What Is Ernestly?

Ernestly is not just a conference. It is a convening. A provocation. A moment in the ongoing reimagination of how society is built, governed, and sustained—beyond the brittle limits of 20th-century institutions.

In an era where platforms have become proxies for the state, where governance is more interface than infrastructure, and where public trust is mediated by private APIs, Ernestly gathers the practitioners, funders, technologists, and policy-disruptors who believe we can—and must—design better defaults.

From Civic Tech to Civic Stacks

Civic tech was supposed to make democracy easier. Simpler. More user-centered. But somewhere between open data dashboards and "text your rep" apps, it became clear: the tools were not the problem. The systems were.

Ernestly exists for those who aren’t content to fix procurement workflows or modernize legacy forms. We’re here to prototype post-bureaucratic possibility. Our speakers don’t just build apps—they build alternatives. From shadow zoning DAOs to ethics-as-a-service models, we’re exploring new civic primitives and new incentive architectures.

Governance is an Interface Problem

Our institutions were not designed for latency. For iteration. For feedback loops. They were built to endure, not to evolve. Ernestly asks: What happens when you apply product thinking to public life—not to optimize it, but to remake it entirely?

What would an MVP of a Department of Mutual Aid look like? How do you A/B test civic rituals? Can you fork a city charter the same way you fork a repo? At Ernestly, these are not rhetorical questions. They're the starting point.

Why “Ernestly”?

Because sincerity is the ultimate disruption. Because nothing breaks a legacy system like good-faith iteration. Because somewhere between “civic hackathons” and “exit to community,” we forgot that genuine belief is harder to fake than impact metrics.

Ernestly is for people who still believe—earnestly—in building things that matter. And also for people who know how to tokenize belief for liquidity events.

We hope you’ll join us. Not because the system is broken. But because systems are just interfaces—and every interface can be redesigned.