 Well, cheers. I can propose or share the agenda. I thought we would do it here, but I'd also love just to do a little check-in and let people settle into the space. So we can do a check-in and some introductions so you know who you're talking to. And then I thought we could share a little bit about building belonging, sort of what this initiative is that we're trying to do and where we see your work kind of connecting to it. We'd love to hear how that lands for you for way off base. And then there's a specific invitation, which is why I'd ask the average for the connection in the first place, around what we're calling conversations on transformation. And so it's basically, what is the role of technology in scaling democracy? So a lot of the work you've been in for a while, and we have a couple of specific items there to discuss, but that's kind of our general proposal. Does that sound okay? Yeah, sounds great. So I can start for a check-in, which is it's an auguration day here in the U.S. It's been, I'm trying to hold the polarity between feeling grateful and also, this isn't it. We haven't arrived. It's just an important step along the way. So I've tried to find that balance. And my kids, we're just running around somewhere right before this call. So they may join us at some point. Nicole. Yeah, yeah. I think we feel a huge sigh of relief today at the peaceful transition of power. And it's a beautiful day here in Berkeley, California. So I'm excited to take a walk with you. Yeah, as for me, I literally just woke up and this is, I think, I slept for nine hours and 10 minutes. So one of the longest slept I've had in weeks actually and feeling pretty great and looking forward to the conversation. Right after the conversation would be the cabinet meeting and after which there's a long space like, I don't know, four hours doing nothing. So it feels quite luxurious actually given the schedule for the past few weeks. Wow, spacious, a rare treat. Yeah, I was trying to explain to my five-year-old. I said, well, I'm gonna talk to this person who's a minister. He said, what's a minister? I was like, yeah. It's kind of hard to explain actually. It doesn't make a lot of sense to kids. They're like creatures and hear confessions. Yeah, if they don't even have that context, we're a... Yeah, I'm afraid we're a... Well, cool. I thought we could do just a little introduction on who you're talking to. So you have some context for what we're about to say to you. So my sort of super brief story of self is a middle child. So second and fourth kids grew up here in Southern Oregon on the West Coast. And I came from a family of lawyers. So I'm the only male in my family who's not an attorney. My dad and my two brothers are all lawyers. And I went to undergrad and wrote a thesis on alienation. And the question I was asking at the time was if things are as bad as they seem to be. This is the U.S. circa 2000, in college 2000, 2004. So I was there for 9-11, sort of post-WTO protests of 99. And the question I was asking was where are the social movements? Like how come we don't have broad-based social movements in the U.S.? And we did have some. I mean, there's stuff around WTO. We had a lot of mobilizations from the Iraq war, but both of those to me at least felt as if they were complaining about what we were doing over there somewhere else and not really looking at what we were doing right here. So the answer I explored to explain that sort of gap in action was alienation, that people are separated from their own sense of power, agency, each other, the land, right? And after graduation, I got involved in human rights work and anti-genocide work. So I graduated in 2004. It was the time of Darfur in Sudan. I had this sort of, you know, naive perhaps middle child belief that, you know, surely in the 21st century, we could agree not to kill each other in mass. Felt like a low bar for humanity. And did that work for a couple of years? A nonprofit went to grad school for conflict mediation, looking specifically at peace processes and how to resolve political violence without resorting to it. So informed a lot by the Rwandan experiences of Bosnia, Northern Ireland, some experiences in Africa. And then I spent five years at USAID. So in the federal government, the Obama administration working on conflict management and focused specifically on the Horn of Africa and the Great Lakes. And then I was stationed in Myanmar in 2012 and 2013 during the, you know, air quotes, democratic transition there. And yeah. And I think the experience I had to kind of like fast forward to the present was I had a critique of the aid industrial complex that I largely exempted myself from it. So I was like, well, I'm one of the good guys. I'm still doing good work here. And in Myanmar for a bunch of reasons which we could get into if you're interested, I lost faith in my ability to know whether I was doing good or causing harm. And that was a really destabilizing place to come to for me. So quit. And my wife and I moved to Seattle. She was and is at the Gates Foundation. I joined the Gates Foundation for a couple of years as a transition to knowing it wasn't gonna last there for a bunch of reasons, which I'm also happy to get into if you're curious. And then quit in the early 2016, specifically because I was concerned with the rise of authoritarianism globally. So, you know, it was the Trump primary campaign here, but, you know, Bolsonaro was coming in, Johnson was coming in, Brexit was a few months out. And there was something about gender and authoritarianism that I wanted to understand more deeply. And my experience in sort of the countering violent extremism and conflict management world was that most of these people who were drawn in these movements were male and were drawn and motivated by sense of belonging. And that ideology was always second or third. And so I was interested in sort of that connection and also the resistance movements, the social movements I wrote my thesis on back in the day had materialized, they were here, right? Occupy and the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter and Me Too, Sunflower Movement. And was curious about a lot of those movements seem to be led by women and youth. This is just, there's an interplay there that I'm gonna understand. So, all that way of context that led me to building Bologna, but let me pause there. Okay, yeah. So we just say that today's or yesterday's, from this inauguration symbolizes a step toward non-authoritarianism. It's a complicated question. Yes, definitely. And so far as it slowed the slide toward authoritarianism in the U.S. But what narrative we take away