Margo Loor about CitizenOS, an open-source, community-based, grassroots decision-making platform

So welcome on another episode of Democracy Innovator podcast.

And our guest of today is Margot Lure uh from CitizenOS.

And welcome and thank you for your time.

Hi, Alessandro.

Thank you for having us.

Very happy to be here for this podcast.

uh

Thank you.

And as a first question, I will ask you what is CitizenOS?

Yeah, sure.

So CitizenOS is an online tool that grassroots communities, organizations, networks, people, villages, can use to make decisions jointly.

It has several functions.

You can use it for idea gathering at the beginning of the decision making process.

You can then move on to discussion where people present their

arguments, have an online discussion about the ideas, and then you can move on to a voting phase or seek consensus depending on what you're after.

And finally, there's a follow-up stage where the proposals that have been accepted by the community are followed up on to see if it's actually been put into practice.

it's an online tool for...

grassroots joint decision making.

And how does it work?

I mean for the the citizen?

Is there an interface he can use?

Yeah, so it's ah a SaaS tool.

So it's a software service.

go on the website.

ah You log into the web app.

um You can use your mobile device.

You can use your laptop desktop.

And then there's an interface that you use to interact with these functions.

At the moment, can citizens also organize uh idea gathering discussions or is it more like for institutions that decide to use the software?

So uh institutions can use the software, but we intended it for um grassroots networks, for non-formal citizen groups.

They can be formal.

There may be an NGO, there may be a local municipality, for example, we have several of them using CitizenOS, but the original um design was done so that it was...

either individual people or small unorganized groups of people or slightly organized groups of people, movements and the like, who can initiate idea gathering, who can

initiate the discussions.

it's not primarily or first and foremost, it's not an involvement tool or participatory policymaking tool where it's like from top down, it's primarily, its primary design is

bottom up.

Do you have any uh use case that was by some community, by some institutions, some topic that was discussed?

Okay, so let's look at a couple of uh examples.

um One example comes from Indonesia.

So uh in Indonesia, on a number of uh islands, the smaller islands, Indonesia is a nation of islands.

There's very many.

And on smaller islands, there was a big issue with uh waste management.

So in a lot of places, waste management was...

fairly non-existent.

It was piled together and then torched occasionally.

don't know if you can call that waste management.

So people were having that problem.

then discussions were initiated about what could be the possible solutions.

And during those discussions, people took the photos from their islands, different areas of the problem, and they posted it on

and citizen OS into these discussions and then they were talking about what the possible solutions could be.

And then some solution, some potential solution ideas emerged and then these were uh voted on.

And at that point, the government became involved because uh due to logistics, um it required the participation of uh

some government institutions to implement some of the ideas that had been originally initiated by um citizens from these islands.

And working solutions came from that.

So that was one example.

The other is very recent.

It's actually ongoing.

um It comes from the country that I'm in, Estonia.

uh And it was initiated by a group of um people who felt that uh we need to set as a nation or as a people, Estonians need to set a future vision and direction for the

country.

um And obviously there's a constitution which says, you know, the purpose of the country is to maintain the nation and the culture.

uh

It was a of a spreading feeling among people that there's no agreed vision of where do we want to go as Estonians, as a people.

And I was wondering, so this tool is mainly used inside Estonia or like also outside?

Citizen OS can be used anywhere, but the most recent example was within Estonia, where then the idea gathering was about the dreams that people have about where they want the

country to be um in 30 years uh time.

And it's ongoing.

So people are right now submitting different dreams.

are these groups of people gathering in different places around the country.

They're doing the

the dreaming of the future and then the writing things into uh CitizenOS.

And then in a few months time, it will be taken and written into a of a cohesive text about, you know, where do we see the country going?

So, but it's very much cross-roots initiated.

It wasn't even an organization.

It was just a group of people that started it.

I like it.

um I was thinking, how is like relationship with institutions?

Because I know that in some places, also politicians or people that are working inside institutions, are not aware of the solution that can be, technological solution, software

that can be used for political use to engage with citizens.

uh We don't actively seek them out.

However, if there is someone, and usually the story is that someone who has been a civic activist joins a movement or a party and then ends up, not ends up, but starts working for

a local government or maybe even goes to the national parliament.

