 Hi everyone. Just a quick note on the recording. No one can see you. I think only the panelists have been seen. If you ask a question, the audience's Q&A, your voice will be reported, but not your face. So just a little intro there. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Matthew Victor. I am one of the co-founders and co-leads of the Maple Project and Massachusetts platform for legislative engagement. I'm an attorney, a corporate practice, a Boston firm, a former technology consultant and a democracy policy analyst. Today we're gathered. Thank you for sharing your time and lunch with us to talk about the political energy that we all have and the infrastructures that are built to channel that energy. Where does it go and can those spaces online be designed better to allow us to channel our energy for productive improvements for our communities that we touch? So with that, I want to, we have a little bit of a slide deck here and a demo of the Maple platform, which is actually live. It launched this week. So it's an exciting week for us and we'll be talking about state and local politics, I think, primarily. So on that note, we don't have to do a show of hands here, but I encourage you to think to yourself whether you know who your federal representatives are in Congress and the Senate and whether you know who your state rep and senators are. And also think about whether you shared something on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram about politics, about your political feelings, and then whether you submitted testimony formally to the legislature in our state or if you communicated with your legislator formally somehow. And I think that little thought exercise illustrates some of the dynamics that we'll be talking about today. And I'll jump into a quick demo of the Maple platform. But first I want to call out the Maple developers. So the Maple platform has been built over the last two years by an entirely volunteer group of developers and project managers and marketers. Over 40 people have shipped code to the Maple platform. That doesn't count our project managers, designers, and so there's been thousands of hours of entirely volunteer time put into this. And I'm really indebted to that group, especially because I can't code myself. So really need their help. The Maple mission is to make it easy for anyone to view and submit testimony to the Massachusetts legislature about the bills that will shape our future. And a quick note about Massachusetts is that our state does not publish public testimony and our legislature has exempted itself from public records laws, FOIA requests. So all together it can be difficult at times to understand who our legislators are listening to when they make decisions. Our goals at Maple are to create a public archive of legislative testimony to standardize and demystify the testimony process so that people understand how they can make their voices heard and to foster an online space centered around learning and sharing about pending legislation. So with that I'll hop into a quick demo. This is our little home page. The action starts on our browse bills page. So we've scraped the Massachusetts, the legislature's website and populated with really the exact information that they've got, but a very different interface. So we have all the bills here. We have tools that allow you to sort by different criteria so you can find the bills that are interesting to you. You can search, you can filter by committee and cosponsor and find things that are interesting to you. Every bill has its own page and you can see the testimony that individuals and organizations have shared. So this is a testimony that I've posted recently. Each organization and individual has the option of creating a profile as well so that people can see the testimonies that you posted. That's the basics. There's some more features that we're working on but that is the basics of the platform. We do have this little, I'm sure, sorry, much better. We have this roadmap for features that we're planning on rolling out over the next year. So we're really excited about the ability to follow organizations and follow bills to add a little sort of social aspect to the ecosystem that we're building so you can get notified when people that you care about or organizations that you care about, their testimony or when a bill is moved to the legislative process and a hearing is scheduled. So we're going to have sort of email notifications and a news feed. We're working on translations, adding lobbying disclosures and a whole bunch of other things. And finally, this slide is about why people is different from traditional social media because we are non-profit. We don't face a lot of the incentives to make money that for-profit social media institutions face so we can make different design decisions. So we don't have comment sections below testimony because they tend to turn into reductive arguments and are good opportunities for trolls to do their troll stuff. We have- we are a public archive so there's limited abilities to edit and delete. We care about sincerity over performance so when we do have the following ability, we won't display following counts or follower accounts to anyone. And because we want to foster shared understanding and common ground, we limit sort of the algorithms and the personalization so that we all see the same things and have that foundation to build better decisions for all of us. So with that, I'll hand the mic off to our moderator and stop sharing. So grateful to have Jennifer Smith here. Jennifer is our moderator today, is our reporter at the Commonwealth Magazine. You can see her work in every publication in the state, it seems, and is the host of two Massachusetts Politics podcasts, The Horse Race and The Codcast. Okay, thank you so much for being here. I'm thrilled to be here to moderate with this excellent group of folks and I am not going to be introducing them. They're going to be introducing themselves. I trust they can do a better job than I can. So why don't we start with Mike D and tell us a little bit about yourself and your interactions with digital democratic spaces. Sure. Mike D and I work for Axios Boston. Axios is of course a national international news organization but over the last few years we've been focusing on city-based newsletters. I co-write the Boston version of that so it's kind of a mix of top headline news down to what to do this weekend and everything in between kind of a magazine style thing. Poverty. I don't like to call it but that's what I do now but for a long, long time I come to the state house in Boston for WGBH news as well as the state house news service prior to that. So I spent about 15 years in that building really just in the trenches covering what these lawmakers do, who calls the shots and what you're saying, who they're talking to and what's influencing the decisions that they make. Prior to that I had a bit of a background and sort of engagement through Berkman Klein and other places, the U.S. Amherst where I studied and places like that. So it's something that I've always been very interested in and any kind of new opportunity to utilize technology to disrupt this age-old system as it is. It's a very outdated system. It's a