Magnus Strobel about the Future of Civic Engagement: Inside the Nexus Politics Platform

Welcome on another episode of Democracy Innovators podcast and our guest of today is Magnus Trubel.

em Magnus is working on Nexus Politics and thank you for your time, Magnus.

Well, Alessandro, thank you for having me.

It's a great pleasure to be here and finally being able to join your podcast and talk with you about all the important things that are going on in our ecosystem right now.

I hope the same.

And as a first question, what is Nexus politics?

You want the long or the short answer?

You can start with the short one, maybe.

Okay, short one would be it's a digital democracy platform that is partially a GovTech solution, partially a CivicTech solution.

So we're offering citizens um the opportunity to easily voice their opinions, concerns, problems, and then we are connecting them with the responsible politicians to make sure

that they can be accountable and give updates on

what they're doing in order to address these problems and also give them insights into public opinion.

So that's it in a nutshell, I would say, but there's more to it.

And what about the long answer?

It's interesting.

The long version would be, so first of all, that the problem that we want to address is like the growing dissatisfaction with democracy.

So that's something which is not just prevalent in Germany, but I guess it's all over, like at least in all Western democracies.

And in our opinion, so what is our opinion?

So that's me, my co-founder Christoph Waffler.

um

We um had a long discussion and many thoughts about what is the core problem of why people are becoming more more increasingly dissatisfied with democracy.

And one of the reasons that we came up with was a lack of representation.

So many people don't feel represented anymore by their elected officials.

And I think it's not just our hunch, but it's also like uh baked by data.

So there's, for instance, m

a study by the Pew Research Center, which was conducted, I guess, in 2023.

And there they looked at citizens for more than 24 democracies and surveyed like more than 30,000 people.

And they found that overall, like 59 % of the citizens are dissatisfied with like the way that democracy is working currently.

So that's a shockingly high number in our opinion.

And

Like 42 % of the citizens didn't feel represented by at least one party in the parliament.

So that's also shockingly high.

And lastly, about 74 % of the citizens did not believe that politicians care about their opinions or what people like them think.

And all these numbers, I guess, show that there's a huge lack of representation.

people don't feel represented by their politicians.

And of course, there's also a core problem to this.

So this is just the surface, but the underlying core problem is in our opinion that there's a lack of reliable real-time data on public opinion, which is basically limiting

politicians in their ability to make data-driven decision-making and good representative decision-making.

And this is due to a couple of effects.

If you look at the status quo, like how politicians right now form their beliefs about what their constituents think, there are a couple of ways they're doing it.

For instance, they can use polls, but polls are quite expensive and are conducted very infrequent.

And also this might be done on the federal level, but probably not so much on the local municipal level or state level.

And then there's legacy media.

The problem there is that you have an editorial bias.

So depending on which newspaper you read, you get a totally different opinion on what uh people might think.

Then there's social media, of course.

In social media, you get all different voices, but the problem there is it's very unstructured.

It's noisy within your eco chambers and so on.

And then, of course, there's citizen feedback.

But citizen feedback, problem with that is that it's very unrepresentative and selective.

So if I would be a politician, I get approached by my voters mostly.

So that's a huge selection bias in what I get to hear and what I get to see.

ah And then, yeah, the solution we came up with is like a platform um which allows citizens to voice their

opinions because people have their beliefs, have their opinions and they're basically looking for tools where they can express it, where they can reach politicians easily.

And we are empowering them by giving them an easy tool which they can use to effectively reach the politicians that are in charge, that are responsible.

m

The way it works is we have kind of a chat window where citizens can just voice their opinions, what's bothering them, the problems, issues, et cetera.

And then uh our artificial intelligence will analyze uh the expression of the citizen, will identify the core issue, and will then classify that and based on the location, based

on the category and so on, it will automatically assign it to the responsible politician.

So that's the first problem we are solving here for citizens.

Because, um for instance, me as a citizen, if I have a problem, I would not automatically know for sure who's the right person to contact.

