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    "utterances": [
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 0.0,
        "end": 0.0,
        "transcript": "Awesome. Welcome everyone to Medigov seminar. This is our weekly seminar series where we invite researchers from the Medigov community to share the cool things that they've been working on in the space of governance and digital governance. Today, I'm super excited to intro to be introducing Sam Shikowitz, who is gonna be sharing his research on the arch voting method. And I'll let Sam, introduce himself and his work and present to us now. Thank you, Sam."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 15.0,
        "end": 15.0,
        "transcript": "Thanks, Bal, for the introduction, and it's great to see so many people here, many of whom I've had nice interactions with. And so nice to see you all here, and great to have Liz as well as the director and superstar in the realm of deliberative processes. So so a little bit about myself. Yeah. I'm a physician, integrative physician, and I, entrepreneur for many years. And, you know, many years ago, I started to be interested in direct democracy and, you know, things happened, and I didn't kinda jump you know, I didn't go very far with it. I was more. And then about four years ago, I started to get really serious about it and started building this platform that I which is about to go into beta testing for b.io. But, you know, I just had to really figure out how I wanted to do manage voting, and so I've just been really deep diving into it and meeting with really great people, having great discussions with people who are experts in voting science. And kinda came up with a method, And I'm working to submit a a academic paper on the method at some time, but I'm gonna give kind of an overview. And the slideshow that I have today is it's probably a little bit there's too much information about, you know, ranked choice and score voting and stuff like that. So I'll try and burn through some of those slides, try and get through them more quickly, because I think most of the people here are very familiar with with all that stuff. But, but I'll I'll I'll touch on it in a bit. And, yeah, is there anything else I should talk about here or say? As far as an introduction, I'm not sure. That's good? Okay."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 30.0,
        "end": 30.0,
        "transcript": "Sounds good to me. Yeah."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 45.0,
        "end": 45.0,
        "transcript": "Okay. So then I'll share my screen, and let's see here. I don't know what these options are, but I'll just click share. And"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 60.0,
        "end": 60.0,
        "transcript": "Just put on the mute option."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 75.0,
        "end": 75.0,
        "transcript": "Oh, what happened?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 90.0,
        "end": 90.0,
        "transcript": "You were momentarily muted for me, but okay. I guess you're back."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 105.0,
        "end": 105.0,
        "transcript": "Okay. Okay. So can you see my screen? Oh, hello?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 120.0,
        "end": 120.0,
        "transcript": "Yes."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 135.0,
        "end": 135.0,
        "transcript": "Okay. Great. Good. Great. So so this is my slideshow. This is me. There's my son, Aiden. And this is about the arch method. And just a little prefer preface here is that there are some problems with voting. In fact, some people think we should do a way with voting altogether. I don't think it's possible, but I think it is possible to use voting as a way of sort of gathering resonance or understanding the resonance that options have with with the community. And so, you know, we're all used to single choice voting methods like plurality and majority rule, and, you know, they're just really not good methods. And so we all sort of have a a bad taste in our mouth, I think, with regard to voting. And so the methods that are most commonly used have, you know, limited expression preferences. So if you're not voting for the winner, the person people that you do care about, you know, you don't sort of get to push, nudge the vote towards the people, you know, your preferences. It's hard to achieve consensus, and strategic voting is a real issue, and that's how we get, you know, the the systems that we have now, you know, with the in the states and in in all the democratic countries where we're using that type of voting, where you're, you know, avoiding for the lesser lesser of two evils or many evils and etcetera. So, so we're facing these challenges and trying to apply this method of voting or gathering consensus or gathering residents to us to more evolved systems. You know, the voting system and the whole government system that we have in most countries was designed when, you know, people had little villages, and they would meet in a town hall, and somebody would write down what everybody thought about taxation or whatever, and write it on a piece of paper, and get on a horse, and drive it, you know, ride it to the capital, and then meet with a bunch of other people from other villages and decide what was gonna be done. And so the methods of governance that we have now are are really not suited to the huge complexity and the huge number of people that were were that are, you know, are affected by the decisions that we're making. So we're looking for better methods of collaboration, of coordination, governance, and so I think we're gonna have to have some kind of a voting system in in there. And so I'm basically trying to figure out one that would work given the the nature of of the challenges that we're facing. So I've come up with this called the ARCH method. It's the approval and rating slash cardinal hybrid loading method. And so, basically, the kind of design constraints are that no one likes to rank order large list of options. And so, like, dragging options into the order, that's difficult. So, so we're eliminating, that ordinal method and sort of making everything cardinal. In other words, you can rank them, like, in in our case, plus five to minus five, or you can just, you know, give them a a star or however you wanna do it, depending on what system. But and Arch method accommodates, many different types of aggregation. So, and so, basically, what it is is you sort of decide, you know, what reading you wanna give each option, and then it actually converts that into an ordinal