Research and governance
A pilot institution, not just a product surface.
Moral trade depends unusually heavily on trust, review quality, and operator integrity. This page keeps the research agenda, safety blockers, and governance work visible before the project expands beyond cohort-mediated proposals.
What we are testing
- Whether low-risk pledge swaps can be made legible enough for private 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 a small cohort can generate reviewable examples before broad marketplace mechanics exist.
What would make this unsafe
- The pilot 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 should make reviewer roles, challenge windows, conflicts, appeal paths, proof uniqueness, and third-party externality standing visible before users rely on a proposal.
Transparency reports
The first useful report now 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 authorship matters because counterparties are trusting more than a matching interface. The team and governance page should identify operators, reviewer responsibilities, and advisor roles as they become formal.
View team and governanceSubscribe for pilot updates
Follow the cohort, reviewer governance, and public-goods pilot without treating the site as a liquid marketplace before the trust problem is solved.
Read pilot updates