But we're facilitating that process by directly sending it to the responsible politician.

And then they are aware of the issue.

And you um get assigned as a citizen a problem ID.

And based on that problem ID,

you can basically track the entire legislative process, like from problem creation all the way up to it being resolved and probably or hopefully ending up in the legislative act,

which solves or addresses this issue.

And like this is the whole process.

And then once we have all the data on what people think, then we can help politicians make better informed decisions.

by giving them kind of a dashboard for public opinion analytics.

And on that dashboard, they have different features where they can analyze by category, where they can analyze by time.

So they can see which problems are trending, for instance, in their constituency.

They can see it on a heat map.

um They can analyze it by social demographics and so on.

So this is all data which citizens can provide voluntarily.

in order to allow politicians to make better informed decisions.

And this is the first step in our project, but of course we are very ambitious, so we want to extend the whole product by adding additional features, because once we start from the

very beginning, like from the problems all the way to the solutions, are of course different steps in between.

So we want to add...

like add additional features like um crowd lawmaking, for instance, so that we can engage citizens more in the legislative process.

um We offer opinion polls so that politicians can get additional insights on what citizens think.

yeah, for public officials, uh we are offering a customer relationship management system.

So it's a dedicated system for public officials.

where they can manage their constituent requests and yeah, better, give better updates on what they are doing in contrast to how it works right now.

So status quo would probably be like, I send an email to my politician, voice my concern or issue, then I get a very nice email.

as a reply saying, well, thank you, Magnus, it's a very important issue.

And then I probably never hear back from them.

And with our tool, you can track the whole process.

And for politicians, it makes it much more efficiently because they have their own workspace so they can collaborate with other politicians from the same party, for

instance, and therefore, yeah, get being

being closer to their constituents and giving better feedback on what's actually happening.

So we are opening up the black box of politics, so to say.

I was wondering when you first had the idea that technology could be helpful to the political life.

when we had this idea.

Yeah, when you had this idea or maybe like many years ago, you have read a book, you realize that it was useful to use technology inside the political sphere.

Yeah.

Well, first of all, as a German, I'm one of the many who are very frustrated with how public administration works here.

So just the other day I spent like a whole afternoon in the municipal office just to register my apartment for another place.

yeah, so I feel like there's a lot which can be done more effectively and efficiently with technology.

So that has been a feeling for a while and I think I'm not unique to this.

But in general, I came very much in contact with these new technologies like AI during my PhD.

So there I got the chance to sign up for OpenAI as a beta tester, kind of, so I could use the product early on, see what it could do.

Yeah, but back then, I, to be honest, didn't have in mind that we can directly apply it to politics.

uh So that was more like we came up uh together, like with Christoph, my co-founder.

So he's the tech guy in our team.

He's a, I tend to call him a child prodigy because he's uh first of all, very young, but also super, super smart.

And he um knows like ways to

use technology for the better and help us with making our products efficiently and apply it there.

Yeah, and about your PhD, would you like to share something about your academic background?

Sure.

What have you studied?

um So by training and I'm an economist, um so that probably happened by chance, I would say.

So I got my high school diploma in 2008.

And back then, as you might know, there was the great financial crisis.

And yeah, I was always interested in what was going on.

um So I read the newspapers, but to be honest, I didn't have any clue about.

um why it should affect me in my small town in Germany if like some stock market indices are crashing in New York.

So I got interested in economics.

um Everyone told me, well, if you want to understand that kind of thing, you should study economics.

So that's what I did.

I got my bachelor's and master's in economics and was always also very interested in the human side.

So with human side, mean,

psychology of people, like why do people behave the way they do?

I mean, that's also a big part in the financial world, because you have all kind of irrationalities people tend to exhibit.

So behavioral biases, like hurting behavior, and stuff like that.

And um yeah, this is what I focused on in my PhD.

So I got a PhD in behavioral economics, which is like in between economics and psychology.

So why do people behave the way they do?

And how can we achieve that people make better decisions?

um So for instance, save more for retirement and stuff like that.