And then because they are already aware of

civic tools, including citizen OS, then they sort of take us with them.

But we don't directly um market to or somehow do directed contacts with um either national or uh local governments.

So they contact you basically, I mean you or CitizenOS to use the tool for some...

Sometimes they do.

Sometimes I just noticed that they've started using.

Because you don't need to tell us that you can just come to the website, start up the web app and register an account and you can start creating a public topic or a private topic

or an idea gathering.

But sometimes if um they feel that they need us to do some...

training for them beforehand on how to use the tool in the best way, then they do contact them.

We're actually in the process of writing up, we had some good cooperation with some local governments and then we are in the next month or so we're writing up a better described

use case em about how CitizenOS was used by a local municipality to engage citizens.

So just to showcase that you can use it the other way around too.

Even though the primary design is bottom-up, then it can be used for participatory policymaking as well.

I was curious about the design of the platform.

ah What is the story behind?

if there was someone that designed a team of people, how old it is as CitizenOS?

Yeah, okay, I'll try to make it brief.

So, CitizenOS grew out of another civic movement, which was called at first, let's do it Estonia and later, world cleanup.

It was an ecological movement.

And different countries were doing these like massive national cleanups where people would come out and in one or two days clean up their country of

garbage that was lying around that were like in nature and places where it's not supposed to be.

And then a few countries after they had done it for a few years, like once a year, em but then the next year they see that it needs to be done again because waste management wasn't

proper and people were still throwing garbage in places it shouldn't be.

They asked, okay, so how long do we keep doing this?

And that's what led us to think that maybe we should

create a tool that enables or what if there were a tool that would enable people to jointly think about how would we like the waste to be managed so that we wouldn't have to

clean the country every year.

And that sort of started the thinking towards, let's create this tool.

design-wise, we're right now on our third version of design.

So it's been um

eh iterations towards where we are now.

And there are a number of design choices which you, like maybe if you go to the uh portal for the first time, you don't consciously notice, but a lot of thought has gone into them.

for example, I think in most places these days, you can create the personal profile.

You can put your like photo and things.

We don't,

I mean, there is somewhat the very minimal profile, but we don't show whenever you post an argument, we don't show your picture next to it because we don't want it to be about

persons or people.

We want it to be about the discussion to be about the content, the arguments.

So unlike many other places where people can comment and we and for example, there's no comments.

You can post arguments.

So it asks, OK, so what's your point?

And how do you explain and prove it?

So there are these design choices or design features that aim to make it a uh rational discussion instead of

something that becomes emotionally bloated.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I was thinking, you are probably updating the software, I mean, with new ideas or not.

I mean, is there anything you're working on right now, new features?

There's a bunch of things in the pipeline, but the past two months, two or three months and the upcoming few are difficult for us right now.

So right now, within the next, I would say like two or three months, we're solving some bugs and issues, but we're not coming out with new

big new features.

Obviously, there's a lot of thinking around and so far we've been very careful about AI em due to all kinds of different reasons, but the world seems to be moving in that direction

so powerfully that uh it may still be useful in what we do as well.

If I give you one quick example, then

then if very many people give their idea or opinion or argument about something, then it becomes overwhelming.

And it's difficult to have an overview of, okay, so what's the general mindset that is being expressed?

uh And in such things, AI obviously has its strengths.

However, it also has the things we're careful of, like the biases and...

and things.

So, are we maintaining the code?

Yes.

Are there features we're thinking about or that are in the backlog?

Yes.

Right now, a slower period for us within the half a year period or so.

It's interesting because um some other projects that we, I mean people that we interviewed, they were working on some new software for Civic Tech and the software was

new and was also using AI while CitizenOS is pre-AI.

And so at the moment it doesn't use AI at all, right?

Okay, so you're trying to find a way to implement it in a cautious way.

uh

take what's valuable but without the problems that have already been sort of identified.

I'm not saying um AI is bad or it's good summarily.

eh I think if it's a considered aware design choice and you build your tool so that you

know about the possible problems and you design for them, then I don't see a problem with it.

I'm certain that we will be using some.

