New England, United States · 1630s — present
Direct local self-government is not an innovation to be piloted; it is a heritage to be extended.
Switzerland, national and communal · 1291 / 1848 — present
Frequency normalizes participation.
Taiwan · 2015 — present
Comment sections amplify fights because replies reward them.
Porto Alegre, Brazil (1.3M people) · 1989 — 2004 (peak years)
Both halves.
Reykjavik, Iceland (120,000 people) · 2010 — present
The loop is the product.
Barcelona, Spain — then hundreds of institutions · 2016 — present
Build the kernel once, isolate the local specifics in configuration, give it away — a second county should be a config file and a folder of PDFs.
Stanford / worldwide (100+ polls in 50+ countries) · 1988 — present
The deepest return on participation isn't any single result — it's what taking part does to the participant.
Lahti, Finland · 2020s
Hybrid isn't an accessibility gesture; it is what makes results representative enough to cite.
Washington County, Wisconsin (~137,000 people) · 2020s
The quorum court is not too small to act on demonstrated priorities; small is where it's most possible.
United Kingdom · 2015 — present
A county platform cannot obligate officials — and doesn't need to.
Tupelo / Lee County, Mississippi · 1940s — present
The closest analog to a small rural county in the whole library: a place with no natural advantages that changed its trajectory through organized community structures and a local institution keeping score in public.
Chattanooga, Tennessee · 1969 — present
Mass participation isn't the celebration after a turnaround — in the best-documented American case, it was the ignition.
Kalamazoo, MI · El Dorado, AR · Arkadelphia, AR · 2005 — present
Trajectory change can be bought deliberately, locally, and per-child — and some counties already own a working piece of the toolkit.
California, United States · 1911 — present
Every design choice in this platform is an answer to a California failure mode.
The argument these cases add up to: our stance.