can
i'd say
so we are here with from atom
thick enough
and today we love we talk about
the or monica and disease or another
episode of their democracy innovator podcast
so thank you hurt them for your
time and they're very clear for having
me
i'm very curious about the or monica
and so the first question is that
what is the actually or monica
i can tell he goes for monica
but maybe he wants me to give
you some quick intro like my background
also your background and whatever like you
like
okay so my bedroom and isn't a
product marketing i used to do like
a lot of use a resurgence communication
strategies and
and eventually product strategies for clients like
product innovation you know like defense prince
and customer experience design then i got
very tired of all that and i
decided to make like a pivot and
find something that would be more that
with more that resonate with me more
and that sir why i decided to
or get a liquor some indication that
like
a degree and then i went to
the uk where i studied
innovation management and
part of that program was writing a
thesis and they decided to write my
thesis about
cooperatives and then i learned about commons
elinor ostrom
and i realized that sir this is
like super
profound
ah theory that she was working on
and in her research and that took
forty years maybe and eventually she'll got
the nobel prize for the researcher was
the first woman to ever gets our
nobel prize in economics so elinor ostrom
was a great great sir political
our political scientist may be political economists
anthropologist who believed that sir
community shared resources or communities with shared
resources is an alternative to
and markets and states so basically this
is like a third
the economic paradigm that is very different
from both companies like private companies and
also the states
the state the beasts
management all you know state owned companies
all planned economy and so on
so that that was very very inspiring
for me and that's what how i
got into web three i was a
governance lead in a row and i
consulted a few does
after that
and that's how i got into meta
gov
because not to golf is like this
the community that is researching cutting edge
governance and web three governance in particular
and i was learning a lot from
met the gulf
and the also i got into newspeak
house which is a very interesting place
in london where they can have try
to
cross-pollinate ideas that are related to governance
and open source and civic tech and
the basically like intersection of democracy and
technology
i
that it's one of the most interesting
places in the world they think in
for the people who are interested in
democracy and technology and that's where harmonica
started so i i came up with
idea for harmonica while living in you
speak house in london
and also working at at as a
governance lead in a small doubt
and as the governance lead i was
first i was really struggling with
you know getting some input from the
community
i like trying to get people comments
on proposals in the forum right those
proposals you know join the workshops and
can contribute during those workshops and fill
out the surveys that i asked them
to feel
and all that was very very difficult
like people didn't want to do anything
they didn't want to write proposals they
didn't want to discuss proposals they didn't
want to fill out the forms that
didn't want to join workshops was like
hurting the cat for so at the
time i didn't know that but basically
this is what's or
i call sense making right now
so
oh when there was
you know did during my residency at
newspeak house john g p t came
out and it was like a very
very big topic like follow a lot
of conversations that happens in les twenty
two and twenty three
and which some of those i was
part of and so we discussed how
language models could be used to improve
governance of communities
and that's again the towel harmonica started
like i thought that maybe we could
use
generative a i to help with sensemaking
to help
the community managers governance leads and everyone
else who has to act as facilitator
not necessarily being professional facilitator but everyone
you know who is managing a community
that has to facilitate discussions from to
the time they have to facilitate
and so how generative a i could
help them how can we empower those
people the in those roles and to
or basically do
decent the collective sense making
so that's what we're monica is about
okay it's and i'll ever see now
i was looking at about your curriculum
that is the i will say alpha
economic and the and of yeah innovation
management and
and it's interesting it will be interesting
to know ah how you develop this
product i mean i deserve the software
was in terms of her
i've seen that he applied for some
grants and the that was the something
i think that allow you to build
the platform
but
it it will be interesting i think
for the people that want to build
the a platform for certain our little
bitter about the the backgrounder because the
ah
yeah your background in economic i think
it made the in a way for
you
it was may be easier for you
to find the summer and
some money to sponsor the project or
not not know first of all you'll
have background the the comics i started
in high school of economics that's the
name of the university that i studied
boomer added when i got my bachelors
degree
and it was like long time ago
twenty years ago
do
i graduated in two thousand and salad
but
i i didn't study economics i started
management and then a once i i
asked worked in advertising and then i
worked in product management and
i tried to build some startups before
harmonica but sir
i never
you know it was more like experiments
and i didn't
raise any like a venture capital for
those
sometimes i just invested my own saving
sometimes was like friends and family and
with harmonica it's actually the same
i invested them my savings and i
ain't got some grunts got some donations
