Artem Zhiganov, Harmonica: How to improve collective sense-making with GenAI

can

i'd say

so we are here with from atom

thick enough

and today we love we talk about

the or monica and disease or another

episode of their democracy innovator podcast

so thank you hurt them for your

time and they're very clear for having

me

i'm very curious about the or monica

and so the first question is that

what is the actually or monica

i can tell he goes for monica

but maybe he wants me to give

you some quick intro like my background

also your background and whatever like you

like

okay so my bedroom and isn't a

product marketing i used to do like

a lot of use a resurgence communication

strategies and

and eventually product strategies for clients like

product innovation you know like defense prince

and customer experience design then i got

very tired of all that and i

decided to make like a pivot and

find something that would be more that

with more that resonate with me more

and that sir why i decided to

or get a liquor some indication that

like

a degree and then i went to

the uk where i studied

innovation management and

part of that program was writing a

thesis and they decided to write my

thesis about

cooperatives and then i learned about commons

elinor ostrom

and i realized that sir this is

like super

profound

ah theory that she was working on

and in her research and that took

forty years maybe and eventually she'll got

the nobel prize for the researcher was

the first woman to ever gets our

nobel prize in economics so elinor ostrom

was a great great sir political

our political scientist may be political economists

anthropologist who believed that sir

community shared resources or communities with shared

resources is an alternative to

and markets and states so basically this

is like a third

the economic paradigm that is very different

from both companies like private companies and

also the states

the state the beasts

management all you know state owned companies

all planned economy and so on

so that that was very very inspiring

for me and that's what how i

got into web three i was a

governance lead in a row and i

consulted a few does

after that

and that's how i got into meta

gov

because not to golf is like this

the community that is researching cutting edge

governance and web three governance in particular

and i was learning a lot from

met the gulf

and the also i got into newspeak

house which is a very interesting place

in london where they can have try

to

cross-pollinate ideas that are related to governance

and open source and civic tech and

the basically like intersection of democracy and

technology

i

that it's one of the most interesting

places in the world they think in

for the people who are interested in

democracy and technology and that's where harmonica

started so i i came up with

idea for harmonica while living in you

speak house in london

and also working at at as a

governance lead in a small doubt

and as the governance lead i was

first i was really struggling with

you know getting some input from the

community

i like trying to get people comments

on proposals in the forum right those

proposals you know join the workshops and

can contribute during those workshops and fill

out the surveys that i asked them

to feel

and all that was very very difficult

like people didn't want to do anything

they didn't want to write proposals they

didn't want to discuss proposals they didn't

want to fill out the forms that

didn't want to join workshops was like

hurting the cat for so at the

time i didn't know that but basically

this is what's or

i call sense making right now

so

oh when there was

you know did during my residency at

newspeak house john g p t came

out and it was like a very

very big topic like follow a lot

of conversations that happens in les twenty

two and twenty three

and which some of those i was

part of and so we discussed how

language models could be used to improve

governance of communities

and that's again the towel harmonica started

like i thought that maybe we could

use

generative a i to help with sensemaking

to help

the community managers governance leads and everyone

else who has to act as facilitator

not necessarily being professional facilitator but everyone

you know who is managing a community

that has to facilitate discussions from to

the time they have to facilitate

and so how generative a i could

help them how can we empower those

people the in those roles and to

or basically do

decent the collective sense making

so that's what we're monica is about

okay it's and i'll ever see now

i was looking at about your curriculum

that is the i will say alpha

economic and the and of yeah innovation

management and

and it's interesting it will be interesting

to know ah how you develop this

product i mean i deserve the software

was in terms of her

i've seen that he applied for some

grants and the that was the something

i think that allow you to build

the platform

but

it it will be interesting i think

for the people that want to build

the a platform for certain our little

bitter about the the backgrounder because the

ah

yeah your background in economic i think

it made the in a way for

you

it was may be easier for you

to find the summer and

some money to sponsor the project or

not not know first of all you'll

have background the the comics i started

in high school of economics that's the

name of the university that i studied

boomer added when i got my bachelors

degree

and it was like long time ago

twenty years ago

do

i graduated in two thousand and salad

but

i i didn't study economics i started

management and then a once i i

asked worked in advertising and then i

worked in product management and

i tried to build some startups before

harmonica but sir

i never

you know it was more like experiments

and i didn't

raise any like a venture capital for

those

sometimes i just invested my own saving

sometimes was like friends and family and

with harmonica it's actually the same

