Olivier Schulbaum on democracy after the platform and the struggle for democratic infrastructures

Alessandro Oppo: Welcome to another episode of the Democracy Innovator podcast, and our guest of today is Oliver Schulbaum.

Olivier Schulbaum: So Hi there. Hello.

Alessandro Oppo: So thank you, Oliver. And if you'd like to share something about you and

Alessandro Oppo: your path.

Olivier Schulbaum: Right, yes, maybe to make it very short, I always thought since I was a child, I would be a poet and

apparently it's not quite there yet, but actually, if you want a little secret,

Olivier Schulbaum: I was a young poet champion in France some time ago,

Olivier Schulbaum: but then that drove me to say, well, I need to be an artist if I can be a poet, so then

I thought I needed to do study art and then I studied arts at the art school in design and communication

Olivier Schulbaum: and this is how I got into,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, video editing and then slowly

Olivier Schulbaum: into documentary filmmaking and this is basically where my head started exploded on, you know,

Olivier Schulbaum: the amount of money

Olivier Schulbaum: people who want to provide information to others needs to pay to public archives or to private archives, if you want to

talk about anything about something that has been recorded or something historical like you know, civil war, second war. You need to

pay for any second of these archives you want to have in your documentary and this is where I started thinking,

Olivier Schulbaum: so that's, isn't there a solution to open up more like, you know, think about the commons of knowledge and then this

is where I basically learned about, you know, open licensing

Olivier Schulbaum: and then met like crazy guys,

Olivier Schulbaum: the time I was in

Olivier Schulbaum: Berlin, a big,

Olivier Schulbaum: I remember Florian Kramer, he was the first about talking about codes and poetry, so codes as poetry, is basically where I,

you know, I derive into code and civic tech, is probably something we'll be talking about, but you know, I'm not a

determinist

Olivier Schulbaum: from the start, I'm basically thinking that art based methodology are the best to create dialogue,

Olivier Schulbaum: even like deal with conflicts and create democracy. So this is basically where I come into civic tech, but really my training

is

Olivier Schulbaum: humanities or right now that would be something associated with data humanities and deliberations, something like that. This is my

dream was not really true, but, you know, I do I do, you know, political

Olivier Schulbaum: poetry somehow sometimes to express myself, to talk about our work. So for, you know, forgive me if I if I speak

in rhymes and all these bullshit, but, you know, let's make it fun.

Alessandro Oppo: Yeah. And then, I mean, it could be possible that your career moved to just poetry,

Olivier Schulbaum: maybe? Maybe I'll get back to it because tomorrow there's an eclipse

Olivier Schulbaum: and where I'm standing in in the Balearic Island now, this is the best spot to see it. So probably I will

be blinded by, you know, the the

Olivier Schulbaum: the black

Olivier Schulbaum: lights tomorrow and the eclipse, and I changed, you know, tomorrow maybe we can speak again, and then I'm I'm back to

poetry, obscure poetry being the trying to be the head gallant ball of democracy, I don't think it would work anyway.

Olivier Schulbaum: But anyway, now maybe just to,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, geographically, I mentioned I was really influenced by the scene in Berlin,

Olivier Schulbaum: but this is basically when I met Susana and we founded Platonic Together and she was into

Olivier Schulbaum: occupation and alternative

Olivier Schulbaum: economies

Olivier Schulbaum: in Barcelona and basically because of love, this is the best excuse in the world to do, to work on democracy.

Olivier Schulbaum: I just moved to Barcelona and it's then, that was the second

Olivier Schulbaum: exploding moment for me

Olivier Schulbaum: because of the light, the quality of light, but also the fact that all our activism was happening on the streets and

not in bunkers like in Berlin. So this is basically, you know, platonic at the end of the day is a bit

of a mix of the two culture of Susanna and me together. And

Olivier Schulbaum: at the beginning, actually, wanted to be an independent label because by the time we were doing internet radio, which is really

old already,

Olivier Schulbaum: and then we thought we need an internet label.

Olivier Schulbaum: So we did lots of projects around like using,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, music or digital labels

Olivier Schulbaum: as a vehicle to talk about

Olivier Schulbaum: how, you know, the

Olivier Schulbaum: effects of patterns

Olivier Schulbaum: and

Olivier Schulbaum: copyright

Olivier Schulbaum: on society and on dialogue. So this is basically

Olivier Schulbaum: where all these interests for us on developing technology,

Olivier Schulbaum: which basically was a kind of a, we call this burn station. It was basically a sound system that moved in the

street with like computers where people could copy music. We had like free licensed music and we had like lots of live

acts and then talking about, you know,

Olivier Schulbaum: patents on health,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, all that kind. So music and art in general is the best, for me, it's the best vehicle to bring,

you know, to deal with conflict, to deal with polarized

Olivier Schulbaum: positions and this is how we came into work, working also on free software technology. So we always have been developing

Olivier Schulbaum: our own tech and started from scratch just as a way of learning because Susana is a learner

Olivier Schulbaum: and she's a hacker in her nurse learner. So this this is basically the way we approach technology by creating small open

source tech with different communities and see that would work. And at some point we created Goteo, which is an alternative funding

platform

Olivier Schulbaum: in Spain and it took it took up. So this is basically where we started designing like

Olivier Schulbaum: next serious, let's say, serious open source technology.

Olivier Schulbaum: And this is basically how we came into into developing

Olivier Schulbaum: technology with with a meaning, let's say.

Alessandro Oppo: And the Platonic Foundation,

Alessandro Oppo: what is doing?

Olivier Schulbaum: That's actually a great question and probably not the best name.

Olivier Schulbaum: We should maybe thought about being Socratic,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, it would be more, even more fun. But anyway, I can deal with the myth of the caravan,

Olivier Schulbaum: won't talk about that today, but basically Platonic would,

Olivier Schulbaum: the foundation was at the intersection of, let's say, participation, civic technology, culture, social innovation, and democratic experimentation,

Olivier Schulbaum: I would say.

Olivier Schulbaum: And basically

Olivier Schulbaum: what we try to do is creating more and more communities for citizens to participate

Olivier Schulbaum: while people increasingly think that they have less and less political agencies. So we create an other bridge between institution and

grassroots movements.

Olivier Schulbaum: So we build platforms, we love consultations,

Olivier Schulbaum: but we love cities and assemblies, but we see the limits and the obstacles of them. So we trying to redesign all

this from

Olivier Schulbaum: a more,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, intersessional point of view, but we talk probably about that a little bit more. So yes, we have increasingly sophisticated

methodologies

Olivier Schulbaum: and our tools.

Olivier Schulbaum: So yeah, that's the issue. And we are basically a foundation,

Olivier Schulbaum: there's a reason for it because we shall be, we part of the social and social economic, we shall be a cooperative,

but in fact, we need it to be a foundation

Olivier Schulbaum: because of that Coteo platform we created, which is basically,

Olivier Schulbaum: it's kind of a, you know, we call it the Trojan Crowdfunding

Olivier Schulbaum: as the Trojan horse of the comments. So we use the standard of crowdfunding just to finance social impact projects and project

that we're building or retrieving or protecting

Olivier Schulbaum: an intangible, tangible physical and digital comments.

