Action to Reduce Energy Demand in Places that Contribute Most to Global Warming

We have the technology we need to reverse global warming... ...we are using it to create global warming.

Bringing lawsuits requires organization, funding and legal expertise. If it takes a lawsuit to motivate a progressive government like Switzerland's, we need organizations with standing to bring such actions in U.S. states If governments of carbon producing nations can be held responsible for harmful consequences, those who are adversely affected in places that are more sensitive to climate, and who depend less on carbon technology may demand remedies through legal action, changing the economics.

European nations may now be held responsible for the health effects of global warming, however, not necessarily other effects of climate change.

Urban planning and development technologies in the Americas, Asia and Europe are increasing the need for electrical energy and high volume transit systems, producing CO2 in construction as well as lifestyles.

Global business interests resist efforts to reduce markets, and megaproject investment interests are focused on their bottom lines. Growth-ambitious megaprojects around the world are not stopping despite protests and oil and gas exploration have also not slowed.

Energy demand has increased and oil and gas exploration is not slowing with a 50% increase in renewable energy. Fossil fuel technologies are exported to Latin America and Africa, while increasing demand in Europe and America surpasses reductions in carbon with new technology.

A drop in demand can help promote alternative energy but it takes time to bring new sources online, while the window for climate action is short. How can we create a sufficient reduction in energy demand until we can supply energy demand without inducing climate change?

This requires technology for a behavioral solution because people in general are not organized to scientifically document damages and fund legal action, nor are they well enough informed to influence government administrations. How do we motivate societies that produce most CO2 to reduce energy use until we can sustainably meet demand?

The cost of climate change should fairly fall on those whose energy demands cause global warming but the cost of replacing energy sources is more than monetary, it means promoting changes in lifestyles and values. Literally, we must re-educate the 10% of us that are resistant to discomfort albeit we are causing global warming.

The solution will involve both a retooling of democracy and a rewiring of values in the societies that cause global warming and others who suffer the effects.

Our solution will motivate governments to address  global warming as weell as dsistractions created by ongoing economic crises, collapsing infrastructure, social inequities and corrupt and incompetent administration. We cannot afford this much incompetence and solve the biggest threat to civilization since WWII.

Our solution engages public sentiment in direct democratic action. Changing names on office doors in elections has not helped. Elections distract from the issues and policies that are not in the public interest are not mentioned.

This solution is conceptually simple and made possible by technology.

A technology that puts the reigns of government into the hands of the people also makess the people responsible. This technological solution therefore includes methods for re-education and informing public sentiment.

In A Nutshell

Imagine an online platform deployed for your small community of 15,000 to 50,000, including adults and children. You and your neighbors can use the network to communicate, run businesses and other activities. The most powerful functions are curated news and forums with the ability for people to weigh in and build consensus for things that matter.

Everyone can poll the community, and if their poll gets traction, the platform notifies media and government officials. 

Functions that support business may also be used to raise money for a lawsuit or media, or organize activities. Fintech functions can aggregate purchasing power of the community for discounts on energy, water, telecom or other services.

Communities using the OYG framework can also opt into an LLM trained to suggest polls for community consensus based on conversations in social media broadcast media. For instance, widespread interest can suggest a poll on abortion rights, climate action or water conservation.

Technically, the platform is a social structure for collective impact, a technological structure that automates the building and notification of verifiable consensus. The structure also supports, encourages and rewards collaboration and cooperative enterprises.

The global framework integrates software solutions. An LLM is trained to generate polls based on the content of conversations in social media, to suggest to communities. The framework is deployed on the worldwide web but alternatively, it can be located on a server in a local or regional data service center. An instance of the framework that supports many community platforms can be hosted on redundant servers and be able to recover in minutes in another location in the event of a failure or attack

A community network can serve as a vital communication network that can be life-saving in the event of a catastrophe.

Community platforms are managed by the consent of community members who vote their preferences using the platform's consensus function.

In the onboarding process the community examines and declares core values and adopts and affirms rules of participation.

