EXPLAINER 2 OF 6 / PLEDGES
A pledge is a signal.
Never a payment.
On the value market you can say how much you’d put toward a local gap. Nothing is charged, and nobody learns who you are.
What happens when you pledge
Four steps
- You pick a gap and type a whole-dollar amount, from $1 to $10,000.
- You can add a short reason. It’s kept private and is never shown on the site.
- The amount joins a public total for that gap. Your browser keeps a private token.
- That token lets you withdraw the pledge at any time from the same browser. Withdrawing erases your reason.
What it isn’t
No strings
A pledge is not a donation, a contract, a petition to the City or a promise to pay. There’s no name, email, card or wallet, and the site stores no IP address or cookie for it.
Totals are public and unverified. One person could pledge twice, which is why the page labels the totals as signals, limits how fast anyone can pledge and lets every pledge be withdrawn.
Why ask at all
Demand you can count
Today the main ways to tell an agency what you want are a meeting, a survey or a complaint. A dollar figure says something different: how much it’s worth to you. Added up across a neighborhood, it’s a rough, honest map of what people would put in.
Pledges might one day turn into real money, for example a pledge that only charges if enough others join. That would need a trusted way to hold money and Michael Hoydich’s go first. For now, it stays a signal.
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