from friends or through give us which
is a
platform for crypto donations and by the
way we are participating in the quadratic
funding round on giveth right now and
we would really appreciate even like one
dollar donation if anyone can do that
before fourteenth of february and and harmonica
is open-source try
correct
so
while we discussed disgusted a few times
if it's possible to fundraise i mean
to raise venture capital for open source
projects and i think there are some
examples of that i think this but
basically it's possible but you know after
reading elinor ostrom and
he going into this kind of posts
capitalists the
and
thinking was his school of thought not
only i mean not only thanks to
all eleanor but also some other
the researchers and thinkers like michelle bounds
for instance from peter pi foundation like
i i became very
disillusioned in venture capital like i really
don't want to go that route i
want harmonica to be like to open
source
with without this kind of growth imperative
or for profit
imperative like i don't want to to
build harmonica for product which makes it
much harder to build it like we
we won a few grants are actually
to grunts the through get coin and
i think one of them was like
three thousand dollars and other one was
like seven thousand so that's not a
lot of money and i hope that
we will
be figure out how to make it
more in a more systemic way and
make harmony curb self-sustainable sustainable without
and compromising the open source narrative or
if this that we are
committed to so right now it's a
free tool there is no subscriptions
and we we might introduce some kind
of premium features or for b to
be customers and maybe that would be
certain
yeah the to address specific use cases
that are important for me to be
customers
which show would be yeah with which
could be i think
available as like additional thing but the
the core product the court experience of
harmonica should be free and available to
everyone
and so we rely on grandson and
we rely on donations
then he yeah it's are important for
this kind of product i of projects
maybe is saw in the this word
fit better and yeah i think to
be open source because the we are
talking about the very serious things i
mean the
you're talking about sense making and inside
a nicer way to this group
what the softer what the software does
and the yeah it seems quite hard
the for innovative project to ever some
funding and the yeah sorry for them
as understand get misunderstanding about your background
and the
and it was thinking about like the
first question and like what is our
monica like for someone that has never
tried the the tool like i've tried
it and is a is a chat
no way
and the user has a conversation with
an llm about the a certain topic
right now
and they're the idea is quick to
collect the
all the different positions
how will you describe it in and
to someone that the as know the
right yeah so what's the actual product
healthworks and
yes you're at the we decided to
focus at least for now focus on
one on one
dialogues with the participants of each process
each session or we think that it
has a lot of benefits people can
be much more honest or open and
they can be anonymous and they don't
have to you know think about what
what other participants or maybe their team
members or like people from the organization
and how they might interpret their words
and
they can do that
at at their own time like he
is important to note that the harmonica
is facilitating asynchronous
discussions or asynchronous workshops asynchronous sir deliberations
so
yes of the host creates a session
and invites the participants and participants joined
the session and they start talking to
the
a i read the language model through
our web app through the chat interface
that you mentioned which is very similar
to charge a pity but unlike tragic
p t it's a multiplayer experience it's
multiplayer session which means that even though
you talk to everyone talks to the
a i the ai is saving all
those responses to a vector database
and it can ask follow-up questions or
additional questions based on other participants responses
what we call cross pollination
so
basically we once participants to be able
to
comment on each other's ideas or build
upon each other's ideas while talking to
a i saw like they talked to
each other but indirectly they talked to
each other through the ai
and the the ai synthesizes the statements
the responses and
it can identify the clusters of opinions
in the way like similar to what
police or how police works i with
policy you create some since statements and
participants can react to those statements but
also they can add their own statements
and then or the participants can react
to those additional statements from other from
from you and so eventually you can
create this kind of
cluster raised or like the you can
map the
i've been clusters of of your community
so we wanted to something similar with
harmonica but with conversational
in interface though that everyone can just
to chat with the ai and also
we are working on an additional modes
of input like voice so that he
will he won't have to type you
can will you will be able to
talk to her monica and also we
want your to add like additional like
elena
it's like sliders like made me like
multiple choice and so on so it
would be much more
and flexible or dynamic experience for participants
but most importantly there and responses will
be saved in this fashion database or
context window and session context and the
first of all the
harmonica will
identify
like
important statements or may be outliers like
strange ideas that are in it things
are original and then for instance asked
participants what they think about those strange
ideas outliers because what we believe is
that
consensus is overrated like consensus of common
ground is the one you know it
it can be it is great when
communities were aligned and like everyone is
