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        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
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        "transcript": "Hi, everybody. Welcome to another MediGov seminar. Today is 10/11/2023. Today is one of our short talks days. It's a very impromptu short talk session today. Myself and Seth will be presenting on a I'll be presenting on a report that I gave to the board about the community on Monday, and Seth will be giving a short presentation on this collaboration manual experiment that he's running. We have a small group today, so we'll have plenty of time for discussion, and then people who are watching later can catch up asynchronously. So I'll go ahead and go first, and I'm gonna pull up this presentation. So bear with me one moment. Okay. So to give a little bit of context for this presentation, I was invited by the the board of Medigov to give a a short report about the state of the community. And so I prepared this along with a couple of recommendations for some policies that the board could adopt. I think what I'd be most interested in after sharing this is getting some feedback on the recommendations, how the community is represented, if you think there's anything else that should be in here, and that type of thing. So it's about ten minutes ish. I'm gonna try to go through it quickly. But yeah. So this is the report. The it covers the current state of the community, a little bit of a context on the roles that we have, a summary of our current activities and projects, some takeaways from that, a couple of recommendations for the board, and some follow-up. So the current state of the community is that MediGov is a home for those who want to go deep and stop responding governance. The community is anchored in the membership, which, contribute financially and allocate their funds towards cultivating opportunities for the community. And the community also complements the research and operation pillars of Medigas. The three pillars interact with each other in relatively complex ways, but this report mostly focuses on the the community. Just to give a little bit of context for the kind of where the the community fits in with the overall structure of Medigot as an organization, we have two kinds of categories, participants and members. Participants is a broad category for anyone who's involved in Medigot, so this would be inclusive of everyone who joins the Slack, for instance. Members are currently one type. They contribute funds to a collectively governed pool of funds, and we're in the process of potentially restructuring the membership in order to have two types of categories, active and passive. So passive members would only financially support the organization and perhaps receive some benefits, which are still to be determined, but would not participate in the governance of the funds. Active members would also financially support membership, pay a reduced rate for their membership dues, but be required to participate in the governance of the funds. This is also within the context of the organization, which includes the staff, the board, researchers, contributors, guests, partners, and contractors. There's a really nice post by Zargam and hashtag board. If anyone wants to kind of go a little deeper into the kind of taxonomy that is outlined here. So, in addition to being a home for discussion of online governance, the community is also part of a kind of intellectual climate through short talks, go based work in work in progress presentations at go based labs, reading groups, in person gatherings, and our fellowship, we create opportunities for knowledge sharing and development both internally and public facing. The the intellectual climate also contributes to the development of collaborations. Several formal and informal projects have emerged this way. Examples include collaborations between research directors and community participants, some of them based off of in person exchanges, projects that have spun up due to the opportunity to present on a shared interest, and opportunities to co locate through activities such as panel discussions. And also, the community also serves a function of bringing the research that the organization does into the respective communities that the participants exist in. So by involving the community and the ongoing development of standards and software, the organization is increasing the likelihood of its work connecting with other online communities. Here's a brief overview of the programs and activities that are currently running at MediGov. It's not a complete cataloging, but it gives you a sense of the breadth and diversity. And each of these have specific are kind of framed based off of impact outcomes and also future kind of projections for how these programs might evolve. There's a I'm gonna just do, like, a kind of brief overview of some of these and not go into a lot of detail, but there's a document that I'll share at the end of the presentation that basically details all of these slides if you wanna dive in a little further. So, I would say that one of the new developments in the last three or four months that is pretty significant for the community is this monthly community orientation paired with our community navigator program. So each month, we have a new orientation meeting for a new cohort of community member participants that filled out the survey. This this meeting involves presentation of Medigov followed by presentation by the community navigator and question and answers. All members and participants of the community are welcome to attend each month. It's not just for new community participants. The navigators also detail the journey about how they learn about Medi Gov, what it was like to join, what it was like to, you know, become familiar with the organization, and then eventually what it was like to contribute to the organization. So people can have a kind of model for what it means to be in the community. They also serve as one month mentors for new community participants, offering them a thirty minute meeting during the first month of them being in the community. The outputs of this are currently none, but we do wanna convert some of these presentations that