 Welcome everyone. This is the pandemic as a portal, tracking and enabling new possibilities. My name is Beatriz Botero and I am a fellow at the Bergman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. And it's my pleasure and honor to introduce you to our panel and our panelists today. So we are in a Zoom webinar, a very, a very paradigmatic form of gathering in our pandemic times. And in many ways, these times of the coronavirus pandemic have shown many of the injustices and not so nice parts of our societies. We've seen risk of innate surveillance, authoritarianism, racism, various forms of discrimination, but something interesting is happening too. We have seen innovative alternatives, ideas and projects that that not long ago seemed impossible emerge and become all of a sudden possible. Today we'll hear from the founders and participants of three projects that are seeking to capture and document this new possible. These projects are COVID-19 policy response, the new possible, and don't go back to normal. And they're all motivated by the belief that archiving and rendering visible. These new ideas and alternatives might contribute to shifting our regulatory problems and how our post-pandemic world might look like. The speakers, views expressed in what follows are their own and they don't represent the opinions of the institutions they're affiliated to. And I'll just introduce them, but just for you to know, if you have questions, there is a Q&A feature in the lower bar of your Zoom platform and you can type your questions then and then we'll have some time in the Q&A for hopefully discussing many of them. So our speakers. El Letra Vietti is a doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School, a Kennedy scholar and an affiliate at the Berger and Klein Center for International Society. Her research is on platform power through a moral and political philosophical lens and US and EU technology law. She regularly volunteers for Privacy International. Traderike Caltejoia is also part of New Possible with El Letra and she's a tech policy fellow at Mozilla. Previously, she led Privacy International's work on corporate surveillance and she has given expert evidence in the European Parliament, the Belgian Parliament and the UK House of Lords. She holds a master's in Internet science of the University of Oxford and a BA in philosophy and politics from Maastricht University. She also has an upcoming book about technology and global justice. Fiatique is part of Don't Go Back to Normal Project. She's a complex system thinker developing methodologies and governance better suited for a complex world. She was previously a researcher at Imperial College London in microbial engineering and is now an associate lecturer at Schumacher College. And her work, she has worked across multiple contexts, applying complexity and systems thinking to many things, governance, organizational design, philanthropy, advising education and other forms of strategy, and she sits on the advisory board of the International Institute. Francis Cheng is part of COVID-19 policy tracker. He's a software engineer and lead independent researcher at the Giant Family Institute. And in the past, he was a decent radio, a junior faculty in the new school, co-publisher of the new inquiry, researcher in residence of New Inc. He's a fellow at the New York Times and has worked on spatial economics model at the Institute for Applied Economic Research. And finally, but not least, Daria Weisman is also part of COVID-19 policy tracker. She's a doctoral candidate in criminal justice at CUNY Graduate Center and at John Graduate Faculty and Statistics and Richard Design at John Jay College. She's currently working in the public sector and previously worked at Transparency International, the Eurasia Foundation, and was a speechwriter and media analyst for the Prime Minister of Georgia. And with that introduction, I'll just open it up for our panelists to tell us about the alternatives of our future. Great. Hi. Thanks for having us. So Daria and I will be talking about our COVID-19 policy tracker. So let me just share my screen. Okay, so just a little background for how I came to this project. I noticed a lot of people posting examples of policies that seemed very progressive and radical and as a response to COVID-19. So I started collecting them on this page here. And the way I thought of it was this is a list of things that we allegedly can't have except that now we can. Yeah, so that's how I came to it. Oh, Daria. I started noticing in the beginning of COVID a lot of absurd laws that were disappearing were being revoked. And I think, you know, ever since I was a kid, I had a book called Why donkeys don't sleep in bathtubs. The idea of archaic laws that are still in the books that could easily be reversed. And I was also seeing really progressive policies, but incidentally progressive. And I was thinking about what it would look like to be able to have some kind of comprehensive systematic way of organizing some kind of database. And a friend of mine actually sent me Francis's website and we got on the phone and we started discussing what that would look like, which he's already you know he has a background in building really interesting models. Yeah, so this so we came together and we started talking about what we would want in such a collection and archive. And this is the site that resulted. So I'll just briefly go over kind of what we have here on the main features that we are building this data set of these policies, trying to keep track of what category they fell into what the nature of the policy change is, whether it's public or private or interled change. We have some other things about like the specific branch of government where that information was available. What level that was state local federal where it occurred, and so on. And we experimented a few different ways of actually visualizing this information. And I think one of the most useful ones is this timeline here. So where information about when these policies were expire would expire was available. We plotted them here just so you could kind of see like the extent of them when they were about to run out and so on. And we had discussed how to create this taxonomy it really it was what took the most time in the beginning. It really was an iterative process so we were collecting examples and then looking at what sectors they fell in and then we made a list of what sectors seemed like where there were changes happening were most important and then you were collecting example based on the sectors. And in terms of debating how to limit the scope at first we were deciding whether to also include regressive policies. You know what kinds of changes we wanted to look at what the threshold was so would we look at policies like you know for example in the court system. You know the profound effects of moving to video. And so what we decided as a rule of thumb is was this something that people have protested for. So all of our examples in our I think eight or nine categories are our issues that people have protested before. And then we worked on the subcategories which we wanted something that was sort of on a mezzo level so that it had, there was a uniform set of criteria so someone could search through them quickly or look