60 Participatory Democracy
[Wietse Van Ransbeeck](https://twitter.com/WietseVR), CEO of [Citizen Lab](https://www.citizenlab.co/) drops by the podcast for a conversation about democracy and civic participation. We'll also cover a bit about the role technology may play in both.<br><br>### Resources and Shoutouts:<br>- [Against Elections: The Case for Democracy](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29605509-against-elections?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=rSorZlgqRq&rank=1)<br>- [Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52579179-open-democracy?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=1NEKKHdKeA&rank=2)
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- community engagement 0.005
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Transcript
Hello. I'm Ryan Cook, and this is Civic Tech Chat, a podcast about the civic technology movement. We seek to harness the power technology has to improve the delivery of public services to people everywhere. Witsa, thank you so much for joining us us here on Civic Tech Chat. Could you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about what you do?
Sure. Thank you for having me in the first place. So my name is is Witsa. I'm one of the three cofounders of, CitizenLab, and I'm also the CEO. And what we are working on is the broader mission of making public decision making more inclusive, more participatory, and more responsive. And we do that by providing a online community engagement platform to governments who work with over 300 governments worldwide on on online, community engagement. And, the way they practically works is actually that citizens, when they come to our platform, they can have a look at what the the city is currently working on because often in a with the city or with the government. And then they can have their say on topics they really care about. So they can share their ideas. They can discuss, other ideas. They can vote. But then on the other hand, they can also come up with proposals themselves and actually share their ideas for the city, and communicate them to, or with their council. And so we're an organization of about, 40 people right now, trying to to work and and build a better digital democracy.
What would you say is your personal why? That thing that drives you to get out of bed each morning and do all of that.
Yeah. What what gets me out of my bed in the morning is is the idea that I can contribute to better democracy through my work. Our mission of helping shape stronger democracies for digital age by levering technology and and getting more people involved in in democracy is something, that actually started out of also my own frustration that I had about five years ago as a citizen here, and I'm calling from from Brussels here. I wanted to actually make my voice heard, and I wanted to share my ideas, discuss them with other citizens here in my city. But the means to do so are pretty limited. You can, of course, attend the town hall meeting and go there on a Tuesday night at 08:00. But, especially for youngsters and millennials, that's not the most attractive idea. You will only see a handful of people doing so. And that's where I believe that technology can really make, democracy and and public decision making more accessible and more inclusive to many more people. And, yeah, that's what I'm I'm really passionate about because after all, the decisions being made, they affect all our lives. They affect, the streets that we live in, the neighborhoods we live in, the cities we live in. So it's something that's yeah. That that we should care about and that we should participate in. And, that's what I'm that's what what really gives me what gives me purpose. And one other thing that I wanna add to that is being able to work in many different countries, being able to compare how governments work in The US versus Europe versus the global South is also something really fascinating, and and just being able to work with a team of people who, who believe in in building a stronger democracy, that's giving me, a lot of motivation.
Are there any podcasts, books, video, print media, or other such things that you'd recommend to folks that are out there listening?
Yeah. There are two particular books that I would that I would recommend to listeners. The first one is a book called Against Elections. It's a book written by, David Van Reagrugg. He's a Belgian writer. And, the book is actually about, it's introduction of of of democracy, some history on democracy. But what the book does really well in in less than 200 pages is it introduces some key concepts such as efficiency and legitimacy and why we need both to have a function in democracy. And, he makes the case to to look at democracy as something beyond elections. He makes the case for a more participatory and a more, deliberative democracy, and the ideas in his books have also shaped our work at at CitizenLab. So that's that's the first one and a good one to start with. And then from there, I think it would make sense for people interested to move on to, Open Democracy, Reinventing Popular Rule for the twenty first Century by, the French American political scientist Helene Landmore. So that that's a more recent book. I think that book appeared last year. And, in the book, she actually describes her vision on participatory and deliberative democracy, how it could work with, open mini publics that are really transparent, and how it could, be complemented with digital platforms so that more people can be included in in democracy. So that is a book that gives you very concrete ideas of how the future democracy and open democracy could look like. And there's there's one other particular idea that I really like that she elaborates on in her book is the importance of political agenda setting. So something that we have experienced too at CitizenLab is it's one thing to have a say on, you know, like, the projects that your government is running, but it's still another thing to be able to influence the political agenda and to actually, yeah, to also lead the discussion. So in a way, to have some meta participation, to have participation about participation, how shall we do that? So these are two books that I would absolutely recommend. And then, maybe a last one, and the newsletter that I really like is the newsletter of of GovLab, of the New York University. They have, each week, they have a newsletter with some some really good articles and papers about, yeah, the intersection of technology, data, and, and democracy.