the navigators are giving into a recorded interview format that can give prospective members just a bit of a better feel for the community, put a face to it, get a little bit of a sense for the story. And then in terms of impact, this process helps to increase the legibility of the community. It increases the distributed sense of community leadership through the monthly mentorship opportunity. And it also establishes a bit of a better rhythm and cadence in the org in terms of when we have inflows of community participants, which lowers some of the kind of overhead that can come with a kind of continuous trickle of new members. The short talks and community spotlights are another important part of the community. This is one of them, obviously. Some of the outputs from it include the protocol for hosting one of these activities and the occasional community spotlight, which features speakers from short talks with a little bit of an interview and a photo. It's also led to a lot of informal collaborations. And it also, again, as part of this theme of distributing the agency and leadership in the organization, allows participants to step into a contributor role by hosting sessions. The in person gatherings that we do are also really critical for the organization. Some of them involve DWebcamp twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three, ETHDenver, the fellowship program, and casual self organized meetups. Some of the outputs of this have included the ethnography and speculative fiction of a governance like that BluxOne did at dWebCamp, video documentation of that gathering, and the newsletters, both Medigov's newsletters, but also syndicated with organizations like the Internet Archive also really seeing news about our activities. The impact of this is that a lot of formal and informal collaborations have developed, such as the Comtech Standards Department and the Attention Economy and Governance paper. And it's also an effective mechanism for increasing participation and ownership in the community. In the future, I think these types of interactions and gatherings are really powerful and can be paired with more output based activities and could be kind of thought of in a way that is more designed about producing collaborations in addition to just enjoying gathering. There's a new seminar format that we're gonna be exploring in the new year, which is based off of topics that have been surfaced through the community, and it's gonna be more oriented around co working and experimentation. It'll also kind of serve a useful signaling function for prospective community participants, funders, and other organizations to say, we're gonna be focusing on this particular topic for a two month period. If you wanna join, this is a good time to join. And in addition, one of the other longer term aims of the community is to protocolize or standardize to some extent these different types of programs that we have so that other community members could pick them up and run with them both in our organization or possibly in other organizations. I'm gonna skim over this just to say that we have this weekly lab gov based labs calls, and it's, I think it's one of the the best opportunities to really get a sense for where people's thinking is at in terms of current worst research. People share work in progress research and a lot of projects spin up out of this. For instance, there is a project that's being developed at the moment, which is focused on doing digital ethnography at scale with large language models. And it's one of many different projects that have kind of spun up out of this kind of intellectual conversation space. There's the membership program. There's a very a lot that Giri said about this. There's as mentioned earlier in the presentation, there's a restructuring proposal on the table that'll be decided on next Thursday, October 19. And the goal largely with the program is to increase the self sufficiency of the community and also provide a mechanism for the community to actually explore in a a tangible, practical way self governance. There's the groundwork fellowship, which we've had presentations from three fellows so far. And the kind of key here is that it's been a really useful mechanism or program for pairing fellows with research directors and in person gatherings. It's also a really nice way of getting the work of Medigov into a lot of different context than it would originally or typically be found in, and it also increases the diversity and perspective of voices on governance within the organization. We have SETI groups, which I'm not going to go into much detail here, but can talk about more in the discussion. There's a mission and vision workshop that we conducted that I think was really great for the community in the sense that it gave everyone an opportunity to give some voice to how they think about the organization from a high level perspective and has also been a catalyst for doing more community based work such as the conference that Seth is organizing or the panel rather, I should say, for the Ostrom workshop next year in Indiana. The we were doing some practical governance exercises a little while ago. I'd like to get back into the process of doing this, mostly because it had a really nice output model. So there was the presentation, and then one of our researchers, Val Lafonte, would write reviews of the sessions. So we had some difficulties finding people who wanted to do this. So if there's ever interest in picking this back up, I think this would be a really good program to try again. So in terms of, like, future funded community activities, some ideas that we might explore, and I would love to hear what other people think of these or if they have other ideas are leaning into a little bit of the LLM project by, doing some kind of intentional channels where people, specifically feed the model, based on some kind of topic, or doing some RLHF that also feeds into the project. There's also ideas of doing a community run podcast, doing community placement in consultation with other communities both on and offline, putting together a community generated and approved syllabi that brings together research that's happening at MediGov, that other communities could deploy. So, again, that's