for patterns. It's an iterative process also so for example in healthcare. We had examples of I'm trying to find them. Lifting arcade blood restrictions for men of sex with men, lifting Medicare work requirements for Medicare. New York State allowing for and trained medical workers to work in New York State so we put all of those under the category of what was the category of lifted regulatory barriers, regulatory barriers. Yeah. And we did that process for a number of our subcategories. And so real quick just to go over kind of what we were hoping to accomplish with the project. Our main goals were to understand where these changes were happening and who is driving them and how long they're supposed to be in place so that people are aware of when the changes are meant to expire it so and they know when to start pressuring people and who to start pressuring to expand or extend them. And then the secondary goal was to create an archive. And so to to use it's great until that we can actually do data visualization and actually look for trends you know our changes happening at what level of government are certain types of lawmakers initiating them mayors governors legislators are there certain sectors where they're having more and having less. And so building an archive and data visualization. And that is, that is our project. Next project. There will be a lot of me and I'll start by sharing my screen. So like every every good side project. The new possible started with a tweet. Just like Daria and friends it Francis I had been noting in March but also in April. I had started bookmarking examples of things that changes decisions, policies, but also changes in public opinion that I thought were genuinely surprising. And for a long time I thought it would be really important to, to capture these on the one hand to remember to have an archive of all the things that were suddenly possible, that were seemingly possible all along, so back to them and make more bold demands in the future. And I think the one example that spark did were discussions about canceling debt, which is a, I know friends have been working on this issue and pushing for debt cancellation for a long time, and suddenly in the midst of a pandemic it's suddenly possible to forgive debt. A few weeks later so we started the new possible I think the moment I tweeted saying I would love to collect these examples somebody showed me the COVID policy tracker, which is very detailed and has lots of subcategories and has a US focus. So also based on seeing this I thought we want to do something slightly different as in we do not aim to have a creative comprehensive archive of everything that is happening, but the purpose is to fall so on the one hand. This is a repository. It's an archive of ideas, but it's also a prompt for further action and policy changes. I also noticed, for example, the way in which lost in translation changes that were happening in Italy were being reported in the UK. Sometimes they were being misreported. So what started as a simple repository of new stories quickly became a little bit more where we provided different more context and background to each of the stories. One good example is there were suddenly reports that a universal basic income would be introduced in Spain and people kept emailing us that we should include this in the archive. But it turns out that's actually not the policy change that was happening. That's just how it was being reported in other European countries. So what started as a small project for by letter and me, we're now a group of volunteers. We have people in the US UK, Germany and Italy helping us and Emma Lopez from Valencia also created a Spanish version of the site. So this is what the site currently looks like so you can see we do have categories but they're very broad so it's transportation economy, society, cities. So something we notice is that lots of changes were happening on the local level. So a lot of, a lot of cities were making very progressive decisions. And we do accept submissions. Recently we agreed on submission criteria, which we always implicitly had but we now articulated them more clearly so the criteria are, we want to document and explain policy and grassroots initiatives. We included that to ensure that change does not just come from government, especially in parts of the world where the government is more repressive. But these changes have to have become possible as a result of the pandemic. We also decided to focus on positive changes. We defined this to mean changes that lead to more environmentally sustainable, democratic, inclusive, equitable and more just societies. That's still vague and broad but we had a case where the US Supreme Court was allowing phone calls and we were thinking that was one case where we weren't sure is this generally positive or is this simply different. And finally, I think what's really important is that all of these are possibilities that activists or communities have been fighting for for a long time that they were also being told that they're impossible unrealistic. And we're striving to collect from example from different parts of the world, but obviously we are limited in and based on who we are the languages that we speak. So we have a, we have a strong European bias and that we have lots of examples from local government and cities from Europe but we like examples, let's say from Latin America. And with this I'm handing it over to you. So, as Franika said the project has two main functions on the one hand it's conceived as an archive as a repository of things that are happening. And that are possible. And on the other hand, it's supposed to be a source of inspiration for future action. And it's also forward looking. And obviously what happened is that the pandemic is shifting it's moving geographically and it's becoming more salient in certain regions less salient and others as time progresses. And so as time progresses things kind of changed also for us because. And as Fredric and I are currently located in Europe, which was one of the early look, look, she of the pandemic and is now relatively less central. So we've also started thinking with our collaborators about what the future of this project might have to look like. We want to maintain it as it is, should it be relatively static archive should it be an evolving archive. Should we include different kinds of things on the website and what kind of direction we want this project to take. So selecting on this moment in history and this really important moment of breakdown or shift. I was thinking there are three possible metaphors that might help us think what exactly the pandemic is doing. So on the one hand we can understand the pandemic as a catalyzer as an accelerator of dynamics and paradigms and structures that pre existed. But that were less salient, less aggravated less exacerbated. And so here. So that's one perspective on the pandemic a lot of people have said oh nothing's really changing it's just being accelerated. And for example we see lots of neoliberal kinds of policies, privatizations, giving more and more power to private tech companies to handle and take care of services that would otherwise normally be considered within the scope of governments action and competences. So that's one way in which