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Who am I?

My name is Hector Perez Arenas. I'm an AI team lead at Doofinder by day, and I spend my free time building experiments to improve how societies coordinate and govern themselves. You can find more at hecperez.com.

After an MSc in telecom engineering, I founded a startup, then in 2009 did something unusual: I founded a political party in Spain built around liquid democracy. The idea was simple but radical—Members of Parliament would vote in Congress based on citizens' direct input online. You could delegate your vote to experts you trusted, but override them anytime by voting directly or switching delegates.

That experiment taught me that coordination is the hardest problem in governance—not ideology or policy details, but the mechanics of how groups make decisions at scale while staying democratic.

For the past decade, I've worked as a web developer in London and Madrid, moving from Ruby to Elixir. But I never stopped thinking about coordination problems. Now, as AI reshapes everything, I'm building YouCongress to test new democratic participation mechanisms and exploring how democratic societies can coordinate to govern AI systems that will affect us all.

The questions that drive me: How do we make collective decisions about technologies most people don't understand? How do democratic societies achieve the scale needed to influence AI development? How do we design institutions that are both fast enough for technological change and legitimate enough for democratic governance?