We created OYG to apply data science technology to help people protect and preserve their communities. Our platform supports communities in building and using the power of consensus to prevent projects and policies that are inconsistent with their priorities. We believe a community-centric consensus engine makes it possible for people to set the agenda of local governments to reduce global warming.

In some respects, OYG looks much like social media with familiar streaming chat and video features. Several important features distinguish OYG’s community-centric focus:

Polling and discussions are aimed at building consensus for actions
OYG protects privacy, anonymity and immutability of poll results
Consensus reports are delivered to traditional and social news media in real time
OYG uses AI and NLP to observe and find semantically-similar commonality in polls across communities, cities, counties, and states to reflect a broader consensus with the power to influence decisions at the highest levels of government.
OYG is agnostic to differences: one-person = one-vote, and 100% inclusive, which produces a breakthrough in direct democracy protecting people from flawed predictive models in lieu of actually asking people what they want
OYG provides ways to reconcile differences and diverse points of view, to find solutions where leaders often fail.
Communities can use their aggregate purchasing power to obtain better services and reduce costs and waste

People can take stock of the natural and human resources of their own communities. They can use OYG to organize local energy and bandwidth co-ops, with a commitment to reducing global warming. They can also launch income generating enterprises and acess financial services that help them improve and preserve quality of life and public safety

–OVERCOMING OBSTACLES TO SOLUTIONS TO PERSISTENT PROBLEMS –

#1 Citizens are not motivated.

Defining legislative priorities using NLP and data samples, instead of verifiable consensus of people who are properly informed has created a huge problem. People are not motivated to be responsible for the outcome. They can blame government.

Misinformation, opinion and gossip gets our attention, or we keep our heads in the sand. Voting doesn’t set the agenda of government to address our priorities, it just puts a piece on the board.

Why should we expect that the public will feel responsible for and able to make a difference about global warming, or be motivated beyond buying solar panels?

Voters distrust government, grow cynical and stop participating

#2 Campaign Finance and Top-Down Solutions

#3 Voters Distrust Government

Ecosystems are failing. Lithium, Copper and rare earth mining for electrification is not well thought out, if not, insane. 100s of millions in poverty. and what is that if not the epitome of powerlessness? How do powerless people help reduce global warming? OYG Own Your Government.

Why?

Our response to global warming is constrained by institutions that are supposed to defend us against existential threats. reasonable expectation of government.

For example, public reviews of EIRs are mandated but the EIR process is designed to facilitate development, rather than to prevent development unwanted by the community. Why should the community have a say?

THREE PROBLEMS – ONE SOLUTION

A STRATEGY FOR REDUCING GLOBAL WARMING

CONSENSUS GOING GLOBAL

Our Team

THE OYG TEAM IS A COMMUNITY OF COLLABORATING ENTITIES

OYG began as a collaboration of a creative, politically savvy person and a data science professional that shared a desire to put powerful software tools into the hands and knowledge of people who are motivated to reduce global warming.

The project began as a nonprofit but because it needs to be self-sustaining and rapidly scaling and involves business relationships with companies to integrate their expertise in streaming, telepresence video conference, blockchain, encryption, polling and support for community enterprise, we formed a limited liability company to obtain private capital.

SOFTWARE DESIGN - 8TH LIGHT

OYG invited 8th Light to joint venture with a proposal for Bogota, Colombia. The importance of the Bogota project for the people of Colombia led us to 8th Light based on their track record of reliable software design, development and success in building DevOps teams looking to achieve ambitious outcomes.

8th Light has a reputation for nurturing and guiding engineering and creative teams, expanding their technological expertise and software-building capabilities to spark change. [Eighthlight.com]

Michael Winn

CEO

Michael Winn’s Olympic Plaza project in Los Angeles was his first venture in advanced tech and the world’s first smart multi-tenant building with an ethernet LAN, file, print and scanning servers and a gateway into the global telephone network. In 1982, Tenants of his TOP executive suite accessed office systems from home. Winn wrote about this in Architectronics, McGraw Hill, 1987, a reference for developers about the advent of digital technology.

Working with data scientist, Norman Katz in 2019, Winn brought forward his ideas of tech for communities when they launched Own Your Government.

Norm Katz and Winn met through LinkedIn in 2018 when Winn was looking for a software architect to help him get an online/hybrid town council built for the community in San Diego where Winn was living. When Winn formed a limited liability company called, Own Your Government, LLC. he asked Norm to join with him.

Norm had previously developed backend architectures for web-scale consumer-facing apps and cloud-based scalable web services hosted on AWS and Azure with Kubernetes and Docker Containers. His projects include a patient-centric interoperability platform for health data retrieval, harmonization, visualization and data sharing, subscriber management systems supporting millions of users’ PII and credit card data for identity protection and exposed data matching, a data warehouse with ETL from multiple business units, and a social network for traveling nurses.

Most recently, VP Research and Development at Seqster, Norm achieved success in several companies across multiple markets; including healthcare, consumer products, financial services and defense: Sony Electronics, Orincon, acquired by Lockheed Martin in 2003; CSID, acquired by Experian in 2016 and AMN Healthcare. He provided engineering support for the San Diego Police Department’s New Technologies Unit, and research labs at UCSD and CMU.