trends of neoliberalization have been really accelerating. Another thing that has been accelerating is the exacerbation of inequality, as we've seen in the last few weeks, and anger and exclusion. So obviously that's another way in which we're really seeing how the pandemic has accelerated and acted as a cat, as a catalyzer. The second metaphor is the pandemic as a form of breakdown as a moment in, in which things break down changed and suddenly become visible. It's really a moment to start seeing and reevaluating certain structures and paradigms that we operated under. And so here, one really salient example is the environmental question so the pandemic has obviously completely shifted our impact on the climate, not necessarily because of our own will or not necessarily control, but it has brought us to a world that seemed completely impossible just six months ago. And so somehow it acted as a moment of breakdown where we could actually see in action some of the consequences and some of the possibilities that six months ago seemed completely crazy and unbelievable. The other one is healthcare and I think of the US in particular and countries where healthcare is privatized and where there is no universal right to free basic healthcare. And I think situations like COVID-19 are highlighting the need for further access to healthcare for all, and are highlighting the need for all to be able to access healthcare for the welfare of others. So my right to healthcare protects someone else. And I think that's a very powerful realization that comes with the pandemic and really shifts some important paradigms. And then finally, the pandemic is a portal, which is a room that I wrote, sorry, room that he wrote his metaphor, and that's the, that's the idea that it's an opening, it's a window on something different. It could be very much of the same and accelerated. So a kind of different exacerbated similarity. It could be something entirely distinct and entirely unforeseeable. But the idea is that there might be some optimism that we, we are at a moment when we can change certain things. And so, while the portal can bring negativity and disillusion, it's also a time to start acting to start showing to start seeing to start discussing the global futures that we want to bring about. So with this said, to the next slide. So what are we thinking about for this project. There are lots of challenges questions things we're thinking about and we would love input we would love if people are interested in our project please come forward please please email us. Any questions about how to maintain the website. For the moment it's a side project for all of us. So we do it in the weekend we do it when we have a moment of spare time. We basically take news and submissions that the public submits to us and we take it on and do a selection. This is a criteria that Frederica explained. And then we decide to publish or not to publish. It's not a repository that's supposed to be exhaustive in any sense. It's very much a selection that we think is helpful to kind of get a sense of what's happening in the world. We want to expand it geographically. We would like to get more perspectives from around the world from people who have different experiences to us different languages. So we're very interested in expanding in that sense. And finally we would we were starting to think about potentially diversifying the kinds of content that we have on the website. So we're thinking about the second function of the website which is forward looking, moving towards action, and we're thinking about bringing in policymakers and people who actually work on policy changes, and maybe have interviews or videos with them, trying to raise policy change from its roots to its ultimate implementation. So that's an idea that we're playing with right now and so we're thinking video podcast we're thinking all sorts of media and if you're interested we would love to hear from you. Stop. Before before we hear from Phoebe which is our who's our last speaker. I want to tell the audience that you can access all these projects online. The links are on the events side so don't stop here and then you can also engage with them directly and scroll them by yourself. And now our last project. The floor is yours or the screen. I'll just, I'm just going to get my slides up. Can you see that. Great. So hi everyone thank you for the invitation to take part it's really, it's really great to be among so many great projects that kind of interlink and potentially have this ability to be like a tapestry, I guess in this moment, of ways we cannot go back to normal or ways we can help manifest this new possible. So the project that I'm here to talk about. I co founded with somebody called Steven read, and it's called don't don't go back to normal. Which I think is quite self explanatory and in the message that we're trying to put out. But we, I'll say a little bit about the genesis of it but just to give you an idea of what it is. I've put the link into the chat if you want to click on it. It's essentially a platform of alternatives, alternatives, meaning like services tools, ways of working ways of decision making, like in a kind of categorized list that makes it really easy for people to see the alternatives that can replace the old way of doing things with new ways of doing things and the new ways are essentially a whole range of things like technology that is open source technology that has better privacy and security services that prioritize localism sustainability. So you can click through and have a look and I'll go through some examples. But the way we imagine this project was basically being a full stack like a full societal stack of alternatives that people can very easily one by one shift over to. And we as a project we resonate most with this pandemic as a portal metaphor because it's, we see this kind of overton window also for consumer behavior and potentially while everybody's pausing and in lockdown. They can actually use this moment to kind of reflect and make those changes. So kind of transition from, let's say an unethical bank to an ethical bank. So this is the URL. Right now we've got the URL don't go back to normal dot world but also don't go back to normal dot UK because we'd really like to encourage people from other countries to get in touch with us. We've made all of the code of the website open source it's all built on our table, and it's very, very easy to make copies of it. And we've had somebody, a team in touch from Germany and a team in touch from the US, who are interested in creating a website to go back to normal dot US or. Yeah.com don't go back to normal dot d so we'd like to build up this whole stack across different countries and we want to kind of own that we can only give advice to in a local like geographical context we can't give advice globally. So this is myself and Steven, we co founded this in mid April and the genesis of the project was essentially a phone call where I had, I'd spent the last month, like very, very activated and writing all sorts of articles about, for example, like the need to run before the lockdown happened like I was really, and I was, I was feeling a lot of urgency that the pandemic in a way is a bit like a dry run for the sorts of changes we need to go