access, free enterprise, education, and excitement for our future.

Prosperity connotes a feeling of security, freedom from want and mortal fear, enjoyment of beauty of nature, expectations of peaceful habitation. 

Prosperity is characterized by economic independence, not affluence nor sophistication, but rather a sense of deserving well-being. In this sense, a prosperous Yanomami community resembles Geneva or Mill Valley.

A technological solution must create a climate of trust with rules of transparency, integrity, security, privacy and so on, agnostic to culture.

Global prosperity suggests a ubiquitous experience of prosperity, agnostic to place, culture, political and ecological conditions. Global prosperity seems oxymoron because it suggests a world at stasis. Peace and prosperity are not synonymous. In a zero sum world, gains equal losses, loss is upsetting and competition leads to conflict.

A technological solution for global prosperity involves cooperation and, because we take pride in accomplishments, talents and abilities; we need rewards and privileges. Prosperity is not a one-size-fits-all quality.  Anticipating differences, a solution is designed to enhance understanding and trust, cooperation and collaboration of complementary but different participants.It offers rewarding opportunity, preserves freedom and respectful competition. 

A technological solution for global economic prosperity in a capitalist economy empowers individuals to openly compete, own exclusive resources and sustainably manage collectively-owned and shared infrastructure.

Fintech policies of a technological solution for global prosperity must be consistent with financial underwriting standards, free of biases of gender, ethnicity, nationality, age and so on.

Explicit policies must guarantee environmental protection and inclusive opportunity with funds to mitigate risk. Enterprise development must be monitoried for occupational and environmental vulnerabilities.

A solution must prevent exploitation of unsophisticated populations, and empower them to husband natural resources and support their efforts to thwart corrupting influences.

A solution must make it possible for people to address social and cultural  conflict and fear, and in some cases, address the legacy of colonial policies of racism woven into the social fabric of communities. 

A technological solution must preserve the intelligence of cultural harmony with nature while transforming a paradigm of scarcity to one of abundance and prosperity. It must integrate technology to make new resources available and make historical resources better serve prosperity of communities.

The soluton must see virtue in diversity; quelling long-standing fear and bias.

For prosperity, a technological solution must include integration of civil service in the general economy and society of the community, civil servants must be of and for people in the communities they serve.

A technological solution for global prosperity must be consistent with the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and ensure that the voices of all people are represented in the decisions that affect them.

Imagine a discrete platform informing your community, with a news feed  that lets you know what's going on with a button you can click that lets you do something about it, or post it on your community forum of people you are connected to as community members. A streaming media channel for user content and a community AI assistant brings you up to speed.

Incorporation of Theory of Change

Community polls allow 100% participation in inventing solutions. A poll can establish verified consensus and invite critical thought. Anyone can poll. A poll might ask, "If we want to reduce our carbon footprint, should we do (choose all that apply): x, y, z,?" Members comment, upload evidence, question hypotheses (if we do "x", then...)  Because consensus triggers actions, voting counts.AI analyzes conclusions and suggests opportunities.

Ratifications

Algorithms can reveal wider consensus from independently initiated polls and conversations in a wider population, essentially ratifying global agreement.

Anxiety Reduction

Personal ability grows with your sphere of influence. Instead of sensationalizing events, there is experience of control over quality of life when communities set the agenda of government from the bottom, up.

Quantum Computing

Quantum computing powers LLMs that assess and report alignment with local, national and global consensus. The community LLM is trained to recognize subjects of user-generated polls and content and to propose polls for a wider consensus.

Human Values Drive the Technological Solution

The machine learning component listens to conversations in the wider culture and news feed, as well as polling and conversations in the community's forum, and suggests poll questions that might elicit consensus.

Algorithms use interactions to suggest consensus and propose polls.

Participants learn in a process with a desired outcome.

Access is limited to verified community members.

Platform functions serve personal interests on demand:

Members access information salient to their own needs and interests

Members build, oppose and advocate consensus of the community

Members initiate collective action within moral/ethical boundaries

Collective action easily organized for collaborative enterprise

Features attract and reward participation and enhance community identity

AI helps ensure the veracity of vetted content

This global framework integrates its functions in cloud technology. It can be accessed with a connection to the worldwide web or a server at a data service center. An instance of the framework can support many community platforms. The framework can be hosted on redundant servers and can be spun up in minutes to recover in another location. 