on the same page and you know
on that common ground but also in
of i think especially in law
larger communities like common grounds can be
quite bland you know like when there's
a lot of people something that all
of them agree on can be quite
small or you know banal like obvious
you know and then it's it's very
very important to
get feedback on less obvious ideas coming
from some of those members some of
those groups we want other groups to
comment on those ideas and then it
would be hopefully it'll be much easier
to for instance like develop a strategy
that will be very inspiring for most
of the community
but it wouldn't be boring it wouldn't
be obvious it would be based on
some of the outlier ideas coming from
some of the members which are supported
by other members
you know what i'm talking about so
it's not just finding common ground it's
not just finding something that everyone agrees
on it's about amplifying the good ideas
and then let's i think what sensemaking
is about
thought that i will say or do
a sort of ai mediator mediation and
also sort of collective of brainstorming weafer
the llm yep this is very interesting
i was also thinking about the device
the input that the could make every
finger ether
and the
about the there is also on an
idea that the i thought about the
so collectivist collective utilization of problems like
someone as a certain kind of problem
may be in the same town another
person as this improv
and the eventually this tool this project
called the show that many people in
that place share the same problem and
so eventually they can also try to
find a solution to to death
in them
you told me about the a little
bitter about the the idea how you
had it and but i would like
to ask you if you were interested
in the
in this the topics not maybe nothing
civic tech but like air in your
experience i have you had any previous
to experience about conflicts
because of you know sometimes it's normally
we disagree i
and the some time we understand the
other person but we not share what
they say what that person say
and the i dunno was there for
you like a a moment when you
thought okay we need that new tools
i dunno maybe a personal situation something
that you thought okay we need the
new things because they it's it's hard
to to agree if we use the
normal and
if we just communicate in a normal
way
while with ai and a
and they use of llm cooler facilitate
call sections
to be honest the conflict resolution wasn't
something that i thought about when i
came up with her idea of for
harmonica i
like i said it was more about
my struggle with the
just getting input from the community like
it was very you know
it took me a lot of time
and also i had to process the
inputs like for instance you know when
i did like workshops and miro and
mira not sure how to planet
and you know people added some stickers
to the white board and then after
the workshop i had to copy all
those stickers somewhere and like tried to
cluster them and to synthesize them so
that it would be like the something
like actionable make some kind of
summary of the workshop and the to
me it was like one of the
most difficult things with and in terms
of workshops spiritual workshops so it's a
little it's also about the time basically
separate so it's it was a very
it took a lot of time and
also it was hot
to engage people just to get like
a lot of people to participate and
finally you know like with for instance
with them
like okay cures frederick objectives and key
results which is very popular framework for
a setting like objectives for our organization
like i tried to do that
with with my team with the other
teams but first of all i did
have much experience with it so i
wasn't entirely sure that i'm doing it
the right way and secondly other people
didn't know about ogres until i told
them about it
and so for them it was like
a learning experience and that they they
didn't quite understand what they need to
do so
i think what a harmonica
one of the benefits of harmonica is
that it helps you to use the
right framework and the right way like
for instance if you want to develop
a goes like harmonica will know how
to do it and if you want
to develop a theory of change for
the community from one occur will tell
you or suggest one of the ways
to to develop a thief
of change in terms of conflict resolution
i think that's a very interesting topic
basically for me conflict resolution is one
of the key
and elements of governance
so a lot of people think there's
like a very like a popular misconception
that a lot of people think that
governess means decision-making and actually that's not
the case decision making is one part
of governance that
it is suddenly decision-making it's also
no code of conduct for instance like
certainly principles of how your organization is
like operating and and that can that
there's a big overlap between those principles
and decision-making ideally the decision-making should be
like synchronized with your values and the
prince
apple's
and there is also a very important
topic of tools like what does the
use and who has access to those
tools like who can actually
edit or delete you know important documents
in the cloud that's not so very
very big part of governance to me
which some people just don't think about
the enough some just don't think about
and then there is conflict resolution which
is also equally important like how do
you actually resolve conflicts or disputes
which is by the way like it's
one of the design principles of elinor
ostrom like element western ghats for nobel
prize basically for developing eight design principles
for building successful comments like how to
how to create a successful comments like
a if you wants to build the
occur open source project which what
or eighty wants to maintain a forest
she was obviously a and forests and
the like fish in the water but
the same principles apply to open source
projects and the other digital commons so