through for climate change and kind of long term civilization or survival as well. And we were talking on the phone with Steven who's a software developer and also we both have a complexity and systems change complexity and systems thinking background that we've both applied to systems change in different ways. And we were just talking about the opportunity of this moment actually like to help people see that the old ways of doing things are not great and that they can not go back to normal. And so I'm going to show you some of the examples of our site and then talk a bit about what we're thinking about for the future and ways that you can support or get involved. These are the different categories. So I'm not going to show all of them that just to give you a sense of what the website looks like and talk through some of these examples. So for each category, I think there are 10 categories in total. We are choosing maximum three options because our desire with this project is to keep it really, really simple. Like part of our hypothesis is that there's so many alternatives out there and there's so much advice and there's so much kind of competition of what's the best tool that we want to try and be a kind of filter and give people a really easy way to see some alternatives that they can very easily transition to today. So for doing food differently, we've got some like community supported agriculture schemes like an odd box like using getting these like boxes of vegetables that are wonky or rejected from supermarkets we've got the open food network which is an open source tech platform that helps people connect to local farmers. This is doing decision making differently. So forms of like flat decision making non hierarchical decision making, for example, democracy. This is an example of social media so different platforms that are actually open source or cooperatively owned doing video messaging differently. So this feels especially important like in this moment so many people have transitioned to working and having conversations with family on zoom. But actually we're finding out that zoom doesn't have very good privacy and security policies and is not, you know, it's a large corporation that owns it so. Yeah, there's this importance of actually transitioning to platforms that put people and ethics and privacy and kind of freedom first. Then we've got do work differently so these are kind of different ways of working horizontal organizations or like collaborative work patterns doing budgeting differently. So this is a co budget is a tool I was involved. It's a collective that created co budget. And it's essentially a tool online tool that allows groups to do budgeting together and a totally transparent and open way. And so that's just one example of another tool doing ownership differently so prior like promoting cooperative company structures instead of shareholder owned companies. That's all that's, yeah, those are all there are more categories on the site but I didn't want to have to go through every single one. But yeah just to say that it's as as a letter said like this is also not an exhaustive list and the idea is that it's curated and actually Stephen and I either know people need know the people who run the projects or own the projects or we've worked with them in some way before or we've like verified so there's like a lot of due diligence that's kind of gone into choosing what is on the site. And that's part of like the value that we want to bring to people is that yeah kind of trusted source of top projects or services that they can move to. The last thing I wanted to say was, I guess both of us by Stephen and I are really passionate about kind of whole systems change and we've got this idea that I guess because of our complexity and systems backgrounds. We believe that potentially all of the changes kind of have to happen at once like you can't kind of just go slowly one by one it's going to be a total transformation that we need in quite a short space of time. And you know it might sound crazy that that you know that there's a reality where all of us are buying our food from communities of good agriculture or that all of us are using subtle but instead of Facebook but essentially that's the place we need to get to and this project is an attempt to help that shift happen. We've got our launch event on the 23rd of June. I will put the link into the chat because I haven't got the link up here. You'd all be very welcome. And this is my website. This is Steven's website if you'd like to be in touch. We'd love to have you. Thank you. Well, thank you all for those great presentations and great work. Before we open it up for the Q&A but I want to encourage the audience to submit your questions we have maybe two lined up but not that many so go ahead. I have a few questions for you first. I want to ask you what is one of the most surprising things that you've encountered as you've created this material what policy changes have surprised you and how those have changed throughout time. I think maybe the latest project was started in April but how have you seen the mood change. So the question is how have things changed. How have I seen that. What has surprised you and what has changed since you started. Okay. I'm going to start with the second question. So what I've seen change I guess is the energy and momentum that I think a lot of us could feel in March and April and the sense of like, you know, I think many of us are utopian at heart who start these projects and there's a sense of like, oh, things could be different, you know, another another world is possible. And now I think I'm starting to think about crises, for example, 9-11, and what happens after a crisis like often there's an immediate response of loads of like goodwill and collaboration and hope. And then, I mean, if we look at 9-11 what's happened after that like the impact on the way the world politics and policies and culture changed after that like I'm just concerned about what yeah about what might happen after this crisis and how do we work together to make sure that this is potentially a catalyst for greater change and helps be, you know, when you've got like a saturated kind of solution, and you just add like a grain of dust and it turns into a solid like that. I'm kind of wondering if we can really find what that catalyst is to crystallize better ways of doing society. And sorry, what has surprised me. It's really hard question. I'm actually going to pass to someone else. I can't think of what surprised me. Okay, do the new normal founders have something that has surprised them or something on how it's changed? I think there's one example that I think both the letter on iPhone always very fascinating and that was the fact that at some point in the pandemic, Amazon has nudged users to buy less, not more. And I find this fascinating. It's not radical. There are lots of things to criticize about Amazon's the way that Amazon has handled this crisis, but I thought it's interesting that the very same tools that currently optimized for one goal can very quickly be utilized to optimize for a different goal. And this one I found fascinating. I think another one was, but only because I am not where I usually live and I've been living in sublet. So I spend a lot of time