Omniago

Omniago was a platform I co-founded during COVID with Matt Brooks. The core idea was simple but hard: the internet is full of climate misinformation, and accurate information is usually buried in lengthy academic papers. We wanted to build something that brought the two closer together.

The Problem

Debates on the internet are a lot of noise. False claims spread easily on social media, while scientifically substantiated facts require effort to find and share. We identified a gap between what virality rewards and what accuracy demands.

What We Built

Omniago was a crowdsourced knowledge base focused initially on climate change. Users could submit one-line summaries backed by sources, vote on quality, and propose revisions to existing entries. The best-performing posts surfaced to topic pages — covering debates like the Green New Deal, plastic pollution, and carbon capture technology.

Key design decisions:

• Citations required — every post needed a source, making unsupported claims structurally harder to spread
• Revision system — the community could improve posts over time, similar to a wiki but with voting dynamics
• No account needed to read — lowering the barrier to sharing accurate information

The Team

I hired and managed an international team across the US, UK, and Brazil during COVID. Building remotely under those conditions taught me a lot about async communication, trust-based management, and shipping under uncertainty.

Traction

We engaged with environmental organisations including the Sierra Club, Sunrise Movement, and Extinction Rebellion, and competed in the Pioneer Startup contest.

“We want to get above the noise and create the best climate knowledge base for learning and teaching.” — Matt Brooks, co-founder

What Happened

The project was eventually archived. The challenge of incentivising high-quality contributions at early scale, combined with the difficulty of moderating an open contribution model, proved harder than anticipated. But it remains one of the most meaningful projects I’ve worked on — a genuine attempt to make the internet a little more honest.