 So, this is mainly for me, but I think for everyone. So we've learned over the last 10 years that we should build our own platforms, and we've learned that we can get into already established tools and reach people there. There's a growing conversation in the US about micro-concentration of the big platforms, and there are some examples now of you build something based on a technology underneath, like Facebook or Google, and then the algorithm change and then your product is gone. Do we have any evidence, more than anecdotes for that, and should civic tech have a monopoly policy position? Question. Yes, that's right. Thank you. Yes, pushing the button is right. It should be right. It should be right. That's it. I have to hold it down. That's great. Thank you. Welcome to the tech conference everyone. I think that's an awesome question. I think that we've been arguing for a while with little success that if, for example, we want a genuine digital public square, it needs to be built on public servers, or non-profit servers, you know, that with the exception of Wikipedia, every other commercial website tracks you and monitors you in a variety of ways, and there's very little evidence that people know what they're signing up for in the US. So that civic health quotient that comes with surveillance and tracking is really worrisome. And the good news is that we've passed the point of peak indifference to the issue, and now people are paying attention and asking good questions. I would say that in the Civic Tech Success Department, there are a number of both for-profit and non-profit projects that serve in a niche. I have a piece coming out in a couple of weeks about Front Porch Forum, for example, which is a neighborhood forum that is basically a daily email consisting of things that people write just in their close neighborhood. It's primarily, almost entirely in Vermont. There are several hundred forums by neighborhood or town. A typical one has about a thousand households or residents in it. And the state has, it's about 60% coverage. So 150,000 households in Vermont belong to a Front Porch Forum. And the quality of the dialogue is terrific. But they also have paid moderators for every forum. And every post goes through a human moderator before it gets cleared for posting. And there's no threading of comments. So even when issues flare up, there's a deliberate slowing down of the speed of information that flows through. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation just did a third-party study of Front Porch Forum users, 15,000 of them, and discovered that usage of the platform makes people feel more neighborly, more inclined to be interested in public issues, have a better sense of trust of their neighbors. I mean, there's no inherent reason that online platforms have to make people angrier, sadder, more polarized, or more misinformed. But that's because Front Porch Forum isn't solving for massive growth as its number one priority or monetizing its users as much as it can so its founder can get incredibly rich. So, you know, it goes to values and choices in the structure of the platform. And we are having a healthy dialogue about it now. I do think that our civic tech maker community is faced with a really hard dilemma because we know that the big platforms have reach, and if you want to go where people are, and you can get more civic information in front of them when they're looking, when they're interested, that you can have positive effects, right? And so this is a tension that's not easily resolved. But it's good that we're having the debate now, whereas before it was not even a topic that was discussed. And hopefully, look, my belief about this is that this is not going to be solved by tech or machine learning or really great data science. It's going to be served by lots more people acting like full citizens, asking questions about things like, how is my data going to be used? Why do I have to sign up here? What if I don't want to opt in? And that has to become a much bigger demand that we can only get from the user side. And then I think the market will respond if more people ask for it. Can I answer that? Yeah. Just to answer your question about whether we have empirical data on how algorithm changes affect that. Journalists have been very open with sharing that kind of information. Every time Facebook changes the news feed algorithm, they tend to share very specific and large numbers on how that's hurt their traffic. And then on the question of whether we should have standards in civic tech, make a start talking about the tension, I've seen in some of the failure, in some of the graveyard projects, sometimes the problem isn't relying on Facebook. Sometimes it's trying, it's like the sin of being too holy of let's use everything possible open source and then those projects get shut down. My colleague at Center for Civic Media, MIT, Charlie Dittar, made this amazing group deliberation tool called Intertwinkles, which is from the Occupy Intertwinkles. But it was based on the Mozilla Identity Standard specifically to avoid Facebook. And the Mozilla Identity Login was shut down. So Intertwinkles was shut down also. So I do think it's a balance of using what's popular and available and then ethical. It's definitely... Just to say one more thing about this. We have to get government involved in insisting on common standards. I mean, there's a reason, for example, why we all can share weather data, right? Because that's baked into how weather data is collected and made available. So if it's civic data, why are we relying on private platforms for things like identity, right? And it's because 20 years ago, Democrats and Republicans who all were free market ideologues decided to privatize the Internet. That's really