Thank you for having me, Alessandro. So my research part is, quite unusual in the field, because I started as an economist studying monetary crisis. I finished my undergrad in 2000. My dissertation was with professor Gervazzi that is quite well known in Italy. And, but then, I read a really famous article from Le Mans diplomatique that was talking about participatory budgeting and, social forum in Porto Alegre. And, I got really interested into it. And, and then I was talking with some friend, and he came out. The family friend, Giovanni Legretti, was the first Italian to actually have studied participatory budgeting and one of the biggest expert of participatory budgeting in Europe. Again, for random reason because Giovanni was, vacationing there when he was 16 because his family was going, there because they had connection, to civil society organizations and, and religious groups. And so I wrote Giovanni, and Giovanni told me that he was organizing the first training for civil servants in Trento in Europe on participatory budgeting. That was, June no. Maybe July 2000. I went there and I kind of got the bug of, democratic innovation. But at the time, I was still studying economics. I began a PhD in economics in Bologna, and then, I got in a Northwestern. I went in The US, to do my PhD in Northwestern. I really didn't like it much. The I I don't know if you have read the capital of Piketty, but there is an introduction that really describes also my experience about this mathematical model that had reached a level of elegance. I love math. Very mathematical elegance, but completely disconnected from reality. And, and so there, I was thinking about my life. I was coming back in December of my first year on the plane, and close to me sits Michael Wallerstein, one of the few analytical mark Marxist of of The US. We discussed for six hour. He was doing model of redistribution and we discussed. He was also a Northwestern, and, I started an independent study with him when I came back after vacation. And after a year of independent study, he told me, look. If you wanna study, when you wanna study, you need to move to political science. Big crisis because, I was coming from economics and economists to look down to political scientists. As everybody knows, there is this funny ranking where at the top, the physicists, they look down to everybody else, and it goes down, like, in in the food chain of academia. I I think political science is probably one of the lowest. I don't know where we are. And, big crisis and, but then I decided, against my parents. My parents were, no. What are you doing? No. I decided to switch. So I applied again to a PhD, and I moved, to Yale with Michael, to start, a new PhD at 27 years old in economics. He named politics. Sorry. That was a big shock, obviously, because I didn't know anything about politics. Right? I was coming from a complete econ background. And, and there, I I met people that were studying Latin America. Finally, my little projects that I had on participatory budgeting at Northwestern, I was going around professor by professor with this little project asking, are you interested in this? And they're like, what? No. That's not economics. Finally, I found both economists and political scientists at Yale. They didn't know anything about PB, but they were interested. And so I managed to go study participatory budget in Brazil. I lived one year in Brazil, and I, contributed to the creation of this, dataset that is the largest dataset in the world of a democratic innovation. It's called, the participatory budgeting science. So this is kind of a public good. I really insisted to be a public good. I used the Creative Commons license when nobody was using it. They were talking about eons ago. People use it without citing me, all sorts of things, but I didn't care. I kept insisting, and, and I kept redoing it. It's a survey we do every four years. We basically call, all the 500 cities in Brazil, and they ask if they do participatory budgeting or not. And it was using the sort of first, large scale quantitative analysis of diffusion of participatory budgeting and impact. There is still nothing similar to that data set. We just did the update now. And then, from there at Yale, they were doing, deliberative post because, Jim Fishkin was collaborating with people at Yale. So I started as a research assistant giving sandwich to the participants. And then I slowly went up. So I started from the sandwich, from the then the data entry, and then the last one, I was actually designing an experiment. And, I also got into America's Peak. That was one of the early experiments, for, multisite deliberation. They were using basically Skype and clickers. We are talking about 2006, 2008 to connect multiple cities. They were doing deliberative events together. So I organized one, together with the Japanese researcher in, at Yale. And, then, Helene Landemore arrived. She her first job as a as a professor out of Harvard was at Yale. That was my last year. I just came back from the field in Brazil, and I took her class on deliberative democracy. And we had this very interesting, lovely conflict on relationship because she's more deliberative and more participatory. And, and and so but she really opened up a lot of my interest. That was, also when I met Hugo Mercier. That is one of the psychologists, that works on collective intelligence, that does amazing work, that then I collaborate with with some grant. I was one of the collaborator with the land. The next step, I was really lucky, and I went to Harvard, in. And then all sort of complicate life reason for which I couldn't stay in the in The US. I had to come back to to to to Europe and, because my family is in Milan now, with my ex wife. And so I worked but I I I did a step in Canada, with Mark Warren at UBC, where I helped organize some, citizen assembly. That was my first experience with Canadian style citizen assembly that I really like. I was one of the facilitator of, one of the the citizen assembly on Grandview Woodland. They said district in Vancouver. And then I came to The UK to do what they did they the first citizen assembly in The UK. They were done in 2015. Then I moved to collaborate again with Giovanni Ligretti, they mentioned before in an horizon grant in Portugal in which we develop a digital platform for participation. In the meantime, through a land, I've met Mark Lane that had developed the deliberatorium. It's an argument mapping platform. If we're talking about scaling up, that's what I'm gonna talk about because the early experiment before AI and before, the current, wave, on, on how to scale up, large scale, discussion online where asynchronous and text based and argument mapping was really promising and is still promising as a technology. And then, ultimately, I got a job at Southampton. I did it one year in Italy, in Laquilla at, GSSI, the the research center in, on on regional economics, where they organize the festival of participation for a few years. Now I think he moved to Bologna. No. Sento. So so And I really liked that. To support. But then I got a job at at Southampton, and I really like Southampton because, it was really valuing, the democratic innovation scholarship. We now have one of the largest faculty, not just in politics, but, in all department. If you look at the center of democratic futures, we probably have 80 to 100 scholars. They work on different kind of democratic innovation from computer science, politics, economics, all sorts. It's really, really interesting in Southampton right now for this stuff.