And um yeah, I got lucky that I was accepted at Technical University of Munich for my PhD.

Studied there for five years.

Got a lot of interesting insights.

Also worked with machine learning during my PhD.

um became familiar with the basics, at least how it works.

And um yeah, after that, I worked in finance, got some got some experience there, but I was always very interested in entrepreneurship.

um So for instance, even during my bachelor's already, I was working as a student research assistant at the LMU Entrepreneurship Lab, or Center and yeah, got

got my first exposure there, met some very incredible people there and ever since was eh on my agenda to um maybe also become an entrepreneur one day and finally it happened now.

I was thinking about this dissatisfaction, I mean that people do not feel represented and I was trying to, because there is this question in my mind every time, why people do not

participate in the public life, why they do behave in this way.

And I was wondering how it can be associated with some...

You mentioned like a behaviour economy.

um Yeah, I don't know if you have any idea.

um First of all, guess people are lazy and you have to make it very easy for them to participate in the public life and to be civically engaged.

And I guess that's one of the key problems we are facing that uh there are a lot of formats which um require you to be available at certain times, for instance.

So like you can go to evening events, talk to politicians there, et cetera, but you also have to be there in person.

And that makes it tricky for people who are um working regular jobs and so on.

So um we should definitely decrease the threshold or lower the threshold for people to engage by offering them first digital access, um then also making it possible to...

attend asynchronous, not in real time, but share your opinions whenever it's suitable for you.

um Because you might come up with something that's bothering you at one point, but then um you might have forgotten about it until there's an opportunity to raise your voice and

communicate it to your uh local representative.

And I guess whatever we can do in order to decrease that

participation threshold helps to get more and more people engaged and the more people we get engaged, the higher the representativeness and the better it is for democracy.

this is what we are trying to achieve.

um Creating a very inclusive environment which makes it very easy for people to participate when they want, where they want and the way they want.

So either by voicing their

opinion publicly or also privately because sometimes you might have issues, concerns that you're not willing to share in public but which is still very important to you and

therefore we have to give citizens ways to achieve that and that's what we're trying to achieve with Nexus Politics.

And from the idea to the product, how it was the journey.

So all the steps.

a roller coaster ride as probably most entrepreneurs might say.

Well, but to be honest, right now, um most roller coasters start by raising going up very steeply.

So it has been the same for us.

So I met my co-founder Christoph last year through the Entrepreneurial Network of Technical University of Munich.

oh

Then we started brainstorming about our product, about our idea.

And towards the end of the year, it got more serious.

So we started applying for funding.

And then we got lucky by having been selected for the Exist scholarship.

Exist Gründerstipendium, that's how it's called in German.

And there we get support by the Federal Ministry for Economics.

and also the European Social Fund.

So we are fully funded for a whole year now.

And yeah, we tackled most of the obstacles at the beginning.

So we also got office space at the Technical University in the incubator.

We got all kind of support from Technical University.

So it's a really, really great environment to build your company.

It's probably one of the best in the world.

I would say like you get startup consultancy, which you can use for free.

So we had our own startup consultant um shout out to them.

um Big thanks for the help.

And um they help you navigate all these steps, which you're required to do at the very beginning, like giving you insights on funding opportunities and so on.

um Now we got office space, we got funding.

um Currently we are

like enlarging our team so we get some students supporting us in our project.

um yeah, we are currently working on our prototype.

So we got some politicians that we are working with.

So we spoke with lots of politicians from all levels, like in the German Bundestag, like federal level, state level, so the Bavarian Parliament and also the local level.

And um yeah.

Many of them are sharing insights on what they need, what they would like us to build.

So we are trying to approach this whole thing very need-based in a sense that they tell us what their pain points are, and then we are trying to address it directly and uh

incorporating it in our product.

And um yeah, of course, there are obstacles, but that's the fun part, I guess, you want to challenge.

accept the challenge and master it quite well.

And so far it's going well.

have lot of uh getting a lot of traction and attention.

