The Data Cooperative & Open Source Vision

The most common failure mode in civic technology is not technical. It is organizational. A well-intentioned founder builds a platform. It gains traction. Investors acquire influence. Incentives shift. The platform that began as democratic infrastructure becomes a data extraction business.

This isn't a hypothetical risk. It is the documented pattern of the last two decades of social technology. Project Liberty — Frank McCourt's initiative to build a people-centered internet — has identified this capture dynamic as the central design challenge of the next generation of digital infrastructure. Their research into data cooperatives as alternatives to centralized digital economies provides the intellectual foundation for what Open Caucus is building: governance structures where the people who generate data are the people who control how it's used.

Open Caucus extends this vision with a specific architectural commitment: the governance structure is reinforced by open source code and Swiss cooperative law working together, so that the promises embedded in the governance cannot be silently violated in the software.

Governance: three entities, three protections

The long-term architecture places the platform's mission under the custody of three legally distinct organizations, each providing a protection the others cannot:

Open source: code you can verify, not promises you must trust

Governance structures protect against organizational capture. But governance alone cannot protect against a platform that says it respects your privacy while its code does something different. This is why Open Caucus is committed to auditable code — not as a marketing label, but as a structural trust mechanism.

Our approach draws on what Proton demonstrated in encrypted communications and what Project Liberty's DSNP is building for decentralized social networking: when the infrastructure serves a public interest function, the code must be publicly auditable. Privacy claims that cannot be independently verified are privacy theater.

The code licensing follows our entity structure. We state that sequence directly, because the communities we serve will verify it.

Commercial features — the B2B tools for researchers and political organizations — remain proprietary. This is the open core model: the democratic infrastructure is open and auditable; the business layer that funds it is commercially licensed. Investors need this boundary. Users benefit from it because the revenue it generates funds the infrastructure's independence.

The code is the proof. Under any license, auditable or fully open, any developer can verify whether our privacy claims match what the code actually does. That audit capability exists today. Full open source protections follow when the Swiss AG forms.

The cooperative model: paying as resistance

The "Navigator" tier (~$1.30 USD/month) is not a subscription to an app. It is a membership reservation in the Swiss Cooperative. When the Cooperative forms, Navigators become founding members with governance rights over how their collective data is used.

This framing draws on a principle articulated by Doc Searls in his concept of the Intention Economy: instead of platforms extracting your attention and selling it to advertisers, individuals broadcast their intentions directly, and markets compete to serve them. Project Liberty's Alliance of 160+ organizations is building toward the same structural shift — moving from an internet that extracts value from people to one that serves them. Open Caucus is designed to be part of that transition.

The Navigator payment is the structural mechanism that makes cooperative governance possible. The person who pays is the person who cannot be sold. Revenue from Navigator memberships funds the cooperative's independence, ensuring the democratic governance body never depends on the commercial entity for its existence.

Where we are honestly

None of these entities exist yet. Open Caucus is currently operated by Quiet and Helpful, LLC, a Minnesota limited liability company. The Swiss AG, the Cooperative, and the Foundation will be formed at specific milestones as the project matures — each triggered by real adoption metrics, not arbitrary timelines.

What that means for trust right now: four protections are active today. Your political preferences are stored on your device, not our servers — individual political data cannot be produced from infrastructure that doesn't hold it. You are the licensor in our Terms of Service; we are the licensee, and you can revoke that license anytime. The source code is published and readable — any developer can audit it on your behalf. And our build process is designed for verifiability.

Additional protections — jurisdictional, democratic governance, and mission permanence — activate as the entity structure matures through its milestones. We name those milestones publicly because the communities we serve will track them. What you have today is real. What comes next is staged, budgeted, and tied to verifiable triggers.

We publish this roadmap — including the honest gaps — because vague promises about future governance structures are worth less than a clear vision with stated limitations at each stage.

The vision is a platform where the people who generate political data are the people who govern how it's used — and where the code that implements those governance commitments is publicly auditable. Structurally, not rhetorically. Getting there requires building trust one verified step at a time.