 So, our first session will be by Ben Snow of Sylocracy, Learning from Setback, Sylocracy and Citizen Consultations. Ben. Is that all right? Sorry, could you move to the front while you're speaking? Okay, sure. Sorry about that. I told you different. Next to the mic. All right, sure. Is that better? Okay, perfect. Thanks for all joining. This is, I guess none of you care about women gaining funding or well-being, which is interesting. No. And I also, I'm not going to do your slides if that's all right. I feel like there's a certain PowerPoint fatigue at things like this eventually. It's a point in the afternoon after lunch, so I'm just going to share a bit. So my name is Benjamin Snow. I'm from an organization called Sylocracy. We're a Dutch company run by an American and a French person based in Berlin that mostly works in France. So, if you think that's confusing, it's because you have no faith in Europe. We are a European company. We are proving the mission of Europe and that it can be done. And it's easy enough, which means it's not very easy. That said, so what we do is we work with local, regional, and national governments. We have an online platform that helps involve citizens in participating and giving feedback towards local decision-making, which is very similar or kind of very aligned to what almost everyone in this room does. And so I'm going to leave a lot of times for kind of discussion and question and answer because I feel like the, I don't know, I don't know, I don't have any question and answer because I feel like the collective intelligence of this room is quite high. And so I don't want to talk very much because that's part of what we do is we know that anyone who's usually given the microphone only holds a bit of the key to solving a problem. And so opening that up to a wider community is really important. But I did want to start with a bit of an anecdote. So part of this got pitched essentially as lessons learned. So I want to talk about when stuff doesn't go well, which isn't all of the time and that's important, but it's some of the time. And so it's kind of a tale of two cities. So two cities that we worked with, one that went really, really well and one that went not very well and kind of why we think that is. And so one was the city of Potsdam. If you guys know Potsdam, Nice City has kind of a touristy thing you go visit. It's outside of Berlin, good universities. Another one was the city of Lyon. One we worked with in 2016. The other one we started working with in much later 2016 and still work with now. And what we were in both cases, you have kind of the very kind of starting point of we want to involve citizens in understanding kind of what they believe about the work that we're doing or in how we understand what we're doing. Which is great. So that's fantastic. We're in the same point. Cut forward several months. In one case, you've engaged dozens of citizens and in another thousands. And in one case, you have basically nothing you can kind of take away from it and there's very little momentum towards the project. And in the other, this is what we're doing. This is organizational change. We should be doing this all the time. So what went differently? You hear about people who are doing the same thing on paper and then how it goes radically different and trying to understand kind of what the importance of that is is very difficult. So what we found were a few things. One, it depends a lot on what you're trying to engage citizens about. So the one with Potsdam was about they wanted feedback around a project that they were doing to involve citizens in the local government administration. That sounds great, right? That sounds wonderful. Why is that bad? Because no one knew about that project at all. So you're asking for feedback about how they like something that they didn't know existed like a little bit. And so when you're trying to pull feedback from people very broadly and about something that they have no context towards, they aren't likely to want to talk to you. Versus Lyon, we have a number of topic areas around changing the local elementary primary education system. So this affects a lot of people. It affects them very personally and it affects them over a long period of time. And it has a very strong constituent group. And so it's something where people know how it affects their lives. They know why it affects their lives. And it's something where the answers aren't obvious. So if you're asking people should we build the road? Build the road? Don't build the road? Usually those are quite straightforward. Something however that can seem quite straightforward from a policy perspective is quite complex. So what is the actual problem with changing the start and stop time of a school day? Scheduling? Daylight savings? No. When do the parents have to go to work? What sort of after school and before school support is already built into that system? Kind of even how when you start what day for what student affects who can babysit, what age groups can take care of what other children later. All things that aren't usually taken into account when making these decisions but when you kind of start from a citizen-centric perspective suddenly you get a lot more feedback about what your actual problem is. So that was one is content that actually affects people's lives like really, really directly. The other one is when we started in Potsdam we had one guy, we had one champion who was really excited about it. That doesn't, that never works. So if you are the one champion in your organization for doing something participative if you're the, you know, Joan of Arc of citizen participation I don't know how that reference carries in France actually I hope that's okay. Napoleon? Maybe worse. So if you are the figurehead of this for your organization go make friends because when you get sick go on parental leave get shifted to the other project what have you or you simply get a new project that's put on your table and you have less time it sputters. And the worst thing that happens when it sputters is you're doing citizen participation so when you do that poorly you're actually making it worse than when you started in the worst case scenario. You are breaking trust because people are getting involved on the idea that something will get better or that there will be some reciprocity or some feedback or something in their community will change and when that disappears it's worse than you not being there in the first place and so we take that responsibility really seriously but we were in a case where we had the guy who was really enthusiastic about it in the IT department who then wasn't on that project anymore and you're suddenly trying to rebuild support within an organization so you need a kind of a community of support. So a lot of what we do now, what we learn from that was we start really transversely so you think of your city or your local town as your local town or your local administration you go into every department everybody has different mandates you have to, everybody should be aware of what you're doing everybody should know how it affects the work that they're doing