Olivier Schulbaum: And by the time we were thinking and designing

Olivier Schulbaum: the old statement

Olivier Schulbaum: or mission for it, thought, yeah, well, if now, because I must say it could have happened

Olivier Schulbaum: by the time that the, you know, 2008,

Olivier Schulbaum: we started to design it.

Olivier Schulbaum: And this is basically what, by the time we had like

Olivier Schulbaum: a big crisis of financing

Olivier Schulbaum: social and political projects,

Olivier Schulbaum: also like micro credits at the bank that used to finance social projects were basically

Olivier Schulbaum: completely dry and ending, so we thought we needed tool to be,

Olivier Schulbaum: and this is basically how we started building Godel, but we thought if, you know, now we basically a 100%

Olivier Schulbaum: pending on citizens supporting commerce project and the public,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, the public administration is not part of it, it's not really fair. So we thought, you know, at least whenever

Olivier Schulbaum: someone is financing or helping financing a project, if I take a €100,

Olivier Schulbaum: if I have this economic capacity and supporting the project in Barcelona,

Olivier Schulbaum: Basically we did a little hack, and this is why we are a foundation,

Olivier Schulbaum: you get 80%

Olivier Schulbaum: of the money back from the state,

Olivier Schulbaum: which is basically a little hack, the more you invest, the more you donate in GoTeo, the more you get back from

the state. And then, you know, if you keep on doing that, I think it's nice

Olivier Schulbaum: little hack. So I think, you know, I should also take care of what I'm saying publicly because, know, it's a very

nice hack, but, know, we also on the lots of threats

Olivier Schulbaum: from especially right wings, right

Olivier Schulbaum: wings parties

Olivier Schulbaum: and governments right now and extreme right,

Olivier Schulbaum: just because of the success of the tool,

Olivier Schulbaum: because we have raised

Olivier Schulbaum: almost 25 millions for political projects. Some of them are about, you know,

Olivier Schulbaum: basically,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, paying for

Olivier Schulbaum: solidarity

Olivier Schulbaum: cases, you know, so some groups have been, as an example,

Olivier Schulbaum: been basically

Olivier Schulbaum: have to pay a lot of money because they were striking,

Olivier Schulbaum: so we just basically repay it and we also sometimes litigate against government for the project, so which is, you know, puts

us in the position that we do institutional participation, but sometimes we're also conscious that, you know,

Olivier Schulbaum: there's still some obscurity

Olivier Schulbaum: that needs to be put in the light in the public administration. That's also why I'm an active member of the board

of another foundation called CVO, they do

Olivier Schulbaum: civic,

Olivier Schulbaum: let's say journalism and they litigate against governments.

Olivier Schulbaum: So they have a few cases that are really

Olivier Schulbaum: some case studies for, I would say

Olivier Schulbaum: in Europe at least, so they

Olivier Schulbaum: won a case against the government,

Olivier Schulbaum: Spanish government that didn't release the code of COSCO, which is basically

Olivier Schulbaum: a tool to determine

Olivier Schulbaum: if people on the vulnerable conditions can access

Olivier Schulbaum: a bonus, know, something like a cheaper

Olivier Schulbaum: energy

Olivier Schulbaum: and the code was not released and it's public code, so that's an example of litigation

Olivier Schulbaum: from civil society that creates precedence for others to build that. So I think that's important that money

Olivier Schulbaum: is some of the main obstacle that civic society has to build more, you know, grassroots

Olivier Schulbaum: incidents or

Olivier Schulbaum: advocacies.

Olivier Schulbaum: This is basically what we call crowdvocacy.

Alessandro Oppo: Okay. And I was thinking like during

Alessandro Oppo: this time,

Alessandro Oppo: have you seen any changes in,

Alessandro Oppo: don't know, in the civic tech field or

Alessandro Oppo: similar and connected fields?

Olivier Schulbaum: Yeah. For sure.

Olivier Schulbaum: I I would say Decidim is one of the other example, and actually, it's it's also

Olivier Schulbaum: important to mention both Broteo and the city happens

Olivier Schulbaum: in Barcelona, which is a city which has a long tradition of, you know,

Olivier Schulbaum: like free schools, if you took like rationalist school during the second civil war, and that's not

Olivier Schulbaum: something disconnected from the fact that an open source technology for participation such as Gotheo or Decilim is built in that environment

because the culture is basically also teaching

Olivier Schulbaum: lines of codes for us, know, It's basic, almost like automatic writing, the code should be responsible for, you know,

Olivier Schulbaum: empowerment of society

Olivier Schulbaum: and the people using it. So I think it's pretty interesting. So what I've seen, of course, by the adoption of decedim

by more than 500

Olivier Schulbaum: instances, governments,

Olivier Schulbaum: cooperatives among the world makes it something to be considered by the commission as the tool to be reused and adapted. So

it's also used for

Olivier Schulbaum: all these European cities and assemblies. So I think it's interesting to

Olivier Schulbaum: mention that the civic tech is growing under, you know, progressive governments,

Olivier Schulbaum: but now we are really facing

Olivier Schulbaum: a threat on how this shall be involved.

Olivier Schulbaum: So we, you know, and I think sustainability is an issue here. So if government stops

Olivier Schulbaum: financing a tool like the SIEM or public civic type, we'll have a real issue, right? So will the community

Olivier Schulbaum: be self sustainable? Not quite sure, yes. And then we need to enter in another

Olivier Schulbaum: debate which we will not have today,

Olivier Schulbaum: what is the cost of such a technology? By the time the government is feeding it, you know, you can launch, you

know, working with a language that is on the market,

Olivier Schulbaum: very

Olivier Schulbaum: expensive,

Olivier Schulbaum: but it's not a problem if you're a public entity, it could be, but if you're a grassroots community, then that comes

Olivier Schulbaum: an issue. So are we talking about civic tech, open code, but is the code approach or the approach to the code

Olivier Schulbaum: democratic enough? So that would mean now it's much cheaper to develop Goodeo because it's mostly PHP

Olivier Schulbaum: and it's much more expensive

Olivier Schulbaum: to develop any, you know, tricks,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, any new modules on Decidim. So that's basically why we also do lots of very opening projects to be able

to provide some innovation and feeding Decidim back, you know, from

Olivier Schulbaum: a more community approach, but through European funding, because it's not easy to, you

Olivier Schulbaum: know, that's something to consider. So for me, the debate is about like being open is not maybe the first thing we'd

have to define,

Olivier Schulbaum: but it's like being democratic and then the we look at the open technology that is the most democratic to do that.

Alessandro Oppo: And

Alessandro Oppo: and other projects that you are working on right now or ideas that you would like to develop and maybe you don't

have the time.

