 conversation, the reason why I want to sort of have, and so it is in this context of what is a structural change, and what is that nature of that structural change, I think it's important to have this conversation. So this conversation is not easy and I acknowledge its contextual challenge as well. The second part of this is that I think, is that I think when you place this in the wider epoch of transformation, I think we are facing a kind of a systemic crisis of worldviews, where you would argue that over a 400 year theory of enlightenment, which actually looked at how we separate things out and looked at the world through separation, classification, subject, object thinking, that classification, that separation allowed us to ignore our entanglements. And that willingness to ignore our entanglements has been, has created, I would argue, the symptoms of the crisis that we face today, climate change, inequality, many of these are other structural issues. At the same time that separation also created a permission of violence. We know that in terms of racialization, race as a theory was constructed as a theory of separation to permit violence. And that tool has been used over and over again in different formats. And we also know that actually whether it's in other forms of violence, whether it's our planet and other forms, I think it's worth us considering that as we move from an age of objects to entanglements, where our entanglements become more visible and real, there's a real fundamental question of how we organize. The division of public and private no longer seems real, neither from the private side, nor from the public side. Actually, the entanglements are massive and continuous. There's a really good pieces of research all the way through even people like McKinsey who've been talking about 40% of the balance sheet of a company is generated by public goods and public infrastructures and public value. So in an age of entanglement, how do we operationalize ourselves? And I think the next part is in an age where control centralized control becomes very ineffective, because actually in a complex emergent world, control doesn't the centralization of control doesn't have the information. We know CEOs have left the 7% of the information to drive to understand what the real problems are with the challenges the organization faces around. How do we move from control to learning and increasingly in a complex system, learning orientated leadership becomes more more critical, but innovation and agency needs to be at the front end of the system. And finally, and perhaps more critically, I think there's a bigger question which sits at the thesis of how we think about the world from increasingly what is a planetary singularity? Whether you look at the food systems crisis or the gas prices or financial systems, actually what we're starting to see is a planetary level sort of interdependence. At the same time, what we're seeing is not only just planetary to dependence, whether we dealt with ozone layer or whether we did it with climate change, these global commons are restructuring or requiring us to restructure how we see our relationship not only within ourselves, but actually interdependently at a larger level. So is a state a boundary or is a state a metabolic flow of relationships? And how do we perceive that? How do we organize that? Now, I know this is a bit high level, but I just want to situate it in what I think is a larger theory of change. Now, I'm going to very quickly, oh, sorry, could someone just give me host rights? Go ahead, so I can just share. Yeah. So it's in this context that I think we want to talk about radical civics, and I'm going to try to be relatively brief, probably about seven minutes, and then open up this conversation. So I think one of the first questions is building a movement for civil society or civic society-led civilization. Is there an alternative path which isn't structurally as David Graber rooted in kind of the violence of state as a kind of fundamental movement? And increasing the history tells us there is. What are the deep structures required for the transformation to a radical civic future? And more and more, we would argue that looking at the transformation of our capacity in our bureaucratic systems, it's, I think, the bureaucratic transformation that we're witnessing is opening up really interesting radical civic pathways. And then, how do we actually experiment into this future and really challenge some of this stuff and build on what is already growing around the world in many formats? I think this, for me, is a framing piece, which I haven't slightly discussed, but we are living in a major war. And the war, I mean, is an everyday war. A war against each other in terms of actual inequality and the violence that we generate or war against our planet. The war certainly against future generations. And these instruments of war are embedded into our everyday reality, where our contract theory is based on actually predatory optimization, not actually contracts of care. Our monetary theory massively drives the centralization of monetary production, which draws and extractive models into our economy. I think these everyday instruments are actually very problematic. And I think there's a really interesting question to be had about them. And simultaneously, we're locked into these old pathways in multiple formats. And the kind of social history of our lock-ins are really, I think we've forgotten our capacity to deal with deep lock-ins. Whether it was in a complete address at all, but 1833 when the UK spent 25% of GDP abolishing slavery, we have done extraordinary things to make extraordinary moves. Definitely not sufficient certainly in 1833, but these were extraordinary transformations to unlock ourselves on path dependencies. And in a way, this also opens up a real question about relationships, civics and social society in really fundamental formats. A lot of the work that we've been doing and is really built on work that we've been doing for over 12, 13 years now, whether it's actually writing the compending for the civic economy, or building the Wickey house, or open desk, or actually talking about new civic capital structures and looking at how the pipeline in New York could be financed in different ways. But I think at the root of it is actually a need to look at much more of the structural issues. Our theories of ownership, our theories of relationship with land, our theories of relationship with the future, and our practices of them, which are material. The trees you see probably next to you outside your window are currently a liability for most local authorities. They are not perceived, their environmental and social goods are not perceived in our accountancy frameworks and our public accounting frameworks. So actually these structural issues are causing local authorities to chop down trees after 10 years because the insurance costs and the maintenance costs become too excessive. So we think it's really critical to start to look in a way when we talk about the civic economy as almost this initial birth was very much about looking at the brilliant examples that were happening around the world. We're increasingly seeing that there are some structural deep code issues that need to be dealt with. And no longer can the civic economy be a crack, filling, tapering the crack between the centrist capacity and the relatively centrist capacity of the state and the capacity of the private sector, but actually much more structural transition. Looking very deeply into new possibilities. So one of the things that we often talk about is that a shift in our capacity for agreements going from one-to-one agreements and one-to-one contract law to many-to-many fundamentally transforms what is the idea of the private economy as a means of value creation to a civic economy because the many-to-many agreements actually create a new type of obligation to the collective and shared goods. So we're seeing the bureaucratic transformations open up new pathways of being able to look at the future. The same is true whether we're not just to be clear, we're not big fans of Bitcoin. We think it's socially regressive, but actually currency and the democratization of currency production and the capacity to do that I think open up new pathways for deeper democracies in terms of agency. And how do we look at that all the way through identity systems? How do we really build relational identity systems which are fundamental? We also know actually our legal systems no longer are able to provide genuine pathways for