The community platform can serve as a vital communication network that can save lives in the event of a catastrophe.

People learn that their agency expands through participation. They can see the effect their participation has produced. In the onboarding process the community examines and declares core values and acknowledges the framework of democracy, inclusivity, consedsnsus and collective action.

Onboarding is initiated with the guidance of experts in neuroscience, social justice, psychology, economics, arts and education. The onboarding online environment follows principles of Montessori classrooms, however, AI assistants help community members find, organize and share information.

Future opportunities depend on how well a current generation prepares the foundations for economic success. This solution empowers the ability to shape the future by creating a structure for fulfillment for the community. 

Interdependence occurs naturally where people choose their own paths. They need opportunities to use their curosity and knowledge. Without such opportunities, knowledge can lead to frustration, anger and resignation. 

Exercising personal agency and honing skills of interdependence is transformative and applies to every discipline in every culture.

A global framework for localizable community platforms creates a venue for sharing information in a climate that nurtures ideas for mutual benefit between everywhere people everywhere in the web, without limitation.

When participating in consensus building, people learn from each other, and become aware of the needs of others and qualities of relationships in human interaction in a context where they have put something they at stake.

Participation in consensus involves people in communicating for common goals, and assessing the ways that their own skills and relationships are useful assets for prosperity in scenarios that empower their goals. They learn how to listen and how to speak their personal virtues and values.

With a safe container for dialogue this solution empowers experimentation with innovative ideas and opportunities to learn valuable lessons from mistakes, that being wrong is as valuable as learning you are correct.

The global framework in cloud technology engages everyone in the global economy for the prosperity of their community. They learn that Ignorance, poverty and inequities limit the ability of people and access to resources with which healthy interdependence can occur. 

This technology is a foundation for individual initiative using AI technology trained to make resources available in a framework for localized support and collective action to initiate enterprise and develop resources.  

Community platforms can fund and support business within the community, leveraging trust to support the online space of the community. 

With informed participation in consensus building, this solution amplifies the community's voice in government funding and development decisions.

Traditional art, music, dance and theater can be organized and promoted.

Dialogues about priorities, values and traditional stories can be explored in a way that fosters feelings of mutual commitment in both virtual and physical realms, with an emphasis on environmental ownership.

By learning to use this technology to achieve independence and freedom from self-limiting bias, communities learn to value the importance of their individual differences to collective enterprise and collaboration.

Because it is a community solution, this solution protects people from  financial predators that proliferate on the web. The support for the most vulnerable increases personal agency of those with special needs and the young and elderly.

The entire community can be engaged and contribute to their mutual prosperity and their legacy, and help shift the paradigm from zero sum to self-sufficiency and abundance.

Michael Winn:

After a career making educational films for use in schools about technologies, and documentary films and commercials, I wrote a script for a feature film about an intelligent building. Before I could make this movie, I had an opportunity to work with a consortium including AT&T, IBM, Xerox, 3-COM, JPL, Hewlett-Packard, and Kurtzweil. They had been brought together by the U.S. Advanced Research Program Administration (ARPA) to create a way to secretly notify all U.S. offices, everywhere, that nuclear weapons were about to be launched and they were looking for commercial uses. My intelligent building idea caught their attention. Xerox had just bought Apple (from Jobs and Wozniak) and were already transferring parts of this new technology that would become the Apple Macintosh.

My intelligent building was a great success for real estate marketing but the technology did not reflect my vision about the people that lived in and around the intelligent building. The technology in my vision was not yet available. After I wrote Architectronics for McGrawHIll, a reference for architects about the new technology, I followed other paths, waiting for the technology to catch up. I conducted annual surveys of children in San Diego's public and private schools, to inform city government about the needs of children. I built apartments for low income families for a nonprofit development company. I created media for the Southern California Association of Governments to sell the public on Smog laws. I ran for City Council and served on the Railroad Committee for the city where I lived. I brought musicians from San Diego Symphony into city schools and brought the students to Symphony concerts. I designed and conducted a demonstration of offshore commuter transportation between the cities of Oceanside and San Diego for Caltrans. I retired and got an MFA in music.