very understaffed system so any kind of technological advantage that can be brought to it and any transparency that can come along with it is of course a benefit. Danielle Allen. Greetings everybody. Great to see you. I'm Danielle Allen. I'm a professor of clinical philosophy and public policy here at Harvard and director of the Edmund and Lily Samson professors. When folks ask me what I've worked on, my answer is always very simple. It's just democracy, past, present, and future era with no question mark at the end of that. And I come by that commitment super honestly. I'm just from people who have loved and fought for democracy over generations. My granddad helped out one of the first NAACP chapters in Northern Florida in the 40s. That was taking your life in your hands. And my great-grandparents on my mom's side helped fight for women's right to vote in the early 20th century. My great-grandmother ended up as president of the League of Women Voters in Michigan in the 30s. This time with a sort of pocket size and rules of order for running meetings actually from the 30s. So I grew up in a universe of people committed to democracy, a sort of the air and water that we breathe. I kind of took it for granted. That's until the point where I was watching my own generation come up in the world. And my parent generation, everybody sort of more or less moved up. But in my generation, we've experienced what I call the great pulling apart. So here I am with Professor Harvard, tenure professor. That's literally one of the most privileged positions of the entire universe. Like forget Jeff Bezos or whoever else. It's like for freedom of security, like scarcely anything compares. And I have a brother who's a corporate executive, but I have dead cousins. So I'm not in ways I can feel. I have peace about substance use disorder, homicide, things like that. And so at a certain point I started pulling my work in the direction of justice reform to try to sort of pull things back together. So a whole cohort to move forward together and quickly realize that even where we had bipartisan solutions, you couldn't get them through because of governance dysfunction. But since about 2013, I focused above all on the question of democracy, how do we have healthy responsive, inclusive organizations that we can actually deliver for people with regard to the just terrible problems people face. And that means not just right to vote. That is for sure a cornerstone can't do anything without the right to vote. But the right to vote doesn't get you anywhere if you don't have competitive elections. So you've got to focus on the right to run as well. And even that doesn't get you anywhere, if you can't see what your elected officials are doing. There is also a right to see and shape your community. And that's why I'm so excited about Maple, because it is a tool to give the people of Massachusetts the chance to see finally what's actually happening in the state house to participate directly to track it and to make a difference in steering the direction of the comment. And Matt already introduced himself a bit. So Nathan Sanders, why don't you take it? Thank you very much. So I'm Nathan Sanders. I'm one of the volunteers that you saw in that panoply of faces earlier, but I'm going to take off my maple head and speak to you as an environmental justice advocate. That's work I've been doing for about a decade. For me, it started here at Harvard when I was a student. I did a Kennedy School Fellowship at the Massachusetts State House. I worked with two state legislators, Senator Pat Jalen and Repton East Provost on environmental issues. And I was really inspired by that work and by them. I got to see firsthand what it looks like when a constituent comes to a lawmaker and shares a story. And then that sets a policy agenda. It changes the direction of the committee, changes the direction of legislation, and leads to actual impact. And I found that incredibly exciting. So I finished my fellowship and I looked for ways to stay involved in that kind of work. So for about a decade now, I've been working from outside the building as an advocate with great organizations like the Mr. Gruber Warnstein Association, like the Massachusetts Rivers Alliance. One of the things that we've done together is lobby for a bill that would make it law in Massachusetts that when a sewer operator discharges sewage, spills sewage into a river, that they have to tell you about it. And that was not law before. But it is law now. After eight years, we've got this law passed and now that's for a requirement. And that was inspiring to me too. I got to see what it looks like for an advocacy community to mobilize on an issue that's really important to them, what it takes to get people to reach out to their legislators and become part of the conversation, and to see success, to see a law passed. But there were also frustrations in that too. I also got to see what it looks like, how hard it is to get people to mobilize in that way, how hard it is to help them understand how they can have their voice heard in the somewhat arcane process that we have in our state and other states today. And I also got to see what it looks like when you're sort of shadowboxing, when not every side of an issue is on the record and sharing their opinions in a public forum, and you're left trying to make an argument, knowing that other voices are not being exposed to the public and may not be accountable in that way. So in 2020, I came here to Berkman Klein as a fellow and was looking for ways to help advocacy organizations do this kind of work better and more efficiently. Had the great fortune to meet Matt, so worked with our group of amazing volunteers with Code for Boston, our host at Northeastern University, Dan Jackson, New Law Lab, and to create something I hope will be really impactful for all of us, for all of us as citizens, and for all the advocacy groups that are trying to represent our interests. Matt, would you like to add anything about your relationship to digital democracy specifically? Yeah, while at BC Law, where I studied law, became a lawyer, I founded a student group and built a website with sort of the genesis for the Maple Projects, and I think seriously about the online institutions that we all interact with, and I think this is a little funny, but I'm just very online, and I think I sort of bring that perspective of knowing how online communities work and like seeing the potential to do really incredible things, but I think a lot about how I'm on a website that's designed to show cat videos, trying to express my political feelings, and it seems obvious that it's not set up for success. Okay, well, let's get into this with this group of very online people. Danielle, you've written and talked at length about the importance of digital democratic spaces specifically, but also democratic infrastructure in general. So when you're looking at something that's a functional or a dysfunctional example of democratic infrastructure, what are you looking for? Sure. Thanks so much, Jennifer. I should have said in introducing myself, but I also am president of a new organization called Partners in Democracy, and we are working on that holistic picture of healthy democracy that I mentioned, you