1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,451 Welcome to another episode of the Democracy Innovator Podcast and our guest 2 00:00:03,451 --> 00:00:08,483 of today is Paolo Spada. And thank you Paolo for your time 3 00:00:09,123 --> 00:00:14,305 and as first question I would like to ask you ~ if you can share something about 4 00:00:14,305 --> 00:00:19,166 yourself and ~ your research path, 5 00:00:19,166 --> 00:00:23,408 also like what you worked on. 6 00:00:24,274 --> 00:00:26,505 Thank you for having me Alessandro. 7 00:00:26,505 --> 00:00:31,537 So my research is ~ quite unusual 8 00:00:32,238 --> 00:00:39,141 in the field ~ because I started as an economist studying monetary 9 00:00:39,141 --> 00:00:43,098 crisis. ~ I finished my undergrad in 2000. 10 00:00:43,098 --> 00:00:47,145 My dissertation was with Professor Giavazzi that is quite well known in Italy. 11 00:00:47,145 --> 00:00:53,678 ~ But then I read a really famous article from 12 00:00:53,678 --> 00:00:54,678 Le Monde 13 00:00:54,889 --> 00:01:01,543 There was talking about participatory budgeting and the social forum 14 00:01:01,543 --> 00:01:06,816 in Porto Allegre and I got really interested into 15 00:01:06,816 --> 00:01:12,834 it and then I was talking with some friend and he came out that 16 00:01:12,834 --> 00:01:18,834 a family friend Giovanni Allegretti was the first Italian to actually have studied 17 00:01:18,834 --> 00:01:22,987 participatory budgeting and one of the biggest experts of participatory budgeting 18 00:01:22,987 --> 00:01:23,987 in Europe. 19 00:01:24,208 --> 00:01:27,740 random reason because Giovanni was vacationing there when he was 20 00:01:27,740 --> 00:01:33,620 16 because his family was going there because they had connection. 21 00:01:33,620 --> 00:01:35,522 ~ 22 00:01:35,742 --> 00:01:39,664 to civil society organizations and ~ religious groups. 23 00:01:39,664 --> 00:01:45,736 ~ And so I brought Giovanni and Giovanni told me that he was organizing 24 00:01:45,736 --> 00:01:49,978 the first training for civil servants in Trento in Europe 25 00:01:49,978 --> 00:01:54,070 on participatory budgeting. That was ~ June, 26 00:01:54,070 --> 00:01:58,362 no, maybe July 2000. I went there and I kind of 27 00:01:58,362 --> 00:02:02,573 got the bug of democratic innovation. 28 00:02:04,766 --> 00:02:07,306 But at the time I was still studying economics. 29 00:02:07,306 --> 00:02:13,526 I began a PhD in economics in Bologna and then I 30 00:02:13,526 --> 00:02:18,946 got in a Northwestern. I went in the US to do my PhD in Northwestern. 31 00:02:18,946 --> 00:02:20,606 I really didn't like it much. 32 00:02:23,170 --> 00:02:25,581 I don't know if you've read the capital of Piketty, 33 00:02:25,581 --> 00:02:30,493 but there is an introduction that really describes also my experience about this 34 00:02:30,813 --> 00:02:33,994 mathematical model that reached a level of elegance. 35 00:02:33,994 --> 00:02:37,056 I love math, very mathematical elegance, 36 00:02:37,056 --> 00:02:39,016 but completely disconnected from reality. 37 00:02:39,016 --> 00:02:43,618 And so... ~ 38 00:02:43,964 --> 00:02:46,275 There I was thinking about my life. 39 00:02:46,275 --> 00:02:50,997 was coming back in December of my first year on the plane and close 40 00:02:50,997 --> 00:02:53,238 to me sits Michael Wallerstein, 41 00:02:53,238 --> 00:02:57,720 one of the few analytical Marxists of the US. 42 00:02:57,720 --> 00:03:02,002 We discussed for six hours. He was doing model of redistribution and we discussed. 43 00:03:02,002 --> 00:03:07,395 He was also a Northwesterner and I started an independent study with him when 44 00:03:07,395 --> 00:03:11,807 I came back after vacation. And after a year of independent study, 45 00:03:11,807 --> 00:03:13,158 told me, look, if you want to study, 46 00:03:13,158 --> 00:03:14,158 what do want to study? 47 00:03:13,938 --> 00:03:15,968 you need to move to political science. 48 00:03:15,968 --> 00:03:21,850 Big crisis because ~ I was coming from economics and economists that look down 49 00:03:21,850 --> 00:03:25,130 to political scientists. As everybody knows, 50 00:03:25,130 --> 00:03:28,761 there is this funny ranking where at the top the physicists that look down 51 00:03:28,761 --> 00:03:34,392 to everybody else and it goes down like in the food chain of academia. 52 00:03:34,392 --> 00:03:37,253 think political science is probably one of the lowest. 53 00:03:37,253 --> 00:03:43,394 I don't know where we are. ~ And big crisis and ~ 54 00:03:43,580 --> 00:03:47,062 But then I decided against my parents. 55 00:03:47,062 --> 00:03:48,913 My parents were like, no, what are you doing? 56 00:03:48,913 --> 00:03:53,385 No, I decided to switch. So I applied again 57 00:03:53,385 --> 00:03:58,357 to a PhD and I moved to Yale with Michael. 58 00:03:58,357 --> 00:03:59,458 ~ 59 00:03:59,784 --> 00:04:05,018 to start a new PhD at 27 years old in economics. 60 00:04:05,018 --> 00:04:08,870 named politics, sorry. That was a big shock obviously because I didn't know anything 61 00:04:08,870 --> 00:04:12,443 about politics, right? I was coming from a complete econ background. 62 00:04:12,443 --> 00:04:15,305 ~ And there... 63 00:04:17,346 --> 00:04:19,846 I met people that were studying Latin America. 64 00:04:19,846 --> 00:04:23,939 Finally, my little project that I had on participatory budgeting at Northwestern, 65 00:04:23,939 --> 00:04:27,708 I was going around professor by professor with this little project asking, 66 00:04:27,708 --> 00:04:29,242 are you interested in this? And they're what? 67 00:04:29,242 --> 00:04:32,033 No, that's not economics. Finally, 68 00:04:32,033 --> 00:04:36,485 I found both economists and political scientists at Yale that didn't know anything 69 00:04:36,485 --> 00:04:39,096 about PB, but they were interested. 70 00:04:39,096 --> 00:04:43,818 And so I managed to go study participatory budgeting in Brazil. 71 00:04:43,818 --> 00:04:46,320 I lived one year in Brazil. 72 00:04:47,040 --> 00:04:53,484 ~ And I ~ contributed to the creation of this data set that is the largest data 73 00:04:53,484 --> 00:04:56,656 set in the world on a democratic innovation is called 74 00:04:56,656 --> 00:04:58,368 the Participatory Budgeting Census. 75 00:04:58,368 --> 00:05:02,230 It's kind of a public book. I really insisted to be a public book. 76 00:05:02,230 --> 00:05:06,673 Good. I used the Creative Commons license when nobody was using it. 77 00:05:06,673 --> 00:05:08,554 They were talking about eons ago. 78 00:05:08,554 --> 00:05:12,077 People use it without citing me all sorts of things, 79 00:05:12,077 --> 00:05:16,930 but I didn't care. I kept insisting ~ and I kept redoing 80 00:05:17,100 --> 00:05:19,353 It's a survey we do every four years. 81 00:05:19,353 --> 00:05:24,518 We basically call all the 500 cities in Brazil and they ask if they 82 00:05:24,518 --> 00:05:26,330 do participatory budgeting or not. 83 00:05:26,330 --> 00:05:32,767 And it was used in the sort of first large scale quantitative 84 00:05:32,767 --> 00:05:36,361 analysis of diffusion of participatory budgeting and impact. 85 00:05:37,162 --> 00:05:40,704 there is still nothing similar to that data set, 86 00:05:40,704 --> 00:05:47,107 we just did the update now. ~ And then from there at Yale they were doing 87 00:05:47,367 --> 00:05:53,250 deliberative polls because Jim Fishkin was collaborating with people at Yale. 88 00:05:53,250 --> 00:05:58,482 So I started as a research assistant giving sandwich ~ to 89 00:05:58,482 --> 00:06:01,633 the participants and then I slowly went up. 90 00:06:01,633 --> 00:06:03,374 So I started from the sandwich, 91 00:06:03,374 --> 00:06:06,976 then the data entry and then the last one I was actually 92 00:06:07,026 --> 00:06:12,710 designing an experiment and I also got into America Speak. 93 00:06:12,710 --> 00:06:16,402 That was one of the early experiments ~ 94 00:06:16,402 --> 00:06:19,885 for ~ multi-site deliberation. 95 00:06:19,885 --> 00:06:23,647 They were using basically Skype and clickers. 96 00:06:23,647 --> 00:06:26,509 We are talking about 2006-2008. 97 00:06:26,509 --> 00:06:32,393 To connect multiple cities they were doing deliberative events together. 98 00:06:32,393 --> 00:06:36,896 So I organized one together with a Japanese researcher in 99 00:06:37,496 --> 00:06:43,050 at Yale. ~ then Elaine Landemore arrived. 100 00:06:43,050 --> 00:06:49,554 Her first job as a professor out of Harvard was at Yale. 101 00:06:49,554 --> 00:06:53,457 That was my last year. I just came back from the field in Brazil and 102 00:06:53,457 --> 00:06:59,071 I took her class on deliberative democracy and we had this very interesting, 103 00:06:59,071 --> 00:07:02,833 ~ lovely conflictual relationship because she's more deliberative 104 00:07:02,833 --> 00:07:06,816 and more participatory. ~ 105 00:07:06,826 --> 00:07:09,238 she really opened up a lot of my interest. 106 00:07:09,238 --> 00:07:12,680 That was ~ also when I met Hugo Mercier, 107 00:07:12,680 --> 00:07:17,863 it's one of the psychologists that works on collective intelligence that does 108 00:07:17,863 --> 00:07:21,746 amazing work. That then I collaborate with some grant, 109 00:07:21,746 --> 00:07:23,647 that was one of the collaborators with the land. 110 00:07:23,647 --> 00:07:29,831 ~ The next step, I was really lucky and I went to Harvard in Arkham Fung 111 00:07:30,112 --> 00:07:36,146 and then all sort of complicated life reason for which I couldn't stay in the US, 112 00:07:36,146 --> 00:07:37,146 I had to come 113 00:07:36,708 --> 00:07:37,708 back 114 00:07:37,059 --> 00:07:38,059 to. 115 00:07:38,248 --> 00:07:44,081 to Europe and because my family is in Milan now with my ex-wife. 116 00:07:44,081 --> 00:07:47,182 And so I worked, 117 00:07:47,182 --> 00:07:52,855 but I did a step in Canada with Mark Warren at UBC where 118 00:07:52,855 --> 00:07:55,616 I helped organize some citizen assembly. 119 00:07:55,616 --> 00:08:00,248 That was my first experience with Canadian style citizen assembly that 120 00:08:00,248 --> 00:08:06,531 I really like. I was one of the facilitator of one of the citizen assembly 121 00:08:06,671 --> 00:08:08,152 on Grandview Woodland. 122 00:08:08,372 --> 00:08:14,226 It's a district in Vancouver. ~ And then I came 123 00:08:14,226 --> 00:08:19,930 to the UK to do what the Fair Citizen Assembly in the UK, 124 00:08:19,930 --> 00:08:24,503 they were done in 2015. Then I moved to collaborate again with Giovanni Legretti, 125 00:08:24,503 --> 00:08:28,055 that I mentioned before, in an Horizon grant in Portugal in which 126 00:08:28,055 --> 00:08:30,967 we developed a digital platform for participation. 127 00:08:30,967 --> 00:08:34,570 In the meantime, through Elan, 128 00:08:34,570 --> 00:08:38,111 I'd met Mark Lane that had developed the Deliberaturo. 129 00:08:38,162 --> 00:08:40,212 that it's an argument mapping platform. 130 00:08:40,212 --> 00:08:42,265 If we're talking about scaling up, 131 00:08:42,265 --> 00:08:47,248 that's what I'm gonna talk about because the early experiment before 132 00:08:47,248 --> 00:08:51,221 AI and before the current ~ wave on 133 00:08:51,221 --> 00:08:57,735 how to scale up large scale discussion online where 134 00:08:57,735 --> 00:09:01,998 asynchronous and text-based and argument mapping was really promising 135 00:09:01,998 --> 00:09:04,149 and it's still promising as a technology. 136 00:09:04,149 --> 00:09:08,032 And then ultimately I got a job at South Africa 137 00:09:08,352 --> 00:09:11,736 I did one year in Italy, ~ L'Aquila, 138 00:09:11,736 --> 00:09:17,603 at ~ GSSI, the research center on... 139 00:09:17,603 --> 00:09:20,226 ~ 140 00:09:20,376 --> 00:09:26,169 on regional economics where they organized the Festival 141 00:09:26,169 --> 00:09:27,930 of Participation for a few years. 142 00:09:27,930 --> 00:09:32,312 Now, I think he moved to Bologna ~ and I really like that. 143 00:09:29,249 --> 00:09:32,235 I feel it, don't know if it's blocked or not 144 00:09:32,312 --> 00:09:35,923 But then I got a job at Southampton and I really like Southampton because 145 00:09:35,923 --> 00:09:38,775 it was really valuing 146 00:09:38,775 --> 00:09:43,717 ~ the Democratic Innovation Scholarship. 147 00:09:43,717 --> 00:09:46,118 We now have one of the largest faculty, 148 00:09:46,118 --> 00:09:50,240 not just in politics, but ~ in all 149 00:09:50,262 --> 00:09:53,155 department, if you look at the Center of Democratic Futures, 150 00:09:53,155 --> 00:09:58,191 we probably have 80 to 100 scholars that work on different kinds 151 00:09:58,191 --> 00:10:00,995 of democratic innovation from computer science, 152 00:10:00,995 --> 00:10:03,688 politics, economics, all sorts. 