One day, a neighbor asked me to help our community of Point Loma in San Diego, stop a building deveopment the city had permitted in violation of  the height limit on buildings in a coastal area, where people enjoyed views of the sea and the bay. With my previous experience in projects that involved local government, I wrote, pretty much in its entirety, a design for the project that became Own Your Government, originally called, Point Loma Town Council. This was in 2018.

I founded Own Your Government as an LLC in January 2019 and I offered, in return for assisting me in describing the project to investors and designing the necessary software, an interest in OYG to Norman Katz, a software engineer in San Diego, who I found on LinkedIn. Norman wanted to invest the money himself, but after we fully described the software and received bids from several software companies, and spent a lot of our own money on a prototype, we realized we will need much more money than we had to invest. We are now raising $5 million to build the project, launch it in several beta communities and refine it for global use.

We have completed the design and produced and tested functionality of the prototype. The technology for the framework and user interface has been extensively researched working with software engineers in three software development companies 8th Light, Chicago, Illinois, which helped with integration of APIs from Dolby, Signalwire and PubNub. LinkThinks, Aguas Calientes, Mexico, which worked on mobile app and Trajectus, Hyderabad, India, which developed the backend for the chat streaming and polling functionality. We have also researched and outlined the onboarding philosophy that is so important to the success of this project, including the Beta community components.

AI components and blockchain have been outlined but were not included in the prototype. MIT's program attracted our interest for this reason, and in connection with quantum computing. At scale, quantum computing would find a valuable use in supporting global alignment using LLMs to identify when independent polls in different communities showed consensus for an important global change. 

Wireframes have been produced for the framework and a community platform for a ReactNative prototype and API integration for video teleconference have been tested.

The framework is suitable for browsers to be used with beta communities. We plan to continue with native Android and iOS apps in beta.

The MIT reputation for scientific integrity can be helpful for a solution that deploys cloud technology and AI that allows people everywhere to participate in the success of sustainable economic prosperity through cooperation. We and this project deserves, needs and desires your attention.

MIT's innovation ecosystem and community of supporters can make a huge difference by supporting a solution that can become a standard, life saving use of technology for those who are at risk, and for our legacy.

This solution can have a transforming impact on MIT and the international engineering profession.  Those who build cutting edge technology for human interaction can only benefit from a few months or years working in a real time real life laboratory that this solution provides, to better inform their designs and test with practical applications. In this respect MIT is the perfect partner and the kind of institution that can benefit from participation.

This solution is about incorporating the hearts and minds of real people.

Transforming economic systems involves trust and global cooperation not imagined since WWII. Following that hugely devastating war, the world was threatened by an even worse catastrophe, nuclear war, and global cooperation was blocked by competing hierarchies. The United Nations was a compromise and the cold war strategies that prevailed evolved into the world as we now know it. There has never been as much communication and international business and at the same time, we have never been more divided. Meanwhile, global warming, migration, pandemics and wars create pressures that both drive us apart and into cooperation.

Global prosperity can calm fears and reduce defensive policies. Cooperation is a hallmark of this solution, which combines engineering ingenuity with  personal and socially transformative processes. Interest of MIT Solve in this approach will meet the impulse of young people that is reflected in the popularity of Taylor Swift and social media influencers.

This solution provides a technological infrastructure for global cooperation and global unification to address climate change, economic inequities and conflict resolution. It provides a bulwark against misinformation, divisive rhetoric and mistaken fears about global unification.

A solution for global prosperity is blind to color, gender, age and ideology. It transcends nationality, class, race, ethnicity and ability, not by suppressing differences but by welcoming and celebrating differences. This ssolution provides a safe container in which differences can occur in alignment. The consensus structure for collective agreement made possible by technology is aligned with the inclusionary commitment of MIT Solve and a guiding principle in the design of OYG.

