About Project Seldon

We aim to be an unbiased analysis platform for understanding societies and systems of government. Our mission is to build technology that helps people easily understand governments and interact with their own.

So, how does one go about understanding a government?

Some might start by breaking down how the government is structured. Others might look to its leaders. And what about measuring output? Questions like...

• How healthy is the average citizen?
• What degree of freedom do people have?
• What level of education do most citizens reach?
• What percentage of the population lives in poverty?
• How diverse is its population?
• Are rates of crime high?
• How well does a government represent the will of the people?

This list can go on and on, and its important to note that while some might think there's a "right" or "good" answer to each, we reserve judgment and are just trying to surface the information. You might be surprised at how the answer to one question is correlated with another. Our hope is that the people using this tool can leverage information to govern more effectively, improving their society's output without negatively impacting their neighbors.

The mission is broad. To get started we have honed in on national data, building foundational resources that will enable the project to easily scale to regional and local governments as we grow.

Who are we?

As of right now there are just two of us working on the project but we hope to see that change soon. My name is Greg and I've been designing and architecting software, mostly on the web, for almost 10 years. I'm an engineering director at my current company but still very hands on both inside and outside of work.

A friend, Gerard, has also joined in and become a key contributor to the project. He's a product manager in education technology and tinkers around in Python and Node.js for fun.

Our shared interest in geopolitics and data visualization prompted us kickstart this project in 2020. The platform is now coming together with enough useful data and functionality for others to see the vision, leverage the tool and hopefully join in to help.

What's with the name?

Those of you who read science fiction may already have recognized it. Hari Seldon is a character from Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series who develops a way to predict the future of humanity. Using his framework he discovers that his own society is collapsing. With that knowledge, he starts taking actions to remedy the impending doom. The first of these is putting together a group of people to capture all knowledge in an Encyclopedia Galactica.

Here at Project Seldon, we certainly don't know how to predict the future and haven't the slightest idea what's coming for humanity. We simply think that improving our societies starts with putting information in the hands of the people.

We have no affiliation with the new TV show, though we hope they do the series justice. We strongly recommend the books; see this chronology if you'd like to learn where you might get started.