Those, those suggestions are are quite apropos for the conversation we're gonna have today. And, evidently, when when you mentioned the, the one that talks a bit about agenda setting, I sort of have a little flashbacks to grad school with, you know, the the line and the median voter and, you know you know, trying to figure out, where the agenda sitter would wanna overlap with them on utility. It sounds like both those books would be really interesting. I'm gonna have to check them out after we do this show here. So pivoting us over to our main conversation today, something we're gonna talk a bit about is this idea of a hybrid approach, where governments might seek to find some harmony between the technical and the nontechnical as they're looking at ways to engage with their communities. For folks that might not have heard about this relationship and this kind of thing that governments are doing, can you give us a high level idea of what you might mean by, like, a hybrid approach?
A hybrid approach to me is an approach in which we're combining more traditional instruments for community engagement and parts of tour democracy combined with more innovative, more modern, more newer technologies. So concretely, something that we have especially also seen during during the pandemic is that governments, they started scratching their ass because they couldn't host their beloved town hall meetings anymore because we couldn't meet in person anymore. So that is more that's a typical traditional instruments, town hall meetings, monthly meetings where people could sit in and where they could have, a couple of minutes to talk and to share their their ideas or opinions and follow which public decisions have been made. So that's a more traditional approach. But then next to that traditional approach we've seen over the last couple of years, there's been a rise of digital platforms for community engagement. And the way that they interact or work together is that town hall meetings were previously mainly used for face to face in-depth conversations to make decisions, digital platforms more to collect ideas, more open ended. You could do voting, commenting, ideation. So that is how it used to work. Now with COVID, something that we have seen is that hybrid has also been redefined in a way because we previously always used we always used to talk about, online versus offline means of of engagement and participation. I think it's more accurate now to start talking about synchronous versus asynchronous participation, because both can actually be online or offline. What do I mean with that? Well, synchronous means face to face. We're talking real time just as we're doing right now in this podcast. We're having a conversation, and it's the right way to or, yeah, the right way to for for deeper engagement, for in-depth discussions, to explore options, to have argumentation, deliberation. But it's only for a small group because it's time consuming. And then you have more asynchronous participation. Asynchronous basically means that you can participate wherever you are, whenever you want. So that is something that is that is, yeah, that is, very well suited for for online platforms. And that allows for, let's say, a Tinder engagement. It it's not gonna be as in-depth as you would do with your town hall meeting or during, like, a community meeting, but that allows to get way more people involved. So just to say that I think that this hybrid approach of having both, whether you call it online versus offline or synchronous versus asynchronous participation, that such a blended approach is is often actually optimal in in the participatory process because it allows both for getting more people involved, but at the same time, still keep a good, in-depth process and conversation,
the decisions at stake. Yeah. As you're talking about that, the the public meetings example, I think, is a is an astute one. I recall myself being in a meeting with a with a couple of folks from a park district. And I remember something that they were thinking about out loud is how do we engage with folks that we typically can't communicate with. And what they explained to me is, like, one of their primary mechanisms was the public meeting. As it turns out, if you hold a public meeting at, like, 3PM in the afternoon, the the you know, you're gonna get a biased group. It's gonna be people that are already, like, highly interested and also not at work at that time. Right? So it sounds like I think what I'm what I'm hearing from what you're saying is, like, this allows you to maybe reach out and engage those folks that can't make it necessarily to that synchronous, you know, in the middle of the day thing, but you can still get their input. Am am I hearing that correctly?
Yeah. Totally. And then we're talking mainly about young younger people. So they are often left out from, like, community meetings and community engagement processes. And they are typically also the group that is increasingly dissatisfied with with democracy. So that's why I believe that technology really plays an important role to get also younger people, involved in in the community meetings and and, yeah, all the the the participatory processes.
And as you've mentioned, the the past year has been, somewhat difficult for governments as they've had to adjust to the pandemic, whether it's finding new ways to communicate, as we've been talking about, whether it's, trying to solicit input on things that they have going on that they're deliberating on. They've had to, like, figure out new practices. So we talked about the public meetings example, but, are are there other practices that you've seen that out there that you've thought have been effective?
