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We the Founders

We're brothers and students at Stanford University. We founded ePluribus to better connect people and their government. ePluribus bridges the worlds of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill to help you be heard. 

Liam and Aidan McCarty

Founders of ePluribus

Living in Silicon Valley, we know firsthand how transformative technology has been in the private sector. But most people in technology aren't thinking enough about politics and government. We started ePluribus to do what we can to make the political system work better, for everyone.

We're a team to be reckoned with. Some of our relevant accomplishments and qualifications are detailed below. You can also check out Aidan's personal website and Liam's LinkedIn page.

Aidan McCarty

Liam McCarty

Our Advisors

Every startup needs seasoned advisors as much as passionate founders. We're extremely proud to have Greg Rosston, Nick Troiano, and Riana Shah on our Advisory Board. Their support and expertise are invaluable.

Greg Rosston

Director of Public Policy at Stanford University

Nick Troiano

Executive Director of the Centrist Project

Riana Shah

Founder and CEO of Independent Thought & Social Action International

Why "ePluribus"?

"ePluribus" is a play on the "e-" commonly used to abbreviate "electronic," as in e-Mail or e-Commerce. "ePluribus" is also inspired by the unofficial motto of the United States "e pluribus unum", which is Latin for "out of many, one". You may not realize it, but this motto is all around you! Take out a one dollar bill and look at the back side.

"E PLURIBUS UNUM"

In Brief

• We're brothers and students at Stanford University building an online platform to help you be heard.
• We're working with a team of world-class developers and advisors to equip democracy with 21st-century tools.
• ePluribus lets you turn tweets and Facebook posts into official messages to your representatives. It also provides a contact form that any website can embed to let its users talk to their representatives.
• ePluribus users complete a one-time registration process that verifies their identity. This ensures that unique identity will be the new standard for civic communication, which is crucial for helping real people like you be heard.
• We give representatives aggregate, non-personally identifiable data to help them process your messages. We also give some of the data to media so that they can hold your representatives accountable.
• We need your help! We're raising money to make ePluribus a reality and would so appreciate your help. We'd also love it if you'd help spread the word!

What We're Building

We've spent over a year working on ePluribus to deeply understand how representatives process and understand constituent messages and how we can help them do it better. We're now extremely well equipped to do so.

ePluribus has four main components:

• social media integration
• embeddable widget
• website
• data dashboard

The following sections detail these components.

Social Media Integration

People routinely talk about politics on Facebook and Twitter, but it doesn't make much difference because social media is a bubble.

Our social media integration helps you break that bubble! It lets you post on Facebook or tweet on Twitter and simultaneously send an official message to your representatives. It lets you tell your friends and your representatives what you think about political issues at the same time. You simply choose a representative from a dropdown menu, and ePluribus takes the text of your post or tweet and sends it as an official message to that representative. Check out the animation below to see how it works.

Facebook

This is a huge deal. Social media today is the ultimate echo chamber. Stuck in our own bubbles, what we say goes only to our friends and has little impact on the outside world. ePluribus breaks the bubble so that you can be heard.

Embeddable Widget

The embeddable widget is a web form that any website can use to let its users send messages to their representatives. Representatives themselves can use the widget, as can news publications, blogs, government agencies, and many others. Check out the animations below for an example of how this could be used on Speaker of the House Paul Ryan's website. Notice how much easier it is to use than his current contact form!

Embeddable Widget

This is game-changing technology. When representatives embed the ePluribus widget, you'll be able to talk to them directly and finally have real impact. Other websites can also embed the widget so that you can write to your representatives anytime, anywhere. Imagine reading about the latest healthcare debate in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal and being able to send an official message to lawmakers from the same page. ePluribus will make it easier and more impactful than ever before to talk to your government. 

Website

The website will allow you to send messages to multiple representatives at the same time. It will also let you see the messages you've sent, control which personal data is attached to your messages, and change your account settings. The website will be mobile-friendly and accessible on any device -- whether a desktop computer in a public library or the latest iteration of the iPhone.

Mobile-Friendly Website

Data Dashboard

The data dashboard is what representatives and their staff will be able to access. They'll get messages on one side and aggregate data about those messages and the people who sent them on the other side. Because ePluribus ensures unique identity and verifies personal information (see the sections below), representatives will know with certainty for the first time ever who's contacting them and what they're saying.