know, the right to vote, but also the right to run the right to see and shape your community. So we are looking for all three of those things to be true, and it's the case that if we look around Massachusetts, we have seen an incredible erosion of local journalism over the last two decades. We all know this, right? This is one of the huge impacts of social media and digitization and so forth, but there's really significant consequence to that because all of that local journalism was the infrastructure of democracy. If you're running a public meeting and you have to do public notice, you're supposed to post in a local newspaper. It doesn't exist. What do you do? You take our ballot access process. We run caucuses all over the Commonwealth. There's a 1970 law that required public notice for those caucuses. Only about 20% of them currently meet that legal standard, not because of any ill intent on anybody's part, but because there is no infrastructure left for public notice. So in that vacuum, we all collectively have a huge job to do to re-establish infrastructure for actually seeing and shaping our communities. So I take Matt and Nathan to be really important pioneers, but I hope this is just the beginning. So partners in democracy, one of the things we're trying to do is see and help facilitate the growth of several different building blocks with a new infrastructure to support democratic participation and engagement. And so coming at this from the journalistic perspective, the increasingly hollowed out space of local news, though Massachusetts is doing better than most states in terms of coverage, at least in its core areas, how would you kind of run into barriers to or perhaps good examples of legislative engagement in the course of journalism again? Well, unfortunately my mind jumps to the negative side of that equation is that I've seen over the 15 years of uncovering legislature lawmakers who have very little exposure to journalism, not even just political or civic journalism, but just journalists in general. I am very often the first reporter an elected state representative will meet with. And it's, it happened rarely and it became more increasing as the years went on. I will go get coffee with a new rep because I'd like to introduce myself and they'll say, you know what, I don't think anyone covered my race. And they got elected to the state house without a single word being written in their local newspaper because they don't have a local newspaper. We go into, you know, the corporate reasons of bios and shifting and who's getting, you know, which weeklies are going down to business, which daylies are getting all out as a different story. But one thing that doesn't really talk about that much is that we have almost a certain kind of media illiteracy among the lawmakers themselves. And that is has become kind of shocking. They're very good social media, you know, in a way that 15 years ago a lawmaker may not have been that is how they're connecting with a consistent that is how they're getting there in much more direct without the gatekeeper that the media traditionally would play. In Massachusetts on the more positive side, however, we do have a lot of people covering kind of the upper echelons of story on rank and file aren't getting covered. And not at home, not on weekend, but the leadership really is there is when I talked to reporters in other states, sometimes they're if they find it remarkable how much coverage the speaker of the House Senate president, the chairman of ways of means gets, you know, a weekly basis from what's like Commonwealth, the state of new service. And then the rest of us kind of, I'm, you know, as a long time ago, one of those publications kind of that's going as you find out very quickly that is where the decisions are being made. And it's almost an essential ball to a certain extent to get at those leadership positions. We just don't know what is going on. So Matt speaking as someone who's not in academia nor actively practicing journalism, you mentioned what it kind of feels like to try and express yourself politically online. What does it feel like to watch the discussion of what governance looks like online? Does it feel like something you can access or not? Watching the discussion online, the extent that you see politics covered up state politics and local politics covered on on Twitter or Instagram or it seems like people are expressing themselves through infrastructure that's not designed to carry serious civic conversations. They're not designed to get the best out of you. They're designed to extract your attention to keep you online at any means necessary so that naturally lends itself to people acting more extreme to people being less sincere to being self-conscious about who they are and how they express themselves. And I see an opportunity, the expression in the civic tech world is that social media is racing to the bottom of your brainstem trying to get you to stay online if by any means necessary. And there's an opportunity instead to raise to the top of the brainstem or at least the middle and get people to act with compassion and civility and curiosity and like the best things that make us human. And I don't see any interactions that I see. I don't see the best being brought out of people and it's frustrating. So Nathan how are you trying to incorporate these tensions or address these principles in the Mabel platform in a way that might be different from the way that other social media or digital platforms might be affected too? Good question. So let me try to answer that by first thinking about describing what the experience has been traditionally for an advocacy group to interact with the legislature and then what it might look like in a way that could be more supportive of the right policy outcomes. So traditionally the process for submitting testimony for the legislature is that you might have a training in your organization, you're informing your members about what the process is, that involves giving them the email addresses of staffers or committee chairs, giving them like a template of letterhead that they can use to write out their testimony, giving them guidance of course on what your message might be and what you hope that they'll mirror when they share their possible legislature. And then you advise them to send that email, send your testimony in and you caution them that they're never going to hear anything back. That's the end of the process. It goes into a black box. As Matt said there's a exemption of our legislation from public records laws. So even those who may want to know more about what different views were shared with the committee actually don't necessarily have that access. So that's where the process works today. But let me also give you an optimistic vision of what this could look like. I'm thinking even here in Massachusetts there's a very different process for interacting certainly in the environmental space with executive agencies on regulatory comment processes. When you engage with TEP or the Department of Environmental Protection, it looks very different. They may be promulgating a draft regulation or a draft permit. An organization may have comments to add to that. They submit it through process and then they