Okay. So, as the the the terminology of citizen assembly, is traced back to the British Columbia citizen assembly that was, done in 2004. It's kind of the grandmother of the citizen assembly. And, and the way I define it, is a, a, it's a it's a systemic, innovation. Right? So it's it's because it engage multiple audiences at the same time, significantly more systematically that most of the other models. So what's the big difference? Apart that it's longer and bigger. So instead of, like, having two, three weekends in last one year and they had, I think, 10 weekends, I don't remember. But if you look in participial, there is a nice case study by Mark Warren described. But on top of that, they had 56 open to all meetings in which the participants of the assembly, the one that were randomly selected, went back to their location because the the region was divided in 56 location and two people were randomly select from each to come. And they basically act as a facilitator of an open to all assembly together with professional facilitator to bring in the discussion to the maxi public. The key problem, a legitimacy problem of, the current generation of mini public is that they're too closed. Right? They they don't connect sufficiently in maxi public. It's really hard to do that connection. With technology, people are trying now. Maybe they ask people for comments, but then it's unclear what happened to the comment. And so the the Canadian model when there is enough money and when they are doing a citizen assembly because sometimes they're doing other things, as a really this sort of multichannel engagement system in which it has the randomly selected assembly plus, open to all events. And I think that works, way better. That's my personal opinion than the standard model. A deliberative call, it's it's tiny compared. It's completely different, system. And the question of what works, what did not work, are you referring it to participatory budgeting or to the the entire galaxy? Because if it's the entire galaxy, we're gonna stay here three months.

so I if you if you think about, the continuous scale from the most evangelist of democratic innovation and the more skeptic that thinks that nothing works, I am a sort of skeptical friend. I I think there is too much hype, in the in the field, in part because the field was minoritarian, particularly in The US. Public policy was completely against, deliberative process. They thought they were just, mumbo jumbo and an interest group will control everything. If you still find or present democratic innovation stuff to a traditional, sort of polyarchy train, US core and public scholarship, and it happened to me a couple of times, you feel this perception that what are you talking about. Right? This thing, it's can be politics is power. Right? It's all this stuff make no sense. It's obvious that it doesn't work, and this is just you're deluding yourself to think it works. And, and so I am in a also, I am an empirical scholar. And so I I I I found myself many time in the position of testing empirically some of the claims that, philosopher had had put out about the potential of deliberation and not not finding a feedback in, in in the empirics. And and I was a pioneer of the empirical studies. Right? I started in 2004 together with many others. But so I come, from that side, but the field has evolved a lot. Initially, there was a lot of allergic reaction if you were criticizing exactly because it was a minoritarian field. Right? So the title of my dissertation was something I forgot what it was, but it was the original version. It was something about the problem of participatory budgeting or the limit of participatory budgeting. And my external adviser, Brian Wompler, is the most famous researcher on participatory budgeting in The US, told me to change the title. He said, you still have to sell participatory budgeting. Nobody believes that does anything. Right? So first, we need to establish that it works. And I was, yes. But, like, I found issues. But and it's I think it's a problem with all the, sort of niche growing field that are normatively driven because we believe that democratic innovation are good. So there is an action research element, a political element to it. And, and we talk about it a lot in in a paper that we we thought nobody would have read. We've wrote it, like, in a month, me and Matt Ryan, after a conference called the failure to examine failure in democratic innovation, but it's actually the most one of my most cited paper. Right? And he talks about this our weird field. Right? It's a bit strange. There are all sort of little conflict of interest because we are doing research on something that it's also a political process we're really passionate about. It it's very different from what, I don't know, a person that studies economic crisis as I used to or a political parties. Right? And so navigating, this, conflict of interest is is fascinating but also challenging. I'm often asked to sign NDAs, right, by, some of the big players in the field when I'm evaluating for them. And I am an evaluator. And so I I and but now I know. Like, the first time I was puzzled, I had a, like, a big crisis when I was asked, by participatory budgeting project in The US. After I helped to evaluate New York City, there was a bigger process US wide. And they said, okay, Paolo. Yes. You can evaluate. You can help for free, obviously. But you're gonna sign an NDA. And I was, what? An NDA? Where transparency is going? Accountability. Right? But then three minutes of reflection, and you realize that there is an important political project that it's minoritarian, and it's attacked left and right by very conservative forces. And what do you think it's a minor critic that you are providing to improve the project? Right? Something didn't work here can be instrumentalized by the media, by the opposition to kill the entire process. And so, again, that was my reaction as a young post doc. Now I actually when I have a client, I immediately say, look. There are two ways to evaluate here. Do you want an independent evaluation, or do you want me in research and development mode? At that point, if I'm r and d, I don't want my name on the evaluation first because at that point, it's not my academic work. It's another job. I'm here to help you because I believe in your project, and we don't need to publish anything. Right? We can decide what to publish or not in your name. Right? Because at that point, the publication are way more sketchy. But that's my way of navigating it, but it's complex. It's not easy. And, what works and and and doesn't work, now there is a vast literature on the impact, but it's still if you look at it, it's still very limited. Right? We still don't have a lot of meta studies, very few replications, and, and it's there are trends that are emerging, but it's it's a very complicated literature to to say exactly what works. So I'm gonna give you my take, but it's an experiential take that it's based on my intuition, and I would not be able to prove it academically. Right? And so in my opinion, participatory budgeting is the best technology to improve trust at the local level because it is designed structurally to close the feedback loop When it works, and