ABOUT
Who is behind governance.center.
governance.center is from the team behind vote.direct.
vote.direct is operated by Syft8, Inc. and is 100% owned by its founder, Oday Brahem, with no outside investors. Who owns a voting platform is worth knowing before you trust it with an election, so this one is on the record: the person who owns the company is the person who builds the software and answers (512) 222-8191.
WHAT WE ARE BUILDING
The Board Office for a volunteer-run community.
The governance year of a volunteer-run organization in one place: the notice, the meeting, the minutes, the resolution, the record, the dues and the election.
The people who run a homeowners association, a small nonprofit board, a lodge or a congregation are volunteers. They are usually between 62 and 80. They are doing the governance year out of a Gmail thread, a Word document and a folder in somebody's house, and every two years the folder moves house.
The software sold to them assumes a thirty-year-old with a company laptop. It wants an app installed, a password remembered, a seat licensed per person and a card auto renewing. So the folder wins, and the record that should outlive this board does not.
We build the opposite. A member gets a link, and the link is the login. The type is sized for someone who does not want to hunt for glasses. The price is annual, it is one number for the whole organization, and a person answers the phone. Send us your roster and we set the community up for you, on that call.
TWO PRACTICES, ONE COMPANY
The product and the research.
They sharpen each other, and we are not going to pretend that makes either one independent.
One half of the work is the board office itself: the roster, the notices, the meetings, the minutes, the records, the dues and the decisions, all in one workspace that a member reaches by a link. The other half is the research library on this site: what the law says by state, what the participation data actually shows, and how boards that get quorum do it.
These pieces are written and published by the team behind vote.direct, which sells the software on this site. Read them as work by a vendor with a view, and follow the sources we link.
WHAT WE HOLD OURSELVES TO
Four things we can actually keep.
Not values. Rules with a page or a test behind each one.
We say who pays us
Every page on this site, and every research piece on it, is published by the company that sells the software. The ownership disclosure is in the footer of every page and in the machine-readable index. You should read what we publish as work by a vendor with a view, and follow the sources we link.
We cite sources and date them
Statutes carry their citation. Survey numbers carry the survey. A claim about what a competitor charges carries the date we checked it. When something we published turns out to be wrong, we change it and say that we changed it, rather than quietly editing the page.
We say what we do not do
There is a page for it, linked from the footer of every page on this site. No payment processing, no violations, no work orders, no legal advice, and no inspector of elections in California. A board that finds a limit by itself stops believing everything else we said.
We never say a board is compliant
We show the rule as we read it, with the citation, and we tell you to have your attorney confirm it before the board acts. Your bylaws win over our defaults in every case. Compliance is a legal conclusion about your association, and it is not ours to draw.
THE PERSON ON THE OTHER END
One number, and it is answered.
Oday Brahem founded the company and answers the phone. It is the same person who reads the contact form and the same person who runs a managed election when a board buys one.