Yeah. Sure. So, Yeah. I guess, in in some way, shape, or form at the intersection of democracy and technology for, for ten or so years in in a range of different capacities. So I was I originally, before that, I was, just going back to 02/2010, so fifteen years. I was based in Cairo when the Arab Spring started. And that's where my passing interest or not passing interest. That's where my interest in in democracy and learning more about democracy became a kind of lifelong passion because that that whole, era, and and set of processes that happen in multiple countries, was, not only, like, a really, you know, significant personal experience. It was a significant piece of his bit of history, and it was a significant global events. But it was also, incredibly educational, as to the, like, complexities and and, you know, practical realities of of, political change, democratic change in particular, just how hard it can be, and and the sorts of underlying, social processes that, that affect it. So that was probably, like, the the most significant life event, that that led to, an interest in or a deeper interest in a in a kinda career change in in this direction, like, wanting to be involved in democracy and innovating democracy and, and and understanding more about it. I was there for about five years. I in that time, I was a researcher. So my my research focused on, the, we call it, like, the social geometry or, like, the the the shape of social trust networks, between individuals as these sorts of political processes took place. So I was, actually interviewing people and mapping shifts in trust networks, and and how they changed over the course of that five year period, which was just fascinating. There were a lot of assumptions that I went into that research with, a a lot that were, born out, but a lot that were not, and that were, that were shattered in some way as well. But it was it was just incredibly interesting to see, but as a student at the beginning, and then a researcher further on, the assumptions that political science and the social sciences kind of, like, bought into big like this, and and see, basically, the the the academic circles kind of, scratch their head about it as well, thinking that it, a, if it couldn't happen, and then, b, not understanding the exact kind of, you you know, nature of what was happening and getting a lot of things wrong, basically, all the way through. In any case, that that whole experience, as I said, led me to, want to be more deeply involved in in in understanding and and shaping, democracy. Like, we talk about democracy innovation, a lot, but I'm really interested in democratic sustainability as much as anything else because I feel like there is a lot of things that erode democracy and there are a lot of things that are, neglected when it comes to keeping democracy afloat. Most notable of which from my perspective is these sorts of foundational social trust relationships between people and society. It's a it's a problem that we are all too happy to to, to to write about and to think about when it comes to authoritarian societies as places where it's very obvious that people are shut kinda shut off from each other and and walls are built everywhere and and so forth. But, it's a problem that really affects every society in the world to greater or lesser degree. And that's one of the things that I realized coming out of that as well is that every society regardless of whether it was authoritarian or ostensibly democratic was essentially having the same problem to to different degrees. And so coming out of that whole thing, I I worked as a diplomat for a while, but I also started a, cofounded a startup company that developed transparency software for journalists. So that was the beginning of the the, you know, the work at the intersection of of democracy and technology. We wanted to address this because this is like, you know, ten years ago when in Trump's first election. So we wanted to address the issue of disinformation, that kind of crisis of trust. At the time, a lot of people were putting forth, solutions like, you know, we're gonna use AI to just correct all the facts and and correct all the data in an article and and and as you read it, or we're gonna, you know, have a gold star or a green tick that a whole bunch of news organizations give to each other and pat each other on the back. We didn't think either of those solutions were really addressing the core problem of of human trust. And so we thought, sort of radical transparency approach to the research behind, journalism was was a better, better way of going about it. So we developed software that allowed journalists and other researchers to, record the work that they were doing and and annotate it with like this, basically, just kinda talking to the camera and and explaining what they were doing. So and then and then embedding a kind of highlight reel of things, in the story once they published it. So, that anybody reading an article could, a, have a quality signal that, yes, a real person did this, and, b, they get to kind of follow the story behind the story and see the the epistemological journey that the journalist went on. Like, this is a real person doing real work. I can relate to them, and build trust from that. So that was that was our approach. And as and and as I said, that was the my first touch on, to my what I'd say was my first touch on democracy technology. I've been involved in other projects before then. I'd also, started a company earlier that was more of like a consulting, slash, team building workshop, our company where we would work with companies, you know, small to medium sized businesses and NGOs, and do, team building workshops where we took their decisions and add the the sort of decisions they would make on a daily basis. And, kinda gamify them a little bit and introduce other decision making methodologies to kinda get creative to find out what people found most effective. And at the time, we were working with a number of different tools, to facilitate that process as well. But it was after all of that, and the sort of startup companies. So sort of, like, getting to 2018, 2019, 2020. I came to Europe, came to Germany, and started writing about democracy technologies, started working with, the Innovation Politics Institute, on, projects related to democracy technologies, exploring all the other projects that were going on, not just around Europe, but, around the world and have since, undertaken a couple of my own. So now, one of the big projects that I'm working on is, kind of, the fusion of lifelong passions, actually, because I've always been I mean, I've been a democracy nerd. It's the kind of the thing that I know, but I've also been a lifelong, space nerd. And so a couple of years ago, I started asking myself, how can I combine these things together? And, so at the moment, I'm working with, half a dozen other people from across, four different countries, on a participatory, space policy platform, that we're you know, we've got partners in the space sector, public sector, private sector, and, we are trying to, yeah, create a participatory plat space policy platform that can be introduced to the kind of grassroots of the policy creation process to, like, political parties and others. So leveraging some of the technology, some of the projects that are out there at the moment. Yeah. That's a sorry. It's a bit long winded, but that's that's a brings us up to date, I think.