Onboarding is initiated with the guidance of experts in neuroscience, social justice, psychology, economics, arts and education.

The onboarding online environment follows principles of Montessori classrooms, however, AI assistants help community members find, organize and share information.

And the solution is a self-sustaining enterprise that drives prosperity and peaceful cooperation globally.

We are all at risk from climate disaster and with regard to that risk, we are all "underserved" in the matter of climate change. 

Those who have standing to build and advance their case in court must have a social structure with verifiable consensus for collective impact .

By 2050, one in six of the world's inhabitants will be over age 65 (16%), up from one in ten in 2022 (10%). The number of people age 80 or over is projected to triple, from 157 million in 2022 to 459 million in 2050. 

Africa has the youngest population worldwide, with 40 percent of the population are below 15 years. Europe has a higher share of the population above 65 years than the population under 15 years. 

This solution provides a way for everyone to have a voice and be represented about reducing global warming and preventing suffering from climate change.

We are advised by peer reviewed studies that should we fail to reduce global warming, people in places that are highly sensitive to climate, are vulnerable to increasingly severe weather events that will make these places unlivable for hundreds of millions who now inhabit them. This could produce starvation and compel migration north that will increasingly burden northern economies and potentially violent conflict.

This solution addresses these circumstances with a nongovernmental framework for autonomous, democratically managed organizational support using social media technology to inform and support collective strategies that can limit exposure to vulnerabilities, prepare for and deal with catastrophes and reduce dependence on carbon-based energy. 

OYG's technology does not change nor regulate behavior, but instead, provides technology that allows people in communities to communicate more productively, to cooperate and develop and make use of resources. By empowering access to global markets and improving the economic potential of communities, this solution supports participation of individuals in  decisions and actions of government to make it better support their welfare.

The consensus functionality of this solution gives every community member the ability to poll the community with an AI assistant trained to report when and how consensus favors an action or decision.

This solution is based on community platforms for many reasons, the most important of which is the importance of diversity to survival. The platform is designed to respect the diversity of individuals. Consensus support the diversity of communities. Integration with live venues within communities and social interconnectedness brings respect and intimacy to the online space. Priorities, values and traditional histories foster connections in both virtual and physical realms.

Michael Winn:

Michael Winn:

After a career making educational films for use in schools about technologies, and documentary films and commercials, I wrote a script for a feature film about an intelligent building. Before I could make this movie, I had an opportunity to work with a consortium including AT&T, IBM, Xerox, 3-COM, JPL, Hewlett-Packard, and Kurtzweil. They had been brought together by the U.S. Advanced Research Program Administration (ARPA) to create a way to secretly notify all U.S. offices, everywhere, that nuclear weapons were about to be launched and they were looking for commercial uses. My intelligent building idea caught their attention. Xerox had just bought Apple (from Jobs and Wozniak) and were already transferring parts of this new technology that would become the Apple Macintosh.

My intelligent building was a great success for real estate marketing but the technology did not reflect my vision about the people that lived in and around the intelligent building. The technology in my vision was not yet available. After I wrote Architectronics for McGrawHIll, a reference for architects about the new technology, I followed other paths, waiting for the technology to catch up. I conducted annual surveys of children in San Diego's public and private schools, to inform city government about the needs of children. I built apartments for low income families for a nonprofit development company. I created media for the Southern California Association of Governments to sell the public on Smog laws. I ran for City Council and served on the Railroad Committee for the city where I lived. I brought musicians from San Diego Symphony into city schools and brought the students to Symphony concerts. I designed and conducted a demonstration of offshore commuter transportation between the cities of Oceanside and San Diego for Caltrans. I retired and got an MFA in music.

One day, a neighbor asked me to help our community of Point Loma in San Diego, stop a building deveopment the city had permitted in violation of  the height limit on buildings in a coastal area, where people enjoyed views of the sea and the bay. With my previous experience in projects that involved local government, I wrote, pretty much in its entirety, a design for the project that became Own Your Government, originally called, Point Loma Town Council. This was in 2018.