conflict resolution is one of those eight
principles like if you want to if
you
want your community to maintain or develop
shared resources
you need to have conflict resolution in
a place
and either i i dunno if
like how exactly a i could be
used for that i'm sure there's probably
like a few different startups that are
trying to develop to to build a
tool for conflict resolution with a i
right now
the harmonica is
so i think for conflict resolution facilitation
is also very important basically facilitation is
something that is important for sense making
and for conflict resolution
and how many trying to understand how
to
turn facilitation wisdom until code like how
to codify facilitation wisdom so that a
i could facilitate workshops in a specific
her away like for instance like a
retrospective road like harmonica can run a
retrospective for your team or it will
talk
to use or participants to the members
and it will ask them about you
know like the standard the retrospective questions
like what was good about the last
sprint what didn't work so well what
can be improved and how could we
actually improve it or how can we
fix the problems right of there's like
three
three main questions in a retrospective and
it's kind of obvious like yeah like
he can write a prompt for like
djibouti and explain all that for the
language model and then it will this
prompt will be used to
like you know talk to each participant
collect the inputs from them
and then another prompt which is also
part of the retrospective session will be
used to synthesize all those responses and
generate the summary
of your respective and that summary would
be
pretty good like it will be very
close to water in a liquor retrospective
outputs should look like it according to
like a jail
the thinking like you know experts in
agile and management who are we really
wanted to collaborate with and like we
want them to give us feedback like
if the prompts that were using is
not very not very good then we
are happy to
change them you know improve them or
maybe those experts wants to create their
own prompts and their own then place
as we call them and the it
can be not only about agile it
can be about anything and so may
be conflict resolution could also be
you know what part of that experience
maybe the the actually can be like
a lot of different templates a lot
of different frameworks that help people took
resolve conflicts we just haven't thought about
that yet
but maybe it's actually in important like
direction for tools like harmonica like how
how you could do
yet how the a i should talk
to people but the what when bit
skeptical about this is i think conflict
resolution is an emotional like with when
you trying to develop like oak yards
or a roadmap it's basically it is
just about ideas it can be quite
rational it doesn't have to be emotional
with conflicts i think there's much more
emotions in place and i think it's
very important not to lose those emotions
in the process like you need to
actually be ideal you want to be
in the one in one room with
the someone to the resolve the conflict
like if you just talk about that
that stuff through zoom or some other
and you know
video conferences at all it's already like
harder to resolve the conflict and if
you do that through the chats with
a i
i'm afraid that the just to you
know it you just lose all the
emotions that you need to actually hear
the other person like not just saw
with a
not just the war is would also
like the by the language and stuff
like that so
i dunno having the conflict resolution is
very big topic that can you give
you can think about like projects like
clara's phrase that claris is doing kind
of decentralized to
conflict resolution but that's more like a
court right likely just turf people who
who
i tried to resolve conflicts and as
a service you're using blockchain but i
don't think they're using ai
and
i can correct now
then and you are made me think
that the maybe facilitation is the step
before conflict resolution
i mean because i just despise listen
to the mental skill that you need
for affix resolution as well as sensemaking
yeah yeah exactly if we ever way
to understand each other before we have
a conflict then hopefully we done after
i have a conflict and so that
is why of incur
the to like harmonica could be very
useful
and the elect ask you if you
encountered any kind of problems i dunno
maybe you are thinking about something okay
we have to do it in this
way or in another way and then
your face some something unexpected i dunno
well room
you know
every startup the has like dozens of
things like that
until they get to their black product
market fit and we we haven't got
there yet
so i guess we have something like
that like every week
but also like when he asked me
about this right now i just i
need some time to like remember something
that would be interesting to talk about
and like you know in general this
is all very fuzzy rent like for
instance we we started with a different
but like the first the for the
type that were built was a bot
for discord
and then we realized that and
it's not that easy to
like facilitate a workshop in there
dems on discord through through the ams
on discord
and also like a lot of people
that i talked to about harmonica they
were not underscore like they had to
install discord and register just to be
able to test the harmonica
so then we decided to move to
telegram and like last summer i was
invited by
as ozil community and and of he
knows as a little was as allow
it sur le carr conferences as sponsored
by ethereum community foundation
and so the first one was in
montenegro in twenty three
and the last year it was in
georgia
georgia the country not the state
and
so they invited me to help them
organize the one of the weeks because
it's a long contracts they call themselves
pop-up village so i think it took
like six or seven weeks and total
and one of those weeks was about