Alessandro Oppo: So both

Olivier Schulbaum: Yeah. Basically,

Olivier Schulbaum: what I'm

Olivier Schulbaum: really interested in these days, we have we run this project called School for Community in Democracy, which is about training

Olivier Schulbaum: the youth facilitators of,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, citizen assemblies or grassroots assemblies in the future.

Olivier Schulbaum: It's based on

Olivier Schulbaum: art based methodology, as I was mentioning in the beginning, like sociodrama,

Olivier Schulbaum: legislative theater, something interesting that could interest you and we need some support for this. We basically,

Olivier Schulbaum: we call it dramatization

Olivier Schulbaum: as democratic inquiry. So

Olivier Schulbaum: we were using a lot of legislative theater and social drama,

Olivier Schulbaum: more than engagement techniques that are analogical,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, there are methods

Olivier Schulbaum: of inquiry. And what we're trying to do is how would the digitalization of these methods

Olivier Schulbaum: would look like, which is really that physical

Olivier Schulbaum: space based and interaction. So how can we make this, you know, the scene

Olivier Schulbaum: in the theatre or in socio drama, the stage is something really important. So how can the civic tech platform

Olivier Schulbaum: can be a stage? So we're working on on adaptation of the city. Virtually

Olivier Schulbaum: we'll be releasing a distribution of legislative theater.

Olivier Schulbaum: So we like clean the city that is cleaned up and adapted to legislative theater and participatory policy making in general. So

basically my obsession is this is going from what we call like affect to digital participation, I would say.

Olivier Schulbaum: So this basically

Olivier Schulbaum: where we we at. And if you look at civic tech precisely,

Olivier Schulbaum: I'm more now researching and designing what we call political user experience. So, you know, that's

Olivier Schulbaum: so PUX,

Olivier Schulbaum: and this is basically something we've been reading reports on it, and it's basically about imagining platforms like

Olivier Schulbaum: almost like a city, like you would navigate a city or you yeah. Like, citizen would basically meet up in a school

or meet up wherever in a in a factory by the time of the secondary republic,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, or all that idea that the platform should allow people to navigate a space they feel comfortable with, safe, but

also like feel like, you know, this is exactly the architecture I'm living in. So it's not a flat

Olivier Schulbaum: interface with lots of, you know, box

Olivier Schulbaum: to fill with text because basically this is what policy making

Olivier Schulbaum: is,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, providing text to be technified by policy makers to adopt them, and this is basically something we're trying to push

back or avoid. So what about like non discursive participation? What about,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, audio participation? What about, you know, that this is a lot of,

Olivier Schulbaum: whole that's

Olivier Schulbaum: universe to, from our base methodology to bring onto

Olivier Schulbaum: platform like Decidim. So we wrote about it, so I'm happy to share with whoever listened to this podcast,

Olivier Schulbaum: the more and more and more detailed

Olivier Schulbaum: definition of what,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, political user experience shall be.

Alessandro Oppo: Sure. Dani, if you have any link, we can put them in the description.

Alessandro Oppo: And

Alessandro Oppo: I was thinking,

Alessandro Oppo: do you think that is important that,

Alessandro Oppo: let's say, participation

Alessandro Oppo: also maybe is not directly connected to institution

Alessandro Oppo: or association? I'm thinking about

Alessandro Oppo: specifically

Alessandro Oppo: about citizen assembly

Alessandro Oppo: that most of the times they are,

Alessandro Oppo: let's say, they are organized

Alessandro Oppo: by

Alessandro Oppo: an association

Alessandro Oppo: or a foundation.

Alessandro Oppo: But I'm thinking also also about, I don't know, providing,

Alessandro Oppo: I don't know, a tool where, I don't know, a person can just organize a citizen assembly inside their community,

Alessandro Oppo: inside their neighborhood.

Olivier Schulbaum: Yes.

Olivier Schulbaum: Yeah.

Olivier Schulbaum: Actually,

Olivier Schulbaum: I was basically mentioning

Olivier Schulbaum: affect, you know. So what is the emotional connection of people

Olivier Schulbaum: or citizens to democracy?

Olivier Schulbaum: Is there any?

Olivier Schulbaum: So it's basically how can we recreate affect with democracy? And then with you talking about citizen assemblies, and I'm a big

defender sometimes in a, you know, in the facilitation world is not very welcome. I'm a big

Olivier Schulbaum: defender of enclave deliberation.

Olivier Schulbaum: So basically starting with the most affected by the topic of an assembly. And of course, this will bring you to

Olivier Schulbaum: identifying

Olivier Schulbaum: which communities are already active dealing with certain topic. Like, this typical topic that are sensible and a politician would

not

Olivier Schulbaum: take as a starter for citizen assemblies, like racism,

Olivier Schulbaum: gender violence,

Olivier Schulbaum: or even like the management of trash in a city. It's not, it's almost non

Olivier Schulbaum: institutional citizen assemblies that deal with it. Nevertheless,

Olivier Schulbaum: I think the agenda should be defined by the most affected.

Olivier Schulbaum: So

Olivier Schulbaum: my question is how do we

Olivier Schulbaum: make people, let's say,

Olivier Schulbaum: feel that democracy

Olivier Schulbaum: has something to do with them again, but not with them individually, with them individually and collectively. So what has democracy

done actually to deserve people's trust?

Olivier Schulbaum: That's the good question, not much.

Olivier Schulbaum: Not only their trust, their attention and their emotional investment,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, because you have seen lots of cities and assemblies happening,

Olivier Schulbaum: lots of recommendation being voted, prioritized, but not adopted or implemented yet. So, you know, that's a big

Olivier Schulbaum: bottleneck there. So democratic participation can not only produce rational legitimacy,

Olivier Schulbaum: I would say,

Olivier Schulbaum: it also needs to reconstruct what we might call like effective legitimacy.

Olivier Schulbaum: So

Olivier Schulbaum: the question is like, if I had a claim, if I start with the most affected, always, depending on the topic, even

climate change, look at who needs really climate refugees in a city like Barcelona, start creating a mandate for an assembly where

you have the rest of the population

Olivier Schulbaum: coming in. But I think it's very important that, you know, avoiding that experts

Olivier Schulbaum: formulate the question. They should only help people affected formulate the questions a little bit better

Olivier Schulbaum: or less activist at home, let's say. So, but we ask, what is clear, the person who asked, what if the people

most affected entered before the question or the mandate has been decided? This is basically what I see,

Olivier Schulbaum: and here you don't need much technology, I haven't talked about technology.

Olivier Schulbaum: I think that's, I think the idea of migrant community discussing borders and the right to the city, people experiencing

Olivier Schulbaum: housing insecurity,

Olivier Schulbaum: discussing housing policy.

