The complete conceptual framework, methodology, governance principles, and implementation approach for the Teisond Platform.
Every citizen of a democratically governed country holds a body of internationally recognised civil and political rights: rights that shield the individual from injustice at the hands of the state, and that secure a place in the civic and political life of society. Some of them, however, remain declarations. They are written into treaties, constitutions and statutes, and left without any mechanism through which an ordinary person might actually exercise them.
Modern democracies operate no mechanism by which the judgment of citizens might bear upon the quality of the authority exercised over them – neither across the long intervals between elections, nor in respect of the authority of the ungranted mandate, the countless officials who are appointed rather than chosen. This absence is not an oversight awaiting correction. It has hardened into a permanent structural feature of the democratic order, and it preserves, undisturbed, a latent social conflict as old as government itself: the conflict inherent in the compulsion exercised by some members of society over others, and in the inequality of their positions with respect to the distribution of power.
Teisond is a universal digital platform, capable of independent and autonomous operation in any democratic jurisdiction as an economically self-sufficient nationwide infrastructure of civic judgment.
Its purpose is to extend the familiar repertoire of democratic practice by one further mechanism: an institution of civic monitoring of the public legitimacy of officials at every level of public authority. Such monitoring consists in the continuous collection and aggregation of the personal attitudes of citizens towards serving holders of power – judgments rendered by verified citizens of the country, users of the Teisond Platform, of their own will and by their own choice, freely and at no cost, in a simple binary form, trust or distrust, and open to change or withdrawal at any moment.
From these judgments the Platform produces public indices of the legitimacy of each object of monitoring, released once a minimally sufficient body of judgment has accumulated. Beyond the indices themselves, a distinct specialisation of the Platform is the continuous generation of analytical derivatives of monitoring: data intended for use by every participant in public information exchange, for personal, civic and commercial ends.
What separates Teisond from the many existing channels of communication and information exchange is architectural. It resolves the old dilemma of authenticity and anonymity: irreversible cryptographic hashing joins, for the first time, the verifiability of the participant with the anonymity of the judgment.
One consequence of an institution of this kind is the appearance of a category of data that did not exist before: Public Legitimacy Analytics (PLA). The scientific soundness of the methodology by which the Teisond platform gathers these data is what makes them trustworthy; the market value of the Platform's information products is what makes the infrastructure of civic judgment economically self-sufficient.
Classical constitutional theory proclaims the people the sole source of power. On that logic representative democracy is the legitimate frame, and the system of public administration the instrument that gives effect to the sovereign's will. The practice of modern government reveals a persistent divergence between the declaration and the social reality. Democracies have come up against an accountability deficit that is turning public governance, by degrees, into a closed and self-reproducing process. The deficit is systemic in character, and it appears in two connected circuits, each of which weakens the capacity of citizens to influence those who govern them.
The first circuit is laid down in the nature of the representative model itself, which may be reduced to a formula: continuous power, episodic oversight.
On polling day the citizen is the supreme subject of politics, delegating through the ballot the right to govern. But the act is a single one, a conditional blank cheque written years in advance. Once the polling stations close, power becomes continuous, autonomous and monopolistic, while public control over it contracts to the nominal. The citizen moves from the centre of the system of public administration to its periphery, and turns from a subject of politics into an object of its effects.
Formal elections remain the principal mechanism for renewing and revoking mandates of power, yet they occur discretely, ordinarily once in four or five years. Between electoral events citizens live through a long period of practical disenfranchisement, deprived of any accessible structured instrument of influence. The legalised forms of political interaction – public hearings, assemblies, petitions – are received by the population as rituals without consequence. Digital initiatives of the gov tech kind and deliberative practices erect no more than a participatory façade, since they are pointedly advisory in character and easily disregarded by the officials to whom they are addressed. Power remains continuous; oversight of it remains sporadic.
Where the first circuit concerns elected power alone, the second, and the deeper of the two, covers the whole apparatus of state public administration.
Modern governance is legally layered: elected representatives concentrate on framework norms of nationwide application, while real everyday power – the right to issue instructions and licences, to allocate budgets, to inspect and to impose sanctions – passes to appointees.
Beyond the offices of political power there operates an immense administrative and bureaucratic apparatus which governs the public space day by day and holds direct and immediate authority over the population. These are the directors of healthcare and education establishments, the heads of social services, the chiefs of inspectorates, the commanders and functionaries of law enforcement. All of them take decisions, general and individual, which citizens are compelled to obey under threat of state compulsion.
When such an official proves incompetent, partial, contemptuous or corruptly motivated, the ordinary citizen stands in a position of effective absence of legitimate defence. Appeal procedures are for the most part internal to the department and directed at protecting the interests of the institution; judicial protection is either disproportionate in cost to the weight of the matter or out of reach for most citizens; the media respond only to isolated cases loud enough to become news. Electoral levers are powerless here: this category of officials is by definition not elected and faces no electoral risk. The citizen, in short, holds no real lever over their conduct or over the quality of their administration.
This actual absence of feedback between the governed and those who govern is what constitutes the deficit of legitimate public influence.
The scale of the administrative blind spot formed by the two circuits is striking. What is meant here by permanent public oversight is not specialist political analysis, and not visibility in the media, but regular, verified and systematic measurement of the level of public trust. By that criterion, in any modern democracy the overwhelming majority of the apparatus of power stands outside oversight altogether.
In an average European country of thirty to fifty million people, some tens of senior political figures at most are covered by any form of sociological monitoring. Real powers of authority, meanwhile – the disposal of society's resources, decisions of permission and prohibition, the exercise of functions of compulsion – are held by more than a hundred thousand appointed administrators.
The figures below show the ratio between those who actually exercise state power and those whose standing with the public is at least sporadically tracked between elections:
a small democracy (3–5 million people): some 10,000–20,000 officials exercising power, against some 5–15 under sporadic observation;
a modest state (10–30 million): some 30,000–100,000 against 10–30;
a mid-sized state (30–50 million): some 100,000–150,000 against 15–50;
a large state (50–100 million): some 150,000–500,000 against 30–80.
Put another way, for every official whose level of public trust is periodically published there are several thousand who act in conditions of complete public invisibility.
The persistence of both circuits rests on two deep premises built into the modern architecture of power.
The first is the presumption of an incompetent demos. Political institutions and electoral technique proceed on the thinly concealed assumption that the ordinary citizen is incapable of forming an independent rational assessment of complex administrative decisions. Citizens are taken to delegate power to representatives while remaining permanently without the competences that oversight of those representatives would require. From this follows the settled practice of managing the voter's behaviour through media narratives and information campaigns, justified by a crudely generalised public good.
The opposing position, less popular among governing elites, holds that civic competence is a real and widely distributed capacity of society. It does not idealise citizens as well informed or immune to manipulation, but it rejects outright the idea of an innate inability of the population to recognise its own interest or that of society. That people are able to observe the actions of institutions, to set them against their own expectations and to form a relevant judgment about the quality of public administration is not in doubt. The question is only whether there exists a system of information exchange capable of turning that capacity into a sustained public signal.