I founded Own Your Government as an LLC in January 2019 and I offered, in return for assisting me in describing the project to investors and designing the necessary software, an interest in OYG to Norman Katz, a software engineer in San Diego, who I found on LinkedIn. Norman wanted to invest the money himself, but after we fully described the software and received bids from several software companies, and spent a lot of our own money on a prototype, we realized we will need much more money than we had to invest. We are now raising $5 million to build the project, launch it in several beta communities and refine it for global use.

We have completed the design and produced and tested functionality of the prototype. The technology for the framework and user interface has been extensively researched working with software engineers in three software development companies 8th Light, Chicago, Illinois, which helped with integration of APIs from Dolby, Signalwire and PubNub. LinkThinks, Aguas Calientes, Mexico, which worked on mobile app and Trajectus, Hyderabad, India, which developed the backend for the chat streaming and polling functionality. We have also researched and outlined the onboarding philosophy that is so important to the success of this project, including the Beta community components.

AI components and blockchain have been outlined but were not included in the prototype. MIT's program attracted our interest for this reason, and in connection with quantum computing. At scale, quantum computing would find a valuable use in supporting global alignment using LLMs to identify when independent polls in different communities showed consensus for an important global change. 

Wireframes have been produced for the framework and a community platform for a ReactNative prototype and API integration for video teleconference have been tested.

The framework is suitable for browsers to be used with beta communities. We plan to continue with native Android and iOS apps in beta.

The MIT reputation for scientific integrity can be helpful for a solution that deploys cloud technology and AI that allows people everywhere to participate in the success of sustainable economic prosperity through cooperation. We and this project deserves, needs and desires your attention.

MIT's innovation ecosystem and community of supporters can make a huge difference by supporting a solution that can become a standard, life saving use of technology for those who are at risk, and for our legacy.

This solution can have a transforming impact on MIT and the international engineering profession.  Those who build cutting edge technology for human interaction can only benefit from a few months or years working in a real time real life laboratory that this solution provides, to better inform their designs and test with practical applications. In this respect MIT is the perfect partner and the kind of institution that can benefit from participation.

This solution is about incorporating the hearts and minds of real people.

Transforming economic systems involves trust and global cooperation not imagined since WWII. Following that hugely devastating war, the world was threatened by an even worse catastrophe, nuclear war, and global cooperation was blocked by competing hierarchies. The United Nations was a compromise and the cold war strategies that prevailed evolved into the world as we now know it. There has never been as much communication and international business and at the same time, we have never been more divided. Meanwhile, global warming, migration, pandemics and wars create pressures that both drive us apart and into cooperation.

Global prosperity can calm fears and reduce defensive policies. Cooperation is a hallmark of this solution, which combines engineering ingenuity with  personal and socially transformative processes. Interest of MIT Solve in this approach will meet the impulse of young people that is reflected in the popularity of Taylor Swift and social media influencers.

This solution provides a technological infrastructure for global cooperation and global unification to address climate change, economic inequities and conflict resolution. It provides a bulwark against misinformation, divisive rhetoric and mistaken fears about global unification.

A solution for global prosperity is blind to color, gender, age and ideology. It transcends nationality, class, race, ethnicity and ability, not by suppressing differences but by welcoming and celebrating differences. This ssolution provides a safe container in which differences can occur in alignment. The consensus structure for collective agreement made possible by technology is aligned with the inclusionary commitment of MIT Solve and a guiding principle in the design of OYG.

OYG uses AI to reliably and consistently inform and measure consensus. This solution acknowledges and respects differences in perceptions of human beings.  In this solution, people interact with LLMs about matters of serious importance to their lives with an AI assistant trained by the community. AI may be seen as a new member of the family rather than an infallible authoirty. People will discover how to play with AI for self-knowledge and  self-expression. This experiment offers an iopportunity for MIT Solve.