monitoring Airbnb for very personal reasons. But what was interesting to really, I could really see and observe how holiday rentals were entering the long term rental market. There was a moment in April when this was happening a lot. And now it's it's again sort of the atmosphere in Berlin at the moment is the pandemic is over, which it really isn't. But that's the general mood and it's, it's immediately reflected in in holiday rentals and the way that landlords behave. And on the overall question, I'd also say the, I think the being in Europe, the mood at the moment is very different than it was in March in March. We also did this project to practice optimism at a time that felt extremely dark to to really celebrate and highlight all the positive changes that are happening. And with a lot of things I feel this moment has passed a little bit, but also this pandemic isn't over. So I think we're in this strange period at the moment, where in some places places that there's the appearance of normalcy. But that's not the radical new normal that we thought it would be. So, which makes it more important than ever to track and remember all these radical possibilities that were possible, and that still are possible. And to, to follow up on them and make sure that we keep keep the possible open and not go back to very narrow or even dystopian versions of the future. Thank you. I'm going to mention two different ones from Frederica. So one that I found really interesting. So I'm Italian and there were lots of news about the Venice canals being super clean and having never been as clean, which I found very exciting and also very pretty. And the other one is a very recent one. It's the announcement by IBM, Amazon and now Microsoft that they would stop supplying facial recognition software to the police. There are obviously questions on how that will play out and whether that's a full commitment or not. But I think that's significant and very recent. So how things changed. Just one reflection is if you look at the numbers of cases around the world. It's quite interesting to see what countries are doing badly and what countries have done well. We were not at the end of the pandemic. We can't draw final conclusions about this. But it's pretty telling that a lot of the countries that are led by populist leaders have done fairly poorly in these times. On the one hand, I think that's a positive message. It tells us there is something wrong with some of the way, you know, some of the directions that politics has been moving towards in recent years. On the other hand, there's a question, I think, as things change, as people get more and more unhappy and poor and excluded, whether some of these kinds of policies will actually start gaining traction again and discontent might take over and lead to some really concerning results. So, so I think that's my kind of gray, black, you know, positive and negative conclusion. Should I start Francis. I think for me and again our project is about focus on the United States. The, the ability to house the on house to house the homeless so quickly. And with, with the same budget that there was before really surprised me when, when the issue was about coven and spreading coven same with jails and prisons. Really kind of extraordinary people, criminal justice reformers in the United States have been pushing for these changes for decades and this, you know, and we've been told that it's difficult or impossible for a variety of reasons that suddenly disappeared. And the, you know, I'm hoping this will trigger larger questions about what how the US uses its prisons. Obviously, besides the profit motivation. I know this was so sorry. I'm on cue always whenever I get on isn't cool. But also that the, that these releases for people who don't aren't public. I think what's changed. I think this fatigue has set in. I think we believe in law and governance a lot less now than we did three months ago in the US the same way we believed in it less three months ago than we did a year ago. And so what's interesting is the way that we envision this project is sort of incidentally progressive policies that were changing for other reasons to deal with the economy to deal to mitigate the spread. But now the most to my mind significant reform in the past. I mean, really extraordinary is police reform, and the way that is actually being the the protests, which, you know, I'm still thinking through how they're connected to cover they're clearly very deeply to my mind. But this is something that is being propelled by by people by citizens and then is prompting governments to be responsive as opposed to governments, trying to mitigate their own crises and giving more providing more to me and the last thing is I think a lot progressivism I've seen this or people are scared of it but they're actually they are progressive you don't use that word in the US. You say to someone, would you like student debt forgiveness would you like health care you like a basic level of human rights and if you mean, you know, style living people will say yes but then if you frame in a different way they get very scared. So I think that there's something in the framing of how to hopefully push forward but I sadly I'm not very optimistic. I think a lot of these are one offs, you know, for example prison releases this is not risen to a level of policy and I I think we're going to see a lot of evictions right now. If there isn't an extension and there's a crisis crisis in the making that hopefully will prompt better reforms. Yeah, just to build on what everyone else has said. I think one of the most surprising changes for me is not actually from the policy side but in the US at least there's been kind of this rise in interest in mutual aid and these kind of non governmental ways of support structures and that's really encouraging to see in terms of how I guess my own kind of thinking about this has changed. I guess there are two things one is that it seems to me like a lot of these policy responses weren't so much about. I guess, yeah, they weren't really about addressing the pandemic per se but controlling the economic consequences of it. And it seems that the economic consequences, the narrative that's kind of emerges that there are more to do with the shutdown in response to the pandemic as opposed to the pandemic itself itself. And now with all these kind of rush reopenings here it seems the decision is now that we can avoid a lot of this economic fallout if we just don't shut down and so that's kind of a worrying trend for me. The other is I think Dari already touched on this but a lot of these policies aren't really kind of long term changes. They're more a kind of pause button. So in the US for instance there's been many eviction moratoriums but the problem is that those have largely not included any kind of rent forgiveness. So you can't be evicted for three months for not paying your rent. But at the end of these three months you still have to pay the three months of missed rent. So that's effectively just delaying the consequences. So that's been a little discouraging as well. Thank you. So the questions from the audience are piling up but I want to just ask another general question to you and then we'll read from the Q&A feature the questions. I want to hear a little