decentralized governance
and so i helped them organized that
weekend also i thought that it it
was it would be like a good
opportunity for us to test harmonica
like a pilot project for harmonica and
so we built a telegram telegram bot
ah for that week so we tried
to use from monica at the conference
and zoo village georgia
and invited the participants of the conference
of that week people who attended the
the sessions that i organized
like with stickers and
and some workshops we invited them to
use the the telegram bot harmonica on
telegram
which also wasn't very successful like
a lot of people joined those sessions
but never finish them they didn't respond
to the questions
and the i realized that yeah we'll
probably just it wasn't the right solution
for that context like people who attend
the conference they're not members of the
same team some most of them don't
know each other so they didn't have
any like
skin in the game they didn't want
to discuss anything with each other they
didn't want to help us and harmonica
so
with all that sir feedback i in
the nothing that but feel that but
also like just the kind of
you know basically that wasn't the very
successful experiment for us so we decided
to start using to to build a
web app like to just to create
something like judge a pity on on
the web and i think that this
currently working pretty well the web app
but it also has its limitations and
i think that people
and a lot of people just don't
want to open links like if someone
sends them a link especially if it's
not the direct messages but as if
it's like a channel on discord and
like everyone on the community is invited
to join the session very very few
people actually click on the link and
that's what we've seen recently for instance
in orinda community like they tried to
do at a year retrospective with harmonica
in les les december or january to
reflect on twenty twenty four as a
community and i think it was like
ten people for joined the session
with the yeah i think like a
few hundred members and on the discord
server like maybe a five hundred six
hundred members in orinda and only ten
of those users actually joined the session
in harmonica
which you know it's it's a problem
for us and we haven't the
figured out how to solve this yet
but one of the hypothesis that we
have is that we still we we
need to go back to building a
discord bot so that we made you
will make like the full-circle and but
it will be a new kind of
bot that would be using a
that would be connected to an agent
so it will be basically like harmonica
agent that would be joining
certain channels or threads are in a
committed to server and maybe it will
be and
trying to facilitate
discussions happening there like so that people
wouldn't need to leave discord they wouldn't
need to join any sessions it will
be it won't have any set it
will be like specialists sense experience just
happening on the community platform that the
community the so they both inside the
the group that is core group
telegram group or whatever instead of further
use that as to fried to the
bot privately
the oil joining a session on the
web which is to the current solution
exactly and the i think about these
the problem i mean someone build up
a project our platform that can be
very useful and then people are may
be they are yet as you said
afraid of opening a lie
the or maybe they are just lazy
i dunno they ever things through their
their their their life and the may
be gimme vacation systems called the help
in a way to
yet to stimulate use earth to to
do a certain thing to reply but
also as you say like they're out
you could be
ether so you just the the is
just say something to there
cell phone a year he absolutely i
think people can
sheer like ten times more information if
they can talk
instead of typing
and we basically we want to increase
the bandwidth we want to for sensemaking
we need to get as much information
as possible
from the community or from the organization
so we really need to on the
one hand be able to use different
modes of like except different kinds of
input including voice and on the other
hand we need to be able to
join the conversation
that are happening already and you know
that could be a boss that is
deployed to and discord server or maybe
it's just the something like as call
maybe we should be able to join
some calls so we could build the
zoom app rights that
would be invited to those calls or
we could use the transcripts that are
already generated by tools like autor and
fireflies you know those a i know
taking tools so that's something that we
are working on right now we want
to be able to add those transcripts
as the context to the sessions so
it's not just what people
i say or what people tell harmonica
in our sessions but also being able
to import conversations that happened elsewhere
may be on zoom may be in
discord we want to be able to
kind of
combine or merge all those different to
conversations to form this kind of a
you know
collective intelligence or
like a context for a i and
then the next question and then on
the question but the something that we
are working on day i want to
share with you is that if we
managed to like form that collective intelligence
or she context sir based on all
those conversations that can happen in
harmonica or outside of harmonica then we
also want to be able to turn
that into
and agents itself
and that agents would be able to
represent the opinions or the perspectives of
that group of people
ah somewhere else
so this is what the we call
a i avatars
and i think that could be like
a
really fundamental breakthrough for
like online governance when groups of people
will be able to deliberate
on certain topics and then create an
ai agent that would er
represent them based on all those deliberation
the based on all those conversations with
and all those responses that people shared
and you know what they agreed on
and disagreed on so i think it