part of the kind of scaling idea of how we can protocolize some of the work that's happening in Medigap and have other organizations interface with it. And then doing more focused highlights based on some of the kind of projects that Medigap is developing such as collective voice or governance experience, making a zine. There's talks of this proposal to have a circle focused on a zine as part of the membership, and then also involving the community in sourcing and submitting grants. So in terms of takeaways, I think in person gatherings are really effective for generating collaborations and is something that the organization and the community should continue to pursue. The future direction of the community is more cocreative than it currently is. The community so far has been largely autonomous from the research pillar, which is a good thing in some ways, because it provides a little bit of distinction between the two different components, but I think there are ways that we can more tightly and intentionally couple those two things. The the work that goes into doing community building involves a lot of invisible labor and takes a long period of time to be felt. And so I think there are changes that are occurring within the community, but they're happening at a kind of slower pace than, might or normally be associated with other forms of, labor. I would also say that, broadly speaking, the community is developing more operational capacity through volunteering opportunities, such as hosting seminars or short talks, stepping into the community navigator role, activities like this. And I also think that the community activity can also be a catalyst for new research initiatives and collaborations in in a way that keeps the organization and its research sensitive to the shifting interests of the community and online governance in general. So in terms of some some recommendations that I brought to the board, I the the two top ones that came to mind was that more work could be done to integrate community engagement into research projects. So one proposal would be to enact an operational policy stipulating that community management and engagement be baked into MediGo grants. And then I I think more work can also be done to emphasize the value of community through the public signaling of community efforts. So for instance, if at the end of this mission vision workshop process, we have a new mission and a new vision, being able to state clearly that it was coproduced in collaboration with the community, would be really powerful in my opinion. Also, having some information about how funds are managed within the organization. I think demonstrating how the membership, governs the funds could also be, a really useful signal for prospective funders or organizations that are looking at MediGov and wanting to see how an organization that's focused on governance is actually interfacing with that. So another proposal that I made was that the organization will commit to foregrounding the contributions of the community and public facing document documentation where relevant. So yeah. And then I offered the, opportunity for the board to meet again and discuss ways that we can develop these programs and make them sustainable. And there's a link to the Mhmm. Basically, this slide presentation if anyone wants to go deeper. So, I will stop there and then, open it up for a little bit of discussion, maybe, like, seven or ten minutes or so. And then, yeah, I'd love to hear what people think about this report. Like, what's missing, what hasn't been accounted for, what are some other recommendations that we can make to the board, this type of thing. Does anyone have any initial reactions?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 15.0,
        "end": 15.0,
        "transcript": "That's really comprehensive. Thanks so much."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 30.0,
        "end": 30.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. So one thing I was thinking about was it it one thing that isn't really captured in here is, like, the voice of the community or how the the community talks with one another. And it it feels like this report was very kind of, like, output impact oriented. So I'm wondering if people have thoughts on this way of representing the community. And I am really interested to know if, like, these recommendations make sense or if they should be amended in any way that, like, is there something that the board could help us support us with as a community that we could ask them directly that isn't being asked?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 45.0,
        "end": 45.0,
        "transcript": "I mean, the the the best way to reflect community voice, you know, it seems like it would be have a community member, you know, work towards a place where its community members able to, present it or organize it or participate in it. So, you know, that's that's showing more than more than or it's not doing more than showing more than the same. Yeah. But, I mean, you know, it's evident that all that stuff is, like, behind the scenes with all of its, successes. I I didn't really get is is there, like, a clear? I mean, the overall sense to me at least is that this is all a lot of just figuring stuff out as we go and, and you're in the most strategic position to do that. So so, like, you kinda have a mandate. There's a lot of trust and especially especially because your values of engaging people. I mean, that, if it's there's nothing done up, it's being done as much as possible. You know, I think, yeah, you you just have a lot of trust there. So, you know, maybe it maybe it's almost disappointing to to not get any, like, push back or comments, but that's a little bit where I'm coming from when I my only response to all of that is, hey. Yeah. Good job. Keep at it. Thanks. You know? Which isn't doesn't feel very needy or useful."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 60.0,
