Old North EndRenter
Every year the rent goes up and my raise doesn’t. At some point the math just stops working.
Contribute to a live report of what your city actually thinks
DemocracyOS is designed to hear from everyone and turn their thoughts into a continuous, up-to-date report of what the city is thinking — and by making that clear to public and government alike, help shape its future.
Takes about 2 minutes. We verify you’re real, then your responses are anonymous.
Spamless. Easy. Data’s never sold. Publicly funded, for the public.
Most Mentioned Issues
1,739 responses
- Housing412
- Transportation260
- Safety206
- Environment174
- Education130
#1 Theme inHousing
People are being priced out of the neighborhoods they built
From 312 responses like these —
New North EndRenter
I moved three times in four years. Every time the rent went up and the apartment got smaller.
How it worksYou shape the report.
You shape the report.
The report shapes the city.
We text you open-ended questionnaires called Pulse Ballots. Write about the burning issue you’ve been thinking about for weeks, or let DemocracyOS help jog your memory.
- 01
You register
Once, in about two minutes.
What we ask for
Your cell number
So we can text you Pulse Ballots — and confirm you’re a real person.
Basic demographics
Used only to make sure all voices are heard, checked against Census and other public data.
What we guarantee
We never spam you
We only contact you with invitations to respond — never anything else.
Your data is never sold
Not to advertisers, not to campaigns, not to anyone.
Never traced back to you
Your responses are never attached to your personal information — not even in our own system.
- 02
You respond
A text, once or twice a month at most.
Every two weeks we invite a different representative sample of residents to respond, ensuring no one hears from us too often. We’ll ask a simple question like:
BTV-1739Official
Pulse BallotGeneral — Helps city leaders understand what matters most to you.
Thinking about your life in Burlington lately, what’s been on your mind?
Only two rules: be honest, and be human.
Rents keep going up faster than paychecks. I want my kids to be able to stay in the city they grew up in.
- 03
We turn it into the Live Report
Every response counted, every two weeks.
Our system reads every response and distills them all into a clear picture: which issues come up most often, and what residents are actually saying about them.
Responses are tagged by the issues they raise, and their key messages are grouped into themes — always keeping the resident’s original words.
Rents keep going up faster than paychecks. I want my kids to be able to stay in the city they grew up in.
Housing38%
of voices
We update the city’s Live Report every two weeks — giving everyone, residents, representatives, and reporters alike, a data-backed, methodical, and neutral source to point to when shaping discourse and governing.
Read the Live Report →
Why
Because a government can’t serve people it can’t hear.
We believe the effective government of the future will need a trusted and reliable way to:
Gather
Collect honest, thoughtful input from every person and perspective.
Understand
Make sense of it all, and turn it into insight clear and accurate enough to be trusted.
Act
Use that insight to drive decision-making.
We are building DemocracyOS to be exactly that: a publicly funded resource that makes the honest, thoughtful will of the public clear — and changes representative, elected government for the better, everywhere.
First
Register now.
We verify you’re real, then your responses are anonymous. Spamless, easy, and your data’s never sold. Publicly funded, for the public.
2 minutes to register · 1–2 texts a month · Stop anytime
Not in Burlington, VT? Preregister anywhere in the United States and we’ll alert you when your city goes live. Global preregistration opens in 2027.
Then
Make it possible.
DemocracyOS keeps the Live Report running solely with funding from residents like you — people who know that making the public’s voice clear, reliable, and easy to understand is a prerequisite to government that actually serves it.
Add your funding. You won’t get extra access or features — just the knowledge that you’re contributing to something larger than yourself.
Contribute →Nothing in the way
Transparent
Every assertion is cited with real resident quotes and backed by data.
Independent
The Live Report is funded by members of the public like you — independent of the elected government it reports on.
Neutral
You’re the voice, not us. The report takes no side and pushes no agenda — it says what residents said.