25 The Good Country with Madeline Hung
We're joined by [Madeline Hung](https://www.linkedin.com/in/madeline-hung-357137a6/), Co-Founder of [The Good Country](https://goodcountry.org/) an effort to create a digital country based on shared values. We'll engage in a conversation about how their mission, values, and how the organization operates.<br><br>### Resources and Shoutouts:<br>- [Good Country Index](https://www.goodcountryindex.org/)<br>- [Liquid Democracy](https://www.democracy.earth/)<br><br>##### Music Credit: [Tumbleweeds by Monkey Warhol](http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Monkey_Warhol/Lonely_Hearts_Challenge/Monkey_Warhol_-_Tumbleweeds)
Top Keywords
- good country 0.024
- country 0.017
- citizens 0.009
- good 0.009
- countries 0.007
- global 0.006
- world 0.006
- different 0.005
- issue 0.005
- citizen 0.005
- implementation 0.005
- global challenges 0.005
Transcript
Civic Tech Chat exists because of collaboration between volunteers and listeners like you. And to that end, we could use a bit of your help. We just put live on our website, civictech.chat, a link to a form where you can submit your feedback. Is there a person you'd really like to see on the program? A topic you'd like us to cover? Or would you just like to share your thoughts about what you like and what you dislike? Well, then head on over and check out that link. Now, to get to our discussion though, for episode 25, we have, an interesting topic to cover. We were joined by Madeline Hung, co founder of something called The Good Country, which is a project to create sort of what it sounds, a digital country. So in this discussion, we'll talk a bit about how something like that might work, what their objectives are, and how the inner mechanics of their organization function. I think you'll find this conversation as interesting as I did. So let's go ahead and hop right in. Madeline, thank you so much for joining us on Civic Tech Check this week. Could you take a moment and introduce yourself to our audience?
Yeah. Thanks so much for having me on, Ryan. So my name is Madeline, and I'm cofounder of The Good Country, which is a new country to make the world work a little bit better.
Now one of the things we address often on Civic Tech Chat first is this idea of personal why. So the idea of what drives you to get out of bed each day and go and do what you do. So, Madeline, what is that for you?
Well, I guess I've always cared about lots of different global challenges, whether it'd be climate change or most recently, I was working in the human rights world, women's health, public health, food insecurity. I guess what really excites me about the Good Country Project is that it's an opportunity for me to work on all of those challenges at once, because what we're aiming to do with a good country is is target one of what we see as the root cause of our inability to address those other global challenges, which is our inability as a global community to work together more. So I guess that's what motivates me is with this project is, getting to address all those global challenges at once. And then I think beyond that, just a fundamental love and interest in humanity and the ability to work and connect with so many different kinds of people from all around the world. I've I've always been really interested in in understanding people from from different cultures and different backgrounds. And so, the opportunity that this project gives me to do that is also really exciting and motivating.
I gathered from your background that you've been exposed to, a number of sectors, including the health care sector, nonprofit, and, research. Could you tell us a bit about your path and how you wound up at The Good Country?
Yeah. Absolutely. Well, I guess, like you said, I've I've dabbled in lots of different, areas of work and and different issues. You know, as a as a young person growing up, I, you know, volunteered a lot, whether it was with public health organizations or with food banks or climate change campaigns. I kind of cause hopped, I like to say, because I was looking for that one driving passion cause and never quite felt satisfied. Never felt like I found it. And then one of my realizations when I was a little bit older and in college was that, I actually I don't think I was ever gonna be satisfied just working on one issue. And I realized that one area in which I could make a bigger contribution was in thinking about systems that produced lots of these, but were actually fundamentally interconnected issues. So in college, I started looking a lot more at global governance and international relations and, that started out with a look at international human rights. So I worked for a couple of different human rights organizations, mostly doing research. First, Oxfam America and then at a smaller human rights NGO called MSI Integrity. And then it was through those experiences that I, again, took a step out and looked at some of the the bigger global system that was producing, these patterns of of systemic human rights abuse. And that's really what led me to The Good Country. I was, about two years ago applying for a global governance competition, to design a new global governance system for the world, kind of a United Nations two point o project. And that was the impetus for me reaching out to, now, my cofounder, Simon Anholtz, seeing if he wanted to work on the competition together. And although we ended up not pursuing a proposal for the competition, it really sparked some of the the conversations that led up to our decision to create a good country. So that's my path to today.
So we we've said the words the good country, several times here at the beginning, and I imagine the the listener now would like to know what that is, if they haven't, themselves been exposed to it. So for folks in that TED space, could you give us the high level of what the good country is?