from that? What lessons we draw? What success looks like? I'm concerned that a lot of, for a lot of moderate people in the U.S., white people in particular, it'll be a little bit too easy to say, okay, that aberration's behind us, move forward. I think the story is a little more complicated than that. So, the fact is 74 million people still voted for someone who is by any metric an authoritarian. And so for me, it's good news that 81 million people didn't, but it's hard to claim a clear victory there. Well, yeah, and I also think that, I mean, in the minds of a lot of Americans who have, who believe fake news, they don't think that the current presidency is a legitimate one, right? Which is, and then for a lot of younger, more liberal folks, they don't think Biden represents them. And so in their sense, it's also not, it is a legitimate presidency, but it's not a representative one. And so in that sense, I feel like there is a lot of money. It feels like it slowed down, but a sense of belonging is yet to be built. Yeah, okay, sounds good. Yeah, so I can introduce myself a little bit. So I'm a civic technologist and Taiwanese American, started off working in non-profit digital capacity building back at Civic Hall. And then did some research in DC, working to inform policy makers on digital transformation and what they should be thinking about with regards to the future of work and AI ethics. And then most recently, I launched a new resource called platformvis.org, which is a knowledge source of technological harms and mitigations to guide safer development. So we're trying to make information about things like trolling and mass downvoting and other forms of harassment that a lot of minorities might experience more accessible to your average UX designer or developer who isn't necessarily well-versed in these issues. Sorry, the website is platform. Platformabuse.org, I can share. Abuse, okay, I got it. Yeah, I got it. And so I'm interested in both the positive and the ugly parts of the internet. So first of all, in my work with Brian, thinking about how do we build spaces for more and deeper connections digitally and what type of digital infrastructure does our democracy need right now? But then also with projects like platformvis.org, how do we face the harsh reality that people will always use these tools to hurt? And tied to both of those questions is this interest in tech access. So who are digital tools being made for? Who has access to them and understands them? And the idea that the tech sector itself can't solve all of these problems, some of which is created, some of which it hasn't, but is kind of exacerbating or magnifying. And we haven't really done enough, at least in the U.S., to make it feel accessible to your typical citizen who maybe isn't an engineer. So yeah, that's a little bit about me. I'll turn it back to Brian to talk about the organization. I like the wordplay, abusability testing. Yeah, it's very interesting. Abuseability testing and mitigation. Yeah, so one of my collaborators is very interested in privacy engineering. And so we're definitely hearkening to other similar aspects. Yeah, I know some other industry that refer to their customer as users and abusers. So yeah. I feel we have a bit of an unfair advantage knowing a bit more about you because you have a more public profile. But if there's anything else you'd like to share beyond what we might already know, please feel free. Sure, so I wasn't quite kidding when I said I mostly preach and sometimes hear confessions and also write poems, I guess, prayers. And I said, I call myself a poetician and I'm a lowercase minister. And so if you look at my Twitter profile, it's digitalminister.tw. But I very rarely uppercase the M. And to me, my work really is with the government for with the people not for with Taiwan not for and mostly just making sure that I deal with spreading spread. I guess that's the summary of how I see my work. I'm really happy to connect and to kind of lift this narrative out from this naive individualism that strips individuals out of belongings which is I think the root of the kind of user slash abuser mentality because only when individuals are treated as like the pride of their social connections could the AI become truly authoritarian intelligence. That is to say it doesn't enslave people or alienate people. Other people enslave people through AI. So my usual way of rephrasing that is calling the assistive intelligence. It could assist the collective intelligence. It could assist a small community, but just like my eyeglass is assistive by being aligned to the values of me wanting to see better instead of see some advertisements popups and also to be accountable in a sense that I can repair it myself or find my friend to repair it without paying for astronomical license fees. So that's how I see my job. Cheers, thank you. Yeah, and I'm happy to have Nicole here because I'm not a technologist. So I have to feel out of my depth when we start tilting into the tech space. But I think part of the aspiration for this connection in the conversation we want to set up is in part out of recognition that these sectors are way too silent, that they have the tech conferences that's technologists and then democracy conferences with folks who deal with democracy and yeah, trying to create some hybrid ground that is intentionally multidisciplinary and trying to draw on some of the skillsets and insights from lots of different spaces including poetry and art. I think Nicole and I both saw you speak a little bit in the new public gathering whatever that was, I guess last week, time flies and thinking about, right, what is the digital infrastructure but who decides and it can't be just technologists. Yeah, and ways for community, organization and facilitation to me are also technology. I mean, they are applied social science. So science and technology for me is not just about natural science and industrial technology for the record. So let me do just a couple of minutes on what we're trying to do with building belonging and then obviously feel free to interrupt and then we can get into the specific invitation for you. So building belonging was, yeah, one of the concerns with the rise of authoritarianism and an interest in sort of this, the common thread uniting the move towards far right nationals and globally and paradoxically animating the rise of social justice movements is a quest for belonging. And like that seems to be sort of a core narrative thread. And so what about that? And can we have more of this belonging and less of that belonging? So part of the aspiration in building belonging is can we create