The Society Library

The Society Library, legally known as Benjamin Franklin Society Library Inc., is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded by Jamie Joyce and based in Orlando, Florida. Inspired by Benjamin Franklin's Junto club, which conducted discussions "in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth, without fondness for dispute or desire of victory," the organization archives humanity's ideas, ideologies, and world-views for future generations to access, understand, and more willfully choose to adopt or adapt. The organization's core methodology involves extracting arguments, claims, and evidence from scholarly articles, government reports, news, books, podcasts, social media, and other media sources across all detectable points of view on complex social and political issues. These are organized into formal debate structures using a process called "descriptive emergent structuring" that discovers fundamental questions through bottom-up analysis rather than top-down framing, linking arguments via 20+ logical relationships. Their AI safety and alignment work is a major focus area. The Society Library has mapped hundreds of dimensions of debates about AI safety, alignment, and existential risk, cataloguing 272 fundamental questions and subtopics with over 6,000 arguments across 11 high-level points of view. They mine information from sources including LessWrong, academic conferences, DeepMind publications, and various AI safety forums. AI/LLM engineers have built prompt engines that allow large language models to assist in the modeling of deliberation maps, helping to scale their methodology. Notable programs include The Great American Debate (their debate mapping initiative), the Internet Government project (a non-partisan effort to reinvent the legislative process), AI Politician (an AI agent platform), and their collaboration with the Internet Archive on Democracy's Library. The organization has taught university-level courses at over 32 institutions and provides educational programs in logic-based media literacy. The Society Library has received support from funders including Jaan Tallinn (via SFF), and has worked with organizations including OpenAI, Meta, Helena Institute, Foresight Institute, and the Poynter Institute. In 2024, the organization reported total revenue of approximately $773,000 and expenses of approximately $471,000. The core team includes Jamie Joyce (President and Executive Director), with a globally distributed team supplemented by approximately 30 project-based volunteers and contributors. The organization holds a Platinum-level Candid (GuideStar) transparency rating.