system later. But it it does it in an interesting way. So it allows you to not just express the order of your preference, but also the strength of your preferences. So you can use it in a score like method. And I'll talk about that a little bit more because the score method does allow more detail about the strength of preferences. And it supports continuous voting. So this is part of that sense making process that we really need in our new governance systems where, you know, you can kinda see the options that are there. You can have a discussion about each option, decide, you know, or discuss why you think they're good or bad, and you can give tentative votes and change them as new information comes in. So and that information about how you're feeling at the moment about this option really helps in the creation of better options. And so the arch method kind of facilitates that, and it bridges the gap between, you know, score voting and assertive contraceptive methods. And so it is very flexible as far as different ways it can be used. It's just a bit about voting. You know, hunter gatherers did it. We did have, know, Athens two thousand five hundred years ago, and we've been using voting ever since. And I don't think we're gonna do away with it. Even if we're using council, like, sortition councils and you know, I think even within those councils, there will come times when people will have to sort of decide amongst themselves, you know, or or res it's how much options resonate or which they prefer. And so really kind of honing in on how to do that and finding methods that reduce polarization and have the most centrist options or the most the least disapproved options rise to the top is really important. So these are some of the people that informed this method, Richard Darlington, Pietro Sparadi Definitio, and Richard Forbes. And, basically, in conversations with them, that is how his method was developed. So what are we doing wrong? Well, firstly, it's just a voting method. Okay? So if you have sort of corruption in the back end, it's not gonna solve the problem. Boss Tweed here, I don't care who does the electing so long as I get to do the nominating. So, basically, garbage in, garbage out. And so it doesn't solve that problem. But it does solve a lot of problems with single choice voting. And this is where it gets single single choices where you just get to choose one. And then there's plurality, where the biggest one wins, and then there's majority where it has to be more than 51%. But both of these because you're only choosing one, you get this problem of splitting the vote. So, you know, this is a silly picture, but, you know, if you're only counting people's first preference, then you can end up getting sort of, you know, splitting the boat and getting getting a less a less approved option. And so, again, sort of lesser of two two evils kind of problem. Also, winner takes all and wasted votes, and that gets really employed quite a bit in the redistricting where you can kind of shuffle things around. And whereas all of these people's votes should be counted in a way that, you know, accounts for their their list of preferences, the the strength of their preferences, but none of that happens, and you and and redistricting takes advantage of that. And so we end up sort of voting in losers, people that nobody really approves of, and there that can be solved. Yep. So single choice oops. Single choice voting is great when there's two options, yes or no, or option one, option two. But as soon as there are more than one option, it gets really bad. And I think I'm I'm gonna skip through these. These are this is too much detail, but this is basically showing you how in a single choice option, you know, this grapefruit ends up winning with six votes when it's hated by nine of the people. And so it doesn't it doesn't sort of account for that. And in, you know, majority, it it wouldn't nothing would win. In morality, the grapefruit would win. But in reality, you know, let's see here. There are other methods that work better. And so approval voting, we're assuming here that people approve the first two options and reject the final option. So these are the same votes from before, and you get to see here that, you know, six approvals, for the grapefruit, but nine approvals for the, strawberry and, 15 approvals for the grapefruit. In fact, nobody hated the I mean, the, mango. Nobody hated the mango. So this would be a case where the, you know, there are some disapprovals of the strawberry, and so the mango wins. Condorcet ranking. Same thing. You do the pairwise comparisons. So you see here that when you pair up grapefruit and strawberry, strawberry wins because more people preferred it. More people preferred strawberry grapefruit. And then looking at grapefruit to mango, more people preferred mango. Now looking at strawberry and mango, actually, more people preferred mango over strawberry. So you get this ranking where, actually, the mango's the winner. So, that's the contraceptive method, which I really like. I'm just gonna mention this very briefly. We have all heard you know, those of us who are in the field hear about arrows and possibility theorem, basically, that you can't, you know, have your cake and eat it eat it too. And, you know, in other words, no voting method solves all the problems. But the descriptions that I've heard about that, actually, I don't agree with. So this idea of transitivity and ties, and they talk about Condorcet paradox. Actually, I think it's not a problem. If you have a paradox, in other words, a is, a is high more highly ranked than b, b is more highly ranked than c, and c is more highly ranked than a. So, basically, that's a tie. And that only happens when you know, extremely rare cases. In small groups, it can happen more commonly. But,"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 150.0,
        "end": 150.0,
        "transcript": "it's basically Indicative of a general close state. It's just in other words, it's it rather than being a a result that you take as a final result, you should now use this as an input for further action based on that result. Yeah."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 165.0,
        "end": 165.0,
