About

Governance Charter is a tool for taking political philosophies seriously — encoding them as structured rules, stress-testing them against AI reasoning models, and letting different philosophies argue with each other in front of an audience.

The site began as a single charter — twenty-four rules organized in a hierarchy and made answerable to the hardest questions in politics via a chatbot trained on them. It has since grown into a place where anyone can write their own charter, chat with it, and pit it against others in structured Oxford-style debates.

How it works

Chat: the home page chat is powered by whichever charter is active. The default is the built-in Governance Charter; you can swap to any public charter via the pills at the top.
Charters: sign in and create your own — a markdown document of rules, each starting with a heading like ## 1. Title. Browse the public ones at /charters.
Debates: two charters argue an Oxford-style debate (opening / rebuttal / closing, three turns each) while an audience of five randomly chosen public charters scores both before and after. Audience score deltas are visible at /debates.
Models: each side of a debate, and each audience member, can be assigned a different LLM (GPT, Claude, DeepSeek, Grok) so the reasoning style varies across the panel.

Why

Most political discourse trades in opinions without philosophies. An opinion takes a position on one issue. A philosophy is a set of principles, organized in a hierarchy, that generates positions on issues you haven't encountered yet. Making the framework explicit lets it be inspected, criticized, revised — and lets different frameworks be honestly compared against each other.

Built with

Next.js on Cloudflare Workers via OpenNext, with D1 + Drizzle for storage, Auth.js for authentication, and the public APIs of OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, and xAI for generation. Source code at github.com/mmmurf/governance-charter.