Our mission is to help democracy better serve humanity and meet the challenges of the present and future.
We’re building infrastructure that strengthens communities and helps governments make wiser decisions. We aim to make these tools easy to adopt anywhere in the world: from the smallest towns to the largest countries.
Who we are
Jesse Warren
Co-Founder
Alex Melville
Co-Founder
Jesse is a designer based in Burlington, VT. He worked for over a decade in government and politics, from congressional offices to campaigns. From 2020 to 2025, he ran Democracy Creative, a nonprofit he founded to design creative solutions to the problems facing democracy. He believes design is our most powerful tool for improving democracy. DemocracyOS grew out of that belief. He’s also a cat dad 🐈, book collector 📚, and carpenter 🔨.
Alex is a software engineer and educator based in Burlington, Vermont. He’s worked in several startups building cryptocurrency wallets, exchanges, and as a coding bootcamp instructor teaching senior engineers how to write secure smart contracts. He has been thinking about the intersection of software & governance systems for his entire career. Now he’s focused on building tools & processes that help people engage more deeply in their community, like DemocracyOS. Outside of work he’s a dad with two youngins (shoutout Dad Guild 🍼!), loves to read 📚, and loves the Lake 🏊.
Why
Government can’t serve people it can’t hear.
Democracy aims to deliver government that serves the needs and desires of the public. But in order to do that, it needs to know what the needs and desires of the public really are.
If you look closely, however, the typical ways of doing that are substantially lacking:
Elections are infrequent, binary decisions, revealing little about the public’s priorities on specific issues.
Public comments tend to reflect only the people with the time and confidence to speak up.
Polls are infrequent, expensive, and often serve the agenda of whoever funds them.
DemocracyOS is building the publicly funded infrastructure that gives people more voice beyond the election cycle, is more likely to represent the views of the whole community, and is steady, easy, and non-partisan.
How we’re building DemocracyOS
We’re building DemocracyOS as a public benefit corporation, working closely with Democracy Creative, a U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
Our long-term goal is to build a civic institution, sustained and broadly owned by the public.
What we promise
We never spam you.
We only text you with invitations to engage in your democracy, and with related information like receipts and followups about your responses.
Your private data is never sold.
We’ll show governments reports including your anonymized responses, in service of helping them understand you and your neighbors. But they can never see your identity. And none of your data is ever (or ever will be) sold to data brokers, marketers etc...
Your answers are never traced back to you.
Your identity and your answers live in separate databases that no one on our team connects. Your identity is always kept separate, secure, and private, like your vote on election day.
We’re transparent about accuracy.
Every report’s Representation Summary compares the people who answered with the city as a whole, gaps included.
Public funders get no extra say.
Contributions keep us publicly funded. Contributors get no extra access and no extra say in any report.
One person, one voice.
In the age of AI, no platform can speak for people unless it verifies they’re real. So we’re building that in, and may ask for your ID. We wish we didn’t have to.