you have to start really transversely everybody needs to know how they can use this and how they can do participation because it shouldn't be something that just sits with the innovation department or the citizen participation department it has to be something that really sits across all of the different aspects of government or at some point it gets abandoned and then you become one more empty box on the internet and you do not want to be one more empty box on the internet because that, that just, that lack of motivation and that lack of movement really hurts you so working really transversely so we, now any city any region that we work with it's about how do we get as much buy-in and as much awareness as many projects going as possible so that this isn't left with that one guy the other thing I'll mention with that is design is really important so you'll notice that everything I've talked about until now as a civic tech company is not technology technology is I think one of the lesser important things in doing civic participation online this is why you see a lot of really bad civic participation stuff get built and then be empty be one more empty box on the internet and it's because all of the other aspects are really important and so how do you communicate with people how do you build that promise, how do you build that community how do you retain that community it's all much more important and so training people to own that process rather than handing them a piece of software is really, really important and that's, you know, if you're the OECD if you're NATO, if you're a national government doing the, you know, grand consultations that are happening now down to the local town there's the assumption that the more local you go, the more you kind of just know everybody and that's not, that doesn't really work that way and so you have to really build that that relationship as strong as possible and you have to kind of build that up as robustly as possible however technology can matter so when we did this in Potsdam and it didn't work very well we had a pretty basic platform that didn't communicate and iteratively and effectively what the government was doing and what was happening in the project and how people were being involved participatively as much as they could and what we built into it so now what we do, what works in Lyon is now, if the city it's a small thing, so if the city reads your comments so that you've been heard, you know about it if somebody responds to you you get an email, if there's an update to the decision and then kind of how you build in from a design perspective the nudges that make the government feel like they really need to do that and so you think that they're enthusiastic but these are busy people, they have stuff to do some of you work in government you have a lot of priorities so making that as easy as possible and making them feel like they kind of need to do it is really important and so designing technology that is user friendly trust building mechanism is really important and then the last thing is what are the outcomes so with this weird project in Potsdam where nobody really understood what the thing was in the first place how can they create an expectation of how it would improve versus when you're saying we're changing the local environmental law which will have these effects and these effects people know how that will affect their business and their life or their local education or their kids and that gives them much more of an expectation of what will come out of this and so you both have to give them outcome of you've been heard but also where the policy process will change but then the other part of that is you also have to make them understand that that won't happen overnight and so most people kind of reasonably understand that things take years however if you just kind of ping them come back to them two years later then they might have forgotten what the hell you're talking about and they might be mad that you haven't talked to them in the last two years and so how you create this kind of regular communicative relationship even when stuff works at the pace of government which I think all of us kind of understand what that pace can be is really important and so what you want to do is kind of those aspects is you need to pour things to work well so that when you have transversality across the organization you want to have good design so that you're creating these feedback loops you want to have a clear outcome and you want to have content that people actually understand and know about and have a relationship to and that's the difference between having a really great case study for civic participation and one that you kind of don't want to talk about but only feel obligated to once in a while at the OECD perfect so our second speaker is Marcos Gorek who is talking about being unsocial on social media sorry did everyone hear me just then I wasn't using the microphone next speaker is Marcos Gorek who is talking about being unsocial on social media here we go I will give you up to half an hour so if you want to go is there a clicker? sure so maybe something that you did not expect but I think it's still kind of important to hear about how we are unsocial social media social media is also for being unsocial not anti-social okay I want to start by saying this so this is something that a colleague in political communication said that conversation is a soul of democracy so if you're doing a lot of monologues even if you're doing dialogues you have many many conversations with a fairly broad cross-section of society so if we start with this idea that we need conversations social media platforms did look very good for that purpose they looked kind of ideal you can connect with a lot of different people and all that but here's what happened so we've been talking as humans for probably a few hundred thousands of years and we've had democracy that we were at from a few thousand years to a few years or never but only in the past ten years or so we have a capacity to basically record or mediate daily conversations everything we say now with that said only about 5% of conversations are captured so 95% is still face to face but still for the first time you have a situation where the essence of democracy is being recorded and of course what's interesting is being monetized so not only you record other people's conversations but you're trying to make money out of it so these are kind of new things and I think they're kind of related to a lot of a conversation we're having here about civic and political impact of social media so what I'm going to do is remind you, because everyone here is I think old enough to remember the time maybe 10 or 15 years ago when we were just starting this conversation about social media democracy let's go back to 2007 and that was a great year, that's where Facebook became global and I was doing research on Facebook and we were very excited and we thought that it will change everything usually everything changes everything every new tech changes everything and democratizes and other things I'll remind you of some of these promises so