OYG uses AI to reliably and consistently inform and measure consensus. This solution acknowledges and respects differences in perceptions of human beings.  In this solution, people interact with LLMs about matters of serious importance to their lives with an AI assistant trained by the community. AI may be seen as a new member of the family rather than an infallible authoirty. People will discover how to play with AI for self-knowledge and  self-expression. This experiment offers an iopportunity for MIT Solve.

A global framework for supporting discrete, compatible, independent community platforms as a political infrastructure for proactive, consensus-driven initiatives. Communities can bootstap initiatives to meet needs they identify, and access resources to influence government decisions, create cooperative energy and utility networks, improve disaster preparedness, aggregate purchasing power for commonly used goods and services.

Everything about the way this solution uses cloud, AI, media, news and blockchain technology can catalyze broad impacts from others in the space, parrticularly, platforms like TikTok, YouTube and cable & streaming news. Every community platform will provide new economic opportunities for Fintech and a way that foundations and government can collaborate with grassroot initiative.

And onboarding process iintegrates the social and economic fabric of the commuity in a series of open workshops in which community members define priorities, goals and create community organizations.

Reduces the influence of campaign finance and endorsements on voting behavior and aspects of the platform support the impotance of knowledge and education.

Cloud technology and AI support verifiable consensus that communities can use to demonstrate collective will and carry out actions.

AI (LLMs) are trained to suggest polls to communities based on comments, posts reports in news feeds, polls and community forums. Algorithms detect similar themes in posts and polls in other communities and suggest polls worded in the same way. Consensus about similar themes are linked.

Polling about controversial ideas shows when ideas are marginal or mainstream, and whe ideas gain traction and consensus changes.

Facilities on the platform support education and goals of students, partents, educators and schools.

Community platforms can support initiatives that benefit the community with the collective energy and aggregate resources of the community., 

Platforms support independent initiative and opportunities for individual contribution and development and provide a venue for healthy moral and emotional conversations.

The ability to build consensus to guide governmental policy is an  expansion of personal agency that restores the potential of democracy.

A bottom up process replaces topdown promulgation of solutions. Communities define priorities and choose paths that suit the community and its ecosystem.

AI technology is used to enhance relationship building and improve the quality and character of interpersonal communication

A framework for iresolving conflict empowers interdependence and trust.

Dissolves political inertia and fears that inhibit progress by bringing the unsaid content into the light of public dialogue.

Transforms communications with elected officials by focusing on relevant facts. 

Provides an interactive open forum that informs voting, reducing the influence of campaign finance and endorsements and increasing the importance of knowledge and experience.

Reduces the power of privately owned media by providing information and analysis salient to the community.

Onboarding of this solution in a community begins by integrating the platform into the social and economic fabric of the commuity.

A platform is analogous to a medium that is managed by consensus of the community can help protect the integrity and quality of information

An LLM is trained to curate information for salience to community priorities and to debunk misinformation

Verified consensus as an instrument of change can produce change when it is public and prominent. Social media is influencing government decisions daily and has overcome established regimes and powerful economic hierarchies. This solution organizes collective action on behalf of community consensus as a strategy to use the collective impact and resources of a community to nurture the economic prosperity and safety of by community members.

The solution targets a cross-cultural transformative affect to overcome  inertia that impedes our commitment to ending poverty and violence, and solving the conditions that inhibit personal and global prosperity. The world is small now. A person born in a village in Madagascar may find herself in London, Bronx, Beijing, Toronto etc. This platform prepares and supports her journey and transforms her experience of the world. 

In a hypothetical scenario where a community platform like OwnYourGov has been successfully integrated into society for multiple generations, several aspects of the world would be different compared to a world without such a platform.

Here are some potential impacts:

Economic Equity: OYG's support for community-based fintech and economic empowerment initiatives leads to reduced economic disparities. The platform's commitment to entrepreneurship and equal participation results in a more economically equitable society.

Informed and Engaged Citizenry: OYG's commitment to listening, learning, and engaging citizens results in a population that is not only well-informed but actively contributes to civic matters. The platform's emphasis on self-expression and articulate communication fosters a culture of informed engagement.

