Clause Out

Today is the inauguration of our 🎙️Building With the Public🎙️ campaign! With 100 days to go until the election, we’re taking inspiration from Franklin Roosevelt and his famous 100 days of action. 🇺🇸✍️ The idea of Building With the Public is that we’re turning our business and product development into a dialogue, rather than doing it under wraps. We’ll show both our progress and our stumbling blocks—wins and wtf’s—as the chips fall. We don’t have a master plan for how this will work. 😬 That’s the story of startup life for you! And the reason we’re opening up about all the uncertain bits is to let YOU have a say on what we’re building. For the public, with the public. Over the next 100 days, we’ll be posting every day and inviting you to conversations about: • 👥 People and principles • 🛠️ Processes and product • 🏃 Pounding the pavement! Check out our new website to get started as a beta tester: clauseout.com 🎞️ Image credit: Library of Congress

Meetings are a must when we're spread out across three continents. 🗺️ We tried something a little different today by shifting the focus away from tasks and updates. Rather than info-sharing, we focused on: 💫 Inspiration - are there positive signals we should know about? ⛽ Motivation - how do we connect to the problem we're solving? 🫂 Connection - what's going on in our lives apart from work stuff? Not all meetings require a defined agenda to be effective. Yea or nay? #BuildingWithThePublic - Day 95

📰 Breaking news: We’ve been selected for the Climate Tech Catalyzer run by Kaplak Ventures! It’s an honor to be selected for this cohort as we switch gears from product development to commercial sales and impact strategy. Not only are we serious about revitalizing civic engagement and improving the political climate, but we’re also setting on sights on legislation like the IRA that influence decarbonization. Can’t wait to share more updates as we go, and we’re thrilled about this opportunity! 💚🇩🇰🇺🇸 #BuildingWithThePublic - Day 94

The idea for Clause Out emerged from our CEO’s grassroots advocacy in the Danish system. Today the newspaper Politiken featured him and others who have shared their stories about direct experiences with immigration policy. In this post (sorry it’s in Danish), he explains what we’re doing to help both citizens and advocates bring views and evidence on policies to light. #BuildingWithThePublic - Day 93

🙋 “Decision dissent” is a ritual in our team’s review meetings. We believe in speaking out. Instead of diving right into status updates, we use the first 10-15 minutes of the meeting to ask: ⁉️ …if anything needs to be clarified ⛔️ …if we should prioritize differently Even though we believe in company planning and individual accountability, we’ve realized that it’s so important to create a culture of openness. Whether that’s being open to questions about the value of what we’re each doing - or being open to potential course corrections and new ideas that come up as we go. Here are the things we got wiser about yesterday thanks to our decision dissent ritual. 1️⃣ Terminology: Turns out we were playing fast and loose with terms like mockups, sketches, and wireframes. Getting these defined will cut down on confusion as we redo our pitch deck. 2️⃣ Notification Strategy: We decided to prioritize push notifications to encourage web app installs, with email notifications still in development. We decided to recommit to our original plan here. 3️⃣ Developer Roles: We just started to work with an external agency for the first time, so we had a talk on which kind of tasks we’ll assign to internal talent and which ones are suited to externals. By expressing inevitable confusion and doubt, we grow more confident and bonded as a team. ✨ #BuildingWithThePublic - Day 92

Another week, another release to production! Translation: We’re making incremental changes to the Clause Out platform to get launch-ready. 🚀✨ We had our weekly production call to test our latest features in plenum. If you go on the app, you’ll find our new FAQ page, for instance! 💡 #BuildingWithThePublic - Day 91

Clause Out isn’t meant to replace protests or traditional activism. We’re building tech tools to organize public debate and translate citizen demand for change into actual reforms. The question we’re solving for: “How do we get our platform to broaden, ground, and accelerate policy development - ideally all at once?” This all came into focus this morning when we came across a protest gathering for more climate action. It took place in front of the building where Denmark passed its tripartite climate deal. While this deal is perhaps the first of its kind, it leaves climate activists and experts unsatisfied. Clause Out aims to channel these initiatives and ideas into concrete proposals. Advancing reform - on the margin, down to the clause. 💅 #BuildingWithThePublic - Day 90

🇺🇸🚘🛣️ Pennsylvania, here we come! #BuildingWithThePublic - Day 88

A good debate just happened inside our team. 💥💥  It has to do with the "middle layer" in our project management setup.   🫡 Benjamin (CEO) here - opening up about this question we have: My default approach is to break down company milestones into initiatives. I like to structure and cascade the workload that way. Now that we're counting down to our initial product launch in a few weeks, the question is what to tackle next and how we decide. I noted down some different options, depending on the feedback we get. Then I handed the list off to Emil Novák-Tót, who is responsible for our internal ops. And I didn't expect to hear the following in response... "I'm a bit sad that there's no room for the team to propose solutions to problems..." 🤔🫨 We talked it over, and it turns out that Emil is big on a "problem-oriented direction-setting" approach. Basically identifying what problems to solve, rather than breaking up the workload into initiatives. What works well for you planning-wise? 🛣️ Option 1, 2, or a mix? #BuildingWithThePublic - Day 87

Clause Out is working to improve upon the traditional comments section. To that end, our engineering lead, Victor Brechbill, has built something we call debate cards. Where you can throw your hat in the ring. 🤠 Here are his reflections and question for you: "We think the debate cards can be a great place to discuss ideas, but only if the right incentives are in place. With the wrong incentives, it's possible for comments to devolve into name-calling and reaction-baiting. "We want to design a feature which elevates the best arguments to the top, so that users are rewarded for leaving a comment with the highest likelihood to change someone's mind." "What are the incentives you would like to see in a comment sorting algorithm?" #BuildingWithThePublic - Day 86