Yeah. Sure. So the there are a number of I mean, as you're well aware, you've interviewed some of the people behind them, I think. There are a number of, platforms out there at the moment, that facilitate participatory processes, deliberative processes, digital tools, for facilitating those and scaling those, upwards. You know, in particular, the use of, AI has been leveraged to scale participatory and deliberative processes by by, quite a margin, in the last few years. It used to be a matter of, you know, you'd have to have an army of volunteers to sift through everything and make sure it was all, above board. So there's all that sort of stuff going on at the moment, which I think is fantastic. I mean, I have my own, cynicism about the use of AI, but, that is not one of them. I think when you know when the the dataset that you're drawing upon is, is, and that you're synthesizing is, consciously and and consensually offered inputs and responses. I think that's democracy technologies. Obviously, there is still an issue of having humans in the loop to make sure that whatever work the AI is doing to synthesize inputs, is, double checked, triple checked to make sure, you know, that there's people going through and going, does this when it shows a receipt and it says, you know, here's the half dozen or 50 or a 100 responses that I drew this summary statement from, do those does that summary statement authentically line up with, with with the responses that it's pulling from? So you still need to go through and make sure that it is responses that it's pulling from? So you still need to go through and make sure that it is actually, representative and and accurate. But it nevertheless, it it scales your ability to to undertake those sorts of big, big participatory and deliberative projects. So we wanted to take something like that, take that capacity to, collaboratively develop, you know, sort of leverage collective, creativity to develop, like, complex actionable documents, like policy documents or policy platforms, and bring it to a space, pardon the pun, that was basically, outside of the kind of focus, of the the the general public and this is where the space nerd in me comes in and starts talking. I think the the, the the the space the area of space policy or space development in general is one that is massively overlooked and, that they can be a on its current trajectory could present quite a large problem, in the future. It it's a massive opportunity, and it's also a massive problem. And the reason I say that is because, there's this almost self fulfilling prophecy, a kind of a a negative feedback loop that exists presently that's only gotten worse in the last couple of years, where because people feel alienated and disconnected and, you know, they feel like it's irrelevant, like, you know, what happens in space isn't really of interest. It's kind of just for, air force pilots, engineers, billionaires, etcetera, etcetera, or it's the realm of science fiction. They disconnect, and there's a cynicism that develops where, if you ask people what humanity's future in space is gonna look like, well, people will usually cite you one, one cynical dystopia or another. Right? It's either, gonna be dominated by giant corporate oligarchs who are drilling out moons or it's gonna be an extension of present day geopolitical squabbles. And, the thing is buying into that narrative, however, however however, whatever truth to what there may be, only makes it more likely to happen that way because you you sort of divest yourself from, the process of determining what shape, the industry takes, what shape our our involvement space takes, and what and how benefits are shared, and how international treaties are developed. And, you know, once you divest yourself from a policy area like that, and I'm gonna use another pun, the vacuum just gets filled by whatever vested interests there are. So you know, all of those, vested interests that are already operating in that space are all too happy for the general public to just kind of ignore it and pretend that it doesn't exist because they get to do whatever they want, right, in in place. So from my perspective, that's a big problem. And in order to prevent, mistakes of the past, like environmental damage being repeated in order to prevent, you know, issues of the present, like massive inequality being exacerbated. The public needs to be treating it like another important policy issue. Otherwise, it'll wind up like climate change or, you know, financial regulation or something like this where you get a few decades down the road and all of a sudden it's a giant tidal wave that's just wrecking everything, and we don't know what to do about it. Right? So we going back to where we were a moment ago, we were thinking, well, how can we bring this capacity to, you know, allow large volumes of the general public, large numbers of individuals to collaborate around something into the into the space sector. And and also address the fact that this is kind of like a bit of a dreamy Neverland for everybody that's not