i invested them my savings and i

ain't got some grunts got some donations

from friends or through give us which

is a

platform for crypto donations and by the

way we are participating in the quadratic

funding round on giveth right now and

we would really appreciate even like one

dollar donation if anyone can do that

before fourteenth of february and and harmonica

is open-source try

correct

so

while we discussed disgusted a few times

if it's possible to fundraise i mean

to raise venture capital for open source

projects and i think there are some

examples of that i think this but

basically it's possible but you know after

reading elinor ostrom and

he going into this kind of posts

capitalists the

and

thinking was his school of thought not

only i mean not only thanks to

all eleanor but also some other

the researchers and thinkers like michelle bounds

for instance from peter pi foundation like

i i became very

disillusioned in venture capital like i really

don't want to go that route i

want harmonica to be like to open

source

with without this kind of growth imperative

or for profit

imperative like i don't want to to

build harmonica for product which makes it

much harder to build it like we

we won a few grants are actually

to grunts the through get coin and

i think one of them was like

three thousand dollars and other one was

like seven thousand so that's not a

lot of money and i hope that

we will

be figure out how to make it

more in a more systemic way and

make harmony curb self-sustainable sustainable without

and compromising the open source narrative or

if this that we are

committed to so right now it's a

free tool there is no subscriptions

and we we might introduce some kind

of premium features or for b to

be customers and maybe that would be

certain

yeah the to address specific use cases

that are important for me to be

customers

which show would be yeah with which

could be i think

available as like additional thing but the

the core product the court experience of

harmonica should be free and available to

everyone

and so we rely on grandson and

we rely on donations

then he yeah it's are important for

this kind of product i of projects

maybe is saw in the this word

fit better and yeah i think to

be open source because the we are

talking about the very serious things i

mean the

you're talking about sense making and inside

a nicer way to this group

what the softer what the software does

and the yeah it seems quite hard

the for innovative project to ever some

funding and the yeah sorry for them

as understand get misunderstanding about your background

and the

and it was thinking about like the

first question and like what is our

monica like for someone that has never

tried the the tool like i've tried

it and is a is a chat

no way

and the user has a conversation with

an llm about the a certain topic

right now

and they're the idea is quick to

collect the

all the different positions

how will you describe it in and

to someone that the as know the

right yeah so what's the actual product

healthworks and

yes you're at the we decided to

focus at least for now focus on

one on one

dialogues with the participants of each process

each session or we think that it

has a lot of benefits people can

be much more honest or open and

they can be anonymous and they don't

have to you know think about what

what other participants or maybe their team

members or like people from the organization

and how they might interpret their words

and

they can do that

at at their own time like he

is important to note that the harmonica

is facilitating asynchronous

discussions or asynchronous workshops asynchronous sir deliberations

so

yes of the host creates a session

and invites the participants and participants joined

the session and they start talking to

the

a i read the language model through

our web app through the chat interface

that you mentioned which is very similar

to charge a pity but unlike tragic

p t it's a multiplayer experience it's

multiplayer session which means that even though

you talk to everyone talks to the

a i the ai is saving all

those responses to a vector database

and it can ask follow-up questions or

additional questions based on other participants responses

what we call cross pollination

so

basically we once participants to be able

to

comment on each other's ideas or build

upon each other's ideas while talking to

a i saw like they talked to

each other but indirectly they talked to

each other through the ai

and the the ai synthesizes the statements

the responses and

it can identify the clusters of opinions

in the way like similar to what

police or how police works i with

policy you create some since statements and

participants can react to those statements but

also they can add their own statements

and then or the participants can react

to those additional statements from other from

from you and so eventually you can

create this kind of

cluster raised or like the you can

map the

i've been clusters of of your community

so we wanted to something similar with

harmonica but with conversational

in interface though that everyone can just

to chat with the ai and also

we are working on an additional modes

of input like voice so that he

will he won't have to type you

can will you will be able to

talk to her monica and also we

want your to add like additional like

elena

it's like sliders like made me like

multiple choice and so on so it

would be much more

and flexible or dynamic experience for participants

but most importantly there and responses will

be saved in this fashion database or

context window and session context and the

first of all the

harmonica will

identify

like

important statements or may be outliers like

strange ideas that are in it things

are original and then for instance asked

participants what they think about those strange

ideas outliers because what we believe is

that

consensus is overrated like consensus of common

ground is the one you know it

it can be it is great when

