Open, Transparent Democracy in the Hands of the Public
We at WizCol believe that true democracy must be open, transparent, and controllable by the public itself. Therefore we choose to develop all our democratic products under a full open source and open knowledge policy.
Our Goals
1. To Become the Foundational Platform for Israeli Democracy (and Beyond)
We aspire to build infrastructure that will serve from the community level up to the national level. Public decision-making mechanisms must be completely transparent and secure. Every citizen must be able to understand exactly how a decision was made, how results were calculated, and which algorithms and weightings were applied. Full transparency is a necessary condition for public trust.
2. Because True Wisdom Belongs to the Public
We don't believe that all knowledge and ideas reside with us. We trust public wisdom — programmers, researchers, activists, and citizens who want to improve democracy. As artificial intelligence and digital tools mature, anyone will be able to contribute improvements directly to the code and mechanisms. Together we will create better, smarter, and fairer decision-making mechanisms.
3. To Enable Global Research and Improvement
We publish papers, documentation, and open knowledge so that researchers, academics, and experts from around the world can join the effort and contribute to improving public democratic decision-making systems.
Why Open Source and Open Knowledge?
Our supreme goal is to develop improved systems for deliberative democracy — ones that return true control to the hands of the public.
We see a great danger in communication and decision-making systems managed solely by profit motive becoming tools of polarization, division, and societal weakening. Therefore we insist that our public systems remain in public ownership and control.
We develop all the code of WizCol's democratic platforms as open source under the GPLv3 license, and all the knowledge — articles, documentation, and methodology — as open knowledge under the Creative Commons (CC BY-SA) license.
Open source and open knowledge mean that anyone can freely view, use, improve, and share the code and knowledge.
The importance of these licenses lies in preserving true control in the hands of the public, preventing commercial exploitation that harms democracy, and enabling the joint creation of transparent, trustworthy, and fair systems that serve society as a whole and not just private interests.
How We Generate Revenue
We are a social business at our core, and in order to sustain our mission over the long term, we need a stable and independent source of revenue — one that is free from dependencies on grants, favors, or external pressures.
We believe that the vibrant discourse, community improvements, and innovation that will occur around the open platform will teach us much about true democracy. Large entities — municipalities, local authorities, and governments — will be able to approach us as experts to receive implementation, maintenance, training, and high-level customization services.
Additionally, we develop commercial technologies (closed source) intended for businesses, organizations, and companies. These technologies will be built on the knowledge and experience we accumulated in the open public space. Profits from commercial products will serve us to continually build and improve the public platforms — by the public and for the public.
Our Vision
WizCol is not just a software company. We are building the technological infrastructure that will allow Israeli democracy — and democracies around the world — to advance to the next stage:
Transparent, participatory, intelligent democracy based on the wisdom of the entire public.
Our systems will be of the people, by the people, and for the people — not just in words, but in code, in transparency, and in the mechanisms themselves.
This is our manifesto. This is our commitment to the community, to democracy, and to the future.
WizCol – because better democracy is possible. And it must be open.