The accountability data is public, but scattered — and understanding it alone changes nothing. We're connecting it, and building the public that can act on it. Built in the open, in Toronto, and looking for people to build it.
Democracy Distributed is an open, crowdsourced record of how a government spends money and makes decisions — structured so anyone can follow a budget line to the vote behind it, the contract it funded, and the outcome it produced.
But the record is the means, not the point. The point is to help people understand how the system around them actually works — how money moves, who decides, and when — and to find others who see the same things. Toronto is where we started.
Democracy was built for a smaller world. The systems we still use to decide things together — to pool money for the common good and hold the deciders accountable — were designed for communities a fraction of today's size. Now most people have no idea who their councillor is, what they decide, or where the money goes.
It isn't that the information is hidden. Every budget is published, every vote is on record, every large contract is disclosed. But it's scattered, in different formats, and never linked to what came before or after it — far too much for any one person to follow. So spending goes unwatched, not because the public doesn't care, but because keeping up is a full-time job no one is paid to do.
And the connections that would make it legible — the ones that turn a number into a story — don't exist anywhere. A budget line doesn't tell you what project it funded. A contract doesn't show the vote that authorized it. None of it connects, unless someone builds the connections by hand.
WikiGov gives any government organization a page where its finances render as an interactive Sankey diagram. Click a flow and you follow the money: from the budget allocation, to the decision that authorized it, to the contract or project it funded. Every link in that chain is visible, and every link can be contributed or corrected by anyone.
That's the differentiator. Most civic tools show you finance, or decisions, or projects. WikiGov connects them — and the connections are crowdsourced, which is why they don't exist anywhere else. The data is open, contributable, and free.
Every government organization gets a consistent, structured page — budget, decisions, contracts, outcomes — formatted the same way every time.
Finances render as a live flow diagram. Hover or click any stream to see what's inside — the numbers, the vote, the outcome on the other end.
The links between money, decisions, and outcomes are contributed by the public and verified openly — the work governments don't do, done together.
The public layer is WikiGov. POD is the coordination tool sitting beside it: a way for community groups to run themselves on the same data model governments use — structured decisions, transparent finances, clear outcomes. Defined in vision, not yet launched.
Agriculture eased the bottleneck of food, industry the bottleneck of production, the information age the bottleneck of knowledge. How we govern — how money gets allocated, how accountability gets enforced — still runs through the same few people in the same few rooms it always has.
That's not a criticism of the people; it's an observation about the tools. Accountability at scale has always needed more coordination than any one person or press outlet could sustain.
Democracy Distributed adds a parallel public layer alongside existing institutions — not to replace them. First by making the information that today reaches only a few available to everyone. Then by giving the people who care a way to find each other and form a position that can be reckoned with.
This is a direction, not a near-term promise. The work starts in Toronto, with one chain: money, decision, outcome.
Democracy Distributed is a working proof of concept, built in Toronto and released in the open. No org chart, no funding round, no press release — just the thing itself, and an honest invitation.
This is bigger than what exists today. If you're a developer, a researcher, a journalist, a civic technologist — or just someone who thinks this should exist and wants to help define it — there's room, and the direction is still being set.
Started Democracy Distributed after the same thing kept nagging at me: civic data is public, but it's never connected — and being public isn't the same as being useful. Building WikiGov to prove it can be both.