Olivier Schulbaum: This should happen first and then create the mandate for

Olivier Schulbaum: a more representative citizen assembly to happen. This is something we're trying to

Olivier Schulbaum: provide. So of course, probably

Olivier Schulbaum: decidim could be a tool for community to self organize and claim for such

Olivier Schulbaum: an incidence,

Olivier Schulbaum: but this is also where we need to help and make sure that, you know, institutions are aware that

Olivier Schulbaum: there's this red zone of topics that they will never treat and they shall,

Olivier Schulbaum: otherwise there will not be no

Olivier Schulbaum: legitimation

Olivier Schulbaum: or effective reconnection with democracy, I would say. So really I believe in enclave

Olivier Schulbaum: the deliberation

Olivier Schulbaum: to agendas and agenda setting

Olivier Schulbaum: and co designing the mandate. So this is basically

Olivier Schulbaum: what I think the mostly the bottleneck of citizen assemblies are. And you talked also about self organization of citizens. I think

that's a loss of a big opportunity in citizen service. So

Olivier Schulbaum: there

Olivier Schulbaum: has been many in citizen assemblies,

Olivier Schulbaum: if in general 100 citizens are selected,

Olivier Schulbaum: we might have a huge amount of citizens that already have

Olivier Schulbaum: felt,

Olivier Schulbaum: lived, understood

Olivier Schulbaum: what an assembly is and could create, and actually there's we're supporting also a federation of some of the citizen assembly

Olivier Schulbaum: members associations

Olivier Schulbaum: that the one in France, in there's one in Austria,

Olivier Schulbaum: there's one in Spain from the climate assemblies, they come together and I think, you know, and basically

Olivier Schulbaum: reclaim the role in

Olivier Schulbaum: expanding what happens in the cities and assemblies, and going to school to explain what climate change might be, and what,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, participatory policy making shall be. But in the world of professionals

Olivier Schulbaum: like the one I'm part of,

Olivier Schulbaum: they would be considered a new lobby so you can throw these

Olivier Schulbaum: ex members of citizen assemblies away. It's a bit exaggerated in what I'm saying, but I had these conversations with

Olivier Schulbaum: with professionals of my sector,

Olivier Schulbaum: which I

Olivier Schulbaum: entered in shock, because I think digital citizen unions of ex members of citizen assemblies is the best to contaminate the rest

of population,

Olivier Schulbaum: because at the end of the day, will be only 100 citizens elected, what about the rest?

Olivier Schulbaum: So there's some kind of an emission, and then we can maybe have beyond technology and the technology we use, which are

the physical space that are used in these citizens only,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know? Usually institution, the European Commission that I see in Catalonia,

Olivier Schulbaum: I see in,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, in

Olivier Schulbaum: the French assemblies,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, it's always about bringing the citizens to the parliament.

Olivier Schulbaum: Fuck that.

Olivier Schulbaum: Citizens should choose their own space. You talk about climate change, go to the forest.

Olivier Schulbaum: You know, so I believe this is also a bottleneck of citizen assemblies, the way we imagining

Olivier Schulbaum: that

Olivier Schulbaum: citizens should play the role of politicians for a certain amount of time and disappear,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know? So we should avoid that, think. They should contaminate all that, especially the youth in schools. So what about like,

you know, if you have had lots of national assemblies in France about climate change and in Spain, what about going in

a in a in a Catalan school and redimension

Olivier Schulbaum: the policy recommendation to,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, the word that kids know? So what about how this recommendation, which is on the national level affects my river,

the river that goes through the school or the the trash, the management of trash in my city? So there's lots of

opportunity to bring, you know, that culture

Olivier Schulbaum: to to, you know, scaling deep as people like Scaledem would say. It's about scaling deep

Olivier Schulbaum: more than scaling abroad or resale or like

Olivier Schulbaum: laterally, you know.

Alessandro Oppo: Yeah. And indeed there was scaling.

Alessandro Oppo: I I think it's a very important concept because otherwise,

Alessandro Oppo: as you said, if you organize a citizen assembly of 100 people

Alessandro Oppo: and then those people are not able to organize

Alessandro Oppo: other participatory

Alessandro Oppo: process because they could.

Alessandro Oppo: And and then the other

Alessandro Oppo: issue,

Alessandro Oppo: I think, is commitment

Alessandro Oppo: because maybe an institution and I can also understand that could be a little bit scared about signing that they will do

what the citizens will say.

Olivier Schulbaum: Yeah, but once they're prioritized and adopted,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, they should the mandate should be automatic, but that's the stage that usually,

Olivier Schulbaum: I think for the French convention on climate,

Olivier Schulbaum: we have lots of colleagues that have wrote it, written about it, it's quite documented, but it's not the case of all

citizen assemblies in Europe.

Olivier Schulbaum: I think basically there's something that is not clear to

Olivier Schulbaum: most of the society

Olivier Schulbaum: is that these recommendations

Olivier Schulbaum: are technified

Olivier Schulbaum: after the assembly. That means to be to to be, you know, to to land on the

Olivier Schulbaum: whoever administration technician in charge of developing it, they will ask for, you know, the technified version of it. And in technification,

Olivier Schulbaum: again, there's a lose of the original meaning by the citizens. And it's not very well documented, so we should also take

care that, you know, maybe AI is a nice way of saying, you know, if you have access to this technification moment

and how the

Olivier Schulbaum: proposals have been reformulated,

Olivier Schulbaum: then it's much more evident that you lose a lot of meaning

Olivier Schulbaum: and power in technifications.

Alessandro Oppo: Maybe we need the sort of social political hack

Alessandro Oppo: regarding

Olivier Schulbaum: A lot of them.

Alessandro Oppo: Regarding these problems. Yeah. Because I I see, like,

Alessandro Oppo: this problem about commitment many times came out

Alessandro Oppo: during the interviews,

Alessandro Oppo: and I think it's a sort of unsolved problem.

Alessandro Oppo: And,

Alessandro Oppo: yeah, I wanted to ask you if you

Alessandro Oppo: think there are

Alessandro Oppo: if there are some, let's say, open problems,

Alessandro Oppo: are there some open problems in the

Alessandro Oppo: in this space, in this field?

Olivier Schulbaum: Yeah, I think the

Olivier Schulbaum: other mass obsession of

Olivier Schulbaum: basically neutralizing conflict

Olivier Schulbaum: and find consensus.

Olivier Schulbaum: So there's lots of literature

Olivier Schulbaum: about how we can avoid that, you know, from Chantal Moux, for example, it's difficult also to bring that, but I think

conflict is basically an activator of our credibility as citizens.

Olivier Schulbaum: That basically allows us to go beyond the expert

Olivier Schulbaum: knowledge that was presented to us as citizens.