153 00:10:03,688 --> 00:10:08,033 It's really, really interesting in Southampton right now for this stuff. 154 00:10:10,053 --> 00:10:16,387 I was curious, what is different in relation 155 00:10:16,387 --> 00:10:19,419 to citizen assembly, you mentioned the Canadian way, 156 00:10:19,419 --> 00:10:25,583 and also another question, during these experiments related 157 00:10:25,583 --> 00:10:31,608 to participation, what worked and what didn't work as you expected? 158 00:10:32,638 --> 00:10:33,638 Okay. 159 00:10:33,488 --> 00:10:38,250 So as the terminology 160 00:10:38,250 --> 00:10:44,443 of citizen assembly is traced back to the British Columbia Citizen Assembly 161 00:10:44,943 --> 00:10:51,186 that was ~ done in 2004, it's kind of the grandmother of the Citizen Assembly. 162 00:10:51,186 --> 00:10:54,268 ~ And the way 163 00:10:54,508 --> 00:10:59,080 I define it is 164 00:10:59,080 --> 00:11:01,991 a systemic ~ innovation, right? 165 00:11:03,442 --> 00:11:09,014 because it engages multiple audiences at the same time, 166 00:11:09,014 --> 00:11:13,486 significantly more systematically than most of the other models. 167 00:11:13,486 --> 00:11:16,937 So what's the big difference? Apart that it's longer and bigger. 168 00:11:16,937 --> 00:11:19,488 So instead of like having two, 169 00:11:19,488 --> 00:11:22,009 three weekends in last one year and they had, 170 00:11:22,009 --> 00:11:24,700 I think, 10 weekends, I don't remember. 171 00:11:24,700 --> 00:11:26,351 But if you look in participator, 172 00:11:26,351 --> 00:11:28,961 there is a nice case study by Mark Warren described. 173 00:11:28,961 --> 00:11:29,961 But 174 00:11:30,394 --> 00:11:36,337 On top of that, they had 56 open to all meetings 175 00:11:36,797 --> 00:11:39,908 in which the participants of the assembly, 176 00:11:39,908 --> 00:11:41,899 the one that were randomly selected, 177 00:11:41,899 --> 00:11:47,772 went back to their location because the region was divided in 56 locations 178 00:11:47,772 --> 00:11:50,363 and two people were randomly selected from each to come. 179 00:11:50,363 --> 00:11:57,016 And they basically act as a facilitator of an open to all assembly together with 180 00:11:57,016 --> 00:11:59,868 professional facilitator to bring 181 00:12:00,648 --> 00:12:02,589 the discussion to the maxi public. 182 00:12:02,589 --> 00:12:09,054 The key problem, a legitimacy problem of ~ the current generation of mini public 183 00:12:09,074 --> 00:12:10,925 is that they're too closed, right? 184 00:12:10,925 --> 00:12:13,597 They don't connect sufficiently maxi public. 185 00:12:13,597 --> 00:12:16,459 It's really hard to do that connection. 186 00:12:16,459 --> 00:12:19,911 With technology, people are trying now, 187 00:12:19,911 --> 00:12:21,942 maybe they ask people for comments, 188 00:12:21,942 --> 00:12:24,444 but then it's unclear what happened to the comments. 189 00:12:24,444 --> 00:12:27,766 And so the Canadian model, 190 00:12:27,766 --> 00:12:30,198 when there is enough money and when they're doing a CT 191 00:12:30,208 --> 00:12:33,851 this is an assembly because sometimes they're doing other things ~ 192 00:12:33,851 --> 00:12:38,233 as really these sort of multi-channel engagement system in which it 193 00:12:38,233 --> 00:12:42,936 has the randomly selected assembly plus open to all events. 194 00:12:42,936 --> 00:12:46,029 And I think that works way better. 195 00:12:46,029 --> 00:12:48,900 That's my personal opinion than the standard model. 196 00:12:48,900 --> 00:12:51,165 A deliberative poll, it's teeny compared, 197 00:12:51,165 --> 00:12:54,244 it's completely different ~ system. 198 00:12:54,244 --> 00:12:56,726 And the question of what works, 199 00:12:56,726 --> 00:13:00,128 what did not work? Are you referring it to participatory batch? 200 00:13:00,769 --> 00:13:04,339 or to the entire galaxy? Because if it's the entire galaxy, 201 00:13:02,776 --> 00:13:03,876 Ugh. 202 00:13:04,339 --> 00:13:05,852 we're going to stay here three months. 203 00:13:07,666 --> 00:13:08,666 So 204 00:13:08,689 --> 00:13:13,622 maybe not the entire galaxy but like yeah in your experience something that maybe 205 00:13:13,622 --> 00:13:15,685 you were expecting certain 206 00:13:15,720 --> 00:13:16,720 All right. 207 00:13:17,638 --> 00:13:23,111 If you think about the continuous scale from the most evangelist 208 00:13:23,111 --> 00:13:28,303 of democratic innovation and the more sceptic that thinks that nothing works, 209 00:13:28,303 --> 00:13:34,026 I am a sort of sceptical friend. 210 00:13:34,026 --> 00:13:40,469 I think there is too much hype in the field, 211 00:13:40,469 --> 00:13:43,390 in part because the field was minoritarian, 212 00:13:43,390 --> 00:13:46,912 particularly in the US, ~ public policy was... 213 00:13:46,864 --> 00:13:47,864 was 214 00:13:47,064 --> 00:13:50,737 completely against ~ deliberative process. 215 00:13:50,737 --> 00:13:55,281 They thought they were just mumbo jumbo and an interest group will control 216 00:13:55,281 --> 00:13:59,684 everything. If you still find or present democratic innovation stuff 217 00:13:59,684 --> 00:14:04,248 to a traditional ~ sort of polyarchy train, 218 00:14:04,248 --> 00:14:06,760 US scholar in public scholarship, 219 00:14:06,760 --> 00:14:08,601 and it happened to me a couple of times, 220 00:14:08,601 --> 00:14:13,025 you feel this perception that what are you talking about? 221 00:14:13,025 --> 00:14:14,526 Right? This thing, it's can be, 222 00:14:14,526 --> 00:14:16,768 politics is power, right? ~ 223 00:14:16,848 --> 00:14:21,531 stuff make no sense. It's obvious that it doesn't work and this is just... 224 00:14:21,531 --> 00:14:24,403 you're deluding yourself to think it works. 225 00:14:24,403 --> 00:14:28,255 so I am an empirical scholar. 226 00:14:28,255 --> 00:14:32,578 ~ 227 00:14:33,182 --> 00:14:37,962 And so I found myself many times in the position 228 00:14:37,962 --> 00:14:44,422 of testing empirically some of the claims that philosophers 229 00:14:44,422 --> 00:14:48,962 had put out about the potential of deliberation 230 00:14:48,962 --> 00:14:54,142 and not finding a feedback in the empirics. 231 00:14:54,142 --> 00:15:00,342 And I was a pioneer of the empirical studies, 232 00:15:00,342 --> 00:15:03,136 right? I started in 2004 together with many others. 233 00:15:04,737 --> 00:15:09,640 But so I come from that side, but the field has evolved a lot. 234 00:15:09,640 --> 00:15:13,953 Initially, there was a lot of allergic reaction if you were criticizing exactly 235 00:15:13,953 --> 00:15:15,644 because it was a minoritarian field, 236 00:15:15,644 --> 00:15:18,746 right? So the title of my dissertation 237 00:15:19,167 --> 00:15:23,900 was something I forgot what it was, 238 00:15:23,900 --> 00:15:27,863 but it was the original version was something about the problem 239 00:15:27,863 --> 00:15:31,715 of participatory budgeting or the limit of participatory budgeting. 240 00:15:31,715 --> 00:15:32,986 And my external 241 00:15:33,008 --> 00:15:37,710 advisor, Brian Wampler, the most famous researcher on participatory budgeting 242 00:15:37,710 --> 00:15:40,422 in the US, told me to change the title. 243 00:15:40,422 --> 00:15:43,633 said, you still have to sell participatory budgeting. 244 00:15:43,633 --> 00:15:46,435 Nobody believes that does anything. 245 00:15:46,435 --> 00:15:50,096 Right. So first we need to establish that it works. 246 00:15:50,096 --> 00:15:53,478 And I was, yes, but like I found issues. 247 00:15:53,478 --> 00:15:58,621 But I think it's a problem with all the sort 248 00:15:58,621 --> 00:16:01,002 of niche growing field. 249 00:16:01,660 --> 00:16:06,003 that are normatively driven because we believe that democratic innovation is good. 250 00:16:06,003 --> 00:16:08,369 So there is an action research element, 251 00:16:08,369 --> 00:16:14,147 a political element to it. And we talk about it a lot in 252 00:16:14,407 --> 00:16:16,329 a paper that we thought... 253 00:16:16,824 --> 00:16:20,496 nobody would have read. We've wrote it like in a month, 254 00:16:20,496 --> 00:16:24,578 me and Matt Ryan, after a conference called the failure to examine failure 255 00:16:24,578 --> 00:16:29,700 in democratic innovation. But it's actually the most one of my most cited paper, 256 00:16:29,700 --> 00:16:33,722 right. And he talks about this our weird field, 257 00:16:33,722 --> 00:16:38,204 right. It's a bit strange. There are all sorts of little conflict of interest, 258 00:16:38,204 --> 00:16:42,986 because we are doing research on something that it's also a political process we're 259 00:16:42,986 --> 00:16:46,688 really passionate about. It's very different from what I 260 00:16:46,758 --> 00:16:53,337 know a person that studies economic crisis as I used to or political parties right 261 00:16:54,358 --> 00:17:00,406 and so navigating ~ this conflict of interest is fascinating but also challenging. 262 00:17:00,406 --> 00:17:02,769 I'm often asked to sign NDAs. 263 00:17:03,590 --> 00:17:10,153 right, ~ by some of the big players in the field when I'm evaluating for them. 264 00:17:10,153 --> 00:17:13,935 And I am an evaluator. And so I, 265 00:17:13,935 --> 00:17:17,046 but now I know, like the first time I was puzzled, 266 00:17:17,046 --> 00:17:23,169 I had like a big crisis when I was asked by participatory budgeting project 267 00:17:23,169 --> 00:17:27,701 in the US. After I helped to evaluate New York City, 268 00:17:27,701 --> 00:17:29,722 there was a bigger process US wide. 269 00:17:29,722 --> 00:17:31,573 And they said, okay, Paolo, yes, 270 00:17:31,573 --> 00:17:33,504 you can evaluate, can help for free. 271 00:17:33,456 --> 00:17:34,456 free, 272 00:17:33,676 --> 00:17:36,788 obviously, but you're going to sign an NDA. 273 00:17:36,788 --> 00:17:41,861 And I was, what? An NDA? Where transparency is going, 274 00:17:41,861 --> 00:17:46,704 accountability, right? But then three minutes of reflection 275 00:17:46,744 --> 00:17:48,926 and you realize that... 276 00:17:49,650 --> 00:17:53,453 there is an important political project that it's minoritarian 277 00:17:53,453 --> 00:17:58,377 and it's attacked left and right by very conservative forces. 278 00:17:58,377 --> 00:18:04,261 And what do you think it's a minor critique that you are providing 279 00:18:04,261 --> 00:18:06,343 to improve the project, right? 280 00:18:06,343 --> 00:18:11,247 Something didn't work here, can be instrumentalized by the media, 281 00:18:11,247 --> 00:18:14,589 by the opposition to kill the entire process. 282 00:18:15,374 --> 00:18:19,661 And so again, that was my reaction as a young postdoc. 283 00:18:19,661 --> 00:18:22,665 Now I actually, when I have a client, 284 00:18:22,665 --> 00:18:25,640 I immediately say, look, there are two ways to evaluate here. 285 00:18:25,640 --> 00:18:27,693 Do you want an independent evaluation? 286 00:18:28,650 --> 00:18:31,771 Or do you want me in research and development mode? 287 00:18:31,771 --> 00:18:34,870 At that point, if I'm R &D, 288 00:18:34,870 --> 00:18:37,734 ~ I don't want my name on the evaluation first, 289 00:18:37,734 --> 00:18:40,496 because at that point, it's not my academic work, 290 00:18:40,496 --> 00:18:44,157 it's another job. I'm here to help you because I believe in your project. 291 00:18:44,157 --> 00:18:46,879 And we don't need to publish anything, 292 00:18:46,879 --> 00:18:50,900 right? We can decide what to publish or not in your name, 293 00:18:50,900 --> 00:18:54,362 right? Because at that point, the publication are way more sketchy. 294 00:18:54,362 --> 00:18:56,923 But that's my way of navigating it. 295 00:18:56,923 --> 00:18:58,394 But it's complex. 296 00:18:58,464 --> 00:19:03,745 It's not easy. ~ And ~ what works and doesn't work, 297 00:19:03,745 --> 00:19:08,626 ~ now there is a vast literature on the impact, 298 00:19:08,626 --> 00:19:11,747 but it's still, if you look at it, 299 00:19:11,747 --> 00:19:14,535 it's still very limited, right? 300 00:19:14,535 --> 00:19:17,148 We still don't have a lot of meta studies, 301 00:19:17,148 --> 00:19:23,590 very few replications, and there are trends that 302 00:19:23,590 --> 00:19:25,570 are emerging. ~ 303 00:19:26,258 --> 00:19:31,121 but it's a very complicated literature to say exactly what works. 304 00:19:31,121 --> 00:19:33,723 So I'm gonna give you my take, 305 00:19:33,723 --> 00:19:40,037 but it's an experiential take that it's based on my intuition and I would 306 00:19:40,037 --> 00:19:42,619 not be able to prove it academically, 307 00:19:42,619 --> 00:19:48,603 right? And so in my opinion, participatory budgeting is the best technology 308 00:19:48,603 --> 00:19:53,957 to improve trust at the local level because it is designed structurally 309 00:19:54,017 --> 00:19:55,478 to close the feedback loop. 310 00:19:55,858 --> 00:19:57,920 when it works, we're talking about when it works. 