        "end": 60.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. I think there's something in there that's, like, a little bit of attention to me, you know, just internally with myself that it I mean, I I I I suppose, like, in some ways, like, that mandate to me never felt like to me, like, when I was hired into this role, it felt like the mandate was to support the voice of the community, not necessarily my vision of the community. And so there's often this tension where I'm kind of continuously seeking feedback and input. But a lot of the time, the kind of signal that I'm getting is, no. No. No. Like, it's fine. Please make the decisions."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 75.0,
        "end": 75.0,
        "transcript": "I've experienced that too. What what do you think, Daniel? You know, you've experienced that as well. I haven't changed."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 90.0,
        "end": 90.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. I mean, I I think that, like, you know, a a compromise is is can always be like, well, every three to six months, I I check-in, and then once if I feel like I get a strong endorsement, I just do what I want for three to six months. I check-in again. You know? I remember I remember when I first started doing leadership at the at the coop. You know, initially, I was so cautious because I was just waiting for them to basically tell me that I was doing a bad job. But after a few, you know eventually, they were just like, Daniel, we we we chose you for a reason. You know, we really want you to to to do things and make stuff happen. So it took a long time to to allow myself to feel that. So, yeah, I'm just gonna echo what Seth said. The one thing that I would toss I don't know. That's not the right metaphor. Toss my hat in the ring for would be, in person events, which you mentioned have have been valuable, but, you know, maybe even more proactively organizing. Like, I think there was there were one or two New York meetups that were meant to be, like, day long coworking things. Like, more of those, you know, maybe send a few pizzas over. Like, we pretty high leverage, I I would think. You know, you find someone to host it, get people together, and then maybe even organizing. Like, we just had there was the collective ownership summit yesterday, and I know that we got a a discount as MediGo members, and that was really cool. So things like that, like facilitating discounted tickets, mid person meetups, but probably pretty high leverage in the grand scheme of things."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 105.0,
        "end": 105.0,
        "transcript": "Yep. That's a great idea. And, also, thank you for the telling your story of of leadership. Yeah. I agree. Okay. Yeah. That makes sense. What about the the recommendations to the board? I mean, the like, do those seem like things that people in this call even want, like, to have this kind of representation of community input, like, as part of, like, kind of public facing stuff about the mission and vision or, like, detailing the financial transparency of the membership. Like, are these sensible kind of recommendations, or are there other things that, like, the board could be doing that would help to support the community more directly?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 120.0,
        "end": 120.0,
        "transcript": "I mean, I know I know that Eugene was working on this a while ago, and I think it kinda got dropped. And and then he did all this research on grants programs, but a internal grants program for Medigo projects, I feel like, would make a lot of sense. You know? I think at this point, the tooling is getting pretty mature. So running an internal round, I think I mean, obviously, I I would want that, but even myself aside, I could imagine that being useful for a lot of people."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 135.0,
        "end": 135.0,
        "transcript": "Mhmm. Yeah. Cool. You guys are great. That's a great I think I think Eugene is still turning on doing some kind of, like, community based granting workshops. But, yeah, having an internal grants program. We we we tried that with the Medigap DAO, and it was sort of successful. But yeah. Doing grant is really challenging to do it, like, thoughtfully and yeah. Okay. What about the so one thing that I kind of noticed as well when I was doing this was that there's so many activities. Does anyone have the sense that there's too much happening or that it would be useful to kind of consolidate at all?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 150.0,
        "end": 150.0,
        "transcript": "My my read is, you know, there's a difference in what's happening and how you present it. And so, like, obviously, yeah, like, conceptually bundle things that you're never presenting, like, so you're always presenting a list of three to five things. Yeah. But if there's a lot happening at, like, on the ground, that's, you know, that's that's a good thing. And, yeah, it's not natural to consolidate them for your own sanity, then don't. As long as it's all running itself. Are you going crazy? Is it sustainable?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 165.0,
        "end": 165.0,
        "transcript": "Yes and no. It's sustainable to the degree that there is is some volunteer support, like, for, like, the navigator program, for instance. But then and and those moments where, like, that role can't be filled, then I become the default person who fills in that role, and that that's the part that's not sustainable."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 180.0,
        "end": 180.0,
        "transcript": "Is the new membership plan a route to making that sustainable? Being able to kinda formally ask for help on things?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 195.0,
        "end": 195.0,
        "transcript": "I mean, that's the idea is that the the membership sort of develops into circles so that people can take on certain responsibilities and, you know, be, like, allocate the funds for that work and that activity how they like. Up to date, it hasn't really been as successful as I'd like it to be in terms of actually getting those working groups, like, spun up and operational. But that's the that's the that's the idea there, is to give people the resources in order to actually meaningfully contribute."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 210.0,
