 I mean it feels so good to be in a space that's so full of people thinking on the intersection between technology and social change and just hearing so many people reference in their check-in rounds this idea that we need to design spaces online that can unlock collective intelligence and collective purpose and collective empathy and I guess I feel really privileged to be here and to be working on a project for the last few years that's sitting at exactly that intersection, this attempt to really design spaces intentionally to enable people to achieve collective purpose. So I had hoped to be joined here by my amazing co-founder Alana Cross. She's sadly laying low with some poor health today so I'll do my best to honour her in this presentation too. I was just going to share a little about my background, about where Lumios come from, the journey that we've been on and then really get into some examples of, I mean one of the things I really wanted to bring was the hope that's come with working on a project that's just this magnet for amazing community driven self-organising, innovative business minds, people in government, just this magnet for amazing things happening all over the world so I'll bring some of that too. So I never imagined that I would get involved in a technology project so my background is in something quite different. A few years ago I was hitting rapidly down this academic path researching cognitive neuroscience and then into comparative evolutionary psychology. I wasn't going to bring this in but then hearing Joshua speak about his experience of working with chimpanzees, I started a PhD, I got sent to Texas to work with chimpanzees to research the evolution of collective intelligence in humans and so I was attempting to teach chimps to use touch screens to see, thank you Joshua, to investigate something called cumulative cultural evolution so this is this idea that humans for whatever reason as far as we know the only species that has this increasing wealth of cultural complexity that increases with every generation so with each generation, with each passing moment, the total accumulated mass of socially transmitted information is growing in complexity so we're born into this social environment, this social information environment that enables people to do more complex things than the previous generation was able to. And so I was engaged in really trying to answer this question of why humans are the only species as far as we know that's becoming, and this is a simplistic way of phrasing it but that's becoming collectively more intelligent over time. And at the same time engaging in this work really interesting on a theoretical level and then every night when I would go home I would be struck through, largely through social media and through online communications just flooded with images of everything going wrong in the world on the systemic institutional scale so economic collapse, social upheaval, environmental degradation, more than anything and just feeling like well if we're getting more collectively intelligent over time supposedly why is it that our behavior just seems collectively stupider and stupider like on a systemic scale what is dumber than undertaking these behaviors that are threatening our collective existence, that are threatening the capacity of the earth to sustain life, it's just about the dumbest thing you can imagine. And so I got really disillusioned with the pace of translating academic knowledge into anything that could positively impact on the real world at the same time I found out that the primate sanctuary I was working at was just a front for a massive breeding center where they're breeding thousands of owl monkeys and squirrel monkeys to sell into the pharmaceutical industry. So those things combined led me to just drop that work, come back to New Zealand, get involved in community organizing and social movement activism. And it was a good time to do that, it was just before 2011 when this wave of social movements swept around the world and these just seemed like, I mean just seeing this happen sweep through the Middle East through the Arab Spring revolutions, seeing what was happening in Spain and Latin America with the Indignados and 15M movements and then Occupy Wall Street. So right in the heart of the financial heart of the world these people coming together with this shared belief that things could be better, this shared belief that on a systemic level our economic institutions are no longer serving the populations that they were designed to serve, they're no longer performing the function of distributing resources equitably that they were set up to. So this was, we've heard, I mean Kenny's comment I really resonate with, it's a comment about social media having this huge mobilizing effect and then leaving this sort of vacuum. Once people are all together what happens next? And seeing this happen in person in Wellington so that the bottom right hand corner shows so like most things in New Zealand happening on a smaller scale than in other places but happening nonetheless, hundreds of people who have never met each other coming together, this is October 15th, 2011, this International Day of Solidarity with Occupy Wall Street and figuring out how to organize themselves in a way that's inclusive and participatory and doesn't replicate the hierarchical power structures that have caused the problems that people are coming together to talk about solving. And seeing this happen in front of me and through the lens of collective intelligence when people are making decisions together, sitting in a circle, hearing all perspectives, really empowering individual opinions, individual voices but also valuing the, you know, the ability of the collective to get things done together, the collective purpose. And seeing groups go through that process and come to better decisions than any individual would have made by themselves because they're enabling these diverse inputs because the truly enabling diverse perspectives to feed into a process was just something I'd never seen before. But we also saw how limiting it was, needing to be in the same place at the same time to participate in a decision-making process means everyone else is excluded from it. Having a situation where loud voices, where only one person can speak at a time and loud voices come to dominate the discussion, shutting