 So, to start off with the basics, so I don't think we've done the big what is my society slide yet this talk, so basically we, you know, our goal of our staff is to help people become more active citizens, and we're primarily thinking about how we can use technology to achieve that. In the UK we've built websites like they work for you, which helps make parliaments more accessible, and what do they know, which helps people make FOI requests, and fix my street which helps people report issues without having to understand who's responsible for that area, and versions of these sites operate around the world, either directly using our code base or inspired in some way by them. What we've been looking at last year is how technology can be used alongside other forms of participation. We've gone through this through two streams of work, our involvement in the UK government's innovation and democracy program, which has been run in a series of citizens assembly at the local level, and in partnership with the Democratic Society called Public Square where we were looking at different forms of participation at the local level. In the former we were looking about liberation, and the other how we can do meaningful participation. We published a lot of different researches going through this process, all of which is available on the website, so if I don't cover something today, which I probably won't, then it's all there to be read at your own pace. In both of those areas we've been working with organizations that are quite hands on and well practiced at running in-person deliberation, and so we focused our role in trying to understand how tech can complement and not undermine this in-person approach. For instance, when we were looking at how we can use digital tools as part of citizens assemblies, we sort of focused about how we can use tools to get evidence into them, or how to show transparency during the assembly, or how to make sure the evidence inclusion has got disseminated afterwards, but what we didn't do was look at how digital could implement the sort of core deliberation part of that, and so not replace the in-person thing. Now there's an obvious reason why we thought that was a good idea, however it's not a great idea right now. So this sort of model of in-person deliberation is a bit, well, difficult over the next few months, and what I've been thinking about, getting ready for this talk, is how many of these conclusions still stand up in the sort of new situation we find ourselves in. So thinking about civic tech more, tools more generally. Transparency tools are less to be transparent about. If there's no parliament, then they work for you as less useful. At the same time as if parliaments come back with less people in them, individual tools of transparency make less sense. Intermediate services that rely on state services, or legal obligations will become less responsive. So for instance, we know that the UK's regulator, the ICO, who regulates information rights and freedom of information, has said they're not expecting especially to police request times in the next few months. And so there's sort of a knock on effect as state resources are reassigned onto civic tech research projects that depend on that. So in terms of trying to work out if the evidence and sort of talk about that in a bit is still relevant, are we in a sort of period where things go back to normal and all these original assumptions are still fundamentally valid, or are we in one that sort of goes off in a tangent from where we were, where these tools and research are still relevant, but the context has changed and there may be different problems to solve. And so some of these things may need to be re-evaluated. And I think that's more likely than the first scenario. I think we're going to have to think a bit about what we've previously thought about and if it's still entirely true that some things will be walled off are necessarily correct to wall off. So in terms of online deliberation, this might be a good opportunity to think a bit more about why I was less certain about online deliberation approaches and if there's ways of breaking up what I was uncertain about. For instance, there are some things that may be solved with better experience from facilitators, but they're over walk assistance issues like the ability to cordon off distractions or inequality concerns in how the products are used. So with that disclaimer out of the way, here's some possibly out-of-date research. So to give an idea how to divide up different processes and methods in this area, I used to use James Fistinger's idea that there are free components to democracy and you can at most do two of them at once. And this gives you a framework like six different kinds of democratic method or process you can run. So here are the three components which I've sort of rewritten a bit as a partial acrostic. I'll come up with the other six later on. That can't be that difficult. So you've got deliberation, which is essentially the idea that people can talk to each other and that this is constructive in a way that isn't just you're wrong and I'm right, but it can build constructively to build a better sense of what people understand or what they know and come to better conclusions as a result of people having these discussions. The second is equal participation, which is that everyone has a right to be part of the process and also that part should be as equal as possible. And the third is mass participation that democracy should include as many people as possible, because it should be about as many people as possible. And you can sort of see how these things may overlap to understand, but also how they can undermine each other a bit. I'll check into a second. So to look at the example of tools for the first basic free offline, you have deliberative community meeting that's great online. You've got forum software and it's not just that the forum software will inherently create a deliberative meeting, but it means you can structure it online. You can structure online deliberation in a way using software that's been available