In fact, this isn't right now a feature of CitizenOS, but the Estonian Dreaming project that I described, there actually AI is going to be used because if 35,000 or 50,000 people

submit their dreams, then it will be very difficult to work with that amount of information without using a large language model.

So one will be used to em detect common themes and bring out the common dreams that people have about the country.

m yeah, that's the direction it's going to take anyway.

I was curious about all the other ideas in the pipeline.

I suppose ideas that maybe will require m maybe a lot of time to be developed, or maybe they are just ideas at the moment.

But if you can share any of them, or maybe you can't, I don't know.

um There's a number of things that have to do with m integrations, which aren't that exciting to talk about.

But um maybe it's more important or relevant to say that if someone is listening and they have been using CitizenOS, say, a few years ago, because we've been around for a number of

years now, eh then what they haven't seen and they should come and see on the platform.

is the idea gathering functionality, which we released quite recently.

It's the latest big, big, big update to the platform.

Because again, we put a lot of thought into it.

there's a...

em I've been doing as a moderator, I've been helping...

em

some of the processes in Estonia where people have come together for citizen assemblies and joint decision-making processes.

And sometimes in the beginning of those, um idea gathering was done using very simplistic tools like here's a Google form, submit, and nobody could comment on or upvote or downvote

each other's ideas or any of that.

all of the dreams that we had about like what would an ideal idea gathering look like we put into the design brief and then eventually released as a big sort of feature update.

So I would say, know, if you haven't used that but you're aware of CitizenOS then come and give that a try.

It's something that I'm sort of excited about and excited to use.

also curious to try it.

And I was thinking about integrations.

um Could it be also integration with other civic tech software?

Ha!

Made it.

a very interesting one.

mean, we can definitely talk about that one because now when I said integrations, I was thinking more along the lines of integrations with identification tools because one big

area in civic or participatory or et cetera tools is how do you make sure that the people that are participating are real people em at the same time without em

endangering people's identities somehow if a bad actor wants to target them.

So it's a big thinking uh area.

the question that you actually asked about integration with other civic tech tools, I've been thinking about it for almost as long as CitizenOS has existed.

We have data formats for a number of things.

So if you have a spreadsheet, then we have data formats that you can

use.

if you open the file up in Excel, it will look like a table.

And if you open it up in Google Sheets, it will still look like a table and all the data will be there and correctly formatted.

Or to look at the larger example, um something that I'm also working with are online courses.

online learning and online courses, they have this data format called SCORM.

oh

if you create an online course, can import it into many different learning management systems, and it will still look more or less the same because the SCORM format is

recognized.

We don't have that.

Or at least I'm not aware.

Maybe you are.

But I don't think we have that for a decision.

But I think we should because when we started thinking about uh CitizenOS in the beginning, and we thought, OK, what are the stages of decision making?

Then we thought

or we still think that they're fairly standard stages.

So gather ideas, talk about ideas, select the ones that you want to vote on, vote, follow up.

So why couldn't we?

We can't do it single-handedly, but why couldn't we create a sort of a data interchange format where if you have a, and I think,

It's less likely that in the middle of the process, you would want to transfer from CitizenOS to Moodamos to the Icelandic software, etc.

It's more realistic, though, that if you have like a say, you're say you're I don't know Fridays for Future and you've been using a civic tech tool and you have a history of

decisions you've made and then the civic tech tool, I don't know, closes down, something happens and you want to migrate it.

um so that you wouldn't lose all of your history of the past decisions.

And maybe some of them are still being applied.

That's where something like this would be immensely helpful.

So if there are people listening to this podcast that are aware of maybe already a pre-existing tool or are running other civic tech tools and have also thought about the

same thing, I think this would be extremely interesting if it came out of this.

Yeah, interoperability, thinking, uh I know that, I mean, also Metagov is working on that and also other uh organizations are very interested by maybe creating this standard

between so that

Yeah, that is interesting about recovering the history of and moving it to a new software, but also like thinking about maybe, I don't know, doing brainstorming with a platform and

then a rotation on another platform and so on.

also, but also that is a little, it seems not so easy to do it uh at the moment, but I know that there are people that are working on

on it.

Okay, that's excellent.