justice to many peoples. So how do we start to rebuild some of the kind of legal infrastructure and the kind of accommodating infrastructure which is genuinely powerful in new pathways? And this sits in the context of this stuff is happening. This is not make-belief. I mean whether it's actually lakes or rivers, we are seeing a new type of civicness to where we see the world around us being given legal personhood and recognize in a way as a legal person to which we do not own what we are in relationship to. And that fundamental transition we're starting to see in many nature-based environments around us, but in really structural ways. So how looking at whether it's sort of looking at value, so how do we go from understanding value from understanding the value of a forest, its value of a tree timber, but actually understanding it from an entangled value proposition of timber ecosystem services multiple entangled value systems. How do we go from this single point optimization of ownership to a deeper appreciation and relationship to the entanglement of value? How do we go from this this kind of human centric model to a relationship treaty centric model which seems fundamental in terms of being able to it's not a moral position, it's actually a position of how we understand operate in care in a complex emerging world and it opens up some really key pathways into that future. How do we actually reimagine our relationships with our environment? I mean so really brilliant work that's been done and actually historical work around actually re-imagine our relationships with our non-human relatives, the nation of trees, the bird nations, looking at the world in new relationships I think is fundamental to actually exploring some of these civic pathways. For me for us the civic is not just the idea of human to human but human to future and human to non-human systems as well. How do we understand value in new ways? So whether it's the high line in New York which pains me hugely, an extraordinary investment in civic infrastructure, 173 million it would have paid for itself if only 10% of the land value uplift it generated was shared back it would have paid for itself in 10 months so we know civic goods construct vast amounts of spillover value yet they're undervalued and underpriced because they are extracted from as opposed to invested in and how do we start to think of these the civic infrastructure in new ways and dealing with not only spillover effects but the intangible effects but also the import of carbon so how do we look at this world from an intangible intangible perspective? How do we hold on certainty which I think is a really big issue at a societal level it's increasingly clear that you know in order to hold on certainty we have to build the capacity and the capability of people not to be precarious and everyone talks about universal basic income but which I think is a really interesting option but the really fundamental question is what would happen if we would have is a universal basic income delivered by the state a good thing or would we need to construct a new theory of allocation of resources and new ways to build universal basic income in more in a different format which doesn't create the centralization of power in theories of state but actually complements the power of state with new civic large-scale infrastructures so what are these alternatives becomes really important are theories of identity I think singular identity that's a relational evolutionary identities how do we build that capacity of reimagining identity that's really great work that's been done all over the place around that these are really deep fundamentals which need to be addressed in that format and building what is I mean I think some of the work that Cassie you've been doing around Caroline very many many of you actually around building the common infrastructure what are the common infrastructures that are critical to be able to build some of these civic futures becomes really critical and fundamentally this also means the new theory of democracy with democracy is not relegated to the vote with democracies of theory of agency and how do we build the distributed agency in many pathways so I've talked I wanted to talk a little bit through some of these principles these emerging principles but actually what these rely on is really some of the deep code issues that I mentioned earlier and addressing those deep codes becomes very critical now we've been looking at some experiments but I think I think whilst we can talk about this big stuff this also manifests in how do you build imagine a new forest which is self-learning how do you operationalize it how do you build trusts which are actually self-governing efficiently which can be replicated all around the world and all around the country how do we how do we manifest some of these things what if a forest takes self-image how is public good identified how is public good evolved not even just fixated on how is stewardship ownership replaced by stewardship what is the new relationship of care that it builds how do you construct content contracts of care how do you build a care economy when we know vast amounts of our care economy is undervalued and completely undervalued and certainly underpriced but we don't want to instrumentalize in theories of transaction because care cannot be transacted it must be a gift but it needs to be recognized socially how do we construct a positive society for care without actually becoming instrumentalized and financialized and reduced to simple transactions when it's never as effective as when its care is actually something far greater and how do we how one of the models of driving some of these things what is a combination of gift economies market economies and welfare welfare systems how do they work together a new new format and how do we genuinely create those spaces in equitable formats rather than extractive formats and these things have manifest for us in everyday realities of you know all the way from a house and how do you find out to house in a way that it doesn't become a new value extracting mechanism doesn't become a rent seeking mechanism in process and drive it in affordability into the future how do you care for it how do you structure it all the way through and I suppose I want to end here in this conversation because I think whilst we can have these big conversations I think what's really critical is that we create some of these experiments as real experiences which is what we are starting to do physical experiences which actually allow people to experience these new alternative social realities experience actually public conversations around that experience actually some of the system level innovations that are required and actually challenge underpinning for theories in terms of the white papers that are driving some of this story so with that I'm going to stop and come back to the group so I wanted firstly I want to thank everyone for the patience in listening listening to me but I just wanted to set a bit of a scene of where we're going and I recognize this isn't a straightforward conversation in a way but I do think it's an important one in actually going beyond the kind of addressing of symptoms some of the deep structural issues of how we organize it so I maybe I'm going to start by actually just bringing some reflections and some personal reflections in onto the conversation and then hopefully we can end with a kind of more group group group collective interrogation in that format as well. Audrey can I come to you first and just to hear your thoughts and reflections about this because you've been leading some extraordinary work in actually transformation of change using very civically driven processes and I think you're almost you know some of your practices are building what I would say is a radically civics democracy in itself in a state in a new format so maybe I'd love to come to you first to get your reflections. Thank you yeah at the beginning of your sharing you said and I quote may I have the host rights end of quote that and unmute yourself were the kind of two utterances that we hear a lot during those online conversations and I think unmuting ourselves and sharing the rise to host are actually the the core that I got from your presentation because previously it's easy to to imagine an exit right the term made of us in snow crash was invented by people in that novel snow crash who want to wear something to escape from a dystopian reality so exit is easy to imagine indeed it's still in many parts of the world where people