an us without of them? And we think the answer is yes, but frankly the evidence does not necessarily support that belief. So I'm actually, if it's capable, let me do this as an issue for a second and give you something to look at at the rate of view should be possible. Do you see that? What do you see? Oh, I do. Okay, so I'm not sure exactly what the screen is showing, but yeah, so the first core insight was, this is partly where I, when I left the Gates Foundation, I was looking for this question, which is basically if you take climate as a for instance, it's not enough to remove or reduce carbon in the atmosphere. You actually have to solve biodiversity loss, water scarcity, ocean acidification, right? These are all part of that picture. So that's what I mean by comprehensive. And then the whole listing actually has to be adequate to the scale of the problem. So if we're talking about the degradation of the earth, we actually have to have solutions that are commensurate to that. So this is basically a call for transformation rather than reform. The green circle there is, you can read the science as well as anyone. We have 10 years until the Antarctic ice shelf breaks off. So what are we doing? If we expect every results at that time. And then the third is population scale, right? Like the pandemic makes this painfully obvious. We need eight billion vaccines probably many more besides. So anything short of that isn't going to be sufficient. And so this question for me is both motivating and also very daunting. And maybe that's not possible, right? Like a lot of the questions that we face, the trend lines certainly are not super encouraging, but for me it was quite clear that I wanted to try. And I didn't want to try to work with other things we're also trying our ways. The second kind of insight was this one, which is basically a recognition that transformation at every level impacts transformation at other levels. So my experience as I was doing this landscape work prior to launching built-in belonging was that you go over here and do your therapy work, right? Your mindfulness, your somatic practice, individual transformation, you go over here and do your equity work, your anti-racism training, or your sort of conflict revolution work. And then you go over here and do your systems change work, your complexity thinking. And through the obvious reality that of course all these things are interrelated, right? We can't remove a person from their social context and the systems and institutions that would be apart. Why don't we sort of develop some practices that acknowledge that reality? So the way we get at that, I'm not saying this is the answer, this is just our hypothesis that we're exploring and testing is through this concept of the fractal. So my own introduction to that was through Adrian Marie Brown and her work on version strategy, but it's not, you know, it comes from lots of different places. And so it's basically the notion that how we are at the smallest level is in fact how we impact the system at the largest level. And so the level of micro interactions, you know, this conversation as one instance, but there's another sort of thing that we're also experimenting with, which is can we create a small group? So have that as the unit of transformation have to be curated as a fractal of the whole. So it has to look like the world we want to live in, you know, in terms of representation and different experiences represented there. And then how we hold the space has to be consistent with the world we want to live in, which none of us have experienced, unfortunately. And then can we practice those ways of being in that small group and connect to others who are also doing, understanding that none of us have all the answers, but what you're doing in a technology space and what, you know, Richard is doing with small group work, what, you know, Mickey is doing with sort of global governance theory all has something to say about the same issues that we bring those people together around those questions. So we don't know how to do that, obviously. The effort is to experiment at this fractal level and see if we can get the pieces right, you know, with big air quotes around it, because you know, I usually talk about this as directionally after it. Can we feel like we're going in the right direction if we're not exactly know, where we're going, if I get there. And the question for me, like the biggest dot, dot, dot is I'm pretty confident that we, or one, if not us can do this at the level of 20 people, even 50 people, maybe even a couple hundred. You're doing it at the level of a city or perhaps a small nation state. Yeah, it's a million, yes. Right, I mean, so how do we do it for seven and a half billion people with appropriate humility about the scale of the challenge and the different contexts of which this work needs to get done? So nobody knows, but it's quite clear at least to me that technology is a piece of the answer, like it or not. And most of the technology that's out there right now doesn't really serve us or that aspiration. So I was interested in your work and Polish and sort of aligned efforts around how do we distribute democracy as much as possible? One of our partners, we're going to get to work with a group called societal platform based out of India talks about distributing not the solution but the ability to solve. So can we create a platform that people can then adopt and apply in their local context? That's a lot of abstract talking. Let me pause there, see if Nicole wants to add anything or if you have any questions or comments. I'm good. Okay. Yeah, so I guess just building on that. So Brian kind of left off with saying like as part of this work, one of the big questions that we think technology can help with is the question of scale. So we're currently already within our community having small group conversations about belonging, creating kind of a community of practice around belonging where there are people who study network weaving, people who study different issues related to this topic and how do we turn that into more of a global movement? And also as we're trying to scale, I think what Brian is very mindful of is like creating a community that's inherently anti-heroical and as we're starting to make our first decisions about this community. So for example, is the current platform we're on the right platform? Who should be the stewards of this community? We're also trying to figure out like what types of tools we can maybe integrate into this type of decentralized decision-making process. And again, particularly as we scale because right now we don't really need it since we're not large enough yet to need it but I'm thinking ahead to what lessons we might be able to apply from your work. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, okay. So just to check my understanding. So this idea is supposed to be an in-group with no out-group, right? Everyone has the potential and this is similar to how I call my community is the Homo sapiens community. It has more or less the same symbolic value in this. And the technologies that we are using like right now, I mean, it could be Zoom, it could be Skype or things like that are not that bad for this purpose. Skype actually has a group view mode that puts us in a virtual background side by side. The experience likes us looking into a large mirror together and that builds a sense of belonging and so on. So the designers of these two dimensional video conferencing spaces are also more or less working on the same dimensions because otherwise, you know, fatigue and so on is a real thing. And so beyond which I don't really see any issues really with the current generations of technologies when one, one, two scale it because it sounds like you're not really scaling it up, right, where you're scaling it out or scaling it deeply in the sense of basically let's just say idea was spreading, spreading. And so I'm less clear in how exactly the kind of applies of our technology is going to be used because I firmly believe we only assist the people whenever people feel a longing for something to be automated for something to be done because it doesn't feel like human work. It feels like machine work. That's alienation, ratification and so that's, but in your description, I don't quite feel anyone saying or relaying anyone saying that they're doing very repetitive work that they would rather not doing and in which case I am not exactly sure how technologies in the sense of digital software would help on this regard. Yeah, I think it's, for me, the way I think about the two levels of this is the world we move in, most people's experience of belonging is not belonging, right? Like that's unfortunately how it tends to resonate with folks and the idea of belonging, the felt experience of belonging for most people is not part of their lived experience. And so there's something powerful like uniting around that that brings folks together. I think everyone has that experience and our digital spaces reflect that our digital spaces are not good at cultivating belonging. It's hard to find a space. This is my experience. Hopefully you've had a better one that embodies belonging and the ways we tend to do it are either very flattening, partly of necessity through the technology, but also means Nicole's point, like they're not designed for access, they're not designed for radical inclusion. They're designed by whoever designed them with whatever their frame of reference was at the time. And so we're interested in how do we, we have no choice but to move from offline to online and back, right? Have that be a dialogue and that's partly what was attractive to me about the V-Taiwan experiments. But if I'm pretty confident that with the rights of the folks involved, one can create a container of belonging and we're sort of seeing that happen right now in building belonging, I think, I hope I trust. The question is, how do we scale that to 7.5 billion people? I don't know how to do that. I'm not sure it can be done, but can we find technology that cultivates that same sort of sense of relational intimacy and promotes the kind of behaviors that we want to live into, right? So norms around harm, around accountability, around equity. And right now, I like your frame around assistive intelligence, right? It tends to perpetuate whatever, I think of it as like power, right? Power amplifies and reflects. It doesn't corrupt. It just is what your underlying tendency already is. So I think for me, I understand the question of how do we use technology to scale the experience, the felt experience of belonging and to what extent is that even possible? And then there's a, at the other end of that, part of the way I understand belonging is it requires co-creation, right? It requires you to be part of it, otherwise you don't belong, right? You're just a spectator. So how do we instantiate that? How do we make that real? And I think part of what I am attracted to in your work is the possibility of distributing decision-making and having that be and the experience both of belonging and its companion significance, right? You're not only belong, but your decision and your presence matters. And I think if we don't figure that out, the other side, not that I believe or not some of them, but if we're juxtaposing democracy and authoritarianism, authoritarianism is finding a way to get people's significance in a way that is dangerous. And a lot of the online spaces that I can really support that are actively trafficking in a form of significance and belonging that I would argue is quite harmful. So can we offer a different experience that is consistent with their values and allows people to sort of move online and offline without having to, yeah, and then still be able to belong? Nicole, would you add anything to that? Yeah, thanks to reiterate. I think a lot of folks in our community are not super excited about the potential of, for example, all just joining a Slack channel or all just joining a Facebook group. These are folks who want to imagine different ways of being in community with each other online. So are there ways, for example, that what Brian was talking about earlier with the fractal? How can we enable small groups and the intimacy of that small group, but also scale? So those small groups can kind of learn from each other. How can we kind of replicate, for example, mutual aid networks online and that type of like decentralized movement online? And so, yeah, I think it's very much people who are hungry to experiment, I think, with newer platforms and in particular, I think like the decentralized decision-making portion is really important to everyone. And I think that's the piece that we're struggling with more because it feels like just a poll, right? Isn't quite enough to really capture everyone's thoughts and opinions. And a forum can feel a little too linear. And so that's why we can looking for more outside solutions. Well, I mean, Polis is free software at pol.is and it's free as in freedom and also free as in Bia for non-profit groups as well. So that's something one can try. But my core point is this. So when we're having this dialogue in the very beginning, I said that I'm requesting your permission to contribute a transcript and