really real. You know? And and it just kind of it was a perfect fit really because, what we realized is that, you know, the the the space sector has been going around, like, you know, let's say the the the positive side of the space sector, like, the big public agencies like NASA and things like that that do, like, cool stuff. They've been saying things like spaces for everybody for the last fifty years. And it's not really it's just a platitude. Right? It's not really the case unless you actually make it so. And they've been trying to play the PR game, and that's all they're continuing to do. Most most of these organizations are just playing the PR game. But in order to in order for it to people to give people a, sort of, some skin in the game, give them a sense of actual connection, you need to find other ways for them to be involved. So we thought, what if rather than, asking sort of loaded cynical questions, we asked them we embraced the fact that it was kind of a dreamy neverland, and we asked them fundamentally optimistic questions. Kept it really simple, lowered the barriers to entry, because a lot of the challenges that we got to this idea, initially were things like, oh, well, you know, the the general public. They kind of bought into the idea that the general public doesn't have anything really relevant to say about the topic, you know, by saying things like, well, you know, we're developing, a policy around lunar timekeeping and what to do with special interest zones and the blah blah blah blah blah. Right? And on those technical topics, yeah, perhaps not everybody has something particularly poignant to to add to that conversation, but that's not what we're addressing. The the problem we're addressing is the sense of disconnect and alienation. So we don't go and alienate people by asking them all those detailed questions because that's what we're not what we need. We we bring them into the fold by asking them, first and foremost, and I know it sounds a little silly at first, what do you want the future to look like? What do you want humanity's future in space to look like? How do you want it to affect your life? What role do you want it to play, etcetera, etcetera. And the answers to those questions are, you know, limitless in scope. People can say whatever they want. And in some of the, you know, some of the responses we've had to this question have been, you know, a simple sentence. Others have been, paragraph. Others have been, like, virtual essays. And we allow people to write their answers. We allow people to provide them in video or audio. And, and then, the follow ups of the the answers to that question synthesized, give us a kind of vision statement. Right? Like, we want this is what we want the future to look like. Then our second question, and the survey is only really two questions. There's a few others, but, the the the meter that is only really two questions. The second question is, well, okay. Let's bring it back to the present. What do you think governments and, businesses and other stakeholders should be doing right now in order to make that a reality? So everybody has an idea about what they want the fit the future to look like. And everybody most people will have an opinion about what they think governments could be doing better. So we've structured it that way to avoid alienating people and to make sure that anybody we speak to, whether they are, like, a, you know, a teacher and Rio Rio De Janeiro or taxi driver and, and and Sol or wherever you happen to be, can answer that question. Right? And what we've found is, a, everybody has an opinion. Right? And once you get people going, they're really excited to talk about it because it's not something that they ever expected to be asked because the nature of our, political environment, our democratic, environments these days is that, we are so focused on the problems that many very real and very understandable problems, very, very I should say it's understandable why we're focused on all these problems right in front of us. And it's the root of that, objection that you very often hear towards, focusing on or talking about the space sector, which is some variation of what about all the problems here on Earth. Right? It's totally understandable. It just so happens that they're all interconnected and, you know, we we we know that what happens in the rest of the world is important because of how it's connected to us, and space is exactly the same. But, we don't we're so focused on these problems in front of us that we we don't ask people what they actually want the future to look like. We don't ask them what they what kind of, thing we should be building towards. And political parties, political leaders, in fact, leaders generally, don't do a particularly good job of actually articulating a vision for the future. It's all sort of reactive problem solving. So that's what we thought is the is the is the gulf we could fill. Yeah. Sorry. Again, I I put it through. No. No. Sorry. I I was thinking maybe this,

You mean alienated from that particular, topic?