Inclusive Decision-Making: The platform's core values, involving the community in decision-making, create an inclusive and transparent governance structure. OYG's emphasis on equal voice and vote ensures that decisions reflect a diverse range of perspectives, reducing marginalization.

Community-Driven Innovation: OYG's commitment to teamwork, creativity, and determination results in a society where innovation flourishes. Collective intelligence and collaboration become key drivers in solving local and global challenges.

Educational Transformation: OYG's integration into education systems, guided by virtues such as self-discipline and a commitment to learning, transforms education into an interactive and participatory experience. Students develop critical skills for active civic engagement from an early age.

Using transformational media to empower new ideas is implicit in art throughout history. Euripides and Aristophanes wrote and staged transformational plays with political aims in the 5th century BCE. OYG creates a virual online community with a forum similar to the Greek forum.

Participation depends on familliarity and community members generating  issues and content. The platform includes integrations with user-content platforms like TikTok and YouTube.

We plan to test elements of the software in our beta communities using onboarding workshops led by facilitators trained by Vanto Group and ThinkVirtues. We have proposed a study related to development of digital twins for cities to the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London. MIT is a possible research candidate as well, related to uses of AI and Blockchain. In developing the beta community experiments, we will work with performing arts agencies and producers of transformational media.

Primary Goal: Peaceful and inclusive society of communities a majority of members participating, initiations of sustainable enterprises, engagement with energy use reduction and active preparations for climate change,  access to resources and accountable, inclusive institutions at all levels.

We plan to onboard academic research teams to track events and public sentiment in beta communities related to the following and other measurable changes in communities, and use this information to modify. A platform in Madagascar will not look the same as New York but they will be compatible and connected in ways that will produce astounding and valuable relationships.

Measurements of economic sutainability:

1) Improvements in aggregate wealth of the community, amount and ratio of external investment to internal investment and improvement in the individual wealth of community members.

2) Sufficient funding for economic security for individuals in all participating communities

3) Integration of community consensus in government decision making and participation of community members in govrernment decisions about the community economy amd natural ecosystem.

4) Percentage of artiipation of community members relative to population size.

5) Results of consensus polls about climate, safety and economic security

6) Sufficoemt funding for healthcare, childcare and eldercare servicees.

7) Satisfctory community assessments of the sufficiency and accountability and competence of institutions at all levels, including the platform.

8) Elimination of domestic violence and violence against children and sufficient trauma resolution therapy for victims and perpetrators

9) Percentage of individual participation in collective projects and individual action to combat climate change

10) Knowledge of and participation in the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development demonstrated in restoration of environment and sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, forests and reversal of land degradation and  biodiversity loss.

11) Status and performance of community disaster-response organization.

Framework Admin OYG manages the infrastructure of the platform through an admin portal.  OYG Admin manages overall functioning of the platform, maintains use and performs triage. 

Local Admin verifies member accounts and confirms registration. Local Admin manages and may view active profiles and group memberships. 

Personal Profile Community members register, login, verify residence in the community and create a Personal Profile.

Community  Profile The Community Profile is a default landing screen for users and contains information about the wealth and power of the community. Community members populate the community profile.

AI-Summarized Chat Streams: Members toggle summaries by AI

Forums - curated news feed, community forum, user-group feed or young person’s forum

Community Forum: read, post or question the community.

The Newsroom: An AI assistant curates news salient to community members  from local, state, national, and international sources.

Young Person’s Forum:  Children may post in the forum for children. 

User-Selected Group Forums: The feed and access is similar to the Community Forum but participation requires joining the group.

Survey & Polls:  Members create surveys and polls and view media relevant to poll questions, and they may nominate and elect representatives.

Consensus: A threshold can be set for a poll to automatically send reports of consensus to media, government officials and the community. 

Outcome Actions: When a poll reaches a threshold (set by consensus), the platform generates a report to a selection of recipients including media, officials and community organizations.

Communication:  Members may instantly teleconference with peers  or join a scheduled teleconference using a prompt that connects to this function.

Peer to Peer(s): text, voice and video features between members using a directory of information.