Yeah. Well, something that that, that I started doing is hosting online meetings, and I think we've seen some really great examples of that. Also at Syslop, we started developing, like, a tool for hosting participatory community meetings online. So I believe that that is something that will stick around even after COVID, that we're not going back only to town hall meeting and and, like, the in person physical meetings, but they will also host online meetings that people can tune in just from their couch at night, and and follow the meetings. So that's, I think, a practice that is that is that is that is promising, that we can blend, like, on the one hand, participation via the digital platforms, get more people involved, get more transparency, but then on the other hand, can use new tools, new workshop tools, video technology to start experimenting with doing deliberation at larger scale, not only having to rely on, like, physical meetings, but getting more people involved by hosting these meetings also online and not only, at a town hall.
A practice that sticks out to me as I was, like, looking through this topic or, you know, preparing for this conversation is participatory budgeting, where some amount of the funding that a government is is allocating is devoted to initiatives that the community might come up with and vote on. I find this particularly interesting because often a budget is one of the clearest ways that a government can communicate what its values are. So in this case, you could say that we're getting a similar peak into what those values are for the community at large. For folks who might not be familiar with participatory budgeting, what is that all about? And, like, how how does that work?
Participatory budgeting, it's all about the allocation of budgets through the community. As you said, I mean, it's budget is indeed one of the best ways to actually communicate about your values and your priorities. So what's special about participatory budgeting is that you ask the public or your residents to actually be in the shoes of the mayor and the policymakers and see the trade offs because, I mean, our resources are unfortunately not endless, so we'll have to make choices. And, that's the whole idea with with participatory budgeting to actually be faced with these trade offs and, yeah, making clear priorities. So we see there are actually two sorts of participatory budgeting. On the one hand, we have, participatory budgets about the overall budget, about policy priorities. So in that case, you could have a say, how what's the percentage that should go to greener mobility, to better infrastructure, to more health care. So that's one sort of participatory budgeting. It's often in a more advisory role. It's more as a way to get our feedback on the budgets being said by by by the mayor or the council. But then the more popular way of doing participatory budgeting is to actually have the community allocate funds to community projects. So that is something that we see all over the world in The United States, but also in Europe, more and more happening. For instance, in in Scotland, they have it actually in in their line, their legislation that all municipalities, local governments, they should allocate at least 1% of their total budget together with, the public and their residents. But we also see in in The United States, more and more participatory budgets are are happening. Just to give an idea of how this works concretely, so we work, for instance, with, the city of Ghent in Belgium, and they have a budget of €6,000,000 that they allocate together with the community. And this often happens in a couple of in a couple of steps. So step one is generating ideas for your neighborhood. So the citizens, the residents, they are invited to submit their ideas and discuss them with each other. Then from the initial ideas, there's a selection. And the second phase, you're going to develop these into into projects. Once these projects are developed, you go to third phase and you go to the ballot box to actually allocate funds and to make choices on, alright, which project do we do we wanna see funded in our neighborhood, And that's typically how the process behind the participatory
budget looks like. Something I imagine that is challenging with that process is communication mediums. As you mentioned, like, that that that process seems very heavy with interaction. You know, you have to get gather ideas from the community. You're figuring out, you know, how weighted they are in popularity. How how do how do those governments kinda go about trying to get that interaction in a way that is accessible to the entire population, not just, you know, those who have access to, like, a particular type of device or something?
Two two points that I wanna make here. So the first one is it's always a good thing to go hyperlocal. How do you wanna see your neighborhood change? What would you like to see improve in your neighborhood rather than making it too high level for the entire city or the entire, you know, like, larger area. So that's that's one thing, making it hyperlocal and targeting in the communications also the residents for their respective neighborhoods so that everything becomes very tangible for them. And then secondly, to to answer your question, like, which channels of communication? Of course, there are the the all the online channels with, you know, like, social media and and and newsletters and and whatever, online channels. But then something that we've seen, in order to include people who don't have digital access is they would have floating stations in the city, in the neighborhood during one week, for instance, so that people who don't have access to Internet can then still, yeah, make their voice heard and cast their vote, on on the specific projects.
Some something that I think might be a challenge if you're, you know, a member of the community is you if you're not if you haven't this isn't the first time you've done the participatory budgeting process. You might be wondering whether or not an initiative you did in the last cycle is was effective and whether or not you wanna carry that idea forward, whether continuing it or doing another idea similar to that. One thing that can be challenging is trying to understand that idea of was this effective? Was this idea good? Did it do the thing that we were hoping that it would do? Which may maybe government is then in in a unique position to try to do that, I guess, to maybe use the academic term like cost benefit analysis kind of kind of thing. Have you seen, any governments, like, doing anything that's, like, particularly effective at trying to facilitate that sharing of information?