311 00:19:57,920 --> 00:20:03,366 Because what you're doing is you're letting ~ citizens propose ideas, 312 00:20:03,366 --> 00:20:10,134 rank ideas, and then the city is implementing those ideas in a short amount of time. 313 00:20:10,790 --> 00:20:13,261 So there is a direct feedback loop, 314 00:20:13,261 --> 00:20:16,592 like in a video game, you push a button and something happens. 315 00:20:16,592 --> 00:20:19,353 And in PB is designed for that. 316 00:20:19,353 --> 00:20:22,124 And we have some data here and there, 317 00:20:22,124 --> 00:20:26,355 but it doesn't always work. But the result is not really that data. 318 00:20:26,355 --> 00:20:29,016 The result is the fact that PB, 319 00:20:29,016 --> 00:20:32,998 to me the intuition is PB spread like wildfire. 320 00:20:33,840 --> 00:20:40,227 And it's used a lot by charismatic new mayors that come 321 00:20:40,227 --> 00:20:44,561 in for the first time and they need to show that they're different from the past. 322 00:20:44,561 --> 00:20:47,845 And that's when it really shining works. 323 00:20:47,845 --> 00:20:48,866 ~ 324 00:20:49,360 --> 00:20:53,732 Interestingly enough, I have a very different position from a lot 325 00:20:53,732 --> 00:20:57,864 of the literature on PB that says the more years you do PB, 326 00:20:57,864 --> 00:21:03,347 the better it becomes. I'm actually kind of against institutionalization because 327 00:21:03,347 --> 00:21:09,369 apart from a few cases, my research shows that PB has a life cycle and 328 00:21:09,369 --> 00:21:11,780 it tends to die after eight years. 329 00:21:11,780 --> 00:21:17,503 Like it's really hard for a PB to survive really well 330 00:21:17,503 --> 00:21:19,064 at the peak. 331 00:21:20,264 --> 00:21:25,285 after eight years. If you look all the best practice after eight years, 332 00:21:25,285 --> 00:21:31,987 they are lower in quality. Like usually the first year are not the best because they 333 00:21:31,987 --> 00:21:34,718 need to learn how to do it. Then there is a peak. 334 00:21:34,718 --> 00:21:40,199 It's like a life cycle. And the peak is the moment in which the PB achieves 335 00:21:40,199 --> 00:21:43,410 his best outcomes. This closes this feedback loop. 336 00:21:43,822 --> 00:21:48,764 Often there are political ~ positive feedback in which the mayor gets re-elected 337 00:21:49,204 --> 00:21:52,546 or the group supporting it gets a lot of visibility. 338 00:21:52,546 --> 00:21:57,328 But then there is almost like a glass ceiling of what it can do, 339 00:21:57,328 --> 00:22:02,170 right? ~ All the easy wins have been achieved in the first few years. 340 00:22:02,170 --> 00:22:06,602 And then there are a lot of pesky problems that the citizens would like 341 00:22:06,602 --> 00:22:13,405 to solve via PB. But they're really hard to solve due to the complex ecosystem 342 00:22:13,405 --> 00:22:14,405 of a 343 00:22:13,725 --> 00:22:16,162 it here, right? There are... ~ 344 00:22:16,264 --> 00:22:19,746 there are problems that are politically extremely complicated, 345 00:22:19,746 --> 00:22:23,898 but that appear easy for the citizens and they get channeled through 346 00:22:24,018 --> 00:22:28,119 PB and that's when short circuits start happening. 347 00:22:28,119 --> 00:22:32,591 then there is all sort of life cycle issues like politicians do 348 00:22:32,591 --> 00:22:36,453 not get reelected because it requires a lot of work, 349 00:22:36,453 --> 00:22:42,806 it's politically costly. So PB2B is the best at generating trust and it's also 350 00:22:42,806 --> 00:22:45,368 the best university for civil servants. 351 00:22:46,278 --> 00:22:49,069 I remember the civil servants were all annoyed at the beginning, 352 00:22:49,069 --> 00:22:50,929 but then after a while they were saying, 353 00:22:50,929 --> 00:22:54,030 ~ now I know so much more about the city. 354 00:22:54,030 --> 00:22:56,840 People recognize me in the city. 355 00:22:56,840 --> 00:22:58,711 When I go around, people stop me. 356 00:22:58,711 --> 00:23:04,252 So there are very interesting ~ learning for 357 00:23:04,252 --> 00:23:07,250 the city machine that are very rarely studied. 358 00:23:07,250 --> 00:23:13,103 I keep asking in my grants on PB to study the civil servant learning, 359 00:23:13,103 --> 00:23:15,154 but it's not a very... 360 00:23:16,174 --> 00:23:19,135 sexy ~ topic that gets you money. 361 00:23:19,135 --> 00:23:23,596 All the topics are about, we're going to make the citizens better, 362 00:23:23,596 --> 00:23:25,058 we're going to defend democracy. 363 00:23:25,058 --> 00:23:30,051 And instead, think one of the best outcomes is really the PB 364 00:23:30,051 --> 00:23:35,003 is the university for the civil servants. 365 00:23:35,003 --> 00:23:40,425 Really to open them up to dialogue with the city and to the difficulty of the city. 366 00:23:40,425 --> 00:23:41,425 Because if you think about it, 367 00:23:41,410 --> 00:23:44,487 it's a sensor. It's a decentralized, 368 00:23:44,487 --> 00:23:45,878 low-cost sensor. 369 00:23:46,120 --> 00:23:48,592 in which the civil society organization, 370 00:23:48,592 --> 00:23:53,766 the common citizen bring problems and a lot of them cannot be solved, 371 00:23:53,766 --> 00:23:57,569 but they're brought in a more propositive way, 372 00:23:57,569 --> 00:24:04,195 in a less conflictual way. ~ And also it bypass a bit, 373 00:24:04,195 --> 00:24:07,197 not always, but it bypass 374 00:24:07,517 --> 00:24:14,323 a existing barrier of communicating this problem. 375 00:24:15,964 --> 00:24:20,727 students has just done a fascinating study on a different topic 376 00:24:21,328 --> 00:24:27,092 on a project done by COVID by Boris Johnson. 377 00:24:27,092 --> 00:24:32,335 Obviously they didn't know anything and they thought there was 378 00:24:32,335 --> 00:24:34,797 no other voluntary sector in the UK. 379 00:24:34,797 --> 00:24:39,380 And so from the top they created an app and a system 380 00:24:39,920 --> 00:24:45,664 to ~ allocate random volunteers to bring food to health 381 00:24:45,945 --> 00:24:50,793 people they were stuck in the house because for their weak condition they couldn't 382 00:24:50,793 --> 00:24:54,479 go buy grocery or they didn't have the money to use the liver. 383 00:24:54,479 --> 00:24:56,142 What is 384 00:24:56,676 --> 00:25:01,029 Obviously, there was a massive reaction because the UK is one of the most vibrant, 385 00:25:01,029 --> 00:25:06,992 vibrant, voluntary sector. It's just that Boris Johnson had no clue about it. 386 00:25:06,992 --> 00:25:11,475 And so obviously, all these voluntarities, 387 00:25:11,475 --> 00:25:16,078 existing voluntarities sector at the local level were really annoyed and said, 388 00:25:16,078 --> 00:25:17,739 why you didn't talk to us? Right. 389 00:25:17,739 --> 00:25:22,482 And also, they were scared that the system will crowd out. 390 00:25:23,036 --> 00:25:26,220 their work, right? Because if you're volunteering for that system, 391 00:25:26,220 --> 00:25:27,491 you're not volunteering for me. 392 00:25:27,491 --> 00:25:32,417 What was interesting that in the unique situation of COVID, 393 00:25:32,417 --> 00:25:34,659 a lot of people didn't have a job anymore, 394 00:25:34,659 --> 00:25:39,185 they're working from home. A lot of people volunteer for both first, 395 00:25:39,185 --> 00:25:40,326 but 396 00:25:40,658 --> 00:25:44,520 The key, and this is the connection with participatory budgeting, 397 00:25:44,520 --> 00:25:49,902 is that for the first time, ~ a lot of minorities volunteered. 398 00:25:49,902 --> 00:25:55,185 If we look at the shape of volunteers in the UK, 399 00:25:55,185 --> 00:25:59,177 it's most elderly white people that have a lot of time, 400 00:25:59,177 --> 00:26:01,568 they're educated, they've been... 401 00:26:01,568 --> 00:26:04,709 People from minority do not participate, 402 00:26:04,709 --> 00:26:10,372 right? And I think that's the same very nice entry point of participatory budgeting. 403 00:26:10,592 --> 00:26:16,325 Sometimes, not always, it allows for minorities to participate because it's easy 404 00:26:16,325 --> 00:26:19,417 to propose ideas. It doesn't require a lot of time. 405 00:26:19,417 --> 00:26:21,918 And then it's difficult to win, 406 00:26:21,918 --> 00:26:25,010 right? Obviously to win in participatory budgeting, 407 00:26:25,010 --> 00:26:27,822 you need the machinery, but to propose ideas, 408 00:26:27,822 --> 00:26:29,743 it's easy. Okay, that's it PB. 409 00:26:29,743 --> 00:26:32,324 When we are looking at mini publics, 410 00:26:32,324 --> 00:26:34,946 I think... ~ 411 00:26:35,228 --> 00:26:36,819 the current generation, right? 412 00:26:36,819 --> 00:26:42,122 It's very important to distinguish between the first best we have not achieved yet, 413 00:26:42,122 --> 00:26:45,444 and it's still a bit far away, 414 00:26:45,444 --> 00:26:49,946 and the current sort of pilots that we have seen. 415 00:26:49,946 --> 00:26:53,448 So in the current pilots, to me, 416 00:26:53,448 --> 00:26:56,570 the biggest effect around the participants, 417 00:26:57,498 --> 00:27:00,319 and they are an increase in efficacy. 418 00:27:00,319 --> 00:27:06,382 The idea that you can contribute effectively 419 00:27:06,382 --> 00:27:09,874 to politics, an increase in learning. 420 00:27:09,874 --> 00:27:14,506 And if the recruitment has managed 421 00:27:14,526 --> 00:27:20,309 to achieve ~ participants that are not already highly interested in politics, 422 00:27:20,309 --> 00:27:23,000 not already participating a lot, 423 00:27:23,000 --> 00:27:27,372 there is also potentially an increase in what they want to 424 00:27:27,402 --> 00:27:33,156 do after, right? ~ But ~ the political impact 425 00:27:33,916 --> 00:27:38,139 of citizen assembly is problematic for structural reasons. 426 00:27:38,139 --> 00:27:42,802 It's consultative, right? PB is created 427 00:27:43,123 --> 00:27:49,036 to be safe because the city sets aside a little bit of money that is nothing 428 00:27:49,036 --> 00:27:51,868 for the city and it lets people play with it. 429 00:27:51,868 --> 00:27:55,411 So it's almost like a safe democratic game. 430 00:27:55,411 --> 00:27:57,312 It still costs 431 00:27:57,264 --> 00:27:58,264 Mostly 432 00:27:57,734 --> 00:27:59,344 it can still generate problem, 433 00:27:59,344 --> 00:28:03,265 but it's safer. With citizen assembly, 434 00:28:03,265 --> 00:28:08,066 sometimes they go into very complicated and difficult problems. 435 00:28:08,066 --> 00:28:11,077 And so they stay consultative. 436 00:28:11,077 --> 00:28:13,478 And then the problem is cherry picking, 437 00:28:13,478 --> 00:28:18,489 right? That it's being discussed a million times in which, 438 00:28:18,489 --> 00:28:23,210 yes, the citizen assembly does an amazing amount of creation of ideas. 439 00:28:23,922 --> 00:28:28,758 but then there is a second step about implementation and what's gonna happen there, 440 00:28:28,758 --> 00:28:31,931 it's unclear. And so that to me, 441 00:28:31,931 --> 00:28:35,856 but again, I couldn't prove it, 442 00:28:35,856 --> 00:28:40,461 right? This is experiential having organized, 443 00:28:40,461 --> 00:28:41,461 I don't know. 444 00:28:42,366 --> 00:28:47,968 200 democratic innovation and seeing more participatory budgeting. 445 00:28:47,968 --> 00:28:50,259 think Citizen Assembly, I lost count, 446 00:28:50,259 --> 00:28:54,060 but ~ I'm not one of the big implementers of Citizen Assembly, 447 00:28:54,060 --> 00:28:56,231 but I've done 30, something like that. 448 00:28:56,231 --> 00:29:01,113 I call Citizen Assembly, but in reality it's mostly like a variety of mini publics. 449 00:29:01,592 --> 00:29:04,113 ~ 450 00:29:04,113 --> 00:29:08,595 I was thinking also commitment can be an issue in relation 451 00:29:08,595 --> 00:29:14,807 to participatory budgeting ~ because as you said most of the time maybe it's just 452 00:29:14,807 --> 00:29:19,679 consultative so they can decide if to follow the output of this. 453 00:29:19,026 --> 00:29:20,027 BB no, 454 00:29:20,448 --> 00:29:24,872 we participatory budgeting, if it's the definition of symptom air, 455 00:29:24,872 --> 00:29:26,734 it's not consultative. 