Yeah. I I I absolutely think that's true. And I I think that problem of alienation, you're you're right. It stretches far beyond, like, the, it's not just we're not just talking about the the the space policy. Right? Or is this or space as a topic. People are alienated from politics in general. And a lot of public engagement, a lot of citizen engagement, you know, certainly, because this this we're not when we talk about citizen engagement, we talk about public participation. We're not just talking about, you know, the digital platforms and things like this that we're we're we're we're this area that we're working at the moment. You know, we're talking about, town hall meetings and the media and, like, social media and protests, movements, and all sorts of sort of stuff as well. Right? And, yeah, people can be alienated, from it, and there can be a discourse around it, all of these different things, all of the problems that are identified, that can be very alienating to people. And we can all kind of add to that and exacerbate it and make it worse in our daily lives by, you know, through through the sort of general antagonism of a lot of the discourse and the way we interact with each other. And I think, and this goes back to one of the things I think I learned out of the the Arab Spring, was that it's a lot it's it's a lot easier, to form solidarity against something than it is to form solidarity for something new. But, it is also, the case that, it is a lot easier to form solidarity around what we want than how we want to actually get there. Right? The the the sort of and a lot of contemporary politics, focuses, almost exclusively on the the on the what, like, conflict around, process and methodology and, like, the minutiae of, like, policy. And it's not that that isn't important. It's just that it needs to be complemented by, a vision, by, like, a destination, by a, you know, a a a by by, those sorts of things that that bring people together. Right? And I think that it's the case that even in some of the more polarized political environments in the world at the moment, if you go out and ask, for example, people in The United States, what they want the future to look like twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years from now, you'll find a lot greater overlap and solidarity in the answers to those questions, than you will, like, around, you know, what do you want people to do tomorrow? What do you think the Democrats or Republicans should be doing? So by not asking those questions, by not kind of baking those questions into our political process, we are really depriving ourselves of the, a core mechanism for building solidarity as well as, one of the things that helps contextualize and explain a lot of the small day to day policy stuff that we have to do. Right? Like, it makes a lot more it it's a lot easier to explain to people why you're passing this bill, for example, if you can explain it in terms of the destination, like how it how it gets you towards an end goal than it is just all by itself. So it helps to contextualize and explain things, and that's why I think it's so important. And that is why that that is the one of the huge benefits that I think, this to bring it back to democracy technology, that this technology these technologies can provide as they they offer us the ability to almost create this, like, parallel kind of politics. You have the the representative politics, the the the the sort of standardized democratic processes and institutions around decision making and policy making and what we're doing today and tomorrow and so on and so forth. But we also have this ability to leverage collective intelligence and collaboratively create visions for the future about the goals we're actually working towards and then use those to hold decision makers to account and say, like, this is this is your job. Like, this is this is your marching orders. This is what you're supposed to be doing, where you're supposed to be taking us, and your your the the and establish some form of accountability as to, like, whether or not they're actually, like, have made any ground or or gotten us there. I mean, we see limited forms of that, you know, although largely toothless, forms of that. Like, we've had, the the the Paris accords, for example, around climate where it got these, like, actual goals are set. But because there's no formal process of accountability and and and and around there at the, at the domestic political level, you know, individual countries within their own politics can kind of just push them to side and and and not really, focus on them. There is other countries like The UK that have, established independent councils that set goals for the set targets for the, for for, for for the national for the government to, you know, making it legally binding to meet certain targets around around climate. That's kinda closer to the thing that I'm pushing for is that, you know, by having, a collaborative public process, basically, collaborative goal setting, you can and and if you can establish, this is what the peep this is the the the sort of general direction or this is the the the kind of future that people want you to build, then you can actually start holding governments accountable to whether or not they get there or not.

