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Dear Citizen,

Four hundred years ago men and women crossed an ocean toward a coast they had never seen, carrying a conviction that they could govern themselves better than they were being governed. Much of what they attempted failed. They buried more of their own than they wished, and they quarreled without end over what each owed the other. Yet they held to the work, and in time their descendants founded something the world had not seen before. America is often described as an idea, and it is true that a creed lies at its center. But it was never only an idea. It is a land, and it is a people: a people who hold a particular conviction about how free men and women ought to govern themselves, settled upon ground they have made their own. The men who pledged their lives and their sacred honor in Philadelphia were not dreamers. They were serious and clear-eyed about the size of what they were doing, and they knew well that it might not endure.

They called it an experiment on purpose. Franklin, when asked what they had made, answered: a republic, if you can keep it. That condition has hung over every generation since. Keeping it has never been automatic. The republic has survived war, faction, and its own repeated folly, carried in every generation by ordinary people who came forward to serve, to argue, and to build, often without knowing whether the thing would hold. It endures because each generation has chosen to receive it and to add to it. No generation was ever promised that it would last.

We have received it in our turn: the land, and the convictions that came with it. We have also received something we ought to name plainly. The relationship between Americans and their own government has soured. For too long we have accepted that dealing with the government means dealing with an adversary, that the form we need sits on the wrong website, that the men and women who represent us are invisible between elections, and that the information we surrender will sooner or later be turned against us. We have grown accustomed to the DMV and called it ordinary.

None of this is inevitable. It is a failure of design, and failures of design can be repaired. Every generation before us governed with the best instruments it possessed: the printing press, the post road, the telegraph, the broadcast. Ours holds the most powerful means of connection in human history, and we have aimed almost none of it at the plain task of helping a citizen understand and reach their own government. MyPolity exists to aim it there. Our purpose is simple to state and hard to accomplish: to put the whole of a citizen’s government in one place, and to make dealing with it feel orderly rather than hostile. This is the next chapter of the experiment, self-government rebuilt for the digital age.

I will not pretend this is easy, for it is not. The United States contains roughly ninety thousand units of local government, some three thousand counties, fifty states, and five hundred and thirty-five members of Congress. To become the civic operating system of this country, we must earn the trust of a meaningful share of them all. Not buy them, nor trick them, but earn them, one clerk and one council member and one secretary of state at a time. We begin with a handful of citizens and not a single government under contract. The honest odds against a venture of this kind are long.

Here is why it can be done regardless. The need is real, for every city labors under the same burden, and residents everywhere already want what we are building. The incumbents can be beaten, for the companies that now stand between citizens and their government are slow, costly, and built for the institution rather than for the person. The work compounds: each government that joins makes the map more complete for the next citizen, and each citizen strengthens the case for the next government. And it remains a cause for which Americans will still answer the call. Our countrymen have accomplished harder things than this, with far less.

Here is why it must be done. A republic depends upon citizens who can see their government and reach it. When that grows too difficult, citizens do not become more devoted to it; they withdraw. Civic understanding declines, cynicism fills the vacant place, and the distance between the governed and the governing widens until the consent that lies beneath the whole compact begins to feel like a fiction. To close that distance is not a convenience. It is the ordinary maintenance the experiment requires, and it is overdue.

We are not seeking people who want a job. We are not seeking partisans; the work serves every American alike, of every party and none, or it is not worth doing. We are seeking people who have read this far and recognized the work as their own, who are willing to labor long and without applause at a thing that matters more than they do. If that describes you, your country has need of you.