actually get a formal response. Actually the agency will exert and cite specific requests and arguments that came from every organization on all sides of the issue and then they'll publish back their responses to those comments. And that's so helpful as an advocacy organization. You can see where you stand relative to peers, other advocacy groups. You can see who may have different perspectives and learn from those perspectives and often we do have opinions that shift based on what we read about other people's perspectives, positions and needs. And then you have the opportunity to integrate that in your thinking. And I find that so, so valuable and I'm hoping that we can achieve something like that for the legislative process as well, not just the executive. I think a lot of that experience not just on my own but all of our volunteers and the people who have given us feedback has informed how we've designed MAPL. We've tried to make it a space where everyone can come together, share their perspective and have an opportunity for a more bilateral conversation, not just throwing something into the ether. So Danielle, if you're looking at MAPL as a program or just a kind of hypothetical digital space for interaction with the legislature, how would you measure whether or not it's a successful example of digital democratic space? So I mean your question is a great one because it really is tapping into the frustration we all feel right now, right? We feel really good at knowing that things aren't working, either the sort of sense of disappointment that Matt described and what he sees online in his efforts to participate. There are the number of times we see really toxic things happening in the light. So we all have a very well worked out map for the negative, right? How to see it, how to measure it. So we have a job view actually to set standards for what would count as success. But one of the things that's so lovely about the work that make you a sense on that first slide, when Matt was naming a couple of key design principles, right? There are no comments where you're not to have any trolling, sincerity, not performance, and so of course sort of down the middle of that. So those are already things that there are metrics that can be used to start really clarifying are we achieving our goals. The question, of course, is one of engagement, how many people are participating in a universe shaped in this kind of way? And when they participate in it, are they reporting an increased sense of efficacy? The good news is in the civic education space, there's been a lot of work on measures lately, you could actually fold into your work sort of a survey instrument that would let you sort of measure whether or not people are experiencing increased sense of efficacy as a part of this. And I would say that would be a really important indicator for whether or not this is helping to rebuild that infrastructure we need for healthy democracy. And what about as a reporter, what about this or something like it would be an effective tool for you as opposed to sort of siloed space online for people who are already engaged? Yes, certainly the ability to get to the bottom of who was testifying, but even a source building perspective, if your organization, I may not have ever heard of you, but now I know that you have to fight on this very competent arguments or against a piece of legislation, writing about that piece of legislation over that issue in general, I'm going to try to get in touch. That's just more of a self-serving way to get more kind of traditional journalism. But I'm thinking right now I'm going to start linking to Naples links when I write about bill numbers, because there's nothing I hate more than a bill number that isn't either like sort of like either legislative website at very least or something of substance. Naples can be a fine addition to that. But I think also when confronting these lawmakers, let's say there is a thousand pieces who test to only a four one bill and it never gets out of committee. That's just another piece of ammunition where I can say, look, you have half the legislature co-sponsoring this bill. You have session after session of people saying that it's on the agenda and it cannot get out of ways and means, which is one of the more powerful committees. Why not? And they never have answered that. But this will be one more piece of ammunition to say, and there's all this testimony on Naples suggesting that this is incredibly popular. Is that going to change the mind of those lawmakers? Maybe not. Is it going to maybe change the mind of some of their constituents? Hopefully. So that's really the game here is if you're going to ruffle feathers, if you're going to really just ruffle the system, it's going to take new people and people voting against the people who are there now as a leader. But unfortunately, that's where we vote in a lot of ways. So I'm so glad you brought up kind of looking at who's giving this testimony, because one of the things that you both incorporated was the individual and also the organizational aspects of it. So either if you can take this, whoever feels more comfortable with it, how are you thinking about the distance between everyone's screams into the void equally versus there are some voices that might have more of an institutional backing that might be taken more seriously in a way that demands that they be separated out. That's a really good question and something that we struggled with for a long time. It also gets into the problem of identity verification. How do we know that people are who they say they are? If they are impersonating others or if they are out of state or out of country and lying, then that inhibits the ability of people to trust what we put on our website. So that's part of the calculation. That's more directly answer to the question. We believe that organizations hold like a more special place in society. They speak on behalf of more than just one person, a dozen or hundreds or thousands of people. And so they should be noted separately. And so that's why we have a separate section for organization. So people can more readily understand what these groups are saying. It also helps us fight against trolls and misinformation that might exist because the organizations at the very least have a lot more on the line than an individual with a bank account. And we know the organizations are who they are because we check with the Secretary of State and all those records about incorporation. So that's the basics of the thinking there. And what about broadly the kinds of digital spaces that we already existed? Most of them tend to be privately owned. What dangers did that pose that you were thinking of in looking at this as a non-profit organization? And then I'll head over to Danielle about the bigger picture. Sure. Yeah. When we think about our potentially special and privileged roles in non-profit organizations trying to have a different model for engaging people of the legislature, we've taken that responsibility seriously. We've looked for the ways that we can differently contribute than a platform like Twitter. I think Matt touched on some of this earlier. But for me, it's really about resolving this tension between the profit motive and scalability