communities were aligned and like everyone is

on the same page and you know

on that common ground but also in

of i think especially in law

larger communities like common grounds can be

quite bland you know like when there's

a lot of people something that all

of them agree on can be quite

small or you know banal like obvious

you know and then it's it's very

very important to

get feedback on less obvious ideas coming

from some of those members some of

those groups we want other groups to

comment on those ideas and then it

would be hopefully it'll be much easier

to for instance like develop a strategy

that will be very inspiring for most

of the community

but it wouldn't be boring it wouldn't

be obvious it would be based on

some of the outlier ideas coming from

some of the members which are supported

by other members

you know what i'm talking about so

it's not just finding common ground it's

not just finding something that everyone agrees

on it's about amplifying the good ideas

and then let's i think what sensemaking

is about

thought that i will say or do

a sort of ai mediator mediation and

also sort of collective of brainstorming weafer

the llm yep this is very interesting

i was also thinking about the device

the input that the could make every

finger ether

and the

about the there is also on an

idea that the i thought about the

so collectivist collective utilization of problems like

someone as a certain kind of problem

may be in the same town another

person as this improv

and the eventually this tool this project

called the show that many people in

that place share the same problem and

so eventually they can also try to

find a solution to to death

in them

you told me about the a little

bitter about the the idea how you

had it and but i would like

to ask you if you were interested

in the

in this the topics not maybe nothing

civic tech but like air in your

experience i have you had any previous

to experience about conflicts

because of you know sometimes it's normally

we disagree i

and the some time we understand the

other person but we not share what

they say what that person say

and the i dunno was there for

you like a a moment when you

thought okay we need that new tools

i dunno maybe a personal situation something

that you thought okay we need the

new things because they it's it's hard

to to agree if we use the

normal and

if we just communicate in a normal

way

while with ai and a

and they use of llm cooler facilitate

call sections

to be honest the conflict resolution wasn't

something that i thought about when i

came up with her idea of for

harmonica i

like i said it was more about

my struggle with the

just getting input from the community like

it was very you know

it took me a lot of time

and also i had to process the

inputs like for instance you know when

i did like workshops and miro and

mira not sure how to planet

and you know people added some stickers

to the white board and then after

the workshop i had to copy all

those stickers somewhere and like tried to

cluster them and to synthesize them so

that it would be like the something

like actionable make some kind of

summary of the workshop and the to

me it was like one of the

most difficult things with and in terms

of workshops spiritual workshops so it's a

little it's also about the time basically

separate so it's it was a very

it took a lot of time and

also it was hot

to engage people just to get like

a lot of people to participate and

finally you know like with for instance

with them

like okay cures frederick objectives and key

results which is very popular framework for

a setting like objectives for our organization

like i tried to do that

with with my team with the other

teams but first of all i did

have much experience with it so i

wasn't entirely sure that i'm doing it

the right way and secondly other people

didn't know about ogres until i told

them about it

and so for them it was like

a learning experience and that they they

didn't quite understand what they need to

do so

i think what a harmonica

one of the benefits of harmonica is

that it helps you to use the

right framework and the right way like

for instance if you want to develop

a goes like harmonica will know how

to do it and if you want

to develop a theory of change for

the community from one occur will tell

you or suggest one of the ways

to to develop a thief

of change in terms of conflict resolution

i think that's a very interesting topic

basically for me conflict resolution is one

of the key

and elements of governance

so a lot of people think there's

like a very like a popular misconception

that a lot of people think that

governess means decision-making and actually that's not

the case decision making is one part

of governance that

it is suddenly decision-making it's also

no code of conduct for instance like

certainly principles of how your organization is

like operating and and that can that

there's a big overlap between those principles

and decision-making ideally the decision-making should be

like synchronized with your values and the

prince

apple's

and there is also a very important

topic of tools like what does the

use and who has access to those

tools like who can actually

edit or delete you know important documents

in the cloud that's not so very

very big part of governance to me

which some people just don't think about

the enough some just don't think about

and then there is conflict resolution which

is also equally important like how do

you actually resolve conflicts or disputes

which is by the way like it's

one of the design principles of elinor

ostrom like element western ghats for nobel

prize basically for developing eight design principles

for building successful comments like how to

how to create a successful comments like

a if you wants to build the

occur open source project which what

or eighty wants to maintain a forest

she was obviously a and forests and

the like fish in the water but

the same principles apply to open source