So we have been invited at many different events where we can present our idea.

And um yeah, we are already getting at this point where we are not just reaching out to people, but people are reaching out to us and offering their support and so on.

So it's a great journey.

um

highly encouraging others to also embark on this journey and give it a try.

And I guess that's the most important thing.

You just have to get started at one point.

You'll probably pivot another million times, but that's part of the journey.

And eventually it will hopefully bring you somewhere and allow you to make some impact along the way.

Yeah, sometimes we think too much.

Maybe like doing it can be a way of also modifying our idea, changing our idea on the way.

And I was curious because I remember that you organized also Nakaton with students.

And how did it work?

It was a great success.

So we are always looking for people supporting us.

And one idea was to engage students who are very interested in our idea and give them the opportunity to collaborate with us and provide us with some interesting insights in how

they would solve our problems.

So what we did is we partnered with the public makers.

a great student initiative also at the Technical University.

And they helped us setting up the uh hackathon in Heilbronn at the campus there.

And at the beginning, we were expecting maximum 20 students to participate.

But it turned out we got like more than 40 coming to our event.

And we posted three different challenges.

um

where students could come up with their own solutions, like technical challenges.

for instance, showing different, uh like creating a heat map, for instance, where we can exhibit all the issues which citizens are facing.

And yeah, at the end of the day, we got very interesting results out of that and very good connections with the students, was a great atmosphere.

and I guess helped us oh quite a bit in our journey.

And with politicians, you said that you talk to them, I mean, you talk to politicians of every level.

And I was wondering um what was their preparation um compared to these kind of technologies?

I mean, they were just excited because it was something new.

Or do you think that they were like...

uh

I don't know.

um So I guess you could get politicians from all kind of walks of life, so different backgrounds and so on.

And therefore some are very interested, some are not so much.

um But overall, I guess there's a very, very good feedback from politicians that are very interested in our product overall.

I would say just because um

we decided that our business model will be such that we are offering the customer relationship management system for free for politicians because that gives politicians the

opportunity to be accountable to their constituents.

And this is creating the largest impact.

And um also because it offers us the opportunity to gather a lot of data, like then uh whatever data uh

citizens complain already to politicians will then be routed via our platform and with this data we can kind of solve the chicken egg problem of getting citizens respectively

politicians in our platform and yeah since we offer this for free to politicians there's a lot of interest because it definitely gives them a value add.

Because right now, um I guess most politicians don't have a dedicated CIM system which they're using in their daily work.

some, most I guess work with like Microsoft Outlook for getting emails, inbound emails from citizens.

And then some are using Excel sheets maybe to track like who complained about what and when.

And sometimes they might send them an update, but most...

Mostly they don't.

And we are basically offering the first dedicated system for politicians that they can use.

Therefore, there's a lot of interest in that.

Of course, there are also parts about our product which they don't like that much.

So the transparency part maybe where we want to make politics a little more measurable and

make it more transparent for citizens like what their elected officials are doing.

But of course, that also depends on the politicians.

There some who embrace it and see it as a big step forward in the way democracy should work.

uh But yeah, it's as always in life, the ups and downs and pros and cons.

And overall, would still say politicians uh are very

eager to see our product finally launching.

uh then, uh yeah, it's also because we engage with them quite well.

Like we, uh as I mentioned, we give them the opportunity to uh suggest features and tools they are looking for, they are needing.

And since uh we work with them so closely, I guess they really feel heard and they feel like they can, yeah.

get something out of that collaboration because at the end of the day it will be a great product or tool that they can use in their daily lives which saves them lot of work.

um So just to give you an example, for instance, within one party, um sometimes it happens that several politicians within one party get the same email from the same citizen, then

they by accident might find out that uh they all got the same email.

So then they want to coordinate um who's going to reply to that particular email.

So they just send each other hundreds or sometimes thousands of emails, depending on how many people are in the party, just to coordinate on who will respond to one single uh

email from a citizen.

And this is surely not very efficient and would save them lots of hours of work and uh therefore.