will be very powerful away to scale
will do
deliberative democracy because you know it's very
hard to deliberate and stuff all the
time like people have other things to
do they don't want to join like
citizen assembly as every week
but if we managed to create something
like and governance surface for the team
or for the community
and that would enable them to create
an agent that would accurately represent their
perspectives and values and like girl intentions
like what are they really once maybe
within the company like maybe it team
wants to create an agents that would
represent it
on like higher level company
the strategy meeting rights of that the
interests of that team would be represented
the when the department is making decisions
and then maybe the agent of the
department will be represented at the company
level the this is making the same
applies to politics like maybe a neighborhood
can
discuss lot of different stuff like deliberate
for like maybe a few months and
then that context would be enough for
this neighborhood to create an agents that
would represent this neighborhood on city level
deliberation and then maybe the city consisting
of all those different neighborhoods would be
able to create an agent
with represents the city on national national
level
deliberation so this is i think very
very important because it allows you to
scale a deliberative democracy
absolutely it's very charming them
the the way the the a agents
can represent people
and the that's also a water was
talking about the when i said about
the collective is collectivization of problems so
i went to a laker some people
that ever the same problem can be
represented by a certain the agent to
them
i dunno the state level town level
whatever here
and the i'm thinking i mean now
the plus from now is the i
mean is developed and a you're talking
about her a lot of for improvement
that are very cool
and the
which kind offer
ah i dunno like up
problems you think you will face or
skill you will require that you do
not have now i mean a mythical
of the said is a big community
and luckily there are also other communities
and the people are collaborating saw
like it is there any out that
you need the
the
had another
okay thank you for asking
yes we need it
a lot of different kinds of help
that's for sure we are a small
team there is only five numbers in
tim harmonica including myself we have been
bootstrapping like we don't have external funding
apart from the get coin grandson the
giveth the nation's
so we definitely need the you know
we need to fundraise basically somehow for
the to make it more the able
to work on this full i think
i'm the only to remember that works
on harmonica full-time are currently and
but that's kind of obvious right like
fung funding also we definitely need like
developers who would be aligned with what
we're doing who really like wants to
fix the democracy and make the planet
more happy place
and
so developers is another thing but i
guess what we really needs right now
is the facilitation wisdom because like i
said i think facilitation is the core
value that we are trying to deliver
with a
a i
though it's harmonica is basically a i
facilitation tool
in a way like a high-powered since
making tool and and the facilitation as
be part of that so i wanted
to use this opportunity to share some
and updates from the
an interoperable deliberative tools program that's i
participated in with the harmonica i think
you are also part of that the
program and so
a few weeks ago
we decided to collaborate with some of
other members of this a program including
a i object as institute and the
eyes
and so i hope that other projects
will also join us and may be
built benefit from what we want to
do it and what they want to
do is open source library of facilitation
patterns so facilitation patterns facilitation tactics
basically we want to turn the difference
facilitation traditions like
socio chrissy or nonviolent communication or maybe
canadian or you know there is a
lot of different stuff that is very
very interesting that has been developed over
like decades liberating structures in and is
another great example and those are like
different traditions the a focus on different
things like obviously like agile is more
about teamwork and like companies that companies
in particular and mobile communications just about
how you can facilitate discussion in the
room and how do you can how
can you make people
you know open and the criticized safe
space for more open discussions so those
are they like different things different aspects
of facilitation maybe like difference even like
levels of facilitation but we want to
try to turn all that into code
so that's tools like her mom
annika what dr the city or eyes
or maybe some other deliberative tools which
i think her yeah hopefully will be
open source as well
would be able to benefit from this
open source library which we call open
facilitation library so are we really want
to engage as many facilitators as possible
to share their wisdom with us
you know it for salvation experts from
those all those different
the facilitation traditions we really want to
collaborate with them to create this kind
of shared facilitation
library
this is critical in mean that a
library means that the i will help
her yeah new developers new people that
have some new ideas to develop their
project yeah
i say that
you know there are some examples of
libraries like this for example there is
a session lab a library and the
result the wise democracy project that also
tried to describe this kind of butter
language of democracy and there's like a
big overlap with what what would we
want to deal with what we also
want to do
not just the describe those facilitation or
tactics or patterns but also tried to
turn them into a machine readable form
so maybe like typescript
so that we could basically teach a
i how to use those things how
to use those patterns
the you know the it will could
