Citizen-Owned Forum

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What is this?

People should understand the value of their data. Political institutions pay tens of millions of dollars to data brokers to harvest our sentiment and use it however they want. We're now watching the federal government push legislation to scrape even more of this data directly from major tech platforms.

We should have a place where verified, concerned citizens can give anonymous feedback and see where their community actually stands.

Pol.is is a great example of this kind of technology: finding points of agreement and helping facilitate legislation from the ground up. The Forum Initiative does something similar, but as a lightweight, open-source tool that any municipality's IT team can fork and deploy in an afternoon.

How it works: residents submit anonymous feedback on local issues.

Names and addresses are never stored, they're converted into a one-way hash for verification.

A sentiment analyzer processes submissions into a public dashboard showing civic health, friction points, and top community topics.

Raw data is automatically purged.

Verified citizen sentiment, no bots, no doxxing, no personal information stored.

I created the database, and I won’t even know who submitting the comment once it’s hashed.