456 00:29:28,230 --> 00:29:32,672 So there are consultative PB, particularly in Germany, 457 00:29:32,672 --> 00:29:35,753 but they all died. That's kind of established, 458 00:29:35,753 --> 00:29:37,343 right? If you do a consultative PB, 459 00:29:37,343 --> 00:29:41,475 it dies off. There is a very nice paper again from Giovanni Legretti 460 00:29:41,475 --> 00:29:46,246 on Portugal that shows that the first generation of PB in Portugal implemented 461 00:29:46,246 --> 00:29:50,018 in 2004 were all consultative, 462 00:29:50,018 --> 00:29:53,399 apart a few. When the crisis of 2008 arrives, 463 00:29:53,399 --> 00:29:56,920 all the consultative die, the non-consultative stay. 464 00:29:57,600 --> 00:30:00,593 And then Portugal in that moment really exploded, 465 00:30:00,593 --> 00:30:04,055 became the country with the most PB in the world apart the countries in which 466 00:30:04,055 --> 00:30:06,407 PB is mandated by the government like Peru. 467 00:30:06,407 --> 00:30:11,511 ~ But PB is the power in a sense, 468 00:30:11,511 --> 00:30:13,993 not by the fact that it's consultative, 469 00:30:13,993 --> 00:30:19,978 but by the fact that the budget you give to PB is a joke compared to 470 00:30:19,978 --> 00:30:24,001 the budget of the city. I have this story I always tell my students after 471 00:30:24,001 --> 00:30:27,264 I make them enamored, I like to confuse my students. 472 00:30:27,314 --> 00:30:31,467 So I usually make them fall in love with something and then I tell them 473 00:30:31,467 --> 00:30:33,308 it doesn't work. It's kind of my way. 474 00:30:33,308 --> 00:30:39,222 And so after teaching PB, I recount the story of when I helped Josh Lerner, 475 00:30:39,222 --> 00:30:45,276 there was the PBP CEO come to Vancouver because I was a postdoc there. 476 00:30:45,276 --> 00:30:51,790 I was working for PBP Pro Bono and I invited them to present participatory budgeting 477 00:30:51,790 --> 00:30:55,923 because Vancouver was already doing a million participatory planning things, 478 00:30:55,923 --> 00:30:57,184 citizen asset. 479 00:30:57,184 --> 00:31:02,367 I was curious, PB was being relaunched by the PBP project. 480 00:31:02,367 --> 00:31:06,129 And so Josh comes, he does his usual spill, 481 00:31:06,129 --> 00:31:11,592 and the room is full of the Department of Communication, 482 00:31:11,592 --> 00:31:16,534 Engagement, Youth Engagement. We are an hour in, 483 00:31:16,534 --> 00:31:18,815 and three people in a suit come in, 484 00:31:18,815 --> 00:31:22,120 and they sit, they listen for one minute, 485 00:31:22,120 --> 00:31:23,198 and there is the end. 486 00:31:24,062 --> 00:31:25,724 and they introduce themselves and they say, 487 00:31:25,724 --> 00:31:28,676 I'm the chief of planning, like the people that count, 488 00:31:28,676 --> 00:31:30,608 not the communication and engagement. 489 00:31:30,608 --> 00:31:32,709 And they ask, how much money do you need? 490 00:31:32,709 --> 00:31:36,893 And Josh said, we recommend 491 00:31:36,893 --> 00:31:42,768 ~ one million Canadian dollars for a district because it's 492 00:31:42,768 --> 00:31:46,882 a nice symbolic amount of money as a minimum. 493 00:31:48,048 --> 00:31:49,640 And the guy of planning for, yeah, 494 00:31:49,640 --> 00:31:54,505 you can have it. But do you understand that it's a lipstick on a peg? 495 00:31:54,505 --> 00:31:56,968 My budget is two billion dollars. 496 00:31:56,968 --> 00:32:00,902 And he leaves. Right. 497 00:32:00,902 --> 00:32:06,298 So so PD is sort of is doing this feedback loop. 498 00:32:01,336 --> 00:32:02,336 So. 499 00:32:06,748 --> 00:32:10,581 but within a safe environment, 500 00:32:10,581 --> 00:32:15,916 right? You cannot do much. And if you think about the way also the money is divided, 501 00:32:15,916 --> 00:32:20,850 it's one million, but you don't ask one million. 502 00:32:21,822 --> 00:32:26,404 The objective of PB is really designed as a tournament to maximize the winners. 503 00:32:26,404 --> 00:32:30,276 It's really well designed from a game ~ design perspective, 504 00:32:30,276 --> 00:32:32,137 not game theory, actual game design, 505 00:32:32,137 --> 00:32:35,849 right? Because a lot of people win and in a game, 506 00:32:35,849 --> 00:32:40,771 if you want to maximize the feeling of sort of satisfaction, 507 00:32:40,771 --> 00:32:42,392 you want to have a lot of winner. 508 00:32:42,392 --> 00:32:44,473 It's like the first level of a video game. 509 00:32:44,473 --> 00:32:47,754 It's very easy. You win easy, then it becomes difficult, 510 00:32:47,754 --> 00:32:50,736 right? And so the million dollar, 511 00:32:51,556 --> 00:32:55,679 at maximum you can propose a project of 100,000. 512 00:32:55,679 --> 00:32:59,001 So you have 10 winners, right? 513 00:32:59,001 --> 00:33:02,894 And so all those little rules are really, 514 00:33:02,894 --> 00:33:08,307 that have evolved over time, are really designed for engagement. 515 00:33:08,307 --> 00:33:11,479 But it comes from the origin. 516 00:33:11,479 --> 00:33:13,671 When I interviewed in Porto Allegre, 517 00:33:13,671 --> 00:33:19,445 Ubiratande and Susa Santos, that it's really the mind behind PB together with Arsene 518 00:33:19,445 --> 00:33:20,816 General and a few others. 519 00:33:21,496 --> 00:33:27,693 he told me straight PB is a hook to engage people that 520 00:33:27,693 --> 00:33:32,688 are disengaged so that they come to the workers party and we select 521 00:33:32,728 --> 00:33:37,874 the leaders that we need to do our process it was very clear 522 00:33:38,715 --> 00:33:41,698 and that's how it was started right it was a 523 00:33:41,790 --> 00:33:44,951 ~ from their standpoints that's how the PT used. 524 00:33:44,951 --> 00:33:50,684 Then it was modified, it was transformed in a neutral approach that 525 00:33:50,684 --> 00:33:55,156 is governance driven. But the genetics 526 00:33:55,797 --> 00:33:59,968 is about really making sort of engaging people, 527 00:33:59,968 --> 00:34:06,081 identifying leaders, re-engineerize social groups at the local level because 528 00:34:06,261 --> 00:34:11,384 you can establish rules that give ~ more advantages 529 00:34:11,804 --> 00:34:15,906 groups, right? That was typical in the first generation of PB. 530 00:34:15,906 --> 00:34:22,679 You got more votes if you got more people in your group proposing 531 00:34:22,679 --> 00:34:27,331 the idea. And so that pushed civil society growth. 532 00:34:27,331 --> 00:34:30,032 It was dragged, but it still pushed it, 533 00:34:30,032 --> 00:34:33,793 right? And so it's an incentive system. 534 00:34:33,793 --> 00:34:34,974 ~ But 535 00:34:35,694 --> 00:34:38,335 it remained safe in the modern model. 536 00:34:38,335 --> 00:34:42,458 In the early Brazilian system, 537 00:34:42,458 --> 00:34:48,534 the money was not set aside. So it was more vague, 538 00:34:48,534 --> 00:34:51,235 more nebulous, right? And in Porto Alegre, 539 00:34:51,235 --> 00:34:55,309 at a certain moment, it was 20 % of the investment of the city. 540 00:34:55,309 --> 00:34:59,773 So massive, right? ~ But if you look at... 541 00:34:59,773 --> 00:35:01,154 ~ 542 00:35:01,276 --> 00:35:08,159 modern PB and in fact there is the famous paper of Baiocchi and Ganuzza that call 543 00:35:08,159 --> 00:35:12,511 it a sort of decathenated PB, 544 00:35:12,511 --> 00:35:17,494 right? They have really removed the radical ~ approach. 545 00:35:17,494 --> 00:35:20,645 So there is a really nice evolution. 546 00:35:20,645 --> 00:35:27,208 PB starts very radical and it becomes less radical over time when it explodes 547 00:35:27,208 --> 00:35:29,409 in the world. But it's still very interesting, 548 00:35:29,409 --> 00:35:31,200 right? I like to think 549 00:35:31,312 --> 00:35:35,575 of it as a democratic game, again a democratic school. 550 00:35:35,575 --> 00:35:38,638 People don't like it, I never published it because they told me, 551 00:35:38,638 --> 00:35:42,631 no, you are belittling the democratic innovation, 552 00:35:42,631 --> 00:35:44,933 right? If you call it a game, again, 553 00:35:44,933 --> 00:35:47,925 this problem of we are in a movement, 554 00:35:47,925 --> 00:35:51,108 right? If you're criticizing the movement, 555 00:35:51,108 --> 00:35:57,223 ~ it's complicated. So we have one paper that is called Democracy 556 00:35:57,223 --> 00:36:01,056 is a Serious Game that was just presented and never published. 557 00:36:01,237 --> 00:36:06,461 because we got such a negative reaction to the idea of calling participatory budget 558 00:36:06,461 --> 00:36:07,574 in a democratic game. 559 00:36:09,284 --> 00:36:12,486 And what can be improved? 560 00:36:12,486 --> 00:36:18,111 if we think about a possible next generation of... 561 00:36:18,111 --> 00:36:23,975 ~ And also this can be maybe related to the concept of scaling, 562 00:36:23,975 --> 00:36:28,739 also how to scale ~ this kind of part. 563 00:36:24,658 --> 00:36:28,068 Yeah, let's go into scaling. 564 00:36:29,694 --> 00:36:31,138 So. ~ 565 00:36:33,722 --> 00:36:38,605 It's really funny because I was one of the very 566 00:36:38,685 --> 00:36:45,039 few people within the deliberative democracy that was really doing scaling around 567 00:36:45,039 --> 00:36:51,652 2012-2013. I did this experiment in Italy with a group from Bologna 568 00:36:51,652 --> 00:36:57,615 of the Italian Democratic Party in which we used argument mapping 569 00:36:57,776 --> 00:37:00,677 online to discuss the electoral law. 570 00:37:00,677 --> 00:37:02,178 ~ 571 00:37:03,096 --> 00:37:07,586 that was done in 2013 and... 572 00:37:08,142 --> 00:37:10,533 the process was called Insieme per il PB, 573 00:37:10,533 --> 00:37:15,124 it was with the group of Gotzi that now is in France. 574 00:37:15,124 --> 00:37:19,705 It was a weird group of Catholic and leftist together, 575 00:37:19,705 --> 00:37:22,726 but very, very nice, a very nice process. 576 00:37:22,726 --> 00:37:25,807 I was coming from face to face from Brazil, 577 00:37:25,807 --> 00:37:28,487 completely skeptical about the tech. 578 00:37:28,487 --> 00:37:34,069 That was the first time in which I saw that online deliberation could 579 00:37:34,069 --> 00:37:37,550 be better than face to face deliberation when well organized. 580 00:37:38,384 --> 00:37:43,319 And I started saying those things in a field that didn't like those things. 581 00:37:43,319 --> 00:37:49,144 And so it was very funny. Like people were no online interaction are terrible. 582 00:37:49,144 --> 00:37:52,448 They don't work. You lose so much information. 583 00:37:52,448 --> 00:37:54,349 I yes on Facebook. 584 00:37:54,974 --> 00:38:00,106 ~ If you have a community of interested people that want to use 585 00:38:00,106 --> 00:38:02,677 the technology and really want to, 586 00:38:02,677 --> 00:38:05,758 and you have a good platform, 587 00:38:05,758 --> 00:38:09,160 the outcome can be better, 588 00:38:09,160 --> 00:38:13,722 right? And I had the data to show it. 589 00:38:15,431 --> 00:38:18,974 And I had seen it, right? The quality of argumentation. 590 00:38:18,974 --> 00:38:20,895 Obviously it was a lead process. 591 00:38:20,895 --> 00:38:25,420 That was not ~ massive, but it was a lead within a political party. 592 00:38:25,420 --> 00:38:28,653 And there was the start, 593 00:38:28,653 --> 00:38:32,386 like we had an online deliberation among 600 people. 594 00:38:32,386 --> 00:38:36,309 For a month, they built an argument map that it's not easy. 595 00:38:37,112 --> 00:38:39,783 And we had a lot of people participation, 596 00:38:39,783 --> 00:38:43,725 like 60 out of 600 contributing to the map. 597 00:38:43,725 --> 00:38:46,977 Like almost everybody participated in something. 598 00:38:46,977 --> 00:38:49,288 So fascinating, fascinating example. 599 00:38:49,288 --> 00:38:55,851 ~ Then the big switch that was fascinating to observe was COVID. 600 00:38:55,851 --> 00:39:00,653 And it was driven by the implementers that had been paid to 601 00:39:00,653 --> 00:39:03,654 do a face-to-face process and couldn't do it anymore. 602 00:39:03,654 --> 00:39:06,896 So they all moved to Zoom with all the 603 00:39:06,976 --> 00:39:09,176 of transparency and using Zoom. 604 00:39:09,176 --> 00:39:12,496 And there was almost a flip and 605 00:39:12,496 --> 00:39:16,196 now online became ubiquitous, 606 00:39:16,196 --> 00:39:21,436 right? And now a lot of citizen assembly have 607 00:39:21,436 --> 00:39:26,076 an online moment among the participants, 608 00:39:26,076 --> 00:39:30,696 but the citizen assembly are still relatively small, 609 00:39:30,696 --> 00:39:34,896 up to 100 to 100 people. There are some experiments that are doing it bigger. 610 00:39:36,834 --> 00:39:41,432 and there are these attempts to involve the maxi public in 611 00:39:41,432 --> 00:39:47,752 the city assembly sometimes are done sometimes are not done the one I've seen rarely 612 00:39:47,752 --> 00:39:48,752 are done well 613 00:39:49,158 --> 00:39:52,199 You just open up a website, you ask for comments, 614 00:39:52,199 --> 00:39:53,690 you generate, if you're lucky, 615 00:39:53,690 --> 00:39:57,521 a gazillion comments, and then you don't know what to do with it because 616 00:39:58,161 --> 00:40:01,062 how do you give the assembly a gazillion comments, 617 00:40:01,062 --> 00:40:03,993 right? So if you have the energy, 618 00:40:03,993 --> 00:40:06,004 you summarize them. Now with AI, 619 00:40:06,004 --> 00:40:07,404 you can do all sorts of summaries, 620 00:40:07,404 --> 00:40:11,726 but the transmission problem is a crucial problem. 