everyone else out. You see this trajectory from what begins as a participatory, inclusive movement and over the course of a few weeks ends up being a bunch of loud, generally white men yelling at each other because no one else wants to be around. It starts to resemble, you know, parliament. So basically we felt like surely we can use this communications infrastructure that we're using, you know, to mobilize, that we're using to exchange information every day. Surely there's some way of using that to also make decisions together to translate that information into agreement around a collective action, collective purpose. So just at exactly the time that that was going on, we encountered this network of social enterprises in Wellington called Inspiro. So we got in discussion with a guy called Joshua Vile, who's one of the people that kicked off Inspiro. And just started talking about, you know, their intent to use technology to mobilize around social change, to use social enterprise, the tools of business to further our social mission. And we turned up there and asked them, you know, told them about this idea that we'd had, you know, how can we build something where we can make decisions online? We basically asked them to build it for us. And their response was, well, you know, we need that as well. We need to make collective decisions about how we run the co-working space, about how the network functions. So you should build it for us. And so the outcome, luckily, was this collaboration where they gave us a disk and an internet connection and we got to work. So what we started building became over a few months to be known as Lumia. So this is an open source platform for collective decision making. So this idea that we can build an online space that provides the simplest way for people to come together, talk something through, agree a course of action, and then act on it. So a clear decision, a clear decision as the outcome. So just show you a little bit, just very, very basically how it works. So I mean, at its core, it's a really simple concept. It's essentially providing an online space for people to make decisions in the way that groups of people who work well together in the physical world to provide a space for them to do what they already do. So, you know, you've got a, you have a known group of people and within that group, anyone can start a discussion on any topic. You've got a space to outline the topic and give context so people can have a well informed discussion. And then when the discussion gets to a point where someone in the group feels like the group could make a decision about what course of action to take, they can put up a proposal. So a proposal, a good proposal is a clear course of action for the group to take. And then people have the ability to participate in a decision by clicking one of four buttons so people can either agree with the proposal. They can abstain or opt out. They can disagree and say, well, it's not my ideal solution, but I'm not going to stand in the way of the group if people really want to move forward with it, or they can raise a red flag or a block. So these are just the core elements of consensus decision making as has been practiced in social justice movements for generations and generations. So this is not about majority rules polling. This is not about, you know, this binary opposition that we get into in our traditional political system. It's not about a snapshot of preferences like you get in a survey. It's about having a flexible mode of making decisions where you can see however one feels, why each person feels that way, and you're able to change your position as new information comes to light. And you're able to go through an iteration of proposals. So when concerns are raised, the group can address them and the proposal can be updated to reflect those concerns. So you get this effect of collective wisdom that we just see over and over again of groups coming to better decisions together than any individual would have by themselves. So really opening that space for diverse perspectives to feed into the decisions that a group makes. And at the end of the process, you get a clear outcome. So whether there's agreement or not, you can see it and you can decide together what the next step needs to be. So you always get a conclusion. It's not like if you've ever tried to make decisions with a group of more than three or four people by email, you'll know what it's like to get bound in this back and forth in this like tangle of communication where you can, you know, you can pass information to each other, but bringing it to this convergence on a shared course of action can be really difficult. And this system, you end up with a really clear outcome. And so as soon as we got it out the door, we were, I mean, the most striking thing is just the international spread that just emerged. So just through word of mouth. I mean, that's that's what the internet's really good at. So we started seeing it being used in the first large-scale international use case was in Hungary, the Hungarian student movement, organized large-scale nationwide protests, protesting against government education cuts. And so, you know, we saw this group spring up, group of student activists spring up, and then that led to this profusion of groups in Hungary through, you know, newspapers, government departments. There were festival organizers using it. Just this real really interesting organic spread. Grocery cooperatives in San Francisco through to, you know, conferences for nonviolent communication in India, through to companies like Cora and Dropbox have worked teams using it, through to, you know, the French, French Division of Orange Mobile and then, you know, city councils and local governments using it to feed in citizen input into policymaking. One of the most striking things for me has seeing has been seeing it picked up in on a large scale in Spain over the last six months. So there's this huge social movement right now that's come out of the 15M or the Indignados, the Spanish equivalent of the Occupy movement. And that's given rise to a political party now called Podemos. So it's sort of the Spanish equivalent to what's happening in Greece right now with Sariza and their grassroots community base, 25,000 people using Lumio in hundreds and hundreds of groups, neighborhood working groups to organize