Thanks for the responses — it would be great to connect more on this in person.

I think that some collaboration will be valuable, but that independent iteration is equally important and will ultimately be most likely to yield what we collectively want. The way the world ended up with hugely successful/valuable tech products in commerce, communications, and transportation wasn’t because those companies collaborated; it’s because a lot of smart people separately started organizations that took different approaches to the problem, competing to create the best product with slightly different theses. They definitely built upon each others’ successes, and leveraged the tools created by others in related domains, but they didn’t exactly collaborate in the way it seems you might be implying is necessary for success in the democracy space. I think that ten separate teams of ten people competing would yield a single solution that is far stronger than a hundred people collaborating. (It’s not that we don’t want to collaborate; it’s just that I don’t think that collaboration is the lever that will get success here. It’s having more well-funded organizations, companies or non-profits, separately iterating.)

I like your framing of this as a pyramid rather than three pillars; it’s how we see it as well. Nothing matters if you can’t get millions of people to first participate; it’s why this is what we’ve focused on first.

And I totally agree that the biggest problem with political/civic sites has been engagement. While we’ve had significant growth, we’ve had only adequate levels of engagement, and it’s the thing we’re now most focused on. But I do believe it can be done — we already regularly have tens of millions of people taking action on the site every month, organically, through tens of thousands of new campaigns, and there are a ton of things we clearly should and will be doing to build on this (more focus on local, community, content, etc).

Anyway, would love to tell you more about some of the things we’re working on and to get your thoughts.