I guess we are creating a lot of value aid for them in their daily works and that gives them the opportunity to deploy this labor more effectively in other domains where it can

have a greater impact than just sending emails around.

Yeah, and I did ask anything about you, about, I don't know, your childhood.

Like, if you'd like to share something, where did you...

Sure.

I think I touched it earlier already a little bit.

So I got my high school diploma.

I was always very interested in society, economics.

No, no, I remember your academic background, more like where did you grow?

Okay, yeah, I'm...

normal family.

More the private stuff.

um Yeah, as you can probably hear, I'm from Germany um by my accent.

And I grew up in Baden-Württemberg.

uh yeah, during my childhood, I guess I was always very interested in sports.

I did track and field, was running the 400 meters.

um So that uh prepares you well for life because you're willing to take in a lot of suffering.

especially the last 100 meters and the 400 are quite hard.

And that was a good preparation for life in general, I guess.

But apart from sports, I was always very interested in society and economics, I guess.

My parents encouraged me to read the newspapers.

We had lots of different newspapers already lying around in our house.

And I got interested mostly in the economics part because I economics is a very big determinant of how society unfolds.

Like if you're in an economic crisis, then uh society takes a big hit, for instance, and therefore civil life will also go in a much different direction than it would otherwise

do.

as we can probably see in Argentina right now and before.

And yeah, therefore that was what I was mostly interested in.

But I already had like lots of different interests um also in technology.

And um I like to travel a lot, go to different countries.

There you tend to talk to people also about politics, of course.

And then you eventually figure uh more or less everyone is having similar problems at the end of the day.

And um yeah, this is also very encouraging because for us it means that our product is scalable.

um So we can not just use it in Germany, but we can also deploy to other representative democracies all over the world.

um But yeah, the way I ended up where I am right now was

I guess more or less by chance.

Of course, I always have plans and I'm planning ahead, but in life you have to take it the way it comes.

yeah, my academic journey was very fruitful and helpful for what I'm doing now.

And yeah, let's see where the journey continues, which way it's gonna go.

I was thinking about the...

Because you said something related to economy and how it can change cities and behaviors.

economy can also be a sort of incentive, maybe.

I mean, when they talk about gamification...

and about giving something to the user, to the citizen that participates.

em I was thinking that this can also be an incentive for people to participate.

em I know that some people agree, some disagree.

In some way, think that a citizen that is using her own time to participate in the public life uh

can be also compensated as if he's a politician, like I will say a part-time politician.

And yeah, I was wondering if with all these kinds of technologies that are uh being developed now, I mean, these civic tech software, GovTech software, if in the future we

will see some, if every one of us will become in some way a...

part-time politician, because we participate.

Maybe there is some AI that listens and that's right to the right person, to the right politician.

I don't know what are your ideas, if you had any thought about possibilities in the future.

I mean, that would be awesome.

guess with AI, you always have to be careful, of course, but I tend to see the positive side um as bigger than the negative side.

um Of course, with great potential comes great responsibility and great threats, but I guess AI is definitely something which is very helpful to...

see the patterns in the noise that we are seeing right now in public opinion.

um Because just starting from like the way citizens express themselves, sometimes they have problems, like expressing the underlying core problem, what they are trying to say.

um So just to give you an example, like I might say, ah

like my local kebab is becoming so expensive, it's doubled in prices.

And what I really want to say is that inflation is hitting me hard.

So purchasing power is decreasing.

So that's like the underlying core problem or the meta problem, which one citizen is facing.

And I guess AI is very good in identifying this core problem and then clustering it together with other opinions of the same category.

and therefore giving politicians good insights into what's going on.

um coming to your point of um everyone becoming a mini-politician, so to say, I guess that would be awesome.

I like uh the direct democracy component of it.

um Because right now, what we are picking is we're picking a whole menu of um

of political stances that we are voting for.