I think you need it starts from in the first place, sharing the information and going beyond, like, hey. This is what we're gonna do. And so that you're so we we we have indeed seen quite some governments, constantly keep on giving updates about what has happened with an actual project or idea and and to be able to follow the implementation afterwards. So that is indeed like a a key thing in in community engagement, that we always close the feedback loop. It doesn't end, hey. That's been the decision, but that there are constant updates about what is what has happened. And really, they go from an initial idea to the project being realized or being implemented in in real life. So that is that is something that is absolutely key to have transparency on the actual implementation, Also, in order to hold our policy makers accountable because you could say, hey. Yeah. We're gonna do this and that. But after all, are we effectively going to implement all of this? That's why, open communication about the act the outcomes is so important.
A considerable amount of what we talked about involves getting information about what folks in the community think about these topics, policies, ideas. It's not uncommon for folk for elected officials to lean on polling information in order to help give them an idea of where the public is at on an issue. What makes for an effective poll in the kind of environment we've been talking about, and how can government officials avoid being, thrown off by biased results?
That's a good question, and I think we should first look at polls in in themselves, because I'm quite skeptical actually about polls as as a mean for community engagement, especially if you look at them as, you know, like, here's a poll. These are the two choices, yes or no, binary choice, and now we wanna hear what your preference is. The typical example is obviously Brexit where they asked a question, but they didn't expect to get these answers. And I think that's what typically happens with with a poll if you don't have deliberation or discussion preceding the actual voting. So what I think to make polling effective, what should happen are are two things. The first thing is there should always be a public debate preceding the actual vote. So you should always have the possibility to actually say, hey. That's option a. That's option b. That's option c. And these are the pros and cons. Having that debate is at least as important as the actual voting part because that debate is going to shape the opinions and the preferences of your community. And then that's what what also participatory democracy and community engagement is about. It's not only about us expressing our individual opinions. It's the transformative effect of being able to listen to others to share empathy with the perspectives of others, and that's why, the discussion is so important. So that is that is one that there should be discussion preceding the actual voting. And two, I'm more a fan of what I call, a referendum instead of a referendum, giving multiple options, not just a binary choice, but giving more options, so that it's not too restricted to to yes or no. To just give an example there, couple of projects that we've done are, for instance, on on on the redesign of a public square in the city. And you could phrase it as, hey. Do you agree with this design or with this plan? Yes or no? Another way is to say, hey. Here are a couple of options, and now we're going to deliberate. We're gonna look at the pros and cons, and then we want you to vote on what your preferred option is, which I think is a way better, participatory design. And to to answer the last part of your, question, Ryan, on how to avoid, biased results, I think it's important to always have really clear rules for engagement and then you communicate them upfront. So if it is a if it is a binding poll, it would be a referendum, then you need to be very clear upfront about, for instance, minimum show or parade, minimum number of participants, or you could even say we need to have at least so many participants per age group. So that's something, that we've also seen a project that we've done in in Belgium with the city was about, shall we make the the city center, car free every first Sunday of the month? And they said, alright. We're only going to accept the result if we have at least 20% of our population, showing up and voting within this this digital referendum. So which I I thought was was really good because they made it clear upfront when they would accept the result of of, this poll. If it wouldn't be a binding poll, then I think it's also important for the the government to look at the data, see how preferences might differ between different age groups, how youngsters might have different opinions versus older people or the different neighborhoods. So these are just a couple of things I think that we have to keep in mind when, designing for polls.
That that last example is pretty interesting. I, wasn't aware that there were governments that were setting floors for participation in order to say whether or not the there's strength behind the referendum to to accept it. Because, you know, you've heard the there's kind of the the gradient of how participation works where it's like, you know, either there's no requirement, there's a requirement, there's, like, the two extremes that kind of forced participation in a poll. But this seems like it's somewhere in the middle where it's like, well, you know, it's voluntary participation, but we're really only going to see this as a valid result if enough folks participate.
Exactly. That's that's the idea indeed. But we've also seen examples of some cities setting setting some other rules. For instance, hey. We're gonna share the decision making power. So the council has 50% of the votes, and the community has the other 50% of the votes. Just to say that, I think I mean, there's there's really a strength in having rules and setting them, and communicating them clearly upfront.
