Tools, trainings, and the infrastructure that make new findings usable by the people doing the actual organizing. Built on a decade of practice with collaborating organizations and organizers.
The dominant civic-tech platforms are owned by investors, not organizers. They incentivize the metrics that scale fastest and generate the most revenue: doors knocked, dollars raised, RSVPs collected (with little attention to who shows up).
The slower work can be counted too: one-to-ones, leadership development, the relationships that hold a base together over years. Existing platforms have the fields to track it. They're rarely used, rarely trained on, and almost never the metric anyone gets asked about.
Groundwork is built differently: designed around that work, owned by the organizations using it, and governed by them too.
An opinionated, open-source organizing platform built around the practices that turn participation into power: one-to-ones, leadership development, team formation, retention, and the relational work between elections. Memo: read it here. Pitch deck: here.
Most civic tech platforms are buffets: every feature any campaign might want, none of them sharpened for the organizer logging one-on-ones or closing shifts at eleven at night to track who actually showed. Most of the time, the customer is the consultant or state director who signed the contract; the organizer is the user. Groundwork inverts that: practitioners shape what gets built, and govern how it's used.
Building real software for organizing now costs a tenth of what it used to. That's a time-limited window to reclaim this infrastructure from the private sector and place it in the hands of the people using it.
Built on five-plus years of practice with the organizations in the DPI Data Cohort. Rollout is staggered across the POLIS network: alpha with one or two organizations, beta with five to ten, then the full network. Through our partnership with the Organizing Lab, the platform will ship alongside training, so Groundwork enters an organization with practitioners who already know how to use it.
Groundwork is in early development. The model is a small engineering team embedded with partner organizers: sitting in on team meetings, shadowing one-to-ones, watching how data actually moves through an organization before deciding what the platform should track. Training will be delivered jointly with the Organizing Lab, whose curricula have trained thousands of organizers. We're hiring for the team and raising the funding to build it out.
Groundwork's first deployment runs through Molly Fleming's Organizing Incubator in Kansas City: a state-based, parent-led organizing project working in a state where the dominant CRMs have thin reach.
Whether the platform plus embedded engineering plus organizer training actually shifts the practice, not just whether the dashboards look right. Specifically: does adopting Groundwork measurably increase the rate at which leaders develop other leaders?
A structured training arc delivered across the POLIS network in collaboration with the Organizing Lab, building leadership density in real time while producing the data that lets us measure what training does.
Workshop timing is staggered across the network, letting us compare leadership-density trajectories across cohorts. Combined with Groundwork adoption, the 2 × 2 design (platform × training) lets us separately identify the effect of data infrastructure from the effect of training.
The Organizing Lab, with public-narrative and organizing-pedagogy lineage that has trained tens of thousands of organizers internationally.
A small set of indicators that let organizations see their own power-building as clearly as they see their turnout, measured at the level of practice, not just output.
Partner organizations receive quarterly benchmarks (anonymized across the network) and longitudinal tracking for their own practice. The goal is not a scoreboard, it's a language.
The lab doesn't work alone. Our practice arm runs through a set of long-standing collaborations, with intermediaries, funders, and civic-tech peers, to build the field-owned infrastructure the moment demands.
Groundwork is being built in the open and shaped by the people using it. If your organization wants a seat at the table, start with a written spec.
Submit a research or tooling spec →