Olivier Schulbaum: You know, so I think finding the polarized

Olivier Schulbaum: views is something that should also be sometime discussed. And I saw these these these ideas

Olivier Schulbaum: of how can we rebalance the algorithm of sortition

Olivier Schulbaum: depending on discussion, universities and SMEs. So and there's not many cases about that, about documented about that, but, know,

Olivier Schulbaum: you would imagine that at some point,

Olivier Schulbaum: of having, if we're talking about vulnerable communities

Olivier Schulbaum: that are present around the room, in a room, while the bat, instead of having one of these community members in each

of the table,

Olivier Schulbaum: take one table exclusively

Olivier Schulbaum: with these people together, to leave it an enclave deliberation in the middle of a a of a sortition process, deliberation kind

of assembly, and I think that would also rebalance

Olivier Schulbaum: power

Olivier Schulbaum: and interest. So I think that from there, probably there would be more polarized

Olivier Schulbaum: views that if you consider art based methodology like the theater would be easy to create empathy

Olivier Schulbaum: from the people who are on both sides. So, and probably technology can also help you doing this, that would not less

be a participatory methodology, but more a digital display where, or like a broom.

Olivier Schulbaum: So

Olivier Schulbaum: this we project

Olivier Schulbaum: using the Sydney Barcelona

Olivier Schulbaum: data,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, on climate

Olivier Schulbaum: discussions in various processes where we see, identify polarized issues, and then try to get them back in what we call an

augmented deliberation space,

Olivier Schulbaum: where you basically talk to the most polarized

Olivier Schulbaum: views or representants of these views,

Olivier Schulbaum: and they work together on seeing a series of materials from the other point of view, and come to work again physically,

and then again from this process where we use non discussive

Olivier Schulbaum: approach, people drawing together,

Olivier Schulbaum: people doing sociodrama to understand the position of the most affected, And then back, we take back this

Olivier Schulbaum: discussion onto the digital

Olivier Schulbaum: platform,

Olivier Schulbaum: and we're working on something like that. So extracting

Olivier Schulbaum: polarization from data,

Olivier Schulbaum: it physical and see how much data visualization or experimental data visualization or

Olivier Schulbaum: non discussing methodology can help us building like, you know,

Olivier Schulbaum: more understanding,

Olivier Schulbaum: but not basically

Olivier Schulbaum: neutralize

Olivier Schulbaum: conflict

Olivier Schulbaum: by consensus. So it's something we that should be worked out. So yeah. Yeah. This thing is super interesting to me,

Alessandro Oppo: like,

Alessandro Oppo: because I thought about it many times.

Alessandro Oppo: As you say, like, if you put

Alessandro Oppo: a member of a minority, let's say, in different tables or just in one table,

Alessandro Oppo: you obtain a different result.

Alessandro Oppo: And, also, I mean, sometimes it is clear if someone is part of a minority,

Alessandro Oppo: but the other time I was thinking like, let's say there is a process where, I don't know, 100 people participate

Alessandro Oppo: in a citizen assembly sort of.

Alessandro Oppo: And then after some time, you put together the people that think the same or think in a different way, or maybe

you have different steps, different rounds.

Olivier Schulbaum: Because at the end, you obtain different results, like in one way one way But there's there's only few few experiments that

have been and sometimes even with smaller groups, so not even an Android, more on on mini publics.

Olivier Schulbaum: And and I don't have the the the research in front of me, but, know, you it's pretty surprising that sometimes,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, these echo chambers,

Olivier Schulbaum: if they're physical, they're really different, if they make them physical

Olivier Schulbaum: in an assembly than online.

Olivier Schulbaum: You know, people looking at emotionally

Olivier Schulbaum: at at people's eyes, you know, it's all different conditions that civic tech would never bring. So I believe that hybridity is

the best way to to work that out. So it's not like I, you know,

Olivier Schulbaum: representativity

Olivier Schulbaum: should be coming back regularly,

Olivier Schulbaum: but we should move around these these more like and if you want to talk about affect, you need to realize

Olivier Schulbaum: what you how what you're discussing is affecting

Olivier Schulbaum: people who are, you know, directly

Olivier Schulbaum: involved.

Olivier Schulbaum: So probably, maybe sometimes I'm not in the room, but, you know, a good sortition

Olivier Schulbaum: algorithm would guarantee that probably there's a, you know, percentage

Olivier Schulbaum: that is reserved to, you know, the most affected in the assembly. That that would be enough to start with.

Alessandro Oppo: The I was thinking,

Alessandro Oppo: are you thinking about any tool?

Alessandro Oppo: Because now there is AI, so it's possible to create new tools. Coding

Alessandro Oppo: is

Alessandro Oppo: cheaper,

Alessandro Oppo: very, very cheap now.

Alessandro Oppo: And so I was thinking,

Alessandro Oppo: yeah, if you are satisfied with the actual tools, or do you think that a new tool should be created?

Olivier Schulbaum: And Yeah. That's, yeah, that's a good question actually. But so that's a nice example. So you've seen the other mass machine.

Again, I'm

Olivier Schulbaum: talking about

Olivier Schulbaum: probably

Olivier Schulbaum: partially a failed experiment

Olivier Schulbaum: just because of consensus and we're trying to reproduce

Olivier Schulbaum: institutional deliberation.

Olivier Schulbaum: So now we're building a small experiment

Olivier Schulbaum: called GRID and

Olivier Schulbaum: it's basically we're trying to

Olivier Schulbaum: create an

Olivier Schulbaum: AI agent with different personalities, so a bit schizophrenic,

Olivier Schulbaum: and one of them is the joker who's a facilitator from legislative fear,

Olivier Schulbaum: who was a kind of provocative

Olivier Schulbaum: agent that would also stop you to use

Olivier Schulbaum: him as an agent and saying, you need to reflect on that, stopping the flow of, you know, you're the perfect companion

for the deliberation, that would be the other mass machine, we don't want that.

Olivier Schulbaum: And then we have introduced

Olivier Schulbaum: a philosopher and he's an agent we're feeding with

Olivier Schulbaum: scanned books from a collection of a colleague of mine who's a philosopher from forty years of collection. And this is basically

how we feeding

Olivier Schulbaum: this AI engine. And of course, we have the deliberator, which looks a little bit marked like the upper mass machine, so

we're introducing the upper mass machine to see how it evolves

Olivier Schulbaum: in front of a legislative joker.

Olivier Schulbaum: But the idea of using this

Olivier Schulbaum: AI is to use it in physical space by the time we have people deliberating

Olivier Schulbaum: together. So it's a collective use of it, it's an individual one.

Olivier Schulbaum: And it's basically helps you also to design,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, mandates that have all these intersectional elements in consideration and all, you know, elements that we have been introducing

like design justice.

Olivier Schulbaum: So, and then all these literature about

Olivier Schulbaum: the

Olivier Schulbaum: bottlenecks of AI that is also feeding the agent

Olivier Schulbaum: to be self conscious about these limitations.

Olivier Schulbaum: And then we, as

Olivier Schulbaum: a way of experimenting

Olivier Schulbaum: as part of Inspire Project, so we have the radically independent agent, which is on my, one of our developer

Olivier Schulbaum: TV sets, so it's not even a computer, the AI agents runs on a very small

Olivier Schulbaum: memory,

Olivier Schulbaum: and then we have the one that is more connected with the beast, like

Olivier Schulbaum: OpenAI

Olivier Schulbaum: and see the different results.

