LISTENING

For a learning technology to help people with real problems, they must trust and own decisions of the social structure for collective action. Population increase and migration have created culturally diverse communities often without the moral centers traditionally provided by church or temple and many people don’t identify with the community. The learning deficit is not only global, it’s a natural state. Moverover, a global learning solution must be both local and applicable everywhere. This solution uses technology to pose a community learning problem, and in onboarding, as people address this problem, their agency expands, transforming both them and their community. Moreover, this happens in the context of the evolution of popular media. The problem posed by this solution is to define the community, values, problems and possibilities. Onboarding engages people in adapting this technology into the fabric of their lives, and through consensus, to the extent that it is relevant. By consensus, the community names and trains AI assistants, and shapes conventions to fit the styles of culture, language, economy and other circumstances. The Learning Challenge application asks us about underserved populations, however, critical learning deficits occur in all societies, and this is a global solution: Enrollment in higher education has fallen dramatically globally. Anxiety and depression are increasingly reported by tweens, high school and university students. 40% of students in the United States are unable to read at a basic level and 54% of American adults read below the equivalent of a 6th-grade level, while 1 in 5 adults read below a 3rd-grade level. Core values of every culture are revealed in traditional, popular media, art and literature: the Torah, Proust, Nietzsche, Quran, Cervantes, Dumas, Omar Kayyam, Hans Christrian Andersen, Taylor Swift and The Black Eyed Peas. Localizing this solution accommodates lifestyles, core values and family traditions. However, there are cultural equivalents in Africa, Latin America and Asia that show up in music and other arts. Cloud technology requires connection to commercial networks and a global solution must make it possible for underserved populations to cover such costs. Government regulations protect online users in Europe and America. Consensus is the crux of this solution, can consensus determine curricula without constraining personal freedom? Opportunities reveal gaps in knowledge that motivate learning. Gaps in knowledge occur naturally in the context of practical needs, how does the solution create opportunities that inspire learning and accommodate the unexpected? Social Science: Observation & Analysis User-generated content reveals the world view of observers. A globally compatible solution for observation, experiment and collective impact using compatible platforms can be augmented with AI to learn, transfer knowledge and create relationship. Communication between diverse elements within communities towards common goals helps the global community build consensus for collective action, while the compatibility of platforms ensures that efficacious solutions are shared.

Imagine a discrete platform for your own community. There’s a news feed that lets you know what's going on with a button that lets you post comments or ask questions of people in your community. A streaming media channel is ready for user content. An AI reads aloud and helps learning, curates information and guides your interest. AI also fact checks your research and composes messages.

Theory of Change

While acquiring knowledge improves your performance, this platform  organizes studies and integrates your education with your life. It's like a library, TV studio and university, an infrastructure for learning, sharing information and organizing action. It can help obtain funding for alternative energy sources, homes, schools or clinics.

Polling functions engage people in consensus building for tackling community problems and earning while learning programs. Verified consensus on a community poll leads to collective action.

A poll in a village might ask, "Do you want to raise the grade of the road to [other village] and prevent large rigs from using it?” AI keeps track and offers solutions. Learning how to use the platform and then accomplishing things is transformative.

Below is a simplified plan of platform functions. Implementation begins with a series of live and hybrid community workshops in which initial participants are trained to train the community.

In the onboarding process the community learns about community resources and core values and adopts a framework of democracy, inclusivity, consesnsus and objectives for collective action.

• 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

The platform is accessed with a connection to the worldwide web or a server at a data service center or it can be on a machine in the community accessed via a wifi or village LAN. A cloud instance of the framework can support many community platforms at a very low cost. A cloud framework will be hosted on redundant servers so it can be spun up quickly to recover in a new location. 

People learn that their agency expands through participation. They can see the effect their participation has produced.

The platform offers templates and professional support to form and manage community coops and otherwise support community objectives.

In the onboarding process the community learns about community resources and core values and adopts a framework of democracy, inclusivity, consesnsus and objectives for 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.

What can be learned by whom from this solution to this challenge?