        "end": 210.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. On the, on those tutors, is there something you said for making every member be in a circle, but then making the labor versus money trade off be, like, the level of responsibility you take in a circle or kinda what circle or how much, like, hours you put into your circle?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 225.0,
        "end": 225.0,
        "transcript": "Oh, yeah. Interesting. I had accounted for that. I mean, I was talking to Zargan a little bit about this, and it even, like, the current restructuring basically necessitates a kind of data model implementation in order to be able to accurately track who's active in a circle and who's not in order to move back and forth between active and passive. So there's there's a little bit of, like, a management overhead there that needs to get worked out in the implementation. So I'm already kind of weary of, like, the level of complexity of the the restructure. It would be afraid of making it, like, based on hours of participation. Something like that would be possible. Yeah."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 240.0,
        "end": 240.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. This is the big thing about, like, sociocratic type of structures. There's some some pulling self up by bootstraps going on. I mean, yeah. I mean, it's it's it's worth asking rather than solving it before implementing. If you can just make one of the first tasks of the, of a circle to to to write these things. Mhmm. It's all these things."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 255.0,
        "end": 255.0,
        "transcript": "Okay. Great. Well, if there's no more feedback or thoughts, then we will move over to Seth. But, also, feel free to reach out to me if you ever wanna, like, help or do, like, a navigator program or anything like that. So that kind of support is really useful. And, yeah, thanks for listening and responding."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 270.0,
        "end": 270.0,
        "transcript": "I called. So you may maybe it's maybe it's worth asking. Was there anyone else who have anything to add to that? I I chimed in a lot. And then they they only In that case, I'm I'm on?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 285.0,
        "end": 285.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. I'm set."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 300.0,
        "end": 300.0,
        "transcript": "Okay. So this is quite a complaint. As you you were here, it's about it happened five minutes into this thing. I've been working on something. Yeah. I was first exposed to it in a community I lived in. You know, different peep I lived in a house where, like, not everyone wants like, I say good morning to people. But you know what? In your house, not everyone wants to be said good morning to. That's not everyone's style. Really. Like and and, you know, and different people have different ways they wanna be confronted or or, hey. If you have an issue, please always tell me, but only in this way or this circumstance. So we end up on this thing where where people sort of wrote manuals to themselves, a user manual. And just the act of writing it teaches you about yourself, and the act of providing it, you know, provides the beginnings of of of, yeah, believing and understanding how we all work and the variety of ways people work. So I kind of got an inkling to you know, I started noticing that this kind of thing would be really split in all my collaborations as well. Oh, this like and I'm always telling, you know, students, like, oh, oh, your adviser is this person? Just, like, just send them a lot of follow ups. Don't don't even worry about it. They just love follow-up emails. Like like, don't be nervous. This person, you know, not not this person only works by text. You know, start texting. You know, do SMS because they're just not gonna pay attention to email or Slack, but they're always super responsive on text. You know? And I've learned this about people, and and I get these tips from from other people of, like, oh, yeah. If this person suddenly chain you know, tries to pivot the entire, you know, project you've been working on for months, just say no. It's fine. They won't take it personal. You know? And it comes down to sometimes permission to say no, permission to push back, and in a sense of when it's appropriate to do that. Some people are I've had a really easy time collaborating with certain people that other people struggle to collaborate with, and vice versa. I've struggled to work with people that other people are like, what are you talking about? This is fine. This is natural. And so it occurred to me, you know, like, how what would it look like to have a manual for our collaborators? And I've I've settled on the design. I've settled it through a an iteration or two. I've I've plugged it just within MediGov and with my own lab. And one thing that's really struck me so right now, about three people have manuals, Josh, me, and a a bee in the in the community. One thing that's really struck me about it is no one is touching it with a 10 foot pole. I I have it I have it structured actually so that I can't see my manual. Josh can't see his. That you can't that that no one can see your manual except people who work with you. So my manual is owned by another person. It's owned by Josh. It's a Google Doc that has, like, restricted viewing, and I can't view it, and strangers can't view it. You have to write Josh as a collaborator, and then Josh will add you. He can view it, add it, edit, contribute, whatever. So it's secret from the person who it's about. Okay. I can share now. Now is a good time to share the structure. And that may be contributing. I haven't totally thought it through. That may be contributing to this fact that, basically, no one's manual gets any activity. So here, this is this is a a a template I wrote, and I can share this. So I actually wrote Just"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 315.0,
        "end": 315.0,
        "transcript": "a little bigger stuff. I don't think."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 330.0,
        "end": 330.0,