one of the first articles was about the benefits of Facebook friends it's great to have many Facebook friends and they'll help you with social capital and they'll help you with your well-being mental well-being and you will connect with people you never imagined connected with this is also done by a group of my colleagues so I love this stuff, I've cited it hundreds of times we also talked about something that's called context call apps so the idea that on Facebook at that time you had friends, your bosses some random people you met at the party when you were drunk and you don't remember them anymore and increasingly your parents and that this kind of cross cutting exposure to information and engagement with these people would be beneficial for democracy we're looking at normative expectations of course here so people who you would not talk to usually well since they're on Facebook and you're on Facebook you're more likely to talk to them and again we were kind of excited about this, we were like well this is great I can hear the other side well fast forward 2011 and we were still excited about it we're still excited about it this time we think that Facebook is going to crush these authoritarian governments and we're called this an army of natives so many people will rise up and bloggers will rise up and the dictators will go away as you probably know if you look at the data from most reliable sources the democracy has actually been in decline in most places it looks like something is going on here one thing I want to say is that one reason why we have these kind of clashing views of technology is that we one suffer from these ever present liberation narratives we want to liberate ourselves and other people and it's kind of easiest to do it with technology it's very difficult to liberate yourself without technology imagine you have to change fundamentals of your society that's very difficult but if you can invent a technology that's relatively straightforward and people would use this technology to change for instance their status that would be fantastic 2013 I think it's a crucial year we learned that governments buying us for those of you who didn't know right it was a shock I don't think it was a shock actually to anyone but it just made people aware that these things exist and for those of you who are keen followers of political history you have exactly the same thing happening with Cardinal Metering's rule so during his rule people withdrew from society and cafes and they withdrew to their living rooms or salons and started talking in smaller groups because spies were everywhere and people were not comfortable disclosing this information in public places so as a consequence if you think about it 2013 what's happening after 2013 a lot of us have shifted to you know WhatsApp Viber Line all these things were we still talked to each other in public and it's kind of encrypted alright 2016 why is 2016 important because we have what Shantyke calls hyperpolarization this is of course the US election context but in many countries you have the same concerns that people have stopped talking to each other especially those on the opposite side of political spectrum right and the whole idea that we were talking about in 2007 that yes it's great to hear so many different views and engage with them and have friends from places that you've never been to that's great right well this time it looks like it's not that's actually helping us hate each other more 2018 also I think an important year and it's kind of showing us what's about to come I think again not a big surprise here I mean everyone who was in the business knew that these things were happening so I don't really know what the thoughts was about Cambridge Analytica I think lots of us were doing similar things not at this scale we were not using it and started to target voters but we're collecting data we're in a data business right and then GDPR that kind of says well slow down and I think there's going to be GDPR too we'll talk about that later so where do we go from here the research that we are doing this is a group of maybe two or three of us and there's some colleagues around the world who are kind of I think focusing on similar themes this idea that social media is being reconfigured the social media sphere is being redesigned sometimes by people through basically usage so people use social media in very different ways right so there was a paper published about a year or two ago which said well some people in Turkey have 12 Facebook profiles right one for a wife one for a girlfriend one for a girlfriend from abroad one for your friends one for your children right so you have multiple profiles so how does that fit with this idea one profile one identity one transparency right so some of these things are about how people actually use technology versus the intended use so it is about the actual redesign of technologies so of course first big change is that if you look at your own use probably most of it is encrypted now and we don't see it I was very excited maybe five six years ago how I'm going to basically get all the data in the world go Twitter get collect everything Facebook right okay now I can't collect anything anymore I have to do interviews interviews are you know 19th century sort of data collection method we kind of have to use them again so this is the first shift the second shift is something that also makes sense which is what they call ephemeral social media we don't like necessarily being sort of hold to the record a lot of things that we say on a daily basis are not to be recorded not to be archived not to be remembered and especially if you are 18 years old or 16 years old you don't really want these things to stay and of course you don't want your father and mother and all these boring adults to have access to this right so you have a very simple platform that just changed the business model slightly we promise you that your parents or no one else will see it and then something that we really pay attention to which is this phenomenon of political unfriendly and I think there's a more kind of global or bigger picture here which is about disconnection I'll talk about this in a second so this is data from most of these studies are our studies the Israeli study is from a colleague Nikols John the rest is from the data that we collected together so these are percentages of political offending across the world in different years you will obviously see an outlier here again not very surprising outlier and what's interesting about U.S. is that this is just during the elections this is a normal situation, periodic elections, there's nothing unusual about it if you look at Hong Kong, this is Hong Kong during the Abrella movement when the whole city was blocked for three months very unusual situation, high level of conflict, high level of polarization Israeli guys aren't conflict, people are getting killed yet the number of people unfriendly is probably half of what we had in U.S. during the elections yes please sorry maybe I missed this one where did you get the data and two what is the 10, 20, 30 does that mean 30 percent percentages