So we're voting for one party and uh there might be some parts in your party that you're voting for that you like, but also something that you dislike.

um So in Germany, for instance, we have this so-called Walumard um where prior to each federal election, you can rate different statements based on whether you agree, disagree,

or see it as neutral.

And then um at the end, it suggests you which political party might fit your political view.

And typically, at least for me, I get a maximum overlap of about two thirds, maximum 80 % with one party that um overlaps the best with my political views.

But still, nonetheless, I have to vote for one party then, which means I have a third or 20 %

of that particular party, which I don't like.

And therefore I see it as an improvement if we could um pick a la carte, so to say, like in a direct democracy like in Switzerland.

um Because um metaphorically, you would also not go to a restaurant where you can um just pick one fixed menu of like entre, main and dessert.

And then you say,

don't like one out of the three, but you still have to take all of the three at once and pay for it.

And therefore, I guess it's a good way forward if we create tools which allow us to express our um views um in different topics, I guess in the past, it might have been

easier um in terms of

you had one view and you fit it very well to one party, but these days the world is becoming more more complex.

And with these complexities, I guess, the different variations of political views that you're seeing increases as well and therefore the mismatch of uh citizens and their

parties.

And therefore technical tools provide a good way of...

good opportunity to address this issue.

course, um technical tools will not uh solve all problems because right now they can just be enabling tools um to help with the processes that we set up, the political processes.

And if they are flawed, like the political system in itself, if that's flawed.

then there's only so much you can do about trying to help and fix it um with your solutions or technological tools.

um But yeah, maybe in the end, um politics is also adaptive and um maybe we end up um in the future making our voting decisions on platforms like Nexus Politics or others um where

you can voice your opinions and then politicians

follow the public opinion which is expressed there to make sure that preferences are better aligned with outcomes in politics.

Yeah, I was thinking also about all possible evolution, like because there is this, you know, civic tech and gov tech that sometimes they are uh very connected.

And so in some way, like if a citizen say something, don't know, certain kind of problem in the chat, to the chat, but I mean, the software can connect the citizen to the

politician, the right politician, or in some way,

If that thing requires more citizens, the software can also connect all those citizens together.

um And that approach will be more civic tech in some way.

um But that is what you were saying about pivoting on the way.

You can always add or remove feature.

Exactly.

And then, yeah, you mentioned some futures that you wanted to add.

um I don't know, you have some sort of vision, like about in the future, we were saying that it could be possible that there are like part-time politicians or like small

politicians, little politicians, I don't know.

If you have any idea about...

I mean, I'm sure you have, and also we talked about it before.

How do you expect democracy to be in five, 10, 20 years?

If you think that the...

That's a very good question.

I think there will be changes coming for sure, because what I'm personally foreseeing is that we have, as a society, we're facing lots of challenges ahead.

um First and foremost, the technological revolution.

um what I see there is that, m so of course we always had technological prog.

progress over time, meaning that new jobs uh were being created and uh it was always very beneficial for society overall.

And I think um this time it might be different.

uh The reason for that being is that uh in the past, like we had the uh industrial revolution, so first people were working on the fields, but then the industrial revolution

basically.

freed them from their labor on the fields, put them in factories and they worked there.

But then in the factories, they also eventually became obsolete because machines did much better work than human labor could do there.

So they ended up in the tertiary sector, so doing cognitive work.

And then now we're at the point

in time where also cognitively machines are becoming better than humans or at least are at par with humans.

And the problem that I see is that there are only so many domains in which humans can do work.

So there's the one component is labor and the other one is cognitive.

So physical work and cognitive work.

These are the two which humans can do.

And maybe emotional.

emotional work as a third category, but at least in the physical and in the cognitive domain, machines are now at par or becoming even better than humans.

Meaning now when humans are becoming also obsolete in the tertiary sector, so the white collar jobs which are being replaced, then I don't see too many domains left where humans

can do any work.

Because

uh like capitalism dictates that um everything that can be done by a machine faster, better and cheaper will eventually be done by a machine.

And therefore, I guess we are running out of last domains where humans can retreat to.