Olivier Schulbaum: You know, it's very difficult so to close

Olivier Schulbaum: your knowledge, the knowledge, your knowledge base from OpenAI, you never know if it's completely independent.

Olivier Schulbaum: But it's interesting. So each time we do,

Olivier Schulbaum: we have collective prompts running, we also have systematically

Olivier Schulbaum: an analysis that gets to us to see how much percentage of the,

Olivier Schulbaum: let's say, the corpus we fed the AI agent with

Olivier Schulbaum: was used for the response

Olivier Schulbaum: and how much it had to identify what is type of knowledge

Olivier Schulbaum: that was missing from our own corpus.

Olivier Schulbaum: And sometimes we allow then the agent to go to OpenAI and see this, some responses there. So we have the two

experiments running at the same time, the one that is basically part of the beast and the one that is completely radically

independent,

Olivier Schulbaum: that is probably not sustainable, because it takes more of time. So if you ask like, what is democracy?

Olivier Schulbaum: Then, you know, the TV set agent will last, you know, will

Olivier Schulbaum: take more time, but it would be a 100% independent from any

Olivier Schulbaum: previous,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know,

Olivier Schulbaum: buyers that shall have been introduced by someone else. So this is how we we approach the the AI deliberation. It should

be a connected use, not something that is used only to digest

Olivier Schulbaum: results. I I don't think that I mean, it's probably not the the most exciting use you can do. It's just facilitating,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, institutional work, but it's, you know, if

Olivier Schulbaum: yeah. I I would rather probably use AI to

Olivier Schulbaum: basically activate people's creativity

Olivier Schulbaum: during a citizen assembly. That could be something. That's the also the idea of our of our grid agent. Yeah.

Olivier Schulbaum: Yeah.

Alessandro Oppo: No. I had a question like from

Alessandro Oppo: a practical point of view, because you were saying like people in real life

Alessandro Oppo: in some ways supported by the AI

Alessandro Oppo: agents.

Alessandro Oppo: So I can imagine like with

Alessandro Oppo: a phone

Alessandro Oppo: microphone and the so it's a sort of like a participant

Olivier Schulbaum: or Exactly. It's just one more participant.

Olivier Schulbaum: Yeah. And sometimes we bring him onto,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, as a more facilitated group

Olivier Schulbaum: and people are also using it collectively to organize, to design and mandate.

Olivier Schulbaum: So,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, it's something

Olivier Schulbaum: we're still discussing

Olivier Schulbaum: and with our inspire project colleagues,

Olivier Schulbaum: but shall be presented into the web when we're happy with the results, but it may

Olivier Schulbaum: be only,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, an an internal

Olivier Schulbaum: so we haven't released the agent yet because it wouldn't make sense if we're

Olivier Schulbaum: not happy with the result. It's more of an experiment of learning how these AI agents work, so what is the best

way of learning is creating your own, which is basically a very simple hacker

Olivier Schulbaum: principle that should be always applied. So this is basically what we do.

Olivier Schulbaum: So

Olivier Schulbaum: it's about also like what's the

Olivier Schulbaum: opportunity for technological severity in AI work, not easy to answer.

Olivier Schulbaum: And then how much of, you know, of data would we need or how much? So right now we're quite happy with

a smaller amount of data and then we have prepared like sets of data that are only activated depending on the topic

of where we use it. So if it's about like, you know, frontiers migration or if it's about trash management,

Olivier Schulbaum: we have presets.

Olivier Schulbaum: So we avoiding working with too many data

Olivier Schulbaum: because that would then be something, an agent that would look like

Olivier Schulbaum: I know everything,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, so we're reducing sometimes the

Olivier Schulbaum: the power and the role of the of the AI, but those are the participants decide on how to, you know, expand

the use of it. So I

Olivier Schulbaum: guess by by October, we we will be releasing some articles

Olivier Schulbaum: papers and deep dives about the experiment, and then we'll decide if

Olivier Schulbaum: if it's worth releasing it or not. It will be open source, of course. But now it's so connected with corpus that,

you know, it's it's really a crucial element.

Alessandro Oppo: I really like this

Alessandro Oppo: kind of experiment because I think they are really connected with scaling

Alessandro Oppo: because sometimes

Alessandro Oppo: I mean, in this way, you could provide, let's say, I don't know, a tool for citizen assembly

Alessandro Oppo: with moderation

Alessandro Oppo: and facilitation

Alessandro Oppo: inside the

Alessandro Oppo: tool. And then because you were mentioning

Alessandro Oppo: you what is democracy?

Alessandro Oppo: I want to ask you, what is democracy?

Olivier Schulbaum: How about this?

Olivier Schulbaum: No. This is this not a question you want to be asked. Now for me, democracy has to has lot to do

with effect.

Olivier Schulbaum: So

Olivier Schulbaum: probably democracy is about solidarity in a way.

Olivier Schulbaum: So,

Olivier Schulbaum: from a privileged position such as ours, it's basically about like reversing it, flipping it and saying, who's affected by whatever

Olivier Schulbaum: topic or ideas or decision that needs to be made. So it's really a simple exercise,

Olivier Schulbaum: who should be in the room first,

Olivier Schulbaum: who should we listen to first.

Olivier Schulbaum: So I don't think democracy can be described as

Olivier Schulbaum: a tool in itself,

Olivier Schulbaum: but I think it would basically

Olivier Schulbaum: imagine that we would forbid any institution to do any discursive

Olivier Schulbaum: production around democracy and only art based

Olivier Schulbaum: art based expressions.

Olivier Schulbaum: Oh, that could be a good experience in one year.

Olivier Schulbaum: So the policymakers would be freaking out

Olivier Schulbaum: and I guess citizens less.

Olivier Schulbaum: So you could do that in schools, for example,

Olivier Schulbaum: as a small entrepreneur can build their own democracy

Olivier Schulbaum: without the use of any discourse

Olivier Schulbaum: or even you could also say pre established knowledge, that could be something interesting.

Olivier Schulbaum: Designing a corpus of what we need to design

Olivier Schulbaum: a democratic process is something kids at school should be able to design themselves.