yeah so 10, 20, 30 percent so these are the percentage of people who say I have unfriended someone for political reasons in the past you know six months or three months or whatever is that a self-selecting survey no it's a national representative survey done by professional companies professional market research companies so I mean is it really accurate if we have people from Facebook they will probably tell us I don't know I just collect everything alright so there's a bigger story out there the bigger story is about disconnection so think about the best technology to disconnect from people so if you want to avoid certain people what do you need to know about these people they're religious, they're personality what kind of friends they associate themselves with how much money they make, where they live and you have all this data what teenagers do today is they check on people online before they become friends in real life right so it's completely rational strategy you go online and check someone out and say wow this looks like an asshole I'm not going to be his friend now we're not looking at that we're looking at processes that people use to disengage the first one is very simple selective affiliation so you don't add everyone to your Facebook profile you don't add everyone on LinkedIn but even if you're fairly selective sometimes you make mistakes when you make mistakes then you engage in fancy term post-hop filtration get rid of them and yes people are doing this a lot and of course there's some filtering that's happening thanks to social and other media companies because that's how it is so you end up with a slightly different group of people from our normatively kind of desirable diverse group of people and all that so what I think we're seeing now is not context collapse but context relapse if you look at your phone guarantee that on a daily basis you probably speak to about 3 to 10 people excluding work groups if you look at individuals so individual context that you talk to every day it's guaranteed that it's not more than 10 people for most of us it's about 5 okay so that's where a lot of action happens most of the action, most of our discussion again remember discussion is talk is the soul of democracy happens among 5 people okay so what we do and what we see now is that we tried for maybe a decade or so this open mode of communication it was kind of exciting and you post silly things and you get comments from people across the world it's great but then we're like well actually I don't have time for this right unless you are in tech or you're in PR you really don't have time for social media right you have a job you have children if you do and you have to commute, you have to eat you have to sleep at least some of us I haven't slept a lot but so what we see is that we are shifting to the platforms that actually support a very old mode of communication which is this small group communication a formal communication that disappears we talk and then we disappear and of course everything is encrypted probably the most interesting reference here is Dunbar Robin Dunbar who is an evolutionary anthropologist who studies Apes and studies people and all that and he basically says well you have about 150 friends or so and yes some of us can have 200 or some of us can have only 100 but that's about it and the core group is about 5 the next group is about 20 so we don't really have a lot of people that really we want to talk to now this is kind of a basics social psychology or anthropology so how does it sort of connect with a bigger picture of citizen engagement one of the issues that we are facing in our research is that when we find exposure on social media that's normatively desirable like being exposed to different views across cutting views different people from different class from different race that's a good thing right yes but to this difference we tend to react with unfriendly or blocking so in the last lectures about 30% of Americans reacted to exposure to difference by blocking people we also know that lots of people get kind of confrontational online in three countries and we found that yes being confrontational also makes you more likely to unfriend people so you're kind of an online bully and we probably know some sometimes we do bullying and trolling it's kind of fun but this is the problem right so normatively again we were talking for many years about the strength of weak ties this cross cutting ties and they are very important society social glue social capital etc but it looks like they're a little bit weaker than we expected so yes we're connected with these people but whenever there is some kind of challenge or social upheaval we tend to unfriend these people alright so what's kind of the take home here so yes there is a greatest increase in expressive capacity okay but that's kind of changing too and there are some I think challenges ahead one really interesting piece of kind of relatively new research it's only been about ten years is about what makes us change our minds or what makes us do things in life since I'm a communication or media professor then we usually talk about transmission of information so I tell you something and I persuade you so I tell you a story and I persuade you not to vote for the guy and persuade you to vote for someone else there was a dominant view the view of persuasion there is a transmission of information and there is a transmitter and a receiver but there is another interesting thing which is that some of the strongest effects are the effects of self-expression so if I say if you're in front of fifty people that I'm going to vote in the next elections I would probably be more likely to do so just because I said it and of course if you said it in front of people you know that makes it even more likely so that means people who go and talk about their preferences all the time and about what they're going to do are probably more likely to actually do it and then also people who don't do this are less likely to do it which means the vocal ones are the ones who will participate more right so something also to think about so our gut reaction when we're doing this research is that well if people are rejoining from this kind of garden of Eden where you can get so much different information and if they're rejoining into the small groups this must be kind of a polarizing effect these are the eco chambers right it looks like that may not be the case it looks like that once you feel safe when you're in a small group of people that you trust you can actually say and hear different things to give you an example how many of you have different political preferences from your parents is this a problem when you have bidders? sometimes would you stop going for family dinners because of this that's right because we value these relationships more than politics so here's the funny thing it may not really be about eco chambers it might be about protecting yourself your personal thing and you know how close we are with our technology I don't want people posting bigoted racist comments on my feed they can post somewhere else I'm good with that but not on my