Frequently asked questions

What is YouCongress?

YouCongress is a non-profit and open source platform that informs citizens, finds solutions and shows legislators how people want to solve our most pressing challenges. Starting with AI safety & governance.

Forecasters ask "What will happen?" We ask "What should we do?" or "What would we love to happen even when unlikely?" Inspired by Scott Alexander's "Moloch" — the idea that misaligned incentives can push everyone toward outcomes nobody wants — YouCongress makes shared preferences visible and legible. By pairing direct voting, optional delegation, and sourced expertise, we offer a practical coordination tool: not binding referendums, but decision support that helps leaders choose policies aligned with public and expert values. Starting with AI safety.

More about this on our LessWrong post.

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.
• create new liquid-democracy polls

What are YouCongress delegates?

YouCongress users can choose a list of delegates, similar to following others on social media. However, here, users' votes align with the majority of their delegates unless they vote personally. For example, if a user has five delegates who have voted on an issue, and three of them vote in favor while two vote against, the user's vote will automatically be in favor too. This holds unless the user votes directly, in which case the delegates' votes don't matter.

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.

Users will be able to filter the results by direct votes and delegated votes. This way, if one is only interested in direct votes, the platform will remain useful.

How do sourced quotes work?

YouCongress allows users to add real quotes from notable figures and experts to enrich poll discussions.

All quotes must be accompanied by a source URL so anyone can verify that the public figure or expert actually said that. This ensures the integrity and trustworthiness of the information shared on the platform.

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

How are quotes verified? How can I help verify?

Quotes on YouCongress can be marked as verified once a human reviewer confirms that the quote matches the cited source and is relevant to the poll. Until then, quotes appear as unverified.

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 contact us at support@youcongress.org and we'll address it promptly. In the future, we will add social media login so you can edit or remove your content directly.

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 helps with the UX/design (although we don't have all the time to polish YouCongress as he'd like).

How can I contribute?

Sure, welcome to YouCongress!

The easiest way to start is by adding sourced quotes to polls.

If you're a developer, you can contribute on our open source codebase on GitHub Also, feel free to contact us at hello@youcongress.org