        "transcript": "Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's it's not a very close. It's like an exactly tied. You know? It's like it's a tie. Okay? Any any method any voting method can produce a tie, and this is what a tie looks like in a contraceptive method, in a pairwise comparison method. I just don't think it's a problem. And then non and then you can use other methods like applying scoring or, you know, there's many wet methods to break the tie that are applied, like in the Schultz method and in minimax and all those things. And for finding, you know, sort of the the one that makes the the most people happy and the least people unhappy and that kind of thing. And then there's this concept of nondictatorship, which means that a single person can't just make decide the outcome. And depending on how you calculate it, somebody's gonna decide the outcome, you know, if you kinda look at it. But it's not gonna be the same person every time. And so oftentimes, when they're saying that there's a dictatorship clarification, then it it actually, they're kind of not seeing the the bigger context. Eventually, somebody's gonna tip the boat somewhere. And so and so, basically, we're keep accommodating those two criteria, and we're focusing on practical outcomes, not theoretical constraints. And so, you know, none of these actually are practically constraining. So so that's the contraceptive method, which is one of the methods that we use. So we use approval, contraceptive method, and and score voting. And so score voting is really nice when compromise and soft preferences are are important. So I'll just try and blast through this here. Let's see here. These are the scores. They were given plus five to minus five. And so you can see, you know, when you rank, a lot of people are really not liking grapefruit, and everyone pretty much liking mango. And, you know, yeah, there's some preference for strawberry, but weak preference is there. And the mango, again, wins. So all three of the non single choice voting have the same outcome with grapefruit at the bottom, and the those that was the winner in the single choice method. So it's a little bit worrisome. And these are the the single choice methods have all of these problems, but the vote spoilers, lesser two rules, less winner takes all, wasted votes, apathy, approving losers, bad math. So, basically, what we're doing with the arch method and this is the method that we're using in for you, and this slide should have come later. But, basically, the method is actually, let me just go here. Here it is. So, basically, like I said, it's cardinal. So you you give it a reading plus x to minus x. It could be plus 100 to minus 100 or plus two or plus one to minus one. Doesn't matter. And so that captures both the direction and the intensity of your preference. So how much do you we often think about how strongly do you like an option. Why don't we think about how strongly do you dislike it? I kind of don't like it, but I don't really care that much versus this is the worst thing that could happen to our or or whatever. And so capturing that intensity of preference, I think, is a good idea. And so then because you have minuses and pluses, then you can say plus one and above is an approval. And so you can set a minimum threshold for how many how much of the community will approve approves of an option. And, of course, we can also set a quorum. That's easy. But and you set the quorum on the option level. So when options can come and go, and if an option comes in at the last minute last second, there won't be that many people who have a time time to consider it. And so it can't, you know, kind of slip in past other other options that are, you know, with a few good votes. And and the the approval threshold also kinda prevents that kind of slipping in phenomenon that can happen. So the approval threshold can also be set in a community for different types of votes. So you can say, you know, the default is, you know, 51%, 51%. And then the you know, for bylaw changes, you need more, like 8080% quorum, 80% approval, and, you know, financial situations, maybe, like, you know, 70% and etcetera. So you can decide for the at the community level what type of voting preferences you want in the arch method. And then the aggregation can be done at the end through score voting or a contraceptive method or indeed through star voting, which I've added to another slide I forgot to add here. So star voting is sort of like a combination of score voting and not exactly counterset, but majority approval that reduces some of the strategic voting tendencies or potential in score voting. So and, you know, because of the way this works, we do have continuous allowed continuous voting. And and, you know, because, you know, the the it's harder to game, and so we can allow that continuous voting process. And it promotes a collaborative environment. You can kind of get a sense of the resonance for each option. Here's where yeah. Plus five to minus five, quorum and approval thresholds. Here it is. So the score voting, high score wins, Condorcet method, the ordinal ranks cardinal ranks are converted to ordinals. So it's like you just oh, my baby is obnoxious. I think. Ma'am, can you my daughter is here. So it's the pairwise comparisons, and then we can do a Schultz algorithm or some other algorithm like minimax or whatever on top of that. And so this is Condorcet method is really better for large anonymous groups and because it's less prone to strategic voting than score voting. Score voting is better for small, high trust organizations where you're you really are trusting that people are giving their best they're giving accurate scores of each option, and so you can really understand how strong preferences are. Start somewhere in between. So it allows allows kind of it it discourages the strategic voting associated with score by putting, sort of a a plurality at the top with the top two scored options, and that prevents people from wanting to minimize their second choice or third choice, because there's a chance that that will be in that in that ranking. Okay. So as I mentioned before, dynamic participation, giving feedback on options, promoting transparency and dialogue, informed decision making. So it's deliberative polling in a sense. And options could be modified based on community feedback and with the caveat that if you change the title of an option, the vote has to recount the vote count has to be reset. So let's see here. This slide is out of place as well. But so here's what it looks like in four b. We've got plus five to minus five. And then over here, you've got the quorum that the community administrators can set. This can also be set by a community, vote. But, right now, it's it's just done by administrators. Hold on, Ray Ray. I got I have to talk. So approval minimum, and then we have the vote finalization period. So once you have an option that passes quorum and approval, then there's a period of time that the community can decide if it's a few days or months or years. And then within that period of time, people get a