Frequently asked questions

What is YouCongress?

YouCongress is a non-profit, open-source platform for building source-grounded knowledge bases around hard public questions. We preserve the provenance of sourced quotes and claims, and use liquid democracy to make expert and citizen preferences visible. It offers decision support rather than binding referendums. Our initial focus is AI governance.

Forecasters ask "What will happen?" We ask "What should we do?" and "What would we love to happen even when unlikely?" Inspired by Scott Alexander's idea of "Moloch"—misaligned incentives pushing everyone toward outcomes nobody wants—YouCongress makes shared preferences visible. It combines direct voting, optional delegation, and sourced expertise to help leaders understand public and expert values.

More about this on our LessWrong post.

How does YouCongress support epistemic investigations?

YouCongress is designed to make investigations reusable instead of trapped in one-off reports or chat transcripts. It separates ingestion, structure, and assessment work so humans and AI systems can inspect and extend the same public record.

• Ingestion: capture sourced quotes, authors, dates, URLs, topics and verification status.
• Structure: connect sources to claims, policies, vote inferences, halls and author pages.
• Assessment: use the structured record to compare positions, reveal disagreement, and identify missing perspectives. This is the layer we most want to strengthen next.

What can users do?

YouCongress is still in its infancy, but you already can:

• explore verifiable quotes from experts and public figures
• vote and share your perspective (votes are private unless you publish a comment).
• delegate to trusted experts, public figures and other users. You'll vote as the majority of your delegates unless you vote directly. In the future, we plan to add topic-based delegation and other delegation mechanisms.

What are YouCongress delegates?

YouCongress users can choose a list of delegates, similar to following others on social media. Unless they vote directly, their vote follows the most common answer among their delegates. For example, if five delegates vote on an issue and three vote in favor while two vote against, the user's delegated vote is in favor. If the delegate votes are tied, no delegated vote is recorded. A direct vote always takes precedence over delegation.

Future enhancements will introduce additional delegation mechanisms, including topic-specific delegation. This will enable users to appoint delegates for votes concerning specific areas such as their local community, economic matters, AI-related issues, and more.

In country and year result views, users can filter results by direct and delegated votes. This keeps the platform useful for people who want to consider direct votes separately.

How do sourced quotes work?

Signed-in users can add real quotes from notable figures and experts, then link them to the claims and policy proposals they bear on.

Every sourced quote must include a source URL or, for books, PDFs, and paywalled sources, a sufficiently identifying source passage. This lets readers check the attribution and context.

These sourced quotes help inform voters and investigators by providing expert perspectives, documented positions, and reusable provenance on various topics.

How are quotes verified? How can I help verify?

Sourced quotes on YouCongress can be checked across three layers: whether the quote is authentic, whether it is relevant to the policy or claim where it appears, and whether the vote inferred from it is correct. Each check has its own status; on statement pages, one badge summarizes them together.

An individual verification can be:

• Endorsed: the author personally confirmed the quote, relation, or vote, for example by signing in or by contacting an admin.
• Verified: a human reviewer checked the source and marked the item as correct.
• AI Verified: the automated verifier checked the source and found support for the item.
• Disputed: a reviewer or automated check found a problem, such as a mismatched quote, statement relation, or vote answer.
• Unverifiable: the available source is not enough to confirm or reject the item.
• AI Unverifiable: the automated verifier could not confirm the item, usually because the source was inaccessible or inconclusive.
• Unverified: no current positive, disputed, or unverifiable verification is recorded yet, or a reviewer cleared the status.

On a statement page, the combined badge displays an AI Unverifiable check as Unverifiable.

A quote can still appear while some checks are pending. Downstream checks, such as relation and vote-answer verification, depend on the quote itself first being confirmed by a positive status like Endorsed, Verified, or AI Verified.

Want to help verify quotes? Email us at verify@youcongress.org and we will get you set up.

How can I change/delete content attributed to me?

If you find any quotes or content incorrectly attributed to you, or you want to change/delete content, please sign in with X so you can do it directly or contact us at support@youcongress.org and we'll address it promptly.

Who is behind YouCongress?

YouCongress was started by Hector Perez. Hector has been involved in related projects such as creating a liquid democracy political party with 300 members in Spain in 2008. Also, while working in London, he co-founded the non-profit project agreelist.org to track public figures' opinions.

Other key contributors include Gonzalo Cardenete who supports the UX and design of YouCongress (though we can’t always polish it as much as he’d like). He also has a background in civic tech; during his time at Barcelona's town hall, he contributed updates and screens to the Decidim open-source participation platform.

Who funds YouCongress?

YouCongress has been completely self-funded, except for the $5,000 Future of Life Foundation prize awarded through its Epistemic Case Study Competition. Read about the award.

How can I contribute?

You can contribute by adding sourced quotes to statements (policy proposals and claims) or suggesting important missing perspectives. To help review quotes, email us at verify@youcongress.org .

If you're a developer, you can contribute on our open source codebase on GitHub. You can also contact us at hello@youcongress.org