About this project

What it is

A systematic mapping of the gap between formal representation and lived experience across twenty-two policy domains, applied to Pennsylvania's 3rd Congressional District.

For each domain, the project asks the same questions: What does the law actually say? How does it actually operate, in practice, for people in PA-3? Where do those two diverge? What would it take to close the gap?

The questions don't change across domains; the answers do.

Why it exists

Two reasons.

One: to make a working example of what the People's Assembly framework looks like when applied to a real place. The assembly is an idea — a second axis of representation organized by topic rather than geography. Ideas need demonstrations. PA-3 is the demonstration.

Two: to give Paul's campaign something more substantive than slogans. A write-in campaign without a serious analytical project behind it is just a person asking for votes. A write-in campaign with twenty-two domains of careful analysis behind it is an argument for a different way of doing representation.

What it's not

It's not a personal platform. The analytical work is meant to surface where representation is failing in PA-3, not to advocate for any particular fix. Fixes are the contributor's job — through pull requests on GitHub, or through the policy-proposal track at the deepest tier of contribution.

It's also not a Roosevelt revival. The Square Deal is a name lineage and a historical reference, not a model. Roosevelt was an executive with the federal government as his lever; this project is an organizing exercise. Different theory of change. The linkages document (forthcoming) lays this out at length.

Who's doing the work

Paul is the primary author at the moment. The whole point of building the contribution system from day one is that this changes — that the project becomes maintained by the people in PA-3 who care about the specific domains they care about.

If you're one of those people, the contribute page is the place to start.

How it relates to Square Party

Square Party is the wider vehicle. The People's Assembly is a Square Party-level idea about how representation can be organized. The empower project is Paul's PA-3 application of that idea. Other people in other districts could apply the same framework to their districts; nothing about the framework is PA-3-specific. The framework is meant to be portable.

If the empower project goes well, the obvious next step is to make a clean version of it that someone in another district could fork and start filling in.