for decades. Equal participation, I think polling technology is a good example of this that sort of takes seriously the idea that different groups should be opinions are worth a valid and that you should use different methods to try and make sure your results are weighted in that way. And these have adapted fairly well to the online age. You can have sort of a big example using online panels to get information over the internet. And the third is mass participation, which is done very well online. So offline petitions and writing representatives goes back centuries, online change to all my site is right to them, or many of the consultation packages that are about many people writing to one organization fit quite nicely into this category. What we then start getting into trouble with is the overlap between these three. So equal participation and deliberation is sort of what citizens assembly see themselves as doing. So it doesn't have thousands of people, what it does have is a small number of people who have been chosen to represent, to be representative of society at the same time as they are having intensive discussion about things. Online, there is no specific digital solution to this. There are partial approaches, but it's not necessarily that it's not, there is an easy software I can see taking this specific space. Similarly, equal participation and mass participation is technically what elections are supposed to do, that we all get one vote and that everyone takes part. In reality, there's all kinds of things that stop that being the case, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not. And online, you could have exactly the same thing of voting, but as I get into later, that there is a trade-off between participation and security. And in-person elections have quite low tech ways of dealing with security, you know, literally stopping someone sitting over your shoulder in the ballot box, which are hard to replicate online. And so it's not the case that there is nothing in that box, it's just it's not necessarily as good at the mass participation bit, or it hurts the equal participation because it doesn't have sufficient security to ensure that people are able to participate equally. The third one, which I actually think there is some areas in there, is deliberation and mass participation. And so the offline, that is things like big process about the discovery process and participatory budgeting, where people are trying to submit projects for discussion and discuss them and do things that way. And online, you can sort of see there are various forms of tool which help you scale deliberative consultation. These aren't necessarily ones where people write a huge amount of text to each other, but it is ways people can interact in a way that goes up, and I'll come back to specific tools on that later. So the big gap identified there is the one around political equality and that sort of idea of equal participation. And there's some reasons why it's hard to do this online. There are some intrinsic reasons around the digital divide that not everyone has equal access to the internet. And so if you do things only online, some people can't participate. But it's also important not to overly represent what happens already as being perfect. There are some groups who are able to participate more online. And that is important to remember the balance there, that it's not the case that things are necessarily worse online. They are slightly different. But I think most of this gap is about the work and structures that we have well-established ways of doing offline to help address this inequality. For instance, Residence Assembly, there are sort of free ways that are used to address the inequality. One is Sortition, which is selecting a representative group. You can do that online easily enough. You can run exactly the same process and then put people in a forum. Facilitation, which is sort of making sure that some people do not dominate the discussion and that even if you've selectively got everyone in the room, people who are still used to being dominant are not still dominant. And you can do that online. I think it's slightly harder, but I've seen a reason why sufficient training experience with sufficient training experience that could not work as well. The third is the one I have more questions about, and this is the idea of isolation, which is like removing competition for attention. And I think this is a particularly difficult one to ask people to do online, because when we say doing things online, what we often mean is, as many of you are asked now, working from our own homes, whether any number of things, there are doorbells ringing, there are small children, there are pets, there are things that make big sounds for no particularly good reason, that are competing what we're trying to do right now, which is different than if we all went to a conference centre somewhere. So I think that third one is not impossible, but is where it's easier to isolate things online, offline than online. That one too fast. So given that general framework, here is a bit about what we looked at in terms of software that's already available and how it can be used. I have hit the wrong button on something. Yeah. So digital technology has a lot of benefits. What we spend a lot of our research, try to go, well, you've got to remember the downsides, but it's important to remember that in many cases, it does lower costs in terms of being able to do a consultation to more people at lower costs, and then you can then spend the money you're saved doing that to really reach out to groups that cannot be reached online. And an awful lot of digital tools includes things that absolutely every day, like all these video conferencing tools that just are available and allow this kind of thing have to be sitting there in the background and now really able to make a lot of use out of. And the important thing to remember with these tools is they were designed, they're quite complicated and were designed for a specific task. And that may or may not have been the task that you're trying to do