About

OpenCheck is an error-seeking community that acts as an epistemic filtering and pumping station. We're early in our development and have not released any products, but we are releasing some foundational projects, such as Identity Verification.

Projects

We believe a foundational element of trust in internet communications is authenticity of social media accounts. When you see a Twitter (or other) account purporting to be someone, you should be able to easily validate authenticity with high confidence.

Principles

• Community-driven: A community of volunteers are the verifiers.
• Robust: The identity verification system should be robust to both malicious attacks and errors.
• Universal: We need a global system not reliant on any particular government or authority.
• Transparent: Policies, practices, algorithms, and decision history should be maximally transparent. People should be able to evaluate trustworthiness over time.
• Consistent: Policies and practices should be consistently applied.
• Risk minimizing: Identity verification resources should be applied to where the potential damage from inauthenticity is greatest.
• Free: Identity verification of speakers is a public good and we believe the world is best served by it being free.
• Open Data: Data should be open and usable by anyone without permission.

Notes

This identity verification system is not validation of anything other than real-world identity and the person's (or organization's) social media accounts. It is not a credential of any kind. We do, when available and relevant, link to verified credentials, such as published academic papers.

We're just getting started with our identity verification project. We're using a combination of ORCID, OpenAlex, and Wikidata to bootstrap the system. Data is available under the CC0 license. You do not need to apply for verification. We'll find you based on our analysis of influence and risk. If you want to become an early identity verifier, please read more.

Science Twitter Graph Archive

In case of organizational or technical issues with Twitter, we have started archiving the follow graphs of academics and others. All data is open under the CC0 license.

Who We Are

OpenCheck was started and is maintained by John Beatty. John previously co-founded Clover, a large payments platform. OpenCheck is a project of Metarational, LLC. We expect the corporate form and governance to evolve to ensure longevity and legitimacy if OpenCheck begins to achieve its goals.