621 00:40:12,342 --> 00:40:17,935 And the other issue, if we are really serious about citizen assembly from 622 00:40:17,935 --> 00:40:23,027 an epistemic standpoint, and now Elen Landemore is talking about this, 623 00:40:23,027 --> 00:40:26,809 I think we cannot have one assembly, 624 00:40:26,809 --> 00:40:31,271 right? Because there is group bias and there is a lot of studies about group bias. 625 00:40:31,271 --> 00:40:37,074 We wouldn't have to have a galaxy of citizen assembly that work at the same time 626 00:40:37,074 --> 00:40:42,126 on the same topic, and then a smart transmission system that combines 627 00:40:42,196 --> 00:40:46,119 it. A little bit like what America Speaks was doing in 2004-2008. 628 00:40:46,119 --> 00:40:49,861 That was the early, early time, 629 00:40:49,861 --> 00:40:53,564 right? But that to me is the interesting future. 630 00:40:53,564 --> 00:40:58,847 ~ And that and so if I had to organize like 631 00:40:58,967 --> 00:41:01,489 my gold standard citizen assembly, 632 00:41:01,489 --> 00:41:07,433 I would probably do something in 10 cities at the same time on the same topic 633 00:41:08,033 --> 00:41:12,096 and with a transmission system plus a mechanism to involve seriously 634 00:41:12,146 --> 00:41:18,819 the maxi public like open to all events and and and the last element 635 00:41:18,819 --> 00:41:25,352 is that there is a lot of hype about the engagement system right 636 00:41:25,352 --> 00:41:29,704 so these i've wrote a paper that annoyed a lot of people again i like 637 00:41:29,704 --> 00:41:32,476 to do that there was on 638 00:41:33,566 --> 00:41:36,266 the over claiming of representation. 639 00:41:36,266 --> 00:41:42,586 If you look at the acceptance rate of the vast majority of citizen assembly, 640 00:41:42,586 --> 00:41:47,326 by acceptance rate, I mean how many people when invited say, 641 00:41:47,326 --> 00:41:52,126 yes, I would like to participate is below 5%. 642 00:41:52,126 --> 00:41:57,526 So yes, you send 10,000 invitation. 643 00:41:58,014 --> 00:42:00,514 two, three hundred people say yes. 644 00:42:00,514 --> 00:42:03,254 Then what does the citizen assembly does? 645 00:42:03,254 --> 00:42:06,694 They do the randomization even with the new fancy algorithms, 646 00:42:06,694 --> 00:42:09,634 right? The one that was published in Nature from my friend. 647 00:42:09,634 --> 00:42:14,774 Those are amazing important algorithms that rebalance various things 648 00:42:14,774 --> 00:42:20,774 and they make it more fair, but they make it more fair in those among those 649 00:42:20,774 --> 00:42:26,954 200 people, not with respect the overall 10,000 you have sent. 650 00:42:27,696 --> 00:42:30,428 And so what's the issue? Because you don't have data on those 10,000. 651 00:42:30,428 --> 00:42:35,851 You know very little. There is no way to rebalance things. 652 00:42:35,443 --> 00:42:36,443 you 653 00:42:35,851 --> 00:42:37,862 At most, you know their address. 654 00:42:37,862 --> 00:42:39,633 And if you have data on the address, 655 00:42:39,633 --> 00:42:43,045 sometimes we have information about the address, 656 00:42:43,045 --> 00:42:45,236 right? So you might know the gender. 657 00:42:43,767 --> 00:42:44,767 Okay. 658 00:42:45,236 --> 00:42:47,437 And so there is an issue. 659 00:42:48,846 --> 00:42:53,988 on representativity that needs to be solved by spending more money 660 00:42:54,409 --> 00:42:59,191 on engagement, by using multiple channels of engagement, 661 00:42:59,191 --> 00:43:03,053 by knocking on doors, by using social media, 662 00:43:03,053 --> 00:43:06,934 instead of being very cheap on this type of engagement. 663 00:43:06,934 --> 00:43:12,947 And one of the most interesting debates is about how much money we should give 664 00:43:08,171 --> 00:43:09,171 Yeah. 665 00:43:12,947 --> 00:43:18,680 to participants. Because one of the claims of many practitioners is that if we 666 00:43:18,820 --> 00:43:22,543 pay them more, we will see the acceptance rate go up. 667 00:43:22,543 --> 00:43:24,384 So the problem is purely resource. 668 00:43:24,384 --> 00:43:29,747 But there was a very recent case done in Austria ~ 669 00:43:29,747 --> 00:43:35,301 by and it's published on the Journal of Sortition in which they paid every 670 00:43:35,301 --> 00:43:38,673 participant 1,500 euros. 671 00:43:38,673 --> 00:43:42,076 Right. That was the invitation for weekend. 672 00:43:42,076 --> 00:43:45,258 So you got 3,000 if you came two weekends. 673 00:43:45,258 --> 00:43:48,640 Right. That's a stipend. It's the highest pay. 674 00:43:49,113 --> 00:43:51,775 ever done in history for a citizen assembly. 675 00:43:51,775 --> 00:43:55,735 The acceptance rate went up to 10%. 676 00:43:55,735 --> 00:43:58,821 Still, 90 % of the people did not come. 677 00:43:58,821 --> 00:44:04,866 So the reason of not coming are not about the money. 678 00:44:05,436 --> 00:44:08,617 there are other reasons, whatever they are. 679 00:44:08,617 --> 00:44:12,339 And there is very little studies about the reason like we have done one, 680 00:44:12,339 --> 00:44:14,390 there is another famous qualitative one, 681 00:44:14,390 --> 00:44:16,271 but that's a crucial direction. 682 00:44:16,271 --> 00:44:22,840 If we want to make this thing legitimate and sell them on the marketing that they 683 00:44:22,840 --> 00:44:25,655 are representative, because we could sell them in another way. 684 00:44:25,655 --> 00:44:29,247 And that's my point. My point is at this stage, 685 00:44:29,247 --> 00:44:31,788 these things are not representative. 686 00:44:31,788 --> 00:44:33,639 We cannot say that they're representative, 687 00:44:33,639 --> 00:44:35,320 right? We should sell 688 00:44:35,390 --> 00:44:37,581 them on a Republican argument. 689 00:44:37,581 --> 00:44:42,825 The randomization allows you to prevent interest group to capture them. 690 00:44:42,825 --> 00:44:48,469 That I stand behind. It's really harder to capture a citizen assembly because 691 00:44:48,469 --> 00:44:50,910 you cannot flood it with your confederates, 692 00:44:50,910 --> 00:44:54,503 right? You have to do very legal things, 693 00:44:54,503 --> 00:44:56,904 right? You need to pay the participants, 694 00:44:56,904 --> 00:44:58,555 you need to pay the moderators, 695 00:44:58,555 --> 00:45:01,738 you need to pay the expert. But those are things that are easier 696 00:45:01,738 --> 00:45:05,230 to track than flooding with your confederates. 697 00:45:05,481 --> 00:45:11,050 So I would justify that way and not on representation until 698 00:45:11,551 --> 00:45:15,357 we figure out how to push up the acceptance rate. 699 00:45:18,147 --> 00:45:20,409 Yeah, I was not expecting this, 700 00:45:20,409 --> 00:45:25,292 to be honest. I also thought that giving more money would raise the participation. 701 00:45:25,722 --> 00:45:27,803 It's a fascinating show that paper 702 00:45:27,803 --> 00:45:29,504 in the general petition. I said, 703 00:45:29,504 --> 00:45:35,527 OK, because I had a discussion with Kyle Redman in a a blog ~ and he said, 704 00:45:35,527 --> 00:45:38,928 no, but the problem of a sentence rate is solvable. 705 00:45:38,928 --> 00:45:43,150 It's more money and institutionalization make it mandatory. 706 00:45:43,150 --> 00:45:47,512 But I already knew that make it mandatory doesn't solve it because 707 00:45:47,512 --> 00:45:52,975 we have pulled the work on the juries in the US and the juries in the 708 00:45:52,975 --> 00:45:55,376 US are not representative of the population. 709 00:45:55,408 --> 00:46:01,708 because are highly skewed, because there are ways to get away from mandatory stuff, 710 00:46:01,708 --> 00:46:06,348 And so I, and the money was still open. 711 00:46:06,348 --> 00:46:11,728 Again, it's one data point. So it might be a very unusual case. 712 00:46:11,728 --> 00:46:14,768 I talked to the implementer and asked them why, 713 00:46:14,768 --> 00:46:18,168 because I don't know, 3000 euros, 714 00:46:18,168 --> 00:46:21,968 because the argument, oh no, I want to stay with my kids. 715 00:46:21,968 --> 00:46:25,308 Yes, but you know, I pay baby 716 00:46:25,312 --> 00:46:29,412 and then we go doing an amazing vacation with 3000 euros. 717 00:46:29,412 --> 00:46:33,912 So I was expecting that at least 50%. 718 00:46:33,912 --> 00:46:39,092 By the way, we did 50 % in a citizen assembly acceptance rate on what? 719 00:46:39,092 --> 00:46:41,472 On Brexit, right? 720 00:46:41,662 --> 00:46:46,402 So when the topic is in the mind of everybody, 721 00:46:46,402 --> 00:46:51,662 you get to 50%. The other person that consistently does 722 00:46:51,662 --> 00:46:55,642 70 % plus acceptance rate is Jim Fishkin, 723 00:46:55,642 --> 00:47:00,682 but he spends 200,000 euros plus on engagement 724 00:47:00,682 --> 00:47:06,822 and he uses the same teams that use marketing research that call people 725 00:47:06,822 --> 00:47:11,422 a million times and they really call and call and call and call. 726 00:47:12,057 --> 00:47:15,780 And instead, the standard approach that Citi is, 727 00:47:15,780 --> 00:47:17,412 but also Certisium Foundation, 728 00:47:17,412 --> 00:47:19,584 that is the kind of the biggest provider, 729 00:47:19,584 --> 00:47:20,905 is to send one letter. 730 00:47:23,427 --> 00:47:27,851 And I was thinking in relation to political parties 731 00:47:27,851 --> 00:47:34,797 ~ because we said that online citizen assembly could work 732 00:47:34,797 --> 00:47:40,442 and sometimes also better than maybe offline citizen assembly ~ and 733 00:47:40,442 --> 00:47:45,997 so associated to the concept of scaling like because you know also 734 00:47:45,997 --> 00:47:49,050 in Italy there was the five-star movement and ~ 735 00:47:49,705 --> 00:47:53,516 and they tried with the Russo platform back then maybe the technology was 736 00:47:53,516 --> 00:47:58,838 not very ~ mature like AI didn't exist in the way that 737 00:47:58,938 --> 00:48:04,439 we know it and so I'm thinking like ~ 738 00:48:04,439 --> 00:48:09,341 how could be like a possible way of scaling in relation to political parties 739 00:48:09,341 --> 00:48:13,322 ~ because as just 740 00:48:11,496 --> 00:48:13,601 So the political 741 00:48:13,764 --> 00:48:14,764 parties. 742 00:48:15,112 --> 00:48:18,836 No, just another thing, because at the moment, 743 00:48:18,836 --> 00:48:22,471 citizen assembly participatory processes ~ 744 00:48:22,471 --> 00:48:27,356 are usually held in a specific moment. 745 00:48:27,356 --> 00:48:31,841 maybe, what about something more continuous, 746 00:48:31,841 --> 00:48:34,885 where people can participate always? 747 00:48:32,563 --> 00:48:33,563 Yeah. 748 00:48:34,885 --> 00:48:35,885 ~ 749 00:48:36,959 --> 00:48:42,216 There are now experiences of continuous citizen assembly. 750 00:48:42,916 --> 00:48:44,917 in Italy in theory there is the Milan one, 751 00:48:44,917 --> 00:48:46,338 I don't know anything about it, 752 00:48:46,338 --> 00:48:51,120 but it's so invisible that I'm doubtful that it's doing much, 753 00:48:51,120 --> 00:48:52,851 but I don't know, maybe it's going. 754 00:48:52,851 --> 00:48:56,979 The classical experience that everybody cites is the Belgian one, 755 00:48:56,979 --> 00:49:02,565 right? And so there are these institutionalized citizen assembly that occur every 756 00:49:02,565 --> 00:49:08,268 year. ~ But within political party there is still very little. 757 00:49:08,268 --> 00:49:11,659 There is ~ one fascinating thing is that 758 00:49:12,800 --> 00:49:15,500 The researcher I was working in 2012, 759 00:49:15,500 --> 00:49:19,640 the one that brought the opportunity to do this experiment with the PD, 760 00:49:19,640 --> 00:49:26,340 is the first researcher to talk about doing citizen assembly in political party. 761 00:49:26,340 --> 00:49:29,160 He had this terrible name about it. 762 00:49:29,160 --> 00:49:31,960 He called D'Oparie. This is Raffaele Calabretta. 763 00:49:31,960 --> 00:49:37,880 He has a book about it. And he had a very interesting 764 00:49:37,880 --> 00:49:42,180 and sophisticated idea about it because he has been working in political parties 765 00:49:42,180 --> 00:49:43,180 for a long time. 766 00:49:42,760 --> 00:49:47,614 time as an activist, his standpoint is that the citizen assembly within 767 00:49:47,614 --> 00:49:50,926 a political party was thinking more about deliberative polls and citizen assembly, 768 00:49:50,926 --> 00:49:56,721 but the idea is the same, where should be used only once 769 00:49:56,721 --> 00:50:00,884 a year and on a topic that really divides the party. 