right now. And so when you're using a tool, you have to try and understand what it was originally designed to do and if that is aligned with what you're trying to do at the moment. So the security versus participation thing is a concern online. For many local things, this may not be a big issue on the other hand, it doesn't particularly matter if someone's stuffing the ballot box or you can easily detect if you're only expecting 50 responses in the first place. But as you get to large and larger things, you have to sort of worry about sort of how these systems can be manipulated at scale. For instance, there was a 2017 consultation in the US that had a large number of replies and what it turned out to be were stolen identities. When we did some research about participatory budgeting in Mexico City, this was the kind of risk that was flagged up to us that in one year they had a very large amount of online participation, but much this was fraud based on how easy it was to gather the online log on details of others. They tightened their security and so the number of online participation dropped the next year. And that's both good because fraud was reduced but also bad because participation was down. And there's sort of a seesaw effect here between how secure you make your systems and by secure you're sort of talking about how much people can trust that their voice is being heard equally and that there isn't someone trying to distort the entire thing and participation. So you easy make it to participate, hire the chance to fraud and that kind of thing hasn't really gone away even though even if these tools are becoming more used. So we sort of split the tools we found into sort of four basic ideas. One is sort of place-based and that is sort of looking at things to map to specific areas. The other is more idea and philosophy-based and then you get collaborative surveys which sort of help people not just answer the questions but also shape the survey itself and cluster analysis, which is sort of in looking at how you can identify more than just how many people are in favor of something to identify a sort of fact-finding level how people feel about something and shape your next steps. So for place-based, commonplace engagement HQ, a good example. So you get these maps, put things on the maps, they say there is a problem at this corner and it is sort of a clarity-based in a very geographic way. Concept-based is often like more standard consultation sites you found that sort of pours in the offline consultations process online and sit in space but it was a good one for that. Yeah, similarly surveys, you sort of, you're sort of recognized that yeah, it's asking questions, people give responses, it all works. Your priorities, we talked about a bit yesterday but similarly it's very concept-based thing in terms of there are ideas rather than places involved. And I like the point yesterday that this is not particularly weighted in terms of there is a debate, there is a yes and a no aside, doesn't particularly make decisions about which one's winning but it sort of helps you build up a sort of set of arguments either way. Console, so lots of software that was designed for online participatory budgeting is quite useful in more general consultation because it has a wider range of features for everything from gathering ideas to voting to seeing proposals through. So it is generally useful multi-purpose software there. The ones I found quite interesting were things that were sort of more dynamic ways of gathering feedback and sort of allowed a bit more side communication between users as opposed to just going up and down. So Wiki Surveys allow ideas to be, right? Is my next survey there? Yes. So like the, there's an example of your ideas that you can go and look at but essentially it's a simple AB interface. You can click A or B or you add your own idea and this can over time build up a sort of set of answers to a survey that can shape what you do next. And this is quite useful at the early stages or something because one of the, you know, one of the criticisms about citizens assemblies is when you have a very complicated, you know, when you've set up all this stuff to make the process very fair but the question's bad, what do you do about that? And if you sort of have a sort of a more open way of question forming that sort of can evolve as people add stuff to it. That is a way of involving the people even at the very start and then you can add other stuff on later to make sure you're not going down. Just a lot of money going down a very wrong approach. The other one is a sort of process, a organization called policies using. And this is essentially very similar. You know, you have a statement, you have agrees and disagrees. You can add new statements to that. But what they do with that is it's not necessarily adding up the fact that everyone, you know, lots of people agree with question one and disagree with question two. It's more interesting to know what the different clusters are who are agreeing and A and not B or agreeing with both and then scaling it up to lots of different questions. So you can sort of look at how answering. So if you have, you know, if 60% are in favor of A and 60% are in favor of B it's helpful to know that only 20% of both are in the overlap. And if you can scale up that sort of understanding that actually people have very different opinions on things that again is very useful in the early stages of the consultation sort of work out, well, okay, what are the key questions, the key issues and the people I'm asking? And this is for these in the category of being both mass participation and deliberative because although the interaction between people is quite weak, it is constructive. And that means that sort of weak interactivity can scale up quite nicely to very large numbers of people. So it's not quite the same as having people in a room talking about it, but it is a form of deliberation that can scale to very large numbers. So there's a lot of tools out there. There's a gap around equal participation and it's easier to correct the factors