projects and the other digital commons so

conflict resolution is one of those eight

principles like if you want to if

you

want your community to maintain or develop

shared resources

you need to have conflict resolution in

a place

and either i i dunno if

like how exactly a i could be

used for that i'm sure there's probably

like a few different startups that are

trying to develop to to build a

tool for conflict resolution with a i

right now

the harmonica is

so i think for conflict resolution facilitation

is also very important basically facilitation is

something that is important for sense making

and for conflict resolution

and how many trying to understand how

to

turn facilitation wisdom until code like how

to codify facilitation wisdom so that a

i could facilitate workshops in a specific

her away like for instance like a

retrospective road like harmonica can run a

retrospective for your team or it will

talk

to use or participants to the members

and it will ask them about you

know like the standard the retrospective questions

like what was good about the last

sprint what didn't work so well what

can be improved and how could we

actually improve it or how can we

fix the problems right of there's like

three

three main questions in a retrospective and

it's kind of obvious like yeah like

he can write a prompt for like

djibouti and explain all that for the

language model and then it will this

prompt will be used to

like you know talk to each participant

collect the inputs from them

and then another prompt which is also

part of the retrospective session will be

used to synthesize all those responses and

generate the summary

of your respective and that summary would

be

pretty good like it will be very

close to water in a liquor retrospective

outputs should look like it according to

like a jail

the thinking like you know experts in

agile and management who are we really

wanted to collaborate with and like we

want them to give us feedback like

if the prompts that were using is

not very not very good then we

are happy to

change them you know improve them or

maybe those experts wants to create their

own prompts and their own then place

as we call them and the it

can be not only about agile it

can be about anything and so may

be conflict resolution could also be

you know what part of that experience

maybe the the actually can be like

a lot of different templates a lot

of different frameworks that help people took

resolve conflicts we just haven't thought about

that yet

but maybe it's actually in important like

direction for tools like harmonica like how

how you could do

yet how the a i should talk

to people but the what when bit

skeptical about this is i think conflict

resolution is an emotional like with when

you trying to develop like oak yards

or a roadmap it's basically it is

just about ideas it can be quite

rational it doesn't have to be emotional

with conflicts i think there's much more

emotions in place and i think it's

very important not to lose those emotions

in the process like you need to

actually be ideal you want to be

in the one in one room with

the someone to the resolve the conflict

like if you just talk about that

that stuff through zoom or some other

and you know

video conferences at all it's already like

harder to resolve the conflict and if

you do that through the chats with

a i

i'm afraid that the just to you

know it you just lose all the

emotions that you need to actually hear

the other person like not just saw

with a

not just the war is would also

like the by the language and stuff

like that so

i dunno having the conflict resolution is

very big topic that can you give

you can think about like projects like

clara's phrase that claris is doing kind

of decentralized to

conflict resolution but that's more like a

court right likely just turf people who

who

i tried to resolve conflicts and as

a service you're using blockchain but i

don't think they're using ai

and

i can correct now

then and you are made me think

that the maybe facilitation is the step

before conflict resolution

i mean because i just despise listen

to the mental skill that you need

for affix resolution as well as sensemaking

yeah yeah exactly if we ever way

to understand each other before we have

a conflict then hopefully we done after

i have a conflict and so that

is why of incur

the to like harmonica could be very

useful

and the elect ask you if you

encountered any kind of problems i dunno

maybe you are thinking about something okay

we have to do it in this

way or in another way and then

your face some something unexpected i dunno

well room

you know

every startup the has like dozens of

things like that

until they get to their black product

market fit and we we haven't got

there yet

so i guess we have something like

that like every week

but also like when he asked me

about this right now i just i

need some time to like remember something

that would be interesting to talk about

and like you know in general this

is all very fuzzy rent like for

instance we we started with a different

but like the first the for the

type that were built was a bot

for discord

and then we realized that and

it's not that easy to

like facilitate a workshop in there

dems on discord through through the ams

on discord

and also like a lot of people

that i talked to about harmonica they

were not underscore like they had to

install discord and register just to be

able to test the harmonica

so then we decided to move to

telegram and like last summer i was

invited by

as ozil community and and of he

knows as a little was as allow

it sur le carr conferences as sponsored

by ethereum community foundation

and so the first one was in

montenegro in twenty three

and the last year it was in

georgia

georgia the country not the state

and

so they invited me to help them

organize the one of the weeks because

it's a long contracts they call themselves

pop-up village so i think it took

like six or seven weeks and total