A global framework for supporting discrete, compatible, independent community platforms as a political infrastructure for proactive, consensus-driven initiatives. Communities can bootstap initiatives to meet needs they identify, and access resources to influence government decisions, create cooperative energy and utility networks, improve disaster preparedness, aggregate purchasing power for commonly used goods and services.

Everything about the way this solution uses cloud, AI, media, news and blockchain technology can catalyze broad impacts from others in the space, parrticularly, platforms like TikTok, YouTube and cable & streaming news.

Using cloud technology as a framework for proactive input to government decisions about priorities defined by verified consensus is innovative.

Using cloud technology for relationship building to improve interpersonal communication in communities is innovative and innovatively builds trust  using AI to help inform consensus and blockchain technology to secure it.

Addresses global warming with a structure for reducing enegy demand in places that contribute to the problem with high energy consumption. The platform can also be used to organize a community owned energy utility and develop a local clean energy source, solar, wind, water, gravity, etc.

Addresses the task of motivating personal decisions, expanding personal agency and collective action with a social structure that gives people the ability to build and express consensus  that can alter behavior about energy and set the agenda of government.

Because this solution also innovatively addresses economic inequities in places that are most impacted by climate change, it also reduces the burdens of migration that threaten places that are causing global warming. Those who must choose between eating or feeding their families and doing something environmentally sound are are able to participate in the discussions but are the most vulnerable to the decisions.  OYG gives them a seat at the table

The platform supports collaborations that can remove inequities. This is an innovative approach to reducing migration that can have economic impacts on other places.

Breaks up resistance to change that prevens progressive solutions for climate. or anything. A bottom up process replaces topdown promulgation of ideas with a process in which people that are affected by decisions, define priorities and launch alternatives that make sense to them..

 LLMs are used to curate news reports for salience and accuracy combating misinformation, social media gossip and confusion. Changes the paradigm of official communication by using AI and blockchain to track statements add performance,

Verifiable consensus informs elected officials accurately about public sentiment regarding subjects they are dealing with. 

It moves the conversation for the future away from party platforms to address specific concerns of constituents and reduces the influence of campaign finance and endorsements on voting behavior, increasing the impotance of knowledge and education.

Platforms are owned and managed by consensus of the community, reducing the problem created by private ownership of media. Algorithms are trained to sort information salient to community priorities.

Onboarding integrates the platform into the social and economic fabric of the commuity through a series of open workshops in which community members define priorities.

Verified consensus as an instrument of change can produce change when it is public and prominent. The idea that social media to influence government decisions is demonstrated. Social media has overcome established regimes and misconduct by powerful economic hierarchies. This solution empowers grassroots action on behalf of community consensus as a strategy to use the collective impact and resources of a community to nurture the economic prosperity experienced by its members.

We target a cross-cultural transformation to overcome global inertia that impedes commitment that will end poverty and violence, and other conditions that inhibit personal and global prosperity. The world is very small today. A person born in a village in Madagascar may, as an adolescent, find herself in London, Bronx or Toronto, etc. This platform will prepare her and transform her experience of the world and v.v.. 

In a hypothetical scenario where a community platform like OwnYourGov has been successfully integrated into society for multiple generations, several aspects of the world would be different compared to a world without such a platform.

Potential impacts:

Economic Equity: OYG's support for community-based fintech and economic empowerment initiatives leads to reduced economic disparities. The platform's commitment to entrepreneurship and equal participation results in a more economically equitable society.

Informed and Engaged Citizenry: OYG's commitment to listening, learning, and engaging citizens results in a population that is not only well-informed but actively contributes to civic matters. The platform's emphasis on self-expression and articulate communication fosters a culture of informed engagement.

Inclusive Decision-Making: The platform's core values, involving the community in decision-making, create an inclusive and transparent governance structure. OYG's emphasis on equal voice and vote ensures that decisions reflect a diverse range of perspectives, reducing marginalization.

Community-Driven Innovation: OYG's commitment to teamwork, creativity, and determination results in a society where innovation flourishes. Collective intelligence and collaboration become key drivers in solving local and global challenges.