At the moment, I think it's quite difficult to do this, or there's a lot of manuals of copy-pasting or whatnot.

But if that would be the case at one point, I think that would be a tremendous addition to the whole city tech field.

Yes, maybe, yeah, at the moment some uh trials with human in the middle can be done to see if it works and then automatize everything and maybe...

um Also, I'm thinking that um probably in the next few years with this increasing...

I mean, AI is...

is becoming better every month.

And so probably we will see also a new kind of civic tech uh software that maybe revolutionize everything.

ah I don't know, I'm very curious actually.

It's, yeah, I just had a discussion today with some people about the moment in history where we are is like, it's, I don't know, maybe again, you or someone else has other

ideas.

I personally think that it,

It looks like AI is going to free up people's time.

It looks like there's going to be more people who have less to do.

Now, there's a bad way to think about it, or uh a negative way to think about it, and positive way to think it.

The negative way to think about it is, OK, lots of people unemployed.

But I have a good friend who says that it is strange that in the 21st century, countries still measure their success by how many people have to work.

So, if we combine the ongoing AI revolution with things like um civic salary, I'm not sure about the English term, uh basic universal income, something like that.

So, if we imagine a positive future around this scenario where um

we go from a five-day work week to a four-day work week to a three-day work week.

Okay, three is maybe thinking too far, maybe four-day work week.

And then there's an element of universal basic income.

Then there's a question of, so people have extra time.

Right now, in a lot of cases, the counter argument to more civic participation has been, I don't have time.

Like I work nine to six, nine to seven.

I don't have mental space, don't have physically, I don't have time.

Then more people would have more time.

my hope is that as it goes on, we can increase the amount of input people have into running their societies and running their communities.

But I'm an optimist.

Yeah, I'm thinking also about what is work, ah because now it seems that one of the most important things are data.

And so if we are talking, also can be like a sort of data extraction, data mining.

So in some way, we are also working just if we talk.

So I imagine like with some civic...

some software, the transcription of what we say can actually be like uh the production of something valuable.

um

We do, and I think a lot of civic tech tools work with universities um because there are researchers looking into the data that is uh coming out of civic tech tools to better

understand digital participation and how to govern communities and societies uh digitally.

uh

We also have cooperation with and are right now negotiating a new um cooperation with Italian University here in Estonia, but a few others too that we've cooperated with in

other countries over the years.

So I very much think that civic tools are a source of valuable data as long as it's properly

properly managed and.

guarded.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I was thinking also about motivation, because uh it is true what you say, like a lot of time people say, yeah, have to work, I cannot participate in the public life.

um

And so I thought, yeah, of course in the future if people have more time, maybe they can participate.

It is also true that apparently now people have more time than in the past, but still there are a lot of distractions, media and so on.

em So I'm wondering if there could be other ways to motivate people.

So I'm thinking about gamification and also thought about systems where...

I don't know if a student decides to uh participate in something related to climate change, to environment and so on.

Maybe they can receive a um free bus ticket or a free pizza in a restaurant.

Because I also feel that there are a lot of people that could be the owner of a pizzeria that maybe he is a sensible to.

He has a political sensibility, but maybe he doesn't have time or he doesn't have the energy or maybe he doesn't know where to start.

Because it's also like, usually young people are the ones that want to change the world, while older people usually they demotivated in some way.

uh Well, let me quickly share a dream that I have and it relates to what you say.

um You talked about it on a more sort of granular level and I think it's interesting, especially if you um think about how could we create the sort of a wider system where uh

civic participation would be a um value to trade, but not in the bad sense.

But I do think we uh in certain areas should, and in fact, in certain areas we do compensate civic participation.

um The dream then is that in Estonia we have a one chamber parliament.

So it's only elected representatives that sit in the one chamber of the parliament.

But I've asked people, what if we had

two chambers where one chamber is the representatives, the elected representatives, and the second chamber is a sort of a permanent people's assembly uh where a random but

representative body of people um would participate or discuss the most important issues for uh some period of time, let's say half a year.

you are similar to sort of national, okay, maybe mandatory national services isn't a good idea.

Maybe US jury service is a good idea, good example.