just like copy those things to the
prompts or turn them into a gigantic
wore clothes and stuff like that so
it's also about the cold in a
big way sauce a sort of machine
learning on there
on all the possible ways there yeah
humans used to mediate yeah and the
so it seems like that the what
are needed now are people that are
not from the tech side from the
tech field but they are yes studying
the ways that people use to ah
yet resolve conflicts or or to facilitate
the conversations was citizen assemblies yet
yeah i felt like the same in
the i mean there are a lot
of people's that the have some i
mean technical knowledge and so they are
developing new tools like a could be
or monica could be other tools and
and the and a lot of people
that have a lot of knowledge like
a people that may be studied the
facilitation techniques and the still are not
in this field
but i really hope that in their
next future they will come and teach
household their the knowledge that they have
and them
about term
yeah questions about other tools that the
maybe you have seen around that they
looked very interesting to you and the
that may be share something with harmony
color may be there are very different
to but they were you were inspired
by them
i am as you cited bodies before
yeah
yeah there's definitely a lot of tools
that the
ah
yeah
to trying to do similar things
as her monica
and there is also a lot of
tools that we are using
the to build her harmonica but yeah
i guess you're asking me about the
the former
so yes obviously policy is a big
inspiration and
unfortunately
it hasn't been
updated for a long time i think
it's just like like a public good
now and nobody is extracts to develop
it and like improve the wax so
it's pretty like old call us and
you could say that we are trying
to
yeah like do a similar thing but
with a different tx so that is
more modern and conversational and a i
powered but harmonic is not the only
tool that is trying to do that
so i mentioned the talk to the
city i think the city is a
great project
also part of the sir interoperable collaborative
tools program
and
there is a rematch which is a
very mature project
which is also using a i too
run collective dialogues so he could sculptor
collect dialogue system
and by the way rematch is not
open source and it's quite expensive it
costs i think are like thirty five
thousand a year
thirty five thousand dollars a year i
think
yeah it's a lot of money i
dunno at lot yeah i guess they
maybe they i i know that they're
working with the un and maybe u
n is like a pro bono customer
for them
but the definitely work with like large
companies tool can spend that much money
on their collective dialogue system which i
find interesting there is also another american
projects are called think scape built by
a company called
the unanimous a i
and i think it costs a about
the same and i made me be
mistaken but i think it costs like
three thousand a month
and then escape is also using a
i agents to organize a deliberative process
is or
some kind of yeah
online discussions and they have like a
very interesting design so as the they
want the create small rooms for people
and people discuss different topics in those
rooms and then there are agents who
listened to those discussions and the and
then they have other agents who represents
are the groups in your group so
that you could the
respond to
ideas from other groups that are collected
by one agent and like reproduced in
your group by another agent something like
that they might be
you know i help him that sir
wrong but maybe it's not very accurate
description but i hope for that's more
or less how they work
so that escape is interesting and
yeah i dunno like you know there's
is so we're building a collective the
alex system of i've been talking will
have been met i mentioned if you
collect of alex systems but there is
also very interesting start happening like and
but bridging systems like how to identify
different
opinions and the
like with what they do with committed
to notes and i think committed to
notes is just an early example of
bridging systems and they will be much
more interesting bridging systems in the future
and so i think in a i
think it's interesting to do
like discuss not right now i am
afraid to jump offers soon but i
think it's interesting to discuss a sense
making stack like what since making stack
the consists of
and i think the hurdles like harmonica
is just one part of that stack
so what what else do we need
to like enable
a good the collective sense ah
at the me the is like
or of open question that i don't
know the answer for right now but
like i think that the yeah sensemaking
he is definitely something that we need
to work on their civilization to address
the matter crisis
that's not my thoughts that sir i
think something that i heard from daniel
martin burger which eyes one of my
but which had been like a big
influence on myself and the last few
years
and yeah i think it's important to
think about the collective sense making and
how a i can
enable it i think that there's some
irony that on the one hand a
i is dangerous technology like it could
potentially kill as kill everyone but also
basically we can solve the political problems
that we have without a i
so i think that's a very interesting
moment in history because i'm the one
hand we are building the tools that
can kill as but on the other
hand there is this growing political problems
that can be sold only with the
help of ai
and basically we have this window of
opportunity that we we need a i
but also it's dangerous and we need
to build a i that would help
us do
like fixed the democracy our otherwise it
will be very dystopic yeah it seems
like a sort of paradox or
but yeah i completely agree that the
a i n technology can be used
the
yang the song good ways to move
the to make the war the a
better place
him
another small question i mean is there
i mean there are all the snoopy