exit to cyberspace independence and things like that on the other hand voice unmuting oneself sharing of the host's rights indeed your example illustrates a house a garden a forest and so on sharing host rights to host us I think that's much much more powerful and so I think this is about a pattern that take each and every overly individualistic imagination of the hype curve of technology and then systematically translate that into something that is civics oriented six years ago when I became Taiwan's digital minister I wrote a prayer a poem as my job description to illustrate that you can't take any words of hype and turn it into a work into action and so I'll just it's really short to recite my job description goes like this when we see the internet of things let's make it an internet of beings when we see virtual reality let's make it a shared reality when we see machine learning let's make it collaborative learning when we see user experience let's make it about human experience and whenever we hear that a singularity is near let's always remember the plurality is here now these individual ideas plurality shared reality and so on are not as important as this almost knee jerk reaction that whenever you hear something that overly isolates individuals or over concentrates hosts rights to to imagine states and so on there's a instinctive reaction that said no there's actually a better way to do that and that's indeed what are called to fork the government in Taiwan or to imagine democracy as a form of social technology precisely have done so much so that when people find there's anything wrong with our counter epidemic measures or counter info them measures and so on the knee jerk reaction is now not to demonstrate to protest but demonstrate by building a proof of concept because people know quite reliably that they're better ideas of mass distribution contact tracing or anything really will become nationwide implementations if it's based on open standard within like 24 hours it's as quickly as that just pick up your phone call toll-free number and then your small scale 500 people experimentation become the national standard but of course with always the provision that somebody else may forget the next day and the next day so it's about increasing the bandwidth of agency it's about reducing the latency of making of the common sensing common behavior so that's what we have learned in the past couple years and I don't want to go on the nature itself doesn't go on as the other team says I would really like to hear others speak thank you so much Audrey and I think your leadership is one of the stuff has been extraordinary and and the practical leadership is deeply appreciated in that way as well because I think I think one of the first you know in a way you know whilst I think it's easy to be critical of state I think what you've started to do is actually transform the theory of state into being a civic state and its relationship to be able to enable that and I think it opens up a really powerful conversation into that deeper collaboration that part like so thank you first um can I um maybe I can I come to you Nick um I'm going to come slightly in because in a way you've been a really brilliant friend and a really good critical friend as well which I think has made the work better stronger in many formats and in a way you sit at the intersection of many of these conversations in a different way in a different lens in a different capacity it'd be great to hear your thoughts and reflections as a part of that process uh thanks Indy um and thanks for this uh chance to share some thoughts on this really fascinating kind of space you've opened up um I guess um what I find most interesting in this and relevant for the teams I've worked as part of is this idea of a massively undervalued civic space and when I say that I think of really you know as simply as people asking for and on behalf of each other I'm getting on with it basically sorting out problems for and with each other realizing shared ambitions for and with each other working through pain and trauma together finding workarounds together um you know the as this work describes kind of you know individuals collective communities work the work uh that are working within society confronting many multi-layered challenges on a daily basis and um even though this clearly makes up so much of what is beautiful and important about our society is massively relentlessly undervalued in its ways of working and relating in it in in comparison to the ways of working relating to the state and in comparison to the ways of working relating to the market which I'm not diminishing or but but but just pointing to the the like massive over dominance of those ways of kind of thinking and working and relating bringing this into a little bit more practical day-to-day experience and this might end up with me sounding a bit more prosaic than some others but um uh of work within kind of communities um and sharing a little reflection on some of that work and and how this project has helped kind of file a lens for that with by the way the very important subheading to that work of the last kind of 20-25 years um as a as a white middle-class man with a certain education I have experienced yes of being very frustrated by the lack of potential to kind of operate within that civic space but of also being massively overvalued in the role I can play and in my contribution which I come back to and which is important to what we're talking about here um so so I just a little example of that work so I've been part of lots lots of teams that have tried to help shift local food systems again as this conversation is highlighted um the importance of um trying to drive them towards being more sustainable more equitable healthier and this is obviously more important than ever for lots of reasons and you know we're looking ahead to a year of massively increasing increasing food prices which will push many more households into poverty on top of so many other squeezes on household finances we've also just seen a year or two years in which a lot of national and international infrastructure around food has broken down and we've relied on and needed our local food systems and they've sometimes been there and sometimes it's just been completely bled dry and so ultimately in all of that work wanting to inhabit this civic space but continually being pulled back into that kind of state or market driven mindset or ways of working so what does that feel like what's the actual kind of experience of that and again as someone who's had enormous amount of passes and overvaluing within that but still seeking to be collaborative and collective but basically being pushed into being competitive and independent you know competing for providing services to government as a single actor or competing in a marketplace wanting to pursue kind of long-term intentions but forced into short-termism nearly impossible to get support for longer-term goals within like very narrow political cycles or beyond the kind of immediate expectations of commercial investment wanting to be working mutually and equitably towards shared goals but being pushed into more dissociated inequitable relationships service users service providers produces consumers commissioners providers wanting to just be in amongst the like mess and uncertainty but having to contrive neat deliverable outcomes and outputs despite imagining very different ways of for things to work and seeing and feeling them in the work that goes on in communities all over the place being compelled to come back to intentions that are really about optimizing you know data-driven feedback loops that are just about worshiping what is and and very small iterations of kind of how things work now and and also fairly obviously and again I'm on one side of these and I noticed that very strongly but these fears also contain massive biases and prejudices you know the groups based on race, gender, geography, sexuality, myself the government clearly trusts and mistrust for example investing in and impoverishes represents an exclusive that flows through all of this work and it flows through also every policy every procurement process every contract every investment relationship and we've seen it in food you know we've seen that very very strongly particularly over the last year and the last couple of years and the market even more clearly will always prioritize those wealth and income over those with less unless you try to break those market forces which you know lots of tired social entrepreneurs are trying