770 00:50:00,884 --> 00:50:05,868 Because if the party is not divided on that topic 771 00:50:06,348 --> 00:50:08,370 due to the fact that the 772 00:50:08,786 --> 00:50:12,708 parties competing outside with other parties, 773 00:50:12,708 --> 00:50:17,790 it is an inefficient system. So it's only when you are truly in doubt 774 00:50:18,391 --> 00:50:23,673 and in the left, we are often divided and in doubt among many things, 775 00:50:23,673 --> 00:50:27,615 right? So for example, you can think about the, 776 00:50:27,615 --> 00:50:30,996 when the, the, ~ the, the, 777 00:50:30,996 --> 00:50:35,859 Olivo that it was this sort of less constellation of parties that combined 778 00:50:35,859 --> 00:50:38,650 the Catholic and the traditional 779 00:50:38,720 --> 00:50:44,700 former communist was coming together and they had to decide religious issues 780 00:50:44,700 --> 00:50:48,320 or moral issues. And for Raffaele, 781 00:50:48,320 --> 00:50:53,200 that was a key moment to have a citizen assembly because the leadership 782 00:50:53,200 --> 00:50:55,580 was not able to come to a decision. 783 00:50:55,580 --> 00:51:00,200 Like his key motivation is when the leadership is in conflict of interest. 784 00:51:00,200 --> 00:51:04,720 And that comes actually from the origin of citizen assembly. 785 00:51:04,720 --> 00:51:08,540 The way they implemented the citizen assembly in British 786 00:51:09,060 --> 00:51:13,523 on the electoral law was the recognition that the political parties 787 00:51:13,523 --> 00:51:17,106 are in conflict of interest when they're deciding the electoral law. 788 00:51:17,106 --> 00:51:22,650 so I think that these reflections have disappeared a little bit. 789 00:51:22,650 --> 00:51:25,872 Now we tend to do citizen assembly on absolutely anything. 790 00:51:25,872 --> 00:51:29,834 And in my opinion, that weakens the instrument. 791 00:51:29,834 --> 00:51:34,838 It's only when there is a clear failure 792 00:51:35,290 --> 00:51:39,413 of the politician and the smart politician recognized that themselves, 793 00:51:39,413 --> 00:51:44,396 then at that point, the Citizen Assembly can have big impact. 794 00:51:44,396 --> 00:51:49,040 Right. And you can think about the Irish case also that way, 795 00:51:49,040 --> 00:51:54,163 because in Ireland, the Citizen Assembly that really worked were 796 00:51:54,163 --> 00:51:59,607 the ones on same sex marriage and interruption of pregnancy. 797 00:51:59,607 --> 00:52:03,070 And those were issues that were stuck. 798 00:52:03,622 --> 00:52:06,364 and that the political system could not solve. 799 00:52:06,364 --> 00:52:11,860 ~ And those are the ones that were unstuck, 800 00:52:11,860 --> 00:52:17,465 but they discussed a bunch of other things and those did not do anything. 801 00:52:17,465 --> 00:52:22,620 They had a lot of impact among the participants and a lot of other impact, 802 00:52:22,620 --> 00:52:29,086 but they didn't have change in laws and like the classic public policy stuff. 803 00:52:29,630 --> 00:52:34,112 ~ So for applying internal democracy, 804 00:52:34,112 --> 00:52:37,753 it's really important to understand, 805 00:52:37,753 --> 00:52:40,315 and it's probably similar for firm, 806 00:52:40,315 --> 00:52:45,487 I don't study the firm, ~ but that the agent you're thinking about, 807 00:52:45,487 --> 00:52:46,608 the institution you're thinking about, 808 00:52:46,608 --> 00:52:52,721 has this survival ~ fundamental objective function through election. 809 00:52:52,721 --> 00:52:58,103 And so your citizen assembly needs not to conflict with that survival, 810 00:52:58,103 --> 00:52:59,584 need to help. ~ 811 00:52:59,684 --> 00:53:04,652 need to be there. But it's really an underexplorer space, 812 00:53:04,652 --> 00:53:09,410 in part because party members don't want to do them. 813 00:53:09,410 --> 00:53:10,410 We just did... 814 00:53:10,554 --> 00:53:15,276 a fascinating conjoined experiment in the UK before the election. 815 00:53:15,276 --> 00:53:20,439 And funny enough, Labour put in their election manifesto that they wanted 816 00:53:20,439 --> 00:53:26,872 to do a citizen assembly. But then when we did a conjoined on party members 817 00:53:26,872 --> 00:53:31,924 and party higher echelon and we asked them what is the configuration 818 00:53:32,244 --> 00:53:36,616 of internal democracy, they don't like citizen assembly. 819 00:53:36,616 --> 00:53:40,448 They don't want they want only to increase the power of 820 00:53:40,410 --> 00:53:41,410 members. 821 00:53:41,200 --> 00:53:43,241 So increased direct democracy, 822 00:53:43,241 --> 00:53:48,962 increased oversight. And so that's fascinating, 823 00:53:48,962 --> 00:53:53,123 ~ also intuitive ex post. But ex ante, 824 00:53:53,123 --> 00:53:57,544 we were expecting a completely different result because Labour was campaigning 825 00:53:57,544 --> 00:54:01,705 a bit on more citizen assembly, 826 00:54:01,705 --> 00:54:03,466 but for the public. 827 00:54:04,426 --> 00:54:08,470 not for the party. And so it's still 828 00:54:08,470 --> 00:54:12,533 a conception of democracy as mobilization, 829 00:54:12,533 --> 00:54:18,628 very similar, if you want to the traditional leftist conception of participation. 830 00:54:18,628 --> 00:54:22,782 Participation is when you mobilize for me and you come and... 831 00:54:23,723 --> 00:54:27,957 and you protest for me or you do the things that I want. 832 00:54:27,957 --> 00:54:30,089 If you're mobilizing in general, 833 00:54:30,089 --> 00:54:35,734 I'm a bit skeptical. ~ But yeah, 834 00:54:35,734 --> 00:54:38,007 did I only talk about parties? 835 00:54:38,007 --> 00:54:39,688 Yeah, I didn't talk about scaling up. 836 00:54:39,688 --> 00:54:41,660 You were interested in scaling up. 837 00:54:41,660 --> 00:54:43,202 ~ 838 00:54:42,570 --> 00:54:43,570 Yeah, 839 00:54:43,411 --> 00:54:48,237 I was wondering, yeah, in relation to ~ political parties, 840 00:54:48,237 --> 00:54:50,239 mean, scaling can be also outside of... 841 00:54:51,346 --> 00:54:52,972 Yes, there, like 842 00:54:52,972 --> 00:54:57,188 if you look at the discussion in political parties about membership, 843 00:54:57,974 --> 00:54:59,895 and the literature of membership. 844 00:54:59,895 --> 00:55:06,388 in Italy, we have the experience of the primaries of the PD, 845 00:55:06,388 --> 00:55:11,000 the Democratic Party that I liked it really easily. 846 00:55:11,000 --> 00:55:17,438 There is a tension about involving people in the Maxi public that 847 00:55:17,438 --> 00:55:21,205 are not members of the party and people within the party. 848 00:55:21,205 --> 00:55:25,287 And some people are really in favor to open up primaries to everybody, 849 00:55:25,287 --> 00:55:27,778 but some people are 850 00:55:27,760 --> 00:55:28,760 scared 851 00:55:28,140 --> 00:55:31,962 not because the opposing party will come in and hijack, 852 00:55:31,962 --> 00:55:37,816 but because it's corruption. You can buy and there were lots of scandals about it. 853 00:55:37,816 --> 00:55:42,329 Like you could buy a seat in a primary at the local level with 50,000 euros. 854 00:55:42,329 --> 00:55:44,710 Like somebody have done a study with the prices, 855 00:55:44,710 --> 00:55:50,153 right? Because you literally buy people to go for vote for you in the primaries. 856 00:55:50,153 --> 00:55:54,296 And there are not enough checks because the level of checks are inferior. 857 00:55:54,296 --> 00:55:56,657 But also when 858 00:55:58,262 --> 00:56:02,125 You remember when Renzi won, there was a lot of discussion because a 859 00:56:02,125 --> 00:56:06,529 lot of people that vote for Renzi were not the members of the party. 860 00:56:06,529 --> 00:56:09,151 Similar when Elly Schlein won. 861 00:56:09,151 --> 00:56:13,114 Elly won with the people outside of the party vote. 862 00:56:13,114 --> 00:56:20,000 ~ And so there is that tension when you're thinking 863 00:56:20,000 --> 00:56:26,415 about political parties of who is the person that should have the decision 864 00:56:26,415 --> 00:56:27,415 on the leader. 865 00:56:28,138 --> 00:56:31,029 And when we did the conjoin, that was one of the questions. 866 00:56:31,029 --> 00:56:37,020 And we were doing the survey experiment only with members of the party. 867 00:56:37,020 --> 00:56:40,681 And they were completely against open primaries. 868 00:56:40,681 --> 00:56:46,383 This is the UK. ~ It doesn't really have a tradition of primaries anyway. 869 00:56:44,682 --> 00:56:45,682 you 870 00:56:46,383 --> 00:56:52,685 But it would be, think, within the Democratic Party in Italy, 871 00:56:52,685 --> 00:56:54,965 the debates on primaries keep recurring. 872 00:56:57,746 --> 00:57:03,769 divided, right? And often there was this joke that the PD is the only party that 873 00:57:03,789 --> 00:57:05,879 consistently loses primaries, right? 874 00:57:05,879 --> 00:57:10,752 Because it's always the candidate from the outside that's from the green 875 00:57:11,192 --> 00:57:16,755 or from Possibile or from something else that wins the primary. 876 00:57:16,755 --> 00:57:21,727 And so you can see why the party members might be annoyed, 877 00:57:21,727 --> 00:57:25,899 right? We have been volunteering for the parties for 20 years and there 878 00:57:25,899 --> 00:57:27,650 is this new outsider that comes in. 879 00:57:27,740 --> 00:57:32,772 and wins the primaries with the pros and cons that that involves. 880 00:57:33,060 --> 00:57:34,060 Yeah, 881 00:57:33,340 --> 00:57:37,201 of course. so, 882 00:57:37,201 --> 00:57:41,083 I mean, there is this tension between, 883 00:57:41,083 --> 00:57:43,844 let's say, the leader of the party that, 884 00:57:43,844 --> 00:57:50,047 I mean, the party itself, that maybe would like 885 00:57:50,047 --> 00:57:53,308 to ~ theoretically engage with citizens, 886 00:57:53,308 --> 00:57:57,590 but then maybe they don't like what citizens propose. 887 00:57:57,590 --> 00:57:59,131 So... 888 00:57:59,325 --> 00:58:04,281 I'm wondering also how to solve this issue because I see it's very related 889 00:58:04,281 --> 00:58:08,826 ~ to scaling. ~ 890 00:58:08,158 --> 00:58:09,158 And I 891 00:58:08,898 --> 00:58:15,878 think so the participatory budgeting has a lot of sort of funny techniques that have 892 00:58:15,878 --> 00:58:17,718 been experienced because it's one of the oldest, 893 00:58:17,718 --> 00:58:20,218 right? There are now what 30 years? 894 00:58:20,218 --> 00:58:23,758 1989 were the first 2026. 895 00:58:23,758 --> 00:58:29,418 Yeah. And so, for example, one of the thing that 896 00:58:29,418 --> 00:58:35,158 is often proposed when you are introducing PB in a highly conflictual environment 897 00:58:35,158 --> 00:58:38,112 is the fact 898 00:58:38,252 --> 00:58:44,102 that people can criticize but they always have to propose a solution 899 00:58:44,443 --> 00:58:45,484 to their own critique. 900 00:58:46,398 --> 00:58:52,083 ~ And so you can have literally procedural tricks and 901 00:58:52,243 --> 00:58:58,187 the literature on conflict resolution is probably the oldest mediation literature. 902 00:58:58,187 --> 00:59:02,371 the facilitation, I'm interested in facilitation too. 903 00:59:02,371 --> 00:59:07,805 The facilitation literature in deliberative democracy is standing on 904 00:59:07,805 --> 00:59:11,838 the shoulder on the conflict resolution and mediation literature 905 00:59:12,259 --> 00:59:15,401 in psychology and in law. 906 00:59:16,314 --> 00:59:18,799 It comes, it's older that stuff. 907 00:59:18,799 --> 00:59:20,162 ~ 908 00:59:20,324 --> 00:59:23,616 and has been done more for a variety of reasons. 909 00:59:23,616 --> 00:59:30,419 so conflict resolution has a lot of procedural approach to reduce. 910 00:59:30,419 --> 00:59:33,480 But the issue is to invest in them, 911 00:59:33,480 --> 00:59:39,803 right? And also to involve people in a credible dialogue, 912 00:59:39,803 --> 00:59:44,485 because people get annoyed when they are involved in a non-credible one. 913 00:59:44,485 --> 00:59:49,358 And when you ask them to participate a lot and then nothing happens, 914 00:59:49,358 --> 00:59:50,358 then they get for you. 915 00:59:50,959 --> 00:59:56,180 And so, for example, when I consult for a citizen assembly and I know that it's 916 00:59:56,180 --> 01:00:02,080 a consultative process, my first conversation is about this and is to say, 917 01:00:02,080 --> 01:00:04,840 look, this is a consultative process. 