On The Record

On The Record is a platform for open letters - public statements anyone can co-sign with a sentiment rating and an optional personal note. The first edition of every letter goes automatically to the campaign's recipient. Every co-signer keeps a numbered edition. The organizer sees a live picture of how their audience feels: who signed, how strongly, and what they said.

It runs as a multi-campaign hub. "Dear Stacks" and "Dear Bitcoin" are two campaigns; the same platform powers both, plus any future campaign with its own recipient, theme, and rules.

The same platform can also project any single campaign as its own branded, standalone-looking app - one config flip, no separate codebase. "Dear Stacks" and "Dear Bitcoin" are worked examples of that capability. See Single-campaign apps below.

Why an open letter belongs on the record

A petition site collects signatures and then hosts them on its own database. The platform can lose the list, change the rules, take the page down, or just disappear - and when it does, the petition is gone. Worse, the signature itself is just a row in someone else's spreadsheet. Nobody can verify it independently. Nobody can prove they were the 47th person to sign.

On The Record makes each signature a permanent, numbered, on-chain record. Edition #47 exists forever, signed by you, with your rating and note attached. It can be verified by anyone, against anyone. The platform does not own it; you do. The list does not live on our servers; it lives on a public network that does not go down.

For the recipient - the senator, the foundation, the company being addressed - that means an audience whose support is real and provable, not just a number on a page that could vanish tomorrow.

What you can do today

• Browse open letters by campaign or across all campaigns
• Write a letter addressed to a specific recipient (or a campaign-wide default)
• Co-sign any letter with a 1-10 agreement rating and an optional 128-character note
• See sentiment for any letter - the distribution of ratings, the notes, the count
• Send a permanent record - edition #1 always mints to the campaign recipient

The sentiment layer

Co-signing is not just a thumbs-up. Every signature carries:

• A 1-10 rating showing how strongly the co-signer agrees
• An optional personal note (up to 128 characters)
• The signer's on-chain identity

For the organizer, this is the difference between "5,000 people signed" and "5,000 people signed with an average rating of 8.3, here are the 60 notes from the strongest signers, here is the long tail of the conflicted ones." That picture belongs to the organizer, not to a platform.

Single-campaign apps: your own branded collection, minimal effort

This is the capability On The Record demonstrates: with one config flip, the same multi-campaign platform projects a single campaign as its own branded, standalone-looking app - own recipient, own theme, own rules, no campaign filter. There is no separate codebase to build or maintain. Point single-campaign mode at a collection slug and a creator or organizer has a dedicated open-letter app in minutes, not months.

"Dear Stacks" is a worked example: OTR in single-campaign mode, pointed at the otr-dear-stacks collection, presented as its own branded surface. "Dear Bitcoin" is another, pointed at otr-dear-bitcoin. Same platform underneath, a different face on top.

The takeaway for a creator or organizer: you do not need to commission a bespoke site to run your own open-letter campaign under your own brand. The platform already knows how to be your app.

In this section

• Campaigns - How campaigns work, who configures them
• Writing a Letter - The composition flow
• Signing - Co-signing with sentiment ratings and notes
• For Organizers - Launching a campaign, reading the sentiment data

Getting paid

Writing a letter costs a little; every co-sign pays the writer. How Earning Works explains where each comes from.