Brigade Media

Brigade Media, also known as Brigade, was a civic technology platform that was formed on June 4, 2014, and founded by James Windon, Jason Putorti, John Thrall, Matt Mahan, and Miche Capone. The platform was intended to help users connect with others who share the same or similar views and to voice their opinions, create debates, or organize petitions. This process was intended to make the users' concerns more visible to and influential towards the United States policymakers. In early 2019 the engineering team at Brigade was acqui-hired by Pinterest. The remaining company assets and IP, including the Causes assets, were purchased by GovTech app Countable.

James Windon was the president of Brigade. He previously acted as a vice-president of Causes and worked with the World Trade Organization in Switzerland. Matt Mahan was the CEO of Brigade and previously served as the CEO of Causes. John Thrall worked in engineering, Jason Putorti in design, and Miche Capone in production. Sean Parker was the chairman of the startup, sat on the board of Spotify and was the founding president of Facebook.

In the first stage, the app asked users to agree or disagree on a position. Brigade then split up its users into those who agreed on the issue and those who disagreed. Participants were allowed to write their own opinions on positions and ask those in their respective group if they were "for" or "against" the opinion stated.

A few weeks before the November 2016 elections, Brigade created a ballot guide for its users and ran it in San Francisco and Manchester, New Hampshire. As the user entered the application, he or she was prompted with questions regarding government and social issues, and was given the choice of agree, disagree, or unsure as their answer choices. After completing the questionnaire, the guide gave recommendations on whom to vote for and which propositions to pass or not pass. Furthermore, the app also determined these choices based on those a user socializes with on Brigade. Brigade users could pledge their votes to the candidates and propositions listed on the ballot. With these pledges, the app tracked which candidates had more pledged votes in real time. Users were further able to recruit pledges from other users for their favorite candidates or propositions.

Brigade also implemented a voter verification service. With voter verification, a user could determine how similar or different a political representative's viewpoints were from their own. This data was received from Google's Civic API with geographic information on 520,000 American elected officials.

Brigade Media acquired Causes, Votizen, and Voter. At the time of acquisition, Causes was the largest online platform where candidates could campaign; Votizen functioned as a tool for voters to learn more about their leaders; and Voter aimed to put voters and politicians together via shared viewpoints. These three companies helped Brigade gain social media presence and find intelligent workers in the field.

As technology advanced, it was assumed that the average individual would have further access to voting, and therefore, voting numbers would increase. Instead, voter turnout at the elections remained low, with numbers at the presidential elections between 50% and 60% of the US population in the last 50 years. At the 2014 midterm election, only 36.4% of people voted, the lowest percentage since 1942. It was hoped that civic technology will incentivize and educate its users to vote. Brigade's voter ballot was an attempt as a civic technology platform to increase voter participation as well as educate its users about candidates and propositions.

Brigade interacted with American voters by linking its users to the same held concerns. The opinions of elected officials on those concerns were provided and metrics about the candidate most similar in concerns and degree of concern would be available.