@imcatnoone Thanks Cat! Yeah, we're very much trying to combat the perception that any given individual's vote isn't meaningful. We think that by encouraging one person to pull in several more, they can make their personal impact much more significant. We're friends with the folks at Brigade, and with other startups in the civic engagement space. Our feeling is that we're all tackling an incredibly difficult problem—and a diversity of approaches is the only way we'll beat voter apathy.

@eriktorenberg Thanks Erik! Product-wise, we learned what works and what doesn't. We think the pledge mechanic works. We had pretty good conversion numbers this past election. We did a less-good job of encouraging people to share & recruit friends to vote with them. Fine-tuning that will be an on-going effort. Company-wise, I think we learned the value of shipping. When your product is out there and people are using it, you feel a real pressure to make it better. When it's stuck in the hangar you don't feel the same pressure. Now that our beta is live you'll see a lot of iteration happening quickly. Even today we re-organized our navigation to better reflect our product focus.

@andreacoravos Awesome, thanks!

@chasefoto Thanks! Yep, we plan to allow candidates to claim their Openvote pages at some point. That would allow them to post things with a special "official" badge on them. But we always want to keep a mix of content from regular voters. Our thinking is that some of the most persuasive and honest arguments can be more easily made by someone other than the candidate themself

@rometty_ Thanks! I think one problem with politics on the internet right now is we're rarely exposed to opposing points of view. Facebook shows us more of what we like, and we rarely like things from opposing political camps. We hope over time to draw folks from all sides onto our platform. I think that gives us an opportunity to cross-pollinate political ideas. That said, we think of Openvote as an on-going experiment. We'll get some things right and a lot of things wrong. But over time we hope to create a diverse and honest forum for political discourse.

@rometty_ People don't vote not only because it doesn't matter, but because it should be easier to do (in this era). Why we aren't voting online should be a mystery to more people (I feel). Is that the grander plan here for OpenVote? @rsg

I like the recommend idea! Recently been wanting to be exposed to more of the opposing arguments, especially after seeing this: http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-fee... Seems like Openvote makes that really easy to explore. @rsg One thing I noticed is that clicking on the "Cannabis" or "Gun Control" headers leads you to the first link in the dropdown. I agree with legalization and gun safety, but don't know if others would take that as an attempt to nudge opinions when it's an open platform to all ideas/views. Just a thought!