bit maybe if you haven't yet spoken about this, about the personal experience for you about running these portals, doing it as a side project, what have you learned, what has been challenging and maybe if you can also throw in how people could help. Like tell us a little bit what this has meant for you. Like I hear different inclinations towards optimism and less optimism. So maybe if you tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, go ahead. We need help and if anyone is interested or knows anyone that would be wonderful. The idea for this to be to work is to be able to see patterns is that we collect a lot of things and at a specific level of detail. We had gone back and forth on you know depth first breath and we're trying to do both, but it is so time consuming. We both have full time jobs that you know it took us, I think the taxonomy still works. The structure works but we really want to be able to collect these examples and be able to have this as really as an archive. And it's too much work for the two of us and it would be great to do something a lot of these great trackers are using the Google Docs share where you'll see 45 people on the document at the same time. We want to be able to better everything and fact check it first but you know some kind of modification. If you go to our website you can you can send in examples and Francis is built it back in for that. If you want if you know anyone would like to help please that would be wonderful. So that is that is our pitch to you. I think it's sort of like what what what we need is we are the different. So we decided not to be an archive but a narrative, a storytelling a curated collection of examples and what we need help with is figuring out where to where to take this next given that these stories are just not coming in anymore we could sort of try to preserve them help promote them. But they're also different approaches. I think this is one and then the other one is we are and that was just a quick lazy solution we're hosting this on squash but his which just costs money to maintain just fine for now. But if this were supposed to be sort of present it needs a longer term home basically. Maybe and that's how would you have maybe have different thoughts or additions on this. I was thinking. So one thing that was surprising for me was to realize how complex. It is to so if you decide that you want to put positive changes on the website. How complicated it is to decide whether something is actually positive. And also once you start looking into the pieces news and related coverage, you realize it's actually pretty opportunistic or a one off, or it was planned all the way that they're implementing it, perhaps a little bit more quickly now. So a lot of the things that look surprising actually are not that surprising, and it's pretty rare to find something that's genuinely surprising that was being pushed for for a long time and denied, and then suddenly it's happening. So I think that's, I guess, my takeaway from this and obviously it takes time. But it's, but it's also been a really great experience. And I must say, I don't know, I really like these projects, like all of the ones that have been presented because I think they give this sense of optimism and the sense that actually, you know, yes, everything is great or positive and negative things but there's always a possibility for change and I think that's really important. Maybe one small, building on this one small point is sort of what is positive for some, what is surprising for some is not necessarily surprising for others. So through collecting these examples, I learned a lot about the criminal justice system in Europe that I didn't, I didn't know, which is on me I didn't know the extent to which European prisons are overcrowded and what a big deal it is that currently they are not and how long, how many reports by human rights organizations where they're for a long time. Yeah, so we also need help. I'd say it's also a side project. And any, any help is really welcome. We have a board of advisors. So if you're an expert in any of the categories that are on our website like food, alternative food systems or alternative like technology or ownership, please do get in touch and we'd love to have you like we're happy to have 50 advisors if that's what wants to happen. On the site itself at the bottom if you scroll down to the bottom there's a little like submit an alternative so if you have any ideas of tools or services that are not currently there then you can scroll down and tell us, yeah like submit a project or a tool that you think should be on our database. I think, you know, generally, we just want this to go as far as possible because we want as many people to see these alternatives as possible so sharing the site is really helpful. We've just, we've actually only just launched it publicly like we've had it built for the last couple weeks but we've just been putting everything in place and sorting out the platform so yeah sharing in the next week would be super helpful. And I think the experience of doing the project like I think it gave me a kind of longer term view out of the pandemic of just like okay this is a long game like we yeah it's giving me like a sense of if we want to get here like if we want to if we're going somewhere like how could that happen how long would that take it's not going to happen in three months it's going to take years but using some of this momentum. It seems like a pretty good good idea. Yeah, I think that's everything I would say, I would just add as well I'm interested in talking with Fred Erika and Electra afterwards because I wonder if there are ways in my mind I was trying to think about how they connect that they're like here are these tools or services like that can help you move towards the new possible and then you are kind of gathering evidence that it's happening and I don't know it could be kind of interesting to think about how they connect. It's a non directions right like the taxonomy of the covert policy tech I was also thinking maybe we should have been more systematic. Yeah. Okay so some of the questions on the Q&A ask about their relationship between the civil rights uprising mainly in the US but now also spanning to Europe. Well I don't know if civil rights uprising is the right word like the anti racism and anti blackness movement that we've we've seen in the past few weeks and the role of tech companies and platform so this sort of started maybe last week when I be and decided that they wouldn't sell a facial recognition to police department in the US and there's an interesting set of questions here about how do you see that playing out in the near future like the relationship between the political context and the role of the companies I don't know if any of you have some thoughts on that easy question or hunches hunches to work. So I'll try to respond. Oh right. Tiny you know I'll give my five cents. So someone I think asked about scope. So how do we limit the scope of our website to the pandemic and how do we distinguish efforts that have emerged as a result of the pandemic versus other things including anti racist protests etc. We don't make distinctions and that's something that we've been thinking about now we don't necessarily distinguish between