Yeah. Well, the good country is a new country, and it's a country whose citizens are all the people in the world who identify, first and foremost as citizens of humanity, perhaps even before as citizens of their own country, and who believe that if only other countries could work together a little bit more and compete a little bit less, then we would have a real shot at addressing some of the most pressing global challenges of our time. It's a new kind of country, obviously. For example, we have no territory, But the reason we call it a country is because its primary function is still to develop and execute policy. So citizens work together to develop and implement foreign policy, that provides a model for other countries, and how working together to solve problems, benefits both the international community and countries domestically.
In a lot of the materials I saw, there is this mention or or assertion that 10% of the world's population already shares the values that, I believe you mentioned or alluded to there for the good country. Could you speak to what some of those values are?
Yeah. Absolutely. So some of the values that we're we're talking about are things like identifying, as a citizen of humanity, perhaps tied with or even before identifying as a citizen of any one country. Believing that collaboration and cooperation, actually create better policy, whether we're talking about international policy or even domestic policy that we can learn from each other, to even implement policy quote at home. I think it's a other values are our general interest in multiculturalism that the combination of of different cultures and perspectives often produces things that are more beautiful, and effective than things that are produced in cultural isolation. And then there's some other values around, a general step away from domestic politics, left, right, liberal, conservative as such, and to look at more how, you know, the state of the world and how we can work together across country lines, to address some of these challenges. A desire to ask more questions and assert our own answers. So curiosity and active listening and and things like this. But yeah. And I I think the other thing about the the good country is that, it's important to acknowledge that that people will, interpret what it means to be a global citizen in in slightly different ways. 10% of the pop world's population is obviously a very large number, and so we we understand that that will also mean that we'll have great diversity in within our own population, but it's a general, commitment to not just one's neighbors at home, but to all of humanity and all of the planet. I would be curious also,
how did how did you end up on that, that figure of of 10%? Where where does that in particular come from?
Yeah. So, a very early iteration of this project was something that my cofounder worked on called the Good Country Index, and it's an index that we still produce, which looks at, all the countries in the world, what they contribute and take away, to the rest of the world. So looking at, their contributions and and what they take away from from other countries. So most indices look at domestic behavior, how transparent, how technologically advanced, how happy is x country. But what the Good Country Index was trying to do was to ask the question, what does it mean for a country to be good outside of its own borders? And my cofounder Simon gave a TED talk to launch the first edition of the Good Country Index back in 2014. And what was really most interesting about that talk was the response that Simon got in the weeks and months afterwards. And essentially, he got about 20,000 emails from folks all over the world from a 178 different countries, saying things like, I identify first as a citizen of the world before a citizen of my own country. The principles of the index are my guiding principles and philosophy in life. You know, if only countries could work together more and compete less. And essentially, Simon noticed that there were really strong patterns in the responses, in those emails. And so from there, what we did was essentially form a a character type from the responses in the emails and map that onto, what's called the World Values Survey, which is one of the biggest global surveys and public perceptions and values. And we just took the questions in the World Values Survey, which were, aligned with the email responses and then selected for the sample from the world value survey that strongly agreed with all of those questions. And that's where we get the 10%. So it's actually quite a conservative estimate because you're asking people to strongly agree with, again, 10 different statements, about things like identifying as a citizen of the world, being willing to pay more in taxes to benefit someone from a different country. And actually, if you are using more inclusive sample, so for example, people who just identify as a global citizen, you really get more into the forty, fifty, 60% range of the global population.
If I understand what you've said and a bit of the reading before this discussion, it seems like a a nontrivial amount of what would be going on, within your organization, it would be somewhat akin to law like lobbying? Because it sounds like a lot of what you want to do is change the behavior of other nations. Am I am I on the right track with that? Is part of the concept of this is kind of levying a large group of people together in order to help influence choices?
Yes and no. Lobbying, if we ever were to pursue it, would only be a very, very, small subset of the actions we would take. Lobbying when countries lobby each other is just called soft power diplomacy. But we part of the reason why we wanted to create a new country was because we wanted to be able to implement all the different kinds of policies or interventions that traditional countries might implement. So whether that means writing a new treaty or, you know, funding a new infrastructure project or creating a new international agency. Those are the kinds of things that we see the good country, developing, funding, and implementing. And so only, like I said, a small subset of those actions, would likely be lobbying.
I I I get the sense that in in moving forward this from from from your literature that there is a number of phases or or stages that have either happened or have to happen. Could you give us an idea of, like, what those are and where the organization stands now along those steps?