and one of those weeks was about

decentralized governance

and so i helped them organized that

weekend also i thought that it it

was it would be like a good

opportunity for us to test harmonica

like a pilot project for harmonica and

so we built a telegram telegram bot

ah for that week so we tried

to use from monica at the conference

and zoo village georgia

and invited the participants of the conference

of that week people who attended the

the sessions that i organized

like with stickers and

and some workshops we invited them to

use the the telegram bot harmonica on

telegram

which also wasn't very successful like

a lot of people joined those sessions

but never finish them they didn't respond

to the questions

and the i realized that yeah we'll

probably just it wasn't the right solution

for that context like people who attend

the conference they're not members of the

same team some most of them don't

know each other so they didn't have

any like

skin in the game they didn't want

to discuss anything with each other they

didn't want to help us and harmonica

so

with all that sir feedback i in

the nothing that but feel that but

also like just the kind of

you know basically that wasn't the very

successful experiment for us so we decided

to start using to to build a

web app like to just to create

something like judge a pity on on

the web and i think that this

currently working pretty well the web app

but it also has its limitations and

i think that people

and a lot of people just don't

want to open links like if someone

sends them a link especially if it's

not the direct messages but as if

it's like a channel on discord and

like everyone on the community is invited

to join the session very very few

people actually click on the link and

that's what we've seen recently for instance

in orinda community like they tried to

do at a year retrospective with harmonica

in les les december or january to

reflect on twenty twenty four as a

community and i think it was like

ten people for joined the session

with the yeah i think like a

few hundred members and on the discord

server like maybe a five hundred six

hundred members in orinda and only ten

of those users actually joined the session

in harmonica

which you know it's it's a problem

for us and we haven't the

figured out how to solve this yet

but one of the hypothesis that we

have is that we still we we

need to go back to building a

discord bot so that we made you

will make like the full-circle and but

it will be a new kind of

bot that would be using a

that would be connected to an agent

so it will be basically like harmonica

agent that would be joining

certain channels or threads are in a

committed to server and maybe it will

be and

trying to facilitate

discussions happening there like so that people

wouldn't need to leave discord they wouldn't

need to join any sessions it will

be it won't have any set it

will be like specialists sense experience just

happening on the community platform that the

community the so they both inside the

the group that is core group

telegram group or whatever instead of further

use that as to fried to the

bot privately

the oil joining a session on the

web which is to the current solution

exactly and the i think about these

the problem i mean someone build up

a project our platform that can be

very useful and then people are may

be they are yet as you said

afraid of opening a lie

the or maybe they are just lazy

i dunno they ever things through their

their their their life and the may

be gimme vacation systems called the help

in a way to

yet to stimulate use earth to to

do a certain thing to reply but

also as you say like they're out

you could be

ether so you just the the is

just say something to there

cell phone a year he absolutely i

think people can

sheer like ten times more information if

they can talk

instead of typing

and we basically we want to increase

the bandwidth we want to for sensemaking

we need to get as much information

as possible

from the community or from the organization

so we really need to on the

one hand be able to use different

modes of like except different kinds of

input including voice and on the other

hand we need to be able to

join the conversation

that are happening already and you know

that could be a boss that is

deployed to and discord server or maybe

it's just the something like as call

maybe we should be able to join

some calls so we could build the

zoom app rights that

would be invited to those calls or

we could use the transcripts that are

already generated by tools like autor and

fireflies you know those a i know

taking tools so that's something that we

are working on right now we want

to be able to add those transcripts

as the context to the sessions so

it's not just what people

i say or what people tell harmonica

in our sessions but also being able

to import conversations that happened elsewhere

may be on zoom may be in

discord we want to be able to

kind of

combine or merge all those different to

conversations to form this kind of a

you know

collective intelligence or

like a context for a i and

then the next question and then on

the question but the something that we

are working on day i want to

share with you is that if we

managed to like form that collective intelligence

or she context sir based on all

those conversations that can happen in

harmonica or outside of harmonica then we

also want to be able to turn

that into

and agents itself

and that agents would be able to

represent the opinions or the perspectives of

that group of people

ah somewhere else

so this is what the we call

a i avatars

and i think that could be like

a

really fundamental breakthrough for

like online governance when groups of people

will be able to deliberate

on certain topics and then create an

ai agent that would er

represent them based on all those deliberation

the based on all those conversations with

and all those responses that people shared

and you know what they agreed on

and disagreed on so i think it