feed not on my profile so there's a protection of this mediated space that might be at work there's another thing people might be carving their own digital safe spaces so places where you can say things that you can no longer say in open social media now some of these things are bad some of these things are ok and yes some of them are outright scary but these safe spaces at least just research that we just started working on shows that they are actually depolarizing which was kind of counterintuitive I thought if I'm in the group with five of my best friends I'm going to become less tolerant not necessarily not necessarily this could be especially important for those who are disenfranchised or who are minorities because when they go out and start talking they immediately attack they get attacked by trolls but if you're in a safe group well you talk for a while for a week or two or a month or two you gain some confidence you practice your skills and then you get to the big out world and maybe you participate so a really big picture here so we have a global monopoly on advertising right now this advertising is fundamentally based on personal information and we have to think about the democracies that most of us live in I'm kind of an exception but semi-democracy whether they're built on the same idea that you extract information from citizens and based on that information you present them with different versions of reality that's basically what democracy is not about the version of reality in democracy should be similar to most of us not customized for different people it gets a little more interesting too because there's no talking the academic community at least the stop talking about social media companies as media companies or social networking companies they call them data extraction companies they're not about media they're not about social networking they're about extracting information and of course some of these things can be regulated and my guess is and if you're watching what's happening in the United States right now with a democratic candidate some are saying we're going to break you we're going to break you and I don't think there is a critical mass for that but there is definitely for the first time talk about breaking up the giants which for me is very surprising never expected that and of course the bigger question is about transparency and privacy and what is the right balance of it because a lot of people are very concerned about privacy and they use disclosure or transparency as a strategic tool in persuasion remember influencers tell you what they eat for breakfast they tell you where they shower right they disclose a lot of information because it's a strategic thing in presenting themselves as authentic and basically increasing their persuasive power that's it let's talk thank you both the speakers there isn't a second mic in this room is there no okay that's fine so basically what we'll do now is we get to the front of the room I will take questions in groups of three it might ask the speakers to repeat the question that we are answering in turn just so in case people can pick it up the first time and there's a lot of people in the room hopefully there's a lot of questions if not we'll finish and then we'll leave cool so are there any questions hands right up sorry okay so I'm going to do sorry start with you sorry okay we'll put the phones back up again got it start in here thank you very much for both presentations really engaging in my mind they're pointing to different things so Benjamin you spoke about towns that are collecting the feedback from citizens and then you said but how do you deal with the situation where you know that the government will be able to respond it will take a year or two we're asking citizens to be patient and then Mark we were talking about very inpatient crowd that's very private and behaves very differently so my question is to you knowing what you know about how we behave in this artificial space what are the key top three things you would give to Benjamin and to people like us what is it that we need to do to harvest that behavior to harvest those nuddies to make citizens to be more proactive in that civic space for them to really drive transparency and accountability and be defenders of our democracies once again thank you hands back up cool so I think they would the first presentation there was something in there about the difficulty of civic tech as a hack around democracy that isn't functioning versus civic tech as infrastructure that has a design to it that's designed to last for a long time I was kind of interested because I think there's this tension in a lot of the talks that we've got here about basically whether you're doing service design work for a government on contract which is designing government services or whether you're doing civic technology work which might not be so might not be so involved in government itself and I was wondering if you could perhaps say a little bit more about that tension and also with the second talk I'm a little concerned about there's a lot of assertion there to be kind of knocked out the idea of interviewing people at the start of the 19th century thing which I'm going to have from an anthropology department asking people like there's a singular narrative there of like here are the things that happened in social media that year I didn't see something that happened in civic tech that kind of balanced out what was happening in that space the internet is not an oligopoly of course but it's not just happening on twitter and facebook and ascribing ascribing affective behaviour feels strong and I'd like to hear a bit more of the a bit more of the qualitative evidence you're using to create that narrative and a question right at the back yes a question from Benjamin really interesting presentation you spoke a lot about the process of public engagement I just wanted to elaborate a bit more on what it was about those two projects why one was so much more successful than the other you alluded very briefly to participation numbers I just wondered if you could tell us a bit more about how you're measuring the impact of public engagement activities how do you know when one impacts and how are you measuring that relative to the one you said didn't go so well thank you good choice great so I appreciate the questions to the first one was specifically around that time lag of expectation versus implementation and the relationship around that I find that most of the time there's no communication between government and citizens that relationship is basically there's kind of the construction project and there's the billboard in front of the construction project telling you this is funded maybe by the EU and it'll be here before your children need it vaguely and so it's kind of a lot of what we encourage is just that there's an appreciation by people that large projects and large actions within government and a lot of stuff that takes place in this structure kind of very large scale projects takes time and people understand that but you have to kind of create a continual communication for to kind of keep people and