I was just I was just saying it. I I think it's it's kinda the other side of the coin. Right? Like, it's the other side of the it's this vital part of, political progress that we've kind of sidelined for a longer time. You know, and, again, understandably, because there's so much going on and there's so many problems. What do you what do you wanna call it? The poly crisis or what have you. But it's also one of the things that can kind of help to pull us out of there. And I've always been a big fan of this, like, idea of, for lack of a better way of putting it, like, working backwards towards the future, like, establishing a goal, and then asking yourself, okay. What would that require? You take a step backwards, and then what would that require? And you take a step backwards, and then what would that require? You take a step backwards, and you keep doing that until you, arrive at the present. And then you sort of have your road map and you have your priorities. Right? So I think so much of politics is starting from the present and just kind of asking ourselves what what can we do. And, and and kind of abandoning the creative process from the outset. And I think it was, I think we've had him on, but, Steven Boucher who was saying to me kinda, like, last year sometimes, like, you know, creative, what was this? What did he say? Constraint is the mother of creativity. And so if you if you start out with what you can do, then you're not really engaging in the creative process to begin with. You start out with what you must do, then you start to then you actually get the gears turning. You can actually start okay. Well, that is this what we have to do? Then, like, how how do we get there? Right? And you suddenly, you're forced into a creative process where you have to have to start doing interesting things. So, yeah, again, like I said, I I think I think it's this this missing component of our political process. I think that, that the technology now these technologies that you've interviewed a bunch of the people who are who are building them, who are using them, and growing them and promoting them. One of the things that they can do is give us the capacity to scale up these these sorts of, you know, this collective creativity, this mass collaboration. And the other benefit that it offers, of course, as I said before, is that it it provides context and and sort of explanation for all of the other stuff that we have to do right now, you know?

Yeah. It it it is a it is a bit of a problem, and we've kinda taken a bit of a different route, with it with with this problem. So and I guess this goes back. This is kinda unique to the space sector. Right? I don't think this applies in every area, but this is also one of the reasons why we've designed a particular project like this. There are already, perhaps a dozen civil society organizations in the sort of burgeoning space, civil society, sector internationally, that conduct, top level advocacy, like government level agent state level, intergovernmental level, advocacy, you know, whether it's, lobbying governments and agencies directly or, you know, going to the sort of the NUSA, events in in Vienna and and sort of promoting these sorts of ideas. And it is incredibly difficult to navigate because we need by the time policy gets to that area, that that, that level, I should say, there are all sorts of different, you know, fingers in the pie. Right? And there's all sorts of different vested interests at play. It's incredibly difficult space to navigate and it changes dramatically from state to state, from, from from context to context. So because our project is a grassroots kind of project, right, where we're trying to get citizens to collaborate to produce a citizen's policy document with what would be the best place to to to take this. And, again, it's it's not entirely unique to the space sector, but it's space sector is one area where the space policy is one area where it is particularly prominent. And and what I mean by that is with a lot of the beginning of the policy creation process in not just in, full democracies, but to a certain extent, you know, partial floor democracies as well in your multiparty, system, begins at this, like, party level. Right? And for for there are, I guess, you call them, like, tentpole policy areas, and there are big ones that are pretty common across the world, and then there are some that vary depending on which country or con political context you're in. But pretty much across the board, everywhere you go, space is not a tentpole policy area. Right? It's not climate. It's not housing. It's not, like, you know, education and health care. It's not immigration. It's not one of those things where everybody wants to have a say. Everybody wants to be part of, like, deciding what the platform is gonna be. For a lot of, as I said, pretty much for all, political parties in the world, space policy is in I might be be generalizing a little too much. I might be being unfair to some political parties. But generally speaking, it's a few people, who will who have an interest, who have some expertise, and they they draft a policy proposal and it gets passed by voted on by a committee committee and that becomes the, the the baseline policy platform in that area, right, in space in this case. And so at the same time, political parties, again, almost across the board, are looking for policy validation. They're looking to attract attention to, to what they're doing. They're looking to sort of, develop, and have thoughtful policy, on these sort of in these emergent domains. I mean, space is one. AI, of course, is another, but there's a lot more attention, I think, on AI at the moment because of how it cuts. So, obviously, across the board and affects everybody's lives in ways that are not yet obvious. Sorry, in ways that are a lot more obvious than they are, for example, in the space sector. So, in the space sector, it's it's kind of the germ the point of, like, germination for policy is in a lot of cases, a few interested parties. Right? A few interested people or, you know, collections of individuals who, just happen to care a lot about this topic. So we wanna introduce rather rather than, like, you were right before in that, like, most participation, effective and honest participation processes or projects depend on state level, or or high level political, investment will in order to validate the entire thing. Right? So you need somebody at the other end to say, look. We are really seriously going to listen to you, and we're going to take what you say seriously, and we're gonna