will be very powerful away to scale

will do

deliberative democracy because you know it's very

hard to deliberate and stuff all the

time like people have other things to

do they don't want to join like

citizen assembly as every week

but if we managed to create something

like and governance surface for the team

or for the community

and that would enable them to create

an agent that would accurately represent their

perspectives and values and like girl intentions

like what are they really once maybe

within the company like maybe it team

wants to create an agents that would

represent it

on like higher level company

the strategy meeting rights of that the

interests of that team would be represented

the when the department is making decisions

and then maybe the agent of the

department will be represented at the company

level the this is making the same

applies to politics like maybe a neighborhood

can

discuss lot of different stuff like deliberate

for like maybe a few months and

then that context would be enough for

this neighborhood to create an agents that

would represent this neighborhood on city level

deliberation and then maybe the city consisting

of all those different neighborhoods would be

able to create an agent

with represents the city on national national

level

deliberation so this is i think very

very important because it allows you to

scale a deliberative democracy

absolutely it's very charming them

the the way the the a agents

can represent people

and the that's also a water was

talking about the when i said about

the collective is collectivization of problems so

i went to a laker some people

that ever the same problem can be

represented by a certain the agent to

them

i dunno the state level town level

whatever here

and the i'm thinking i mean now

the plus from now is the i

mean is developed and a you're talking

about her a lot of for improvement

that are very cool

and the

which kind offer

ah i dunno like up

problems you think you will face or

skill you will require that you do

not have now i mean a mythical

of the said is a big community

and luckily there are also other communities

and the people are collaborating saw

like it is there any out that

you need the

the

had another

okay thank you for asking

yes we need it

a lot of different kinds of help

that's for sure we are a small

team there is only five numbers in

tim harmonica including myself we have been

bootstrapping like we don't have external funding

apart from the get coin grandson the

giveth the nation's

so we definitely need the you know

we need to fundraise basically somehow for

the to make it more the able

to work on this full i think

i'm the only to remember that works

on harmonica full-time are currently and

but that's kind of obvious right like

fung funding also we definitely need like

developers who would be aligned with what

we're doing who really like wants to

fix the democracy and make the planet

more happy place

and

so developers is another thing but i

guess what we really needs right now

is the facilitation wisdom because like i

said i think facilitation is the core

value that we are trying to deliver

with a

a i

though it's harmonica is basically a i

facilitation tool

in a way like a high-powered since

making tool and and the facilitation as

be part of that so i wanted

to use this opportunity to share some

and updates from the

an interoperable deliberative tools program that's i

participated in with the harmonica i think

you are also part of that the

program and so

a few weeks ago

we decided to collaborate with some of

other members of this a program including

a i object as institute and the

eyes

and so i hope that other projects

will also join us and may be

built benefit from what we want to

do it and what they want to

do is open source library of facilitation

patterns so facilitation patterns facilitation tactics

basically we want to turn the difference

facilitation traditions like

socio chrissy or nonviolent communication or maybe

canadian or you know there is a

lot of different stuff that is very

very interesting that has been developed over

like decades liberating structures in and is

another great example and those are like

different traditions the a focus on different

things like obviously like agile is more

about teamwork and like companies that companies

in particular and mobile communications just about

how you can facilitate discussion in the

room and how do you can how

can you make people

you know open and the criticized safe

space for more open discussions so those

are they like different things different aspects

of facilitation maybe like difference even like

levels of facilitation but we want to

try to turn all that into code

so that's tools like her mom

annika what dr the city or eyes

or maybe some other deliberative tools which

i think her yeah hopefully will be

open source as well

would be able to benefit from this

open source library which we call open

facilitation library so are we really want

to engage as many facilitators as possible

to share their wisdom with us

you know it for salvation experts from

those all those different

the facilitation traditions we really want to

collaborate with them to create this kind

of shared facilitation

library

this is critical in mean that a

library means that the i will help

her yeah new developers new people that

have some new ideas to develop their

project yeah

i say that

you know there are some examples of

libraries like this for example there is

a session lab a library and the

result the wise democracy project that also

tried to describe this kind of butter

language of democracy and there's like a

big overlap with what what would we

want to deal with what we also

want to do

not just the describe those facilitation or

tactics or patterns but also tried to

turn them into a machine readable form

so maybe like typescript

so that we could basically teach a

i how to use those things how

to use those patterns