notification. Oh, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Where they have a period to change their vote around and or add new options or whatever. And if an option stays in that stays as a winner in that vote finalization period, then then it it becomes a winner. So that's one of the options that allows for that dynamic voting system. And you can also just have end dates on the voting. We also do a system here where you have voting, and you're option opted to give a a reason why you're in favor or opposed. And those options, those reasons become a poll in and of themselves so people can rank the reasons for or against, and you can start to see what's important to the community. Ray Ray, can you stop talking, please? I'm giving presentation. So let's see here. We went through all this. Okay. So, yeah, this is about four b. It's not totally appropriate here, but we're basically trying to make a tool that's useful for any type of group and including, eventually, the world. And so that's my basic presentation. I hope I wasn't too yes. Here you go. Here you go. Here you go. Say hello, everybody. Oh, there's my daughter. Ray Ray. Valkyrae. And Alright. Okay. There are some questions here. Proxy announcement. Okay. Sorry. That's not relevant. Unfamiliar with the field. Continuous voting. Okay. Continuous voting means you can change your vote on anything at any time. And so and so what that does is it you know, there's pros and cons to everything, but what this does is it allows the voting to be used as a sense making process. And so you can sort of gauge resonance, and as new options come in, you could say, oh, this one's better. Change to vote on that one. This one, I I would give it a plus three. Now it's a plus two, and now this one's a plus five. I really like that one. And so you can start to see as you as we go through the process of looking for solutions. For example, looking for a president Of The United States. You know, if you campaigning happens for two years. If we had, like, one year of open voting and people could could, you know, nominate others or themselves, and, you you know, you can kinda go through this process of peep seeing what people are how people are ranking the candidates over the process of a year over over the time span of a year. And then you can kinda see as they discuss reasons for against each option, and there's a discussion associated with each option. And so you can really start to make sense of, hey. You know, this person did that. Well, that doesn't matter to me. Well, it matters to me and blah blah blah. And then the voting accounts for the strength of people's preferences and all that. So this could be used for deciding candidates, you know, for office or or anything like that. And and it's that process that I think Peter's asking about, which is continuous voting. It's a process of sense making, really, so gauging resonance. So I think that ends my presentation, and I hope it was out eligible. I was just blah blah blah. So"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 180.0,
        "end": 180.0,
        "transcript": "No. It was great. I was gonna ask if you could if you wouldn't mind sharing the slides with us so we can look back. Cool. I think maybe that would be helpful at least, yeah, for some of us who want to go back in and maybe learn later or also ask questions."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 195.0,
        "end": 195.0,
        "transcript": "I'll share the slideshow. I'll just make it viewable. And so you can actually go through all of the animations if you want. But it doesn't have the discussion around it. So, actually, I have a video that is older that kind of talks its way through the animations. I'll share that as well. So the the the slide is slightly different. It's not focused on the arch method as much as I mean, it talks about it, but it's it's it's more about voting systems in general. So I'll share both of those, the slide and the end of the video."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 210.0,
        "end": 210.0,
        "transcript": "Awesome. Thank you."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 225.0,
        "end": 225.0,
        "transcript": "Mhmm."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 240.0,
        "end": 240.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. So, folks, if you have questions, feel free to type them in the chat or raise your hand here on Slack I mean, on Zoom, and we can address your questions. But in the meantime, I'm seeing Sam, I'm curious, like, if you could speak a little more to, like, how you developed the system. I know you you shared on, like, how you consulted with those other folks in in the space. But what were kind of, like, some of the pain points that you set up? Or, I mean, you you shared a bit about that too, but, like, what was really your your process or journey into this method?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 255.0,
        "end": 255.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. So, you know, all the voting methods that I've run across seem to be optimized for ballots, paper ballots, one time voting. None of them really seem to be optimized for this sense making process, this resonance gauging process that I'm just that I'm just sort of describing. And so, you know, just looking at the problems with voting methods, with, you know, instant runoff and border method, like, looking at all of them. And and trying to you, like, really understand. It took me a long time. I'm not as smart as I wish I was. And it took me a long time to really understand, like, why why is score voting prone like, why is it susceptible to strategic voting? Took me a long time to understand that. And then and then my contraceptive method, like, why is it less why does it account for the strength of preferences less than score? But, like you know? And so it it just I I had to sort of wrap my head around all these things and and and look at different conversant methods and compare you know, look at all and and and think about the process of like, I want the system to be really dynamic. And so to like, I don't I don't I didn't want for for me to I didn't want this deliberation process to have periods of time where it's like you can add options for a period of time, and then you have to vote for a period of time. And then, you know like, I just wanted it to be super dynamic and super fluid. And in order to accommodate that, there needed to be ways to prevent, like I mentioned, like, newer options from slipping in, needed to be able to accommodate for quorum and approval, and in fact, varying levels of quorum and approval within a community, like, you