integrate it, or we're gonna, you know, do this, that, or the other thing with it. I don't think it's universally the case that in every participation project, there has to be, like, not every participation project has to manifest itself as government policy at the other end. I mean, that just doesn't happen. It is true, however, that every participation project, the effective participation project, has to, be honest about what the possibilities are. So I think, you know, if you go to a bunch of people, either in a city or a country or a town or globally, whatever, and you say, look, we're doing this project. We wanna hear what you have to say, and it's gonna become you know, great things are gonna happen. It's gonna be you know, all of all of all of politicians are gonna listen and it's gonna be amazing, and that's not actually what happens, then people are gonna go away pretty pissed off. Right? But if you go if you go to people and you say, look, you know, we wanna hear what you have to say and we might we might take it seriously. We might not. But is this gonna be really interesting? Is this gonna inform our thinking? Right? People will still wanna give their opinion. So it's just really important to be honest about what's more important, I think, than political will is honesty and transparency on the part of the people who are actually conducting the project, I would say. In our case, we're being honest and transparent about the project and where it's going, and we're not promising anything to anybody because we're kind of embracing the fact that people already assume that nothing's gonna happen on this topic anyway because they're alienated from it. And, like, what what could they possibly say that would be of relevance? They go into it with the sort of attitude of, like, well, space is all just fluff anyway, and and this is just a fun exercise, to paint a picture of the future. So our logic is, well, if we can take if we can embrace the fact that it's kind of, like I said before, this dreamy Neverland, and then we can go away and we can move the ball or move the dial, whatever metaphor you wanna use, even a little bit, then it creates in the place of this negative feedback loop that existed before where people are being driven further and further away from caring about this policy area, all of a sudden they're like, oh, well, okay. You know? Somebody listened. Somebody the people actually are thinking about what I said. So our strategy is to take this, collaborative policy document, the citizens, policy document, and introduce it to those organizations at the bar at at, you know, at the grassroots level of policy formation and ask them to treat it as a foundational document, to treat it as a reference. Say, okay. Well, if you need a space policy, if you're writing a space policy, even if you already have a space policy, here is what people are saying. Here is what people are saying internationally. Here is what people are saying in your geography and your, in in your, whatever, political, catchment you you have is relevant. And, we would like you to reference this document. We would like you to to look it over and incorporate some of the ideas, that are in this document into your, into your policy platform. We also say that to political parties, civil society organizations, and any organization that is increasingly in need of a policy on this emergent domain. And what we want to come out of that is two things. One, that it will trickle up rather than trickle down. So as I said, all the advocacy is just happening at the top level. Right? So if we if we introduce these ideas at the bottom level, perhaps they meet in the middle. It's not, we we can do it to we can we can introduce it to multiple political parties within a given party system. We don't have to be picky and choosy about who we are introducing it to. Everybody can can see it. Everybody can access it. We can reference it. And it so it it also hopefully, this is the idea, is that it helps to generate, not just, effective citizen derived, you know, policy that promotes public benefit over the long term, and addresses some of those problems that I addressed that I mentioned earlier. But then it also, in so doing, because it's an international project, helps generate policy alignment, which is one of the big issues when it comes to topics like this. You know, when it comes to things like climate and financial policy and and other things, it's not just enough to have you know, as we've seen, it's not just enough to have one country that has a pretty decent climate policy or a financial regulation policy because businesses and everybody else will just go, okay. Well, you know, we'll go to somewhere else. We'll go to, New Zealand, for example, or somewhere that doesn't have as effective policy, and we'll find a loophole. So, yeah, that's that's the logic. We're not we're not, going for that. We we are not treating top level political will as a prerequisite. We're going at the bottom.

Oh, yeah. I I started in IT, while I was at university. I was gonna be, an IT guy. I mean, I worked in international development for a while, with refugees and, wanted to learn languages and, kind of was thinking about international development and diplomacy, for a while. And, but then, yeah, I just I I found myself just fascinated with, democratic systems and practices and the kind of, like, social foundations of democracy and how it all worked. And in reality, the revolutions I mentioned are a big part of that. And so, yeah, just kind of, that I guess that's the thread that was winding its way through the last ten, fifteen years. In the course of the last twenty years, tenth of well, I don't know how many years it is now, but, I mean, I've lived all over the place. I was in I was in The Middle East for ages. I was in been in India in India, Ethiopia, Turkey. I was in The US for a while, Australia for a bit. I'm in Germany now. I was in Malta for a while. I've been in Germany for the last couple of years, few years. And, yeah, I think I just, I just wanted to work on on on projects, and help build things that that, I mean, if I'm honest, I was always a Star Trek nerd, so I was always working backwards from that Star Trek future, you know, and asking myself, like, well, that's the future I want. What is taking one step back, what does that require? Then what does that require? And then what does that require? So that's my that's my that's my real motivation is is, just trying to identify the things that I think make good first or second steps towards that. Yeah. I hope that answers your question.

