Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. And thank you for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

I just brought a few extra. I thought the entire team might want to pick one up but… Some stickers and a notebook.

Absolutely. I will definitely do that. I brought a few stickers. It’s what my luggage would permit.

Absolutely, will do.

Right, right. And that makes a lot of sense. I think the horizon analogy is a very strong one. Thank you so much for sharing that with me. And I’m truly inspired by everything that’s being done here, and hoping that we can learn from it and grow a similar ...

Right, right. And that also, I’m sure, helps build credibility in what you would say on the petition platform or actually increase the quality because there is a sort of sentiment attached to that.

Yeah. And I think that’s also really fascinating. I was just mentioning that I’ve spent now three days in the country and I’ve really enjoyed it. But one of the most interesting things to me was, I think it was on the MRT or something where we scanned a QR ...

But at the same time, the consultation window is where we see a lot more conversation happening with stakeholders and with communities.

Right. That makes a lot of sense. I feel like currently we have petitioning systems that work very well for private organizations. Let’s say, Amazon to reduce plastic in packaging. But government petitions aren’t as effective because if they are not presented politically, let’s say, we petition to an elected ...

And then you have enough conversation and context to have a meaningful referendum.

Right.

They feed into one another. Right, right.

And on that, if you don’t mind, I have just a small question. You have both the petitioning as well as the consultation, do you see that one fares better than the other?

Right. That’s so true.

And I think that’s part of why everything that happened in Taiwan was so interesting to me because it almost went from an outside-in approach which you don’t see very often.

But I think oftentimes we wonder if we’re… My curiosity is how wide will our arms go? At some point, you need to bring about that systemic initiative within the system because they have the widest arms.

And we’re building out some more modules and training of that kind, but also working on building out an open-source platform for insights from feedback that will help or support government officials in actually making sense of the input. Different languages, different ways of speaking. Different constraints. Some are coming ...

Exactly, exactly. But yeah, I think this is really interesting because in a lot of our work, we’ve been asking these questions, especially in a country of our size, representativeness becomes a very big challenge. But also, the quality of the feedback, the relevance of the input that we’re supporting ...

Right. Yeah, that’s true. And it’s interesting when you put it that way because there’s so much room to take to move. But oftentimes, from the outside, you might ask for something which is outside the horizon.

So, we’re trying to build out tools for asking more questions from the law to understand it better and also working alongside governments on supporting them through this consultation process, almost to illustrate how it can be done and how it can be done in a way that you actually ...

In many ways, we are trying to lower the barriers for conversation still. I think as an organization, we’re in that zone. Sometimes it takes the form of, for example, for communities that don’t have internet access, we do phone call-based feedback, IVR-based feedback. For communities which are somewhat conversant ...

Yes, absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. I’ve been asking a lot of questions. But yeah, I think this really does make a lot of sense.

Right.

And sometimes you need some of that. But I feel like in our context where rebelling… or not even rebelling where like a combination of assisting and rebelling from the outside when there’s so much we could do if we were on the inside. So, I’m curious about that a ...

How do you think about finding champions or cultivating champions within the administration? Or how do you think about overcoming any resistance?

I’m also curious about people within the system. So, you mentioned that there were politicians and they ran on that agenda. But at the end of the day, there were administrators who you had to work with and train…

Right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That visualization is very helpful.

Right.

Right, exactly. Sometimes people don’t want to engage. So, I just wanted to understand, from your perspective and your experience, what have been some of the interesting opportunities to drive engagement from the citizen level so that you have two opinions or more quality input?

But I think one of the questions that I had, and you spoke about polarity and bringing up opinion. But often times for the citizen to understand that ‘this is important for you to respond to without taking a side’ as an organization becomes really difficult, because everyone is used ...

I’m so interested. I think prior to founding Civis, I worked, volunteered with DemocracyOS, which was based in Argentina. And at that time came across Polis and then your work here. And it’s been many years in the making.

I have so many questions.

But I was keen to learn and understand from you a little bit more about other systems for open access of information. How does it work when a ministry might respond to a citizen? What form does that take? And just to understand that process a little bit better.

Right. I think that’s so interesting to me because one of the things that we are currently trying to do is also try and understand how do you create those systems of incentive, almost gamified for different ministries. But one of the challenges that we face is that it’s every ...

Right.

Right.

Right.

But I was very keen to learn from all of you about how the transition happened in Taiwan, what we can learn from it, who are the forces or people within the system that actually enable that process a little bit more. So, I was just wanted to spend some ...

So, just this year in fact, he was leading this initiative called Bhashini, which does exactly this. It’s a model that is trained specifically on legal language to translate into 22 regional languages. So, we have champions like him who are really keen on the product. And he’s a very ...

MeitY.

22.

I mean we can put in place systems to make this process easy and better for governments as well as for citizens. But yeah, we’re in the early days still and our organization is trying to…

Exactly, exactly. It’s exactly like that. And because of that, our government views this process with a lot of resistance. But it doesn’t have to be hard.

Exactly.

Yeah. So, and yeah, and then we gather all of the feedback and we share it with the government and try and build dashboards and tools for government officials to be able to make sense of feedback. Because in India, there’s two problems. One is either you don’t get any ...

Oh, really?

Each ministry will put it out on their own page.

Oh, that… We’re trying really hard, in fact, to try and get everything to be on one platform. Right now, though, it’s not two; it’s actually 78 different websites.

Yes.

And that system is working fairly well. So, we try and focus on laws. And specifically, laws in the domains of environment, public health, urban governance, social justice that actually impact…