on the one hand and moderation on the other. As Matt was describing on a platform like Twitter or Facebook, they have the potential and they have a capitalistic incentive to serve 100% of the country and maybe 100% of countries really engage everyone on the platform. And that restricts them in some ways in terms of moderation. It means that they need to serve, to not offend people who want to talk about all topics from all jurisdictions. We have a special population that our mission is to serve, which is the residents of Massachusetts to help them have their voice served in the legislative process. And we recognize that moderation is part of how we can do that productively, making sure that it is a safe and civil forum for productive conversation. So the design principles that Matt outlined earlier are part of how we've resolved, how we can provide a different space than you'd find in a social media platform. And I think we're able to do that. We're able to make decisions, for example, about deleting and editing decisions about privileging organizations over other users to have their visibility be representative of communities that they serve in a different way than a for-profit social media platform would. And I hope when we're time we'll find even more ways to differentiate. Well, but just one thing that's been in my head recently on this point is that we have the luxury as civic tech designers to not need to serve profit by any means necessary. I think that the developers and the social media companies have a lot of great ideas that they can't implement because it wouldn't retain attention, because it wouldn't have their users online scrolling for hours and hours and hours. We have the luxury of not having to face that incentive system. And we don't care if you're on maple for hours. In fact, we kind of don't want you to be. I know I'm, you know, there's some things that I care deeply about that I've researched a lot that I think I have the confidence. It's really a confidence thing to share your perspective online permanently. And that's a difficult to ask. And I also know that I have a limited ability. There's only certain things that I know that much about that I should share. People don't want my thoughts on astrophysics. So I'll share what I have and then I'll close my laptop and go to laundry or go, you know, to the park. And that's it. Like that's a luxury that we have as a nonprofit that we can make the decisions that allow you to close your screen. So zooming out a bit into broader digital democratic infrastructures, to what extent does the profit motive make you skeptical of or maybe just give a bit of a side eye to the intentions and the moderation principles of digital platform? Well, there is a huge question to think about the implications of digital platforms for democracy. And the profit motive is one very challenging aspect. I mean, it is not by any chance you mentioned the only challenging aspect. The simple fact of the matter is that the forms of coordination and communication that are now enabled by digitalization have produced sort of new impacts that were unforeseeable. That the basic bare minimum when this country was founded, when the Constitution was designed, one of the premises of the design was that faction would be moderated or filtered by the very fact of geographic dispersal. People would be spread out, they would have to go through representatives to get their views in the public sphere. And that was Madison's argument for how they were going to control the problem of faction. So who would have realized that the invention of Facebook would suddenly start to knock one of the pillars out from underneath the whole design? Now people can coordinate without any problem. People with extreme and factious views can easily find each other and get their views in the public sphere. So that is not caused by the profit motive, right? If that was a student dormant coming up with something not motivated by profit in the first instance. So we have the challenges of the way in which aspects of the capacity enabled by technology fundamentally change the dynamics of institution creation, coordination, etc. That's its own nest of problems. Then with regard to the profit motive, yes, when you have the kind of nest of problems I just described are these public impacts we use of these technologies. And we want to face those public impacts. You have to face them with the public purpose. The face of with a solely profit driven purpose is by definition to go about undermining the public institutions and the public sector. So we need to support efforts to use the technology to deploy the technology for public purpose. That don't depend on profit. So that means yes philanthropy, but it also means honestly that we should really consider public sector investment in digital versions of the kind of infrastructure that we need for democracy. So it is just, you know, it's not that often people sort of think that when you say something shouldn't be for profit, it means there should be no revenue at all, right? We also sort of, you know, use shoe leather and extra time and sort of be unpaid in this work. And like that's not the point at all. Any functional organization or institution has to have a sustainable revenue stream. If that's not pursuing sustainable revenue does not have to be about lining the pockets of an owner in a highly extractive way. So how do we have the sustainable revenue streams for the kinds of digital infrastructure that we need that support people whose work is motivated by public purpose. That's the sort of puzzle that collectively we need to solve. I'd love to pivot over to a thread that's come out so far, which is kind of the engagement who uses this, how often will they use it. So Mike, when you've been using different platforms and of course there's been an evolution over time for journalists when Facebook started becoming a thing and got bigger and bigger and bigger. And then when Twitter became a thing and that was where we spent all of our time always. So how has your approach to using digital platforms as sourcing and also just kind of as a basic pound square news gathering function evolved over time and does Mabel feel like it fits into that or is an expansion? I will answer your second question first. I think Mabel would be parallel to that ecosystem in a way and I'm kind of curious what you guys think about if you want to become kind of the de facto platform of the organizing community. I don't want to say lobbying, but in this case it is lobbying, not capital L lobbying of course. I think over my career as a journalist and from that perspective sourcing is much harder as social media has kind of fracture and everything. It used to be very easy to find sources on Facebook. Now no one's on Facebook. If you don't have their phone number or if they're changing email addresses every few years and every few jobs, I can have people from 10 years ago that I can't get in touch with now but I don't have their number. So the phone number is the only thing that's constant in a lot of ways. So strictly from like a source finding, Rolodex kind of a concept, that's become difficult. It's as people kind of get off of Twitter, now that's happening on Twitter. So it's been deeming