we're talking about when it works. Because what you're doing is you're letting, citizens propose ideas, rank ideas, and then the city is implementing those ideas in a short amount of time. So there is a direct feedback loop. Right? Like in a video game, you push a button and something happens. And in PB is designed for that. And, and we have some data here and there, but it doesn't always work. But the result is not really that data. The result is the fact that PB to me, the intuition is PB spread like wildfire, and it's used a lot by charismatic new, mayors, that come in for the first time, and they need to show that they're different from the past. And and that's when it really shine and it works. Interesting enough, I'm, I have a very different position from a lot of the literature on PB that says the more years you do PB, the better it becomes. Right? I'm actually kind of against institutionalization because apart from few cases, my research shows that PB has a life cycle, and it tends to die after eight years. Like, it's really hard for a for a PB to survive really well at at the peak capacity after eight years. If you look all the best practice after eight years, they are lower in quality. Like, usually, the first year are not the best because they need to learn how to do it, then there is a peak. It's like a life cycle. And and the peak is the moment in which the PB achieves its best outcomes. This closes this feedback loop. Often, there are political, positive feedback in which the mayor gets reelected or or the group supporting it gets a lot of visibility. But then there is almost like a glass ceiling of of what it can do. Right? All the easy win have been achieved in the first few years, And then there are a lot of pesky problem that the citizens would like to solve via PB, but they're really hard to solve due to the complex, ecosystem of a city. Right? There are there are problems that are politically extremely complicated, but they appear easy for the citizens. And they get channeled through through PB, and that's when short circuit start start happening. And and then there is all sort of life cycle issues, like, politician do not get reelected, because it's it requires a lot of work. It's politically costly. So PB two b is the best at generating, trust, and it's also it's the best, university for civil servants. Right? In New York, I remember the civil servants were all annoyed at the beginning. But then after a while, they were saying, oh, now I know so much more about the city. People recognize me in the city. Right? When I go around, people stop me. Right? So there are very interesting, learning for the city machine that are very rarely studied. I I keep asking in my grandson on PB to study the civil servant learning, but it's not a very sexy, topic that gets you money. The the the all the topic is about, oh, we're gonna make the citizen better. We're gonna defend democracy. And, and instead, I think one of the best outcome is really the PB is the university of, of for the civil servant. Really to open them up to dialogue with the city and to the difficulty of the city. Because if you think about it, it's a sensor. It's a decentralized, low cost sensor in which the civil society organization, the common citizen bring problems. And a lot of them cannot be solved. But they're brought in a more propulsive way, in a less conflictual way. And also it bypass a bit, not always, but it bypass a bit, existing existing barrier of communicating this problem. Right? I have a PhD student who has just done a fascinating study on a different topic on a on a, a project done by COVID by by Boris Johnson. Like so and and, obviously, they did they didn't know anything, and they thought there was another voluntary sector in The UK. And so from the top, they created an app and a system to, allocate random volunteers to bring food to elderly people. They were stuck in the house because the for, their weak condition, they couldn't go buy grocery or they didn't have the money to use the liver. What is obviously, there was a massive reaction because The UK is one of the most bright vibrant voluntary sector. It's just that Boris Johnson had no clue about it. Right? And, and and and so, obviously, all these, voluntary existing voluntary sector at the local level were really annoyed and said, oh, why you didn't talk to us? Right? And, also, they were scared that the system will crowd out their work. Right? Because if you're volunteering for the system, you're not volunteering for me. What was interesting that in the unique situation of COVID, a lot of people didn't have a job anymore. They're working from home. A lot of people volunteer for both first, but the key, and this is the connection with participatory budgeting, is that for the first time, a lot of minorities volunteer. If we look at the shape of volunteers in in in The UK, it's most elderly white people that have a lot of time. They're educated or and they've been the people from minority do not participate. Right? And I think that's the same very nice entry point of participatory budgeting. Sometimes, not always, it allows for minorities to participate because it's easy to propose ideas, not as doesn't require a lot of time. And then it's difficult to win. Right? Obviously, to win in participatory budgeting, you need a machinery. But to propose ideas, it's easy. Okay. That's it, PB. When we are looking at mini publics, I think, the current generation. Right? It's very important to distinguish between the first best, we have not achieved yet, and it's still a bit far away, and the current sort of pilots that we have seen. So in the current pilots, to me, the biggest effect are on the participants, and they are an increase in efficacy. This the the idea that you can contribute effectively to to politics and increase in learning. And if the recruitment has managed to achieve, participants that are not already highly interested in politics, not already participating a lot, there is also potentially an increase in what they wanna do after. Right? But, the political impact of, of citizen assembly is problematic for structuralism. It's it's consultative. Right? PB is is created to to to be safe because the city sets aside a little bit of money that it's nothing for the city, and it lets people play with it. So it's almost like a safe democratic game, for it's it's still costly. It can still generate problem, but, it's it's safer. With with citizen assembly, sometimes they they they they go into very complicated, and difficult problems, and and so they stay consultative. And then the problem is cherry picking. Right? That it's been discussed a million times, in which, yes, the city assembly does an amazing amount of, of creation of ideas, but then, there is a second step about implementation. And what's gonna happen there, it's it's unclear. And so that to me, but it again, I couldn't prove it. Right? This is experiential having organized, I don't know, 200 democratic innovation and, and seen a more participatory budget. And I think citizen assembly, I I lost count, but, I'm not one of the big implementer of citizen assembly, but I've done fairly, something like that. I call citizen assembly, but reality is mostly, like, a a variety of mini publics.

