The Trust Ladder
Anyone can open We The Citizens, read everything it publishes, record their own positions and run the whole calculation on their own machine. None of that asks permission. What is earned is influence over other people: publishing into a shared space, being counted in a community's consensus, vouching for somebody else. The trust ladder is the path to that, and every rung is climbed by checkable work.
What it does
Two things share the word trust here, and the visible one is the capability ladder. Five rungs — New, Identified, Contributing, Established, Steward — and each decides what a citizen's input is allowed to do. Five and no more, so anyone can read their own standing in ten seconds. The checklist stays open: what you have met, what is missing, what the next rung changes.
Rung one is the entire individual product. Recording your positions, writing down a value system, building an evidence chain with its gaps named, drafting a proposed law, running the calculation over your own work — none of it is locked, and nothing is asked of you at the door. Every gate sits on acting on other people, never on your own reasoning.
What moves a citizen up is information they hand over:
- An anchor. A verified email, or a proven account somewhere else. A pseudonymous account you can prove you control satisfies this on its own, so the anchor never costs anonymity.
- Work the software can read. Published records that pass their schema, a public repository of your own reasoning, an evidence chain of at least three links with the missing ones tagged, a value system that parses. Structural validity only: nobody can block a rung by calling somebody's work low quality, because that power was never built.
- Time. Account age, and activity spread across months rather than one burst.
- Vouches from citizens already at Established or above. A vouch is scarce, withdrawable with no explanation, and non-transitive, so being vouched for does not let you vouch. Standing comes from your position among other verified real people, so a farm of fresh accounts cannot manufacture it.
Consensus weighting is then flat at the top on purpose: rung one counts zero, rung two counts half, and the three above it count the same. The ladder keeps sockpuppets out of a count rather than making some citizens matter more than others.
The trust score is the other thing the word covers, and it is not the ladder: a continuous 0–100 number used inside the movement's own operations. It is admin-facing. It gates nothing, is never shown to one citizen about another, and opening any part of it to citizens is a written, staged path nobody has taken yet.
The goal it serves
A platform where citizens document the capture of their own government will be attacked. Spam, astroturf accounts, impersonation and the poisoning of a community's consensus are the expected cost of this work. The obvious defense is a login wall, and the charter refuses one: reading the record must never require an account, because a movement that demands identity at the door has already lost the people with the most to lose by giving it.
The ladder is the alternative, and its rule is short. Trust buys attention and weight; it never buys authority, and nothing is auto-approved because a trusted account submitted it. That is what stops a funded operation buying standing here the way influence is bought in Washington — the pattern in money in politics, and the one thing this movement cannot afford to reproduce internally.
It holds the other way too: influence earned in public is capped, because merit with no ceiling turns into a clique inside a few election cycles. See the rules that keep it honest for those caps, and the mesh of verified citizens for what the arrangement defends against.
A pseudonymous citizen is never capped: every criterion is satisfiable without publishing a real name, all the way to the top rung. The thing being proven is one real person, never we know who you are. And the weights the movement judges its own members by are published — the standard it demands of the officials it writes about.
What keeps it honest
- The measurement is about our evidence, not about you. A brand-new, honest citizen sits at the bottom, and the product must say so in those words: we have little evidence about this account yet. Never "low-trust user." That is the line between a measurement and an accusation.
- What you believe never reaches the ladder. A citizen's political placement can never raise or lower how believable their account is; otherwise this would be a purity test with a trust number painted on it. Karma does not reach it either: a busy sockpuppet farm should not be able to buy believability with volume.
- Money buys no rung, and it is tested. Supporter status is asserted in code to be no input.
- Staying on rung one forever is legitimate. It is a complete way to use this product, and the interface is forbidden from nagging a quiet citizen into climbing.
Works with
- Where You Stand — the guided walk that records what you actually think. It runs beside the ladder and never feeds it.
- Groups And Values Blocks — where beliefs and group claims are evaluated, kept one way apart from whether an account is believable.
- Your Profile, Your Anonymity — going private never lowers a rung, and an anonymized citizen counts exactly like a listed one.
Where to go next
- Trust Scores — the one question a trust score answers, and the many it refuses to.
- The trust ladder — how influence here is earned in public, and why its ceiling is deliberate.
- Communities — the shared space the higher rungs open up.
- Karma — the citizen side of the ledger, where recognition for your own logged work is tracked separately.
- Get Started — run it on your own machine or use the hosted copy, and start on the bottom rung with the whole product in hand.