The future depends on foundations that a current generation creates for those who follow. This solution puts in place and maintains an enduring infrastructure that empowers individual ability to move an idea through consensus to collective action. 

Interdependence occurs naturally when people are able to articulate their ideas to others, organize projects and benefit from the knowledge of others. 

A global framework for compatible localized community platforms creates a wider possibility. Each is a venue for information sharing in a climate of trust. Learning to use this technology is learning to work as a team toward common objectives. The framework underscores the value of independent thought and personal freedom from self-limiting bias. Communities learn to support  individual efforts in collective activities and collaboration.

Through participation in consensus building, people learn from each other, and to respect differences and to value their own contribution in a context where everyone can win and everyone has something at stake.

When people are supported in communicating their goals, and comfortable about assessing their performance, they can work as a team. Relationships are resources for learning and listening for the commitments of others.

A safe container for dialogue enables experimentation with innovative ideas and learning that being wrong can be more valuable than being correct. This solution engages people in creating the prosperity of their communities. They learn to distinguish bias in their own language and how important it is to let go of what they know for what actually works.

By nurturing appreciation and understanding of others, the platform opens  access to information, mentoring and self expression, and empowers auto education.

This solution not only values diversity and differences, it helps people use  diversity to make use of different perspectives. Flourishing of the community can occur as an realization of many individual successes.

The structure for collective action created by this solution requires the inclusion of the voices and contributions of everyone; seldom realized in democracy. People learn to listen and observe in a way that defeats prejudicial thinking and biases that impede collaboration.

Today, we can share knowledge with people in many other places. Individual ideas and collective action can migrate instantly everywhere in the world. People can also physically migrate without and stay connected to their roots. In this world of diverse loyalties, it is shame to ask anyone to choose between one and another and this is new and exciting era. The possibility of global peace is one of diverse communities interdependent and independent, autonomous and complicit in a new myth of humanity. This sound of this myth can be heard in much of the new music that travels around the globe. It's beauty can be seen in YouTube and TikTok videos uploaded by countless individuals celebrating life in their self-expressions. This solution taps this potentional with technical facility of commuity platforms with common values on a framework that bridges cultural and linguistic differences. 

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. They 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 allows communities to bootstap initiatives to meet needs that they identify, and access resources to create collaborative projects, including educational programs and facilities, energy and telecom coops, disaster preparedness plans, and aggregation of the purchasing power of the entire community for 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 school and educational institution and foundation will have a new window of opportunity.

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 aanalogous 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. The idea that social media to influence government decisions is demonstrated. Social media has overcome established regimes and misconduct by powerful economic hierarchies. This solution empowers grassroots action on behalf of community consensus as a strategy to use the collective impact and resources of a community to nurture the economic prosperity experienced by its members. 

We target a cross-cultural transformation to overcome global inertia that impedes commitment that will end poverty and violence, and other conditions that inhibit personal and global prosperity. The world is very small today. A person born in a village in Madagascar may, as an adolescent, find herself in London, Bronx or Toronto, etc. This platform will prepare her and transform her experience of the world and v.v.. 

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.

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 can lead to extraordinary results:

1) Cessation of mass murders.

2) Ending of military actions in Ukraine, Israel, Myanmar and elsewhere.

3) Reduction of millitary spending and weapons expense.

4) Cessation of civil engineering projects that do not contribute to ecological preservation.

5) Sufficient public funding of education.

6) Forgiving all student debt and public subsidy of higher education

7) Global version of the U.S. Peace Corps

8) Replacement of Drug War with drug therapy policies, ending the demand for illicit drug purchase from unlicensed services.

9) Reproductive rights legislation protecting autonomy of individuals.

10) Constitutional amendment providing for popular vote elections, retiring the Electoral College.

11) Reparations paid for slavery and restorations of native lands contingent on ecological preservation.

12) Removal of dams and replacement of hydroelectric power with nuclear, wind, tidal, geothermal and other clean power solutions.

13) New policiees for urban development reducing energy demand and requiring sufficient open space and natural environments.

14) Replacement of punitive solutions to crime with rehabilitative solutions.

