 In 2005, Jimmy Wales gave a talk in San Francisco that I attended, and I know it was 2005 because, let me share screen, because he told a story right at the start of his talk. He was laughing at the start of the talk, and he said, I just received a whole flurry of congratulations from journalists and a few other people who were impressed that Wikipedia had such a complete page for Pope Benedict, who had just been named, basically there was a conclave, there was the 2005 people conclave, there was white smoke, came out of the Vatican, and the new pope took the name Benedict the 16th. And he laughs because he says, look, Wikipedia already had a very complete page for everyone of their senior cardinals, maybe even all of the college cardinals, I don't know, but he was like, we already had a page on Ratzinger, all somebody did when they saw white smoke was go there, rename the page, add a paragraph that said, on this date, this cardinal Ratzinger was named Pope, and he took the name Benedict the 16th, and then hit save. And it dawned on me like the light bulb went off in my head, oh right, when a community is constantly curating everything, then the next incremental step is easy. You don't have to reinvent it, you don't have to write a white paper, you don't have to do anything. Some years later, I was learning about legislative process and there's like a 90 day window where they look for comments on legislation, and sometimes they're trying to innovate on group process, but what happens is they commission people to write a white paper about something and let's pretend that the legislation is about land use rights or water rights. So somebody, some expert goes and writes a new paper and I'm like, if you've got water rights in something like Wikipedia or some other set of tools and you've been curating it well over time, then democracy doesn't have to be a big flurry every time to generate original materials and write new stuff. You can use the shared context that you've been curating in a reliable way for better decision making ongoing and it doesn't have to be a lot of labor. So that was the light bulb that went off in my head. First from Jimmy Wales, laughing about the praise that he got on Wikipedia's behalf, but then later when I was thinking about how democracy operates and that's just a story I wanted to capture.