or the video recording to the commas. And that's for me co-creation. That's for me making materials for the future generations to create. And I think that's for me feels like belonging, right? Even though I don't know the people who will remix our conversation, I had interviews remix into rap songs by the Japanese band Dos Monos and in any of which way. But to me, this is fundamentally about giving up control. Like I don't really know how it will be remixed. And that paradoxically makes me feel more secure because I don't need to be a author and therefore not authoritarian, I guess. And so that's one observation. And it doesn't have to be online. For example, the by nothing movement, right? The by nothing movement is about fundamentally the call to action is to rethink economy from scarcity to abundance, right? Or a gift economy. And again, there is no single platform. There is just a pattern of whenever I feel the need of something instead of buying it online or offline, I just ask my community, neighborhood in group, you know, do you have that sort of flying around? And again, this is a pattern that could be replicated on any platform and the platform choices grows out of whatever existing platforms the neighborhoods are using. And then only when we feel the limitation of these platforms, then we extend it or augment it into other newer developed platforms. So always with a very clear use case in mind. So I hear you when you say that the decision-making collectively is something that people would love to experiment and but was sort of decisions. I am still not very clear on that because for example, by nothing, the decisions would be how to, you know, ensure equity, right? How to make the accounts accountable. And there are, of course, decision-making software for those. But for building belonging, certainly this is not yet around the scale that you would need to track each and every interaction for analysis or for ensuring equity or ensuring that hours will spend are equitable. So what sort of decisions are you looking at when you talk about collective decision-making that affects the current group? Well, I think there's a lot there. And I think I would sort of separate out like the specific challenges we're working on right now inside built and belong, you know, exploring things like sociocracy and different ways of dealing with decision-making. I think the connection to your work and sort of the broader question of scale, for me at least is, you know, right now if you want to make a collective decision around climate change, for example, how do we do that? Go to the UN, maybe it's a veto, nothing happens, okay? Then you go to the G7 and have some horse trading there, gets watered down, maybe takes an impetus to nonprofit groups, nothing happens. And you end up getting, if you do get a solution, the Paris Accords were, you know, let's be honest, like a really great achievement, totally inadequate to the challenge. So that's the saddest quote, what's better than that? And how do we make it real? And I think a lot of folks are working on it. And I guess the only thing I would like maybe spin or play with them, what you're saying is, I wonder, and I'll find this as a question. So we're in the business, I think, of catalyzing, cultivating, encouraging, nurturing emergence, right? We want a better world to emerge. And I wrestle a lot with like, what is the verb that precedes emergence? And for me, it's also, what is the verb that precedes belonging? Because I chose building belonging, I chose building for a bunch of reasons, but it's, I'm actually not wedded to, it's not the right verb. Because at some level we all belong, right? Like we're here, it's just a reality. And for emergence, I think my question or my sort of like struggle here in this thing and just here in your response there is like, I don't know that we have the luxury of letting go of total control because the other side, again, with air quotes there, is not, and people are looking for answers. And I think sort of the more energetic intervention is needed there, whether you call that cultivating or catalyzing or whatever the right verb is. But for me, it's like, we don't have the competencies to do this. Maybe, you know, and 10 generations will get there, but we don't have 10 generations. So how do we build the collective competency to make better decisions as individuals as a collective? And my sense is like the, maybe just a pivot here or to offer the connection with the conversation on transformation is, it's now clear from a whole bunch of different disciplines emerging that we actually know more or less what it takes at each level of sort of this I we world, right? Individual transformation, societal transformation, systems transformation. And we now know for example stuff that I didn't know as a kid that if I don't have the ability to emotionally self-regulate, I'm not gonna be very effective, right? I just, if I can constantly triggered, I won't be able to have meaningful interpersonal interactions. I did not get that skill set as a kid. So here I am as an adult, trying to figure out how to do that, right? That's not enough. I also have to have the ability to navigate conflict. If I cause offense, not only do you have to have the ability to let me know, I then have the ability to respond and repair the harm that's been caused. I also did not get that skill set as a kid. Part of my draw into mediation. So I think we now have emerging fields of practice that are saying, hey, there's a thing called semantics that really emerge to practice. There's a thing called conflict transformation. It really should be a basic skill set we get as five girls. There's a thing called, right? They even work around gender, right? Like I grew up in a very specific binary. Right now my kids are like, they ask, you know, he, she, or they. So there is progress happening, but it's not fast enough for the challenges we face. So for me, part of the point of the conversation of transformation is to say, hey, look, if you're out there struggling like the rest of us, cheer some of the folks who have consolidated in the field of practice that has some offense. So for me, belonging, John Powell is in my view sort of the best in the world at thinking about belonging. Does he have the only perspective? Of course not. But if you're gonna learn from someone, he's a good place to start. When it comes to thinking about democratizing technology, Audrey and a sort of folks that you're in the orbit of are about as far along as anybody out there. Not to say that you figured it out, but if we're gonna learn about how to do these processes, why don't we learn