to do you know you're always going to reflect that and and then there is the final the final point I made that kind of systemic overvaluing and undervaluing as I said I'm someone who's overvalued and we've seen in in a relationship with food you know the government trusted and valued profit maximizing companies to know what food should be provided to families on the verge of starvation and didn't trust families to do that I'm going to trust Paris to make those decisions you know it's an extreme example of who is trusted and who is not by these by these very dominant models so I guess the final thing I guess the what I found so challenging inspiring about this and I really stay quite broad or one of the kind of in one of the underlying questions is that it's opened up a much stronger ambition to find and spend more time in that and I think that that is also partly for me personally you know about closing the kind of professional and personal space as well you know I've been part of an agency for a long time that has charges certain rates and has certain project size minimums all that kind of stuff that is going knowledge that is a bit of part of the problem of this as well if we want to inhabit this space explore different horizons we have to get out of some of those constraints we've created for ourselves and again as a privileged person I've got some control over some of those constraints so yeah I think yeah it's pushed me hard and made me think about how and where I want to be spending more time as someone who calls themselves a designer of social and whatever that means and yeah I've loved being challenged by that sorry Indy you're muted. There's a classic moment this thank you Nick for that for that reflection really appreciate it I think there's a few things that you brought up but I think you know there's many things actually but a few that really I'd love to pick up on one is in a way to kind of and this is where it becomes slightly difficult but in a way we are constantly instrumentalised to address the symptoms and actually because the symptoms have everyday politics to them and they have everyday utility but actually the underlying issues the deeper code issues are actually almost exempt from the space of operation so it's very rare and I you know it's very rare to get the time to even think about this stuff or to be able to orchestrate and map some of the stuff out and to build these sort of conversations because actually the instrumentalisation to the action actually is I would say it's almost self-perpetuating you've got a wounding system and you keep patching up the wounds but you don't go for the underlying issues which are actually driving some of these things that are much more structural that level and I think that does create this what I would say is the kind of the service orientation of the civic of civic society as opposed to almost a generative base for new civilisations which I think is one of the things that I think you know is open to question in a deep sense thank you Nick I'd love to Dan I'd love to come to you I know this conversation is outside your comfort space in a way when we discussed it but I really wanted to have you here because I think you bring a really important perspective in this conversation and it's really important that you're here in this in this dilemma that we I think we're putting forth and I would love to hear your thoughts in terms of how this relates to your world as it's materialising No thanks Indy I think you know you could see me as a skeptic having been involved in politics and policy into previous lives too much and struggling to do what one could you know I was working as an advisor for the for the Labour government you know trying to do what you can within the constraints of electoral politics of all crises financial constraints etc etc etc so but I think your the basic point Indy that that you're sort of making in the sense is we need very very big system change it's kind of what you're talking about and I think doing that analysis thinking about it is really important and I think what you just said actually Indy as well is that we don't think enough about that and that does constrain the sort of mindset that we have I mean it's been interesting you know at MPC you know we in our sort of lot of consultancy work we've done a lot of think tank work that system change has come much more to the fore a lot of funders philanthropists being interested in system change and charities and so forth because partly because they realise otherwise they're just dealing with the symptoms and they want to move upstream and work out why these symptoms are occurring and some of them will be some of the things you've mentioned Indy I mean I do think though I guess I you know when you do look at systems and what's going wrong and why it's producing those outcomes I think there's there's often a lot of blockages and there's a lot of places where things are not working and some of those are caused by the state but some of them are not and some of them can be released by the state and some of them can't so I guess my sort of take on all of this is I'm definitely a bit less hostile to the state than perhaps others are I think it's important I think if I look at for instance the social sector charities and community groups and all the rest of it you know I do share you know I'm a obviously fantastic fan of it it's it's brilliant and it's going to be absolutely necessary to playing its role for us to be a good society any society needs that kind of thing for the good work it does the social capital it creates the pluralist voice it creates but we're going to need it firing all cylinders if we're going to tackle things like inequality and climate change and so forth but you know it does have and I think some of the things others have talked about you know that worries me particularly given you know I'm a sort of centre left kind of person that it's it's unequal it kind of you know if you'd like to even where the sector organises within the UK at least you know you get more charities in more prosperous places by by definition it happens where it happens not necessarily where it's needed etc etc and so for me you do need the state and therefore what I get more interested in thinking about this whole agenda is in a way how can we make the state be that in the national state or the local state think very differently about civic society and how to embed it and I'm perhaps too optimistic that there's a number of changes that one could make for instance the way in the UK that white people were Westminster work which would put the whole of civic society far more on its agenda I mean some of them are slightly you might say they're kind of trivial but I think if you did lots of them you know cabinet minister that had this in their title whether they wrote a poem or not is another matter but I thought that very interesting I rather enjoyed that you know requirements for them to to think through whenever they've got a kind of policy objective whether whether a sort of state engineer top-down approach which is what we usually get in the UK is the right way or whether you couldn't harness embrace talk to civic society and achieve the same thing in a much better and sort of inclusive way all sorts of things like that there's a whole number I've written about this over the years and and I I'm optimistic that you could get a change in the way that the state thought about civic society and then and then it would it would behave in different ways and I think that would be a very big system change I think you're seeing a bit more of it in the UK and I don't know if it happens but I think it does happen in other countries in in more sort of devolved areas within the UK I've been quite I've always been a fan of the directly elected mayors because I feel that they tend to feel that they are the representative of the whole community that elected them whereas the traditional way we have things in Britain is that we have the leader of the council who tends to see themselves as the defender of the council services whether they're provided directly or they're outsourced whereas when you're the elected mayor they they they look at the whole area let's say greater Manchester the mayor there you know what have we got what are the assets it's the private sector it's the public centre it's civic society you know how do we work and get them all together how do we all work together how do we get the relationships right all that kind of thing so so I that's what I do at the moment I mean I think some of the