Another thing in what you said that stuck out to me a bit is, you talked a little about the difference between, like, a referendum, and I think you used the term, referendum, where there's kinda multiple choices. And then you also had mentioned, like, the Brexit example. And that to me made the referendum sound especially clever. Because I I recall reading something about how Brexit turned out in that it sort of turned into a bit of a plebiscite on, like, do I like what the government's currently doing as opposed to being about the question that the government was trying to answer. So then, like, folks who whether they had an opinion or not about the actual choice, wanted to still express the frustration they had. And one one side of that vote kinda became the vehicle for that. It sounds like maybe the referendum might kinda help get through cut through some of that to get through, like, like, we're actually trying to make a choice about this, like, scenario. Do you do you think that's the case?
I think that's a really good point. We have in Belgium, we have, a politician who said, with referendum, you will always get answers on a question that you have never asked. And I think that's exactly the case with Brexit. People, as you said, like, out of frustration, they they voted no. But, actually, we don't know why they voted no. So instead, they would have organized more as a referendum if they would have offered a couple of scenarios. And if would if they would have first have had a public discussion on these scenarios, potentially, for instance, with the citizens assembly, and then they would formulate and advise, and then they they they would actually organize the voting. I think that would be a way better design, than just having, like, as you said, alright. Do you do you support the decision that we are about to make here, which doesn't leave a lot of choice and we which doesn't explain why you make up your mind that way and why you have such a such a preference. To give, another example on our end, so something that we have, a cool project that we have done in in in Greenland of all places, the capital of Greenland, was, in light of Black Lives Matter, they had a public debate about the decolonization of the public space. And they had a statue in the middle of the city of yeah. I think it it was sixteenth century Danish missionary who came in for the first time, and then the question is, alright. Shall we remove that that statue out of the public space, or shall we keep it? If we remove it, do we bring it to a museum, or do we what do we do with, like, where do we locate it? And if we keep it, shall we make it, like, more of an art piece? Shall we keep keep it in in its current state? So they offered a couple of scenarios, which then citizens would say, hey. Yeah. Here are the pros. Here are the cons. And then one week later, they would have the the possibility, the citizens, to vote. This is my preferred scenario, my preferred option. And I think something similar for for the Brexit would have been way better. Like, how can our future look like, with regards to European Union? What are the different options here? And, start way more from the actual content than what that what it all implies with of course, also way more, yeah, factual information. That that's another, thing, of course. But I think that could have been a a better design than simply going for, yeah, a simple poll and a simple referendum.
In what we've talked about, there's also this idea that there are kinda quantitative and qualitative natures to the sort of feedback a government might be after. I imagine it can be quite difficult to make proper use of both as you're going through a decision making process. You know, how to, like, kind of mesh them together and come up with those proposals possibly as we were talking about. How can governments work to, like, level up their ability to navigate that sort of research challenge?
First on the qualitative versus quantitative aspect, I think it's important to gather that qualitative data or input to actually understand why people have expressed their opinions in a certain way. Because if you don't have that, why you can't make up why we should make a certain decision. At least in in my ideal model, what we should try to do is we should work more towards making our representative democracy more representative by getting more people involved and having actually, in a more advisory role, having our input being communicated to, our decision makers or then our political leaders are going to make the decision in the end, as opposed to direct democracy where we're directly voting through a poll as we just discussed. I think that's, for me at least, way more dystopian, than having that public debate and sharing these inputs. And then I think we'll always end up with more qualitative data. But now getting back to your question on how governments can navigate, like, bring qualitative and quantitative together, I think that often it's it's one and the same, especially in a in a digital context because we use today, such technologies that in the data analysis and the data processing, they use text analytics and that all the semantics of the content and of the IDs that are being shared, that they're made, quantitative in a way. We're looking at the input coming from the community, in a more mathematical way. We're looking at, like, how similar are certain inputs. We're clustering them together. And that way, qualitative data is becoming more quantitative, data, and you get even starting starting from open ended questions, you you get concrete, results on, hey. Out of this consultation, we've concluded that these are the 10 different, priorities.
