On my birthday, November 22, 1963, an American president who was bringing hope to the world was assassinated after he had ended the Cold War arms race by scuttling plans to bomb Russia and Castro out of Cuba, and created the Peace Corps as an alternative to universal military service.

It occurred to me that pinning our hopes for peace on the life of one fragile human being was never going to work. A safer bet, although it seemed too difficult, was to transform public sensibility—but how? We had demonstrated the ability to do this with individuals and small groups, but not large populations.

Then, in 1983, the Internet was born, and in 2010, the Arab Spring showed us the political possibility of online organization. After working in community development and advanced technology, in 2019 I began to design a digital civic platform that would be managed democratically by established geographic communities—not official jurisdictions, but existing physical communities in which people shared mutual interests and concerns but lacked a structure for building consensus and taking action together.

Over the last 7 years since founding Own Your Government, many people, companies and technology agents have contributed to this project that eventually became Coordinated Action Networks, and many will continue to arrive.