democratically, to decide what their action is going to be in a participatory way. So in total now, as of this morning, I just checked on the stats. You know, just through organic word of mouth spread, while we're still in beta, the software is still in a beta stage, but we're about to have a full release in the next couple of months, 69,356 people engaging in a total of 23,171 decisions. So just thinking about, I mean, it's it's still on this sort of the tip of where it's going to go. Like we feel like we're still in the very formative stages of what this can be, this online space for people to come together, deliberate and make collective decisions. And I guess I just wanted to talk a little bit about the two types of groups that we're seeing come to Lumio. The two sort of broad use cases seem to really come out of the way that decisions are currently being made out in the world. So traditionally, you know, decisions have either been made organizations that care about social justice, social movements, community organizations often will try to make decisions using bottom up processes, trying to involve everyone in the decision. And you know, that can be a really inclusive and empowering way of doing things, but it can also be really slow and really fragile. So this is what we saw in the Occupy movement. It's what we see in social movements all over the world. The other dominant mode of decision making is top down. So you see this in government institutions and companies in organizations that are centralized. But there's this real, you know, and that can be fast and clear in the short term, but it can also be disempowering because it excludes most people. So in that in that group, we see, you know, local governments coming to us to say, well, how can we involve more more citizens in policymaking? We see member driven NGOs and organizations wanting to devolve some of the power that they've centralized. And so for us, it's all about bringing those to a third way of doing things. So rather than classic bottom up or classic top down decision making, thinking about networked decision making. So this is a, you know, a mode of decision making that's inclusive and empowering, as well as being fast and with clear outcomes. So it's not going for participation at the expense of efficiency and effectiveness, but really bringing those two things together. So the way that in spiral functions feels like a pretty amazing embodiment of this mode of organizing where you don't have everyone involved in all decisions, whether they're affected by those decisions or not, which is, you know, time consuming and unworkable. You have different working groups of people, specialized working groups. You have different levels of decision making with different levels of stakeholder. So at Inspiral, the co-working space, day to day decisions are made by all the people using the co-working space. And then at the board level, it's the board making decisions at the strategic level. So you have these different different levels of decision making. You see the same thing in social movements where you have working groups self-organizing, and it's really about valuing the individual and the collective. So individual autonomy, really valuing individual perspectives, providing a space that doesn't inherently marginalize groups while also valuing collective autonomy. So the ability of the collective to get things done together to achieve a collective purpose. Another group that's a really interesting example of an organization using Limeo to become, you know, to operate in a more human, empathic, collective way is the Wikimedia Foundation. So the head office of Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco uses Limeo to involve 180 staff in decisions about the way that their office runs. So it's freed them from, in their words, the tyranny of trying to make decisions by email or through a video conference. So just knowing that we've had some impact on an organization that's behind, you know, the greatest sum of all human knowledge that's ever been assembled into one, into one place has just made the whole thing really worthwhile to us. And I just wanted to finish by by acknowledging that one of the things that's made all of this work possible is support from Brian and Matthew through the Namaste Foundation, who specifically funded us to work on building accessibility into the core of Lumeo. So to make the software as accessible and inclusive as possible, inclusive of people with visual impairment and with cognitive impairment. So people who are so often marginalized in forms of decision making. And I mean, we get these stories flowing in from people who, one story from an activist in Philadelphia, who was deeply passionate about the Occupy movement, but would turn up and because of her severe visual impairment was just unable to participate in general assembly decision making. And so for people like her, I mean, she's she's just this huge supporter and really sees the potential for this to change the sort of diversity of people that are able to be involved in decision making people with limited mobility and people with limited vision. So that's the that's the thing that keeps us working on this really passionately day in day out. So thank you very much. Thanks for that, Ben. Do we have time for three questions? Thanks for that, Ben. I'm curious if you could maybe give us a sneak peek. I think Josh, Josh might share more of this vision, but one thing that that you and Alana have have described for me that gets me really inspired is this vision of how the patterns of Lumio can now be applied to other open source tools around collaborative software network organizations and and so forth. So one of the other things that we're just embarking on is is looking and I hope this is what you're referring to, but looking at how Lumio can operate with other other open source modules. So Inspire is increasingly becoming a network that's spinning out open technology tools to bring down the cost of organizations and communities operating in socially beneficial ways. So the next big thing on the horizon is a tool for participatory budgeting or collaborative funding decisions where where lots of people can be involved in making decisions about how their organization or their community allocates resources. So that's a tool called co-budget and another thing that Namaste Foundation