Olivier Schulbaum: It's more of the new

Olivier Schulbaum: library for me, you know, where we basically, when we were young and we were going like, you know, illustrations as important

of the text,

Olivier Schulbaum: you can be driven by a poem, which is a political poem more than any

Olivier Schulbaum: political discourse or an essay. So, you know, we should offer the opportunity of people to relate or create, you know,

Olivier Schulbaum: positive affection

Olivier Schulbaum: with democracy,

Olivier Schulbaum: choosing a language they feel more

Olivier Schulbaum: configured. And maybe if the AI can translate this for everybody, so, you know, all these different

Olivier Schulbaum: human agents at the end of the day that have different ways of expression, different work,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, I'm

Olivier Schulbaum: talking a lot about socioderma

Olivier Schulbaum: and is that a theater, but there's lots of people that wouldn't

Olivier Schulbaum: be comfortable in using their body to express themselves. We understand that too. It's not that creating more justice doesn't

Olivier Schulbaum: really need to avoid creating more

Olivier Schulbaum: all this affection by a certain series of people or also

Olivier Schulbaum: unsafe space, because when you talk about oppressions,

Olivier Schulbaum: sometimes you have the oppressor in the room. So if you apply legislative theater in Citizen Assamilies, for example, that would be

a deed. So how can we create also like enclaved

Olivier Schulbaum: legislative theater with people that fit comfortable with,

Olivier Schulbaum: and then back to eventually,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know,

Olivier Schulbaum: the rest of the groups? Because if you, we do lots of experiments as part of the School of Creative Democracy in

Schools, and we talk about gender violence, we know that it's not, it's a sensible

Olivier Schulbaum: theme. So you basically want to have maybe one to one dialogues,

Olivier Schulbaum: bring,

Olivier Schulbaum: individual have

Olivier Schulbaum: inquiry and then build some, you know, mandate or questioning that you can be different people from the classroom together. So if

you talk about trash management, you don't need that. But if you talk about sensible issues that you're maybe other person in

the room, that's it, it's a real issue. So, yeah. So I don't know how you have been

Olivier Schulbaum: coming to that point talking about simple idea of what democracy is, but, you know, I've been explaining, so not easy. And

Alessandro Oppo: if

Alessandro Oppo: we think about the future,

Alessandro Oppo: what democracy could look like,

Alessandro Oppo: I mean, if there is

Alessandro Oppo: also in relation to participation,

Alessandro Oppo: civic tech, I don't know if you can

Alessandro Oppo: if you think that maybe a more direct democracy,

Alessandro Oppo: different kind of relationship with institutions,

Alessandro Oppo: more horizontal.

Olivier Schulbaum: Yeah.

Olivier Schulbaum: Well, since we're

Olivier Schulbaum: both part of the civic tech movement, the one simple question is what does the civic tech movement

Olivier Schulbaum: really need?

Olivier Schulbaum: Right? So

Olivier Schulbaum: civic tech, I think doesn't need more apps.

Olivier Schulbaum: Right?

Olivier Schulbaum: We already have an enormous

Olivier Schulbaum: graveyard.

Olivier Schulbaum: Most of

Olivier Schulbaum: with beautiful design, civic tech tools,

Olivier Schulbaum: most of them

Olivier Schulbaum: financed by commission

Olivier Schulbaum: through Horizon Projects and they have no community associate to that. So it's kind of a cemetery.

Olivier Schulbaum: So we shall

Olivier Schulbaum: need to avoid that. So we have been,

Olivier Schulbaum: I think

Olivier Schulbaum: I would say maintenance

Olivier Schulbaum: is a political work

Olivier Schulbaum: and it needs community.

Olivier Schulbaum: So maintenance is never a question for, of techies,

Olivier Schulbaum: maintenance is a question of people who are really

Olivier Schulbaum: in need of certain tech, I would say.

Olivier Schulbaum: And then, you know, talking about AI,

Olivier Schulbaum: one of the question we have to ask is who govern civic tech, right?

Olivier Schulbaum: Versus Gaffat, but really who governs civic techs and who found civic tech? The founders, the developers,

Olivier Schulbaum: the institutions or the communities using it? So I think developing new governance model

Olivier Schulbaum: shall be something we shall start with. And I think, you know,

Olivier Schulbaum: there's a few example that already happened, but I would say civic nets would need to

Olivier Schulbaum: recover something that the world takes sometimes make us forget, so people,

Olivier Schulbaum: relationships,

Olivier Schulbaum: conflict in a good sense of it, care,

Olivier Schulbaum: bodies,

Olivier Schulbaum: time, which is a crucial element,

Olivier Schulbaum: and imagination.

Olivier Schulbaum: So

Olivier Schulbaum: let's say, you know, what I'm saying, how can we build non discursive

Olivier Schulbaum: deliberation?

Olivier Schulbaum: How can we build non discursive code?

Olivier Schulbaum: So code that somehow is

Olivier Schulbaum: community sensible.

Olivier Schulbaum: So that's a real issue, that's something we should thought about. But and then as to pin upon what we obsessed with

in the future with my colleague, Sonia Boussou from Inspire Project,

Olivier Schulbaum: we're working on

Olivier Schulbaum: the conception of intercessional time. So who has time for democracy,

Olivier Schulbaum: right? So who has actually time to participate? So, because, you know, we know the time is not distributed equally,

Olivier Schulbaum: a student, single parent,

Olivier Schulbaum: someone working two jobs or three jobs, a person with disability,

Olivier Schulbaum: so they're not entering a deliberative process with the same temporal resources, right? So, and

Olivier Schulbaum: you know,

Olivier Schulbaum: I think that that's something we should also consider. So what if one of the most powerful forms of democratic exclusion

Olivier Schulbaum: is simply the control of time? So I think, and that's

Olivier Schulbaum: something we would definitely think about that time in democracy is not a natural resource.

Olivier Schulbaum: So it's basically, you know, and also looking at citizens democratic

Olivier Schulbaum: times, especially when we talk about youth participation,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, their notion of time is really different, but if you talk also about certain communities,

Olivier Schulbaum: the use of time and the perception of time is also something really different,

Olivier Schulbaum: the effect of your participation

Olivier Schulbaum: on time is sometimes perceived differently.

Olivier Schulbaum: So I think that's

Olivier Schulbaum: a crucial element, which we haven't take

Olivier Schulbaum: enough

Olivier Schulbaum: care of

Olivier Schulbaum: when building technology or building or designing

Olivier Schulbaum: deliberation,

Olivier Schulbaum: really.

Alessandro Oppo: When

Alessandro Oppo: you were mentioning theater,

Alessandro Oppo: I was thinking also about Sanya Busse.

Olivier Schulbaum: Of course. Yes. Because no.