One, as I mentioned, might be emotional work, um which also uh where I also see like entertainment, for instance, or sports and that kind of stuff.

which might become more more important.

guess we also see it in the salaries already where sports stars are earning crazy amounts of money because uh people are freed um from labor, hence they have more free time, hence

they need to consume, hence they um want to be entertained and the more attention is being directed into this entertainment industry, the more money there is of course.

And um yeah, what I'm trying to say here is that we are facing challenges because technology will free us even more and more from work.

And then I guess the transformational process up to a new societal setup will be the challenging part.

So we have to find solutions, um how we want to structure our...

economies and our societies when there's not enough labor for everyone anymore.

So if there's mass unemployment and increases and increases, then I guess we must come up with solutions, be it universal basic income, be it other forms of how people are rewarded

um for participating or contributing to society.

So you mentioned earlier, for instance,

that you can become a mini-politician and by doing that you have positive externalities and then we might have to think about maybe we can reward these positive externalities

that you are having with your work to society.

And yeah, so it's going to be very interesting.

To be honest, I don't have any solution.

Otherwise I would express it here.

ah But I can clearly see some challenges coming up.

And I guess Nexus Politics is going to be one way, one platform where we can have a decent discussion about how we want to address these issues, what kind of societal setups we want

to implement in the future.

hopefully we get it operational with everything included in time to have these.

to have these conversations.

But to be honest, think the technological revolution always takes place in nonlinear relationships.

it's not that every year so and so many percent will be replaced, but it's more like nonlinear, so exponential growth, for instance.

So right now we're talking about it, but we're don't seeing any progress.

But then all of a sudden it will be omnipresent.

uh

many white collar people will lose their jobs and then we should definitely be prepared.

So better have the conversations now to make sure that the transformation process will not be that nasty.

Yeah, I'm thinking about agentic AI.

That will probably show eh how much AI will change our society.

And I'm thinking about other maybe, em I don't know, products, software companies that you're following.

they are excited because I don't know maybe they are doing something complementary to nexus politics or like

Well, there are very interesting projects out there.

So I'm always open for having conversations with like-minded people.

So I'm reaching out to a lot of platforms that are doing similar work or in the same ecosystem.

I find some very interesting.

So Crowd Insights, for instance, are doing, I would say, similar work to us.

So giving a civic tech solution where they also give uh citizens the opportunity to participate by voicing their opinions.

uh I guess GoVocal is something which is related to our work, which is quite interesting.

But then um the most prominent out there, at least in Germany, is probably the Walumard, which I mentioned, which gives citizens the opportunity to find parties that are matching.

for upcoming elections with their preferences.

Then there are more established ones, which might be change.org, which is a petition platform.

yeah, I guess all of them, what they share is they offer one particular solution to one particular problem.

And the difference in our approach is that we want to have

it all integrated like in one platform such that you don't have a million apps on your mobile phone which you use for each individual use case but you just have it all combined

together on one platform which allows you to easily uh do everything that is related to politics and we are very open to collaboration so we decided for us that we want to do the

whole project open source.

because first of all, open source um creates transparency, transparency builds trust, and trust is very much needed because in the political space, we want to make sure that um

everyone believes us, that we are non-partisan, which is our goal or objective.

So we want to offer everyone a platform to voice their opinions, concerns, etc.

to make it very representative, because that's uh what at the end is needed in order to make it useful for democracy.

and not just creating one other e-code chamber out there.

And since we are doing it open source, I guess there's lots of opportunities for other projects to collaborate with us, like by um us sharing our data and maybe vice versa, um

where they can build solutions on top of our platform.

And yeah, happy to reach out to other fellow like-minded entrepreneurs who

want to make an impact and help us, uh yeah, tackling the problems that we are facing democracy-wise with good solutions.

Yeah, it's always nice to collaborate.

And I was thinking, are you facing any kind of problem right now?

I don't know, there is something you would like to fix.

Or maybe there is, I don't know, you're searching for a certain kind of person skill.

Maybe someone will listen.