kind of I think that it's very easy for government to have the mindset that everyone else is tracking what you're doing as closely as you are in that way that everybody who kind of works in their field feels that everyone else should know exactly what's going on in their field really intimately when it kind of matters to you and doesn't really matter to anybody else nearly as much and so I think that appreciation of kind of the average person on the street isn't paying that much attention and only kind of occupying them communicating with them regularly but only doing it deliberately and substantively is really important and I think that's another kind of differentiation is so we aren't designed for people to use it constantly and I think that's a big thing is social media is designed and measures itself by how can I get as many people to spend as much time on this as possible and you can say it's because they're data extractive and you want to collect as much data as possible or you can say that it's because it's advertising based and you want to run a lot of ads we're specifically designed so that we're not trying to harass you all the time because if you do that people get really pissed off it doesn't go well in the civic tech space to try to create something that runs ad based or runs on this kind of perpetual loop of interaction because often the government or whoever is active in that space doesn't have a continual minute by minute update of the legislation passing on that sort of thing and so creating something that isn't driven specifically on an advertising or a data basis is really important to us because I don't believe it's kind of should be there and important to you when there's something important and relevant and it's like kind of that important function but that doesn't need to be kind of constant and I think that that instructs a lot of how we think of business models and how we think of kind of how you craft that relationship with people to the second question it was around service design versus civic tech and the democracy versus kind of institutional so I think there's a lot of good work being done in just kind of like providing digitalization of basic government services I don't view that as what kind of core civic tech does I think that part of public services is communication true but a lot of kind of basic digitalization stuff like that can happen the difference I think with civic tech is usually good civic tech is scalable so I think the worst cases of kind of that government service design is they're trying to create something for a town and then build the next thing for the next town and build the next thing for the next time or sell it to all of them in isolation and run their little project up and then disappear and I think that good civic tech is looking to create an ongoing continual relationship basis presence so that they're not just essentially disappearing and I think that so that's one element to it I think the other part of it is so we're scalable we work with small cities of 30,000 up to regions in France we work with Ovan Ronal so millions city of Lyon, Nice so we work with also really big ministries and so being something where a person can go somewhere and interact with their town their city, their region and the relevant ministries all in one place is civic tech versus I've got a different web page portal thing that's spun up for each one of those is that I think is another kind of core difference to that that I think differentiates good civic tech however I do think that kind of consulting governments on a local level about how to do that well can look like a contract and a contract basis but is an important part of it and then the third question from our friends at Nesta about measuring impact after doing their session on measuring impact this morning so it's for us we do stuff that's everything from very small projects that really only concern a few under people up to stuff that affects thousands and sometimes millions of people and so you don't want to do it based upon number of eyeballs and you don't want to do it based upon amount of time on the page so there's kind of a lot of the paradigms of social media are relevant to good civic tech what we're looking for is also not what changed I think change.org and kind of the petition model was early civic tech and it created this feeling that like you're only doing it right if we do the opposite of what we were doing last month and as we all know sometimes what you're doing now might be the best thing to be doing and so measuring it based upon just what did we shift based upon the noise of the group also doesn't instruct that so what we really look for is how do you kind of have new ideas how are those ideas informed and what is the support and the kind of understanding of the group the collective intelligence of the community around that problem is that informing a better decision so very briefly could go a lot deeper on all of those Thanks I'm trying to address the first one over H because I'm not an activist and I used to be that was a long time ago we didn't use much tech back then so what do we know about engagement so what we know about engagement in general first of all we have a difference between civic and political engagement I'll come back to this I think these are very important differences caring about your community versus selecting a specific person as your president that's very different and the second thing is as I said about the expression so if expression is let's say followed by some kind of discussion or engagement that usually increases the probability of any kind of participation so we know that we've done hundreds of studies on this one thing I would say I think in recent years what's been emerging is that the combination of online and offline is the most effective one and there's a critical size of groups and so organizing 500 people is very difficult organizing 50 people is probably okay if you have as veterans if you have one champion that's probably not enough but if you have five I think that's probably okay we looked at successful models in Asia, local neighborhood kind of problems usually these days these are messaging platforms so they're kind of private and protected but these are people who may know each other face to face as well and the combination of that with offline events I think it's something that probably works best people are I think increasingly distrusting of anything media and you know in 10 years ago you wanted to post your baby pictures online now I'm not so sure about that so I think that that sets a fundamental shift the second thing is that I kind of forgot to say that we talk about political polarization for instance in the United States or anywhere actually as it is an unintended consequence of something but that probably is not true political polarization is a strategic tool for winning the elections I was talking to a colleague of mine who works for political party in a very large Asian democracy he said the elections are coming and we're going to be polarizing because we want to win the elections so when you see that you know we can't always