So when they select the jury, they look at the voters list and then they randomly pick the people from the voters list and then they invite them for jury service.

And if you don't have a good reason to say no, you can't say no.

So in the same manner,

uh citizens would receive invitation to participate in this permanent people's assembly or the second chamber of the parliament.

em And uh while they are participating for that half a year, their time would be compensated.

And that would then mean they would uh need to look at jointly and discuss the most important or the most...

bills that influence people's lives the most.

They couldn't be expected to look at everything that the parliament works with because there's lots of small amendments and things, but look at the big bills.

Then in half a year's time, they are thanked, they go their own way, and then a new body of people uh is invited.

If something like that were to happen, then I think we can't make it happen

or shouldn't make it happen by saying to people that, this is something you must do and we won't compensate.

think there compensating people's civic participation would be very much uh appropriate.

Yeah, absolutely.

Also, I'm thinking like in ancient Greek democracy, mean, citizens were compensated because they were losing their losing, I mean, their day m because they had to vote and so

they could not work.

And also it's the same with professional politicians.

So, I mean, they are paid and so they should be citizens.

And I think about many times I asked myself,

ah what could be the future of democracy.

um I think maybe in 20 or 30 years.

uh And that could also be a question if you have any idea about it.

But also, ah it's very interesting, em the approach that can be taken to arrive to that uh kind of democracy.

um

So because now we have a certain kind of mainly in Europe or in the US, Western democracy, liberal democracy system.

And yeah, I'm thinking about what you proposed is a sort of maybe hybridization, a sort of test.

And then other tests can be done.

So the system doesn't change from day to night.

So if you have anything to share.

Yeah, think like revolutions where we throw out everything that has pre-existed and then try to put a new thing in place.

I think those are dangerous.

Karl Popper said that you shouldn't experiment on people and societies.

should sort of properly think about and create all the best arguments, but best arguments require good evidence.

and evidence isn't readily available unless you run these tests, unless you try things out and see how it goes.

And therefore, whenever either a city like Paris or some other place uses either participatory or online participatory methods, I always look at them with curiosity

because how they go provides arguments for

for or evidence for arguments for or against change.

Well, I mean, the most common sentence that you hear around and I agree with that sentence is that we're trying to run 21st century, highly technological societies using 16th or

17th century political technology or political system.

And the gap is growing.

On the one hand, I'm worried, a great deal worried when I look at democracy indexes, which year on year are showing the decline of democracy.

So less democratic countries and within the countries, less democracy or less uh civic space.

um But at the other, at the same time, on the other hand, I think it might be that what we're seeing is that

transformation of democracy.

And if we measure the sort of old classical uh indicators, then we see decline.

But if we looked at a new changed set of uh indicators, we would actually see um more activism and more desire and wish to participate by people.

um But it looks different.

It's not the same.

type of legitimacy that we were looking for in democracy in the previous century and not the same type of formal organized participation that we were looking for.

So in terms of the future, I can't paint an exact picture, obviously, but it definitely has a strong technological component because that's what the human future tends to look

like in all areas.

And it seems to, and that's something I'm happy about, it seems to also have a strong participatory component because people seem to be willing to, not just willing to, but

demanding to participate in certain aspects of society.

If any chance at all is given to them, obviously, if everything is suppressed, then they can't do it, which, worryingly, is also a trend in some countries.

I agree with you.

also thinking like this, I mean less people are voting, but I'm thinking that a lot of people are using such networks and also if putting like is not as voting, it's like a sort

of necessity to participate and express it in this way because those are the tools that we, um that most of the people are using at the moment.

Well, I most people in the world don't have the experience of online voting because only a few countries in the world have it.

But, you know, I've had that experience luckily in Estonia for 10 years now where uh liking something on social media and voting in national or local elections is...

only very slightly different.

The difference, I mean, in terms of what it involves as a process, the only step that goes in there is the identification step that I need to verify my identity with the ID

infrastructure.

But otherwise, it's I'm selecting who I like on screen and then clicking like and voting for them.

um

It's been very, very controversial in the world.

In Estonia, too, there are people that have arguments against it.

But I think we would see a lot more voting if this was available in more countries.

Interesting also, uh I know that Estonia on this uh side is quite progressive, no, how would you define it compared to other countries?

