About
The Forum Initiative is building civic feedback infrastructure with a citizen verification layer designed so the platform cannot access, sell, or surrender your data — because the system makes it impossible.
Your feedback is received. Your personal information never hits our database. We don't want to monetize your data. We just want to verify it's a real person on the other end and gather high-quality data for analysis of what Americans want and need.
Why Are We Making This?
Your opinion data is collected everywhere by platforms, apps, surveys, and algorithms. Saved and sold without your express knowledge or consent. The value of what you think flows to corporations. What you think and feel is very valuable to companies, organizations, political campaigns, and others.
Most platforms ask you to trust them with your data. We're building a system based around not wanting to keep your data and not needing to ask for that trust. The goal is an architecture that ensures we never possess your identifiable information. We can't read it. We can't sell it. We can't hand it over to anyone. The endgame is to work toward a system that can verify identity with processes like what ID.me and others offer, while maintaining a non-custodial database and ensuring users maintain their own data rights.
Manipulation of civic discourse data is a documented, profitable industry. The Forum Initiative is the structural alternative. Feedback and comment infrastructure built for the people generating the data, not the people extracting value from it.
Active Build: Forum Feedback Form
A feedback widget connected to a temporary database. The Forum offers ethically designed questions around issues that matter to citizens. One verified resident, one response per question. We aren't seeking ongoing engagement. It's a tool meant to be used and put down.
Every response is designed to be cryptographically signed in the user's browser. The database ledger records only that a verified resident submitted a response. That response cannot be linked back to your personal identity information. Additionally, we intend to scrub the database daily after feedback is analyzed.
Who Is Working on This?
The Forum Initiative is founded and operated by Richard Ferraro, based in Maine. It is a personal civic project being built for "we the people" — not backed by institutional funding, venture capital, or political organizations. If you're interested in being a part of it, please reach out.
Contact
Richard Ferraro
forum.community@pm.me
admin@theforum.community
Maine, USA
Target Infrastructure
Cloudflare D1 (verification ledger)
Cloudflare Workers (compute + data purge)
Cloudflare Turnstile (bot prevention)
Ed25519 (client-side signing)
Identity verification (method in evaluation)
What This Is Not
Not a registered nonprofit, LLC, or corporation
Not affiliated with any political party, campaign, or lobbying organization
Not a social media platform
Not deployed — all infrastructure is in active development and testing
Not funded by any institution, corporation, or government entity
Development Status
Working
D1 verification ledger
Ed25519 client-side signing
Data purge cycle (Workers)
Content integrity patrol
Cloudflare Turnstile bot prevention
Domain and DNS infrastructure
Landing page and project documentation
In Development
Ethical question database
Identity verification model
Feedback form UI
Not Started
LLC formation (Maine)
Privacy Policy and Terms of Service
Data Processing Agreement
Partner organization dashboard
First pilot