sources as much more difficult than it was before. And finding people on Instagram is harder than it ever was on those profiles, et cetera, et cetera. I think from finding out what like the tone of a topic is, how does massive foods that's real about environmental issues X, that is still going to be there on Facebook to a certain extent, the real grassroots level. And it's going to be on other social media. It's going to be on Instagram increasingly on TikTok as TikTok kind of matures if that sticks around. So the things possible, we'll check back in here and see if that's what that is. You can still find out what people are talking about, but it is increasingly more difficult to find those people who are doing it. That makes sense. Well, to Mike's point, where do you see yourselves not just fitting into the digital ecosystem, but also as people move on and off of these other sites? How do you direct people to Maple? What you're thinking about building engagement with this kind of increasingly fractured and in the case of Massachusetts politics on Twitter, windowing sorts of engagement, where does it fit? It's a super interesting question that I think gets to sort of the blurring between politics and social aspects of life. Increasingly over the years watching presidential debates, they're presented in the same way that the Super Bowl is presented at the same narration in graphics. And I can't help but think about online, we're putting our political energies into a social platform. It's a round peg in a square hole. There is some entertainment that we can derive from politics that can exist on Twitter. But if you want to do serious work, you need to go to a place that is designed to carry serious political energy. And I think that communicating that people are going to the wrong place to do this is really important for us. You're trying to cut down a tree with a sock. It's just not going to happen. If you're trying to foster collective capacity to govern and we're going to Twitter, like if we're trying to really see each other and walk in each other's shoes, we're going to a place where there's a video of someone buying expensive shoes and then comments about how would you buy such expensive shoes, all giving money to the shoe buyer to then buy more expensive shoes. That's the ecosystem that is Twitter. And it's just a wholly different mission. Quite literally, their object is very different than ours. And so that's how I see it. Do you have anything you want to add on that one? Sure. I'll just add, we think a lot about how does someone find Maple? How does someone recognize that it's a place where they can make their voice heard? And I think social media, I hope, will be a big part of that. I hope that people will share with the huge networks they are connected to on very successful platforms like Facebook that they have posted testimony in Maple. This is a way that you can add your voice heard. But I hope that's not the only way they're going to find it. I hope that they may click on a link in one of my stories at some point. That would be fantastic. But what we're really focused on is engaging organizations, going back to that grassroots level of communities that are already connected with each other, often in physical spaces in the non-digital world, and making sure that they know Maple is a tool that I hope will be very useful for them for organizing and that they'll choose to share with their members. I gave that example earlier of what it looks like when an advocacy organization trains members to interact with the legislature. And that's a very real example. I'm sure many people in this room have been to read and led a training like that. And I hope that in the near future, a lot of Massachusetts organizations will use Maple as the tool that they share with their members as a way to make it easier for them to accomplish that task of having the voice heard. If I could just throw something out. I made a reference to a guy in a dorm room. Well, Matt was a guy in a dorm room too, inventing something. And he also rightly recognized an appetite. There is an appetite and a hunger for clean, well-curated information. People know they don't have that. And we are currently running deliberative conversations, democracy deliberations around Massachusetts. And that is the highest registering issue over and over again. So there is absolutely an appetite out there for this. And so I do think that the engagement will come. Well, Danielle, how much of that appetite do you think is responsive to some of the things that we've all made reference to, which is the nature of opacity in Massachusetts? It can be a difficult political environment to break in on if you're trying to run for it, let alone trying to get the attention of a representative. So how much of this feels like a Massachusetts problem with a Massachusetts solution? And how much of it feels broader than that? So it is a broader problem, but every state has its own version of the problem. So there are specifics to Massachusetts that we should recognize. And you alluded, in the first instance, to one of the differences. Our news centers are not as bad here as in other states. We do have them. So we're only not bad compared to other states. When you get in the sort of community conversations that we are running, that is over and over again the top thing. We used to have a local paper. We don't have a local paper. So if people feel like they have access to national news, they do feel like they have access to pop leadership coverage. But there's so much more to life and to political decision making, which is an absolute black box. And people register that even here in Massachusetts, where we think we're better off than other places. But in Massachusetts, that is then very much exacerbated by the opacity. So our news does are maybe not quite as bad or opacity is much worse. We are at the bottom for transparency indicators compared to other states. We are at the bottom, literally at the very, very bottom of all the 50 states in terms of the number of contested elections. So to your point, you hope that maybe this information out there will help hold people more to account or help constituents hold office holders more to account. Well, you're going to achieve that. You actually also need contested elections, which we do not have many of in Massachusetts. So that fact of non competitiveness is the exacerbator for us, even though our local news desert situation may not be quite as bad as other states. And I think that leaves us with about 15 minutes for audience questions. I have about 75 more if no one's feeling engaged. But if you have one, raise your hand and we're going to have you project with your inner fear, get energy as loud as can. Go ahead. Hi, thank you so much for speaking to us today. I'm really excited about the maintenance platform and what it means to deliver democracy in Massachusetts. Matt, you mentioned that there's this idea of having the confidence to have your voice heard. And I think a number of the fellows, Danielle, you also mentioned this is around capacity building and training people. I'd love to learn more about how Naples is building citizens capacity to have that confidence to share their story, share their lived experience