Information: Members publish and retrieve information and may search the Internet by topic, keyword, date and poster. The platform sorts information by source/poll/survey topic. Members can upload, view and download document files. Recordings of video meetings may be indexed as well.

Calendar: OYG Admin, Local Admin and Members may schedule events and invite members for teleconference and physical meetings with notifications to invitees. 

Enterprise & Project Management: Mmebers may create a project or enterprise using productivity tools on the platform. A local admin will be able to verify project eligibility when projects are submitted for publication. 

Financial Services: The platform is a catalyst for wealth generation by providing access to community wealth, funding sources, collaborative investment programs, and community-based banking and lending enterprises. 

Blockchain: Used for anonymized voting and security of poll results as anonymized contracts and for personal and community wealth aggregation. Blockchain ledgers for smart contracts and crypto open avenues for wealth generation, creating opportunities that empower individuals and  businesses.

2 full time staff

3 part time staff

14 contractors

During the past 5 years, we have worked with many people in San Diego, Chicago, Mexico, San Francisco, Colombia and India. The Chicago-led team included UX designers and engineers in the UK, Montreal and Estonia.

I conceived the idea of a community platform that could support conversations with the aim of building verifiable consensus and taking collective action in 2017. A neighbor invited me to present my idea for an online Point Loma Town Council at his home on May 25, 2018.

To develop the platform I envisioned I would need to write a business plan, for which I needed to learn more about technology that can be scalable for global utilization.

I filed the formation of Own Your Government, LLC on January 25, 2019

I forget the day, in 2018, when John Chapin, a neighbor and software engineer asked me to help him help our community of Point Loma in San Diego, to prevent the city from permitting a building development on our block that was in violation of the height limit for buildings in a coastal area where there were views overlooking San Diego Bay. With my previous experience with development projects involving city approvals, I understood what was happening and how to address it. But because I wanted to put in place a way for people like John to be effective without me in the future, I wrote a plan, in its entirety, for the project that is now Own Your Government, originally called, Point Loma Town Council. This was in 2018.

I paid a young woman to build a website, PointLomaTownCouncil.org and looked around for the software plugins necessary and I learned that I would have to build the software.

I founded Own Your Government as an LLC on January 25, 2019 and gave an interest in the LLC to Norman Katz, a software engineer I found on LinkedIn,in return for his assistance. Norman wanted to invest the money and he put some money toward a prototype app that was started by a software firm in Aguas Calientes, Mexico called, LinkThinks. I hired a UX designer in Tijuana, who did wireframes for the app. Norm did a flow diagram that shows how everything works together. It was too complicated for LnkThinks. I next connected with a boutique software firm in Chicago called, 8th Light. They are multi-ethnic, mostly women in Poland and UK. They got the concept and developed front end interfaces for video and teleconferencing modules. Colombian and Mexican graphic arts designers contributed designs. I then hired an Indian development team in Hyderabad to work on the back end, which gave us our database component. By now, we had fully specified described all the software needed including blockchain but not LLMs, and we got quotes from several software companies quoting costs and time to buildi it.

We also discussed implementation with prospective users in small cities in Northern California, Orange County and San Diego. They want to try it out. A business associate, architect, urban planner and friend in Colombia asked me to present OYG to the City of Bogota. They liked it, too. For the Bogota proposal, I drafted a plan for onboarding using a community workshop with  The Vanto Group, (mixed ethnicity) which has experience in community transformative technology. Having spent a lot of our capital, realizing we will need to raise seed capital. I submitted an application to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who said they were only giving money for medical programs and in 2019 I submitted a solutiion for a Solve Challenge.

I developed a business plan, something I'm experienced with and we are raising $5 million to build the project and launch it for use in several beta communities.

OYG products and service are provided primarily to both individual consumers and organizations, including local, county and state governments, NGOs, and non-profit community-based organizations

OYG is a California Limited Liability Company. 

Each community instance is a cyber space twin for the real geopolitical community. The global framework integrates digital functions. The licensing model preserves local autonomy and values of physical proximity and interdependent relationships. Community forums deepen connections through a blend of written and visual communication.