budgeting, if it's the definition of symptomaire, it's not consultative. So, there are consultative PB, particularly in Germany, but they all died. That's kind of established. Right? If you do a consultative PB, it dies off. There is a very nice paper again from Giovanni Llegretti on Portugal that shows that the first generation of PB in Portugal implemented in 2004, were all consultative apart a few. When the crisis of two thousand eight arrives, all the consultative die. The non consultative stay. And and then Portugal in that moment really exploded, become the country with the most PB in the world, apart the countries in which PB is mandated by the government like Peru. But PB is the power in a sense not by the fact that it's consultative, but by the fact that the budget you give to PB is a joke compared to the budget of the city. I have this story I always tell my students. After I make them enamored BP, I I like to confuse my students. So I usually make them fall in love with something, and then I tell them it doesn't work. It's kind of my way. And so after teaching PB, I recount the story of when I helped Josh Lerner. There was the PBP CEO come to, Vancouver, because I was a post doc there. I was working for PBP pro bono. And I invited them to present, participatory budgeting because Vancouver was already doing a million participatory planning things. Citizen assembly, I was curious. PBP was being relaunched by by the PBP project. And so Josh comes. He does his usual spill, and the room is full of the department of communication, engagement, youth engagement. We are an hour in and three people in a suit come in, and they sit they listen for one minute and there is the end. And they introduce themselves and they say, oh, I'm the chief of planning, like, the the people that count, not the communication engagement. And they ask, how much money do you need? And Josh said, we recommend, 1,000,000, Canadian dollars for a district because it's a nice symbolic amount of money as a minimum. And the guy of planning for yeah. You can have it. But do you understand that it's a lipstick on a peg? My budget is $2,000,000,000. And he leaves. Right. So so PD is, sort of is doing this feedback loop, but within a a safe, environment. Right? You cannot do much. And if you think about the way also the money is divided, it's 1,000,000, but you don't ask 1,000,000. The objective of PB is really designed as a tournament to maximize the winners. It's really well designed from a game, game design perspective, not game theory, actual game design. Right? Because a lot of people win. And in a game, if you wanna maximize the feeling of, sort of satisfaction, you wanna have a lot of winner. It's like the first level of a video game. It's very easy. You win easy, then it becomes difficult. Right? And and so the million dollar, it's divided in at maximum, you can propose a project of 100,000. So you have 10 winners. Right? And and so all those little rules are really that have evolved over time, are really designed for engagement. But it comes from the origin. When I interviewed in Porto Legre, Ubiratanda Sousa Santos, that it's really the mind behind PB together with Tarso General and a few others. He told me straight, PB is a hook to engage people that are disengaged so that they come to the workers' party and we select the leaders that we need to do our process. It was very clear. And that's how it was started. Right? It was, from their standpoints. And that's how the pete used. Then it was modified. It was transformed in a non neutral in a neutral approach that is governance driven. But the genetics is about really making sort of engaging people, identifying leaders, reengineerize social groups at the local level because you can establish rules that give, more advantages to groups. Right? That was typical in the first generation of PB. You got more votes if you got more people in your group proposing the idea. And so that pushed civil society growth. It was dragged, but it still pushed it. Right? And so it's an incentive system, but it remained safe in the modern model. In the early Brazilian system, it was the the money was not set aside. So it was more vague, more nebulous. Right? And in Port Alegre, at that moment, it was 20% of the investment of the city. So massive. Right? But if you look at, modern PB, and in fact, there is the famous paper of Baiocchi and Gannuzza that call it a sort of, decaffeinated, PB. Right? They have really removed the radical, approach. So there is a really nice evolution. PB starts very radical, and it becomes less radical, over time when it explodes in the world. But it's still very interesting. Right? I I I like to think of it as the a democratic game. Again, a democratic school. People don't like it. I never published it because they told me, oh, no. You are belittling the democratic innovation. Right? If you call it a game, again, this problem of we are in a movement. Right? If you're criticizing the movement, it's it's complicated. So we have one paper, that is called democracy is a serious game that was just presented and never published because we got such a negative reaction to the idea of calling participatory budgeting a democratic game.