from the folks who have sort of made it the farthest out there this wilderness? And not only that, but let's put them together. So for me, it's less about decision-making per se. I mean, decision-making is more at the end of global governance when it comes to like, how do we deal with climate change as a. That's exactly right. It's at the end of the decade of action, right? It's maybe nine years down the road. And if we jump to the months at nine years down the road, I'm not exactly sure it's a good bootstrapping point. Yeah, so I think maybe it's to make the sort of invitation a bit more explicit. Maybe that'll be a helpful way to ground it. So the idea here is we've had a set of conversations, 15 so far, there's a plan total of 20. And basically it's, if you're coming along, the metaphor I use is we're hiding up a mountain. And we don't know if the mountain's climbable. It may not be, we've been on our lifetimes, but we're trying. And we know that there's a set of things we need in our toolkits and our knapsacks, right? Water, food, clothing, right, compass. And none of us has it all, right? You might have the water, Nicole's got the food, I've got the backpack. And so let's go to those folks who are sort of at the peak of their field. And I hesitate to use words like expert or leader because, you know, but nonetheless, some folks are farther along in their own explorations. And so let's learn from John about belonging. Let's learn from Audrey about, you know, the application of civic tech. Let's learn from Mickey about sort of thinking about global governance and consent-based practice that is non-hierarchical and not authoritarian. And then that's an offering. It's just to put in the backpack and pick up what works and leave what doesn't. So we've had a set of these conversations around somatic sort of cultural healing, power and equity. Some of these things about, these are things we have people to reckon with as a species, as homosapiens. We're gonna live in the right relationship with the earth and each other. So we increasingly know this. It's not an exhaustive list. You know, we can play with it for sure. But one of the questions that I feel like is out there, so one of the remaining conversations, the one that we invite you into is how do we think about the relationship between our little fractal work, our small groups, things like building belonging or, you know, what Richard's doing with micro-solidarity? How does that rack and stack into some sort of global governance structure that allows people to meaningfully participate in decisions that impact their lives, like climate change or anything for that matter? And leaving aside the specifics of the construct, which could vary and should vary from place to place, is there a way to scale some of those core operating principles that allow people to say, oh, I see what you're doing over here. Let me take that and apply it. And so I think your kind of core ethos, like the way you show up in the world around transparency and around sort of the spirit of co-creation and generosity that other people can live off of is actually I think a big piece of this. And so the idea would be, what would it look like to have you in conversation with other folks who are experimenting with different pieces of this question, sort of what ought a democratic governance structure look like at a global scale, leading technology out of the picture? What ought, even has to do with what ought, but what might an aspirational view of a small group fractal look like in relationship with others, that is scaling up to some broader whole that is not just a top-down traditional structure? And how do those things relate to each other? So some of the folks who have in mind, you, Richard, Anthea Lee, who runs this organization called Reboot, they're experimenting in different places along that spectrum. And our hope is to say, can we have a collective conversation about what is the relationship between your work and Mickey's work? Mickey's not a technologist. She doesn't understand sort of the space that you're in, but she has important, I think, offerings to bring to the question of, how do we use a tool like Polis to greater effect? Let me pause there. But is this about the mountain or is it about the journey? Is it about the ring or about the fellowship? I mean, the point I'm trying to make is that, I mean, for climate crisis, that there's another school that basically say, let's just get a bunch of climate engineers, right? Like reduce the solar radiation to Earth and boom, it's problem solved or there's another bunch of people working on Mars colonization. No planet, no planet crisis. And so basically what I'm trying to say is that we frame it around a crisis, a particular crisis. And there's always that person that will come along and say, why don't we just fly helicopters to the top of the mountain or into the mountain or whatever. And they kind of, by definition, became our out group. But you just say, we're a group of out groups. And so there's this kind of philosophical tension if we organize our journeys around one particular crisis. But otherwise, I hear you, this is fundamentally about conversations around our competencies and so on. Yeah, and I think how transformation happens, right? Like I think there's, my own kind of lineage of study and practice has been around sort of nonviolent movements, right? Gandhi and Dr. King and the anti-partheid struggle. And there are a set of principles that are discernible and replicable. And they've worked very effectively in different contexts. And so are there lessons that we can draw from that and apply different ways and different technologies and a lot of what honestly happened in Taiwan and in Hong Kong last year is really inspiring. They're applying a lot of sort of this best practice or emerging practice, let's say, and allowing people to sort of spin off of it and build. And to me, that's the whole point. It's like, why start anew each time, right? Like why don't we learn from what they did in Serbia and learn from what they did in Egypt and learn from. And not say that this is the answer, but there's a set of principles that actually are, seems to me quite replicable and sort of directionally accurate. And the problem is no one of us, the field of nonviolent protest movement is an entire ecosystem that has lots of different sort of pieces to it. And that's not enough. We also have to have this other piece over here on semantics, practice and healing. And that's another piece over here on narrative and communications. And nobody can hold all that space, we just can. So for me, part of the fractal is intentionally