the pandemic and everything else that's happening and as Darius said they're probably extremely connected and and so we think it's part of the same big change moment of change and what the role of so I don't know if the question is what the role of tech companies has been in relation to the anti racist protests and how does it connect to the pandemic or just separate questions one and the other I think separate questions and I pile them together so you can do whatever. Okay so I'll just respond on the tech companies point which I think is something that I covered in my presentation. I think broadly we're seeing tech companies taking advantage of the moment and trying to take on more and more aspects of private lives of governmental functions etc. So they want to be depicted and seen as good guys and often they are trying to do good things so I mean in the the contact tracing apps question I think largely they're seen as doing the right thing they're trying to put forward solutions that are more privacy protective but it's part of a general strategy of acquiring more and more credibility trustworthiness and power over people's lives especially in light of the fact that our lives are becoming more and more virtual and more and more mediated through these platforms infrastructures so my view is pessimistic I think we need to push back. I think now we client called this a digital land grabbing that's happening. So there are surveillance companies pitching in. It's very much both I'm also pessimistic. So it's important to push back and exercise sort of like a watchdog function on everything that's happening to technology at the moment and just because the I just one sentence to add I want everybody else to speak as well but to say we struggled a little bit with sort of the protest and how to reflect them on the website and the reason was a lot of the changes are the consequence of years of activism and work and we didn't want to give the impression that this is because of the pandemic that we're seeing these changes. They're probably it's probably a catalyst but especially when it comes to IBM and Amazon. There's been lots of activism that has been demanding that they stop face recognition and it wouldn't be too easy to say it's because of the pandemic. Maybe there's a catalyst factor but it's sort of it's complicated. I guess I would just chip in around like it's I mean I don't think it should be up to citizens and like in our personal choices like I think unfortunately that's kind of where we are though that if we want to choose more ethical and secure alternatives like it's on us and unfortunately it also means that you know if we're all on Facebook. Then the benefit of being on Facebook is that everybody's on Facebook so it's like how do you get I think a question I sit with a lot is how do you get like a momentum or like a mass Exodus to other platforms because they're there they're available and they would become much better if we put money into them instead of using these free platforms where there's these invisible costs like your data is basically mind you know mind like if you're not paying then you're paying through being watched surveyed and you know having targeted advertising and like much worse like being manipulated targeted as you know watch Cambridge analytical like the film it's it's all there for us to see but we're kind of hooked to these platforms that are kind of mining like farming us for data and yes I that's not really an answer that my answer is here's a here's a platform that shows the alternatives but how we get enough people onto those so that it's actually plays the function like is beneficial to be there and plays the function that that these platforms should is is an open question. I don't know if anybody wants to riff riff on that. Okay, so we can go for the next question so there's that there's an interesting question about something that you have mentioned already in your different interventions about the short term versus long term. Nature of some of the projects and ideas you've been following so um so yeah so the I'm going to read it because it's interesting so what obstacles have you found in making the new possible and that type of short term interesting policy or response that you're seeing is state and like for example in the prison reform cases that you have all mentioned or maybe in even a asking Amazon to having Amazon not incentivizing us to shop too much or that type of thing how do you think we could stick to to those were obstacles. You know I think it's a question of political will and I think we're still in a crisis and no one is really making medium term as far as I've seen in this in the space medium term or long term policy decisions so I think there is a moment it's interesting all the trackers that I follow in criminal justice that follow jail releases prison releases. Questions on pretrial detention, they all sort of stopped. All the policies stop and the trackers are stopped mid April I think that there was a moment of who the people are going to be released were released and so, and they haven't read they've because the courts a lot of them are on pause and various ways for for various types of low level crimes and misdemeanors that usually end up in jail churn. So no one's had to really think about this in a sustained way. You know I think it when it benefits companies, you know we've been following employment I think a lot of the flexible work and remote work arrangements. I say this works in government where there is that has never been the case before I think when people see that it works and for companies that it's cheaper for them. And you see which Twitter I think Facebook or a number of big type companies in regards to progressive social public policies, unless people push for it. I think there's going to be this kind of reactionary law and order criminal justice response again, especially because that tends to be this kind of authoritarian personality emerges during moments of crisis I mean we see it we're seeing it all over the place. So, even, you know, even terms of criminal justice we've looked at bail reform even when that when bail reform so it's a completely awful system which majority of people are in prison because they can't afford to pay to pay bail before they've actually been convicted. The there's been a movement to reform to release and recognizance there's been so much pushback against that even when it shows that it hasn't increased, you know any kind of metric of crime things like that so we know that it's emotional we know that it's not logical and it's not based on the reality and so if people continue to respond fearfully we're going to see pushback, I think, unfortunately. So I have something maybe to respond to. I think the key to long term change. Again, five cents. The key to long term change is to shift the paradigms. And so I think we currently live in times where certain forms of economic. Logics tend to be supreme and govern lots of policy making and so policy is shaped so as to fit certain kinds of considerations from a cost benefit analysis. And I think it's key to progressively move away from that in order to have lasting change and how do you do that. So one way of doing that is starting by securing certain forms of well being to those who are