know, for example, by law changes or financial changes. And so it's just a process of, like, bumbling around and, you know, I came up with some with some really bad ideas and, you know, and finally got my head down straight with these these sort of experts and and just, you know, just just it's just a process of trying to understand what the problem I'm trying to solve. And the problem I'm trying to solve is governance at the global level. You know? It's like it's a stupid prob like, stupidly wicked problem. And, like, it's just you have to be as thick headed as me to even think that that they're that you're you know, to be willing to even try to do that. It's freaking ridiculous. And most of the, you know, most of the the the systems out there are really geared towards smaller groups. I mean, you look at some of these great softwares like Loomio and, you know, Polis and, you know, all that stuff, and and they're they don't work at that level. You know? You just, you know, they just don't. And and so I had to mix I had to, like, look at what they were doing and say, okay. This part works there, and that part works there. And how do we accommodate for, like, all the crazy people out there? I mean, you know, there's plenty of them in my family, and maybe I'm one. I don't know. But, you know, there's there's gonna be some outliers, and you have to have systems that accommodate, you know, extremes and and that that, allow for the wisdom of the crowd to emerge, not the insanity of the crowd. You know? So is that too loud? My daughter's no? Okay. Good. I've got a microphone that's hopefully targeted to cardioid or something. But so that that was my process. I don't know if that makes any sense, but"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 270.0,
        "end": 270.0,
        "transcript": "No. Thank you. Yeah. That that was a great answer. Yeah. We have so Scentsy shared in the chat that we had someone named Blaine Hanson come and share on research called persistent democracy, which might be of interest and relevance to you and your work and and this group."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 285.0,
        "end": 285.0,
        "transcript": "I'd love to. And I'm always always looking for you know? I I've watched a few videos from other just speakers. One on liquid democracy. By the way, this system is also a liquid democracy system. And but we're the focus is on the sense making part. And the liquid democracy is, like, kind of a, you know, cognitive shortcut for people so they don't have to make decisions, you know, on everything, on things they're they don't feel qualified to, etcetera. But but, really, what if you know? But, you know, that that talk any anybody who's interested in liquid demoxiti should definitely check out that talk. I forget who the talker who the the the French lady. I forgot her name, but, anyway. Yeah, some great talks. I'll check this one out as well."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 300.0,
        "end": 300.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. Oh, right. Since he shared, Manon Ravel."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 315.0,
        "end": 315.0,
        "transcript": "Yep."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 330.0,
        "end": 330.0,
        "transcript": "That's the one. Cool. Looks like we have Neda, Dow Academy asking a little bit more about Fourbee as a platform, I guess. And I yeah. I'm curious about this too. Like, I guess, who who uses it? And, like, if you could maybe give us a specific example of, like, a decision that was made by a group on there, that would be really cool."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 345.0,
        "end": 345.0,
        "transcript": "Okay. So, like, four b is opening for alpha testing. Version two is opening for alpha testing, like, tomorrow or the next day. So I'll post that once the last few bugs are in doubt in the metagov discussion, but it's just for for by, like, for the people by the people, for by, but it sounds weird. So we call it for b.io, and you'll be able to sign up if you want. But I would prefer, during this period, if you could contact me first and so I can just understand it's in beta. It's really enough testing, and I really would love to go through the process with you to explain. I'll make some videos as well about how it works and and that kind of thing. But so the question is can you rephrase the question? I apologize. So so no. To go back to it. So first version was used by a community garden and a couple other smaller groups, and it just had some serious birth defects. And I just said, look. We have to redo this because, you know, it was designed by me, and I'm not a designer. And, you know, so I got got a lot of really good feedback, from a designer that I hired, and she, you know, kicked my butt and took me to the mat and really cleaned up the mess that I made, which is really helpful and made it more normal, you know, like, more, like, what everybody's used to. So this is sort of the that process has been manifested here. And let me see. Yeah. So you can't let's see. Oh, should I just try to answer these questions from the chat? Or look or reassess the question if I didn't answer it."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 360.0,
        "end": 360.0,
        "transcript": "Well, Neda, if you wanna come off and and share verbally, if there's any other aspects of your question that you wanted Sam to address, feel free."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 375.0,
        "end": 375.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. And I can answer Peter's question in the meantime. Yeah. Actually, go ahead."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 390.0,
        "end": 390.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. Go for it."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 405.0,
        "end": 405.0,
