About

The Wiki-Praxis Institute is a non-profit organization based in Springfield, Illinois. It was established in 2025 as a successor to an earlier non-profit (the Kybernan Foundation). A search of the Illinois Secretary of State’s records will confirm that this earlier organization was founded on June 15, 2015. By sheer coincidence, this was one day before Donald Trump launched his initial presidential campaign. This should demonstrate that our work is not intended as a response to our current political moment, but rather meant to address longstanding issues in our democracy.

Our mission is to develop ways to use the internet to improve political communication and help people advocate for themselves in political life. The key to this effort is the launch of our platform, WikiPraxis, in a beta version this year. If you want to know what we stand for, we are officially non-partisan, with just a few simple principles to guide us: we believe that elected officials should represent their voters, that people should understand the issues that affect them, and that people should be able to advocate for themselves to make things better. The platform is designed to advance all three of these goals.

Our president, Michael Bermingham, received his bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Illinois at Springfield in 2012, and spent much of the last decade studying how people discuss politics on existing social media platforms. The often chaotic nature of these discussions informed the design of our new platform. A paper laying out the theories behind the platform can be read here.

You can view our bylaws here.