other you know ideas we played about I like the idea indeed that about how can we experiment with some of these things although again there's a kind of you know long time policy person the number of sort of whatever you call them experiments pilots trials whatever that sort of showed something or other and then nobody ever managed to scale and that's partly because the nature of these things often is about relationships which are uh place and time specific and then it gets it very hard to to broaden them and widen them so in a sense I think we have to be careful on our experiments so what what are we trying to do we're not trying to find something that sort of we can then replicate pick up and sort of get somebody to fund have it everywhere but we're trying to get across to people there is a different way of thinking about the world a different way about how we relate to each other and those experiments are very valuable how we then get them into the mainstream of thinking I think is it's difficult because I mean all of us uh we probably you know might have different takes but we probably kind of all agree broadly with this meanwhile the rest of society is getting on with with their lives worrying about cost of living crisis and persuading them at the minute that the reason that's all happening is is something uh due to the nature of the way society works coming out of the financial crash um which I was poking in Downing Street at that time afterwards it was great hopes that the public in all countries would think we've got a rotten system how could it produce something like this surely we've got to question the the sort of version of capitalism we've got and a lot of things that went wrong and it didn't really last to be honest and it didn't really last in a lot of countries and in a sense the the reaction we got rather than a kind of switch to that kind of thing and maybe some of the agendas you've been talking about in the we went to populism which is a kind of frightening thing and then and then from other countries you know we've we've got sort of Russia on the wall past China being pretty unpleasant it didn't really change worldview so I think I think it's difficult but I do think there's things we can do I'm optimistic um if a bit less utopian than perhaps some of the others uh here I appreciate that and I think your point about the this isn't this doesn't need to be an anti-state agenda I think as Audrey has beautifully shown I think there is a conversation about civic state in a really deep sense which does shift power I I do think devolution is a this is kind of 19th century response to the complexity problem I don't think it really generates the it just devolves power to another set of people who then think it's their remit uh so I think there's a really deeper question to be had about whether the evolution is it feels so like the 20th century response or 19th century response what is a heron complexity complex problem where there isn't a monolithic single of act but I think it's it's a path in the better direction in that format so I really appreciate that um Cassie can I come to you next um I suppose you've been operating both as a funder and and a kind of changemaker in this space for a while a long while significant while in driving this and you've created some really powerful spaces for these sort of exploration through through the roles that you've held and maybe just a bit of reflection from from a funder perspective or and the politics of funding maybe the perspective of being able to actually support this deeper review but that's I you know I would suggest this is necessary how do you how do you think about this thanks Indy when my notes don't correspond with your question so I might answer it a bit and we'll say my few bullet points um I mean the first as you were talking and presenting I suppose the first thing that I just sort of wanted to say to whoever was listening out in the audience um and might go on to watch this is to like not turn away I think we can hear some of this language or see some of these beautiful diagrams but what do they really mean or you know find some of it you know people Indy we've talked about this people might sometimes find the work that dark matter labs is doing is impenetrable and I suppose the first thing that I would ask people to do is is you know want to on a harrow ways phrases of like stay with the trouble like don't turn away this isn't going away this is complex it is hard the scale of change the depth of change the shifts that we need to make are enormous and if we don't stay in conversation like this or have these conversations we are never going to be able to really affect the kind of change we need to and so I suppose that would be one of my big reflections just in in the funding world now of course not every funder and you know I'm a huge fan of Esme, Fairbent and Caroline so there are funders that are asking big questions and doing deep work but generally that wasn't a conversation it was easy to have to be fair I guess I started working in funding only a year before the pandemic and I think in a pandemic it was really hard for anyone to have some of these kind of conversations so I also want to acknowledge that but I I do feel like this kind of yeah this engagement with depth and complexity is not common and that's not just in funding I mean I think that's just in in the world so I think that's a huge like like that's a huge need and I also think that yeah you know you talk about propositioning and Dan you've just touched on experimenting and I think we don't know how to fund well that kind of more experimental space in me core at the weekend talked about systemic and systemic experiments and you know that that idea of propositioning bringing to life what else might be possible something that feels more speculative that we don't yet know what it's going to look like or how we're going to do it and it needs a space of real open inquiry and ability to sit with uncertainty and all of those things I mean that is just so uncommon in most funding practice and and yeah I and even right now I feel we are in this real state of impasse mostly if I'm being generous because people just don't know what to do you know and I don't I don't know what to do you know it's not like any of us really know what to do but some of us will feel more able to discover what to do by experimenting not by theorizing not by just talking to Whitehall not by you know just doing what we did before because that feels safe and familiar some of us are more comfortable with trying new things out and that we need more funding that is willing to resource that and I guess yeah two other things that the work makes me think of I suppose I for me so much of this comes down to just this we have a long way to go in certainly in the west of that recognizing our interdependence and that's such a fundamental flaw in how we all sit in our world views like that that real recognition that what we do does impact others and then you know that we we are nature like that just isn't something we we feel deep down for many of us and I don't think it's how people fund often either so and I don't know how to create that shift but it's quite deep and profound and I think we're far away from that even in even in a pandemic which I had hoped would make that realization more obvious and then I suppose the last thing is I I do worry and Indy we've talked about this too that in the UK there is lots of people now talking about funding locally in place-based funding and it's all about communities and local communities and that's really important and I'm a big fan of that work but I worry that we have that we have lost a sense of ourselves there's also global citizens and that kind of the planetary level and again people want to disengage with that as a concept because it's too big and what does it really mean and how do we you know but that this yeah like a lot of nation states and this was from Jane Engel in a conversation with her the other day she really reminded me that nation states are kind of they're not serving us they're not going to serve the planet it was with some of what we what we face so I also worry that in the UK we have have a real void of that conversation at the moment because it's so focused on levelling up in local communities yeah thank you I really appreciate that Cassie and thank you for kind of taking that overview of that and and yeah at many many levels I think that this is a kind of as you rightly say is a fundamental question and our relationship with nature is coded into our institutions