15) Transfer of costs and operations of the veterans administration and  expenses associated with military actions to the Pentagon.

16) Public disclosure of all secret operations prior to the year 2000 and policy limiting secret operations.

17) Constitutional amendment removing immunity from prosecution for acts in violation of international or national law by government agents or officials.

18) Constitutional amendments as necessary to protect the rights of children, non-resident visitors and resident citizens of other nations.

19) Enactment of an American Arts, Culture and Philosophy department of government with sufficient funding to support local projects, events and publication.

20) American Academies of Music, Antiquities, Painting, Architecture, Justice, Sculpture, Theater, Literature and Philosophy.

21) Creation of a Crime Abatement Department to oversee the finance and securities trading industry

22) Restoration of ARPA, reduction of DARPA.

23) Expansion of funding for the Federal Trade Commission to adequately protect people.

24) Depolitization of the Supreme Court of the United States

25) Truly representative government in America

26) Universal healthcare, including dental, mental, hearing and optometry.

27) Publicly funded, enlightened pre-school education

28) Restoration of wetlands and other natural habitatss in urban areas.

29) Implementation of urban composting waste disposal systems

30) Decentralization of energy production and distribution

31) Prioritization of parkland preservation to preserve ecosytems

32) Measurable reduction in greenhouse gas emissions

33) Retirement of the retirement myth, inclusion of people of merit regardless of age.

34) Foundation of an American Music and Performing Arts fund

35) Enactment of a Species Preservation and Education Law

36) Development of an International Ecosystem Protective Civil Engineering Standard

37) World Federalism Inititative at the United Nations

38) Experimentation with OYG in The Republic of China

OYG is a digital framework for hosting cyberspace platforms that provide connection and information sharing for geopolitical communities. There is an emphasis on video content and conversations that "lead to action". Cyber space platforms are licensed to and branded for communities. In spirit, OYG's framework promotes an experience that "this is for fun and for keeps", that communication counts, a philosophy that underlies a consensus function.

On an OYG community platform, members can co-create content and blend satire with visual impact of cinematic storytelling. Virtual storytelling events and podcasts allow for sharing of personal narratives related to real issues, values and central myths, fostering a sense of relationship through real-time interaction. Communities have cafes, pubs, bakeries, autoshops and digital platforms may use such spaces for interaction and create virtual twin locations. In digital festivals and comedy nights community members can contribute performances in shared spaces for laughter and reflection.

OYG maintains platforms. The community verifies member accounts, confirms registration, maintains accounts per rules of use and oversees and  records results of polls and surveys.

The following are standard functional modules on every community platform:

Community Profile A Community Profile is the landing screen for users, and contains information about the wealth, power and status of the community.

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

Newsroom: AI curates news culled from local, state, national, and international sources for salience related to the ability to use or take action. The Newsroom is also a studio for member content creation.

Community Forum: Members read, respond, post a comment or a question to the community.

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

Survey & Polls: are the foundation of the consensus tool: members view “hot” polls (or surveys) on the Community Profile; create surveys and polls and share comments, relevant documents and media. Community members may also use polls to nominate, elect and change community leaders.

Consensus: A threshold can be set for a poll to automatically post reports of community consensus to media, elected officials and community members. 

Communication:  Members can teleconference with peers or join a scheduled teleconference using a prompt that connects to this function. Participants can send or push reports from surveys and polls to other platforms, the media, politicians, elected officials and to each other..

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

Information: Users are able to publish and retrieve information. Sort functions allow users to search for documents by topic, keyword, date and poster.. Recordings of video meetings can be indexed here as well.

Calendar: OYG Admin, Local Admin and Users can schedule events and invite members for teleconference and physical meetings and events

Enterprise & Project Management: Users may create a project or enterprise and gain access to productivity tools for the project. Users are able to  network with others for a project or community banking and lending enterprises.

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.

(More information about people in next section.)

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, Point Loma Town Council .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.

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

What is your plan for becoming financially sustainable, and what evidence can you provide that this plan has been successful so far?

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, 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.