curating the folks who have, again, the right set of competencies that we collectively need to have. And again, that list is gonna be infinitely large, but the point of the conversation and transformation is that there's a set of 10 or 15 that we have to have. But we don't have these. There's no way we make it up the mountain. Doesn't mean we will if we do have them, but the quality of the LC add to that. No, that was great. Yeah, and I guess the only thing that I would add is, I think in addition to these gatherings that we're planning and these conversations, we wanna also think about how we bring other folks into the conversation in a substantive way. So we will have a curated panel of folks and we're hoping it can be one of them. And we will also extend an invitation to folks in our network, folks outside of our network who want to then continue engaging in that conversation basically form a small group, a small cohort of people who are technologists and outside of technology to kind of take these principles or like best practices that you all lay out and play around with them in the coming weeks. Yeah, that I can do. I started saying that long as it's in the creative commons, I'm game, I'm happy to participate in such conversations as time allows. And also if you need the resource to make, like copy edit transcripts out of these and so on, I can provide that as well. Cheers, thank you. No, I think I'll speak for myself and I think for Nicole as well, I'm gonna really just appreciate the spirit of generosity with which you do everything you do. It's really inspiring and I think unusual. I will tell my daughter that you are a lowercase digital minister and I'll bring you the poetition. Lowercase digital and lowercase minister. Yeah, and I think, I mean, one kind of, I appreciate that you named the longings or this action begins the longing. I think one that I've been kind of orbiting towards for a few years is like, the only thing I know in the world is good things happen if you bring good people together. And so the question has been, how do we create a container that brings the right set of folks together in the right container with the right, you know, facilitation to lead to some better outcome? And it has to do for me with this question of what is the verb that brings these emergence, you know? I could, you know, ordinary and other good people in room, I'm sure good things will happen, but will enough good things happen? Are we holding the space in a way that allows the fellowship to make it into more, you know? Or are we setting them out for falling short? And with the humility around that to me, it's a question of like, I know part of like one of the dreams I have is in addition to this conversation on transformation, which is sort of bounded around a topic that you're already expert in. The other metaphor I sometimes play with is, you know, we're entering a cathedral and you walk in through one door, you know, you're expert to use civic tech. And I came in over here through, you know, gender authoritarianism, John comes over there through racial identity formation and we all find ourselves in the cathedral. So how'd you be here? I know I came that way. Where are we? Look up. It's actually not a cathedral. Maybe it's a mosque. Maybe it's something else entirely. But each of us has something to do with how do we take this next step? And so for me, it's like Tyson, Yonka Porta, you know, Tyson's work down in Australia. He's an indigenous practitioner. He's done a lot of really cool work around with humans, you know, the riff on homo sapiens is, he sees us as a custodial species. So let's not stop with homo sapiens. We have a role, but let's not forget the rest of the species of which we are, you know, a part of the broader ecosystem. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. I understand. And then there's a gentleman named Sanjay Parohi who's one of the architects between societal platform, this concept. And Sanjay thinks about population scale in the context of India. So, you know, where Taiwan is a few million, India is, you know, over a billion. And he thinks about, for him, the metric of success for the role out of a policy or program is kind of, you know, does it reach a billion people? And if it doesn't, it's not frankly good enough for what their government needs. So some part of the thing is like this question of scale, I think is really be doubling for folks. And there's a resistance in my communities and social justice communities in particular around scale sounds like white supremacy. It sounds like capitalism. It sounds like growth and metastasizing. Can we hold an aspiration to work at scale that rightly rejects some of the archetypes that we've been given to think about scale? And so I'm interested in what would happen in a conversation with you, thinking about bringing sort of technology lens. Sanjay bringing a societal platform lens. Tyson bringing a species lens anchored in kind of indigenous traditions. John thinking about, John Powell thinking about narrative and power and how he talks a lot about building a bigger we. So it feels to me like I access all of your work and I see the connections, you know, with the limitation of my own, you know, site. And I'm like, wouldn't it be better to bring people and dialogue with each other and see what resonates for you and what might emerge from that conversation? And in my sense is like, I'm quite confident that, you know, to put any two of you in a room would be great and each of your work could be influenced by the other for obvious reasons. Three or four or five, if we hold that space well, it seems to me there's some powerful lessons for what each of us is trying to do in our own small ways. If we can only benefit from and draw on each other's work. So that's another kind of an aspiration about what's behind, you know, we have this first conversation of four people who are already to some extent in some relationship, right? You already know Richard, but that's a gateway to a broader conversation that is more intentionally multidisciplinary and more intentionally diverse around, you know, mindsets and paradigms and, you know, frameworks that people are bringing to that conversation. And the effort for me and for Nicole and for building belonging is, can we provide a common language belonging for you to be able to communicate with each other, right? Cause, yeah, pause there. Yeah, I want to return to the mentioning about scale. Well, when we talk about scale, I guess in a lot of social justice groups, people think about industrial scale, which is about scaling up, right? Or a web scale, which is about