Olivier Schulbaum: A that's a few that's a few projects or pilots that have been developed, especially youth led. So there's this one called

You're Fried about

Olivier Schulbaum: employment of the youth, but also the mindset revolution project,

Olivier Schulbaum: which turned out to a more international project called the mental health,

Olivier Schulbaum: youth mental health beyond borders,

Olivier Schulbaum: where we have collaborated and so that's also a small piece of documentary that I

Olivier Schulbaum: can share with you also about it. And I think that these

Olivier Schulbaum: are crucial elements on defining,

Olivier Schulbaum: and especially monacy mindset evolution participants

Olivier Schulbaum: that have grown

Olivier Schulbaum: from participants to legislative theater

Olivier Schulbaum: or digital

Olivier Schulbaum: deliberation

Olivier Schulbaum: designers,

Olivier Schulbaum: when at the start they were basically

Olivier Schulbaum: participants in a in a process around youth mental health, and I'm seeing that they are, you know, professional facilitators

Olivier Schulbaum: that have grown up through this participation process. It also makes me think that, you know, people who have the opportunity to

participate in any of these projects should be cared of, should be,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know,

Olivier Schulbaum: should deep dive with them on their capacities. We should check with them what their democratic and the logic capacities they have

acquired and design from their insights

Olivier Schulbaum: or inquiries, design,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, a better approach on democratic

Olivier Schulbaum: capabilities, which is also something that our colleague Lucie Paris, Oliver,

Olivier Schulbaum: Escobar from Inspire are working on. So this democratic

Olivier Schulbaum: capabilities framework, how is this connected,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, to

Olivier Schulbaum: the power that participants acquire that I would say, which are the capabilities that institution can learn from working with

Olivier Schulbaum: the most effective also. I think that

Olivier Schulbaum: has to be seen on both sides.

Alessandro Oppo: So there has to be a sort of feedback loop with citizens

Alessandro Oppo: that are involved.

Olivier Schulbaum: Yeah. And if citizens are conscious about like establishing their own path on which are the capabilities as part of this process

that I want to acquire, so do I want to raise a political voice that can be a capacity,

Olivier Schulbaum: or do I want to raise more capacities on my solidarity capabilities with others?

Olivier Schulbaum: You know, you should be able to decide from the start, this is the path, so I'd like to grow,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, from this perspective. So that would also determine the type of role you can have beyond being a participant

Olivier Schulbaum: in the process. So quickly come to participating,

Olivier Schulbaum: but sometimes that can also help,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, maybe prioritizing

Olivier Schulbaum: as part of a group,

Olivier Schulbaum: negotiating conflict when it appears in the citizen assembly, you know, but

Olivier Schulbaum: by the way, you can choose the path on which are the democratic companies you want to acquire as participants. If it's

stated in a very simple terms, not technical terms, I think that's very useful to make people understand that we learn through

the process and we will take, you know, we will take in consideration the capacities to be active,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, in in the parallel process. I think that's that's about like democratic

Olivier Schulbaum: and and legacy

Olivier Schulbaum: in fact. It's really something we trying

Olivier Schulbaum: to integrate as part of our school for PDV democracy,

Olivier Schulbaum: having

Olivier Schulbaum: members or

Olivier Schulbaum: cohorts of participants

Olivier Schulbaum: teaching their peers in the next experiment.

Alessandro Oppo: And we are near the end,

Alessandro Oppo: I wanted to ask you if we miss something

Alessandro Oppo: or otherwise I will ask you the last question. If you think that you want to add something that we didn't touch.

Olivier Schulbaum: Maybe taking it back to when we talked about AI and deliberation, I think what we are living now is AI and

the acceleration of deliberation. So this, everybody's convinced that, wow, AI is great to digest, but I think the digestion

Olivier Schulbaum: is something that needs a specific time

Olivier Schulbaum: and

Olivier Schulbaum: non text digestion.

Olivier Schulbaum: So I think we should also take care of that. This is just something like, you know, what if acceleration itself becomes

a democratic bias?

Olivier Schulbaum: So how can we slow down AI in deliberation?

Olivier Schulbaum: And that's partly what we tried to do with GRIT, especially with our joker agent, who's constantly about like provocating that, you

know, rediscussing the prompt as it is, you know, to avoid psychofancy and all these elements. So

Olivier Schulbaum: I just forgot about that.

Alessandro Oppo: And

Alessandro Oppo: so the last question will be,

Alessandro Oppo: if you have a final message,

Alessandro Oppo: I mean, for all the people that are working on civic tech or participation

Alessandro Oppo: or

Alessandro Oppo: similar field?

Olivier Schulbaum: No. I'd I'd love to invite people to read our journal. We have some a journal called wider journal. No. Don't be

afraid. It's not an academic journal. It's got every, you know, I think this is something we

Olivier Schulbaum: I'd like to recommend and also we'd love to see contributions.

Olivier Schulbaum: And of course, will share with you all the, for the civic tech people or the, you know, GoTale repository on GitHub

and all our

Olivier Schulbaum: modules for the civic, there's lots of them

Olivier Schulbaum: that go behind this, you know,

Olivier Schulbaum: text into box kind of navigation.

Alessandro Oppo: And I

Alessandro Oppo: actually have another last question. Okay. The last last.

Alessandro Oppo: Because now you were mentioning the CD models.

Alessandro Oppo: And before you were also saying that there

Alessandro Oppo: are a lot of civic tech applications,

Alessandro Oppo: so a sort of symmetry.

Alessandro Oppo: And so I was thinking if there is someone that has an idea about a civic tech app

Alessandro Oppo: at the same time to not replicate this

Alessandro Oppo: to not create another

Alessandro Oppo: that the civic tech app that goes directly in the cemetery,

Alessandro Oppo: What could be an approach so that

Alessandro Oppo: we do not always recreate,

Alessandro Oppo: but in some way we connect the dots of what is already existing?

Olivier Schulbaum: Probably recycling,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know,

Olivier Schulbaum: so this cemetery

Olivier Schulbaum: is worth visiting sometimes.

Olivier Schulbaum: Maybe not for the tech in itself, but because it's partly funded by European projects, most of it have lots of reports

and, you know, requirements,

Olivier Schulbaum: documents. So probably even more interesting than the code that can be, you know,

Olivier Schulbaum: grow old. But anyway,

Olivier Schulbaum: you, you

Olivier Schulbaum: know, Goetheo is

Olivier Schulbaum: starting in 02/2011

Olivier Schulbaum: and

Olivier Schulbaum: we just, we

Olivier Schulbaum: did the code from scratch

Olivier Schulbaum: last year.

Olivier Schulbaum: So there's, you know, if you design well,

Olivier Schulbaum: you know, no importance that if the code is still something sexy,

Olivier Schulbaum: it's is something stable.

Olivier Schulbaum: I think that that should be something also to consider. And again, back to, you know, the ceiling question,

Olivier Schulbaum: why are we using

Olivier Schulbaum: a certain language and other, you know, reflection on what is the language you will be using and what's the price of

it in the market to avoid the fact that you will have to pay a developer 10 times what something, someone in

your team that has

Olivier Schulbaum: basically studied humanities

Olivier Schulbaum: paid, I think it's very unfair.

Olivier Schulbaum: So we should avoid that on civic tech. So watch out the socioeconomic condition of the code itself and the dependency we

require

Olivier Schulbaum: by this, you know, from a choice or another.

Olivier Schulbaum: Yeah. That that that's that's that's something that should be considered.

Alessandro Oppo: Thank you a lot, Olivier.

Olivier Schulbaum: You're welcome, Alessandro.

Alessandro Oppo: It was a pleasure.

Olivier Schulbaum: Cheers.

Olivier Schulbaum: Bye.