Yeah.

Where's mine?

Wait, just one second.

The thing we all carry around, the national identity card, because it has an electronic identification site to it, so it's not just a physical card, enables, if I need to or if I

want to, to identify myself beyond any doubt or hack or anything online, which means that when I talk,

online or interact online with my government or my country, then my government or my country knows that it's um And that enables a lot of other things.

So it enables a lot of e-services and it also enables online voting.

And it is this component, I think mostly even this component, which is something that people oppose in many countries.

Like they don't want a uh

government uh issued national identity system enabling your identification online.

And historically, and I can understand their reasons, but in the modern day and age, think, you're traceable online anyway, maybe doing the good stuff online with online

identities is something that we should.

be more open to.

Yeah, I agree that it's a quite sensible topic.

No, I can understand why some people disagree.

it can be...

um But going back to...

by the way, the last comment is that that's because on CitizenOS we enable people to either use their hard identification, the ID system in Estonia, or then use the soft

identification, just use their Google or whatnot logins.

because some of those decisions that communities or people make if they want them to be sent forward for implementation in Estonia to local government.

or even as a proposal to the national government, then it needs to have strong identification.

However, if you're just making a decision for your own village, there's no reason to necessarily do the strong identification.

You can just do your uh Google login and then use CitizenOS that way.

So we enable both.

different layers of authentication.

it makes sense.

And I was wondering about the team, because about the team of CitizenOS, how many people are working there?

What are the...

modern organizations, it's difficult to say an exact number.

It's more like a cloud of people.

We have more people in Indonesia than we have in Estonia.

We have two main locations.

So one is Indonesia and one is Estonia.

um But between those two locations, I think I'm not incorrect when I say that altogether around 25 people are

in one way or another contributing to CitizenOS.

So they might be um working, they might be volunteering, they might be uh contributing part-time.

um Like I said, we're in a difficult period right now, so we've had to scale that uh back.

But that applies to mostly Estonian side.

Indonesia is doing great.

And what are you struggling at as an organization?

Or you specifically, if you're working on something or you know something, someone in the organization, you're working on a new future or something, but you need...

I don't know, maybe you're not able to solve something and you're thinking day and night about...

Maybe someone that listens can...

I decide to contact you with a very good idea.

uh So, mean, organizationally, but that I think isn't something that would interest your organization.

We're reworking our financial model.

So, we used to have for many years a very good and steady source of income and that has recently changed.

And now we're in a fairly short period of time having to rework our

financial model, which does actually mean that if that we're looking for, especially within EU countries, we're looking for sort of cooperation um partners that we can uh join

um to because different EU projects require organizations from other member states to coordinate.

um and we've done that in the past, but it would be interesting to.

to find maybe new partners m as well.

But otherwise, think a few years ago, we wrote down these like uh big unsolved issues in uh participatory decision-making.

And I've mentioned m them here during the discussion already, but to sort of clearly name them, one is the issue of identification.

So it's easy when a country has some kind of national system.

A lot of countries don't.

And then it becomes even like more problematic is like, how can you?

We've talked to Switzerland and a lot of time they're trying to move their very excellent offline participatory system into a more.

online because of younger generation and struggling with identification among other things.

So the second big thing is the problem of sort of massive participation.

So if you have to say you're the European Commission, you ask for citizens of EU to participate on a decision and then five million people participate and contribute their

opinion and then you're like.

OK, what do we do with five million opinions?

How do we understand what people actually want to say?

So that's another one.

And I think there are interesting solutions or interesting ideas that have been created.

um But it's not, I wouldn't say like check mark solved, AI came and solved it due to the sort of like

biases it can have and em

and some of the other known sorting issues.

Then obviously there's the big problem is, is deliberate bad actors.

So if you have um someone uh inserting, know, fake news or information attacks into the decision-making, it was interesting when we,

uh When we uh started creating in Estonia a uh separate tool which was originally based on citizen OS code, we have an open source code so anybody can come and take the code and do

with it what they wish and also check it.

And people have.

uh But we created a separate tool for the Estonian parliament so that uh people could do

um petitions or people's, yeah, let's say petition.