Yeah.

So the main problem we are facing is that our days only have 24 hours.

And we are already working like crazy, but can't get everything done.

Of course, we are using a lot of AI internally as well.

um But still, we are looking always for people willing to support us.

um So I guess there are different forms um of how to support us.

So first of all, we created this so-called

a democracy ambassador program where mostly students, also other people who are interested can support us with, yeah, helping us, for instance, with our social media accounts or

other stuff, like voluntarily whenever they want to.

And in exchange, we have some perks and benefits which we are offering them.

So we're inviting them to different events or uh

giving them some goodies every now and then ah in exchange for the work.

um So that would be the first thing.

Second thing is, um I guess, like we are very ambitious, we want to grow.

So we are always looking for other people joining uh our team.

um So if you have like very good technical skills, so this is what we are looking for right now, then um feel free to reach out to us.

And yeah, also if you are very well connected in the political space, I guess, um would be very happy to have a chat.

If you can open some doors to us in terms of gaining potential customers, uh that would be very much appreciated.

But um also it's the unknown unknowns.

um if you feel like you can contribute to our project um by something I didn't mention yet.

um

feel free to reach out to us and maybe we find a way of how to go on this journey together.

And if you have any message for the people in the civic tech, GovTech space, mean people that are exploring finding new solutions.

experimenting.

Well, I guess my main message would be keep going.

um So first of all, if you haven't started yet, give it a try.

Just go out, try it, talk to politicians, talk to public administration officials.

um You will find a million problems out there which are worth solving.

And um you might be amazed how much positive feedback you're getting because

I tend to say we are riding the wave of political dissatisfaction, which is more like a tsunami right now and not just a little wave.

And I mean, this is good in the sense that it helps us like coming up with um or getting a lot of support on our mission.

And yeah, I highly encourage others to do the same because at the end of the day, um

There are so many problems uh that uh every one of us can only offer a single uh puzzle piece to the whole thing.

And all the work is needed.

All your contributions are needed.

if you don't know where to get started, reach out to me and I can name you some potential avenues.

But other than that, keep pushing.

I know it's sometimes very bumpy, the journey.

And it can be very discouraging every now and then.

But I guess great satisfaction only comes from great suffering.

And that's something I learned from running the 400 meters.

So only if it was very, very painful during the race, you get this feeling of satisfaction at the end.

And I guess it's very much the same for entrepreneurship.

So keep pushing.

tackle the big challenges and uh make an impact.

Thank you.

And if you'd like to add anything else, maybe that I haven't asked you um about Nexus politics, if you want to add something else or if you think that you mentioned all the

important things.

There's so much I guess I could continue talking for like hours.

But I would just say stay tuned, there's more to come.

So we are very early stage as of now, but we are making big leaps forward.

um yeah, there's more to come.

And um I think I would just make use of the opportunity now to thank our supporters.

who already contributed quite significantly to this project.

So first of all, um a big thank you and shout out to my incredible co-founder, Christoph.

Like he's an amazing guy, um super smart, super intelligent, knowledgeable in the tech space.

So it's a great pleasure working with him.

um Then our sponsors like from the XSYS scholarship.

We also support it by the...

Professorship of Policy Analysis at the Technical University of Munich.

So that's amazing to have them on board.

We have some democracy ambassadors supporting us.

And of course the entire TUM ecosystem with the incubator, the startup consultancy, etc.

who are supporting us.

So big thanks to all of you.

Also to the politicians with whom we're working already for giving us that trust at the beginning.

I know it's very risky for politicians to support for-profit projects which are out there, which you don't know yet in which direction it will be developing.

But we have uh great supporters out there.

Let's hope uh that we can continue with the traction we may as ever have as of now.

Thank you, Magnus.

Thank you for your time.

Alessandro, thank you for having me on this podcast.

Great pleasure to be invited by you talking about Nexus Politics and um keep it up.

Your great work.

I love your podcast and I'm already curious to all the other upcoming participants.

We'll see.

Thank you.