918 01:00:04,840 --> 01:00:08,820 I need guaranteed of impact. Otherwise, 919 01:00:08,820 --> 01:00:14,040 we should stop here. Right. If you are discussing at the end of 920 01:00:14,040 --> 01:00:20,064 the year the transportation program of the city and you're willing 921 01:00:20,064 --> 01:00:23,086 willing to change it because that's the key, 922 01:00:23,086 --> 01:00:24,427 not that you're discussing it. 923 01:00:24,427 --> 01:00:30,521 If you are willing to change it then and there are not massive political costs 924 01:00:30,521 --> 01:00:32,652 in some changes because that's the issue, 925 01:00:32,652 --> 01:00:37,356 right? If I've and then it makes sense to open up 926 01:00:37,356 --> 01:00:42,619 the discussion about transportation ~ because it would have a little 927 01:00:42,619 --> 01:00:46,922 bit of feedback loop, not at the point of participatory budgeting in which 928 01:00:46,922 --> 01:00:49,984 you ask for the dog park and two years after 929 01:00:50,404 --> 01:00:54,786 you're taking the dog in your dog park and there is a plaque that says this 930 01:00:54,786 --> 01:00:57,976 was for the project that Alessandro proposed, 931 01:00:57,976 --> 01:01:00,268 right? That's where the feedback loop shines. 932 01:01:00,268 --> 01:01:03,699 But to the point that I participate, 933 01:01:03,699 --> 01:01:07,461 I study, I come two, three weekends online, 934 01:01:07,461 --> 01:01:11,972 I organize, I write because now they want the participant to write a lot. 935 01:01:11,972 --> 01:01:15,814 I do a lot of work and at least 936 01:01:16,466 --> 01:01:21,869 there are some changes that the politicians are willing 937 01:01:22,329 --> 01:01:27,132 to think about and at least discuss in a positive way. 938 01:01:27,132 --> 01:01:31,594 That to me is the sort of entry point. 939 01:01:31,594 --> 01:01:34,536 If they tell me no, I stop and I just leave. 940 01:01:34,536 --> 01:01:40,660 ~ But the thing is now there 941 01:01:40,660 --> 01:01:43,321 are some topics in which is easier than others. 942 01:01:45,946 --> 01:01:51,827 In a sense, the explosion of certain topics in citizen assembly is due 943 01:01:51,827 --> 01:01:54,161 to the fact that this 944 01:01:54,866 --> 01:01:56,897 type of closure of the feedback loop, 945 01:01:56,897 --> 01:02:01,450 it's easy on those topics. Like climate change assemblies, 946 01:02:01,450 --> 01:02:07,624 now they're changing again, but at a certain moment they had so much explosion, 947 01:02:07,624 --> 01:02:12,177 in part because people were righteously pissed about the situation, 948 01:02:12,177 --> 01:02:18,241 but in part because the city was already doing a lot of the things that they knew 949 01:02:18,241 --> 01:02:19,962 the citizens were going to propose. 950 01:02:21,126 --> 01:02:24,830 Right. And so if you look at what the citizens propose, 951 01:02:24,830 --> 01:02:27,072 there is very little innovation. 952 01:02:27,072 --> 01:02:31,377 Because in the end, if you think about the big, 953 01:02:31,377 --> 01:02:35,321 the really big radical changes are not in the end of the cities. 954 01:02:36,018 --> 01:02:39,199 They are in the end of the production of energy. 955 01:02:39,199 --> 01:02:43,021 The transportation decisions are often higher. 956 01:02:43,021 --> 01:02:45,903 Healthcare decisions are higher. 957 01:02:45,903 --> 01:02:51,045 And so what the city can change is like very little things. 958 01:02:51,045 --> 01:02:56,578 And the city is often very open, 959 01:02:56,578 --> 01:03:00,379 particularly because I don't know, 960 01:03:00,379 --> 01:03:03,771 maybe there are some, but in my experience in the UK, 961 01:03:03,771 --> 01:03:05,952 the climate assemblies were all proposed. 962 01:03:06,052 --> 01:03:08,494 by labor government or leave them. 963 01:03:08,494 --> 01:03:11,716 They were already very pro-pedestrianization, 964 01:03:11,716 --> 01:03:15,538 very pro-providing bicycle, integrated transportation, 965 01:03:15,538 --> 01:03:21,312 all the things that within that frame the citizens would support. 966 01:03:21,312 --> 01:03:25,145 So it was a little bit, it was an important process of education visibility. 967 01:03:25,145 --> 01:03:31,729 It had huge, I think, sort of expansion and that's why the NOCA network does 968 01:03:31,729 --> 01:03:33,410 the entire work on this, right? 969 01:03:33,410 --> 01:03:35,852 And it's amazing work and we learn a lot. 970 01:03:37,006 --> 01:03:39,548 but it was also a part of less resistance. 971 01:03:39,548 --> 01:03:46,266 Nobody has done a study of it again because it's not a sexy topic 972 01:03:46,266 --> 01:03:50,642 and it goes against the push of the movement, 973 01:03:50,642 --> 01:03:54,046 right? And so criticizing it would be a bit problematic. 974 01:03:54,878 --> 01:03:58,750 But everybody knows it's these funny things, 975 01:03:58,750 --> 01:04:04,303 right? Everybody kind of knows these things and a few others. 976 01:04:04,303 --> 01:04:09,186 So it's a bit of a weird action research situation. 977 01:04:12,266 --> 01:04:15,386 And what could be done 978 01:04:15,386 --> 01:04:19,406 to improve scaling? 979 01:04:19,406 --> 01:04:25,926 And also because you mentioned some conflict of interest and also 980 01:04:25,926 --> 01:04:30,406 in the field people are not always happy when there are crises. 981 01:04:29,726 --> 01:04:30,726 So 982 01:04:30,466 --> 01:04:36,526 I think paradoxically scaling it's easier than the conflict of interest stuff. 983 01:04:36,526 --> 01:04:38,986 The difficult stuff is always the politics. 984 01:04:38,986 --> 01:04:44,186 There are only political solution to political problem. 985 01:04:44,186 --> 01:04:47,386 There is not a technology solution. 986 01:04:47,386 --> 01:04:50,686 For scaling, I think... 987 01:04:50,780 --> 01:04:54,494 we are at the point in which if we had enough money, 988 01:04:54,494 --> 01:04:57,226 we could scale it up. And Elend talks about it, 989 01:04:57,226 --> 01:04:58,807 but others have talked about it. 990 01:04:58,807 --> 01:05:01,030 were experiments in the seventies, 991 01:05:01,030 --> 01:05:02,641 right? It's just... 992 01:05:04,423 --> 01:05:09,605 Even in the 70s, we could have done a thousand micro-citizen assemblies 993 01:05:09,665 --> 01:05:15,738 in a thousand localities across Italy and figure out with a lot of work, 994 01:05:15,738 --> 01:05:17,689 manual work, how to integrate them. 995 01:05:17,689 --> 01:05:23,051 And if you think about some of the process around the Concilio Vaticano II, 996 01:05:23,051 --> 01:05:28,043 the Second Vatican Council, in which all the church across Italy 997 01:05:28,043 --> 01:05:33,136 had deliberations about, they were not high quality deliberation, 998 01:05:33,328 --> 01:05:34,328 but 999 01:05:33,528 --> 01:05:38,548 we had capital, capital deliberation of what the former communist party 1000 01:05:38,548 --> 01:05:40,708 and even the democracy Christiana used to do. 1001 01:05:40,708 --> 01:05:43,408 They used to have deliberation everywhere, 1002 01:05:43,408 --> 01:05:49,088 right? And so we could think about doing that in person 1003 01:05:49,088 --> 01:05:55,328 or online and having like a thousand small cities in assembly that are low cost, 1004 01:05:55,328 --> 01:05:59,108 that are not expensive. They didn't ask a lot of the participants. 1005 01:06:00,036 --> 01:06:03,728 and way to integrate them. And AI, 1006 01:06:03,728 --> 01:06:07,130 I will be really careful, not because I'm skeptical of AI. 1007 01:06:07,130 --> 01:06:09,611 I think AI is reaching very good level. 1008 01:06:09,611 --> 01:06:13,673 The problem is autonomy. If we don't 1009 01:06:14,246 --> 01:06:20,187 a national AI model that is explainable and that 1010 01:06:20,187 --> 01:06:24,119 the organizer of the Citizen Assembly understand, 1011 01:06:24,119 --> 01:06:28,982 we are outsourcing epistemic framing 1012 01:06:29,694 --> 01:06:33,214 to big tech in the US, right? 1013 01:06:33,214 --> 01:06:35,294 And that's extremely problematic. 1014 01:06:35,294 --> 01:06:38,334 And that is obvious if you use DeepSec. 1015 01:06:38,334 --> 01:06:43,354 If you use DeepSec and you write something about the Tiananmen protest, 1016 01:06:43,354 --> 01:06:47,894 it disappears. And obviously, 1017 01:06:47,894 --> 01:06:53,754 that's obvious, but the biases are there. 1018 01:06:53,754 --> 01:06:57,914 And there are like biases about the type of source that are recommended. 1019 01:06:58,620 --> 01:07:00,682 the type of language that is used, 1020 01:07:00,682 --> 01:07:04,275 all sorts. And again, we need full control. 1021 01:07:04,275 --> 01:07:08,678 I would never suggest to use 1022 01:07:08,799 --> 01:07:14,664 a non-locally installed AI to do this work for a serious political process. 1023 01:07:14,664 --> 01:07:20,108 Imagine if the Citizen Assembly is used to discuss security issues 1024 01:07:21,570 --> 01:07:26,554 of Italy or France, right? And the data is in the US. 1025 01:07:27,710 --> 01:07:31,130 And before we could delude ourselves that, 1026 01:07:31,130 --> 01:07:36,070 okay, the US was a good benevolent policeman of the world, 1027 01:07:36,070 --> 01:07:42,210 but now it's obvious to everybody that we're just deluding ourselves 1028 01:07:42,210 --> 01:07:43,789 on what they're operating, right? 1029 01:07:43,789 --> 01:07:47,130 And so that's the key issue around AI. 1030 01:07:47,130 --> 01:07:53,530 The model will improve. It's also a model that will always contain 1031 01:07:53,530 --> 01:07:55,746 randomness, right? And so... 1032 01:07:56,158 --> 01:08:01,018 it will always need cross checks because by the way it is created, 1033 01:08:01,018 --> 01:08:07,578 it has randomness on purpose because otherwise it would be a deterministic model, 1034 01:08:07,578 --> 01:08:10,598 right? So some people describe it as a loaded dice. 1035 01:08:10,598 --> 01:08:15,258 The loading become better and better and better and better and predicting 1036 01:08:15,258 --> 01:08:17,417 the next word, predicting the context, 1037 01:08:17,417 --> 01:08:20,438 but it is a dice, right? 1038 01:08:20,438 --> 01:08:24,278 So even when you're summarizing arguments of citizens, 1039 01:08:25,566 --> 01:08:29,066 you're summarizing them with a random error. 1040 01:08:29,066 --> 01:08:35,026 And that at that point enters into discussion on 1041 01:08:35,026 --> 01:08:39,786 the amount of risk that we are willing to have on that discussion. 1042 01:08:39,786 --> 01:08:46,685 And so if it is a local discussion about do we have the bike lane here 1043 01:08:46,685 --> 01:08:51,926 on there and we can involve all the minorities that usually 1044 01:08:51,926 --> 01:08:54,446 do not participate by using 1045 01:08:54,608 --> 01:08:59,332 an AI tool, I would probably in the cost benefit analysis say, 1046 01:08:59,332 --> 01:09:04,756 yes, we had an error, but we are involving this group like 1047 01:09:04,756 --> 01:09:07,828 the Italian minority, 1048 01:09:07,828 --> 01:09:12,773 they never participate. And so the cost benefit analysis is a yes. 1049 01:09:12,773 --> 01:09:15,856 But if we are discussing, 1050 01:09:15,856 --> 01:09:20,090 I don't know, a topic about a really sensitive topic, 1051 01:09:20,090 --> 01:09:22,721 like a new law on ~ 1052 01:09:23,238 --> 01:09:28,443 sexual violence or whatever in which the voice of victims 1053 01:09:28,524 --> 01:09:33,929 is fundamental and it needs to be reported perfectly and it cannot 1054 01:09:33,929 --> 01:09:40,066 be modified in which biases are already present in almost everybody, 1055 01:09:40,066 --> 01:09:43,970 right? At that point, I would probably say no AI, 1056 01:09:43,970 --> 01:09:45,742 right? ~ Or 1057 01:09:46,330 --> 01:09:48,511 AI with the level of heat very, 1058 01:09:48,511 --> 01:09:52,332 very low so that it becomes a document retrieval system. 1059 01:09:52,332 --> 01:09:55,194 Because a lot of people think about AI only as LLM, 1060 01:09:55,194 --> 01:09:58,035 but there are a million others of machine learning approaches. 1061 01:09:58,035 --> 01:10:03,017 And there are some that purely doing document retrieval and they have less 1062 01:10:03,397 --> 01:10:07,559 randomness. ~ And then there is a human that does the summary, 1063 01:10:07,559 --> 01:10:12,121 does the cross-check. ~ So the technology is there. 1064 01:10:12,121 --> 01:10:14,032 The problem is ownership. 1065 01:10:14,618 --> 01:10:18,159 It's transparency and those right now, 1066 01:10:18,159 --> 01:10:21,260 if you look at the implementation of most AI, 1067 01:10:21,260 --> 01:10:24,381 ~ they're using commercial products, 1068 01:10:24,381 --> 01:10:26,822 right? And that's highly problematic. 1069 01:10:26,822 --> 01:10:33,083 As when they were using Zoom during COVID to do high level citizen assembly, 1070 01:10:33,083 --> 01:10:34,814 I was the only one saying, look, 1071 01:10:34,814 --> 01:10:36,905 Zoom is not GDPR compliant, right? 1072 01:10:36,905 --> 01:10:41,466 Like we're talking about accountability transparency. 