it's really funny because I was one of the very few people within the deliberative democracy that was really doing scaling around 2012, 2013. I did this experiment in Italy with the group, from Bologna of the Italian Democratic Party in which we use argument mapping, online to discuss the electoral law. The the that was done in 2013, and, the the process was called. It was with the group of, that now is in France. It was a weird group of Catholic and leftist together, but very, very nice. A very nice process. There was I was coming from face to face from Brazil, completely skeptical about the tech. That was the first time in which I saw that online deliberation could be better than face to face deliberation when well organized. And I started saying those things in a field, that didn't like those things. And so it was very funny, like, people, no. Online interaction are terrible. They don't work. You lose so much much information. I said, yes, on Facebook. If you have a community of interested people that want to use the technology and really want to, and you have a good platform, the outcome can be better. Right? And, and I had the data to show it, and and, and I had seen it. Right? The quality of argumentation. Obviously, it was a lead process. That was not, massive, but it was a lead within a political party. And there was the start. Right? We had an online deliberation among 600 people. For a month, they built an argument map that it's not easy. And we had a lot of people participation. It was like like 60 out of 600 contributing to the map. Like, almost everybody participated something. So fascinating fascinating example. Then, the big switch that was fascinating to observe was COVID, and it was driven by the implementers that had been paid to do a face to face process and couldn't do it anymore. So they all moved to Zoom with all the problem of transparency and using Zoom. And there was almost a flip, and now online, became ubiquitous. Right? And, and now all a lot of citizen assembly have an online moment among the participants, but the citizen assembly are still relatively small, up to 100, 200 people. There are some experiments of doing it bigger. And there are these attempts to involve the maxi public in the city assembly. Sometimes are done, sometimes are not done. The one I've seen rarely are done well. You just open up a website. You ask for comments. You generate, if you're lucky, a gazillion comments, and then you don't know what to do with it because how do you give the assembly a gazillion comments. Right? So if you have the energy, you summarize them. Now with AI, you can do all sort of summaries. But the the transmission problem is a is a crucial crucial problem. And, the other issue, if we are really serious about citizen assembly from an epistemic standpoint, and now Ellen is talking Ellen Landemore is talking about this, I think we cannot have one assembly. Right? Because there is group bias, and there is a lot of studies about group bias. We wouldn't have to have a galaxy of c of citizen assembly that work at the same time on the same topic, and then a smart transmission system that combines it. A little bit like what America Speaks was doing in 2004, 2008. That was the early, early time. Right? But that to me is the interesting future. And, that and so if I had to organize, like, my gold standard citizen assembly, I would probably do something in 10 cities at the same time on the same topic and with a transmission system, plus a mechanism to involve seriously the maxi public, like open to all events. And and and the last element is that there is a lot of hype about the engagement system. Right? So these I wrote a paper that annoyed a lot of people again. I like to do that. That was on the the overclaiming of representation. If you look at the acceptance rate of the vast majority of citizen assembly, by acceptance rate, I mean, how many people when invited say, yes. I would like to participate is below 5%. So, yes, you send 10,000 invitation, two, three hundred people say say yes. Then what does the citizen assembly does? They do the randomization even with the new fancy algorithms. Right? The one that was published in Nature from my friend. Those are amazing important algorithms that rebalance various things that they make it more fair. But they make it more fair in those among those 200 people. With respect, the the overall 10,000 you have sent. And so what's the issue? Because you don't have data on those 10,000. You you know very little. There is no way, to rebalance things. At most, you know, their address, and if you have data on the address, sometimes we have information about the address. Right? So you might know the gender. And and so there is an issue, on representativity that needs to be solved by spending more money on, on engagement, by using multiple channel of engagements, by knocking on doors, by using social media instead of being very cheap on this type of engagements. And one of the most interesting debates is about how much money we should give to participants. Because one of the claims of, many practitioner is that if we would pay them more, we will see the acceptance rate go up. So the problem is purely resource. But there was very recent case, done in Austria, by and it's published on the journal of certification in which they paid every participants €1,500. Right? That was the invitation for weekend. So you got 3,000 if you came two weekends. Right? That's a stipend. It's the highest payment ever done in history for the citizen assembly. The acceptance rate went up to 10%. Still, 90% of the people did not come. So the reason of not coming are not about the money. They are other reason, whatever they are. And there is very little studies about the reason. Like, we have done one that is another famous qualitative one, but that's a crucial direction. If we want to make this thing legitimate and sell them on the marketing that they are representative because we could sell them in another way, and that's my point. My point is, at this stage, these things are not representative. We cannot say that they're representative. Right? We should sell them on a republican argument. The randomization allows you to prevent interest group to capture them. That I stand behind. It's really harder to capture a citizen assembly because you cannot flood it with your confederates. Right? You have to do very legal things. Right? You need to pay the participants. You need to pay the moderators. You need to pay the expert. But those are things that are easier to track than flooding with your confederates. So I would justify that way and not on representation until we figure out how to push up the acceptance rate.

It's a fact when we saw that paper in the general certification, I said, okay. Because I had a discussion with Kai Redmond in a in a blog, and he said, oh, no. But the problem of acceptance rate is solvable. It's more money and institutionalization. Make it mandatory. But I already knew that make it mandatory doesn't solve it because we have all the work on the juries in The US. And the juries in The US are not representative of the population because are highly skewed. Because you there are ways to get away from mandatory stuff. And so I'd and the money was still open. Again, it's one data point. So it might be a very unusual case. I talked to the implementer and asked them why because, I don't know, €3,000 because the argument, oh, no. I wanna stay with my kids. Yes. But, you know, I pay babysitter, and then we go doing an amazing vacation with €3,000. So I was expecting that at least 50%. By the way, we did 50% in a citizen assembly acceptance rate on what? On Brexit. Right? So when the topic is in the mind of everybody, you get to 50%. The other person that consistently does 70% plus acceptance rate is Jim Fishkin, but he spends €200,000 plus on engagement, and he uses, the same teams that use marketing research that call people a million time, and they really call and call and call and call. And instead, the standard approach that cities, but also certification information that it's the kind of the biggest provider is to send one letter.

