A small studio in Nevada City, California.
We build software and campaigns that make a government process usable by the person inside it. This page is the part of that you would otherwise have to ask for.
The studio is run by Josh Wolf, who is himself a party to the open Nevada County code-compliance case the live campaign began with. growinghome.life is his account of it. We built both sites and the phone line.
Find the point where a person can act, and build the thing that lets them.
Every government process has a place where a private person either can or cannot move it — a form, a deadline, a request nobody told them they could file. Usually that point is documented somewhere nobody reads, and the gap between the right existing and the right being usable is the whole problem.
We work on that gap two ways. Campaigns go fast and argue in public, on one specific process, with the documents in hand. Products go slow and serve everyone inside a process after the argument is over. The campaigns are how we find out what the products need to be.
Campaigns, for hire
The records work, the research, the report, the site, the tooling that lets someone act, and a phone line if it needs one. We have run one end to end, on our own case. There is no intake form and no rate card yet — if you have a process worth arguing with, the conversation starts by email.
Products
PRAready for the agencies answering records requests. Recourse for the tenants and landlords on either side of a housing case. Both are gated on review by people who are not us, and neither has reached the public.
With a language model, and we say so.
Research, drafting, code and design are done with a language model. The legal reading, the county files and every factual claim are checked by a person before they ship. The phone line discloses the same thing to every caller in its opening sentence.
The full version of this, including what the line records and for how long, is on the landing page and at 530utopian.help/the-machine.
The rules we hold, on everything we ship.
No trackers, no analytics
Nothing we publish carries third-party scripts or measurement. We do not know who reads this, and that is the intended state.
No donation asks
Not on the campaign sites, not here. A campaign that is also fundraising is answering to two audiences.
Every claim carries its source
Where a claim comes from a statute, a filing or a published document, the work says which one.
Unverified is labeled, not dropped
What a government has failed to write down is part of the argument. We show the gap rather than quietly routing around it.
We state what we concede
Every campaign says what it is not arguing, in the campaign, where the argument is.
Nothing typed into our tools reaches us
The request builder and the letter drafts run in your browser and send us nothing.
One address, read by a person.
There is no contact form, no chat widget and no auto-responder. If you are a reporter working on Nevada County code enforcement, an attorney willing to look at the unauthorized-practice question behind Recourse, an agency curious about PRAready, or someone with a process worth arguing with — write, and say which.
Democracy Studios LLC, doing business as The Democracy Studio. Nevada City, California.