1073 01:10:41,466 --> 01:10:42,466 ~ 1074 01:10:44,048 --> 01:10:47,022 And so, but there is, I don't know, 1075 01:10:47,022 --> 01:10:50,966 there is still a lot, we're still in the infancy, 1076 01:10:50,966 --> 01:10:54,118 if you think about it, like the first one was done in 2004. 1077 01:10:52,508 --> 01:10:53,508 Yeah. 1078 01:10:54,118 --> 01:10:57,474 And so it will take time, 1079 01:10:57,474 --> 01:11:02,380 but ~ the direction is very promising, 1080 01:11:02,380 --> 01:11:03,682 right? And, ~ 1081 01:11:05,222 --> 01:11:09,936 And even an important thing that I keep repeating to everybody is that 1082 01:11:09,936 --> 01:11:12,008 we need to forgive ourselves, right? 1083 01:11:12,008 --> 01:11:16,111 Because the alternative is really shit. 1084 01:11:16,111 --> 01:11:21,776 And so even if this stuff has a lot of problems and a lot of mistake, 1085 01:11:21,776 --> 01:11:24,157 it's better than the alternative. 1086 01:11:24,157 --> 01:11:30,112 And so, yes, the job of academics like me is to go nitty gritty 1087 01:11:30,112 --> 01:11:33,025 and super critical on every aspect. 1088 01:11:35,144 --> 01:11:40,277 But then the job of the practitioner and implementer is to tell me, 1089 01:11:40,277 --> 01:11:47,152 go away and do my research and do a cost benefit analysis 1090 01:11:47,152 --> 01:11:50,595 and say, no, in Bologna now we need a citizen assembly because it's going 1091 01:11:50,595 --> 01:11:52,526 to break an impasse like in Ireland. 1092 01:11:52,526 --> 01:11:55,027 We need to try to institutionalize. 1093 01:11:55,027 --> 01:11:57,579 Even if we know the challenge of institutionalization, 1094 01:11:57,579 --> 01:11:59,751 we need to try to do it. Right. 1095 01:11:59,751 --> 01:12:02,092 And that's the action imperative. 1096 01:12:02,092 --> 01:12:04,464 And that I absolutely recognize and defend. 1097 01:12:04,914 --> 01:12:06,885 But I have an academic imperative, 1098 01:12:06,885 --> 01:12:12,159 right? And so my role is to still figure out how to do it better. 1099 01:12:12,159 --> 01:12:18,834 ~ I'm very happy now that I'm older to do embargo strategies, 1100 01:12:18,834 --> 01:12:21,265 to do research and development strategies. 1101 01:12:21,265 --> 01:12:27,130 When I was a young postdoc, I was way more Taliban in a sense on this. 1102 01:12:27,130 --> 01:12:30,113 I wanted radical transparency everywhere. 1103 01:12:30,113 --> 01:12:31,834 And now... 1104 01:12:33,106 --> 01:12:35,497 Like the political contest is tough. 1105 01:12:35,497 --> 01:12:37,297 Democracy is retrenching, right? 1106 01:12:37,297 --> 01:12:40,688 And so we really need to be extremely careful, 1107 01:12:40,688 --> 01:12:45,689 extremely careful with critique because they're not gonna care. 1108 01:12:45,689 --> 01:12:51,411 the people, if the readers of my papers are those that want 1109 01:12:51,411 --> 01:12:56,632 to destroy Citizen Assembly, I'm not gonna write those papers because 1110 01:12:56,753 --> 01:12:59,053 I want to improve Citizen Assembly, 1111 01:12:59,053 --> 01:13:01,754 right? Those paper will remain. 1112 01:13:02,043 --> 01:13:06,526 but will be given to those that want to improve city assembly and 1113 01:13:06,526 --> 01:13:09,158 I'm not gonna circulate them in the public. 1114 01:13:09,158 --> 01:13:13,521 I was joking, I wasn't in the department at Yale in which a lot of 1115 01:13:13,602 --> 01:13:18,555 my friends were specializing in ~ violence against civilians, 1116 01:13:18,555 --> 01:13:24,910 civil war, dictatorship. And we were joking that the only one reading their papers 1117 01:13:24,930 --> 01:13:29,613 were actually the dictators and those that wanted to repress. 1118 01:13:30,558 --> 01:13:36,313 ~ civil society organization because by describing in detail 1119 01:13:36,313 --> 01:13:39,465 the way civil society could do things, 1120 01:13:39,465 --> 01:13:46,411 you're also unfortunately providing ideas on how to break down those tactics. 1121 01:13:46,411 --> 01:13:52,686 Right, so when I'm describing ~ ways to improve citizen assembly, 1122 01:13:52,686 --> 01:13:57,680 I'm at the same time describing ways to capture it and destroy it. 1123 01:13:57,680 --> 01:13:59,942 One of the fun exercises 1124 01:14:00,826 --> 01:14:05,249 practitioners do in conferences is to ask the audience, 1125 01:14:05,249 --> 01:14:07,550 how would you capture a mini public, 1126 01:14:07,550 --> 01:14:12,213 right? What would be the best approach? 1127 01:14:12,213 --> 01:14:16,045 That's a, if you have never done the exercise, 1128 01:14:16,045 --> 01:14:18,016 I'm talking to the audience directly right now, 1129 01:14:18,016 --> 01:14:21,097 think about it. I do it with my students all the time. 1130 01:14:21,097 --> 01:14:26,250 ~ At Yale, I did an exercise in which I asked how to overthrow the US government. 1131 01:14:26,250 --> 01:14:29,002 Then I got an email from the head of the department. 1132 01:14:29,838 --> 01:14:33,639 That's too much, Paolo. Stick to citizen assemblies. 1133 01:14:33,639 --> 01:14:39,001 Nobody cares about them. If you're teaching how to do a coup in the US, 1134 01:14:39,001 --> 01:14:42,842 I get an email from angry administrators. 1135 01:14:42,842 --> 01:14:46,183 But yet sometimes, 1136 01:14:46,183 --> 01:14:49,944 and this is, I think, important for action researchers like me, 1137 01:14:49,944 --> 01:14:54,325 we often think that nobody reads our research, 1138 01:14:54,325 --> 01:14:56,366 but it depends what you're doing. 1139 01:14:56,882 --> 01:15:00,163 And sometimes you are thinking about an audience, 1140 01:15:00,163 --> 01:15:02,764 but there is also the opposite audience. 1141 01:15:02,764 --> 01:15:06,866 And it's very important when you do action research to think about 1142 01:15:06,866 --> 01:15:09,877 the opposite audience, right? It's really, 1143 01:15:09,877 --> 01:15:14,599 really important. If you are in action research and you want these democratic 1144 01:15:14,599 --> 01:15:16,220 innovations to become stronger and better. 1145 01:15:19,895 --> 01:15:25,390 My last question was about if you have a message for practitioners and people 1146 01:15:25,390 --> 01:15:30,695 in the field but in some way you already ~ gave some suggestion but if 1147 01:15:30,695 --> 01:15:31,695 you have some others 1148 01:15:32,400 --> 01:15:35,681 I think that the... 1149 01:15:38,610 --> 01:15:42,083 The message that the message and I keep repeating it is that we are 1150 01:15:42,083 --> 01:15:48,058 not a minority group anymore. And so I still see a lot of allergic reaction 1151 01:15:48,058 --> 01:15:51,300 to critique, a lot of evangelism. 1152 01:15:51,300 --> 01:15:57,866 And to me, that was a position that made a lot of sense when nobody 1153 01:15:57,866 --> 01:15:59,807 was paying attention to us. Right. 1154 01:15:59,807 --> 01:16:05,332 But now there is a shift and it's a complex shift. 1155 01:16:05,332 --> 01:16:07,654 Right. Because we are actually 1156 01:16:08,062 --> 01:16:12,742 might need now serious autonomous impact evaluation when it's 1157 01:16:12,742 --> 01:16:16,462 the European Commission that is doing citizen assembly. 1158 01:16:16,462 --> 01:16:21,802 And it's not a problem to say that some of these processes 1159 01:16:21,802 --> 01:16:23,822 are actually highly problematic. 1160 01:16:23,822 --> 01:16:25,342 And I don't want to criticize the commission. 1161 01:16:25,342 --> 01:16:26,962 It could be a city or somebody else, 1162 01:16:26,962 --> 01:16:32,182 right? And so in the moment, there is a moment in which you have grown enough 1163 01:16:32,182 --> 01:16:37,642 in which there should probably be a reset on how much we are open. 1164 01:16:37,886 --> 01:16:44,852 ~ to critique. And so that would be something that probably would 1165 01:16:44,852 --> 01:16:47,574 be my message. I think we have reached that moment. 1166 01:16:47,574 --> 01:16:52,108 And so it's important to start thinking larger if you want. 1167 01:16:52,108 --> 01:16:54,420 We are not a minoritarian movement anymore. 1168 01:16:54,420 --> 01:16:58,183 Democratic innovation are here to stay. 1169 01:16:58,183 --> 01:17:02,356 ~ There are a million that are occurring everywhere. 1170 01:17:02,356 --> 01:17:07,010 And it's a moment also to reflect on ~ 1171 01:17:07,946 --> 01:17:13,688 on the problematic ones and when we should use some and when we should 1172 01:17:13,688 --> 01:17:17,150 use somebody else. It's not always helpful to do it, 1173 01:17:17,150 --> 01:17:22,852 right? But that reflection is really hard to make because in part some people 1174 01:17:22,852 --> 01:17:26,324 livelihood depend on selling democratic innovation, 1175 01:17:26,324 --> 01:17:30,816 all the industrial facilitation of participatory service providers, 1176 01:17:30,816 --> 01:17:34,127 right? But we have very few reflection on the indices, 1177 01:17:34,127 --> 01:17:36,418 a couple of books. ~ 1178 01:17:36,732 --> 01:17:38,884 but it's an important reflection. 1179 01:17:38,884 --> 01:17:43,017 But also the counter, right? I was discussing commodification and 1180 01:17:43,017 --> 01:17:45,409 the problem that this industry is generating. 1181 01:17:45,409 --> 01:17:51,494 There should be voice from the industry defending actually 1182 01:17:51,614 --> 01:17:56,748 commodification because commodification that we see as negative most of 1183 01:17:56,748 --> 01:18:01,642 the time has an element of standardization that allows 1184 01:18:02,426 --> 01:18:06,779 cities that don't have enough money to buy a custom process that 1185 01:18:06,779 --> 01:18:12,031 is way more expensive, to buy an off-the-shelf participatory process that 1186 01:18:12,031 --> 01:18:14,553 is very cheap, that is outsourced, 1187 01:18:14,553 --> 01:18:19,876 and so they start their path into learning more about democratic innovation. 1188 01:18:19,876 --> 01:18:26,739 And so I think these types of really grown-up discussions around commodification 1189 01:18:26,739 --> 01:18:31,212 are very rarely done, like you have sort of the Marxist tradition that's completely 1190 01:18:31,212 --> 01:18:32,212 against commodification. 1191 01:18:31,982 --> 01:18:34,223 ~ it's terrible, it ruins everything. 1192 01:18:34,223 --> 01:18:36,673 And on the other side, people don't even engage, 1193 01:18:36,673 --> 01:18:40,284 right? And we don't care, you're crazy communist. 1194 01:18:40,284 --> 01:18:44,906 ~ And it's very important just to do as many as possible, 1195 01:18:44,906 --> 01:18:49,167 right? The objective function of the industry is to do as many as possible. 1196 01:18:49,167 --> 01:18:52,578 But that's an important discussion to have, 1197 01:18:52,578 --> 01:18:55,789 but it's not easy. And again, it's the role of academics, 1198 01:18:55,789 --> 01:18:58,910 right? I think academics should implement less actually. 1199 01:18:58,910 --> 01:19:00,490 The implementers are better than us. 1200 01:19:01,018 --> 01:19:06,180 and implementing. It's good to help and observe and evaluate, 1201 01:19:06,180 --> 01:19:12,984 but I think it's a good time to have like really redraw some 1202 01:19:12,984 --> 01:19:17,145 of the boundaries, right? And it's important to co-design and discuss together, 1203 01:19:17,145 --> 01:19:21,248 but also there are things that we are better at and there are things that they're 1204 01:19:21,248 --> 01:19:25,770 better at. And it's important to recognize those. 1205 01:19:26,352 --> 01:19:32,004 Otherwise there is a naive view of co-design or sometimes it's called 1206 01:19:32,004 --> 01:19:38,065 democratization ~ of democratic innovation ~ and he 1207 01:19:38,065 --> 01:19:42,557 has his own risk. I think it's very important to do co-design and meta-deliberation. 1208 01:19:42,557 --> 01:19:44,227 I'm one of the pioneer of that stuff, 1209 01:19:44,227 --> 01:19:48,689 but it rarely works. We also have to recognize that it's really hard. 1210 01:19:48,689 --> 01:19:52,700 We just came out of an horizon that tried to do 11 meta-deliberation, 1211 01:19:52,700 --> 01:19:53,700 not a single one. 1212 01:19:54,822 --> 01:19:56,867 and we had a lot of money to throw at it. 1213 01:19:56,867 --> 01:20:00,257 It didn't work for a million political reasons, 1214 01:20:00,257 --> 01:20:03,586 really does. Meta-deliberation is super hard. 1215 01:20:05,776 --> 01:20:09,521 So yes, that's my much, ~ Alessandro. 1216 01:20:09,521 --> 01:20:14,487 And ~ if you want to another one in Italian, 1217 01:20:12,170 --> 01:20:13,170 Thank you a lot, Paolo. 1218 01:20:14,487 --> 01:20:17,188 if that is helpful as a spin-off, 1219 01:20:17,188 --> 01:20:21,600 ~ why not? I'm happy to have it. 1220 01:20:21,600 --> 01:20:26,612 Or a more targeted one, because this was a little bit of flux of conscience. 1221 01:20:26,085 --> 01:20:27,685 Yeah... but- 1222 01:20:26,612 --> 01:20:28,853 I know that you wanted to interrupt me.