Yeah. So The Good Country is currently in the middle of our soft launch period. So we just opened for citizen enrollment for the first time in September. And essentially, from now until September 2019, we're trying to enroll our first cohort of citizens who are helping us test out all of our systems and processes. So we're aiming to enroll just about 200,000 citizens in the next year. And when we mean our systems and processes, we've developed a six stage policy development cycle, that we're going to be, trialing twice in 2019. And so we're asking for our first citizens to to test that out. We can try it at scale and to give us feedback on whether that process feels meaningful and effective. And then once we've gotten that feedback in 2000 in September 2019, We'll make any tweaks, adjustments that we need to to that process and then launch officially, next September.
Could you talk a bit about how the good country will make choices? And perhaps a bit about, like, how someone in the community would take part in that process?
Yeah. Well, we feel like any, decision making process or effective democracy, if you wanna call it that, needs to be an informed democracy. And so the first stage in our process is that every citizen gets information about a range of global challenges that we may consider, addressing. So each citizen gets a a set of briefs about global challenges and we've put a lot of thought into how to compose those briefs to have them be as evidence based and neutral, specifically country neutral, so, as possible. And what we mean by country neutral is not just looking how a given issue affects a single country or a handful of countries. So not just how migration affects, you know, Greece or Italy, but how it affects the entire community of nations. And also what opportunities the good country may have to to penetrate or address that issue. And then once citizens have access to that information, probably the the most key part of our decision making process, uses a natural language processing technology called Remesh. So essentially what we do is have a a real time, collective decision making conversation to determine which of the issues, raised in those briefs, we care about and want to address, and also why. And the reason this stage is so important is because in our minds, it does away largely with the need for traditional binary voting processes or referenda. So instead of saying we wanna focus on issue a or issue b, we can have, like I said, a real time conversation about what aspects of a different issue of our interest to us or have the biggest opportunity for us to implement intervention and also why they matter to us. From there, so we'll have a a decision collective decision about what issue we want to tackle. We call on experts to help us draft policies in detail. And then we have an an ad hoc panel composed of citizens and experts and members of the good countries foreign service who will be implementing the policies to determine, which policies we actually carry forward.
And you mentioned making, coming up with, like, a group consensus as to what the focus would be on. I think what I hear you alluding to is that would be kind of like a direct democracy, component. Like, we're essentially it's like it it would be like a plurality of folks in the community have decided, like, this is what we would focus on, and then that's where it goes, or how does that portion of that work? Yeah. Absolutely. It is very much direct democracy in that we we don't have elected representatives because what the technology allows us to do is have,
everyone represent their own view in their own words, and then what the software does is determines which of those views are most representative of the group. And so so, yes, it's it's direct democracy in that sense. There's also a direct democracy component later on where, citizens can also issue a transferable vote, to their peers who can represent them in decision making around, around what policies actually get selected for implementation. So so very much so in that sense. And I think, you know, this is something that we're going to be getting feedback on and trialing with our first, cycle test cycle next year, to see to see how close we can actually get to consensus or maybe we use these conversations to identify the top three priority areas and try to simultaneously develop proposals for the the top three ranking issue areas. But that will all be determined, in collaboration with Citizens next year.
Now you mentioned the concept of a transferable vote in there as well. Could we dig a little bit more into that, like, how how that mechanic would work and what someone trying to make use of that, what their experience would be like?
Absolutely. So, the transferable vote comes into play with another technology partnership we have with the Democracy Earth Foundation. And the Democracy Earth Foundation has developed a platform called Sovereign, which they call Liquid Democracy, or like I said, a transferable voting platform. And so that comes into play in the last stage of our decision making process when we compose that ad hoc panel to decide what policies actually get selected for implementation. And so, in to determine which citizens represent the group on that panel, citizens will be able to delegate votes to peers in their community who they'd like to represent them based off of the contributions their peers have made to ongoing policy making conversations on the platform.
So it sounds like what that allows folks to do is opt in to having themselves represented by a representative as opposed to doing the the direct interaction. Is is that what I'm hearing?
Correct. Well, we think it we we think that there is, value provided in both. But sometimes, you know, we all want to express how we feel about a particular issue, but we also wanna give people the opportunity to acknowledge, hey, I'm not an expert on this specific issue, but I really, really trust my friend Bill. And so Bill knows more about this issue. I trust him. I'd like to, instead of voicing my opinion through in natural language, I'd like to, transfer my vote to bill. So so we think that there is, you know, value in in offering both systems to citizens.
When someone chooses to do that, is that, a per issue type of decision, or, is it over a span of time? What is the the does the decision to allow yourself to be represented look like?
