Ever since I was a child, there was something I could never quite make sense of.

Whenever a group had to make a decision, why was it that the loudest voice so often prevailed over the most reasonable one? As I grew into my teenage years, I kept encountering the same phenomenon—in politics and international affairs, those with greater power often got their way, regardless of whether their position was rational.

Then, while I was at university, the internet arrived. I thought it would change society.

If everyone could have access to information, the asymmetry of power would begin to break down. Those whose voices had gone unheard would gain power of their own.

That was what I believed.

But throughout the 2000s, we repeatedly saw established powers attempt to hold back the open flow of information. Technology had changed, but the underlying structures had not.

Meanwhile, the global environment continued to deteriorate. We had the data. Scientists were sounding the alarm. And yet collective decision-making failed to move forward. My frustration, anger, and sadness continued to grow.

Still, I could not let go of my belief in the power of open information. If people around the world working to solve social challenges could gain access to information directly from the source, perhaps something could change.

That conviction eventually became the starting point for OSINTech.

Today, plastic pollution reaches oceans across the globe. Climate change is becoming increasingly severe. The market capitalization of a single corporation can exceed the national budget of a country. As more and more challenges transcend national borders, the rules that cross those borders are becoming increasingly influential as well.

And yet remarkably few people know how those rules are actually made.

Every day, governments, the United Nations, NGOs, and other institutions publish official information. These are primary sources. But they remain scattered across different languages and buried beneath an overwhelming volume of material, leaving most of it beyond the reach of most people.

By 2018, machine translation had advanced to the point where it could finally be used in practice. I became convinced that the technology could make multilingual primary-source information visible and accessible.

I founded OSINTech, and after more than two years of development, RuleWatcher finally launched in 2020.

Hebrew. Vietnamese. Arabic.

Information we had previously been unable to read was suddenly within reach.

We are the first generation in human history capable of handling multilingual information at this scale. We decided to turn that extraordinary opportunity into a product.

Today, looking at markets alone is no longer enough to understand the world.

Regulation. Social norms. The environment. Technology.

Understanding these non-market forces—and seeing how the rules of the world are changing—is what we at OSINTech call intelligence. The practice of deriving intelligence from publicly available information is known as OSINT: open-source intelligence.

But this raises another question:

Does having more information actually make us wiser?

Many people, I suspect, would answer no.

When we are overwhelmed by information, the constant cognitive stimulation exhausts us. We stop thinking for ourselves and begin searching for someone else's summary, someone else's conclusion, someone else's answer.

Now that AI can produce fluent answers almost instantly, that tendency is accelerating.

At OSINTech, one principle has remained constant throughout everything we build:

Never take away people's ability to think.

Rather than giving people answers, we want to give them the material they need to think.

A person encounters primary-source information, forms their own questions, develops their own interpretation, and discusses it with others. That process itself is intelligence. It is also inquiry.

RuleWatcher was selected for the UNESCO IRCAI Global Top 100 in recognition of its approach as a solution that does not take away people's capacity to think.

As increasingly convenient AI tools become part of everyday life, it becomes even more important to use them not simply to obtain answers, but to help us arrive at answers ourselves.

Faced with an endless stream of mass-produced information, the question people will ultimately ask is:

What is your own interpretation?

There is little value in simply repeating what someone, somewhere, has already said. What matters is the perspective you develop from the evidence you have gathered.

OSINTech has therefore focused on human intelligence and inquiry, supporting the intelligence of individuals and society through two complementary pillars: information technology and education.

Rules, fundamentally, are meant to make our lives better.

Yet, as many of us have experienced, rules too often end up serving those with the loudest voices. Environmental challenges remain unresolved. Human-rights issues persist. We face an enormous number of problems that are extraordinarily difficult to solve, while collective decision-making remains painfully slow.

And yet rules have the power to change society.

They can direct investment toward more sustainable activities. They can place limits on technologies that fail to consider their consequences. They can encourage innovations that solve social challenges. They can channel funding toward grassroots initiatives.

All of these things are made possible by rules.

That is precisely why we cannot leave rulemaking only to those with the loudest voices.

If we can access a rule just as it begins to be debated in a distant country, it can become evidence for our own decisions.

Each of us can understand how the world is changing.

Each of us can ask questions.

Each of us can raise our voice.

To create an environment where that is possible, we will continue to evolve RuleWatcher, every day.

Our world. Rules by everybody.