the you know the it will could

just like copy those things to the

prompts or turn them into a gigantic

wore clothes and stuff like that so

it's also about the cold in a

big way sauce a sort of machine

learning on there

on all the possible ways there yeah

humans used to mediate yeah and the

so it seems like that the what

are needed now are people that are

not from the tech side from the

tech field but they are yes studying

the ways that people use to ah

yet resolve conflicts or or to facilitate

the conversations was citizen assemblies yet

yeah i felt like the same in

the i mean there are a lot

of people's that the have some i

mean technical knowledge and so they are

developing new tools like a could be

or monica could be other tools and

and the and a lot of people

that have a lot of knowledge like

a people that may be studied the

facilitation techniques and the still are not

in this field

but i really hope that in their

next future they will come and teach

household their the knowledge that they have

and them

about term

yeah questions about other tools that the

maybe you have seen around that they

looked very interesting to you and the

that may be share something with harmony

color may be there are very different

to but they were you were inspired

by them

i am as you cited bodies before

yeah

yeah there's definitely a lot of tools

that the

ah

yeah

to trying to do similar things

as her monica

and there is also a lot of

tools that we are using

the to build her harmonica but yeah

i guess you're asking me about the

the former

so yes obviously policy is a big

inspiration and

unfortunately

it hasn't been

updated for a long time i think

it's just like like a public good

now and nobody is extracts to develop

it and like improve the wax so

it's pretty like old call us and

you could say that we are trying

to

yeah like do a similar thing but

with a different tx so that is

more modern and conversational and a i

powered but harmonic is not the only

tool that is trying to do that

so i mentioned the talk to the

city i think the city is a

great project

also part of the sir interoperable collaborative

tools program

and

there is a rematch which is a

very mature project

which is also using a i too

run collective dialogues so he could sculptor

collect dialogue system

and by the way rematch is not

open source and it's quite expensive it

costs i think are like thirty five

thousand a year

thirty five thousand dollars a year i

think

yeah it's a lot of money i

dunno at lot yeah i guess they

maybe they i i know that they're

working with the un and maybe u

n is like a pro bono customer

for them

but the definitely work with like large

companies tool can spend that much money

on their collective dialogue system which i

find interesting there is also another american

projects are called think scape built by

a company called

the unanimous a i

and i think it costs a about

the same and i made me be

mistaken but i think it costs like

three thousand a month

and then escape is also using a

i agents to organize a deliberative process

is or

some kind of yeah

online discussions and they have like a

very interesting design so as the they

want the create small rooms for people

and people discuss different topics in those

rooms and then there are agents who

listened to those discussions and the and

then they have other agents who represents

are the groups in your group so

that you could the

respond to

ideas from other groups that are collected

by one agent and like reproduced in

your group by another agent something like

that they might be

you know i help him that sir

wrong but maybe it's not very accurate

description but i hope for that's more

or less how they work

so that escape is interesting and

yeah i dunno like you know there's

is so we're building a collective the

alex system of i've been talking will

have been met i mentioned if you

collect of alex systems but there is

also very interesting start happening like and

but bridging systems like how to identify

different

opinions and the

like with what they do with committed

to notes and i think committed to

notes is just an early example of

bridging systems and they will be much

more interesting bridging systems in the future

and so i think in a i

think it's interesting to do

like discuss not right now i am

afraid to jump offers soon but i

think it's interesting to discuss a sense

making stack like what since making stack

the consists of

and i think the hurdles like harmonica

is just one part of that stack

so what what else do we need

to like enable

a good the collective sense ah

at the me the is like

or of open question that i don't

know the answer for right now but

like i think that the yeah sensemaking

he is definitely something that we need

to work on their civilization to address

the matter crisis

that's not my thoughts that sir i

think something that i heard from daniel

martin burger which eyes one of my

but which had been like a big

influence on myself and the last few

years

and yeah i think it's important to

think about the collective sense making and

how a i can

enable it i think that there's some

irony that on the one hand a

i is dangerous technology like it could

potentially kill as kill everyone but also

basically we can solve the political problems

that we have without a i

so i think that's a very interesting

moment in history because i'm the one

hand we are building the tools that

can kill as but on the other

hand there is this growing political problems

that can be sold only with the

help of ai

and basically we have this window of

opportunity that we we need a i

but also it's dangerous and we need

to build a i that would help

us do

like fixed the democracy our otherwise it

will be very dystopic yeah it seems

like a sort of paradox or

but yeah i completely agree that the

a i n technology can be used

the

yang the song good ways to move

the to make the war the a

better place

him

another small question i mean is there

i mean there are all the snoopy