The second premise concerns the internal logic of the state apparatus. In theory the executive vertical of officialdom is accountable to elected politicians, and they in turn to the people. In practice the scheme is eroded by the politicisation of the civil service and by nepotism.
Since the bureaucratic apparatus is ordinarily the creation of the political group in power, that group loses any motive to exercise real control over its own appointees. The effect is one of mutual cover: the apparatus supplies politicians with administrative resource and financial stability, and politicians in return guarantee the apparatus immunity from the law and from public anger [O'Donnell, 1998]. The declared hierarchical accountability within the state apparatus becomes an instrument by which the system defends itself against external influence from its own constitutional source. This feature of the system should not be attributed to any conspiratorial inclination on the part of its individual participants; it is a consequence of its operating without any independent external oversight.
The deficit of extra-electoral influence and the deficit of legitimate public influence share a single root cause: the absence of an organised system of mutual accountability between citizens and power, existing as a social institution in its own right.
Officials exercise continuous power as a matter of system; citizens lack any systematic continuous mechanism bearing on the quality of that power. The consequence is a structurally one-directional relationship: authority flows downward without interruption, while the response of its source rises upward only episodically, and in respect of the most numerous segment of that authority does not rise at all. The modern architecture of public governance displays a deep asymmetry. The system of state administration holds robust institutional barriers, elaborate procedures and legal immunities that protect administrators from public discontent, while the citizen, under the continuous pressure of bureaucratic decisions, is left without defence.
Above all, the problem is not a speculative one. The evidently declarative quality of the people's celebrated status as the source of power carries critical practical significance, above all through the standing threat of a crisis of legitimacy. When citizens begin, in numbers, to see that status as a formula on paper, trust in state institutions as such gives way. Political practice testifies that once a constitutional principle ceases to work, what follows is not theoretical dispute but real social upheaval, from revolutionary rupture to the slide back into authoritarianism.
The deficit of mutual accountability between power and citizens is no more speculative than this. Accountability in an institutionalised form, recognised by society, is very nearly the only real safeguard holding a population back from the loss of any sense of influence over power, and with it from the destructive consequences described.
Several structural factors explain why an infrastructure of mutual accountability between citizens and power never arose of its own accord.
The most obvious is the technological limitation of earlier ages. Until now there existed no instrument for the mass collection, aggregation and publication of the individual judgments of citizens in real time. The inherited instruments – petitions, surveys, rallies – were shaped by the communication capacities of their time, and were never conceived as a means of continuous information exchange between a population and its government.
The second factor is the inherent rejection by bureaucracy, in every age, of any external attempt at oversight that it cannot administer itself. Any system resists ideas, phenomena or foreign elements incompatible with its own deep nature. Internal control mechanisms, meanwhile, are created to protect institutional cohesion rather than to widen the scope for intervention from outside.
To this belongs political opportunism, and the political advantage that flows from the existence of grey zones and inter-electoral vacuums of accountability, and hence the absence of any incentive to build an infrastructure that would fill them.
All of this is reinforced by the barriers to collective action: the dispersion of citizens and the lack of resources to build independent systems of monitoring. Where organised groups do arise, they mostly serve narrow interests rather than the idea of systematic civic oversight at every level of power, an idea that has always laboured under the assumption of a demos incapable of forming judgments worth having on matters of politics and administration.
Finally, a decisive part was played by the neglect, in scholarship, of any vision of public legitimacy as a continuous, quantified and dynamic variable, one that can and should be subject to permanent public measurement. The absence of a conceptual frame in turn prevented the term from forming and the paradigm from being recognised; and so the corresponding social construct generated no demand for an infrastructure to serve it. It is this omission, conceptual and technological at once, that Teisond exists to fill.
Over centuries the democratic world has produced instruments directed, in one way or another, at ordering the relationship between society and power, and among them the inequality of the parties' positions with respect to influence over the decisions of power. None of these instruments, singly or together, has proved capable of closing the deficits described above. The reason lies not in any defect or inefficiency of the instruments themselves, but in the fact that none of them corrects the structural asymmetry of influence: power is exercised continuously, while influence upon it remains episodic and unevenly distributed. In earlier times this asymmetry was taken for an innate property of the order of things. In the modern world it increasingly threatens both social stability and the effectiveness of society, since accumulated distrust and discontent find no legitimate channel of release.
Elections remain the cornerstone of accountability, since they carry a direct sanctioning mechanism: the replacement of those in power. Yet elections operate only on macro-cycles, confining the citizen's right of political intervention to rigidly periodic access. In respect of the multitude of appointed administrators, no form of that right is provided at all. Elections also yield a binary result, retain or replace, compressing thousands of impressions and judgments into a single bipolar choice.
The alternative instruments of direct expression – referendums, recall procedures on the principle of the imperative mandate, and their like – carry an exceptionally high threshold of mobilisation and cost. They are therefore used only in situations of crisis, and only where the law expressly provides for them.
Institutions of parliamentary and intra-state control, such as audit offices, supervisory inspectorates and the offices of ombudsmen, are a characteristic expression of democracy's attempt to build mechanisms of accountability directly into the machinery of the state.
Each is intended to secure the performance of some function important to the state, but to count them as part of a civic infrastructure of oversight would be naive. In practice they concentrate either on high-level policy or on manifest legal deviations, leaving aside administrative ineffectiveness, bureaucratic obstruction and the institutional arrogance of officials in their dealings with the population. Situated inside the state apparatus, such bodies are inevitably drawn into vertical protective coalitions, where preserving the stability of the system always prevails over allaying public discontent.
In these conditions the complaint of an individual is bound to remain solitary within a closed bureaucratic system. It does not accumulate with others like it, does not become a transparent public signal, and leaves the real scale of the problem invisible to society.
Instruments of civic participation display limitations of another kind. Petition campaigns, even where they lapse the moment a formal bureaucratic reply is issued, do generate a sporadic public signal. Their overall effectiveness is nonetheless negligible, owing to the legal non-binding quality of the demands and the discretionary character of the response. An illustration of the latter is the existence of formal signature thresholds: ten thousand may trigger a reaction, nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine will not. The principal weakness of the petition as an instrument of civic influence, however, is that neither the fact of its submission nor the content of its demands creates, in itself, any incentive for those in power to respond. As instruments of civic influence or of oversight over power, therefore, petitions cannot serve.
Street protest signals the outer limit of tension in public feeling, but carries a high cost of participation, risks to the personal safety of those involved, and the raising of conflict to the stage of open confrontation. For building any durable social equilibrium it is by definition unsuited.
Collective forms of engagement such as public hearings and consultations suffer from a systematic error of sampling, since those who take part are an unrepresentative and often interested minority. Beyond that, proceedings of this kind are markedly declarative in character, which allows officials to simulate dialogue without incurring any obligation to change their conduct.
Sociological polling is a relatively effective instrument for studying the state of public feeling, but is unsuited to the role of a public infrastructure of accountability by reason of purely structural limits, alongside a series of systemic defects.