Yeah. Per issue. So, in the long term, we anticipate running these policy development cycles, once a quarter, so about four per year. And that means that at the end of the year, we would, in theory, have, identified four different issues we would like to address and four different interventions we'd like to implement. And each time that we start a policy development cycle, all of the the voting records, all of the transferable votes go back to zero. So, like I said before, you know, maybe I feel really, really strongly about climate change and I have lots of experience there. So I'd like to take a more active role, in that decision making process. Maybe I wanna be more of an observer when we're talking about biosecurity. So, yeah. We we allow citizens to modify or adjust their engagement, during each decision making cycle.
In in your materials, there's also mention, I believe actually you you yourself in the video, started to talk about, I believe, like, the time it was planned for the future. Perhaps it's sooner coming now. But the idea of allowing, these distributed citizens to organize together to propose policies as a group,
can you speak to that and what that might look like? Yeah. So I I think probably what I was mentioning was something we're piloting in the spring, which are called innovation challenges. So in this kind of fourth stage of our process, like I mentioned, we wanna bring in experts to help us develop policy proposals in detail. So what are the attempts that have actually been tried to address this issue before? What can we learn from them? Successes, failures. And then how does you know, what does implementation look like in terms of concrete timeline budget, these kinds of things. And we wanna draw on experts to help us do that. At the same time, we want to, give citizens the opportunity to to take a crack at writing policies in detail as well, if that's of interest to them. But we wanna give them some support in doing that so it's not just, you know, on the fly. So what we're gonna be trying with innovation challenges is bringing together citizens to form teams. We'll give them a mentor or coach, in addition to resources, information about that issue to help guide their policy writing process. And so like I said, we'll be trying that for the first time in, in March and then again over the summer, and seeing how those, pilots go. We'd like to expand the innovation challenge globally thereafter.
A couple of times in our conversation now, the concept of, like, bringing some folks in to to help out has come up. I I believe at one point, the idea of, like, foreign service officers was mentioned for, you know, communication with other states, and then also now experts in different policy realms that come in. Can you speak to the way it would be decided as far as, like, who who you should tap on as far as who is the person that is the appropriate expert to help in these different situations?
Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, as far as as, as we're concerned in terms of expert advice, it should be an open door. You know, we are we're happy to, to review proposals from from anyone who who wants to contribute them. Obviously, different groups have different perspectives. You can call them biases. We don't see that as a problem as long as you acknowledge what the bias is. And then again, we'll put it ultimately put it back to citizens to determine, which policies we wanna implement. But we think, in terms of pooling understanding, expert opinion, and experience, that that should be open door. I think in the early days, of course, we're going to try to rely on or to draw on, existing relationships while we're still somewhat unproven. We have to, to, you know, work on part work with partners to help get the word out and to to draw in draw in those experts. But I think in the long term, having that be, like I said, open door to whoever, wants to contribute is great. And then, yeah, in terms of of selection of of, foreign service members, right now, we have citizens all around the world who are are serving as ambassadors for the good country, getting the word out there, conducting, I guess, you could call it citizen diplomacy, if you will, ad hoc. And and all of those ambassadors are self selecting people who have just determined that they, that they wanna contribute a little bit more to the good country and help us get the word out there. In terms of folks who actually kind of monitor and help, conduct diplomacy with other countries and, shepherd interventions through their various stages of implementation, we'd like very much to to draw on the existing or retired diplomatic community. But that again, we'll we'll have to kind of see how interventions actually pan out in 2019 to get a better understanding of what kind of staffing needs we would actually we would actually have in order to implement our interventions.
I think where our our conversation is starting to to kind of border on the fringes of is perhaps a problem that or not a problem. Perhaps a conversation that, you know, comes up in the formation of of a nation state. Right? There are some things that are kind of the higher level deliberative things that a legislative process would would come up with, which in this case would be like this direct democracy model we had been talking about. And then there's the implementation implementation details type stuff. Stuff where in a traditional nation that would be done by agencies or, like, folks that are staff as as you referred to it. I guess, what I what I'm kind of curious to get to is, like, where is the that delineation in in this in this model, between those two things? And when you go to the side that's the implement implementation detail side, who is ultimately going to, you know, keep that in sync and and keep that machine going?