In some ways, the business of OYG resembles a chain of local newspapers independently owned and operated by franchisees in communities. OYG licenses an instance of the OYG global framework to communities for a nominal flat fee per active monthly user. Licensess (communities) manage their operations as cooperatives democratically governmed by consensus of the community. Where there is no organization, OYG may create a proxy licensee and receive microfee payments directly from users. OYG does not insert advertising content. Licensees may sell very limited local advertising and collect voluntary subscription fees, however, anyone that can prove residence in the commuity is entitled to all privilleges. Other than the proxies mentioned above, OYG does not own or manage operations of a communty platform beyond terms that apply to all licensees. Niether OYG nor licensees derive income from sale of information about users.

Lcense fees are paid mostly by organizations; including, local, county and state governments, community based organizations, NGOs, and non-profit foundations and community-based organizations.

Value Proposition:

Local newspapers made literacy more valuable for people to know about events salient to their lives, and about the culture, and history and traditons of community, identifying individuals, political leadership, professionals and as well as public, commercial, religious facilities and social structures that are learned in  schools. Community values were promulgated by editorial writers along with morality, previously learned in the home and church.

The 20th century brought this information into the home with radio and television. Recruitment and funding warfare got a boost from cinema, radio and TV propaganda. Public figures and popular celebrity expanded. The world wide web brought information from futher away and social media introduced user-generated content along with a flood of published misinformation. Peer-to-many conversations supplanted broadcasting. 

Own Your Government builds on the technologies for webcasting in a way that reduces misinformation and uses the interactive potential to enhance democratic decision making with a structure for consensus with collective impact and information sharing across cultural and linguistic boundaries.

Populations of OYG communities may be highly diverse. The manner in which diversity is accommodated makes the licensee an economic and political force for addressing climate change, economic inequities, education and any matters, where mutual interest can arise in communication.

The greatest value is the "upstream" aspect that allows people to guide their government, expose waste and corruption and improve competence. 

Licensees may empower community businesses, aggregate purchasing power and form cooperatives that serve the community and reach wider markets. 

Community cooperatives can organize renewable energy, communication, water and other services for the community.

Since January 2019, the co-founders and members of Own Your Government, LLC have invested $135,000 in specifiying the design, testing modules and building the prototype for a launch that we anticipate this year.

Monthly expense projections for every aspect of this project are based on quotes and bids from multiple vendors. This analysis includes not only technological elements, but also, marketing, social and business-related elements that are necessary in introducing an innovative new processs for grassroots leadership and global interaction.

Revenue Projections: are based on an annual license fee paid by communities based on monthly costs at scale. The annual fee per user at scale is projected at  $0.75 US per active user including a margin of $0.10 US per user. Revenue is projected to cover cost when OYG achieves 1,000 participating communities of 15k users, producing $4M annual recurring revenue, a number potentially achievable within 12 months following beta launch. The equivalent of  20,000 community platforms with 15k users is achievable within 2-3 years following the conclusion of the beta launch, and $80M recurring revenue.  

The platform will meet these economic goals providing that people register and use the platform. The beta launch, aside from working out any technical issues and research projects, will inform about best ways of achieving greatest value for different situations and populations. We've planned for technical obstacles; such as hacking, power failures and interference of political or criminal actors that might want to disable the framework or individual community platforms. The framework can be engineered to quickly recover on redundant servers and there is a plan for local servers to provide most functionlities and user data intact in the event of global system failure.

Projected costs of building, deploying and maintaining this framework are based on quotes and bids from multiple companies for each function, whose products and services OYG may depend on. Some modules used in beta communities may access APIs from Google, Open.ai, Dolby, Signalwire, Amazon, Microsoft, Starlink, AT&T, and so on. Some vendors may be replaced in house as investment continues and internal resources expand.

A $5 million Investment is projected through the beta period. This amount will increase in the event that: 1) the beta project is expanded to include more communities requiring greater onboarding expense and more rapid scaling, 2) there are localization costs when additional communities in the beta are located in places with different native languages, 3) advanced functionalities or backend systems are incorporated more quickly, 4) demand ramps up more quickly than the plan now anticipates, 5) research projects are incorporated to expand the usefulness of the beta projects.