        "transcript": "Okay. So, yeah, so he's the question is, catering to for views, catering to smaller groups, such as small business environment. Do you have concerns that dynamic voting with small amount of votes could effectively undermine the secrecy of the vote? Bigger people can figure out who voted for what by having access to accurate voting data. Yeah. This is a concern. And, and so, basically, we're there's everything is sort of a juggling act when you're making decisions like this. And so what we're prioritizing is sense making. So we're we're sort of assuming that in small groups that they're high trust groups and that people can speak their mind freely. And, and, you know, we don't know nowhere can you see how anybody voted, unless someone is delegating to you, and then you can see how they're voting. So in a liquid democracy, you have to be able to see how your delegate is voting. And so there is that. If you don't want people to see how you vote, don't open yourself up up to delegation. But so that that's the compromise that we're making, and there may be situations where this this doesn't work. If there's a if it's a very small low trust group, I think better just to I don't know how to solve that problem, to be honest. But in large low trust groups, yeah, there's it's there's too many too many people to really know who did it, who done it. So, you know, you can't have, like, a gangster saying, yeah. You vote my you know, vote in favor of me or else. You know? And I I can be like, I did it, and, you know, I voted for you, but they didn't because you can't really track it. So that's the that's the compromise that we're hoping for. Okay. Figure out what okay. Shall I answer this question? Oh, go ahead. Sorry."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 420.0,
        "end": 420.0,
        "transcript": "Oh, Steve has a question."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 435.0,
        "end": 435.0,
        "transcript": "Okay."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 450.0,
        "end": 450.0,
        "transcript": "I don't know. I might have been spacing out. But do you have the method of when you have a floating vote? What is your term for it? Not floating vote, but what? Like, a vote that is currently happening but hasn't ended yet."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 465.0,
        "end": 465.0,
        "transcript": "So in for me, all all the votes are Continuous."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 480.0,
        "end": 480.0,
        "transcript": "It's called continuous voting. Okay."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 495.0,
        "end": 495.0,
        "transcript": "Continuous voting. Yeah. Yeah."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 510.0,
        "end": 510.0,
        "transcript": "So when you have a continuous vote happening I'm not okay. I'm not sure yet. Okay. Then can that end at any point where you you set a time. Right? And then You're"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 525.0,
        "end": 525.0,
        "transcript": "wasting time."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 540.0,
        "end": 540.0,
        "transcript": "Time, if if all the people who have participated say that they're satisfied with the results, a 100% approval at that point, then the vote ends. But then you have the amount required for approval drop over time. So maybe a week from then, it's 95% have to say they like the results or 90%. And, eventually, you get to a point where the results are ratified no matter how much people dislike them and can't agree. But it but it has that descending quality, and then people can actually productively even gain that with thinking of how much they wanna be hard asses with or do they actually wanna negotiate something before the final? Because it looks like the the vote is about to resolve and they don't like what's happening. They better then renegotiate because yeah. You see what I'm saying."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 555.0,
        "end": 555.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. It's interesting. Yeah. It sounds complicated. Like, it could it could work in such a"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 570.0,
        "end": 570.0,
        "transcript": "the method detailed, then I can send it"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 585.0,
        "end": 585.0,
        "transcript": "to you. Okay. Okay. I'll check it out. Yeah. Yeah. I I don't it's an interesting interesting idea. When you want to when you need to force a vote, I could see where that could be useful."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 600.0,
        "end": 600.0,
        "transcript": "Alright. Well, I well, I'm still I'm still asking questions."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 615.0,
        "end": 615.0,
        "transcript": "Sure."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 630.0,
        "end": 630.0,
        "transcript": "So, you know, my theory is that the least gainable thing is, you know, you know, a selection at a percentile, like the median and so on and so forth. So even more than a a conversate method would be. It is literally a selection of a dictator. That's why it it's like you say, it's proactively using those, Kenneth, again, impossibility. So, you know, that it's it can be a good thing. So I think that's an example right there. So, for example, if you wanna make your scores, you just pick the score. You have everybody do the plus five and minus five. But rather than averaging those scores, you just pick the one in the middle or a different percentile. Now there might be a different percentile than the median that would be appropriate. And maybe, for example, you want to have all of the selected scores average zero, for example. So you pick a selection percentile such that all of the scores when averaged together as close to zero as possible, and that you you well, I mean, once again, this is sort of complex. But I think that that you've hit upon the essence of things, but there are some specific possibility that we could discuss."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 645.0,
        "end": 645.0,
        "transcript": "We've talked about this, and I think one of the media one option for the median that's really useful has to do with choosing like, when you have, you know, for example, money or, you know, like, allocation of resources or something. And you people are saying how much they wanna allocate and finding the median. I think that's a really good use for that. Yeah."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 660.0,
        "end": 660.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. That's my stat method. Right. Exactly. That's the thing that I was talking about. I just created the POC inside of a a so I'll send that to you. You can play with it."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 675.0,
        "end": 675.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. Yeah. And we do we support that as an one of the aggregation methods. Like, you can choose percentage or a number, and then it would probably end up being the mean. We haven't totally settled yet. But for most of the choices, we're we're doing, like, combined approval. So plus one, minus one, and zero, or or sentiment reading, like, minus five, plus five, I think. So yeah. But then yeah. There's there's a lot of other options too. But yeah."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 690.0,