that lead to an equal participation offline. But that's not necessarily a permanent feature. There are lots of things that can be learned to improve on that. And that's either tools or potentially it's not tools, it's just approaches. And that can be sort of, you know, different things we plugged into the tools that help out in that way. While the current crisis is rapidly sort of expanding, the number of people who have understanding of participation, it's also important to remember that while we talk about this being a moment where lots of people get to learn about this stuff, it's not the case for everyone. And having work that can be done by home is distributed unevenly, even me by income and geography. Assemblyly distractions at home are distributed unevenly as well. So while at the moment, there are many more people getting experience with these tools and certainly people who like to live these sort of programs will get more experience with them. It's not this, these inequalities remain. And so we have to sort of think about how we proceed with those in the future. I'm certainly trying to think a bit more about if I was wrong before to think it couldn't be done online. I think probably yes to an extent, but also I think some of the factors remain very clearly valid as to why we have all these structures that have been built up offline and we haven't quite replicated them online yet. But that might be done soon and that'd be fun. So again, all the research is on all the research is on our website and that's me. Thank you, Alex. I'm sure everyone in any organization of any type has colleagues who, you know, you just couldn't run the organization without having a name and Alex is definitely one of our roles. So thank you so much for that. There's a whole bunch of questions. There are a couple of questions coming up in the chat as well that may be interesting just about the difference between online and offline participation. Certainly my experience and speaking to people who are much more accomplished and have been doing this for a lot longer, you know, whilst online participation can be really successful, obviously not everyone has access to online participation or has the ability to use the tools and wonder if you have any comments on that, Alex. You're muted, I think. Sorry if you said that last but again. Just the difference between online and offline in relation to whether, you know, not everyone has access to online tools in the same way and, you know, that kind of, not just a qualitative difference but an actual access problem between your online... This is sort of the thing that's hard to generalize in lots of different countries. For instance, in the UK, we know that while there is a digital divide, we also know that increasingly there is generally access to broadband and so remaining in the quality is in part to do with the underlying demographics. So there is a rural, urban divide and how people use the internet in the UK but that's in part to do with the underlying demographics that the countryside tends to be, on average, tends to be a bit older and so just how people use the software is different and so it's not necessarily just about... Digital divide is about other inequalities in play as well about access to not just use digital technology but in terms of how people relate to it. Great. And just from Slido, so an anonymous question for us. How can we make sure that governments actually take on board what comes out of participatory exercises? Obviously, the climate assembly that we were involved with with involvement and so on was a good example of that. I think it depends... I mean, ideally, that is nice to know from the start how it's going to be used. And this is sort of the big question we're looking at in our final piece of work on this, which we haven't published yet, is how do elected officials feel about this kind of work? And there's lots of different models for it being involved. There are some instances in Australia where it's more integrated into the process where, like, you have select committees and they're a body to accompany it. It tends to be the case that elected officials quite like the idea of, essentially, it's giving them information they can then make use of but they're the decision makers. But that's not universally the case. Some disagree with that. And so it's very much depends on the process in play. I think... What do I think? I think it's good for clarity at the start, whichever way it is. I think it's good for people to go in and know your participation is helping us build a plan or your participation is helping us make a decision. I think that's the fair way to treat people's time. Both processes are valid in some respects. And so a question from David Newman. And what are you or others doing to accelerate the digital transformation of government decision making when all representatives are stuck at home like the rest of us? Any good examples you've seen of kind of supporting elected officials to actually continue their work? Only from what I've seen about, you know, MPs on Twitter sort of move into digital consultations. I mean, obviously it sort of makes people... I think it's unclear. We need to be led by them to an extent. There's lots of different tools in play. And just as lots of other workplaces are moving to digital tools, they're not really an exception in this regard. People need to talk to stakeholders. They need to have conversations among themselves. Lots of these are standard business tools. And imagine the way that, you know, Zoom has been repurposed to a pretty much everything despite being a relatively small business use. That is the kind of thing we're starting to see. They may not necessarily need a new civic tech tool because lots of these things fundamentally exist in some way for the business community. Yeah, I mean, we're clearly at the very start. Oh, actually talking about legislation that requires people to be present in the room. There was some discussion about amending the standing orders in the UK, I think. Great. Thanks for the clarification. So participation, whether