about you just to share something about Yeah. I want a huge stat trick now, so that's that's a

Yeah. I mean, for sure. Yeah. There's there's always there's always problems. So it's very difficult to translate when you're working, across sectors as diverse as this, like, democracy innovation space and the space sector. It's completely different languages. Right? Like and it's two completely different bubbles. So it's trying to, like we're trying to bust this space bubble with real world, like, citizen input, and, like, they will say that they want it. Like, you go to the big conferences, and they'll say, oh, you know, we need to know. We need to bring the public on board. We need to get people caring about space. We need to, we need to have all this input, but it's just a giant they won't mind me saying this because they know it's true. It is just a giant bubble where everybody talks to each other and there is really no significant public outreach beyond, you know, journalism and stories about cool telescopes and rocket launches and, you know, things like I mean, I'm generalizing perhaps a bit much there, but, it is it is a terrible bubble, and it needs bursting. And it needs bursting with authentic public opinion at scale saying this is this is what we want. This is this is how you're gonna get public support because, of course, they're all paranoid about losing public a little public support that they have at the moment. So they all want that. They need it. And then on the other side, you've got the sort of democracy innovation, you know, more generally, the sort of, democracy, act advocacy, activism sort of space. And a lot of people in that space will just be like try and keep using the word space in multiple context. A lot of people in this area, right, will just think space. Like, what the you know, who cares? You know? So they they'll they'll also part of that, this this negative feedback loop. And we've obviously picked it. We we're doing this for, like, as a reasons that I think I explained before, but there's a real huge problem of, like, trying to get these two areas to talk to each other and and and care about or or see the the the potential, in this connection. So that's a that's a big, a big problem, is, like, translating between those very, very different worlds. And, it makes bridge building quite difficult. So I guess if I was to say, anything to anybody who might be listening is if you are a democracy nerd that is also a space nerd or a space nerd that's also a democracy nerd and government's nerd, then please get in touch because we could use your assistance, bridging that divide. And there's a real opportunity here, because it is, it is an opportunity to, do something really significant and, and and practice, collaborative policy making, at scale and have it get listened to, not just, hopefully, within political parties and grassroots, at the grassroots of the policy formation process. But, also, I know that there is a huge vested there's a huge interest in hearing what people have to say at big industry conferences like IAC and the, you know, UN, World Space Forum and, like, places like this as well. So, there's a real opportunity. So, yeah, please please reach out. The other problems, are, you know, logistical, organizational, financial. It's the usual.

So I guess so the first the first part of that question was, like, around technology, like, the the difference in the the the possibilities you mean? Or is that,

You I think okay. So in the my first encounter with what I would call DimTech, you know, because I mean, I've always thought about it as, like, people talk about GovTech and CivicTech, and then, obviously, we wrote for, Democracy Technologies. I I I view GovTech as about improving you know, it's about government processes, and civic tech, the beneficiaries, like the citizen itself, right, helping out the citizen do things, and inform the citizen and things like that. I don't know. This is really difficult. Everybody has a different opinion on on where the what what the circles in this Venn diagram are called. But, democracy tech is something where the, in my view, where the, the the institution, the practice of democracy itself is the beneficiary. Right? Like, it it it becomes more democratic as a result. And my first encounter with democracy tech, something that we consider democracy tech, was probably yeah. I wanna say fifteen years ago, and it was a piece of open source software called, Better Means that I think is defunct now. And I was a huge fan of, I still am a huge fan of, Liquid Democracy as this, like, some people will laugh, but I'm still a fanboy of, of Liquid Democracy as this kind of, like, cool halfway point between representative and direct democracy where tokens shift around, influence shifts around. It's not hyper responsive, so you can still have policy consistency, but it's not hyper stagnant. I love it. Anyway, Better Means was this sort of, allowed you to, it was kind of like a combination of Trello and these sort of, like, project management tools that we have now, with democratic elements introduced, and collaborative, like, decision making around, like, work assignments and how much somebody should get paid for something and how much, you know, this would be worth and what priority this should be and all of this kind of stuff. Right? I