it's coded into our our theory of money it's coded into our theory of contracts it manifests that that problematic relationship manifests in everything and and you're right that some of these things require deeper structural reforms Peter I'm going to come to you next if that's okay largely because I think also in a way the work that you do collective intelligence collective collective intelligence in sort of with a machine and human systems level opens up a question about a different the body of the who collective intelligence is a function of collective and they're not necessarily bounded and it's fundamentally I would argue is a civic good it's a good that sits outside individual discrete value and it's I would argue is emblematic perhaps of actually even our theory of intelligence there is actually a thing as individual intelligence we sit in collectivism of these things and I'd love to see hear your reflections on both the technology capability sides of this new parkways that you're opening up and how they reflect back in into a new way of seeing from this stuff and obviously general reflections more than one like Cassie I'm gonna I'm gonna do a spin and I'm gonna get back to my notes of what I really want to say and then I try to answer that question too but I think I think also to dance point earlier when I read the report I was like how do you get here is it like slow incremental change or is it the revolution to get to the division in the paper and I think that is kind of a question of like what's the pace of change and how do we get there and I think the first thing for me was in your presentation you talked about the old pathways and as someone who spent a lot of time diving into lots of the tools the shoots of the emerging futures that you talk about almost and I don't want to sound too negative here but I also think we have a real kind of role as researchers as critical friends as creators of tools as funders of them to make sure that they don't replicate the old and how they're creating the new and I think we all there's a case that in the Wikipedia which is a good example right of like in one way it's an amazing example of commons we also all know all the issues there are around inequality misinformation kind of basically it's people like me creating stuff that's a lot of people like me on Wikipedia right and if you're kind of if you're being kind of very very very kind of binary about the and I think that is that is the first problem which is if we want to create all these emerging infrastructures for the collect intelligence future civics let's make sure we do it right and not replicate inequalities of the old and I don't think that comes into being had nearly enough neither within the funding community or within kind of the civ tech or the commons community it's something to be kind of shy away from because it's not the beautiful story of the future that we want to tell I am one of the people who tell that story sometimes too but I think you just really need to recognize that which things are getting me to to the second point I think again you mentioned region network in there's another example of how we can create these whole new systems but again you know I think within that we also need to think about kind of the technology which is amazing and which would be smart but what are the fundamental values that underpin that system what do you want to achieve with them so again as a fan of region worth saying you know here you know they sold what is it a hundred thousand soil credits to Microsoft right so Microsoft can kind of hit their 2030 targets for becoming carbon negative but that doesn't mean that then Microsoft just keeps flying business class and have really you know carbon intensive service and a failing kind of net serial business model for the planet so you know that's like are we just kind of saying we're just recreating stuff at the edge of the system but it's actually kind of still not fixing the kind of the core roots to fundamental issues that we're looking at and I think we need to have those discussions as critical friends I can't make a thing for you know so it's also hard for me to criticize the people who do create these tools but I do feel like that this comes in need to have so we don't oversell the problems of the future before we kind of fix some of the fundamentals this gets me to my kind of third point and I think that relates to the general time we think about CI a lot of CI is actually not particularly good CI because it is it is a lot of people who are very similar and it becomes quite multicultural I guess but on the third point and this is where I kind of come back to where I'm from in Denmark so when I was reading the Freehouse example it made me think of you know a concert from Denmark from the 1930s which is very popular around Copenhagen called Endingsbully or cooperative housing right where you know you buy a share in a typically a sixth flat in a housing association and one while you own that share you have access to use it you join the governance of the of the building you can just know what to do about it they won't even leave you sell your share and someone takes over so you don't have the kind of the mass speculation that you get in the UK it's not as radical as the Freehouse but for me it's like it's a try and test of the example that in many ways works to kind of address some of those issues around the housing market and speculation and price and I guess sometimes when we think about kind of the radical like is the radical actually inventing new shiny things we're just looking around the world and saying maybe there's just a completely different policy and housing and ownership that could work to fix the same issue and again as someone who often kind of talks about the shiny things I also sometimes would want to remind myself that there are things that work fantastically well across the world that's been working for decades that we should just replicate if you sit in the stage you'd probably look at the NHS and say the same thing so I think I think it's really really important to kind of remember those those things and that also when we talk about there's a this point in the report around digital democracy which of course with my intelligence hat this really really goes to my heart and you know Audrey you've been many cases about the work that you do and it's kind of there's a kind of gold star in terms of the field but there I think often we so this year citizen assembly is our invoke it's a great example but I think for me it's about understanding particularly for local authorities for cities like what is the plethora of tools and methods that you can use to shift decision making and engaging with communities to kind of to empower communities and shift on that power over spending and decision making away from local authorities you know and we know things like participant budgeting has been in place for decades across the world there's lots of evidence that it works yet local authorities in the UK seem quite reluctant to do it but across the even across Europe we see lots of examples that's working really well so I guess it's the point about the radical where I'm like I really want to get all the basics right first and then we can kind of use that as a foundation to get towards the radical I hope that kind of so that's kind of answering the first question I think the second part around kind of the relationship between AI I actually might part there for the questions because I really want to make sure I lose faith of the other speakers that is that okay indeed because otherwise totally no I really appreciate it I think Peter you bring up some important points there I mean the co-operatives is a really good example right so the UK had lots of co-optive housing and they ended up being sold after first generation there has been lots of co-optive housing being sold for vast amounts of money I know people who did that and we know the co-optive housing movement has struggled also now in Denmark and so there's a really interesting question about what does the second generation model look like community land trusts still rely on actually land being subsidized in some folk fashion so turning what is the kind of a nice idea into a real market societal turn to open up some really structural questions in that format and also I think the wider point that you're making which I think is really critical is is it is it a revolutionary evolution kind of conversation as well I think it's really important the question I would say is that we're seeing some of the