digitally or in person, is expensive, again, in light of COVID-19. What does our community do if there's no longer money for these activities? I think money is one of the big questions about it because they are undeniably expensive processes. I mean, this is another thing that sort of comes up in terms of like actually, for all I think it's probably better if you have the choice between putting people in online forum and putting people in the room, you should put people in the room. But if you can put people in three different forums for the cost of putting people in one room, well, does it matter that much? And that is the kind of trade up there is that actually there may be less good versions of these, but they may be perfectly good enough for most purposes. I see Paul in the comments here and I don't disagree with most of his things, to be honest. I think it's very worth reading that, thank you, Postage. But it's, I've heard it talk about as a sort of example used for the worst problems you have. If you have especially untracked problems that are hard to get at, that's when you spend a lot of money trying to work out the solutions. But there are lots of things where actually, it should be used in incredibly boring ways. The conference around the innovation to the boxy program in January, one, there seems to be, there's like a divide between how deliberation will solve all the problems and is an amazingly, you know, new and innovative thing. And the other one was like, how boring it should be that fundamentally we should be, you know, doing things much more often and it should be, you know, dull to an extent. It shouldn't be expensive and it shouldn't require lots of things and there may be many different levels of which that could happen. So another enormous question. The sessions I host as a local politician have the effect that stakeholders get to know each other. They come closer, there's more mutual understanding. How might we evoke this digitally? I guess that's again on the climate assembly, you know, when you have a very polarized position, you know, people are very far apart on each side of the argument, you know, the physical aspect is a well trodden path to being able to bring people together. Are there equivalents digitally that you can at least enhance digital participation? I mean, that is sort of, so here's a question for in terms of like, you know, conferences like this, obviously people come to conferences for, you know, hearing from speakers, but they also come to talk to each other. And that is the kind of thing that can be replicated online. But again, like thinking about how to do, you know, speaking, setting up speaking slots well, the socialness of it can be replicated in other ways but it needs to be structured and thought of in that way. So, well, they're probably not the same activity. They can be alongside just in terms of, you know, meet up groups to go alongside these things. So it's less that there is a specific project that can manage the sort of socialness of it as well. But at the same time, as there are definitely tool, it just requires what on the organizers, I'd say rather the tool itself. Absolutely. I mean, I think it's something we're all kind of exploring in our own practice really how to kind of make this work and we're only a couple of weeks in, in the UK's case, maybe a few weeks more in some other parts of the world. But, you know, we've certainly got a few months to kind of work out how to create meaningful participation online. Now a quick question. How can these tools be used in organizations that aren't explicitly democratic? For example, workplaces, especially where there are substantial power differences. You know, how does this type of, how do these things become more normalized as part of everyday lives beyond just democratic processes? No, it's a good question because there's an awful lot of what goes on in people's lives is dictated by their workplace rather than their government and figure it has like democratized companies to an extent, but also just how to get more participation in when those inequalities remain. And I guess lots of these tools can just be installed as it is like console in terms of way, you know, console can be used as a massive suggestion box, which people can vote on. And that can also be managed in the middle. So you could allow for the power imbalances or you could say actually we don't want to. And so lots of these tools because, you know, in reality democratic power structures are have unequal bits in them where there are people reviewing suggestions and saying actually this isn't viable. Lots of these software does have that sort of step in it of being to go and know we weed things out of that bit. So these things can even be customized to accommodate existing power or to fight against it. And that is fine, depending on the circumstances. Yeah. So one last question just further down. So Daniel Schwab from Brazil. How can these platforms deal with fake or false actors that may pollute debate or decision making, especially violating privacy concerns. I mean, you touched upon that during the talk, but anything else we can do to kind of combat that involvement of fake actors? I think it really much depends on the project and the size. I think national level stuff has to be much more wary of this because it's much bigger target. Local stuff probably less so, and that will affect the kind of tools people use. And like locally, it probably doesn't matter if technically speaking it's possible to rig the result. You have to kind of act on a certain amount of good faith that we don't have the money not to fight that. On a national level, I think it should be fought about clearly in advance that the risk of people might try to influence the process, look for what that might look like and put more security in place. And unfortunately that has to be at the cost of participation and trying to work out where for your project, you're happy with that line falling is half the work. Yeah, indeed. Alex, thanks so much. Always a pleasure. I'll see you tomorrow probably as well in Slack.