Your political will matters. No one is measuring it honestly.
Open Caucus is building secure infrastructure where verified humans privately express what they care about — and communities see what they actually think. Free from bots, billionaires, and surveillance.
We don't know what we think
The tools we use to understand public opinion are broken. And most people already sense it.
85% of Americans believe elected officials don't care what they think — up 30 points since 2000. Between 40–67% self-censor their political views — a rate exceeding McCarthyism, when only one in eight Americans felt afraid to speak. AI chatbots now infiltrate 99.8% of online surveys, a finding researchers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences called a potential existential threat to social science itself.
Meanwhile, $2.6 billion from top billionaire families flooded the 2024 federal elections — a 160× increase since Citizens United. Political scientists have found that average citizens' preferences have a statistically near-zero impact on policy outcomes, regardless of how strongly they feel.
The silence is self-reinforcing. When most people stay quiet, the loudest voices — increasingly bots, paid operatives, and algorithmically amplified extremes — define what "the public" supposedly thinks. The United States is no longer classified as a stable democracy; the Polity data series now labels it an "anocracy."
Authentic political will hasn't disappeared. It's just unmeasured.
Infrastructure for verifiable public will
Open Caucus is a nonpartisan web platform where verified humans privately rank their political priorities, express which direction they lean, and see what their communities actually care about — by neighborhood, city, county, state, and country.
Three principles make it different from anything that exists:
Your data stays on your device
Individual rankings are stored locally, never on our servers. When you express a direction, it's added to a community counter and immediately discarded — we call it "count and forget." The system is designed so there is nothing to produce in response to a legal demand.
Swiss law protects the infrastructure
All data processing happens in Switzerland, where Article 271 of the Swiss Criminal Code makes complying with foreign surveillance demands a criminal offense — up to three years imprisonment. This isn't a corporate privacy policy. It's federal statute.
You own your data — contractually
Our Terms of Service invert the standard relationship: you are the licensor, we are the licensee. Your data license expires in 7 days unless you choose to renew it. You can revoke it anytime.
Five minutes. Every few weeks. Private by design.
Verify you're human
Swiss-hosted verification confirms you're a real person. No Google or Apple login. No US identity provider sits between you and us.
Rank what matters to you
Drag and drop your top priorities from a nonpartisan issue library built on the Comparative Agendas Project — the same academic taxonomy used by political scientists in 30+ countries.
Express which direction you lean
Your answer is counted and immediately forgotten. No record ever connects you to your direction. Directional options draw from the Manifesto Project methodology used across 50+ countries.
See what your community actually thinks
Results appear only after enough verified humans contribute in your area to prevent any individual voice from being identified. Equal weight — a billionaire's voice counts the same as a teacher's.
Your voice stays current
Rankings count for a limited period, then fade unless you renew. Political will should be living and revisable, not locked in at first expression.
Honest about what exists — and what doesn't yet
Open Caucus is pre-product. We have a working proof of concept, an assembling team with deep experience in digital identity and privacy-preserving technology, and a thesis validated by converging crises in democratic measurement, digital surveillance, and civic infrastructure.
What exists today
The POC architecture, an Inverted Terms of Service framework, Swiss hosting infrastructure, and partnerships in development with the KERI distributed identity community.
What doesn't exist yet
The Swiss corporate entity, the cooperative, or the funded engineering team. We're raising a pre-seed round to build the MVP, concentrate on the Minneapolis pilot, and form the Swiss entity structure.
We're telling you this because the communities we serve deserve honesty, not vague promises about structures that haven't been built yet. If you want to follow this from the beginning — or help shape it — join the waitlist below.
Assembling the team
Russ Haywood
Initial FounderCertified product manager and entrepreneur with 13+ years in digital identity and privacy-preserving technology. Founding Steward of the Sovrin Network distributed identity network. Contributor to the Trust Over IP Foundation and Project Liberty data sovereignty initiatives. Background in Philosophy (community & epistemology) and Political Theory. Early Ethereum community leader. Based in Minneapolis, MN.
Courtney Kovacevich
CMOMarketing and communications strategist leading Open Caucus's brand, GTM, positioning, and community growth. Responsible for translating complex privacy-preserving infrastructure into narratives that resonate with civic participants, researchers, and institutional partners alike.
Nicole Brennan
Sr. Product DesignerProduct designer with experience at the intersection of civic technology and user-centered design. Lead member of Harvard's Applied Social Media Lab research initiatives; and design work on USA.gov and vote.gov federal platforms to deliver accessible, multilingual experiences that increased civic engagement by 96% and reached 105M+ users annually. Brings a rare combination of rigorous UX methodology and deep understanding of the design challenges unique to democratic infrastructure.
Emerson Bantegui
Visual Design LeadVisual designer responsible for Open Caucus's identity system, brand language, and interface aesthetics. Focused on creating a visual vocabulary that communicates trust and nonpartisan credibility without relying on the conventions of political technology or startup culture.
Kent Bull
Technical AdvisorDistributed identity expert at GLEIF (Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation). KERI protocol developer and contributor to the WebOfTrust ecosystem. Focused on cryptographic identity infrastructure and verifiable credential systems. Kent's prior work on caucus vote verification was a seed that grew into Open Caucus.
Advisors
Advisory board forming. Disciplines sought: constitutional law, Swiss corporate governance, political science methodology, cryptographic identity systems, cooperative economics.
If you have relevant expertise and want to help build democratic infrastructure, reach out.
Be part of this from the beginning
We're building in public and we want the right people in the room early. Join the waitlist to get updates on our progress, early access to the MVP, and the chance to shape what gets built.
Your email is stored on Swiss infrastructure, never shared, never sold. We use open-source mailing list software self-hosted in Switzerland. No tracking pixels. No open-rate analytics. You can remove yourself anytime. We practice what we build.
Open Caucus is operated by Quiet and Helpful, LLC (Minneapolis, MN). All waitlist data is processed and stored in Switzerland. We collect only what you provide: email address, optional name, and optional interest category. We do not track email opens, link clicks, or browsing behavior. We do not share data with third parties. You may request deletion at any time.