        "end": 690.0,
        "transcript": "It looks like has a question."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 705.0,
        "end": 705.0,
        "transcript": "Yep."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 4",
        "start": 720.0,
        "end": 720.0,
        "transcript": "I I actually just put it in the the chat. So but I I guess I can read it out loud. Yeah. Sure. So I guess, maybe I'm not fully understanding the whole process, but if I am, if you have a kind of period, in which voting is happening and you're able to see, how people's preferences and and vote is changing. How would you account for coordinated pushes or phases of voting activity or voting change during that period? You might imagine a kind of malicious actor coordinating a group of people kind of in like the sense of like the claque in the French opera in the 1800s, but also more recently, astroturf crowds who are kind of paid protesters. It's kind of like a homonymous kind of element or market that emerges. You have a kind of malleable, changeable voting context. And yeah, and that could also not also be necessarily maliciously oriented, but you might have activist groups or movements or even political parties that are kind of strategically thinking about the timing of when the kinds, like they actually activate their vote. So I'm just curious how you think about that temporal economic, economicization of the vote."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 735.0,
        "end": 735.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. Yeah. That's good points. And, and so the way we're sort of managing that so we have three ways of ending a vote. So one is you just it ends on a on the date specified. And if there's you know, if there are any options that are both passed both a poor quorum and approval, then the highest ranked of those is the winner. Second is you don't get a winner until an option passes quorum and approval. So the vote just goes on until something passes quorum and approval, and then you have a vote finalization period. And so then and so when one op one or more options passes quorum and approval, as long as one of them stays within stays above quorum and approval for that entire vote finalization period, then at you know, then once the finalization period ends, then the voting ends, and we decide which one is the the winner at that point. And then there could be a hybrid of those where, you know, it could end on a date and and or and or when and when there's a when there's something that's passed court of approval. So I don't know. I think, like, to try and answer your question about sort of that strategic voting, one of the reasons that I'm sort of in favor of liquid democracy as opposed to representative democracy is that there are so many you know, okay. Yeah. Obviously, it depends on the size of the group, but you you get to the size of a village or a city, you know, you have thousands of people or, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions or billions. It becomes almost impossible to gain like, you couldn't hire enough people. You know? You couldn't, like, meet with enough people to make a significant difference. I mean, you'd have to be so coordinated. And I think if, you know, if, like, a large enough percentage of, like, you know, a a a 100,000,000 big state or something or whatever, you know, a million people in a city, if if, like, a majority of those people are willing to be gamed, you know, and somebody has enough money to pay them, you got bigger problems than the voting. You know? It's like the the voting nothing is gonna solve that. Like, no system is gonna solve that problem. You've got, like, severe corruption and severe, like so there's different types of I love the the metamodern view on political systems. And there's democratization politics, which is, like, get allowing people to have their say in in proposing things and voting on things and and the whole sense making process. There's another one called Gemeinschaft politics, which is, like, how do the people trust each other? How do they interact with each other? How do they do they have the space to be themselves? And and can they create, like, you know, natural bonds of affinity and that kind of thing? So if you're getting to the point where That's"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 750.0,
        "end": 750.0,
        "transcript": "the subject of next week's, seminar."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 765.0,
        "end": 765.0,
        "transcript": "I I would love to talk. I love you know? And this is sort of one of the problems that I've run into over and over again so so far is that people really want to be in small groups making decisions together. And that's like the gemeinschaft type of processes are are really important, like, in both of them, but in large and small groups, but more important small groups. And the democratization becomes more important the bigger we get. And so a lot of people really just want to, like, gravitate towards small groups because it feels good. Like, we all wanna just be with our people, and making decisions together and stuff. But we've gotta tackle this really ugly problem of, like, you know, ten, eight billion of us and, like, how do we coordinate at that point?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 780.0,
        "end": 780.0,
        "transcript": "Leverage small groups like that in order to do the larger coordination?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 795.0,
        "end": 795.0,
        "transcript": "In indeed. And I I have a plan for that too."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 810.0,
        "end": 810.0,
        "transcript": "That's the subject of the white paper groupopolis, which after I stopped working on this digital twin one."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 825.0,
        "end": 825.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. Right. Right. Right. And and sortition and and community councils, etcetera. But, yeah, but that's a whole another topic as well. Okay. What else? So did I answer the questions to say? You have"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 4",
        "start": 840.0,
        "end": 840.0,
        "transcript": "a nice answer. Thank you."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 855.0,
        "end": 855.0,
        "transcript": "Sure. Okay. Coordinated pushes. Okay. That's your yeah. Okay. Any other questions for me?"
