Thanks everyone. Great to see you.

Feel free to reach out, and I’m happy to send over a few more links.

Figuring out what that landscape is at more and more granularity, there’s different tools and different processes, and we haven’t quite figured out, other than just starting another one and throwing it out there, based on the information. I know that Talk to Taiwan has done that. In various cases, ...

I think you would find Audrey and I both agree. I can definitely speak for myself. We’ve had many conversations in this realm of where you start. You could see in the conversation in Bowling Green, they start at the most general. Then there’s another fractal layer of opioids versus ...

I will kick it back to Audrey. That is a good place to pick up for all of you. That is just about where we leave off in terms of producing a landscape, but not necessarily having an opinion of what its next destination is.

Yes.

I will look into that.

I’m not sure. Audrey, do you know that?

OK, excellent.

They do. Those are really effective if you’re looking for one best answer or to try to converge on a series of best answers, as opposed to trying to converge on a landscape. These are not quite as effective with the landscape. We’re weak if the desire is a discrete ...

It is. It’s another pairwise. I’ll paste that in here, too. I don’t favor those, personally. I am incredibly biased, and you shouldn’t listen to me, but I think they’re a little bit belabourous. What you end up with is red or green, red or yellow, yellow or blue, and ...

All our Ideas?

There’ve been a number of pairwise entries. Have you heard about All Our Ideas?

No.

It’s effectively useless and meant to facilitate rulemaking with 30 lawyers from industry in the room next door. There are the voices of the American people, degraded and treated with no respect...

They go in and have absolutely no quantitative information, just a bunch of raw text saying every which way and every which thing. No validation, like who it came from and where they are.

I’ve spoken to people in the government who are on the other side of that, for instance, in the Department of Agriculture and Consumer and Financial Protection Bureau. They’re on the other side of a million comments, and there’s effectively one and a half full-time people, for a limited amount ...

Whereas the FCC, I actually appreciate the fact that people are throwing in 500,000 fake comments, because it demonstrates what an idiotic system it is in the first place. I am on their side in that case. I’ll happily write that script myself to demonstrate what an idiotic thing it ...

If technologists see something that significantly smarter is being done, don’t mess that thing up. I think there’s a little more affinity from the technology side. I might be wrong, but I have a feeling it’s a little bit less dumb.

Again, in Taiwan, there are thousands of technologists with eyes on, who could certainly write a script to game it. There’s a question of motivation as to why hasn’t that happened. Again, we can only speculate, but I think it’s worth speculating.

We were afraid when we posted it way back when. It was like, "Oh, man. If people see that, they’ll know what we’re doing, and it’ll be pretty clear how to game it." We didn’t see anything like that.

That’s a different level, and we can only speculate there, but I’ll put it this way. When Pol.is went up on "Hacker News," people said, "Oh, that’s extremely smart." [laughs] It’s funny. We got a really good reaction from that crowd.

The other thing is who are trolls and who are bots in the first place? A lot of times, they’re people with an ax to grind. Or, they’re people who are looking to exploit a system. I think the motivations of the bot actors are also very important to consider ...

The visibility and the kind of organic social spread, and the degree to which civil society is looking at this as a means of outlet of frustration, has something to do with how many people show up and what a focal point is.

There are ministries around the world and in national governments that are running conversations. Even still, these are ministries that don’t necessarily get more than a couple hundred people showing up to discuss things. It is not connected to a civic tech community or a visible participator framework, the way ...

Perhaps. We were just used by the Canadian government, and I’ll share this link, as well. This is the visual arts community, a conversation about copyright in Canada. The government of Canada has just used it. Singapore’s Ministry of Youth is also using it right now, running live conversations.

One is that we are not high-profile enough yet, in a way. We’re not being used all over. We are not the American electoral system. This is not the level which we have attained

You can look at IP addresses and if they’re known bot IP addresses. There are number of things that you can get into with the arms race. We haven’t gotten into any of them. I think there’s a question there as to why we haven’t gotten into any.

One level is that it’s an arms race. Security is an arms race, in general. We can detect, for instance, that the votes are coming in every 50 milliseconds. That would maybe look like bot. The clicks look too deterministic. Google uses that for a CAPTCHA. How are the clicks ...

You would see that, but it would be difficult. You would have to be looking for it. It would not necessarily be apparent at the outset, but it’s an arms race. If it is the case that people begin throwing bots at Pol.is, which we have not seen...I will explain ...

If someone is voting dramatically different, there are certain patterns through the woods. There are certain statements, you vote on one, you must vote inversely on the other one. If you have both of those in your head at the same time, something’s seriously wrong.

Let me say it this way. Random is a pattern, because random is a pattern quite distinct from how people vote. People don’t vote anywhere near randomly. People vote in incredibly deterministic patterns through these things. You have the idiot-or-genius effect there.

It’s a good question. I can answer that on a number of levels. One of them is random is probably what you would see. If it were true...

You can click through there in the report and see what’s what.

Had independent media and universities run the conversations, and then -- if power is unwilling -- feed that into a situation where it creates legitimacy. If power is willing to come to the table and run it, then more compromises from civil society can be made. Basically, that’s a little ...

That, to me, was a success. It was a success on a number of levels, though I would not say that it moved the dial on any specific issue. Model-wise, it did the first half correctly, which was that it got distributed through independent media, which is the proper model ...

The things that were controversial were these national straw man issues, things that really don’t affect people day to day. The things that affect people day to day, there was a huge amount of consensus in the city, across party lines. That was clear.

As it was, though, there were over 2,000 people who participated from a town of about 60,000. That was quite a solid percentage of people that were engaged. What was also clear was that there was an enormous amount of consensus.

If they had done it on something like opioids, which was the suggestion for the follow-up from several parties, they would have had probably a more discrete outcome, in terms of what power was willing to address. They could have a panel that was much more focused on some kind ...

What you’ll notice from this is that their emphasis on starting this instead of with a topic, as was done in vTaiwan, but with a general, "How could we improve life in Bowling Green?" led them to a very general, discussion-oriented kind of an event.

This is in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Columbia University started with a Pol.is conversation, and then went into a 250-person town hall, at which many both elected and appointed and career bureaucrats were. That followed with a round table.

It’s funny. I think Audrey is going to the "Civicist" article recently that I was about to go to, as well. Audrey, do you want to share about that for just a moment, and I can fill in? Or, do you want to share that link?

I have a hard stop at 7:45 tonight. I’m totally happy to listen in, but if there’s anything specifically related to me, we should probably...

Yeah.

Yeah. [laughs]

[laughs]

I will note that although Audrey was not technically "elected", in the court of public opinion, Audrey was certainly elected too.

Globally speaking, never far away.

Wonderful. It’s nice to meet you, too. I’m up here in Seattle, so not too far away.

Hi, all.