Educational Transformation: OYG's integration into education systems, guided by virtues such as self-discipline and a commitment to learning, transforms education into an interactive and participatory experience. Students develop critical skills for active civic engagement from an early age.

Using transformational media to empower new ideas is implicit in art throughout history. Euripides and Aristophanes wrote and staged transformational plays with political aims in the 5th century BCE. OYG creates a virual online community with a forum similar to the Greek forum.

Participation depends on familliarity and community members generating  issues and content. The platform includes integrations with user-content platforms like TikTok and YouTube.

We plan to test elements of the software in our beta communities using onboarding workshops led by facilitators trained by Vanto Group and ThinkVirtues. We have proposed a study related to development of digital twins for cities to the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London. MIT is a possible research candidate as well, related to uses of AI and Blockchain. In developing the beta community experiments, we will work with performing arts agencies and producers of transformational media.

Primary Goal: Peaceful and inclusive society of communities of people fully participating  with sustainable enterprises, combating climate change, with access to justice for all and accountable, effective and inclusive institutions at all levels.

We plan to onboard academic research teams to track events and public sentiment in beta communities related to the following and other measurable changes in communities, and use this information to modify. An instance in Madagascar will not look the same as New York but they will be compatible and connected in ways that will produce relationships. Efficacy can be measured in many ways depending on the direction of communities:

1) Rate of reduction of energy use in places that are contributing most to global warming.

2) Organization of communities at risk of climate change to be effective about obtaining resources and funds they need to protect themselves.

3) Integration of community consensus in government decision making and participation of community members in government decisions about the community economy amd natural ecosystem.

4) Percentage of participation of community members relative to population size.

5) Results of consensus polls about climate, safety and economic security

6) Sufficient funding for healthcare, childcare and eldercare servicees.

7) Satisfctory community assessments of the sufficiency and accountability and competence of institutions at all levels, including the platform.

8) Elimination of domestic violence and violence against children and sufficient trauma resolution therapy for victims and perpetrators

9) Percentage of individual participation in collective projects and individual action to combat climate change

10) Knowledge of and participation in the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development demonstrated in restoration of environment and sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, forests and reversal of land degradation and  biodiversity loss.

11) Status and performance of community disaster-response organization.

Framework Admin OYG manages the infrastructure of the platform through an admin portal.  OYG Admin manages overall functioning of the platform, maintains use and performs triage. 

Local Admin verifies member accounts and confirms registration. Local Admin manages and may view active profiles and group memberships. 

Personal Profile Community members register, login, verify residence in the community and create a Personal Profile.

Community  Profile The Community Profile is a default landing screen for users and contains information about the wealth and power of the community. Community members populate the community profile.

AI-Summarized Chat Streams: Members toggle summaries by AI

Forums - curated news feed, community forum, user-group feed or young person’s forum

Community Forum: read, post or question the community.

The Newsroom: An AI assistant curates news salient to community members  from local, state, national, and international sources.

Young Person’s Forum:  Children may post in the forum for children. 

User-Selected Group Forums: The feed and access is similar to the Community Forum but participation requires joining the group.

Survey & Polls:  Members create surveys and polls and view media relevant to poll questions, and they may nominate and elect representatives.

Consensus: A threshold can be set for a poll to automatically send reports of consensus to media, government officials and the community. 

Outcome Actions: When a poll reaches a threshold (set by consensus), the platform generates a report to a selection of recipients including media, officials and community organizations.

Communication:  Members may instantly teleconference with peers  or join a scheduled teleconference using a prompt that connects to this function.

Peer to Peer(s): text, voice and video features between members using a directory of information.

Information: Members publish and retrieve information and may search the Internet by topic, keyword, date and poster. The platform sorts information by source/poll/survey topic. Members can upload, view and download document files. Recordings of video meetings may be indexed as well.

Calendar: OYG Admin, Local Admin and Members may schedule events and invite members for teleconference and physical meetings with notifications to invitees. 