blame social media companies we have other people to blame and they're very visible you know if you see social media companies infrastructure I think that you can't blame infrastructure for what's happening you can't blame roads for every road accident I think that's another thing to think about that polarization is sometimes very very strategically used to gain certain advantages in the voting mode I think that would be my take-home precipice I think it's very different and I really studied these things separately too of course they overlap sometimes but I think they're very different concerns and there are very different groups of people who are interested in these things national politics is not interesting to most people international politics is not interesting to 95% of people another thing that I realize is that if you think about let's say social media versus non-social media people work more and earn less than 10 to 20 years ago and you want them to do something else for you so who's going to give them this time so you know integration of your activities into existing activities is better then say can you give me about an hour or two of your time every day between you know cooking, treating babies and like going to work and answering emails from work at 10pm so I think that's also critical we don't have 25 hours we still have the same time anything that's perceived to be invasive that's taking time away that's already very precious free time I think that's going to be a problem second question about the interviews I was not dissing interviews in any way I was just locating them historically as a matter of fact we just finished an interview study about political disconnection and offending during the Catalan crisis in Spain so we like interviews they're just such a pain to do it's so much work and you know you can collect data from 50 people compared to my dreams from 7-8 years ago where I'm going to have data from everyone else this is kind of disappointing but yes interviews are great and we just have I mean that's a matter of comparison we have I think 700 pages of interview transcripts from 50 people imagine that we have 50,000 people what am I going to do with it spend a life from publishing one stuff so it's from my perspective this is great data but it's bringing me back to the old models where it took a while to collect data from very few people of course there are companies that have much more data and better computational abilities to process this data but again these are this proprietary data and I don't have access to it and most people in this room will not have access to it so it's not something that we can leverage on to answer any of these questions regarding the advertising I think that's pretty much clear if you want to advertise anything online I don't think there is 10 companies to go to and whether this has direct consequences on what we've received as our daily dose of news or chatter or whatever we can discuss that people in this room will have much better data than me but you definitely have a global duopoly on advertising that's for the first time in history with the exception of maybe China China has their own duopoly so I think that's something that we do need to keep in mind if you are talking about access as well as data grab because eventually I would say a couple of years time situations are going to get very different how data can be monetized and whether it can be monetized at all thank you can I have a round of questions please so we've got two there, one there, one there are there going to be any more after that if we do one round of four and then finish would that be okay with people yep so let's just start check the names I've got a question for Mark so you're talking about polarization is everyone okay if I don't use this apparently can't use it very well so you said about people going off into their own separate communities and how that comes with the fear that it will increase polarization but then you said that it would actually decrease in it and you cited the example of marginalized communities developing skills and then going out into the big wide world I don't really see how one follows from the other because if you have people in echo chamber communities they do develop those skills and then go out into the big wide world but is there not a risk of them being perhaps radicalized within the echo chamber to the point where the overall discourse does appear to have multi-plural polarity they're kind of talking past each other not to each other because everyone's being radicalized in whatever chamber they chose to go to and then they go out and they start hurling at each other and that's basically such media at the moment thank you and on that note if I pass this down can it stop somewhere or we can use the fact that Mike's already in the room that works my question is for Marko so you just touched on it but I'm curious about the research you might be doing at the University of Hong Kong working at the difference between sort of the duopoly of advertising and like Facebook and Google and everything in the West versus Baidu and WeChat and China and if you're seeing similar trends there that sort of match what you've seen in your research of I guess polarization from selections or whether there's just like a fundamental difference and if that helps inform depending on how countries or companies choose to further encrypt or limit privacy or expand privacy or limit free speech etc. like what sort of trends you're in to feed in any thoughts you have on that cool and there was another question on that side yep Hi, thanks for both talks so this is more for Marko and our echo chambers at least small groups within them how's an organization can we reach out to these people and try to change their mind on an issue cool and then in that corner I'll try to speak now it's a question for Benjamin I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on the methodology that Syngov uses and how for it allows more deliberate process and also the engagement of people that are maybe not as comfortable and if you've seen any impact of this on the policy outcomes or on the ability of creating but more community and trust in government thank you here's the echo chambers question I think this is one of these buzzwords that's been around for a while a group of five of your best friends that's not an echo chamber that's an ego chamber a group of five thousand bigots who talked about racial supremacy that's an echo chamber for sure so our interest is really in these smaller groups because even these bigots and races they have a group of five of their best friends and some of them may not be racist it's very likely that they are but some of them may not be and saying things that others disagree with so I think maybe I was misunderstood that maybe I didn't communicate this well enough the echo chamber I think corresponds to these I guess parties and differences but these are macro level differences between people ideological differences I don't think that's what we were talking about here we were talking about psychological similarity between people and the people who