        "transcript": "Oh, sure. Sure. Yeah. I wrote a blog post describing it on my website. I can put this in the chat. And I wrote a"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 345.0,
        "end": 345.0,
        "transcript": "template"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 360.0,
        "end": 360.0,
        "transcript": "Here. And the template. I'm gonna make some room on the screen. Yeah. So, you know, the template has a bunch of granules. You should be someone who works with this person. You should want a aspiring, you know, a constructive relationship with them. And I was thinking you shouldn't have power over them. They should either you should be equal or they should have power of the I don't know. Maybe I can change that. Like, all the power stuff is weird. It is weird writing things about a person with power over you. It's also writing things about a personal power over. It's just weird. Power is weird. And and that may be the big obstacle of this work. Maybe I should only be a flat. That would mean there's three manuals. Like, there's only only people who can be a manual for me, like, peers. Contact. This is just, like, assume good faith, don't gossip. You know, focus on the person. Focus on tips. And if you disagree, like, I don't agree with that tip about that person, kinda keep it in the comments. But the disagreement's okay. And, of course, like, you're allowed you're actually allowed to tell a person. You're allowed to refer to the manual. They're allowed to know they should know the manual exists. You're allowed to refer to it. And so the but you just can't show it to them kinda. But you can, like, invoke it. You can go, oh, manuals are this. So, you know, how do you feel about that? It's kinda thing. That's the whole thing. You know, this part, the actual thing is about a person. Well, this is just the template. But as far as I know, on the many of those I'm aware of, I'm not really seeing that anyone's actually, like, done this, used it. And so that's the the puzzle a little bit is how could I change you know, here's one possibility. Just keep pushing it. Eugene and and just both volunteered to have manuals. So maybe I'll have them reciprocally manage each other's. Maybe, like, creating a a channel for it. Maybe it just needs critical mass. Maybe the only incentive to contribute to Emmanuel is if you know someone's gonna contribute to yours. And so maybe it's just that I haven't pushed it hard enough. Like, it's so that's a possibility. Or maybe the design can be better. Maybe it's excessive to to keep it secret from the person it's about. Maybe that's a great idea, but the the that introduces this needing to be invited thing that is just too too much of a practical barrier. I I maybe it's just a ridiculous idea. It's fun to think about, and I shouldn't actually just keep doing it. I should just let it die. You know? May that you know, not every idea has to has to happen. So, yeah, what do y'all think?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 375.0,
        "end": 375.0,
        "transcript": "I mean, I think my an initial thought that that I would have would be that the the security model is maybe just too brittle. You know, there's this it it relies on a lot of, like, sort of good faith assumptions. And I think, you know, I think there'd always be a concern that, a, the the person who owns your doc, you know, for whatever reason, they might become a bad actor, that relationship could break down. You know, there's really no guarantee that you won't be shared the document at any given time. And so someone who contributes might worry that there could be retaliation if you eventually I think, ultimately, anyone who would wanna use this would probably assume that at any point, it could become public, and the the promises of that not happening are pretty brittle, and that might be that might be a deterrent. It could be that if you had a platform that was more credibly anonymous or secure, people would be more comfortable. That'd be my first thought or my first my first critique."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 390.0,
        "end": 390.0,
        "transcript": "More more inputs? Oh, we can jog that. Daniel, I'd say, you know, having worked with you for a while now, that comment a little bit tells me more about you than it does about, like, the system. Like like, the security lens. I mean yeah. So you're right. I'm kind of as like, yeah, assume good faith is kind of in there. Yeah. I'm just sort of, like it's assumed that the person you put in charge is someone that you trust. Yeah. Then that's that's that's kinda the case. That's the case with a lot of social institutions. So I'm not, like, super driven to that's, like, not the motivating problem. I'm not trying to make this work on chain kinda thing. There's a little bit of cover in the fact that so far actually, just cut by accident to merging it that the ownership of these docs tends to be reciprocal. I'm the owner of Josh's. You know? And no one's hit me up to be on Josh's. I don't know if anyone's hit hit him up to be on mine. I don't think so. So that that that is a little bit of a check. But, yeah, I mean, I I hear you. This this this I kinda here's here's a here's a way of answering your question that's a little more constructive and appreciative. Let let me solve this with an assumption of good faith. Like, let me make it something that that we'll use with that. Like like, if it's not even useful, then it's certainly not gonna be use like, useful, like, after all, engineering can make a robust bad faith. Yeah. Yeah."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 405.0,
        "end": 405.0,
        "transcript": "I I guess my other question would be then why not just say this is a a public document that I own for myself. Anyone can contribute to it. And that I think that that reduces the maybe the honesty you'll get, but it would maybe avoid some of these concerns about retaliation or inadvertent exposure or privacy or whatever."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 420.0,
        "end": 420.0,
        "transcript": "Mhmm. That's But"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 435.0,
        "end": 435.0,