all these people i mean you're part

of her and i would say i

am also part of

do that are trying to find new

ways for people to collaborate to to

discuss and the do you think that

the all these people are collaborating in

a good way right now i mean

that that the intent of and i

mean

it is to facilitate dialogue and the

and for for other people like for

dollars for companies from i dunno institutions

but at the same time i think

it's important for people like and their

civic decker space to collaborate and the

do you think that this is happening

right now do you think that something

should improved do you have a message

for older people in into the civic

tech while you know it's a it's

a good question because i think there

is a systemic problem here are which

is funding

this stuff is not very profitable

and if it is built for profit

it becomes much harder to use it

at scale

i mean

basically you want this stuff to be

open source

i like palace

but if it's open source then it's

very hard to

of raise funding

it's very hard to hire like engineers

because engineers are very expensive

so all of this project they get

into this

conundrum or

you know like a difficult the situation

where are you on the one hand

it's

yeah like you want to build something

that would be very like he useful

for the humidity but also like is

not easy to fund it so it's

very hard to the build it

even if you have some kind of

a fear of change and like impact

model and you know they just like

get coin that is trying to solve

this problem with grunts radek with quadratic

funding and grunts and i guess get

coin is like a great example and

garlic there should be more

projects like bitcoin and thankfully get coin

is also developing a protocol that should

enable other communities and other organizations to

run similar like grand rounds using their

protocol of allow

and so let him get quite as

doing like an amazing job and i

want more people to know about get

coin

but also i think it's just the

way

the capital is allocated in in the

economy and maybe we need to just

i think of a new institutions that

would be focused on

like

funding this kind of projects because

yeah it's it's hot it's hard to

fund them with venture capital because venture

capitalists wants to like the next a

growth rate and the

exits and it's also not they're easy

to funded with grunts like even though

get on is doing a good job

i think it still like you can

only get when so many grunts a

year and those grants are not very

big so you can't hire a lot

of for experienced developers sir if you

just the

if your funding is coming from get

coin

so one of the things that i

was really inspired by the or excited

about his

the idea of a guilds as

basically like communities or networks that can

fundraise

and then allocate those funds among their

members

based on much deeper relationships with those

projects than the get coin the can

have rights of because get coin doesn't

care about your project get coin is

using like this kind of mathematical models

to identify projects that get the letter

like support from their communities like if

you can get a lot of people

donate then you get some funding from

gift coin

with guilds i think it's a much

more it could be much more basically

it could allow it much more substantial

funding because if a guild can find

like an institution that is aligned with

the mission of the guild it could

get a lot of money and then

it would distribute that money among members

of the guild like projects that

you know part of that guilds

network or portfolio so i guess it

it this kind of similar to venture

studio but the venture studio is it's

basically accompany you know it's a company

that is part of this kind of

capital capitalistic her

paradigm and i think the adventure split

is are amazing i think it's one

of the most interesting things happening

in terms of like startups and the

of venture capital so like you know

companies that build startups read venture builders

that's a super interesting phenomenon

you know there the community called art

thou that is trying to do something

similar but to leave the like web

three projects and it's like come into

dream and like they have discord server

and like everyone can join the server

and started contributing to those projects and

then hopefully our in there will be

able to raise for

funding itself to distribute it among those

projects but still i think it's it's

not a guilt and maybe met the

gulf could be

the that guild may be met with

medical is doing right now he could

be something similar to what's a guild

is supposed to do and i hope

that the with all the reputation of

the goodwill that medical has built over

the years it will it will be

much easier for medical to fundraise than

for her harmonica or

or the projects that are part of

the thicket of met the gulf eco-system

so i hope that

do you know we can yeah we

can design and implement this kind of

new approaches to for funding or which

wouldn't be capitalistic but also would enable

to hire engineers

yeah absolutely seems like a i mean

as as we said the before like

funding is a problem and the but

the really hope that in the next

future because of the desert ai yi

hyper

that there would be summer

new kind of findings and it's an

interesting to him

the thinks about gills and the is

there anything else that you'd like to

add the

that i have tasked okay no i

think her we have covered a lot

of important topics and the yeah i'm

grateful for the invitation this is the

first time that i to talk to

about for monica with the someone like

this like an hour interview format so

it was great for me just do

you have this kind of experience sense

ah yeah i hope that it wasn't

to that i wasn't talking to slowly

because that's one of my problems i

talk slowly

nah it's i i took in are

horrible way so i it was perfect

and it was the was very interesting

for me so thank you a lot

thank you for the opportunity to

what about the

so i