On your organization's blog, there was a bit of advice that stuck out to me. It suggests that your work should be data driven, and your data should be experience driven. Can you lab elaborate a bit on that and how that point might kinda fit into the theme of the conversation we've been having so far? As we as we discussed earlier,
community engagements well, it's not only the goal of community engagement is not only to increase trust and legitimacy in in public decisions being made. So that's what you could say is giving people a say. But it's also about having people, or giving people an influence on the decisions being made. And that's why your work, I mean, in this case, as a policymaker, should be data driven. You should actually have an understanding of what is the community saying. And when we say your data should be experience driven, then we're referring to the fact that people, in the city, our residents, our citizens who are daily making use of our infrastructure of, our public space, that they are the heart of our city. They have the best understanding of what's wrong, what could be better. So that's the idea that you actually collect input and data from people being daily in out in our cities and that you use that data to better inform your decision making so that actually what's being what's being lived, what's being experienced is influencing decisions being made. A couple of points that I wanted to also make with regards to data driven decision making is that one thing is that something that we've seen is that data literacy within government is sometimes still pretty, pretty low or lacking and is gonna be increasingly important, once you have hundreds or thousands of participants and inputs. Having the ability to understand what's being said is really important because technology that can assist you with the analysis and exploring all, the opinions and what's being said, but it's not going to draw the conclusions for you. So that's still the role of the public servants, public officials, and policymakers. So that's one point that is is definitely going to be increasingly important in in, the coming years' data literacy. The second point, I think we've talked about this before, is next to next to to collecting the input. I think government is getting better and better at collecting input and doing community engagement. But the next step will be, how do we communicate back these decisions? How do we track what has happened after the decision? And, also, how can we give feedback in such a way that it's that it's more personalized? And you actually know as a resident, hey. This is what I've shared, and that's how it has influenced these decisions. So that's something that we're currently exploring. Also, at CitizenLab, to actually connect the input with the actual decision and showing how your input has shaped or has not shaped a a a public decision so we have full transparency on that. And then a a last thing that is important with regards to to data driven policymaking is that we should have, not only transparency about the decision being made itself. That's that's an obvious one. But we should also have more transparency about the data that is being used, the analysis that is being used, and how, how that data has informed the decision. So what I'm thinking of concretely, once you do a consultation and you've you've gathered, hundreds or dozens of input, Well, visualization of that data of what's being said and and the new techniques, the text analytics techniques that we're using, I think that that should always be public so that the public has the same means and the same information symmetry, in order to evaluate actually how their public officials have worked with that data and have come up with a certain decision.
On a prior episode of this podcast, there was a conversation about whether or not there would be this sort of rubber band effect as some governments might seek to kinda return to the way things were as the COVID restrictions kind of go away as ideally as the situation improves. Should we expect to see governments undoing some of the changes that they've made in the face of the pandemic, or do you think a lot of what's been done is gonna end up proving to be sticky, you know, where they'll end up continuing the practice?
I think most of the digital tools that we started adopting because I think that's what it's about. In the end, we started adopting way more digital tools, and, yeah, government has been digitizing so rapidly. Well, I think that these tools, they will they will stick around. And not only because of COVID. COVID has been a trigger, but the the real acceleration, I think, is in more than than only COVID. First one is when we look at the workforce of governments, more and more younger people are working within government or are envisioning a career within the public sector. I think that's, one important aspect that the people, public servants are younger, are more tech savvy. And then next to that, another thing is that now, of course, we have started using these digital tools. We've seen the clear benefits. We might also have seen the downsides, for instance, with regards to digital access that we still need to provide these alternatives. But I do expect actually that governments will keep on, following this this digital Road and we'll still be live streaming their town hall meetings. We'll be using digital platforms to engage our community.
Hopefully, it's only going to increase in in in the years to come. As we get to the tail end of this conversation, something we often do on this podcast is leave some space at the end for the guests to give us an idea of what they'd like us to leave this conversation thinking about. So for this conversation we've had today, what would you say those concluding thoughts should be?
I would advise all listeners to, especially make use of all the great tools that are already out there to get engaged. It's it's going back to to a broader message that I think that to to for us all, for us as citizens, it's our responsibility to also participate in democracy. The democracy is of something that we shape altogether, and it has never been so easy to actually engage. You You don't have to get out of your couch or armchair. You can go online, and instead of having to go, like, from door to door and collect signatures, how we used to do it maybe five or ten years ago, you can now launch your proposal online and get our signatures or or votes online. You can attend a town hall meeting. You don't you don't have to drive there. So it has never been this easy to engage. So my message would be make use of that, make use of that opportunity, and, yeah, leverage these tools to engage and to be part of your local democracy.
Again, thank you so much for joining us here on the program today. I have no doubt folks are gonna have a bit that they can take away and learn from this conversation we've had about democracy.
Thank you, Ryan.
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