are close with strong ties with each other and that for us that's an important democratic benefit that you are able to speak your mind in front of five people or fifty be better if it's fifty but we are happy with five so I think that's the difference that we are looking into is now that some people watch Fox and the other watch MSNBC I think we know that but in a group of five friends from high school there is one guy who watches Fox and four who don't so they start talking about these things I think that's kind of important there was a question about oh yes yes about ecosystem in Hong Kong and China so Hong Kong's ecosystem is identical almost to US so it's basically Facebook and WhatsApp and nothing else maybe a little bit of Instagram with younger folks Twitter is more or less dead so Hong Kong doesn't censor online media or doesn't restrict media access at all so at least China is a completely different ecosystem one interesting thing about China is that it basically skipped the Facebook stage it had something like Facebook for a while but it was kind of a long time ago it wasn't very successful so I think a week or two ago Mark Zuckerberg said oh this thing about WeChat I should have listened to this earlier because if you think about all these other weird messaging services they are not really social media there are things that help you go through life like you can pay bills you can get your passport you can send money to your mother these are things that American social media companies never really considered at least until now so I think that's the fundamental difference in models of course if we talk about political engagement in China well there are no elections so no need to worry about that if you talk about civic engagement that's different actually and for the first time we actually managed to collect probably the largest data from China it took two years of negotiation because basically when you submit a request to do a survey in China it has to be vetted you can't just ask any question and there are certain questions that will never be asked but there are questions that are okay civic questions are okay and that's what we are kind of hoping to find out now we've done some research in China and more specifically on the environmental engagement so what kind of use is for instance of social media and traditional media lead to environmental engagement and surprise surprise so China has a centralized broadcast model so basically government controls traditional media and still uses it in a kind of educational slash propagandistic purpose so to educate the masses that was the original aim of newspapers and television and so what we find is that people who are consuming traditional media the gap between those who are not interested and those who are interested is actually narrowing down so you have basically this kind of blasting information to everyone and then even people who are interested say okay yeah environment is a problem let me do something about on social media the gap increases because people who are interested they can do more things people who are not interested in the environment they go and look for fashion on social media or shopping or something like that they are not going to go for finding information on social media we were actually hoping that to find kind of this accidental exposure to information more like a lifestyle information about the environment and we find this in Hong Kong because basically social media is free in China what gets censored are not necessarily criticism of the government or you know postings or whinies about the government it's calls for action so mobilizational calls get censored the other things don't get censored so I think that's also another kind of a problem because if you collect these data sets we are probably missing some of the important parts at least if you collect it after they get censored I'll call you from University of Hong Kong Dr. Fu, King of Fu he has interesting data sets that give you WeChat before and after censoring and you can see what kind of things are changing they also have a very interesting lab WeChat lab that monitors government accounts in China they literally bought 30 or 40 phones and they had 30 or 40 phones in their lab and these phones are checking government websites and then you see that government websites some information disappears from time to time it's like where is this information why is it not there? because there's probably been a shift in policy just some people that's really interesting I want to be thinking about those 30 or 40 phones for a while so the question was around methodology and I only I think most of it but it's a really deep topic so I'm not going to keep people from the full coffee break to delve too far into it but briefly for us we really focus on not having a one size fits all methodology to what we do or how we measure it because what we find is depending on the context that you're working and depending on the department and depending on the type of civic tech you're trying to do so meaning which kind of policy arms is this focusing environmentally, educationally all of that really affects the outcome you're looking for the methodology for what you kind of rack up to impacts and so for us we take it out of really context by context basis on when how and part of that I would also say is a collaboration so it's we work with cities because if they don't do this it's not civic tech we want the city's involvement and so because of that understanding for them what success or what impact is and in some cases they're much they're really interested in new ideas to solve a problem in other instances they're interested much more in how do we make a decision around this and kind of what informs the choice between three options and those create a different again metric for impact and so what we've developed is kind of a broad toolbox that we use in different contexts and that's something we've been doing over the last few years so that we can apply it in different ways to different kind of policy city region nation issue context and that's part of how we work with and how we support cities and so it's really important I think whenever a lot of times specifically with designers they want kind of an elegant solution tech people they want a really elegant simple solution and I think that kind of trying to create the very elegant simple method metric in this case is I think somewhat fraught and so we try to have a little bit of a broader outlook on it in terms of developing our own kind of methodological theory around this for us it's just a capacity issue so we're not in a way where we can really robustly kind of double blind you know post-talk to test a lot just because of the nature of how we work we'd like to so if any of you are here one of those very well funded organizations and want to support that commission or illuminate the room or nest it would be wonderful so we love to do that right now it's not a situation where we're able to do that as robustly but that's something we're kind of looking towards in the midterm so thanks thanks a lot everyone thank you thank you thank you