OpenGov Foundation

The bet

The OpenGov Foundation was born from a victory. During the 2011 fight over SOPA and PIPA, an alternative bill, the OPEN Act, was drafted with public input online, and its backers called it the first crowdsourced legislation in history. Seamus Kraft, who had worked in Congressman Darrell Issa's office, co-founded the foundation with Issa in 2012 to turn that one-off into infrastructure.

Its tool, Madison, let citizens read a bill, comment on specific provisions and suggest edits. Improving a law could become a public act, done in the open instead of behind committee doors. The bet was that if ordinary people could read and mark up legislation, lawmakers would let the public in.

Peak

The idea traveled remarkably far. Washington, DC adopted Madison, as did the federal government of Mexico and the United Nations. In 2015 the White House used it to crowdsource its Public Participation Playbook, and Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Sunlight Foundation used it to develop municipal open-data policies.

For a stretch, Madison was the marquee example of crowd-law, cited everywhere as proof that citizens could help write the rules that govern them.

What worked

Madison was used for a 2011 draft bill, before the foundation existed, and it made the daunting job of reading and editing legislation approachable. It was open-sourced so others could build on it, and institutions as serious as the White House and the UN took it up. The tool was excellent and the mission mattered.

What failed — the mechanism

Madison solved the citizen's half of crowd-law and couldn't solve the legislator's. Public markup was easy, and impressive institutions adopted the tool. The foundation reported thousands of citizen users and more than seventy-five governments. Participation in the best-known case, the 2011 OPEN Act drafts, was thin, with about 30 comments per draft, and we found no record of citizen edits changing an enacted law. The participation, elegant as it was, tended to end in a comment thread and not in a redline in the statute. A tool whose whole value depended on the responsive side showing up found that side present for the announcement and absent for the follow-through.

Underneath the product, the foundation was a grant-funded nonprofit with no recurring revenue. It released the fourth and last version of Madison as open source in May 2017 and began building Article One, a voice and SMS tool for constituent engagement. It shut Madison down on 10 February 2019 and left an archive. POPVOX brought Madison's collaborative editing back on its own platform that October.

The idea was right. The counterpart with power ran out, and so did the money to keep waiting for it.

What Agora takes from it

The OpenGov Foundation is DemocracyOS's American cousin: a good way for citizens to engage real legislation, undone because the official side didn't take it up.

Agora doesn't build a tool and then wait for officials to notice it. It seeds the official side by automatically gathering officials' public records, and it anchors participation to their actual work. The platform isn't an empty room on day one, and it has a reason to exist before any official chooses to take part.

The foundation's arc is also the business-model void with a human face. It ran on grants and on the willpower of the people who believed in it, and both gave out. Agora answers who pays at the start, before it has to find out the same way.