They they there are now experiences of continuous citizen assembly. In Italy, in theory, there is the Milan one. I don't know anything about it, but it's so invisible that I'm doubtful, that he's doing macha. But I don't know. Maybe it's going. The the classical experience that everybody decides is the Belgian one. Right? And so there are these institutionalized citizen assembly that recur every year. But within a political party, there is still very little. There is, one fascinating thing is that the the the researcher I was working in 2012, the one that brought the opportunity to do this experiment with the PD He's the first researcher, to talk about doing citizen assembling political party. He had this terrible name about it. He called Dopari, this Raffaele Calabretta. He has a book about it. And, he he had a very interesting and sophisticated idea about it because he has been working in political parties for a long time as an activist. His standpoint is that the city assembly within a political party was thinking more about the liberty policy assembly, but the idea is the same, where should be used only once a year and on a topic that really divides the party. Because if the party is not divided on the topic, due to the fact that the party is competing outside with other parties, it is an inefficient system. So it's only when you are truly in doubt. And in the left, we are often divided and in doubt among many things. Right? So, for example, you can think about the when when they, the the the the that it was this sort of less constellation of parties that combined the Catholic and and and the traditional, former communist was coming together, and they had to decide religious issues or moral issues. And, for Raffaele, that was a key moment to have a citizen assembly because the leadership was not able to come to a decision. Like, his key motivation is when the leadership is in conflict of interest. And that comes actually from the origin of citizen assembly. The way they implemented the citizen assembly in British Columbia on the electoral law was the recognition that the political parties are in conflict of interest when they're deciding the electoral law. And is and so I think that these reflection have disappeared a little bit. Now we tend to do citizen assembly on absolutely anything. And I in my opinion, that weakens the instrument. It's it's only when the there is a clear failure of the politician and the smart politician recognize that themselves, then at that point, the citizen assembly can have big impact. Right? And and you can think about the Irish case also that way. Because in Ireland, the citizen assembly that really worked were the ones on, on same sex marriage and interruption of pregnancy. And those were issues that were stuck and that the political system could not solve. Right? And and those are the one that were unstuck, but they discussed a bunch of other things and those did not do any did not do anything. They had a lot of impact among the participants and a lot of other impact, but they didn't have change in laws and and and and like the classic public policy stuff. So for applying internal democracy, it's really important to understand, and and it's probably similar for firm. I don't study the firm. But that the agent you're thinking about, the institution you're thinking about as this survival, fundamental objective function through election. And so your citizen assembly needs not to conflict with that survival, need to help, need need need to to be to be there. But it's really an underexplored space in part because party members don't want to do them. We just did a fascinating conjoined experiment in The UK before the election. And and finally enough, Labour put in their action manifesto that they wanted to do a citizen assembly. But then when we did a conjoined on party members and party higher echelon, and we ask them what is the configuration of internal democracy, they don't like citizen assembly. They don't want they want only to increase the the power of members. So increase direct democracy, increase oversight. But and, and so that's fascinating, but also intuitive exposed. But ex ante, we were expecting a completely different result because labor was campaigning a bit on, more citizen assembly, but for the public, not for the party. And so it's still a conception of, democracy as mobilization. Very similar, if you want to the traditional left this conception of participation. Like, participation is when you mobilize for me, and you come, and, and and you protest for me or you you you do the things that I want. If if you're mobilizing in general, I'm a bit skeptical. And, but, yeah. Did I did I only talk about parties? Yeah. I didn't talk about scaling up. You were were interested in scaling up.

Yes. There, like, if you look at the the discussion in political parties about membership and the literature of membership, and and in Italy, we have the experience of the primaries of the the the the the Democratic Party that highlighted really easily. There is a tension about involving people in the Max Republic that are not members of the party and people within the party. Right? And some people are really in favor to open up primaries to everybody, but some people are scared not because the the opposing party will come in and hijack, but because it's corruption. You can buy and there were lots of scandals about it. Like, you could buy a seat in a primary at the local level with €50,000. If I like, somebody have done a study with the prices. Right? Because, you literally buy people to go for vote for you in the primaries. And there are not enough checks because the level of checks are inferior. But also when, you remember when when Rensi won, there was a lot of discussion because a lot of people that vote for Rensi were not the members of the party. Similar when Eli Schlein won. Eli won with the people outside of of the party vote. And and and so there is that tension, when you're thinking about political parties of who is the person that should have the decision on the leader. Right? And when we did the conjoin, that was one of the question, and we were interview doing the survey experiment only with members of the party, and they were completely against open primaries. This is The UK. It doesn't really have a tradition of primaries anyway. But it would be I think within the democratic party in Italy, the debates on primaries keep recurring. So it it it it's divided. Right? And often, there was this joke that the PD is the only party that consistently lose its primaries. Right? Because it's always the the candidate from the outside that's from the green or from, or from something else that wins the primary. And so you can see why the party members might be annoyed. Right? We have been volunteering for the parties for twenty years, and there is this new outsider that comes in and and wins the primaries with the pros and cons, that that in in involves.