Enterprise & Project Management: Mmebers may create a project or enterprise using productivity tools on the platform. A local admin will be able to verify project eligibility when projects are submitted for publication. 

Financial Services: The platform is a catalyst for wealth generation by providing access to community wealth, funding sources, collaborative investment programs, and community-based banking and lending enterprises. 

Blockchain: Used for anonymized voting and security of poll results as anonymized contracts and for personal and community wealth aggregation. Blockchain ledgers for smart contracts and crypto open avenues for wealth generation, creating opportunities that empower individuals and  businesses.

2 full time staff

3 part time staff

14 contractors

During the past 5 years, we have worked with many people in San Diego, Chicago, Mexico, San Francisco, Colombia and India. The Chicago-led team included UX designers and engineers in the UK, Montreal and Estonia.

I conceived the idea of a community platform that could support conversations with the aim of building verifiable consensus and taking collective action in 2017. A neighbor invited me to present my idea for an online Point Loma Town Council at his home on May 25, 2018.

To develop the platform I envisioned I would need to write a business plan, for which I needed to learn more about technology that can be scalable for global utilization.

I filed the formation of Own Your Government, LLC on January 25, 2019

I forget the day, in 2018, when John Chapin, a neighbor and software engineer asked me to help him help our community of Point Loma in San Diego, to prevent the city from permitting a building development on our block that was in violation of the height limit for buildings in a coastal area where there were views overlooking San Diego Bay. With my previous experience with development projects involving city approvals, I understood what was happening and how to address it. But because I wanted to put in place a way for people like John to be effective without me in the future, I wrote a plan, in its entirety, for the project that is now Own Your Government, originally called, Point Loma Town Council. This was in 2018.

I paid a young woman to build a website, Point Loma Town Council .org and looked around for the software plugins necessary and I learned that I would have to build the software.

I founded Own Your Government as an LLC on January 25, 2019 and gave an interest in the LLC to Norman Katz, a software engineer I found on LinkedIn,in return for his assistance. Norman wanted to invest the money and he put some money toward a prototype app that was started by a software firm in Aguas Calientes, Mexico called, LinkThinks. I hired a UX designer in Tijuana, who did wireframes for the app. Norm did a flow diagram that shows how everything works together. It was too complicated for LnkThinks. I next connected with a boutique software firm in Chicago called, 8th Light. They are multi-ethnic, mostly women in Poland and UK. They got the concept and developed front end interfaces for video and teleconferencing modules. Colombian and Mexican graphic arts designers contributed designs. I then hired an Indian development team in Hyderabad to work on the back end, which gave us our database component. By now, we had fully specified described all the software needed including blockchain but not LLMs, and 4 software companies have quoted hard costs and time to build it.

We have discussed implementation with prospective users in small cities in Northern California, Orange County and San Diego. They want to try it out. A business associate, architect, urban planner and friend in Colombia asked me to present OYG to the City of Bogota. They liked it, too. For the Bogota proposal, we drafted a plan for onboarding using a community workshop with  The Vanto Group, (mixed ethnicity) which has experience in community transformative technology. Having spent a lot of our capital, realizing we will need to raise seed capital. We submitted an application to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who said they were only giving money for medical programs and in 2019 I submitted a solutiion for a Solve Challenge.

We developed a business plan, something I'm experienced with and we are raising $5 million to build the project and launch it for use in several beta communities.

OYG products and service are provided primarily to both individual consumers and organizations, including local, county and state governments, NGOs, and non-profit community-based organizations

OYG is a California Limited Liability Company. 

Each community instance is a cyber space twin for the real geopolitical community. The global framework integrates digital functions. The licensing model preserves local autonomy and values of physical proximity and interdependent relationships. Community forums deepen connections through a blend of written and visual communication.