Data Dashboard

These four components (the social media integration, embeddable widget, website, and dashboard) make ePluribus the world's first civic network.

Campaign Goals

We need at least $10,000 to make ePluribus a reality. We're putting in $10,000 of our own money, not to mention the past year of hard work, so we're very much personally invested in ePluribus. 

We're running this campaign to accomplish two crucial goals:

1. raise as much funding as possible
2. reach as many people as possible

We've made it this far with grant funding we won through competitions and our own money, but now we need your help! The more funding we raise, the better ePluribus will be. The more people we reach, the more impact it will have.

Our campaign goal is $10,000. That funding will supplement the money we've already raised and will go partly toward development and partly toward marketing and service costs. We anticipate the spending breakdown to be as follows:

• $5,000: additional development of social media integration, optimization of virality, Safari extension (in addition to Chrome)
• $3,500: marketing of social media integration and embeddable widget, Facebook and Twitter ads
• $1,500: embeddable widget service costs (for major publishers), data dashboard service costs

We hope to raise far more than $10,000 if at all possible because we can do so much more if we have more resources. Here are a few of our stretch goals:

• with $20,000 total: dedicated salesperson, deals with online media and representatives, validation of business model, additional online marketing
• with $50,000 total: dedicated part-time developer for all technical needs and product iteration, furthering of development timeline as described below, additional online and analog marketing
• with $100,000 total: dedicated full-time developer to prepare for large user base and iterate product along development timeline below, significant additional marketing

Perks!

We're so grateful for your support and we want to give you something personal and special for it. We've prepared some amazing perks for you to choose from. Feel free to ask us any questions you may have about them!

• $500 - The Kitchen Sink: If you give $500 or more, you'll receive ALL of our other perks, without question. This includes a personalized video spot, your picture in our next video, Liam's book, exclusive early access, your name on our "We the People" page, and a heartfelt thank you. If you donate the most, you may even be our John Hancock! (See the "We the People" perk for more information.)
• $200 - Personalized Video Spot: Check out this 15-second video of our social media integration. We'll make a personalized version of this video so that you can show it off to your friends! You'll be the person sending the message in the video, and you can choose what you want to say and which representative want to send it to. We can even use your footage if you send us about 30 seconds of video. There are only 10 available so act soon!

• $100 - Your Picture in One of Our Videos: At the end of our campaign video, we have a series of pictures of people with the phrase "out of many" superimposed. We'll put your picture in our next video! And we'll send you the video and tell you when you appear. There are only 25 available so act soon!

• $50 - Liam's Book, Data and Power: You'll receive a copy of Liam's book, which explores issues of big data and modern America. We're extremely wary of data privacy concerns and take the utmost care with your personal data; this book explains exactly why.

• $25 - Exclusive Early Access: You can be one of the first people in the world to use ePluribus! You'll be able to try it out before anyone else, and will be first in line to tell us how we can make our product even better. This perk is exclusive to this campaign and will not be offered outside of it. Get it while you can!
• $10 - Your Name on Our Website's "We the People" Page: If you contribute at least $10, we'll put your name on our "We the People" page, which you'll be able to see on our website. The more you contribute, the bigger you name will be! The person who contributes the most will be the John Hancock of our page: their name will be much bigger than everyone else's. See if you can be our John Hancock!
• $1 - Every Dollar Counts: Seriously. Every single dollar is enormously appreciated. We are building ePluribus to help people like you to be heard, and we couldn't do it without you. We'll send you a heartfelt thank you for your support.

Problem

The real problem we're addressing may not be obvious. It's that representatives can't process, let alone understand, the enormous number of messages they receive. Because of this, the solution is not to send more messages but rather to send better messages: ones that representatives can process and understand.

One of the hardest things about civic tech is remembering what the problem isn't. Here's a list:

• It's not that we need better access to information. Anyone who wants to read a bill, see information about their representatives, or learn about how government works can do so very easily with the help of a huge number of resources. Even the most obsessed political junkie would never run out of information.
• It's not that sending messages to representatives is hard. Sending messages is easy; being heard is hard. It isn't very difficult to fill out a contact form, make a phone call, or even send a letter or fax. The problem is that none of these traditional channels give you any impact. 
• It's not that people don't care about politics. People talk about politics, protest, and petition all the time. Sure, some people are apathetic, but there have always been a huge number of people who care deeply about politics, and there always will be. Particularly following the most recent election cycle, more and more people are engaging with the political system.