The defects of current polling practice with regard to attitudes towards public politicians arise from methodological problems, from political context and from the psychology of respondents, and may be grouped under four heads. Among the methodological and procedural flaws are the effects of the imposed list – a restricted roster of names, and the artificial modelling of a rating through the inclusion or exclusion of a given politician from it – manipulative wording of questions, and the difficulty of assembling a representative sample. Among psychological factors and respondent behaviour are the effect of social desirability, whereby respondents conceal their real political preferences; the fear of voicing a critical opinion during telephone or door-to-door surveys; and the superficiality of assessments, which fix a momentary emotion in place of a settled attitude.
A separate group of problems concerns manipulation in the publication of results and the activity of pseudo-sociological services: commissioned and invented ratings, fragmentary presentation of data in the media, disregard of a margin of error that may exceed the distance between candidates, and disregard of the share of respondents who are undecided or who declined contact. Last comes the problem of the dynamism of the data, the short-life effect: figures that have lost their currency, and whose publication often misinforms society rather than reflecting reality.
Social networks give citizens unprecedented scope to voice any judgment whatever, including their attitude towards any holder of power, but as an infrastructure of accountability they carry fundamental defects of construction. They require no verification: an account may be created by anyone. They lack structure: a critical post and the output of a bot farm are indistinguishable as a data format. And they perform no aggregation: individual expressions of discontent do not compose a credible public signal.
The consequence is that social networks and digital platforms of general purpose generate unstructured emotional noise and suffer from endemic unreliability through the prevalence of bots. Alongside this, a substantial defect of social networks remains the deficit of privacy: in criticising power, the citizen is exposed to the risks of profiling, of persecution and of personal retaliation, given the ease of deanonymisation.
To summarise, not one of the existing instruments possesses the critically necessary set of properties that a hypothetical infrastructure of democratic accountability would have to hold simultaneously: continuity of operation, universality of coverage, cryptographic verification to eliminate distortion, mathematical aggregation of judgments, unimpeded civic participation, and architectural protection of privacy.
This set of properties, or anything approaching it, has never belonged to any instrument of civic participation devised to date. Before turning to the modelling of a proper alternative, however, it is worth considering why the many attempts to modify the existing instruments, in the sense of overcoming the democratic accountability deficit, met with no success.
The deficits described did not pass unnoticed. Political theory has proposed ways of overcoming them more than once, yet each attempt ran into the structural resistance of the very system it set out to reform. These attempts matter here not as historical reference but as evidence: the gap does not close through the refinement of existing instruments. It requires an instrument of a different nature. What follows examines the attempts to reform both circuits, together with the reasons why each of them came up, without fail, against hard institutional barriers.
Attempts to overcome the accountability deficits of the first circuit took the form of two progressive formats of political order. The first is deliberative democracy, in which the condition of an administrative decision is the prior achievement of public consensus through the participation of citizens in framing it. The second is electronic democracy, which provides for civic participation in governance through the means of information and communication technology [Habermas, 1975; Fishkin, 2011].
Both formats duly revealed defects of their own. The most conspicuous is the participatory façade, arising from the advisory character of decisions taken through such procedures and from the unqualified freedom of their addressees to disregard them. The second is the elitism of participation: deliberative practice always draws in a small self-selected group whose composition does not represent society. The third, particular to the digital formats, is the risk of populism – emotional voting without deep analysis, where the speed and mass reach of the channel reward reaction rather than judgment [Coleman & Moss, 2012]. In sum, formats of this kind widen the space for expression, but create no mechanism whose consequences power would be unable to ignore.
The most radical attempt to revive the second circuit lay in the idea of making appointed administrators elective, on the model of the election of sheriffs and judges in some states of the USA. The logic is attractive: if the source of the problem is the absence of electoral responsibility, then electoral responsibility should be introduced.
The principal defect of this route was found to be the politicisation of professional offices. Once law-enforcement or judicial bodies begin to take decisions with an eye to electoral ratings rather than to the law, the very function for which those offices exist is impaired. Beyond that, the voter objectively possesses no instrument for assessing narrowly specialised competences: the procedural quality of a judge's or an investigator's work can no more be assessed through a ballot paper than a surgeon can be chosen by vote [Schumpeter, 1942]. Making a professional office elective substitutes electoral logic for the principle of criteria, and leaves citizens without any means of judging the substance.
The next approach was realised in the form of quasi-independent supervisory bodies: specialised anti-corruption structures, inspectorates, institutions of the ombudsman and the like. The intention was to place control outside the traditional vertical of administration and endow it with institutional autonomy.
The principal and fairly obvious defect proved to be the speed with which such bodies acquired closed procedures of their own and turned into a new mega-bureaucracy, isolated from civil society [Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2011]. Created as a remedy for the closedness of the apparatus, a body of this kind inevitably reproduced that same closedness at a new level. As a result, in place of an independent arbiter the citizen receives one more institution, to be approached under its own rules and awaited upon for its own discretion. More than that, a controller external by design comes in time to be integrated, in fact, into the very structure of mutual protection it was meant to counterbalance.
The third approach, founded on the concept of new public management, introduced market and service mechanisms, under which the state is transformed into a digital platform and the official into a provider of services with automated KPIs [Osborne, 2010].
Notably, this model proved its worth at the lower, routine level of administration, where interaction with the citizen reduces to a simple service such as the issue of a certificate or a licence. At the higher levels of regulatory decision, however, market criteria prove untenable: the function of state compulsion is by its nature at odds with the logic of market service. The effectiveness of an inspector imposing a sanction, or of an investigator restricting liberty, is not the effectiveness of a service provider to be assessed on service indicators. Where authority is compulsion rather than service, the metric of customer satisfaction loses its meaning.
For all their variety of conception, every one of these attempts ran into a single common barrier, most conspicuous in the second circuit. It is information asymmetry – the Weberian phenomenon of power through a monopoly on knowledge, where complex legal jargon and departmental instructions reliably preserve the deficit of public influence [Weber, 1978]. So long as the apparatus remains the only party that understands its own procedures and controls its own data, any attempt at oversight from outside is obliged to rely on information supplied by the object of that oversight.
From this follows a conclusion that narrows the field of possible solutions: no reform of the vertical of power itself, and no reform functionally dependent on that vertical, is capable of overcoming this barrier, since it inherits the barrier's origins.
The empirically demonstrated institutional weakness of traditional models of public administration establishes the point: neither isolated acts of civic activism, nor quasi-independent safeguards built into the vertical of power, nor the various gov tech services created by the state itself are objectively capable of defending the public interest against a system that protects its own closedness from outside influence, and the private interest of its functionaries. The existing instruments of civic participation in public governance do not close the accountability deficits, and the modernisation of those instruments holds no prospect, given that they are embedded in the vertical of power, dependent upon it, or both.
The social counterweight to an institutionalised system of state compulsion governed by the logic of self-preservation can only be another system, institutionalised in the same measure: a distinct social institution, independent of power, operating at the level where the social and psychological needs of the individual citizen are met.
The Teisond solution is a system of continuous civic monitoring of the legitimacy of power, whose purpose is to structure, regulate and legitimise sustained oversight of the manner in which the powers delegated by citizens are exercised in the period between elections.
The practical embodiment of that system is a public digital infrastructure of non-compulsory, extra-formal, sustained feedback, which continuously generates data bearing on the personal career and reputational consequences for holders of power, and so transforms the judgments of citizens into visible signals and into incentives that officials can feel.
That such a system answers to the classical marks of a social institution is evident. The principal purpose of social institutions is to lend stability, order and predictability to social relations, and their form of existence is a durable public infrastructure securing the free and unimpeded participation of citizens in their operation. At the same time, the democratic accountability deficit is a phenomenon that is systemic, all-encompassing and politically sensitive, and therefore capable of being overcome only by another system on the scale of a social institution, rather than by a one-off initiative or a passive instrument. Continuous civic oversight of the public legitimacy of power can and should become a generally recognised social practice, institutionalised in time as an autonomous institution independent of the state.
The founding principle of Teisond is not without precedent. The open data movements and transparency legislation have already established the right of citizens to structured information from the sphere of public administration, from open budgets to transparent procurement. Until now, however, that principle has covered only the institutional dimension of power. Teisond takes the next step and extends it to the personal dimension: the public visibility of the legitimacy of each individual official.
The significance of this frame becomes clearer set against the classical institution of elections. Both systems are social institutions, and in sustaining the viability of democracy they perform different but complementary functions. The institution of elections structures, regulates and legitimises the discrete delegation of powers from the sovereign to its representatives on macro-cycles. The institution of continuous civic monitoring of the legitimacy of power structures, regulates and legitimises sustained oversight of how those powers are exercised in the period between elections. The first answers the question of whom the people entrust with power; the second, the question of how that power is exercised day by day once it has been delegated.
The purpose of this new social institution is accordingly neither to supplant the institutions that already exist, political ones above all, nor to improve them. Its task is not intervention in the work of power or in electoral procedure, but the securing of a durable equilibrium within the system of governance, by balancing the compulsion of power with the continuous reputational signal of society. It confers on the citizen no right to take decisions in place of an official. It returns to the citizen the right to a judgment of one's own and to its public visibility: basic democratic rights lost since antiquity.
Any social institution with the ambition of amounting to more than a set of declarations requires a material and technical skeleton: an infrastructure of its own. The institution of elections rests on an extensive state infrastructure of electoral commissions, polling stations and systems of counting. But the particular nature of an institution monitoring the legitimacy of power does not allow it to depend on the state or on the state's material base, since the object of its oversight is the state itself. An infrastructure administered by the party it is meant to observe loses its meaning at the moment of creation.
In modern conditions, meanwhile, the viability of this institution can be secured by an independent digital infrastructure arising directly within civil society: a civic technology platform with a verifiable data architecture and algorithms open to independent audit. The resilience of such an infrastructure rests neither on rights of ownership, nor on technological means, nor on the physical protection of servers, but on legal legitimation: on basic constitutional norms, and on Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which guarantees to everyone the right to take part in the conduct of public affairs directly. In respect of its own institutional standing, likewise, civic monitoring of public legitimacy is an instrument giving effect to the citizens' right of political expression: the possibility, provided by law, of freely expressing one's will, thoughts and intentions, entailing consequences including legal ones, and founded on freedom of speech and belief.
Ultimately, however, the resilience of an institution of public monitoring is secured neither by law nor by technology, but by scale. Such an institution comes into being and endures for as long as a critical mass of society shares its aims and its motives. When the instruments of monitoring legitimacy are used by millions of verified citizens, the practice of oversight becomes a social phenomenon that cannot be countered administratively without entering into conflict with the source of power itself.
It is on these foundations – institution, independent infrastructure, scale – that the substantive architecture of the Teisond Platform, presented in this White Paper, is built.
The practical embodiment of the Platform requires an environment that converts a dispersed social signal into structured data with low friction and high security.
The architecture of Teisond unfolds on two levels. The civic level provides verified citizens with access to participation in the monitoring of the public legitimacy of holders of power, and with the means of rendering judgment. The Platform level is responsible for the collection, storage and aggregation of those judgments into public indices of legitimacy, protected by a threshold of representativeness and by the principle of privacy by design, and for the preparation of the accompanying analytics. The consumers of the Platform's information products do not form a separate architectural level: officials, media, NGOs and researchers differ only in their procedures of access. Among the advantages of this arrangement, two are of the first importance: it overcomes the asymmetry of information exchange between citizens and power that is inherent in traditional means of mass communication, and it denies the parties to that exchange any means of direct influence upon each other.
The Platform's interface is designed on the logic of an accessible mass digital product. Anyone may view the current indices of legitimacy of officials freely and without registration; these data are open to all. Identification of citizen users is required only at the moment of rendering a first judgment, which introduces, as a matter of procedure, the democratic standard of one citizen, one account. Thereafter no repeat identification is needed: access to the account is secured by a cryptographic access key bound to the citizen's device, and rendering or changing judgments in respect of any officials takes a few seconds and requires no further checks. Verification is a single event of entry into the application, not a recurring barrier to participation.
Verification takes place through national digital identification services and protects the system against artificial manipulation, coordinated inauthentic behaviour and bot farms. What passes into the system, however, is not the person but only an irreversible cryptographic hash of the identifier. This makes political profiling and deanonymisation technically impossible even for the Platform's own developers: the system is able to confirm that a judgment belongs to a real and unique citizen, but is unable to establish who that citizen is or what the judgment was. Anonymity here is not a technical option of security but a fundamental institutional guarantee of freedom of expression. Without it, a citizen in a small community would never render distrust in a local official.
The act of registering a judgment itself is reduced to a binary choice between trust and distrust, with no further justification required. This binary form shortens a single interaction with the Platform to a minute or two, while the minimisation of thresholds of participation and the absence of any charge encourage the widest possible circle of citizen users towards constant participation in monitoring, as the precondition of network scaling and of the viability of the system. These factors were built into the architecture of the Platform not merely for the convenience of the participants in this information exchange, but above all with a view to forming a distinct space of social communication and to institutionalising the corresponding practice.
The second and final architectural level is the Platform itself: the collection, storage and aggregation of judgments, and their conversion into public indices, being measures of the public legitimacy of a person exercising power in the eyes of those subject to it. Every judgment is rendered in respect of an official identified through the office that person holds. The index is computed as a snapshot of all standing judgments concerning that official at the moment of calculation, and is then published. Calculation occurs at a set periodicity, and so the published index remains unchanged until its next recalculation. The sequence of such snapshots forms the dynamics of public trust in the official over time.
The anonymity of participation and the citizen user's protection against deanonymisation are integrated directly into the Platform's code on the principle of privacy by design. The first safeguard is laid down at the level of verification: since the system stores only an irreversible cryptographic hash, a judgment cannot be linked to the person who rendered it, neither by outsiders nor by the Platform's developers. The second safeguard concerns the data themselves: the system does not, as a matter of principle, retain any history of judgments or of changes of mind, and records only their current status. Even in the event of unauthorised access to the system, an intruder would obtain no more than a body of depersonalised current judgments, without names behind them and without history before them.
A distinct element of the methodology is the statistical publication threshold. An official's index is released once a set number of verified judgments has accumulated; until then the profile shows the progress of accumulation, how many judgments have been recorded and how many remain before the index opens. This is not a technical formality but a standard of quality in measurement: an indicator of legitimacy drawn from too small a body of judgment would be distorted by chance, and the Platform does not present such values as a measured level of public trust. Thresholds are differentiated by the scale of the office, from several hundred judgments for officials of national rank to several dozen for local ones. The publication of an index accordingly means that a sufficient body of judgment always stands behind it, and the moment an index opens becomes a public event.
The accumulated body of individual citizens' judgments the Platform converts into a public signal: the index of legitimacy of the official under monitoring. That index is released in an open reputational profile, and in this the Platform gives effect to a principle – that the public nature of power should be matched by the publicity of society's assessment of the legitimacy of the person who holds it. Here the civic signal completes its journey and becomes a social fact.
Officials do not form a separate architectural level of the Platform; they are consumers of its information products. An official's public profile is open to every visitor. A subscription adds analytical depth to the data concerning the level of that official's own public legitimacy, and a verified profile adds the right of reply: a channel of official presence alongside one's own index, in the same plane of public visibility in which the reputational signal is formed.
The sceptical question put to an institution of legitimacy monitoring, as to any form of social observation without a separate system of sanction or mechanism of compulsion, is an obvious one: if the publication of an index of legitimacy entails no legal consequence, why should the official under monitoring take any notice of it? The answer is that changes of behaviour outside formalised procedure are brought about not by the threat of sanction but by the force of visibility. Publishing the index of public legitimacy of a holder of power sets in motion several distinct mechanisms of independent action, which in turn compose a set of incentives and motivations that matter to the official.
The first mechanism is electoral anticipation. For holders of elected power, instability or decline in the index signals vulnerability long before the electoral contest reaches its close, and allows public conduct to be corrected. Settled electoral cycles open the feedback channel only at the moment when a response has ceased to mean anything, whereas access to continuously updated data turns a distant threat of defeat into a current parameter of management. The incentive to keep watch on electoral sentiment accordingly operates not only in the pre-election period but throughout a term of office.
The second mechanism is the vulnerability of reputational capital. The index is public and persistent: it exists as common knowledge in the official's relations with voters, party, colleagues and the media. An official whose index declines steadily is bound to face uncomfortable questions from journalists, from fellow party members and from opponents, without any formal consequence, but with consequences that are informally quite palpable. The bearing of reputation on career prospects has counted in every age; the existence of a verified public source multiplies it.
The third mechanism is media amplification: indices carry the potential to become standard reference indicators for the media. Any movement in such an indicator becomes news, which widens the space of interest in civic participation and of motivation towards it; a wider circle of participants in monitoring refines the index and deepens the picture. The feedback loop between the publicity of monitoring data and the intensification of civic participation fills the information space and makes the suppression of an inconvenient index impossible: everyone with an interest can see it.
The fourth mechanism is the response of the competitive environment. Political and administrative rivals acquire the means to cite an opponent's unconvincing indicators of legitimacy as an argument for personnel change, and the opposition quotes them in public. The position of the official under monitoring within the institution becomes vulnerable in matters of career prospects, powers and preferment. In theory an official may ignore the data of public monitoring of one's own legitimacy for as long as one likes; in conditions where those around are showing close interest in it, this is unlikely.
None of these mechanisms formally sanctions or compels; together, however, they radically alter the environment in which a holder of power operates, an environment that thereby loses its principal historical advantages: invisibility and freedom from answering.
The nature of a social institution lies in structuring the disorder of some sphere of social relations by standardising it. At the same time, an understanding of the social need such an institution exists to satisfy becomes clear in the distinction between what it is and, particularly, what it is not.
Teisond is neither a body controlling deviation through a system of sanctions, nor even a form of association of individuals into groups or structures for the performance of social functions. Its tasks nonetheless answer fully to the marks of satisfying certain basic needs of society, among them security, socialisation and development, and lend themselves to being built by a democratic society into its existing processes.
Teisond is an infrastructure for measuring the attitude of society towards power, which makes civic judgment visible. Its functions end there, but its social value does not: that value lies in the possibility of softening the consequences of the permanent latent social conflict bound up with the compulsion exercised by some members of society over others, and with the inequality of their positions with respect to the distribution of power.
The Platform takes no decisions of its own, creates no obligations, imposes no sanctions, dismisses no one and appoints no one. What its operation produces is a continuous structured flow of data, available for use by a wide range of parties, from organs of state power and political parties to business, the media, scholars and civic organisations, each pursuing pragmatic ends and needs of its own. At the same time, the Platform's operation as a means of social interaction gives rise to a distinct spectrum of social and political consequences: from the use by citizens of open data in reaching their own electoral decisions, and the emergence of an institution of reputation, to the institutional cohesion of society as a form of bridging social capital.
Teisond monitors not the quality of public administration but the attitude of the governed towards those in power who administer it. An index of legitimacy shows the level of citizens' agreement with the performance of particular functions of power by a particular person, not how well, objectively, that person performs them. These are fundamentally different objects of monitoring, and the Platform does not conflate them: a competent official may hold low public legitimacy, and a popular one high legitimacy on middling competence. Telling the one from the other is the work of society, exercised through the media, expert analysis, institutional checks and the judgment of voters; the Platform supplies a signal, and reading it requires the whole ecosystem of democratic institutions.
Teisond is neutral as to political affiliation. It monitors the public legitimacy of all officials without exception, at all levels of power without exception, irrespective of their ideological colouring. The Platform holds no political preferences of its own and no position of its own on who deserves trust and who does not: its function is confined to publishing the actual state of public opinion.
Teisond is neither a social network nor a forum. The Platform provides no facility for comments, messages or the creation of content of any kind, only the structured binary judgment. Nor is the Platform a system of surveillance in respect of any category of its users, in any form: the object of monitoring is exclusively the public perception of officials' public activity, not their private life or conduct; the participation of citizens is anonymised; and the public character of officials is a legal principle of every democratic state.
The Platform's information data are distributed in the form of market products, which meet the needs of various groups of consumers, social and psychological as well as purely commercial. In relation to citizen users, the Platform is not an instrument for the performance of civic duty: it neither exhorts nor obliges. It renders the citizen a service, unimpeded and free of charge, in satisfying personal social and psychological needs, among them the needs for recognition, for social standing, and for a sense of dignity, of one's own significance and of personal influence.
The overcoming of the democratic accountability deficit, mutual recognition, and the lowering of the level of conflict in society arise as a consequence of the citizen user's pursuit of those needs, and not as the discharge of a task set before that citizen.
Intellectual honesty requires a clear statement not only of what the Platform does and does not do, but of what it does not promise.
An index of legitimacy records public perception, which is by definition subjective, dependent on prevailing sentiment and open to influence and manipulation of various kinds. It is a measure of trust, not a certification of competence, and should be read as such.
The Platform draws no samples and resorts to no extrapolation: it works with rendered judgments, whose voluntary character is the guarantee of their candour. The threshold of judgments required protects against random noise, but is no safeguard against disproportionate participation: some groups of citizens, for reasons of their own or in respect of particular objects of judgment, speak up more readily than others. Each individual index is accordingly aggregated from a circle of judgments unique to it. By the same token, movement in an index does not always mean a change of attitude; it may reflect a change in the circle of those who have chosen to speak.
Honesty about limits requires one further acknowledgement: the first judgment of a new participant costs effort. It requires verification of the citizen's identity – a requirement somewhat burdensome by the standards of ordinary social media use. This is neither the arrogance of the architects nor a barrier of admission, but the price of transparency and the payment for credibility: without verification of the participant's identity, the value of the Platform's data would be no higher than that of a traditional online poll. The architecture of the Platform asks this obstacle to be overcome only once: verification precedes the first judgment alone, at the point of highest motivation, and is never requested again in the life of the account. In countries with operating national systems of digital identification it takes minimal effort and lasts seconds; where these are absent, it is performed by an authorised independent provider through remote verification of an identity document – a tangible effort, but a single one. All further interaction with the Platform – returning to the account, changing a judgment, following the indices – proceeds unimpeded.
If the structural deficits of accountability and the untouchability of appointed bureaucracy have existed for centuries, it is necessary to explain what objective factors make the deployment of Teisond both possible and needed at this particular moment. The answer lies at the intersection of two parallel processes: the maturing of an acute social need, and the maturing of technologies capable of meeting it. The first creates demand; the second, for the first time, makes supply possible.
The digital order has already produced a highly effective, all-embracing and universally accessible infrastructure for the discharge of human emotion. Social networks and communication platforms are optimised for holding attention and spreading content, and both of these tactics reward emotional arousal rather than considered judgment. In an infrastructure of that kind, only emotion moves instantly and without impediment.
Yet for all the colossal infrastructure of emotion that has arisen, humanity has still acquired no infrastructure of sober judgment. The available instruments can mobilise people in an instant for a destructive surge, but offer no sustained institutionalised channel for recording and publishing a measured, everyday assessment of the effectiveness of public governance. Emotion is observed immediately and by everyone; considered judgment leaves no trace.
An entire generation has grown up in this environment. The inhabitants of digital platforms constitute ever weightier demographic cohorts in every settled democracy: multilateral interaction within an ecosystem is natural to them, and feedback in real time is their standard of communication. In consequence, the confinement of civic participation in public life, governance and rule-making to a polling booth once in several years admits of no intelligible explanation. For this generation the question is not why one should use such a thing, but why it does not yet exist.
The infrastructural imbalance described contributes to the erosion of the capacity for rational judgment, to the fragmentation of attention, to the coarsening of public discourse and to a fall in trust towards basic models of governance, and ultimately to the atomisation of society. It is precisely these phenomena that form an acute civic demand for an instrument of direct but non-forcible influence: for a way of being heard that requires neither taking to the streets nor an emotional rupture.
Until recently that demand could not be met, for want of technological maturity: the instruments of the previous generation carried two fundamental vulnerabilities.
The first was the absence of any means of remote identification. Without them, any independent survey is defenceless against coordinated inauthentic behaviour: counterfeit participation cannot be told apart from genuine participation. A system in which that distinction is out of reach cannot be received as a legitimate source of a public signal.
The second was that the database architectures of past decades could not guarantee anonymity of participation. Any centralised authentication of a person left a digital trace linking the user of a resource to the message that user sent, and thereby created risks of deanonymisation in conditions offering no protection against influence exercised outside the law.
Even in a mature democracy the citizen depends on power daily and in many dimensions, which is to say that the citizen lives under the continuous operation of compulsion, applied with varying degrees of justice. Decisions to apply that compulsion, moreover, are taken by people, at their discretion and with all the flaws that people have, while instruments of protection such as the courts or the ombudsman are engaged at best after the fact. In such conditions personal participation in any practice of social observation, even an informal one, remains hazardous for the citizen, and the only guarantee against that hazard is the absolute anonymity of the judgment.
The requirements for overcoming these two vulnerabilities are mutually contradictory: a credible signal requires a confirmed identity, and safe participation requires that identity to be absolutely concealed. So long as technology could not join the one to the other, mass independent monitoring of the legitimacy of power remained impossible.
The situation has changed fundamentally only now, when digital ecosystems have advanced to the necessary infrastructural maturity and closed both of the vulnerabilities named above.
The first precondition is the mass introduction and legal recognition of national systems of digital identification. For the first time these allow the user of an online resource to be identified, authenticated or verified instantly, unconditionally and at no cost to that user, as, among other things, a citizen of the jurisdiction concerned. At the same time no state system is a single point of entry for the Teisond Platform: a parallel channel of authorised independent providers guarantees that an infrastructure of civic monitoring does not depend on decisions taken by those it monitors.
The second precondition, and the decisive one, is the maturity of irreversible cryptographic hashing. Modern digital engineering makes it possible to separate the result of authenticating a person from the storage of that person's judgment, converting personal data into a depersonalised code. As a result, any outside observer may see that the right of judgment has been exercised by one of the verified citizens, and may see the judgment itself, yet no one in the world is technically able to establish who rendered it. The verifiability of the participant and the anonymity of the judgment coexist for the first time within a single system, without contradicting one another.
It is this convergence of two new qualities – the maturity of a social need and the maturity of technology – that determines the historical singularity of the moment for the introduction of a new social practice. An acute demand for the overcoming of the accountability deficits has for the first time acquired an adequate technological foundation, which makes the attempt not premature but timely.
Business Model Supplementing the familiar practices of democracy with an institution of monitoring public legitimacy carries Teisond beyond the bounds both of human rights activism and of a purely technological project. It founds a fundamentally new social category, scientific and commercial at once: Public Legitimacy Analytics (PLA). The joining of these two properties gives the institution a double footing: the scientific character of the methodology secures trust in the data it generates, and the market value of those data as an information product secures its economic self-sufficiency.
The sociology of public opinion records the opinion of society in occasional isolated snapshots, concerning the summit of the political class, from one poll to the next. Digital services, state and commercial alike, generate colossal volumes of data without interruption, but the attitude of society towards power is the subject of interest of none of them, appearing in those volumes at most as an incidental trace: by accident, dispersed and unstructured. The function of continuous public monitoring of the legitimacy of power remains vacant.
It is this function that the category of PLA assumes, presenting to society and to the market, for the first time, the current state of the legitimacy of power – a quantity until now merely presumed from the fact of election or appointment – across the whole vertical of governance, in the form of quantified and continuously updated bodies of data.