the least able to understand what is in their interest potentially and vote for it. And so I believe firmly in welfare and the welfare state and I think if you give health care to people people start understanding why it's valuable and they start understanding why a lot of other things are valuable. So you need to start somewhere, and then you need to start shifting paradigms and start showing that a lot of the things are currently considered in some countries as disastrous are actually not at all disastrous. I'm just chipping that the long term change I mean seeing the impact of say extinction rebellion or the current Black Lives Matter protests like I guess protest and movements has got a role to play here. And there's the study that extinction rebellion was based on that shows that 3.5% of the population is all you need for kind of massive paradigm change or you know movements to succeed based on past movements that have worked in the past around like civil rights so yeah that's a I think that's one piece of the puzzle. In that sense your projects seem very important for the moment. And we have some time so we have two specific questions that I'm going to read and then if you have something to say about them. Please do. One of them is whether you've seen projects, including those without much access to digital platforms or the internet like where you've seen something new in that sense that has a, I don't know, caught your attention. And the other one is something you mentioned in the passing as well some of you but maybe if you have some thoughts on whether a are whether the pandemic has will enlarge or or shrink maybe our privacy and civil rights like how you see that thing out. It's funny because I feel we're all very touched by your projects and so it seems like we want you to tell us about the future that awaits us. But you for sure have been looking into the possible future so please. So those those two questions I don't know if you have thoughts on them. Maybe ready to go ahead and then Daria enough to go fast but I think that the irony is that my normal job is tracking the negative and the dystopian which is why I enjoyed this project so much. There are lots of trackers and projects out there that track precisely this the shrinkage of civil civil rights and I think one take away from this is like. Even if you think in terms of human human rights law in a global pandemic you, it is it can be justified to restrict liberties. If they're lawful proportionate time limited and strictly necessary. So a lot of this my answer to the question is basically well it's up to us and a lot of very boring monitoring will have to happen to really see if our restrictions of civil liberties that were meant to be temporary are actually being rolled back and if a lot of compromises that we made in an emergency will actually end and what will happen to the data that was collected will it be repurposed and all of this will require long term monitoring. And I'm not a big fan of saying, will the pandemic lead to a shrinkage of civil rights because it really depends it's sort of we're in the midst of it and it's entirely and completely up to us to make it help to ensure that this is not the case. Thank you. You also have something to say, I think. I was just going to ask you to repeat the first question. Oh, so the first question was the one on civil rights on the other one was whether you've seen something about digital inclusion projects along those lines. I think our panel I'd let you on Frederick are probably better suited to answer. So I will defer. So on the digital inclusion question. I think it's a very relevant question. And we basically just thought let's create this website and have not thought through any of those important questions also because it's pretty small scale for now. There's definitely a very salient consideration that we should take into account if we want to extend the website and make it something that can actually guide change for many. It's very relevant. I don't have examples in mind of things that are happening offline. That might be kind of analogous to what we're doing on the surveillance question I can only agree with Frederick. I think it's a question of understanding what we mean by emergency under constitutional regimes. What is possible not possible for governments to do a lot of what or everything governments have been doing in times of coven is legal and unacceptable under the law. So the question is whether we're happy with these things being done and potential consequences of these kind of changes and how they might be to use the language of using before shifting paradigms and entrenching certain digital structures certain apps certain methods of tracking that happened just before and that would now become part of the new normal and we wouldn't be happy. I don't think any of us would be happy with a new normal that is about surveilling individuals more and more. On the other hand, I'm not extremely worried personally about contact tracing apps I don't think people are using them as much as we would have hoped, or some people would have hoped. I'm less worried about that and I am also conscious that the surveillance is happening anyways and so not much is changing in that sense but things will be changing and it's very important to see what defaults are being put in place. There's nothing on the digital inclusion because actually my full time job I work as a like in a philanthropy fund where we fund community projects and one of the biggest problems we've had during this pandemic is like basically all of the people that are offline and like completely unavailable and can't be reached so like people who used to drop into like clinics or children who you know like social services of checking in on children like it's all become really difficult and like short of handing out iPads like it's yeah it's really tough to know what to do. My one my two cents around like in connection to the don't go back to normal project is that we'd like to reach out to the mutual aid networks because then networks who are online they have WhatsApp groups but then they are connected locally to people who don't have like the elderly like people who are not connected online and so for for a project that wants to you know reach reach people who are not online and I guess it's about connecting with the people who are online who are connected with people who are offline and trying to like mobilize in that way. That's great. Thank you. Well, I think our our time has come to an end. I don't know if any of you have something very last to say but then I think some of the takeaways are that if you are listening and you want to help them reach out volunteer send projects and an ideas I think that was something that certainly came up and I just really want to thank you all for taking the time on your spare time to a sort of give us all these new paradigms and ideas about how our future can look and also to be attentive to what's going on around us. And yeah, thank you very much. I let's, this is a mute clapping, which is one of those awkward things about zoom event, but we're all clapping for you. And yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Together. An unmuted clap. You can see in the chat that people are saying thank you. Thank you.