Agora · co-founder
Being heard shouldn’t wait for election day.
Agora is what my co-founder Yishai and I are building: a non-partisan platform for the years between elections. Elected officials share what they’re deciding, the people they represent respond, and offices see what their own constituents think. We’re in alpha in the United States.
01 · The gap
Plenty of contact. Not much signal.
What residents see
A view, and nowhere to put it.
A bill moves through committee without making the news. A council votes on a zoning change. Most people have a view on something like that, and nowhere reliable to put it.
What offices get
Noise, from everywhere.
Offices aren’t short of contact: calls, emails, petitions, comment threads. What they don’t get is a clear view of what their own constituents think.
Agora sits in that gap: one structured channel between the people and the offices that represent them.
02 · How it works
One loop, from question to answer.
1
An office shares what’s on the table.
Bills and votes come in automatically from the public record, where we have the data. Offices add questions, polls and town halls.
2
Residents respond.
Enter an address and see who represents you, from Congress down to city hall where we have the data. Then respond to real items. Structured, not a comment section.
3
The office sees its own constituents.
What the people it represents think, separated from outside noise.
4
The office answers in public.
It can acknowledge what it heard and respond, so input doesn’t disappear into a void.
Agora isn’t social media for politicians, a polling firm, a campaign tool or a transparency dashboard. Every official, of every party, gets the same tools.
Responses come from residents who choose to take part. They aren’t a poll or a representative sample.
03 · Where it stands
Built first. Now opening the doors.
Most civic platforms launch with a promise and wait for content to arrive. We started from the public record, so there’s something real to respond to from the first visit. Now the work is getting it in front of the offices that can use it.
100,000+
pieces of public content already on Agora.
16
US states represented on our waitlist.
4
countries on the waitlist, too.
Alpha
live in the US today. More countries next.
- Open to early testers
- Guided app tours
- Not raising money right now
We’re looking for design partners: offices willing to try it and tell us what’s wrong.
04 · What we learned
We studied the platforms that came before us.
Dozens of serious teams tried to connect people and government. Many didn’t make it, and many that survived did so by narrowing. We wrote up 51 cases as Lessons from Civic Tech History and found eight patterns. Here’s what six of them changed in how we build Agora.
1
The cold start: two-sided platforms stall.
We pull in officials’ public records automatically, so there’s something real to respond to from day one.
2
The engagement trap: optimizing for outrage.
No feeds built for outrage, no streaks, no points. Residents respond to real items, not to each other.
3
Partisan capture: once it’s one side’s, it’s over.
One template for every office. We never take sides.
4
Transparency isn’t participation.
Agora is built around responding, not just reading.
5
The advisory ceiling: input nobody has to act on.
Offices can acknowledge input and answer in public. That doesn’t oblige anyone to act, which is why we treat it as the hardest part.
6
The business-model void: no buyer, no future.
Participation is free for residents. Offices, not residents, are the intended customer.
05 · Our story
Why we’re building it
If you take political science seriously, what would you build?
Agora started as that question, during our university years. My public-sector work later taught me how hard it is for institutions to hear the public once the votes are counted. Agora is separate from that work.
Promises
Lines we won’t cross.
- No partisan positions, ever.
- No ads, and no selling anyone’s attention.
- No streaks, points or outrage feeds.
- No paywall on taking part.
- No promising more than we’ve built.
Questions
Questions people ask
Is Agora partisan?
No. We never take positions.
Where does it work today?
Across the United States: addresses in all 50 states are matched to their House member and two Senators. Coverage goes deepest where we started, in New York state and New York City, and we’re adding more one step at a time.
Can I use it now?
We’re in alpha, open to early testers, with guided app tours. The tour is the best way in.
Who owns Agora, and what happens to my data?
Agora is an independent project co-founded by Yishai (Jesse) Stern and me. How residents’ information is handled is set out in Agora’s privacy policy.
Is this a government project?
No. Agora is independent. It isn’t owned, funded or directed by any government body.
Does it cost anything?
Participating is free for residents.
I’m outside the US. Is this for me?
Not yet as a product, but the problem is universal, and more countries are next. If you work on participation in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland or elsewhere, I’d like to compare notes.
Tomer Rozenberg
Co-founder of Agora · writing The Civic Gap
See it for yourself.
The tour shows Agora from an office’s side and a resident’s side, and ends with a way to reach us.
More reading: the manifesto · Lessons from Civic Tech History · Between Votes
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