all these people i mean you're part
of her and i would say i
am also part of
do that are trying to find new
ways for people to collaborate to to
discuss and the do you think that
the all these people are collaborating in
a good way right now i mean
that that the intent of and i
mean
it is to facilitate dialogue and the
and for for other people like for
dollars for companies from i dunno institutions
but at the same time i think
it's important for people like and their
civic decker space to collaborate and the
do you think that this is happening
right now do you think that something
should improved do you have a message
for older people in into the civic
tech while you know it's a it's
a good question because i think there
is a systemic problem here are which
is funding
this stuff is not very profitable
and if it is built for profit
it becomes much harder to use it
at scale
i mean
basically you want this stuff to be
open source
i like palace
but if it's open source then it's
very hard to
of raise funding
it's very hard to hire like engineers
because engineers are very expensive
so all of this project they get
into this
conundrum or
you know like a difficult the situation
where are you on the one hand
it's
yeah like you want to build something
that would be very like he useful
for the humidity but also like is
not easy to fund it so it's
very hard to the build it
even if you have some kind of
a fear of change and like impact
model and you know they just like
get coin that is trying to solve
this problem with grunts radek with quadratic
funding and grunts and i guess get
coin is like a great example and
garlic there should be more
projects like bitcoin and thankfully get coin
is also developing a protocol that should
enable other communities and other organizations to
run similar like grand rounds using their
protocol of allow
and so let him get quite as
doing like an amazing job and i
want more people to know about get
coin
but also i think it's just the
way
the capital is allocated in in the
economy and maybe we need to just
i think of a new institutions that
would be focused on
like
funding this kind of projects because
yeah it's it's hot it's hard to
fund them with venture capital because venture
capitalists wants to like the next a
growth rate and the
exits and it's also not they're easy
to funded with grunts like even though
get on is doing a good job
i think it still like you can
only get when so many grunts a
year and those grants are not very
big so you can't hire a lot
of for experienced developers sir if you
just the
if your funding is coming from get
coin
so one of the things that i
was really inspired by the or excited
about his
the idea of a guilds as
basically like communities or networks that can
fundraise
and then allocate those funds among their
members
based on much deeper relationships with those
projects than the get coin the can
have rights of because get coin doesn't
care about your project get coin is
using like this kind of mathematical models
to identify projects that get the letter
like support from their communities like if
you can get a lot of people
donate then you get some funding from
gift coin
with guilds i think it's a much
more it could be much more basically
it could allow it much more substantial
funding because if a guild can find
like an institution that is aligned with
the mission of the guild it could
get a lot of money and then
it would distribute that money among members
of the guild like projects that
you know part of that guilds
network or portfolio so i guess it
it this kind of similar to venture
studio but the venture studio is it's
basically accompany you know it's a company
that is part of this kind of
capital capitalistic her
paradigm and i think the adventure split
is are amazing i think it's one
of the most interesting things happening
in terms of like startups and the
of venture capital so like you know
companies that build startups read venture builders
that's a super interesting phenomenon
you know there the community called art
thou that is trying to do something
similar but to leave the like web
three projects and it's like come into
dream and like they have discord server
and like everyone can join the server
and started contributing to those projects and
then hopefully our in there will be
able to raise for
funding itself to distribute it among those
projects but still i think it's it's
not a guilt and maybe met the
gulf could be
the that guild may be met with
medical is doing right now he could
be something similar to what's a guild
is supposed to do and i hope
that the with all the reputation of
the goodwill that medical has built over
the years it will it will be
much easier for medical to fundraise than
for her harmonica or
or the projects that are part of
the thicket of met the gulf eco-system
so i hope that
do you know we can yeah we
can design and implement this kind of
new approaches to for funding or which
wouldn't be capitalistic but also would enable
to hire engineers
yeah absolutely seems like a i mean
as as we said the before like
funding is a problem and the but
the really hope that in the next
future because of the desert ai yi
hyper
that there would be summer
new kind of findings and it's an
interesting to him
the thinks about gills and the is
there anything else that you'd like to
add the
that i have tasked okay no i
think her we have covered a lot
of important topics and the yeah i'm
grateful for the invitation this is the
first time that i to talk to
about for monica with the someone like
this like an hour interview format so
it was great for me just do
you have this kind of experience sense
ah yeah i hope that it wasn't
to that i wasn't talking to slowly
because that's one of my problems i
talk slowly
nah it's i i took in are
horrible way so i it was perfect
and it was the was very interesting
for me so thank you a lot
thank you for the opportunity to
what about the
so i