And, I think so the participatory budgeting has a lot of, sort of funny techniques, that have been experienced because it's one of the oldest. Right? They're now, what, thirty years? In '89 were the first 2026. Yeah. And so, for example, one of the thing that is often proposed when you are introducing PB in a highly conflictual environment is, the fact that, people were can criticize, but they always have to propose a solution to their own critic. Right? And so you can have literally procedural, tricks. And the literature on conflict resolution is probably the oldest mediation literature. Like, the facilitation liter I'm interested in facilitation too. The facilitation literature in deliberative democracy is standing on the shoulder on the conflict resolution and mediation literature in psychology and, in law. Right? It comes it's it's older, that stuff, and and and and it has been done more for a variety of reason. And so conflict resolution has a lot of, procedural approach to to reduce. But but but the issue is to invest in them. Right? And, and and and and also to involve people in a credible dialogue, because people get annoyed when they are involved in a noncredible one. And when when you ask them to participate a lot and then nothing happens, then they get for you. Right? And so, for example, when I consult for citizen assembly and I know that it's a consultative process, my first conversation is about this. And it's to say, look. This is a consultative process. I need guaranteed of impact. Otherwise, we should stop here. Right? If you are discussing at the end of the year the transportation, program of the city and you're willing to change it, because that's the key, not that you're discussing it. If you're willing to change it, then and and and there are not massive political costs in some changes because that's the issue. Right? If I've and then it makes sense to open up the discussion about transportation, because it will have a little bit of feedback loop. Not at the point of participatory budgeting in which you asked for the dog park, and two years after, you're taking the dog in your dog park, and there is a plaque that says this was for the project that Alessandro proposed. Right? That's where the feedback loop shines. But to the point that I participate, I study, I come two, three weekends online. I organize. I write because now they want the participant to write a lot. I do a lot of work, and at least there are some changes, that the politician are willing to think about and at least discuss in a positive way. Right? That to me is the sort of entry point. If they tell me no, I stop and I just leave. But the thing is now there are some topics in which is easier than others. And, in a sense, the explosion of certain topics in citizen assembly is due to the fact that this type of closure of the feedback loop, it's easy on those topic. Like climate change assemblies, now they're changing again. But at a certain moment, they had so much explosion in part because people were righteously pissed about the situation. But in part because the city was already doing a lot of the things that they knew the citizens were going to propose. Right? And and so if you look at what the citizen propose, there is very little innovation. Because in the end, if you think about the big the really big radical changes are not in the end of the cities. They are in the end of the production of energy, The transportation decision, they're often higher. Health care decision, they're higher. Right? And so what the city can change is, like, very little things. And and and the city is often very open, particularly because I don't know. Maybe there are some, but in my experience in The UK, the climate assemblies were all proposed by Labour government or Lib Dem. They were already very pro pedestrianization, very pro providing bicycle, integrated transportation, all the things that within the frame, the citizens will support. So it was a little bit it was important process of education visibility. It had huge, I think, sort of expansion, and that's why the NOCA network does the entire work on this. Right? And it's amazing work, and we learn a lot. But it was also part of less resistance. Nobody has done a study of it again because it's not a sexy topic, and it goes against the the push of the movement. Right? And so criticizing it would be a bit problematic. But everybody knows. It's this funny funny things, right, that everybody kind of knows these things and and and a few others. So it's a bit of a weird action research, situation.

I think, paradoxically, scaling it's easier than the comfort of interest stuff. The difficult stuff is always the politics. Like, there are only political solution to political problem. There is not a technology solution. For scaling, I think we are at the point in in which if we had enough money, we could scale it up. And Elaine talks about it, but other have talked about it. There were experiments in the seventies. Right? It's just it's like even in the seventies, we could have done a thousand micro citizen assemblies in a thousand localities across Italy and figure out with a lot of work, manual work, how to integrate that. Right? And if you think about some of the process around the Concilio Vaticano Secono, the second Vatican council, in which all the church across Italy had deliberations about they were not high quality deliberation, but we had capital capillary deliberation of what the former communist party and even democracy Christiana used to do. They used to have deliberation everywhere. Right? And and and so we could think about doing that in person or online and having, like, a thousand small cities in assembly that are low cost, that are not expensive. They did not ask a lot, the participants, and and way to integrate them. And, AI, I will be really careful not because I'm skeptical of AI. I think AI is reaching very good level. The problem is autonomy. If we don't have a national AI model that is explainable and and and that the organizer, of the citizen assembly understand, we are outsourcing, epistemic framing to big tech in The US. Right? And that's extremely problematic. And and that is obvious if you use deep sick. If you use deep sick and you write something about the Tiananmen process protest, it disappears. And obviously, that's obvious. But the biases are there, and there are, like, biases about the type of source that are recommended, the type of language that is used, all sort. And, again, we need full control. I would never suggest to use a known locally installed AI to do this work for a serious political process. Imagine if the if the citizen assembly is used, to discuss security issues of of Italy or France. Right? And and the data is in The US. And and and, like and before, we could delude ourself that, okay, the The US was a a good benevolent, policeman of the world, but now it's obvious to everybody, that we're just deluding ourself on what they're operating. Right? And and and so that's the key issue around the AI. The model will improve. It's also a model that will always contain randomness. Right? And so it will always need cross checks because by the way it is created, it has randomness on purpose because otherwise, it would be a deterministic model. Right? So some people describe it as a loaded dice. The loading become better and better and better and better in predicting the next word, predicting the context, but it is a dice. Right? So even when you're summarizing arguments of citizens, you're summarizing them with a random error. And that at that point, enters into discussion of the amount of risk that we are willing to have on that discussion. And so if it is a local discussion about, do we have the bike lane here on there, and, we can involve, all the minorities that usually do not participate by using an AI tool, I would probably in the cost benefit analysis say, yes. We are an error, but we are involving this group, like, the the Italian minority. They they never participate. And so the cost benefit analysis is a yes. But if we are discussing, I don't know, a topic about, a really sensitive topic, like a new law on, sexual violence or or whatever in which the voice of victims is fundamental and and it needs to be reported perfectly and it cannot be