Absolutely. So, I mean, the way that we've we've thought about it thus far and like I said, I think I think we do actually need to have a go at actually developing an intervention to to see what that looks like and have a better understanding of what, quote, staffing needs we we have. But the way that we've currently visualized it is that the good country has, a very small civil service, which supports the operations of the country. And that's largely been myself, my cofounder, Simon, and, and network of of interns and volunteers who make sure that emails are read and that lights stay on and and things like this. But then again, that's that's really a a operational supportive role and not a decision making role because we, we put decision making to, again, combination of citizens and and experts. And then in terms of the implementation of of policy, the way that we've envisioned it so far is that you have both a operational support person, a kind of project manager who's part of the civil service, and then you have an appointed special representative in the way that the UN the UN often appoint special representatives to oversee the implementation of projects. And then the way that that, individual is selected, I think we would we would like to consult with citizens and see if that, should be a, a deliberative process, whether there's a proposed, you know, a panel of people for up for up for election, if you will, or or how that works. But the way that we're envisioning it currently is having kind of a project manager, again, like I said, in a in house operational role and then a special representative who's independent to then allow for, again, some of those kinds of checks and balances in the implementation of interventions.
And this may be a a difficult question to dig into at the stage you're at now. But, if you're willing, I I like to give it a try. So as as you might be aware, new nation states trying to become recognized as such is a bit of a thick process that's rife with difficulty, for the lack of a better phrase. Have you and your organization thought about what that might look like, for you folks in trying to push ahead as as a country as it were? Absolutely.
Well, here, I think it's really important to to clarify, that the reason that we've created the good country is not because we want to replicate existing countries or because we wanna become a perfect country or a utopian country at all. The reason that we've created, a new country is because we think it's a important and potentially very powerful tool to make a better world, to achieve our goal of encouraging more collaboration and cooperation between other nations. So to that extent, we we are perfectly comfortable with picking and choosing the aspects of countrydom that serve our needs, but not bothering with the ones that don't. So, for example, you know, people often ask, are you seeking recognition in the United Nations General Assembly? For us, it's not immediately apparent that that would directly advance our aims as of now. If it were in the future, then yes, we would seek recognition. But if it didn't matter, then we wouldn't. Obviously, having a close relationship with the UN is important to us. The whether recognition as such is critical to the advancement of our goal remains unclear. Similarly, you know, we don't see the necessarily the, development of a a flag as as or a national anthem as critical to the achievement of our goals as of now. In the future, if it if it seemed like it was it was important again to increasing collaboration and cooperation amongst other countries, then we would do so. But we're only seeking to acquire the trappings of countries that advance our goal, not the ones that simply replicate existing countries.
You mentioned the idea of, like, the real having a relationship with the United Nations, even if not one where you're trying to seek, you know, a seat in the general assembly as you put it. In an ideal world, what does that relationship look like?
Absolutely. Well, we're we're fortunate in that we've already had a lot of, great dialogue with United Nations and have generally, found them to be very supportive of the project. I think likely the the biggest opportunity for partnership and collaboration with the UN will come when it come to actual implementation of interventions. And so that is still a little ways off. But obviously, the UN has vast experience in trying to address so many of these issues. So it would be, it would be silly for us not to draw on their experience. And also, you know, they have boots on the ground, trying already to address so many of these issues. And so if we can amplify the work that's already being done, or be supportive of it, then that's absolutely, would be one of our aims. There's no need in every case to start from scratch. We can often, like I said, amplify or replicate or draw attention to good work that's already being done.
Madeline, again, thank you for taking the time to join us on Civic Tech Chat. One of the things, of course, that we like to do is leave some time toward the end of the episode, for the guests, in in this case, you, to, give us what thoughts they'd like us to leave the conversation with. So, Madeline, what sort of concluding thoughts do you have for us today?
Yeah. Well, I I think what's exciting to me about the good country is that no matter what problem you care about, and maybe you're really focused on issues in your own town or city or community, but the opportunity the the good country provides to just test out and try new technologies and new ideas because the good country's entire theory of change is influenced through replicability essentially. So how can we provide a model for behavior for meaningful action that then can then change the system by being replicated by other actors, all over the world. And so I guess I invite other people to to use the good country as their testing pool. We're looking for, innovators to to help us really develop and shape our systems and processes now and to to try out, bold ideas. And, and so, yeah. I hope to have your your contribution, in in that way and ideas, and innovation to the project. And if you're interested in learning more to become a citizen, you can go to www.good.country.
Great. Again, thank you so much for taking the time to share with us, what's going on in the world of the good country. It sounds like a rather interesting project, and I'm I'm sure the audience was, took great benefit in in hearing about that and your thoughts as well.
Thanks so much for having me on, Ryan. Appreciate it.
You can follow us on Twitter using the handle at civic tech chat. Visit us on the web at civictech.chat, or subscribe to us for content updates wherever it is you download your podcasts.
