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.