in a way that resonates with legislators and will actually be taken seriously. So for those online, this is a question about how Naples will help build citizen confidence and capacity to participate in the process. I think that's one of the more like underrated problems that we're trying to tackle. I think about when I, even though I am highly online when I open Twitter, and I have something that I want to say, I still hesitate to do it, even though I know that it's going to be lost in the sauce of Twitter and no one's really going to see it. I still hesitate to do that. And so it's maybe three or four X more intensity trying to do public testimony on Maple where the environment is more serious, where you don't have the limited capacity to edit or delete your testimony. So it is more serious. And it feels like I'm trying to flex a muscle that hasn't been flexed in a long time. And it's something that will take time, I think. Certainly we have lots of resources on our website about what meaningful testimony looks like, how it can be effective and how to draft it. So there's those resources out there, but they can only do so much. And I think that flexing that muscle will require some confidence. And certainly there are some people and organizations who have no limit to the amount of confidence. But for, I think probably the majority, it's going to take some time, and it's going to take the understanding that we need it. We are the sum of the political energy that we put forth. And if we are not using our muscles, then we shouldn't be surprised when our collective capacity and the collective decisions that are made are not what we want. So I think that there are some design choices that we can make to allow people to give them the ability to, okay, you messed up, you posed a testimony on the wrong bill will help you delete it. There's an ability to edit, should you, oh my god, change your mind about something. There's an ability to edit several times to have your testimony evolve as you learn. So that's there, but I do think that it's a problem for people to sort of find their voices. I love this question too about building confidence. I'm thinking of that example I gave earlier of you sending your testimony and you need to be prepared to receive nothing back. I think recognition really matters for building confidence. I hope that Maple can be a way that you can get recognition for your testimony, gives you the opportunity to share with others. You can see what you've said alongside other people and know where you're aligned and maybe learn something new. A lot of organizations try and build that kind of recognition today outside the legislative process. They will follow up with you and say, thank you for submitting this. It really mattered. They'll say a hundred of our members did this and it's really important that you were a part of that, but it shouldn't fall on organized campaigns like this to do that work. I think by having a platform that provides that recognition directly it can help. The other thing that it's important to say here is we have lots of efforts moving in some sense in parallel in Massachusetts to rebuild civic capacity and civic infrastructure. This now presents an opportunity to bring those together. Another really important body of work at the state is around civic education. Massachusetts does lead the nation with regard to the policy paradigm for what we ask of schools for time spent on civic preparedness. 2018, the Department of Elementary, Secondary Education passed new state standards, introducing a year-long civic requirement in grade eight, as well as the legislature passed legislation requiring before the end of grade eight for the end of high school that students participate in a nonpartisan student-led civic action project. For the last five years now, this has been building capacity among educators and young people in the state. Now that April is launched, we can bring these two communities together. Your next meeting is either the Massachusetts Civic Learning Coalition and they've got to get this into the bloodstream for all the work in civic education because a new cohort would come up knowing that this is the place to go and that would totally change the dynamic of participation in the state. Absolutely. Thank you so much. My question was actually exactly about that, knowing civic education work you've done. I'm curious about how targeted MAPL is towards young people and if that's people that you're looking to target, considering that a lot of young people are also highly online, I'm just kind of wondering where you see the use of MAPL coming into life. So the question was on youth engagement and MAPL. Yeah, it's another great question. I think currently you find that a lot of advocates are of an older generation leading these organizations and providing testimony. And the design choices we've made for MAPL, we want to make it easy for people who are not so familiar with technology to use it. We're catering to a large audience, so we had to make some broad decisions but we do plan on sort of integrating with existing social media so you can tweet out your testimony. You can share it on different ways and we have some nice little graphics that frame it pretty well. So we don't shout out our design and UX team. They do amazing work and yeah, I think that we could spend some more time to capture the energy of youth but yeah, integrating with existing social media is probably our primary route. Any other questions back there? Go ahead. How do you see MAPL or outside of MAPL? How would one advocate for making committee votes and vote the House and the Senate public? Other opportunities to advocate for making committee votes public. I think this one might be in Bush. Yeah, oh you're a lawmaker that that's what you want. There's no other way to do it honestly. Leadership seems dead set against that. It's not a popular idea inside the building, meaning the State House. It would take a sea change. It would take transparency at the State House to become a real voting issue and it never is because statewide issues are very rarely ever the issue that people vote for state representative on. So I think there are opportunities when a new speaker takes power to really get the next speaker on the record about their commitment to transparency. That is the time to do it. The how is very, very difficult. It needs to be a groundswell of people saying now is the time. You have the opportunity to do this all of all 200 of you. It is now time to act. I wish I had an answer about how to make that switch for it, but it's going to just have to happen at the right time. If I could follow up on that with Nathan and Matt, how do you think about the balance between kind of the environment of the people using the main platform versus the need for legislative buy-in? Is this something on the advocacy end or more something on the kind of push to change the central dynamics of the legislature end? It's such an important question for us because of course we want Maple to be used by the legislature. We're trying to post testimony that will impact legislation and will be seen and part of how we do that is just by aligning to the existing process. When you post testimony on Maple, it doesn't just go