evolution happening all the time right now whether it's rivers or other things so we're starting to see different frameworks opening up and and some of the deeper questions on the construction of that becomes really critical because I think I wonder whether we'll ever fix the present and then go back to solve the deep code questions and I wonder whether that's the trap of the present in a way so is actually these are structural questions but I really appreciate that thank you very much Peter Caroline I'm going to come to you finally because I think you've been an extraordinary leader in this space and well it's true but it's true so sometimes worth acknowledging you've been an extraordinary leader in this space and you've created vast amounts of space with great humility around this and being driving some of this conversation so I would love to hear hear your reflections so um Nick I'm going to be uh I'm going to be uber prosaic here and uber practical um and um I'm quite old actually I've been knocking around for quite some time and um and you know I I look at sometimes a state of the world and um it gets very depressing and very hopeless because of course as you everybody here agrees we you know we need a fundamental structural transition within a generation okay this this needs to happen like within a generation um and um it needs to look at I believe um fundamental norms behaviors and expectations because at the at the end of all of this this is about the relationship of people with people and with nature and um and with the systems that exist and you know sometimes that that idea that things that we that generational shift um it seems impossible that we can do this in a generation but I want to tell a very a very simple personal story um my second child Susie she's 23 years old and uh when she was born she ended up by being born um in the hallway at my home um because um I didn't have a mobile phone nobody had a mobile phone we didn't have the internet and uh we she managed to be born by ambulance and my husband completely missed the whole thing um but in thinking about this it struck me that there was a point in time where the combination of the mobile phone and the internet started a global quiet revolution that has completely transformed every single aspect of our life so at the moment um you know it has transformed it started off by transforming the way we communicate but now you know it now it it has fundamentally changed us so 30 years ago the idea that you would buy food online that you haven't touched and haven't seen um was like extraordinary like people would say there's never going to happen but now everything we do our banking our consumption our entertainment um our approach to privacy and data it is totally separate and that has happened in 23 years so for me and whilst like there's lots of problems with it it does show that there are ways in which fundamental fundamental transformation or shifts can happen within a generation so um so I you know I that's one of the things that I through Esme we keep on funding some of these ideas and yes they may not come too much sometimes Dan you're right you know they they flourish away and then they get forgotten about but there will be something I believe in all of this that you know it that will absolutely turn the tide and will create the equivalent of a very quiet movement that that that will fundamentally change the norms um the behaviors and expectations and the way I think about it is that in some ways the mobile phone and the internet were a bit like a Trojan horse the expectation wasn't there wasn't grand plan of where it was going to go um and I sometimes you know and I'm a great believer in tactics and trying to get to where we need to go and I was sort of thinking about what what's the equivalent here of our Trojan horse what's the thing that we can um that is very tangible very human very understandable that impacts everybody's day to day life um and for me it would be some something like plastic so plastic you think about plastic it touches on the uh you know it's the petroleum derivative touches on oil touches on carbon it touches on pollution it touches on waste it touches on food it touches on farming on you know how we buy things um on packaging and it like it seems to me that it's not just it's not it it's not systemic but it could be it could be that Trojan horse that if we all if we all focused on one or two things um we might end up by finding that Trojan horse that could fundamentally alter the way people think and behave because I think if unless you know 23 years ago no one had a mobile phone right now that 91 percent of the population of the world has one and and there are 7.26 billion of them and that's in 23 years so I'm hopeful I have to be hopeful but I'm also I like to be really pragmatic and tactical about these things so um that's why at Esme we do believe in testing and piloting these things that may not that may not succeed but they could be the seed of something that will be completely transformative thank you Caroline no but I think you you bring it you you you write you say with a mobile phone the scale of the transformation that's possible one of the Trojan horses of tomorrow and whether it's our food system or a plastic system or whether it's these things are going to be transformed or whether it's even even trees something something as simple as that in terms of our relationship with our ecological systems are going to be in those Trojan horses brilliant we are running out of time and I really want to be respectful of every one's time but what I would love the speakers to do if you can is have a look at the questions that Gerd and Gerd then has kindly put up on this and I'm going to come to each one of you for brief reflections on the questions you could pick whichever question you like that you want to chat to um and say look I'd love to address this question in that way would that be okay if we can just just to be tight with everyone I really you're so generous in your time I'll come I'll come through that way um I'm going to slightly play around with the order this time um Cassie could I come to you first please as as any of the questions you like and any other general reflection you want to make but if we can just be piffy and brief um okay that there's someone that's talking about um people are stuck with left and right and willingness to explore something new I mean I I don't have an answer to that other than my favorite word that I use every day about 10 times is can we please appreciate plurality like there is never one way it's never the but you know binary thinking whether that's political parties gender whatever it might be is just a really unhelpful way of viewing the world thank you Cassie Dan can I come to you next please thanks Cindy actually kind of picking up what Caroline said I mean one of the interesting things I mean obviously her mobile phone example's terrific one and the fact you could now have a mobile phone and perhaps not give birth in that difficult way is terrific but in general the way the internet social media news media and everything the way it's gone hasn't created what some people hoped was you know like communities sort of in power and all the rest of it if anything it's got society a bit more top down I'm going to argue it's it's easy to control so I guess one of the questions is is how if the answer to this stop to the system change to some extent it can be certain tech breakthroughs or whatever it is how do we make sure that they deliver in the kind of the spirit of what you've been talking about indeed I think that's a big issue because tech is not neutral it's usually developed on the basis of the market and the effects are not always what we'd have wanted oh that's a brilliant segue to straight to Audrey I think so I mute myself right so I think that the meeting that I just had before this one was our annual presidential hackathon meeting for context this is when we crowdsour solutions to any of the 169 SDG targets and any small skill experiments are quadratically voted it's a new voting system into five champion teams after three months of incubation and they get trophy which is a micro projector with Dr. Tsai Ing-Wen President's image giving the trophy to you in the recording so it's a self-describing very meta trophy what this trophy does is that it guarantees you the regulatory the personnel and the fiscal support for your idea to be taken from a small town into the countrywide deployment within the next fiscal year so we give out five such promises each year and we got a