Research and governance
An operating institution, not just a matching interface.
Moral trade depends unusually heavily on trust, review quality, and operator integrity. This page keeps the research agenda, safety blockers, governance rules, and unresolved design questions visible as the service grows.
What we are testing
- Whether low-risk pledge swaps can be made legible enough for serious counterparty discovery.
- Whether action evidence and baseline confidence can be separated without overwhelming users.
- Whether moral public-good threshold commitments can coordinate overlapping moral reasons.
- Whether consent-gated matching can produce useful introductions without exposing exact wishes prematurely.
What would make this unsafe
- The service rewards threats, newly escalated harmful behavior, or coercive bargaining.
- Scores start looking like platform moral rankings rather than party-relative statements.
- Private matching becomes targeting, surveillance, scraping, or autonomous outreach.
- Third-party objections are ignored because both direct parties prefer the trade.
Open mechanism-design questions
- How should reviewers distinguish genuine counterfactual change from actions users would have taken anyway?
- Which moral public goods are broad enough for threshold commitments without erasing dissent?
- When should political-adjacent examples be rejected, delayed, or framed only as case studies?
- What transparency reports can build trust without exposing private counterparties?
Reviewer rulebook
The public rulebook makes reviewer roles, challenge windows, conflicts, appeal paths, proof uniqueness, and third-party externality standing visible before participants rely on a record.
Transparency reports
The report counts review outcomes, disclosure grants, reports, appeals, operator timing, and unresolved disputes with small-sample suppression. It does not expose private-feed data, case files, report bodies, or exact wishes.
Open transparency reportPeople, operators, and advisors
Public accountability matters because counterparties are trusting more than an interface. The team and governance page identifies operators, reviewer responsibilities, decision rights, and advisor roles as they become formal.
View team and governanceService updates
Follow shipped changes, governance decisions, public-goods work, case studies, and activation metrics without confusing plans with reviewed outcomes.
Read service updates