In some ways, the business of OYG resembles a chain of local newspapers independently owned and operated by franchisees in communities. OYG licenses an instance of the OYG global framework to communities for a nominal flat fee per active monthly user. Licensess (communities) manage their operations as cooperatives democratically governmed by consensus of the community. Where there is no organization, OYG may create a proxy licensee and receive microfee payments directly from users. OYG does not insert advertising content. Licensees may sell very limited local advertising and collect voluntary subscription fees, however, anyone that can prove residence in the commuity is entitled to all privilleges. Other than the proxies mentioned above, OYG does not own or manage operations of a communty platform beyond terms that apply to all licensees. Niether OYG nor licensees derive income from sale of information about users.

Lcense fee

s are paid moslty by organizations; such as, local, county and state governments, community based organizations, NGOs, and non-profit foundations and community-baed organizations.

Value Proposition:

Local newspapers made literacy more valuable for people to know about events salient to their lives, and about the culture, and history and traditons of community, identifying individuals, political leadership, professionals and as well as public, commercial, religious facilities and social structures that are learned in  schools. Community values were promulgated by editorial writers along with morality, previously learned in the home and church.

The 20th century brought this information into the home with radio and television. Recruitment and funding warfare got a boost from cinema, radio and TV propaganda. Public figures and popular celebrity expanded. The world wide web brought information from futher away and social media introduced user-generated content along with a flood of published misinformation. Peer-to-many conversations supplanted broadcasting. 

Own Your Government builds on the technologies for webcasting in a way that reduces misinformation and uses the interactive potential to enhance democratic decision making with a structure for consensus with collective impact and information sharing across cultural and linguistic boundaries.

Populations of OYG communities may be highly diverse. The manner in which diversity is accommodated makes the licensee an economic and political force for addressing climate change, economic inequities, education and any matters, where mutual interest can arise in communication.

The greatest value is the "upstream" aspect that allows people to guide their government, expose waste and corruption and improve competence. 

Licensees may empower community businesses, aggregate purchasing power and form cooperatives that serve the community and reach wider markets. 

Community cooperatives can organize renewable energy, communication, water and other services for the community.

Since January 2019, the co-founders and members of Own Your Government, LLC have invested $135,000 in specifiying the design, testing modules and building the prototype for a launch that we anticipate this year.

Monthly expense projections for every aspect of this project are based on quotes and bids from multiple vendors. This analysis includes not only technological elements, but also, marketing, social and business-related elements that are necessary in introducing an innovative new processs for grassroots leadership and global interaction.

Revenue Projections: are based on an annual license fee paid by communities based on monthly costs at scale. The annual fee per user at scale is projected at  $0.75 US per active user including a margin of $0.10 US per user. Revenue is projected to cover cost when OYG achieves 1,000 participating communities of 15k users, producing $4M annual recurring revenue, a number potentially achievable within 12 months following beta launch. The equivalent of  20,000 community platforms with 15k users is achievable within 2-3 years following the conclusion of the beta launch, and $80M recurring revenue. 

The platform will meet these economic goals providing that people register and use the platform. The beta launch, aside from working out any technical issues, will inform about best ways of achieving greatest value for different situations and populations. We've planned for technical obstacles; such as hacking, power failures and interference of political or criminal actors that might want to disable the framework or individual community platforms. The framework can be engineered to quickly recover on redundant servers and there is a plan for local servers to provide most functionlities and user data intact in the event of global system failure.

Projected costs of building, deploying and maintaining this framework are based on quotes and bids from multiple companies for each function, whose products and services OYG may depend on. Some modules used in beta communities may access APIs from Google, Open.ai, Dolby, Signalwire, Amazon, Microsoft, Starlink, AT&T, and so on. Some vendors may be replaced in house as investment continues and internal resources expand.

A $5 million Investment is projected through the beta period. This amount will increase in the event that: 1) the beta project is expanded to include more communities requiring greater onboarding expense and more rapid scaling, 2) there are localization costs when additional communities in the beta are located in places with different native languages, 3) advanced functionalities or backend systems are incorporated more quickly, 4) demand ramps up more quickly than the plan now anticipates, 5) research projects are incorporated to expand the usefulness of the beta projects.