the root cause here. And we're now dealing with the perverse effects of this. And we're only just at the beginning where there are enough people using the web to suddenly say things like, wait a second. The post office gives me an address. Why do I have to get an email address from a private provider? I mean, I don't know if Tom Steinberg is in the room. The only person I've ever encountered who's talked about this as a public issue was Tom. And our field is suffering because we're doing public work on top of private servers. We're really vulnerable because of that. Any other questions? Yep. This is for Christopher. Really interesting research. My first thought when you presented the question of why did the OGP fail in the Nordics? My first instinct to test that, or like, you know, to go about it, is to try everything. First, what does the OGP do? It makes governments more open accountable, participatory, and it allows civil society organizations to be a part of the process. Now, even the Nordic government already are ahead of the game in terms of being accountable, transparent, and participatory. And as you said, if civil society feel that they don't need the middlemen to accomplish their goals, isn't that the reason why OGP is failing? Maybe the OGP is not designed for countries that are doing already so well. And why should we care that the Nordics aren't doing well? Like, you know, where does your interest in this come from? And why should we care that the Nordics aren't doing well in the OGP process? Place the button. Right. Not the wrong microphone. I think that's arguable. You know, I think there's an argument to be made that the, you know, are we ready to say that high-performing, high-income countries shouldn't commit to doing things as progressively as less democratically developed and developing countries? I mean, that's an awkward argument to make, but I think it's worth exploring. On the other hand, there are enough civil society organizations in every one of the Nordic countries who say OGP should be helping us to make all these improvements, right? And if you look at the actual arguments about what the Nordics are doing well, it's all based on a early 20th century model for feeding into the very beginning of policymaking processes from explicit and short lists of organized groups. So it's about allowing the labor movement to have input into the very beginning of policy processes. And it doesn't allow for anything that, you know, feedback loops or monitoring and evaluation or open exchange of information and data. All of these things are really at the front of our minds when we think about open government. That's not what the Scandinavians are talking about when they say we're already doing it. They just feel as though that the established mechanisms from the beginning of last century are sufficient. And so I think there's lots of room for improvement and you could argue that OGP should be a good way to pursue that. Very quickly. Last question. Make sure it's a success in space and how exactly you're managing it. So thinking about the examples of, you know, if you need to report a notice, you know, it might be like maybe only one person took a note, but don't start to be, like, to show that, like, a thousand people are using it in a unit. You know, two people might be, you know, the second thing, you know, in other specific applications in which, you know, it creates a deliberative tool, something like 80 percent of the population is going to participate. Anything about the topic, you know, but it might be that it's not the 10-15, like NGOs that, you know, don't have the access to the table when the designer's not there. They can put an input somewhere. So just thinking about, like, how people have made decisions about funding, shutting down, and hopefully, how are you thinking about these, you know, these matrices of, what's this? Well, I mean, I think there's something that is fundamentally wrong in the way we approach civic tech in the sense that, I think you mentioned that 70 percent of the startups in Silicon Valley fail, right? Then we are saddled with this problem of always having to get grants to build some of these tools, and the donors don't have the same temperament as Silicon Valley investors. So they shut down the project once you can prove impact. But like you said, it might just be a community of 500 people that will use that tool to ensure that one piece of, one important piece of, one important civic duty is being done for all of us, right? So I think the problem is the way civic tech is understood and funded. Yeah, so I think it's distinguishing between two different kinds of metrics, right? There's the kind of metrics that we want to justify the work that we do in general to try to show that civic tech or open government makes a difference so that people will keep funding it. And there's a lot of different ways to do that and it's comparable in some broad sense. And then there's metrics that will influence how we roll out projects. It'll tell us how to design better in very specific niche environments. It will tell us how to adapt what we're doing while we're doing it. And those kinds of things are really hard to generalize. It's really hard to draw conclusions from one context to the other. And it almost always requires a really significant investment of time and energy and sometimes money. Some of it you can automate when you're using tech, right? You can put log data and you can pair that to external data and you can automate processes. But if a lot of it still requires investment and I don't think we'll ever have matrices for that kind of stuff or nor should we because it'll make it less useful. So I just make that distinction. Weird. Awesome. Thank you so much to all of the speakers.