 It's so good to be here and so good to see all of these faces and just to see I just arrived this morning so just to just to arrive in a space where there's this sort of this gentle buzz and just to look around and see how deeply people are connecting with each other there's there's something really special in that and I think it provides a really amazing frame for a focus on story like I just look around the room starting a day with people just authentically sharing their experience and for that to be really celebrated so I'm just going to I'm going to talk a little about my experience of story over the last few years and it's it's really nice to be here specifically one year ago exactly I was standing right here I'd been invited by Matthew and Brian and Yosef to to come and share some of my story of the last few years and it was an interesting experience it was it was one of the first times that I've really felt comfortable going deep into some some pretty personal sort of details of that story so I mean it's a it's a crazy story like everyone's story it's got all these twists and turns and unexpected events and sort of moral crises ethical dilemmas but one in particular I'd met earlier that morning I'd met a guy called Joshua Fouts he's part of the I think he's the executive director of Bioneers the organization that organizes the the Bioneers conference in California and he told me about his parents and his upbringing he lived with a chimpanzee his parents were primatologists they they raised a chimpanzee in a in a human household and they they taught that chimpanzee to use sign language part of my journey one of the strange unexpected parts of my journey was going down this academic track and ending up working with chimpanzees myself and then going through this this crazy moral dilemma when I found out that the primate sanctuary I was working at was actually a front for a breeding center with their breeding thousands of owl monkeys and squirrel monkeys and selling them into pharmaceutical testing so I went through this yeah this this real crisis internally and that led me to jump back to New Zealand and get involved in activism and community organizing which led to get involved getting involved in the Occupy movement which led to this amazing group of people coming together so from the Inspiral community and from the social justice activist community around Wellington and to start building a piece of software that's really about enabling people to come together share diverse perspectives and make effective inclusive decisions together so that's sort of the the story of Lumio which is a social enterprise based at Inspiral but speaking with Joshua Fouts really made me open up to the idea that that part of my personal story was was relevant to the sort of the why not just the how or the sort of the what we're doing with Lumio but the reasoning behind it the intention behind it and that's been the main mode that's been sort of the main way that I've told the story of the work we do with Lumio has just been referring back to my personal experience and this wasn't this wasn't a conscious decision it was just sort of sharing my direct experience the way that things made sense in my head rather than you know the idea of speaking publicly used to absolutely terrify me now it just mildly terrifies me still not something I take to very naturally but the idea of just telling a story is something that I that I get quite excited about giving a conference presentation sounds terrifying but just telling people a story of the work I've been engaged in or what I've experienced over the last few years is a totally different proposition so that work that storytelling work has taken me to 12 different countries in the last three years telling the story of Lumio and not just telling my story but also speaking to the collective story of all the amazing people working on this thing building this organization together some of whom are here Richard and also the story of the people that are using the tool that we've built to make change in their communities and their organizations and the impact that they are making themselves so we've come to take story really seriously as an organization and part of that is reflected in the way that we organize ourselves so we used to you know we used to write plans we used to write strategic plans these big charts that had this huge list of tasks that we wanted to achieve and over the last 12 months in particular we've decided well plans are fine and all but what if we wrote stories together what if we wrote a collective narrative thinking a year into the future about you know if we were a year in the future looking back what would we want to have achieved and how would we have wanted to get there what would be the things that we needed to do to get there and actually as of our strategic planning this year we're not just writing stories together we're writing love stories together so this was just this emergent thing that came out of our collective strategy setting was well how do we want to organize our work for the year well how about we organize it in terms of the different stakeholders that we exist to serve so whether it's you know whether it's sort of a how to foster a loving trusting relationship with our customers you know that relates to well we need to build software that's genuinely useful we need to provide people with a really positive experience we need to really care for people through it and those are all the things that we want to achieve this year whether it's our investors you know another stakeholder group our impact investors we want to you know a relationship that's genuinely based on trust and genuinely based on a sense of love love for the purpose that we've collectively come together to achieve it also applies to our the way that we tell our story as an organization so part of our social mission is really about sharing our own organizational practices open sourcing the way that we do things to make them accessible to others so this is a screenshot from an article that Richard wrote about what it feels like to work in a caring organization in an organization that's that's based on love and mutual aid and collaboration a truly collaborative organization and it also comes into our thinking about how we develop software so we used to you know we used to write code we used to just write computer code now when we come to software design and development we write stories and we listen to other people's stories about what they want to achieve and then we think about oh well what does that mean what do we have to code to make that experience a reality so a really different mode of thinking about the way to develop software and when we used to think about our impact we used to think about numbers and so numbers are still important obviously so you know we're still really proud of the fact that people have made almost 40 000 decisions using Lumio in the last few years that it's used all over the world we're really we're really proud of those things and just in the last 12 months we've had the opportunity to really engage deeply with the stories that people are using Lumio the stories of people who are using Lumio in their communities and organizations and so our our wonderful co-founder Alana who is not here this morning but is going to be out here in a couple of days she was in Europe for for a few months last year she was living in a french castle that a hundred change young change makers from around the world came and built all the infrastructure for and it was an initiative called POC 21 proof of concept 21 looking at open source solutions to energy and environment and she had the opportunity to meet people all over Europe who were by chance using Lumio in their networks and in their workplaces and in their communities and she got to sit down with I think about 12 different 12 different communities or organizations got to sit down and just deeply listen with a video camera so that we could all deeply listen back home and just just get a sense of their stories what they feel like they've been able to achieve with it so this is a woman called Francesca Pick and she's based in Paris she's one of the co-founders of a network called We Share and that's the headquartered in Paris but they've got members all over Europe and actually they're expanding out into lots of