scaling out. But what I hear you, especially around this custodial species work, to me, I would refer to it as scaling deeply as in geological time scale, like scale, not as in space, but as in time. And so maybe it is not about reaching all the homo sapiens currently alive, but rather about the homo sapiens that's to come. And also the species that's to come after homo sapiens. And if we phrase scaling this way, I mean in geological time scale kind of way, then a lot of the detention disappears because when you talk about seven generations benefit, then obviously the economical prosperity, environmental sustainability, social justice, converge seven generations down that line. And it is only when we talk about the next quarter or the next decade, do the terminology of scale brings tension. I say it's a simple observation, yeah. Yeah, no resonates. Moving towards close here, Nicole, other thoughts that we've been talking about or anything else you want to make sure we have on the table before we wrap? No, I think I'm good. Yeah, so I think, I mean, a couple of concrete proposals for next step. So one is we'll circle back with the rest of the folks involved in this and sort of, I think the challenge that I experienced since I was talking about Nicole earlier is that we bound to this topic in a way that allows people to access it. Because there's a lot here, global democracy, tech, scale, belonging. So we think we have a way into it, but we'd love to run that by you and make sure it feels like something that you can dive into and have folks be able to access. So we'll come back with that to the proposed pairing of folks and what that proposed topic might be and gets your thoughts on does that resonate? Does that feel like something you can speak to? There is an aspiration sort of what Nicole talked about of instead of having this be a one-off ad hoc thing that lives on YouTube or wherever. Can we also think about using that as a vehicle to connect communities that are currently not connected? So when Nicole and Brandon earlier, she was talking about some groups in Detroit that are really thinking about access in an interesting way. Audrey, you obviously have connections to all kinds of interesting folks. What would be some interesting combinations or I use the word remix earlier like that? So who might we choose to remix deliberately and see what can emerge from that? So I'm not sure exactly what to do with that, but that's an aspiration. And then the third thought is, I'll just sit on this and maybe we can come back to you later if it resonates. I talked about it as a fractal, fractal. So this conversation I'm sort of trying to put together with John and Tyson and Richard and Adrienne Brown and some other folks around how do we bring together these different ecosystems of societal healing and thinking about demoxing a deep way. And I think your work is an important place to play there. I don't feel like I understand it enough to speak very articulately to it. So it'd be better to have you in the room speak for how you see it connected or where you don't even. I think part of that is also fascinating. So if that's of interest or if that's a group of folks you'd enjoy to play with, we can also keep that in mind. Sure. I can definitely follow up through email on that particular aspiration. And I'm happy to be remixed. I'm not yet quite clear how I would work as a remixer in a community, mostly because I don't quite currently have a inkling of how to reconcile this time scale differences. I mean, the decade of action narrative and intergenerational peacemaking narrative are fundamentally two different time scales. And I did witness that when you move more on the shorter time scale, there is like naturally a dem, outgroup, a kind of authoritarian people and so on. And when we move toward the longer term time scales and we're like, yeah, we can bring, if not themselves, they're offsprings maybe into a more belonging kind of thinking and so on and attention is less that way. And that's what we see in conflict resolution all the time, right? If we extend it into multiple generations and care about future generations welfare, there's naturally less violence and tension there. I'm not yet clear on which time scale do the remixing actually happen. But in the kind of current generation, of course, I'm happy to meet with people who I already have heard of and certainly have much to learn. And that part I'm fine. Yeah, I mean, there's no answer to that. I think it's a great tension to sit with and hold. I think I struggle myself with like, yeah, how do we think about seven generations out and what is the directionally accurate next step in this present moment that is aligned with that future vision understanding all the things we don't see between here and there. And my sense is like part of what I'm trying to solve for or address in some way is the sense that we are all running around putting out these fires, but we're actually not sure if the fires we're putting out are, should we be letting them burn or should we be over here? There's no connection between our, there's instant vision connection between our present action and our future aspirations. And so how do we create spaciousness at every scale to the three sort of the other event I didn't show you in that slide I was showing you is visioning, which is like future state imagination, implementing, you know, how do we do it and sense making? What is the current state? What is the future state we desire and how do we move from here to there? And I'm intentionally trying to bring together folks who are anchored in each of those domains and have it line of sight in the other domains because it's all a ballgame. So I'm sure to bring that question to the group and it's a good one to sit by. Okay, excellent. Thank you so much for your time and for the work you do. And yeah, excited to see what might come of this. And in terms of next steps, once we reach out to other folks that we want to bring into conversation with you, we want to co-create the types of questions that you'll be discussing. So we'll provide some rough framework around it but would love to get your input and the input of other speakers as well. Okay, awesome. So yeah, and are you comfortable with me just publishing this video? Is there any like, I don't know, trace secret or privacy related issues who would like me to censor or do we just publish? I'm not sure where these things go once they're published but I think I'm good. Two future generations, obviously. A gift to the future sentient beings. So that's it for now then. Live long and prosper. Bye. Cheers, Abby. Thanks so much. Bye.