lot of very good civic infrastructures out of this because if you're a pure private sector vendor you probably cannot mobilize sufficient quadratic votes it has to be a real social innovation for that to happen so we got a lot of very good infrastructure and now coming back to the question I think and this is important because the question asks and I quote I wonder whether the real issues are not decentralized decision making because we know how to crowdsource them but accountabilities and how does mutual accountable ledger systems work and and I think this is really the crux of this question because without mutual accountability across sectors there's no way for the career civil servants to buy the system because they care about the auditory so to speak of who exactly said that or contributed that and so on and that's actually the the root of the open source revolution is based on decentralized version control system that can pinpoint each and every letter to who contributed that and resulted in which change and so on so I think there's a real synergy there and the kind of decision we made in the previous meeting about presidential hackathon is that we need to separate that into two tracks one focusing on things that could be delivered in the next fiscal year and the second on the things that could only be delivered 10 fiscal years from now so a longer horizon but it will share the same speculative design routes it will share the same quadratic votes and ideas and things like that it will go make the funding go to the artists the designers the poets and so on that creates immersive felt physical experiences based on things that people widely agree is should be made into a counterwide plan the next year but we couldn't because it will have to wait for some sort of combination of technology to happen 10 years from now and that will then inform our research agenda for our national funded research so basically we move first in the past six years the experiment was quite successful in moving jury style decision making from the decisional stage into the planning stage crowdsourced agenda setting and now what we're doing is to move it even more further to the beginning the radical right with not a l but with l e was the radical the seating stage of the the research community and as the most research community wants from say 6g or whatever new defining some people say 6g enables co-presence which is the next mobile internet we want it to be steered toward the kind of physical experiences that the radical civics want to inspire people including researchers to feel instead of just extrapolating on the 5g vision thank you so much i'm so much in there honestly i'm going to have to listen to that recording twice what would you thank you um pizza can i come to you next please i rather have five minutes more of audio talking than listen to myself but um that's okay um i think there was a question in that round uh do we need new agencies so do we go with the existing ones um i i think we should try and reform my existing institutions first i think kind of creating a new a new separate entity would just create too much noise or do as a great example of how you can do that um and just for reference for example nesta's currently working with you in dp on embedding intelligence as a method within the extended labs and so it's there you can do it it's hard but you can embed some of these methods and approaches in in how existing institutions do work thank you so much uh mick could i come to you mick yes thanks indy i'll be quick so i guess to try and basically address two questions what how might we create the fundamental mind shift away from funding outcomes and specific deliverables to funding experimental spaces and ideas and then the other question uh i wonder if we really choose not to centralize decision-making but accountability and who takes them to link those two i would say that the the answer to the first one is kind of the second one which is around grant funding i guess i would say that probably and most of the time the wrong people are making the decisions they're a very very long way away from the communities or the experiments or even the ways of working of that are being proposed and and are really just in the job which i'm kind of risk mitigation a lot of the time um and the accountability is built into grant funding are really messed up and with you can have an accountability to this kind of distant grant funder rather than accountability to those you're working within alongside in pursuit of change or the people you're working for and on behalf of in pursuit of change so you you don't have really any accountability to those who share your ambitions or you're working with so um like via that kind of grant funding relationship and those outcomes and outputs so um so yeah i think yeah i think that the grant funding is actually you and again i'm proposed a kind of two-day workshop i would agree and say and one of them could be on grant funding because it is not beholden to kind of state-based deliverables or market-based expectations and yet it gravitates towards both of those models a bit too readily but it is precious resource which could be pouring more kind of readily into this civic space in the experiments that we're describing and these ways of working. Thank you Nick, no problem. Yeah i just wanted to come back with Dan because the example i gave wasn't because i believe technology is a solution or it's to show how fundamental norms and behaviours and expectations globally can be changed within a generation and i would always argue that this kind of change is can never be made without it really resonating with people's everyday lives um it has to be something that they value everybody values so uh and mrs smith in taunton would be listening to this conversation and saying i have no idea what you're talking about you know this does not this does not resonate with me in my personal life so that that's why i was coming trying to come up with something very tangible which has captured 91 percent of the global population within a generation and has fundamentally changed commerce public services everything and i do think we there is something here about beginning to adapt this into something that the everyday person can relate to in their everyday lives i think that's absolutely brilliant because i totally agree unless we can make these kind of abstract theories practical in everyday experiences and i think it's the every day which is problematic and i think unless we realize the our everyday lives are right at the problem size it becomes it's a real challenge so thank you i really firstly want to thank the speakers you've been incredibly generous and you've been incredibly contributed and i know audrey thank you for your time zone you've stayed up and to contribute it's always a pleasure and i think you are leading practice which will infect the worlds and i want to recognize that and i think it's a very powerful piece of perfection and like to everyone here i mean nick thank you genuinely for your leadership and and being a really good friend in this process as well and pizza as always for even with the work we did with civic ai and everything else i think just this side of conversations of new values that they're managing really really powerful dan thank you i really appreciate you coming to a space like this as well and actually contributing because i think it's important that we bridge and we hear different perspectives and we work across them and i genuinely mean that thank you for coming here it's really critical um kassie again similarly i say that you've been a really big supporter and for taking the risks to make some of these things happen i just want to acknowledge them as part of that process so um the final point i would like to just add is that i would like to say a big thank you to fang who actually led this project and actually led the research and did a lot to the work so i think it's really important to acknowledge that and also some of the members of members of dm and shift which were part of supporting this so i really want to thank you all and my sincere apologies for running over time to all of you as well so that's the final thing i do want to say thank you and thank you for everyone that's listening and so many great questions join the discord community there is a community and there is a download download or you can download all the documentation as you need and we will hope to carry this conversation forward genuinely so thank you thank you thank you very much hey live line hi hi thanks