modified in which biases are already present in in almost everybody. Right? At that point, I would probably say no AI. Right? Or AI with the level of heat very, very low so so so that it becomes a document retrieval system. Because a lot of people think about AI only as LLM, but there are a million others of machine learning approaches. And there are some that purely doing document retrieval, and they have less randomness. And then there is a human that does the summary, does the cross check. So so the technology is there. The problem is ownership. It's transparency. And and those right now, if you look at the implementation of most AI, they're using commercial products. Right? And and that's highly problematic. As when they were using Zoom, during COVID to do high level citizen assembly, I was the only one saying, look. Zoom is not GDPR compliant. Right? Like, we're talking about accountability, transparency. And and so the the but there is, I don't know. There is still a lot. We're still in the infancy if you think about it. Like, the first one was done in 2004. And so it will take time, but, the direction is very promising. Right? And and and and even and and the important thing that I keep repeating to everybody is that we need to forgive ourself. Right? Because the alternative is really shit. And so even if this stuff that has a lot of problems and a lot of mistake, it's better than the alternative. And and so, yes, the job of academics like me is to go nitty gritty and super critical on every, every aspect. But then the job of the practitioner and implementer is to tell me, go away and do my research and and and do a cost benefit analysis and say, no. In Bologna, now we need a citizen assembly because it's gonna break an impasse like in Ireland. We need to try to institutionalize. Even if we know the challenge of institutionalization, we need to try to do it. Right? And that's the action imperative and that I absolutely recognize and defend. But I have an academic imperative. Right? And so my role is to still figure out how to do it better. And but I'm and I'm very happy now that I'm older to do embargo strategies, to do research and development strategies. When I was a young postdoc, I was way way more Taliban in a sense on this. I wanted radical transparency everywhere. And, and now, like, the the political contest is tough. Democracy is retrenching. Right? And so we really need to be extremely careful extremely careful with critique, because they're not gonna care. Like, the people if the readers of my papers are those that want to destroy citizen assembly, I'm not gonna write those papers because I want to improve citizen assembly. Right? Those paper will remain, but will be given, to those that want to improve citizen assembly, and I'm not gonna circulate them in the public. I was joking. I was in the department at Yale in which a lot of my friends who were specializing in, violence against civilians, civil war, dictatorship. And we were joking that the only one reading their papers were actually the dictators and and those that wanted to repress civil society organization. Because by describing in detail the way civil society could do things, you're also, unfortunately, providing ideas on how to break down those tactics. Right? So when I'm describing, ways to improve citizen assembly, I'm at the same time describing ways to capture it and destroy it. One of the fun exercise, practitioner do in conferences is to ask the audience how would you capture a mini public. Right? What would be the best, approach? Let's say, if if you have never done that exercise, I'm I'm talking to the audience directly right now, think about it. I do it with my students all the time. At Yale, I did an exercise in which I asked how to overturn the US government, then I got an email from the head of the department. That's too much, Paolo. Stick to citizen assemblies. Nobody cares about them. If you're teaching how to co do a coup in The US, I get an email from angry administrators. But, yeah, sometimes and this is, I think, important for action researchers like me. We often think that nobody reads our research, but it depends what you're doing. And sometimes you you you are thinking about an audience, but there is also the opposite audience. And it's very important when you do action research to think about the opposite audience. Right? It's really, really important. If you are an action research and you want this democratic innovation to become stronger and better

I think the the the the message the the message, and I keep repeating it, is that we are not a minority group anymore. And so I still see a lot of allergic reaction to critique, a lot of evangelism. And and and to me, there was a position that made a lot of sense when nobody was paying attention to us. Right? But now there is a shift, and and and it's a complex shift. Right? Because we are actually might need now serious autonomous impact evaluation when it's the European Commission that is doing citizen assembly. And it's not a problem to say that some of these processes are actually highly problematic. And I don't wanna criticize the commission. It could be a city or somebody else. Right? And so in in the moment, there is a moment in which you have grown enough in which there should probably be a reset on how much we are open, to critique. And so that would be something that probably would be my message. I think we have reached that moment. And and so it's important to start thinking larger if you want. We are not a minoritarian movement anymore. Democratic innovation are here to stay, and, there are a million, they're occurring everywhere. And, it's it's it's a moment also to reflect on, on the problematic ones and and and when we should use some, and when we should use somebody else. It's it's not always helpful to do it. Right? But that reflection is really hard to make, because in part, some people livelihood depend on selling democratic innovation, all the industry or facilitation of, participatory service providers. Right? But we have very few reflection on the industries, a couple of books, but, it's an important reflection. But also the counter. Right? I was discussing commodification and the problem that this industry is generating. There should be voice from, from the industry defending actually commodification because commodification that we see as negative most of the time has an element of standardization that allows, cities that don't have enough money to buy a custom process that is way more expensive, to buy an off the shelf participatory process that is very cheap, that it's outsourced, and so they start their path into learning more about democratic innovation. Right? But so I think these type of really grown up discussion around commodification are very rarely done. Like, you have sort of the Marxist tradition is completely against commodification. Oh, it's terrible. It ruins everything. And on the other side, people don't even engage. Right? And then I said, we don't care. You're crazy communist. And it's very important just to do as many as possible. Right? The objective function of the industry is to do as many as possible. But that's an important discussion, to have, but it's not easy. And and, again, it's the role of academics. Right? I think academics should implement less, actually. The implementers are better than us at implementing. I I I it's good to to help and observe and and evaluate, but I think it's it's a good time to have, like, really redraw some of the boundaries. Right? And and it's important to co design and discuss together, but also there are things that we are better at, and there are things that they're better at. And and it's important to recognize, those. Otherwise, there is a a naive, view of co design or or sometimes it's called democratization of, of democratic innovation, and he and he has his own risk. I think it's very important to to do co design and and meta deliberation. I'm one of the pioneer of that stuff. It but it rarely works. We also have to recognize that it's really hard. We just came out of an horizon that tried to do 11 meta deliberation, not a single one. And we had a lot of money to throw at it. It didn't work for a million political reasons, but it it's really does meta deliberation is super hard.