other parts of the world they're a network that has a central purpose around furthering the discourse on the sharing economy so that it's not just about a new way of extracting value from people that's really focused on building a solidarity economy a genuinely collaborative economy that's focused on commons production of commons and resources that benefit all people so they use Lumio we found out in the course of this interview Francesca talks about using Lumio to using Lumio to really expand their vision out and to have a shared story among an international network a network of people that literally will never be in the same room at the same time there are hundreds and hundreds of these people and they're spread really far and wide so they've used Lumio as a space that they can all share their story that they can make decisions together in a way that that has a narrative that they can all get behind and that they can work together to make into reality this is a another extraordinarily inspiring individual called Jessie Kate Schengler she's based in San Francisco and she co-founded a co-living an experimental co-living space in the Haight district in San Francisco so basically they took over a hotel that had been that had been in San Francisco since 1904 at one it's had an interesting story of its own it was one of the main hangouts of the grateful did I found out when I was there and they've just recently converted it from a hotel into a co-living space and community space so again it's it's oriented to the commons they're out to provide a space for creative people to come together for social entrepreneurs to to co-work together and they use Lumio as part of their collaborative governance so they have house meetings and between meetings they use Lumio as a way of involving all the people living in the house all of the residents in the decisions that they make about the direction they want to take it this is an article written by a woman called Inga Jensen and Inga is a social justice activist a committed peace activist and she's based in Pittsburgh and during during the Occupy movement during Occupy Wall Street in 2011 Inga was really keen to get deeply involved and had a had a real challenge so Inga is visually impaired Inga is blind and she is committed as deeply committed to social justice activism as she was it was a really difficult thing to to go down to a public meeting let alone camp overnight so it was really challenging to find a way to meaningfully participate and so she she took to the internet and she real this article she tells the story of just realizing well the most valuable thing that I can do is to to support the movement remotely through mediated through technology that's accessible so using a screen reader in her computer and she was one of the people that mapped out all of the occupations all around the world so this was happening in 800 cities all around the world that ended up getting picked up by the Guardian she was one of the people that set up this website for Occupy Wall Street just played a massive role in the movement but was still left with the sense of exclusion the sense of alienation like the sense of well if only there was a way that I could meaningfully participate and you know if only I wasn't excluded because because of you know because of the way that I am and so she wrote this article about Lumio in that context and it was just it was so moving for us that we set out on a mission to make Lumio as accessible as possible so building the software so that it's screen reader compatible so that it doesn't exclude people with visual impairment um and Matthew and Brian and Namaste Foundation have been hugely helpful in that work um this is a woman called Audrey Tang um and she's based in Taipei in Taiwan um and she is one of the co-founders of an organization called Gov Zero and Gov Zero is a network of civic hackers so IT professionals that are also social justice activists and at the beginning of 2014 this is what was happening in Taipei so half a million people were in the streets as part of the sunflower movement surrounding their parliament buildings student activists occupied their parliament building for three weeks until the Taiwanese government um basically gave in to well came to the table and started really negotiating with civil society about the way that they were trying to push a trade deal through a trade deal with China so that was what set off the this massive scale nonviolent citizen mobilization Audrey and the organization that she set up um played this role of providing digital support to uh to the movement so that they could really meaningfully deliberate at scale and Lumio was one of the tools that they used so we first encountered Audrey when she and another activist got in touch with us to see if we could support them to translate Lumio into Taiwanese Chinese um and we had the opportunity Richard and I and Hannah on our team had the opportunity to spend time time with the Gov Zero community and with Audrey um and being taken on a tour of the government buildings being shown the huge barbed wire blockades that um that were used to um to sort of contain the the citizen activists and to also be at a meeting in one of the government buildings with some of the people within government that the Gov Zero team now works with so the the really hopeful thing about Audrey's story for me is that this isn't an antagonistic relationship it's become a collaborative relationship so people in government who are meaningfully engaging with civil society mediated through online tools like Lumio and another thing that's really inspiring for us is that the Taiwanese government um the Taiwanese trade ministry um and other areas of the Taiwanese government are now using Lumio to involve citizens in collaborative policy making so taking this real collaborative approach they're starting to talk about a fourth sector in Taiwan so they're talking about you know private business um the public sector civil society and now the mediation sector or the the mediation sphere which is enabling safe collaboration between government and civil society and business um so how this relates to New Zealand is where it gets um where it gets even more exciting for me so in New Zealand some parts of government are now also using Lumio to meaningfully engage citizens in um in policy making and in strategy setting um so statistics New Zealand used Lumio last year for a large-scale public consultation um on the so collaboratively developing the questions for the 2018 census and as a result of meaningfully engaging with the LGBT community um came out the other side of that consultation uh with a commitment to instituting a non-binary gender identity category in data collection about gender identity um so sort of where this where this leaves things uh for for me the the power of story in all of this work and and in all social change work um is just more important than I think it ever has been you know we sort of we're trapped in this narrative currently the dominant narrative around what our economy is and what it's for and what our government is and what it's for you know the dominant narrative is about the fundamental selfishness of all people you know it's a narrative by which um it's a narrative that treats all resources in the world that are actually scarce fossil fuels clean air clean water it treats them as if they're abundant it pretends that they are infinite and that they're just there to be extracted um and it's a story that also treats all of the resources in the world that are actually abundant things like human knowledge uh music cultural production it treats those things as scarce so that money can be made from them um and the thing that's really exciting to me about thinking about this in the frame of story is that stories can change narratives can change we have agency in this you know democracy government these are these are concepts that refer to collective story making at scale now this is about how we how we talk to each other and exchange perspectives and combine our truths weave our perspectives and our stories into a collective story that we can start to make a reality and I think that's that's what's so exciting about being here today and having two days for this group of people to really go deep on weaving together their collective stories thank you very much