Like most people working on civic technology, we cycled through these problems-that-aren't-really-problems until we learned better. Through our research, we identified what the problem truly is: it's that civic communication lacks unique identity, which is why you have no impact. When you send a message to your representative, they don't even know for sure if you're their constituent or if you're a unique person. They know nothing about you and can't process your message is a meaningful way. Meanwhile, advocacy groups flood representatives with thousands of messages. No wonder contacting representatives doesn't work: your voice is drowned out in the crowd.

We're building ePluribus to make unique identity the new standard for civic communication. You'll complete a simple, easy, one-time registration process to verify that you're a person (not a bot), a unique person with one account, and that you're the person you say you are. It's no different than signing up for a bank account. You expect your bank to make sure you're actually you, and with ePluribus you can expect the same from your representatives.

Why Is This New?

Our emphasis on unique identity is completely new. Everyone else is building bigger loudspeakers, but volume is the problem not the solution. We're not building any kind of loudspeaker. We're building a direct line to your representatives so that you won't have to shout to be heard.

Civic technology has for the past couple decades focused mainly on two areas:

1. making it very easy for people to contact representatives in traditional ways (all of which lack unique identity)
2. giving lobbyists and special interests high tech tools that make it worse for the average American, not better

Both of these make civic communication worse, not better. The first one ironically makes it even harder to be heard: the number of messages representatives receive has increased at least 10x, but the technology to process and understand those messages has hardly improved. The second only helps big money get bigger: most Americans are completely left out of the loop.

Strangely, advocacy groups are a big part of the problem. Let's say you run an advocacy group, and you run an online petition campaign to show support. If you get 25,000 clicks on your petition, you don't care if those clicks came from 25,000 unique people or just 1,000. Even if you know they came from only 1,000 people, you certainly won't tell anyone else! It looks like you have more support than you actually do, and that helps your cause.

This is an extremely problematic incentive: it makes it impossible for representatives to know where support really lies. What are they supposed to make of online petitions and mass mailings? How are they supposed to hear real people with real concerns who send them individual messages? They can't because those messages are buried in the avalanche of communications advocacy groups are sending them every hour of every day. No wonder we don't like what our representatives represent: they're not representing us!

Unique identity is the clear solution to this problem. With the help of ePluribus, representatives will know that the people contacting them are real people with only one account. They'll finally be able to listen to you and tune out the noise, and you'll finally be heard. Advocacy will be meaningful again.

Why Us?

Civic technology is hard to do well. To build the product, you need to work with people in technology who generally know nothing about politics. To make the product matter, you need to work with people in politics who generally know nothing about technology. And to get the product used, you need to work with people all over the country who often don't know much about either.

There aren't many people with the right skills, backgrounds, and professional networks to create such a product successfully. But we're just those people. As students at Stanford, we live in the heart of Silicon Valley, the epicenter of technology. We spent much of this summer in Washington, DC and built a network of over 250 people across politics, media, activist organizations, and many other areas. And because we grew up in suburban Wisconsin, we know lots of (and are ourselves) middle-of-the-country Americans who will ultimately use ePluribus to talk to their government. 

We're also not new to crowdfunding. Liam successfully raised the money he needed to publish his book Data and Power, which we mentioned above. You can check out that campaign here.

Aidan and Liam McCarty

On the Speaker's Balcony in the US Capitol Building in Washington, DC

Why Now?

No matter your political affiliation or beliefs, American politics is a mess right now. Partisanship has crippled Congress for almost a decade, and we the people aren't being heard. People all over the country are struggling with stagnant wages and outdated infrastructure. Most of us feel like there's no point trying to tell our representatives what to change, and those who still try to are just drowned out by louder voices backed by bigger checks. Better technology won't cure every problem, but it sure is a good place to start.

We've spoken to a huge number of people about the state of American politics, and what we hear over and over is frustration. Everyone knows things aren't the way they should be, but people don't know where to turn. They don't know what could possibly move the needle because their government seems stuck in the mud. We think it is, too, and we're building ePluribus to make it a little less stuck.

The time is now to make a better tool. Talking to your representatives shouldn't be so hard. You shouldn't have to navigate government websites that look like they were built 25 years ago. You shouldn't have to rely on mass mailings and online petitions to get your voice across because those methods don't work. The technology exists to fix this problem, and the passion does too. So let's do it, together. Let's make the system work better, for everyone.