And you need a thousand people to sign it in Estonia in order for it to be considered by the national parliament.

And then we asked the Parliament Information Office, we said, you know, what if a hostile country will pay a thousand people, I don't know, 500 euros a piece and ask them to submit

three petitions per day and sort of overwhelm the parliament.

So do a denial of service attack, not the technical one, but like a content one.

But they seemed very, very unfazed.

said,

let's solve the problem when we get there.

But I see it as an issue.

One thing is if someone does an overwhelming um information attack.

The other thing is if you're being clever about it and inserting bits of false data or false information into a public uh or participatory decision making.

m

Those kinds of things is a third thing that not only we, but I think many others are thinking about.

So does it keep us up at night?

Not really, but is it something we think about?

Then yeah, absolutely.

Both the registration and how to scale the information system are both, I would say, interesting problems.

I also thought a little bit about the identification systems.

I don't know if I have any solution.

Not now, not at the moment.

I haven't asked anything about you, so if you'd like to share anything about your professional background...

So, and also academic, how it happened that you became passionate about.

civic tech participation.

So everything I've done in my adult life falls into a triangle, is uh technology, then uh open society and education.

within that triangle is where I operate, even though I originally uh studied law and I even worked in a law firm for four or five years.

uh

And

The technology part is simple.

I grew up in the first wave of home accessible computers and the early internet where you had to write your own tools and coding was massively exciting.

And that sort of got me started on the technology.

And I'm like an early adopter of things.

m

Citizen OS isn't using AI at the moment.

I myself am a heavy user.

So that part is easy.

Now, the open society part, that came to me via something called the debate movement, which is something I got involved in when I was in high school.

um And that led me to the ideas of, you

Karl Popper and having good arguments and trying to make rational decisions and building processes where you don't primarily look at the emotion, but look at what is the reason

and what is the evidence.

And that sort of grew into also at the time in Estonia, the whole organized civic sector was starting up.

we established the

the first bigger NGOs which are still around.

And so that sort of got me started.

So it's been these kinds of activities that have brought me to where CitizenOS was initiated and is today.

And do you have anything to share about your personal life?

Like, did you grow up?

Also related to your childhood?

Well, I mean, there's

Estonia was occupied by the Soviet Union at the time when I was born and during my early childhood.

And so I have a vague memory of what the sort of repressive communist regime looks like from the inside.

Obviously, I didn't bear the brunt of it because I was a kid.

vividly remember the moment where Estonia was nearing uh the regaining of our independence.

I had to before that on my school uniform, I had to wear the uh red flag of the Soviet Union.

So uh I took it off and I remember the bush on my school street where I sort of threw it in the bush.

and replaced it with our national flag.

And I've often been said that I couldn't picture myself living in a non-open society.

this is, it's something which is a very vital part of me.

And that's why I do what I can to preserve

the participation, the discussion, the openness of talking about decisions and jointly making decisions that influence people's lives.

it's sort of personally important.

Thank you.

as maybe the last question, if you have any message for the people in the civic tech space that are working, I don't know, creating new tools or maybe trying to do what you're doing

but in other countries.

sure.

mean, like, keep innovating.

There's a number of fields where um outside of civic tech, mean, where we can say that, OK, we've arrived at some plateau.

Civic tech isn't one of them.

think it's a vibrant area.

There's challenges to address.

eh Maybe I'm a little, sometimes I'm a little not worried, but.

It makes me think that uh there are uh e-governance tools, but maybe a little less e-democracy tools.

So I would be even more uh enthusiastic or joyful if I saw that within the whole like civic tech uh field, the e-democracy tools part of it, uh grow more or more innovation.

um happening there.

you know, some of them will only be sort of time limited ah tests, as you said, but those tests are valuable.

So even if we're doing something with like project funding for a limited time period, then if you're able to document and leave the results you achieved somehow to last, even when

the tool maybe shuts down, then that is very valuable because it

provides evidence for the arguments for a new type of democracy that is in the process of being born.

I think it's very, very exciting to see where it goes.

So keep innovating.

So thank you a lot, Margot.

It was a pleasure, really.

Yes, very nice.

Really enjoyed the discussion.

Thank you.