TopCorner.org is an online social decision making and fundraising platform for political action. On the website, large numbers of individuals contribute small amounts of money to fund democratically selected solutions to community problems. The mission of TopCorner.org is to broaden participation in community issues by making it easier for people to express their interests, influence policy decision-makers, and effect real-world change in the areas they're passionate about. TopCorner.org empowers communities by providing a platform that crowd-sources solutions to popular problems while ensuring the trust and privacy of its users.
Here is how the website works. First, users decide their political context (local, state-level, national). They then nominate a problem and solution to be a "corner." Users vote on proposals for the most popular corners (‘top corners’). With their votes, people commit to giving one dollar to execute the proposal, no more and no less. Winning proposals are thus not only selected via a democratic process but also have funds for their execution. Proposals may fund a variety of different projects, including political campaigns, lobbying efforts, or public goods.
TopCorner addresses several social problems. First, it ameliorates the misalignment of incentives in the American political system, sometimes called the Principle/Agent problem. Given that politicians are forced to compete for campaign resources to be elected, they are liable to support policies favorable to special interest groups who offer to fund political campaigns. As a result, representatives often do not accurately represent the interests of voters. TopCorner mitigates this systemic problem by providing the funds that politicians require for their campaigns along with public support.
Currently, we are in the process of building and testing the website. While we have clear aims to have the system work on the statewide and national levels, we are planning to pre-launch at Stanford within the next month to test system processes on a smaller scale using issues from the Stanford community.
Interested in hearing more? Then check out our Explainer Video:
