frontstate
The Front State is a generational project to rethink how governance can work better — not by replacing existing institutions, but by building a transparent, community-coordinated layer that sits in front of them.
We started after the 2024 US elections, with the recognition that whoever wins, ordinary people lose ground. That’s not a partisan claim — it’s a pattern visible across decades, at every level of government, across parties. The Front State isn’t another party, another protest, or another nonprofit asking for donations. It’s the coordination layer ordinary communities are currently missing, built generation-over-generation, from neighborhood groups up through national governments and international organizations.
One ongoing “mystery”: why politicians can’t seem to publish coherent plans, even sometimes only having concepts of plans before voters are meant to put them into power. Why are so many bills worked on behind closed doors, then presented to a larger group to vote on before they have time to read them or make changes? And why must we do that repeatedly at every level of government, in every state, municipality, and so on. There is a better way to develop process.
The Front State is built on and develops the open-source Demicracy.org platform — from “Deme,” a term from Classical Greece for a local administrative division. The emphasis: people organized in groups for action, rather than people alone or as a whole.
The cornerstone features
- A voter-oriented user system with verification levels (registered
voter, known neighbor, friend, etc.) that’s pointedly against
global reach at the individual level — but for policy-level reach.
Verification can be optional for other instances, and instances can
federate or stand alone.
- Think of it like a non-profit (no ads, no tracking) NextDoor or service-seeking site that puts users first and in touch with each other, focused on bettering local community.
- Process-in-Git (PiG) for developing and tracking process — like
legislation — with transparency and collaboration as defaults.
Branch variants of a process, collaborate via pull requests, release
specific versions, share process between groups with similar
objectives.
- Useful well beyond legislation — even small groups like PTAs.
- An implementation layer for process, including
Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) —
write requirements for process in a computer-readable, testable form.
Laws should compile, syntax-check, and run tests against themselves.
The same layer can power public-facing tools showing how given
regulations actually work.
- Imagine asking an AI agent on a municipal website to generate architectural plans for a home modification, and getting blueprints back that show exactly how they validate against local code (still verify with a human architect — lest you get a room without doors).
- A platform-engineering frontend for visibility into process:
who’s working on what, are tests passing, what changed and by whom.
This is a classic
platform engineering
problem and starts from backstage.io — which
when viewed from the right angle looks eerily like government should
already work.
- Indexes various available variants of process, presented objectively. You then choose to follow them, or not, then benefit from them, or not.
Back in 1976 a Schoolhouse Rock! segment introduced an anthropomorphic “bill” as a piece of paper that could become a law. A lot has changed lately (expect an eventual expansion here on how Chevron deference relates), let alone since back when representatives travelled to their jobs on horseback. We should be able to update the technology involved here — at times it feels like this is still the tech level parts of our government are at.
Meet Bill the PiG, brought to you by Gemini — no more hiding the pork.
What we’re doing right now
The Front State theory needs working case studies. Our first is the West Orange (NJ) school district budget crisis — a $14M deficit, an exhausted board, and a community of a thousand people who showed up to a board meeting with no good way to coordinate.
We’ve built a working set of community proposals at schools.frontstate.org — a many-module whitepaper, a “Bigger Picture” philosophical layer (the “Time Economy” framework, the “Mutualism” appendix, the Three-Prong Action Plan), and concrete tools like Tax Math worked examples and ready-to-file RFI templates. Behind it sits the Demicracy platform-engineering work that will eventually let any community spin up the same coordination infrastructure.
If the approach can demonstrably help one community — in real time, with real numbers, against a real deadline — the case for everything else above it builds itself. One school district isn’t beneath the Front State. It’s the credibility deposit that makes everything else believable.
Get involved
- Read the working case study: schools.frontstate.org — the full proposal stack, the philosophical framing, and the action plan.
- Volunteer: volunteer@frontstate.org — whether you have technical skills, civic-organizing experience, healthcare / finance / legal expertise, or just want to help build something.
- Follow the platform work: demicracy.org — the open-source coordination platform behind the Front State.
- Follow the development methodology: the whole project is built using Guardian Driven Development (GDD) — itself an experiment in making ambitious software projects maintainable by small groups able to collaborate.
This is early. Things will change. That’s the point.