on our site. It also goes through the traditional channels of an email to the right person on the right committee, so we get seen directly whether or not they ever visit the Maple platform. But nonetheless, we want the legislature to embrace this to see it as useful. So we've been thinking a lot and having a lot of conversations with legislators about what features we have today or could build in the future will be useful for them. We know that right now in a lot of committees, it's not easy to get access to a compiled record of testimony even when it's being delivered directly to them. There are technological issues, there are issues of cooperation, interaction between legislators at times, so we hope that there is a role for a public platform like this to make it easier for everybody, including legislators, and we want to be very collaborative and supportive of them in building it. I thought I saw a question back there. Go ahead. Yeah, so we know that social media is typically a pretty horrible place for people who are women, for people who, well, not men generally, for people who are differently abled, for people who come from any sort of minority background, people of color. We also know that politics is often pretty white and male also, and so I'm wondering if you've thought about how you rent inadvertently building upon and reinforcing discriminatory norms and practices that we see in these two spaces that you're pulling together. So that's about how to avoid replicating discriminatory patterns in this social media site as we see others. That's a great question. First of all, we are trying to be as accessible as possible, so one of our priorities in our next rolling out is rolling out translation abilities, so we're doing manual translations of our entire website in the top five languages from Massachusetts to start, and I think battling bringing existing norms into Maple, I think in creating an institution, we're building on top of existing, and so we're trying the best we can to be cognizant of that reality, and by treating everyone in Maple the same, apart from organizations, there's at least a very level playing field, and I think that as we continue to design the algorithms that might personalize to a limited extent certain things, we can be aware of the existing paradigms and how we can blend them to the extent it's possible in our little website. Can I have one thing for that? The first thing I want to do is just validate that that problem, of course, is absolutely true and something we are very concerned about, discrimination, harassment, or representation in our community not being a safe space on Maple, so we're very concerned about it, and this week is a big test for us, it's the launch of our platform, people are going to be starting to use it for the first time, we have built out a code of conduct in moderating principles that we hope could lead to a safe space for everyone who wants this in the testimony, and we know that that may not happen, people will violate that code of conduct, and so we built out administrative features to help us try and manage that, we're starting small of course, so we're hoping that the manual work involved volunteers will make it possible to moderate that space, but we know if we're super successful that would get harder, and moderation is very hard to scale, and one of the reasons that's exciting to be connected with this community at Berkman Klein is that there's so many really smart people thinking about this, people who have experienced within large platforms that have had to deal with this problem before, and so this is something I think to be vulnerable for a second, we would love feedback about, you know, we know we're facing something really hard here, we'd love to connect and have conversations about how we could do this better over time. And one other thing, I think that in the designs that we've used, because we are not racing to use the bottom of the brainstem, we don't have comment sections, people are enforced to go to the bottom of their brainstem, and there's less space for the productive, discriminatory, extreme, outrageous comments and positions, so we hope that by the design there's the limited ability, and our users are incentivized to not use that part of their brains, and also as a platform, as Nathan said with moderation, we have a goal to facilitate productive civil discourse and build capacity to govern, we have our coded conduct, and we're not trying to be the end all, be all for free speech, we're trying to improve the capacity to govern, and we'll moderate accordingly, so things that are unproductive that we see as moderators are unproductive will moderate. And on that topic, what is the balance that you're looking at between kind of resting on the technology certain level of automation, it connects with the legislature's existing website, versus kind of the manpower, people power that it would take to do the moderating, but also respond to their questions, concerns, that sort of thing. It's a careful balance, like I know machine learning and chat GPT is hot in the streets right now, and I think there's, you know, abilities to use that in certain circumstances to summarize bills or to summarize testimonies, you know, if there's a hundred pieces of testimony on a bill, we could use machine learning to summarize and find what everyone agrees on, or what everyone disagrees on, and to sort of eliminate consensus, but to the people power point, there is a need for human decision making for humanity, and sort of going back to Danielle's point about revenue, there will probably need to be some compensation for our moderators for people that contribute their time and effort to the website that will make it run. And so it's probably a fundraising effort on our part to get that happen. We've got time for one more question if anyone has one. Go ahead. Yeah, I think there's recently been a decision by the by the State Supreme Court, which have held the right to be not civil in town meetings. And I wondered whether that might apply to your space. So this is a question about the recent High Court ruling in Massachusetts arguing that disrespectful discourse is also a valid form of participation in the public meeting space and whether that applies to Mabel's infrastructure. It's super interesting, and I feel like there could be like a bunch of arguments about this. We are not a town hall of physically government institutions, so we have the ability to moderate and to prevent that stuff from happening. I think that's actually one of the like maybe one of the important points we've missed here today is that there is for profit digital public spaces, and then there's government spaces, whether it's online or in person, and the government has restrictions from the First Amendment on what they can do. And so they can't curate, they can't moderate the way that social media can. And so there's this need, there's this gap between the lack of ability for government and the incentives of social media, and we're hoping that Mabel can sort of fill that gap. Okay, that was a wonderful last question. Thank you so much. Again, panelists, Mike Dean, Danielle Allen, Nathan Sanders, Matt Victor, and thank you to everyone else for joining us here and online.