        "transcript": "I guess I I would I would push you further and say, why not just make it a make it a a public document that I own? And I accept that people might be less candid, but maybe they'll engage with it more often."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 450.0,
        "end": 450.0,
        "transcript": "That's good. Or"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 465.0,
        "end": 465.0,
        "transcript": "maybe that that would be totally useless."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 480.0,
        "end": 480.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. You're right. You're right. In the way, I introduced a giant wall to manage a sort of minor concern. Minor concern is like, oh, well, Seth shouldn't see Seth's manual so that people can be honest. But but to ensure that, I just introduced a bunch of other stuff. The security stuff, the stress stuff, and just the barrier of needing to meet them. Maybe people wanna browse it before they read it, and you can't do that if you don't remember. So, yeah, if I just boosted my own, and Josh was with their owner, if it was yeah. Then then I and I can even say, I don't really look at it. They you know, I try not to look at it. Here it is if if"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 495.0,
        "end": 495.0,
        "transcript": "it's useful."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 510.0,
        "end": 510.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. I mean, maybe it's the last"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 525.0,
        "end": 525.0,
        "transcript": "one I'll say. That'll solve the gossip problem as well, kind of. Because if I'm Just"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 540.0,
        "end": 540.0,
        "transcript": "last thing I'll last thing I'll say because I don't wanna dominate. Yeah. I mean, I think ultimately, it would just change the nature of the feedback you would get, but maybe that's something you have to accept. Like, it becomes more of like it becomes almost like more like a roast, which is which roasts are public. You roast the person, so you can think of it more as a roast, like a productive roast."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 555.0,
        "end": 555.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. Well, it's interesting you just said it would change the nature of the feedback you get. That's interesting to me because the goal is not to give me feedback. Right? The goal is to give people who work with me feedback. They give people who work with me a forum to talk about, you you know, me Sure. And to help you. It would change"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 570.0,
        "end": 570.0,
        "transcript": "the feedback given, I think, to put it Yeah. Yeah. More accurately."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 585.0,
        "end": 585.0,
        "transcript": "Well, I I would just wonder, like like, I'm going a little bit muddy here and the fact that you just moved into this feedback mental model. Like, is that something to avoid and to play with? Was that just introduced by the fact that I think, you know, I'm the owner of this document? Like, the the there's a little bit of direction I'm going in. I don't know if there's a need there, though. Thanks, Nate."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 600.0,
        "end": 600.0,
        "transcript": "What do you"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 615.0,
        "end": 615.0,
        "transcript": "think is sent? I know"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 630.0,
        "end": 630.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. I picked I picked"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 645.0,
        "end": 645.0,
        "transcript": "to read about this, like, a half hour ago."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 660.0,
        "end": 660.0,
        "transcript": "I think not like, for instance, even this template is is nice. But, like, it would be interesting to see even if it was, like, a fictionalized person, what kind of thing I would be getting from the manual? Like like like, what about someone else would I be learning that I wouldn't be able to learn otherwise through the kind of, like, secrecy element. Like, to be able to, like, actually get a sense for, like, what it means to interface with this, I think, would be really useful. I think that's one thing. The other thing is, I mean, it it's I mean, I remember I remember when you first posted about this in the Slack, and I was like, this is really complicated. Complicated. Like, I don't know how to get started. Like, I don't know who to reach out to. Like, I I just also have no way for me to remember who owns something. So, like, the discoverability mechanism is is really hard to work out. So there's no clear linkage of, like, who has ownership over these documents. And so if it was to scale, it would become difficult for like, it would be difficult to know who to get in touch if I wanted to, like, actually learn something about somebody."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 675.0,
        "end": 675.0,
        "transcript": "That that that specific one, basically, you follow the link and you have a little form saying, like, you can request here to join. And it doesn't tell you who, but it does, like, get the right person. But, yeah, I've I've I wondered about that too. Okay. So complicated complicated because of the permission mechanism or just complicated because of, like, this stuff?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 690.0,
        "end": 690.0,
        "transcript": "Complicated because of the permission stuff."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 705.0,
        "end": 705.0,
        "transcript": "Right."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 720.0,
        "end": 720.0,
        "transcript": "But also yeah. I mean, I think it's hard to avoid the kind of stuff that Daniel's talking about. Like, there's a lot of, like, like, is the thing that I type going to use against me? Or will it be misunderstood? So I think there's also that level of, like, like, self censorship that's involved. It's a benefit for sure, but then it's, like, actually useful for the other people who are reading the document."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 735.0,
