Founding Document
The Experiment Society exists to help governments and communities adopt a different operating model. Not a partisan policy organization. Not a technology company wrapped in civic clothes. A nonprofit dedicated to making experimentation an ordinary part of public decision-making.
To improve public decision-making through ethical experimentation, measurement, and institutional learning.
A world in which governments improve the way science improves — through observation, experimentation, feedback, correction, and replication.
Policy should become cumulative rather than ideological. Communities should become laboratories of discovery.
ES is not a partisan policy organization.
Its role is narrower and more durable: help institutions ask better questions, design safer pilots, measure honestly, publish what was learned, and make local learning useful to others.
On language and trust
The word "experiment" is powerful, but in civic life it can also sound risky.
ES uses the term honestly while explaining what it means in practice:
An experiment is not reckless improvisation. It is disciplined humility. It says: we do not already know the best answer, so we will try something small, measure carefully, and let the public learn with us.
Intellectual Lineage
The Experiment Society draws on a convergent intellectual tradition recognizing that decentralized, empirical, iterative approaches to governance outperform centralized certainty.
Federalism
James Madison
Local Institutions
Alexis de Tocqueville
Dispersed Knowledge
Friedrich Hayek
Piecemeal Social Engineering
Karl Popper
Successive Approximation
Charles Lindblom
Experimental Society
Donald Campbell
Polycentric Governance
Elinor Ostrom
Democracy as Inquiry
John Dewey
Democracy becomes a system for collective learning.
→Federalism
James Madison
Federalism is often described as a mechanism to limit power. Equally important, it creates multiple centers of governance capable of trying different approaches. Local autonomy creates variation. Variation creates comparison. Comparison creates learning. Government becomes adaptive.
→Local Institutions
Alexis de Tocqueville
Tocqueville observed that democratic life flourishes through local participation. Communities become schools of civic competence. Citizens learn judgment through engagement. Institutions become stronger when they solve problems near their source.
→Dispersed Knowledge
Friedrich Hayek
Knowledge is distributed. No authority possesses sufficient information to optimize society globally. Progress requires decentralized experimentation. Learning emerges from many local discoveries.
→Piecemeal Social Engineering
Karl Popper
Social improvement should proceed through small interventions, observable outcomes, and reversibility. Good institutions discover error early and correct before errors compound.
→Successive Approximation
Charles Lindblom
Policymakers cannot optimize globally. Progress happens through incremental adjustment — each move informed by the last. 'Muddling through' is not a failure mode; it is the realistic description of how institutions actually learn. Acknowledging this opens the door to doing it deliberately.
→Experimental Society
Donald Campbell
Policy should become hypothesis-driven. Programs should be designed, measured, compared, and revised. Public institutions should operate as learning systems.
→Polycentric Governance
Elinor Ostrom
Multiple overlapping decision centers create resilience. Institutional diversity generates innovation. Successful approaches spread voluntarily through demonstration rather than mandate.
→Democracy as Inquiry
John Dewey
Democracy is not merely voting. Democracy is collective problem solving. Communities identify problems, test solutions, revise beliefs, and improve over time.
Secondary Canon
A supporting tradition asks: at what scale can human beings actually understand, participate in, and improve their institutions? These thinkers deepen the localist dimension of the project without making localism the headline agenda.
→Human Scale
E.F. Schumacher
Institutions and technologies should remain proportionate to human beings. Economic and political systems should be judged not only by output, but by whether they preserve dignity, responsibility, intelligibility, and human agency. Localism is a question of scale.
→Local Knowledge
Jane Jacobs
Cities are complex living systems that cannot be successfully redesigned from above. Healthy places depend on local knowledge, street-level observation, and the accumulated wisdom of residents. Local context is not noise to be eliminated — it is often the very information needed to make policy work.
→Practical Wisdom
Michael Oakeshott
Much political knowledge is practical, inherited, tacit, and embedded in traditions. Rationalist blueprints applied to human communities tend to fail. Experiments should not be understood as technocratic control, but as disciplined ways of learning within existing institutions and communities.
Legal Tradition
Justice Louis Brandeis argued in 1932 that states should serve as laboratories of democracy — places where novel policies could be tested without putting the entire nation at risk. American federalism creates this space not merely by dividing power, but by enabling comparison, variation, and institutional learning. This legal tradition is a supporting frame, not the headline.
Scope
Several ideas sound adjacent to what we do. Clarity about distinctions is not defensiveness — it is how credibility gets built.
Not this
Technocracy
Experts deciding for communities
Algorithmic governance
Automated decisions replacing judgment
Social engineering
Shaping behavior toward hidden ends
Replacing elections
Experimentation informs means, not ends
Experimentation without consent
Participants always know the stakes
Instead this
Local
Questions and answers stay inside the community
Reversible
Every pilot has an exit ramp
Measurable
Outcomes are defined before the experiment runs
Voluntary
Communities and participants opt in
Transparent
Methods and results are public from day one
Ethical Review Framework
ES defaults to low-risk, reversible pilots and avoids high-stakes experiments until governance capacity is mature. Ethical review is not a checkbox. It is the foundation of public trust.
Minimal risk
The intervention should not expose participants to serious harm, deprivation, or rights violations.
Proportionality
The expected public value must justify the burden of the experiment.
Equity
The design should check whether benefits and burdens fall unevenly across groups.
Consent and notice
Participants should receive clear notice. Direct consent is required when a meaningful personal service, obligation, or risk changes.
Opt-out where feasible
Especially for communications, nudges, and nonessential services.
Privacy by design
Collect only necessary data, minimize identifiers, and publish aggregate results.
No hidden deprivation
Essential services, legal protections, and civic rights should not be withheld for experimental purposes.
Independent review for higher-risk pilots
School, health, policing, housing, benefits, and vulnerable-population experiments require heightened scrutiny.
Governance
Neutrality
No endorsement of specific political outcomes. The goal is to improve how policies are discovered, not to advocate for particular policies.
Transparency
Methods and results are public. The public should be able to understand the conclusion without trusting a black box.
Consent
Participation is voluntary. Communities choose their goals. Experiments inform means, tradeoffs, and consequences.
Ethics
Experiments must preserve rights and dignity. Every experiment passes an ethics review before launch.
Replicability
Results should be reproducible. Every report includes replication notes — what another community would need to try it.
Local Ownership
Communities maintain decision authority. Public reports remain accessible even without any proprietary platform.
Closing thought