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 870.0,
        "end": 870.0,
        "transcript": "If folks don't have question any more questions, I mean, I I'm curious, Sam, if when four b is ready, if you're interested in hosting a kind of place for play or an experiment with the MediGov community. Maybe there's, like, something you like, even just a a one hour long simulation decision that you can design for us, and we can invite folks onto a call where we can, test it out and actually feel what it's like to deliberate on four b and and make decisions together."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 885.0,
        "end": 885.0,
        "transcript": "Be so happy to do that. It'd be such an honor. You know, honestly, we we're hoping to compete with Slack. So I think we have a better chat system. I didn't talk about that at all. Like, I don't really like the chat Slack system Slack chat system. And, so we're doing kind of, like, a combination of WhatsApp and Twitter, depending on the size of the group, with with, spotlighting. Anyway, I won't go into it. But, and then and then we have what we call topics, which are sort of, like, channels. And so you can have your each you know, in Slack, you just have posts. So you just have, you know, you know, links and images and all that kind of stuff and text. We have that, but we also have this decidables column. So within each topic, you can have it it'll have its own set of decidables. So opinion polls, decision votes, and that comes with more sense making. And then people elections, which, you know, is indeed a little bit deeper in sense making, and then we have this thing called the proposal challenge. And so the idea here is that we have the granular proposal system. So, normally, proposals, you know, just come out of nowhere, you know, like in DAOs and stuff and, like, hey. Give us some money or whatever. And you can't do that in the system. You have to actually pose the problem first. And so you create the challenge, and then you create the proposal within it, and that gives a space for counter proposals. And so now people can look at them and sort of decide which one they like better. And not only that, but the proposals themselves are, like, in this United States government. Like, the proposals are, like, 500 pages long, and they're full of garbage written by, you know, lobbyists and blah blah blah blah blah. No one can read it anyways, legalese. In in the system, we're using the granular proposal system. The proposal is like a Twitter post, a Twitter tweet. You know, it's, like, really small. And then there are these subagreements that are within it. So there's these decisions that are made within it, and people can use those. It's like the who, what, when, where, why. Like, you know, say it's a village in India, and they're running out of agricultural water, and they wanna solve the problem. And so how do we solve the water problem is the challenge. Right? And then someone says, hey. Let's build a dam. And so and then but then there's a lot of questions. Oh, thanks, Liz. Great to have you on. Well, I have questions like, you know, okay. Where on the river are we gonna build it? And, you know, how much do we have to spend? And who's gonna build it? And, you know, what color should it be? And, you know, stuff like that."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 3",
        "start": 900.0,
        "end": 900.0,
        "transcript": "So Okay, Sam. Sam. So, essentially, what you're saying is you don't wanna give a live demo. You wanna do an asynchronous demo. You'll set something up where we can all then participate as a Medigap con community on this this demo."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 915.0,
        "end": 915.0,
        "transcript": "Or or both. Both. I don't care. You know, we can we can I'll set up the community, and we can do the live demo and just leave it up. And people can go in as as needed at will and mess around and play with it and, you know, etcetera. But I'll give I'll I'd be happy to Liz, if you would kinda, like, help me walk through some of the challenges or some of the things that the MetaGraph community is chewing on, and we kind of reset those in there as a demonstration. Yeah. Happy to do that."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 930.0,
        "end": 930.0,
        "transcript": "Awesome. Yeah. I'm happy to help you do that too. But I'm excited. Cool. Well, best of luck on this launch week or or the things the bugs and final fixes for the tool, and we'll be excited to hear when it's ready. Please do message me, and and let's get something set up. Maybe, like, yeah, in the next few weeks or even just the new year, we can, give you some time to take some time off after this final push, but we'll be excited."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 945.0,
        "end": 945.0,
        "transcript": "To go. I'm ready to go. I'll let you know. We can figure out a ton."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 960.0,
        "end": 960.0,
        "transcript": "Okay. Sweet."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 975.0,
        "end": 975.0,
        "transcript": "I'm excited too. So thank you."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 990.0,
        "end": 990.0,
        "transcript": "Yeah. Cool. Well, thank you so much, Sam. Thank you everyone for joining. Unmute. Give Sam a quick round of applause, and and then head off into the rest of your days. Thanks y'all for being here. Thank you, Sunny."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 2",
        "start": 1005.0,
        "end": 1005.0,
        "transcript": "Glad to do it."
      },
      {
        "speaker": "Speaker 1",
        "start": 1020.0,
        "end": 1020.0,
        "transcript": "Thank you. See you next week. Thanks, everyone. Have a lovely rest of your day."
      }
    ],
    "summary": null
  }
}