wasn't entirely liquid democratic, but there was there was all sorts of different democratic, components baked into it. I love that. Right? I loved it. And I and I wanted it I wanted to, like, build something like that and to, like, and to actually, like, build a platform at the time. This was like I was a lot younger. I wanted to build a platform at the time that, that allowed people to sort of, connect nodes, you know, connect, like, issues that they they they they encountered ideas that they had, people that they knew, and draw these nodes together into, like, a new node, which would create a collaborative workspace. Right? So kind of like a cooperative formation tool. Right? And that was that was my first encounter, my first, like, dream in terms of, like, oh, this is the thing I'd really love to build if I had the if I had the, the the tools and the time and the resources. What came out of that was, Democracy Works, which was the, like, consulting team building workshop thing that I, mentioned before, and I never wound up building the actual tool itself. But the difference back then is all that sort of stuff was just pie in the sky. Right? Like, it was it was it was dreamy. It was like, wouldn't this be amazing and cool? The reality of, like, actually catching on becoming marketable and and people using it at scale was not very likely. Right? Because it hadn't become, like, the idea of civic tech, gov tech, and democracy tech had not become as established and and and, and as certainly as it is now. Over the last, like, five to ten years, it's just been making leaps and bounds. Like, now there's governments, city governments, national governments all over the world doing really cool innovative stuff, building their own tools. There's companies that build tools. There's nonprofit organizations that build tools. There's closed source open sources. Just like there's all sorts of stuff, and it's getting traction, and it's a growing industry. And so all of those ideas now are coming out, and they're real. Right? And you can actually do things differently. I think that's amazing. Right? That's awesome. And I know this is gonna sound a little silly, so I apologize. But that's also one of the things that attracts me to space as a as a, as a I don't know what word to use, but, like, as a paradigm of human development, as well is because a lot of people out there will look at spaces be like, oh, we can go and mine asteroids and make a lot of money or, like, oh, you know, we can settle Mars and, you know, do whatever or we you know, there's obviously also the science and technology element to it as well. I look at space, and I think this is our first real opportunity perhaps ever disconnected from the moral and ethical, the terrible moral and ethical implications of, like, colonialism and, like, and and and, you know, all the different, phases of historical human settlement and colonialism throughout history, where we've had the opportunity to actually try out new systems of government, new ways of working together, new new iterations on this idea of democracy in a vacuum. Again, pardon the pun. But, like, this is like we get to do things new. We get to try authentically new things here because we're going somewhere where there's not already an established way of doing things. It is kind of the wild west. Right? And so to pass up that opportunity would just be a huge tragedy. Right? Like, to to to just say, okay. Well, we're just gonna let the big companies and, like, China, Russia, and The United States, like, just bash it out and, like, do whatever they want because space is irrelevant to our lives and we don't care anyway. That I mean, again, I understand why people have that perspective, but I also see it as a huge tragedy because there is also the opportunity. Like, the it is environment is so dangerous and so crazy difficult to do anything in, it necessitates cooperation in a way that is just unprecedented. And with that comes the opportunity to actually create new governance structures and new ways of working together and new ways of, making decisions together and things like that. So I see that as, like, a huge opportunity, and I just really, really hope that we seize it. So I think that is also the point of connection between that democracy innovation space and the the space sector, that I mentioned before that I hope people can, that I hope people can recognize. Yeah. Does that answer your question? I think that was a part two of your question.

Yeah. Similar so, well, similar similar tools. I think all the tools that are that are being developed are fantastic, and, there's gonna be nuances about each situation and each, context that make one tool slightly more useful than another one. So it's good to have a market of tools that are available to people, and I think that market is growing, and that's wonderful. And as far as, people who might be working on similar projects, I think, will power together. So if you also happen to be trying to bridge this particular gap, please get in touch, and, like, we'll see how we can how we can work together. Yeah. Yeah. That's it.

No. Thank you thank you very much for, for for having me on. I apologize for talking your ear off so much, but, yeah, really, really grateful for the invite. Thank you. You're welcome, man. Thank you again. Alright. See you.