        "end": 735.0,
        "transcript": "What what do you what do you think of Daniel's suggestion of just, like, simplifying it by eye on it and therefore, some time to see it? Mhmm. Like, does that solve does that just, like, like, solve does that solve fewer problems than it than it than it introduces or more problems than it introduces, or it's just, like, equal trade offs?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 750.0,
        "end": 750.0,
        "transcript": "I mean, I think it would be interesting if it if we if you check that. I think it but I think it'll be very different. I mean, I guess one thing I mean, you said that you've been doing this with other people as well outside of Medico. Is that right?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 765.0,
        "end": 765.0,
        "transcript": "I you know, just as part of, like, an early push, I am I shared it within my lab. Mhmm. And I told my grad students, like, they did a joke. Yeah. They made some jokes about the idea of it, but I don't know if they know if they actually"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 780.0,
        "end": 780.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. But I guess well, the thing I'd be curious is, like like, have you noticed anything change about I guess it's, like, two questions. Like, the goal for people to be able to collaborate with each other more efficiently or more smoothly because they have this information, or is there another goal? And if that is the goal, like like, do you have any kind of, like, experience to suggest that that this achieves that goal? Or does it produce all sorts of just other externalities such as anxiousness because of the kind of security model?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 795.0,
        "end": 795.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, security model or not, it's anxiety induced too. Right? Mhmm. Oh, what if Sarah sees that I wrote this? You know? You know, a little bit of my, like, motivation for this comes more out of, like, having GISH students than having collaborators at Madigan. I, you know, I'm kinda I would want it for my grad community, but I released it at Madigan because Madigan is a, a place for experimentation and b, a little flatter. At least no one's depending for their in MediGOV, no one in MediGOV is depending on me for their future career. You know? But that that also tells the use case a little bit, which is just that I'll be talking to grad student who'll be like, god, it took me three years to learn this, or I never would have learned it. Why did it take someone three years to tell me this about this adviser, about this person? Right? So that's the problem that's being solved. And maybe, like, maybe that problem gets solved for free when you have a strong culture. Our department's working on having, like, a better culture or, you know, involving more people. And so you maybe you get the secret manual to x for free once you just have, like, a culture of trust and and mutual alliance. Now we're almost at time, but I love that we're getting questions. Daniel?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 810.0,
        "end": 810.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. Just my my one thought was maybe there needs to be a certain density of collaborators to to get this to get traction. And that Medigob, it's just too diffuse and the interactions are too intermittent. But when you have a bunch of students working closely, then you have a critical mass."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 825.0,
        "end": 825.0,
        "transcript": "Mhmm. I would say density is about the same in my department as Medigo. But I but I think that's right. And I can artificially increase density just by getting more people to have manuals and by making them easier to to to access. So that's actually pretty actionable input. Were you gonna add something, Sam?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 840.0,
        "end": 840.0,
        "transcript": "No. No. No. I mean, I think that's a good question, though. And I think, I mean, I think if you were to sort of say, like, you know, 10 or 15 people have, like, decided to do this, like, do you also wanna participate? Like, and then here's, like, the really easy process to do it, then that that could be a way of getting some more traction."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 855.0,
        "end": 855.0,
        "transcript": "This is really helpful. Alright."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 4",
        "start": 870.0,
        "end": 870.0,
        "transcript": "I have one one comment maybe. I don't know if I can do it real quick. Well, I have a question about the stake between the the owner and and the one that it's allowed to enter and given the context or the purpose of the the manual and and and and for whom? And and finally, a question about bad faith as Daniel has talked about, which is very common in organization. And I think it's something that is online also very difficult. You have maybe one difference. It's you can, online have text traces of of the the problem that you don't have in in physical organization because people talk and no one has proof of what has been said. I quit here."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 885.0,
        "end": 885.0,
        "transcript": "I see. Yeah. Thank you, Mark. Yeah. This has required a lot of, like, careful tiptoeing and and thought around, like, who actually has the right to contribute, who has the right to see it. Yeah. That that's the that's been the major kind of design challenge, I'll say. Again, I'm tentative to these things, but super open to it. But"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 4",
        "start": 900.0,
        "end": 900.0,
        "transcript": "Okay."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 915.0,
        "end": 915.0,
        "transcript": "Okay. Well, thank you, Seth. Thank you everyone for coming. Yeah."
      }
    ],
    "summary": null
  }
}