is making possible is us to undertake interoperability work. So really moving towards this ecosystem approach of modular tools that enable groups to get things done in more collaborative participatory ways. So we're we're working with the participatory budgeting project in New York in San Francisco and they're looking at how to include Lumio and co-budget as open technology tools to support participatory budgeting processes in schools in San Jose and in Lawrence, Massachusetts. So this is involving students and teachers and parents in funding decisions about the way that their schools allocate resources. So all of this is about this recognizing this disintermediation that's come with the Internet with more and more governance needing to happen outside institutions because institutions are increasingly failing to meet the needs of people that were set up to serve. So recognizing that if if we're going to be undertaking more governance, we need to get really good at it. We need to get really good at equitably distributing resources. We need to move beyond this era of social media being really good at mobilizing people and they'll move from that mobilization to sustained robust collective action. Thanks Ben. It's it's obviously a almost a very charitable mission, very donation worthy. But we know that that doesn't always mean that the donations show up. Is there a is there any way to without ruining the core mission? Offer a little bit of ROI in some sensible way that brings impact investors to the table. You see that with things like WordPress. I've never paid WordPress a dime, but I think they're probably a profitable company while offering all that free stuff for people. And also maybe tell a little bit about what your funding needs are, which you very humbly avoided so far. It's a really good question. It's I guess we consider part of our social mission to find a revenue model. Basically, we've been really focused on recognizing that we need to we need this project to be financially independent. We need it to not be dependent long term on charitable giving. We need it to not be dependent on government funding. We also need it to not be driven by a revenue model that only benefits financial interests. So it needs to you know to really be public infrastructure for collective organizing. It can't be driven by an advertising model and it can't be driven by you know the needs of venture capital that has an exit strategy in place. But what we are working on is a revenue model where the project is driven with the organization is funded by the users of the software. So that the incentives are aligned. So that the social mission is totally aligned with where the resources are coming from. So we're going down the track of developing, iterating towards a revenue model where commercial uses. So where city councils and government departments, large organizations pay for using Lumio so that non-commercial use can always be free and open. That's testing well so far. So we're at the beginning of that journey, but that's the direction that we're moving in. We already do consulting work. So we do services work for large organizations using it. We teach them the in-person skills of collaboration because there have been several comments this morning which I'm really happy to hear about technology is useless without the culture driving it or the dreams guiding it or the mission or the purpose. So this is really about capacity building. We see Lumio very much as augmenting in-person interaction rather than trying to replace it. So those are the skills that we're currently, you know, we charge consulting rates to large organizations who need that support in collaboration. It's really cool stuff. If you think about how Google does auto correct, I would sort of ask, do you think about recording? Do you keep track of how all of these decisions are made and have a goal in terms of your future that would involve actually extracting new principles of decision-making that no one's been able to extract because they don't have the data and eventually sort of try to notice patterns that evolve based on previous decision-making and actually try to aid people and say it looks like not so much like clippy in words saying you're trying to write a letter to your mom, but like actually trying to predict and help people go forward and use use the path, not just the end result of this data. Yeah, that's absolutely the direction that we're heading in. And we're in conversation with interested academic groups to look at the quality of decision-making and different social factors that influence the quality of outcome of decision-making. There's so much so much useful data in there about group dynamics and the things that lead to groups making more or less intelligent decisions and absolutely building in that feedback cycle. So learning from the people using it and then feeding that learning out to the people using it is really powerful. And I just realized I missed off the second half of Josh's question, which was about funding needs. So our I mean, our focus right now is, you know, where we're in late stage beta, where on the verge of a full product release where it will actually make sense to scale. So we haven't driven, we haven't pushed user numbers at all at this point. It's all been organic and we need the resources to do that early growth work. And so right now we're focused on raising philanthropic donations. So we've got some angel donors in the US and we're in search of more like-minded, mission-aligned people to come on as angel donors. And we're in the longer term when we're looking for capital to really scale up. I mean, things are always going to be mission-aligned. Things are always going to be primarily driven by social mission. But we're also, you know, open to conversations with people about, you know, mission-aligned mechanisms of impact investment that, you know, that acknowledge the risk taken and also acknowledge the importance of having things really aligned with the social mission. So further down the track, when the revenue model is actually up and running and, you know, and it makes sense. But for right now we're focused on finding angel donors that just really understand and share the passion and share the vision and can see the potential for this thing to scale, to really hit large scale positive impact. Awesome. Thank you very much Ben.