---
title: Democracy Earth Foundation
type: platform
status: active
country: AR
website: https://democracy.earth
logo: /assets/org-logos/democracy-earth.png
summary: An open-source civic technology foundation building quadratic voting and
  sovereign identity tools — aiming to make democratic participation internet-native
  and censorship-resistant.
concepts:
- democracy-tools
- liquid-democracy
- direct-democracy
- decentralized-autonomous-organization
location:
  latitude: -34.6037
  longitude: -58.3816
  name: Buenos Aires, Argentina
events:
- date: '2015-01-01'
  title: Founded by Santiago Siri, Pia Mancini and Guido Vilariño; accepted into Y
    Combinator's Winter 2015 batch
  url: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/democracy-earth
  quote: 'Democracy Earth Founded: 2015 Batch: Winter 2015 Team Size: 2 Status: Active
    Location: Madrid, Spain Founders Pia Mancini Founder Pia Mancini Founder Santiago
    Siri Founder/President Santiago Siri Founder/President Guido Vilariño Founder'
  proof_level: high
  url_checked: '2026-08-10'
  notable: true
activity:
  manual:
    checked: 2026-06-09
    date: 2026-06-09
    note: Site confirmed active; no blog or news feed found
  dod:
    checked: 2026-07-05
    date: 2026-07-05
    note: Direct site fetch returned 503; corroborated active via WEF org profile,
      GitHub org, and press coverage of new SAIRI autonomous AI-agent project
  rss:
    checked: 2026-08-17
    note: No feed found
last_checked: '2026-07-05'
---

Democracy Earth Foundation is a San Francisco–registered nonprofit that grew out of the Buenos Aires civic tech scene. Founded by Santiago Siri and Pia Mancini (also co-founders of the Partido de la Red / Net Party), it focuses on building open-source infrastructure for democratic participation that works independently of national governments and legacy institutions.

The foundation is best known for championing **quadratic voting** — a mechanism where participants allocate "voice credits" across proposals, with votes costing the square of the number allocated. This design limits the influence of concentrated interests while preserving minority voice. Democracy Earth's open-source implementation has been adopted by platforms including Gitcoin and tested in pilot programmes in the United States.

Their broader project, **Sovereign**, is a distributed governance application using blockchain for identity and vote integrity. The underlying philosophy is that legitimate democratic participation should not depend on state-issued credentials — making it relevant for diaspora communities, stateless people, and borderless organisations.

As of mid-2026 the foundation has extended this work into **SAIRI**, described in press coverage as a tokenized autonomous AI agent operating on the Base blockchain — able to hold assets, deploy code, and manage its own on-chain activity with persistent memory. It's a speculative, early-stage experiment rather than an established governance tool; noted here as the foundation's current direction, not an endorsement of the approach.

## Key people

- **Santiago Siri** — co-founder; previously co-founded Argentina's Net Party (Partido de la Red), which ran for congress in 2013 on a platform of delegating legislative votes to citizens.
- **Pia Mancini** — co-founder; also co-founder of DemocracyOS and Open Collective.

## Links

- Website: [democracy.earth](https://democracy.earth)
- Source code: [github.com/DemocracyEarth](https://github.com/DemocracyEarth)
- Wikipedia: [Democracy Earth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Earth)

## See also

- [Liquid Democracy](../concepts/liquid-democracy.md)
- [Direct Democracy](../concepts/direct-democracy.md)
- [Decentralized Autonomous Organization](../concepts/decentralized-autonomous-organization.md)
- [Horizon State](horizon-state.md)