The substantive core of the category is the structuring of civic judgment. The Platform aggregates the attitudes of citizens towards a particular official, the object of monitoring within that person's exercise of official powers, relating each judgment to the office and each computed indicator to the moment of its computation. Individual binary judgments of verified citizens are thereby converted into living indices, computed under a single methodology, and from those into derivative mathematical trends and comparisons: between individual officials of equal standing, between levels of governance, and between periods of time.
The resulting analytical products are indices of differing depth of detail: the national officials' legitimacy index (NOLI), detailed scorecards of individual officials (OPLS), and indicators of reputational anomaly. These metrics yield a statistical snapshot of the legitimacy of the administrative apparatus at any depth, from the head of government to the head of a district inspectorate, making visible the attitude of society towards power where until now no one has measured it, neither for the highest leadership of the state nor for municipal bodies.
Teisond's information products open a distinct segment within a long-established market, that of sociological polling: a segment of new demand and of new consumer value, as yet without competition. This market space has had no opportunity to form until now, and not through anyone's oversight: what was missing was the conceptual frame in which the legitimacy of power might be conceived as a measurable quantity. Without the frame there was no category of data; without the data their value remained invisible; without visible value no demand could arise. The Platform breaks this circle from the side of supply: first the frame, then the data, and only then the market. Positioning within the polling market is, however, no more than the commercial projection of the social values the Platform creates. In parallel, as an emergent consequence of the operation of a newly created information channel, an additional form of social capital takes shape: mutual visibility, recognition, and a lowering of the tension of conflict between society and power.
The Teisond Platform does not urge citizens to the discharge of civic duties of one kind or another, and does not rely on any inherent social conscience on their part. What makes the Platform viable is a proposition of value that meets a set of personal psychological needs of the individual user: the needs for recognition, for self-respect, for a rise in social standing and self-esteem, but above all for the restoration of dignity and of capacity to act in dealings with the holders of power.
When officials at the higher levels of power act at variance with citizens' notions of the common good, of public benefit or of justice, and when the representatives of the lower circles of public administration display self-interest, incompetence, legal ignorance or contempt, the citizen is seized by a particular mixture of feelings: frustration, helplessness and humiliation.
When every means of response, resistance or defence known to a person is either unavailable or ineffective, that mixture of feelings destroys psychological stability while at the same time provoking an acute need to find some means of compensation. It is on the notional market of products meeting needs of this character, in a segment of it that has not existed until now, that the consumer finds the Teisond proposition: an immediate, free and anonymous opportunity to act, to respond with a judgment that becomes part of a public signal.
The need is thereby met through a mechanism that allows a citizen's personal experience not to remain invisible. Capacity to act is restored without confrontation, without organisation, without public deanonymisation, and the psychological reward is specific and immediate: I was not helpless.
The resilience and self-sufficiency of an infrastructure of democratic accountability, and of the corresponding social institution, rest on every category of participant deriving value from taking part in its operation, whatever social stratum they come from and whatever role they occupy. For the participant who holds office, that value likewise makes no appeal to virtue – to openness, to accountability, to service – but addresses the concrete professional and psychological needs of an individual exercising public power.
The motivation of an official as a potential user of the Platform operates first of all at a purely psychological level. For any person vested with political or administrative authority it is an imperative to keep watch over the state of the environment subject to that authority, over one's own sphere of electoral interest, and over current sentiment and the events that shape it. Beyond that, the awareness on the part of a holder of power that something is taking place in the public space outside that person's attention, something with the potential to bear upon their standing yet not under their control, makes indifference to such a situation psychologically untenable. The motivating effect of watching the indicators of one's own public position arises almost automatically, whatever the details of the argument.
As to the particular needs of a holder of power that the Platform meets, the first of them is the need for reliable feedback. An official at any level operates in a deep information vacuum as to the actual attitude of those subject to their authority: opinion polling is not practised beyond a few dozen leading politicians; internal departmental channels of feedback filter the civic signal, carrying upward for the most part what those above wish to hear; and social networks produce unstructured emotional noise of little informational content, whose relevance is negligible or nil. Civic monitoring of legitimacy is very nearly the only information channel that delivers to an official an unfiltered, verified and continuous signal about how their authority is perceived by those over whom it is exercised.
The second is the need for a public representation of one's own. The right of reply gives an official a channel of official presence alongside their own index: official explanations placed without the mediation of the media, in the same plane of public visibility in which their reputational capital is formed.
The third need arises from challenges of a professional character. The competitiveness of the environment described above turns ignorance of one's own indicator into administrative blindness by choice: an official who does not watch their index is left uninformed of circumstances known to every professional observer, opponents, colleagues and journalists included.
A particular mark of this set of value propositions is its universality across the whole vertical of governance. The motivations of a prime minister and of the head of a secondary school are identical here: both hold public office, both carry a personal reputation on which their careers depend, and both have until now had access to no source of information whatever as to the actual state of that reputation.
The existence of the Platform creates a new risk for an official: what could previously only be guessed at becomes publicly manifest. At first sight this is a pure threat, yet the source of the risk is not the appearance of public judgment – that has always existed – but only its acquiring a visible and measurable form. In these circumstances the value of the Teisond proposition is plain: an unstructured threat, dispersed and unmeasurable, cannot be managed in principle, whereas a measurable parameter can; and the Platform's function in relation to an official becomes not an instrument of pressure but an instrument of professional self-management.
Participation in monitoring is free for citizens by definition, since the exchange of value between the Platform and its user takes place in the plane of meeting that user's personal social and psychological needs. The commercial potential of the Teisond model lies outside that exchange: the Platform's revenue is formed where the results of processing the body of civic judgment acquire professional value for other categories of user.
The business model of Teisond is built on the foundation of a Crowdsourced Measurement Platform. The Platform does not connect users, affords the parties to the exchange no means of direct interaction with one another, and does not act as an intermediary in that exchange. Using the information data received from one category of user, it instead creates value in the sphere of public communication by processing those data, analytically and synthetically, into structured and useful information. The judgments of individual citizen users do not reach users of other categories in their original form: they dissolve into aggregates, and what becomes the consumer product is an index computed under a single methodology and authored by the Platform itself. The participant in monitoring and the object of monitoring do not meet in this construction, do not come to terms and do not choose one another; the anonymity of participation excludes it architecturally.
The Platform's information products are distributed at two levels of access. The first, the public level, discharges the Platform's mission as the embodiment of an institution monitoring the public legitimacy of power. At this level the information is open to all visitors without any need to register, and comprises the current index of legitimacy of every official who has passed the publication threshold, notice of the threshold where judgments are as yet insufficient, and the full methodology of monitoring. The second, the analytical level, is paid, and contains the absolute indicators of trust and distrust, metrics of consensus, the dynamics and direction of movement of indicators over time, confidence intervals, historical series, comparisons between officials at the same level of governance, and indicators of reputational anomaly. The boundary between the levels follows from the principle that public information is self-sufficient and carries a social value of its own, and that everything relating public data to detailed indicators concerning objects of monitoring belongs to the analytical level, that is, to the results of the analytical and synthetic processing of primary data as the Platform's commercial product.
The Platform's primary source of revenue is officials' subscriptions to data at the analytical level, generated continuously by the Platform from the body of citizens' judgments concerning the subscription holder. In the subscription relationship the official is a client of the Platform, but what is purchased is neither presence in the system nor an opportunity for self-positioning: it is detailed current information about one's own public position. The price of a subscription is fixed by level of authority, from the lowest for officials of local rank to the highest for the leading officers of the state, and depends neither on the number of judgments recorded by the Platform nor on the level of the indicators of legitimacy; within each level it is calibrated to the economic conditions of the jurisdiction. This structure of pricing removes any connection between the activity of citizens in rendering judgments and the economic advantage of the Platform, while keeping the price of access acceptable to an official of any rank.
Secondary revenue the Platform generates from several further categories of subscriber, each guided by motivations of its own for obtaining access to data at the same analytical level, but concerning all serving officials of the country, for professional purposes (Data Access). The value proposition for the media is a saving on sources and a standing editorial resource. Academic institutions and policy development organisations obtain access to aggregated data sets for research, and in doing so constitute PLA as a field of study in its own right. Political consultancies, public relations agencies and the analytical divisions of institutions and corporations use indices of legitimacy as inputs to their own advisory work: the development of strategy, the mapping of stakeholders, the assessment of institutional risk. Revenue from this segment of users grows to the extent that the Platform's data become a standard point of reference in the ecosystem of political analytics.
A distinct feature of the Teisond Platform is a high potential for network growth in the value of the proposition, for each new user and each current one, as the total number of users increases. Each category of user consumes the result of the activity of another, and value accordingly grows on both sides, though in somewhat different ways: a wider circle of participants in monitoring raises the statistical weight of the data, while the attention of power increases the point of civic participation. The wider the circle of citizens rendering judgments, the more precise the index and the deeper the analytics received by the client segments. And conversely: the more officials who watch their own public position and make use of the right of reply, the more palpable to the citizen is the thing for which that citizen is in the system – the addressee of the judgment observes and responds. The first flow of data feeds the commercial value of the product, the second the social value of participation. No transactions take place between the parties, yet each of them contributes to raising the value of the Platform for its counterpart.
The global Teisond project is deployed on a model of multi-tenant centralised architecture: all jurisdictions are served by a single body of software code, and national specificity is set by a separate configuration package of data. Launching a national Teisond platform in a new country requires neither local infrastructure nor local personnel; all that is needed is integration with one or more existing local systems of verification. The marginal cost of each successive country in the Teisond network – the additional outlay on its launch over and above the common base – accordingly reduces for the most part to the one-off population of a national database of officials, the creation of a configuration file, and the activation of identity verification for the jurisdiction concerned. Aggregate costs grow substantially more slowly than coverage, and unit economics improve with every expansion.
A number of common sources of revenue are excluded from the Teisond model deliberately, not as a declaration of intent open to later revision but as a structural constraint of architecture and governance. Advertising in any form is excluded, since it generates incentives to maximise engagement at the expense of adherence to methodology. The transfer of user data to third parties is excluded architecturally: data that could be transferred the Platform neither accumulates nor stores – neither citizen profiles nor individual judgments in any form fit for export. Political consultancy and campaign support services are not permitted, as incompatible with the imperative of neutrality that secures the worth of the core information product. Nor does the model provide for dependence on public budgets or grant programmes: financial self-sufficiency is built into its foundation.
The common denominator of the whole model is the independence of the measurement of legitimacy from the commercial side of relations between the Platform and its participants: neither an official's subscription nor the purchase of a Data Access package has any effect whatever on the Platform's methodology, and neither carries any right to intervene in the collection, computation or publication of data.
Every link of the construction described composes a single circuit. The deficit of feedback between power and society gives rise to a social need; the need is met through mass participation; participation generates data of a new category; the market value of the data funds the infrastructure of collection, storage and processing; and the infrastructure sustains the existence of the institution that meets the need. Social mission and business model do not here coexist in compromise – they constitute a single mechanism, examined above from different sides.
The social disproportion that Teisond removes is not unique to any one country: wherever officials exercise continuous power without being burdened by mechanisms of continuous accountability, the same structural gap exists, and with it the same space for an institution to fill it. The model of the Teisond Platform is accordingly suited to any consolidated democracy in the world, and adapts readily to national specificity by virtue of a single methodology, a single architecture, and the software configuration of local parameters.
The universality of the mission does not, however, imply indiscriminacy in the directions of the Teisond network's expansion. The set of jurisdictions in which the Platform may be deployed is not determined by any settled list, nor established at anyone's administrative discretion: the stated criterion is the mark of a consolidated democracy under the classification of the independent international institutions Freedom House and V-Dem. It is this criterion that answers the question of any given country's prospects of joining the Teisond network, and that makes the geography of its expansion transparently predictable. The current composition of the network's jurisdictions is shown directly on teisond.com; the White Paper deliberately does not fix it, given the dynamics of the network's development.
The Teisond project is not announced – it operates. Every jurisdiction of the current set has a national presence; full activation of the national platform is complete in some and, in others, at the stage of assembling the local databases of the objects of monitoring, the one component of deployment that takes time. The multi-tenant architecture of the Teisond network radically simplifies the connection of a new country at the entry level, and the period for a further jurisdiction to join the operating network amounts to a matter of days. The pace of expansion is limited solely by the operational readiness of the national databases, and not by technical capacity, financial cycles or any need to assess consumer demand: a social institution of this kind forms its environment by the very fact of its presence in the public space.
A single network under a single operator is the base model for realising the Teisond mission, but not the only possible one. For jurisdictions whose interested representatives seek full autonomy, the Teisond standard may be reproduced in the form of a self-standing national platform, with the same architecture, the same software code and the same methodology, but under local management of its own. This form of national realisation of the project is possible on franchise terms, in compliance with the Teisond standards, which guarantee the comparability of indices and the inviolability of the methodology irrespective of the form of management. For either of the two models named, one and the same formula holds: the mission is universal, the execution disciplined.
The sections that follow set out how the construction of the Platform is arranged: the conceptual and methodological foundations of measuring the level of legitimacy, the technical architecture of the Platform, the operational model of deployment, the legal structure, governance, and the long-term vision of the acquisition of ownership rights over the infrastructure by its users.
The sections below are available in full in the PDF. Each builds on Section 1's problem definition to establish methodology, technical architecture, legal structure, governance, roadmap, and long-term civic ownership vision.
The full document – 10 sections, 5 appendices, complete methodology, legal framework, and governance architecture.
Download PDF → JoinRead the Neutrality Charter – the commitments that bind the Platform.
Read the Sovereignty and Trust Framework – the architecture that enforces them.
Have questions? See the FAQ or contact hello@teisond.com.