This project is currently part of interop during bridging period, and it's aiming to bridge as well this divide between political theory and new political practice, especially practice in participatory and deliberative democracy tools. So I'm going to first kind of lay out this problem that the project is aiming to address and then get into what this project is aiming to do about that problem and then close with two examples of what we can accomplish and kind of what we could do for each side when we bridge this gap and then q and a and some information on how you can follow with this project. So first, on this theory and practice gap, the problem that this project is aiming to address, as I see it, there's a lot of there are a lot of practitioners in this space that are very interested in political theory but don't have as much background as one they would like to. And two, maybe they could benefit from in doing their work on these various tools. So there's a lot of kind of common sense views of democracy and a lot of very radical ambitions in this space that I feel like are not adequately supported by theorists. But there's also in the kind of common theories that I see a lot of people discussing in the space, the ways that people interpret the work that they're doing. There's very much a liberal and economic bias, and I mean liberal in the, not the left wing American sense, but kind of in the classic liberal conception. And the there's less familiarity with theories that are very applicable to and useful to interpreting and understanding these tools, especially deliberative democracy and especially especially participatory democracy. And kind of the results of this is, as I put it in some of my PhD applications, that practitioners end up kind of walking backwards into the future. So people are looking backwards at these old theories that were designed and imagined for a much earlier time while kind of charting a path, walking backwards, into a future of democratic practice. And then on the theorist side, there's a lot of inertia in political theory. Political theory is much, much, much older than political science as we understand it today. I've got this little fun Greek word here. Maybe I have too much text on these slides, but political theory really dates back to the very first academics with Plato's academia in March or so, I think it was founded. And so there's a lot of old ideas in these debates around political theory concepts, and there has not really been a reckoning with the massive tech changes that have happened in recent decades. I Kind of from my perspective, mainstream democratic theory has not even really finished reckoning with the Internet, let alone AI and a lot of the kind of Web two and Web three and other online, technologies that have been developed since. And I think there's been from the perspective of the possibilities of mass participation, there's been probably more change between now and 1980 than there was between 1980 and March when, kind of academia got its start and our concepts of democracy kinda came into their own. And, the familiarity that there is in in academic spaces with practical work on e democracy tools is mostly limited to a few very famous cases like v Taiwan or, Italy's Rousseau platform, both of which are now defunct and have been for years that you'll still see political theorists kind of talking about the exciting stuff that's happening in Taiwan, and there is a lot of exciting stuff happening in Taiwan. And, everything that came out of v Taiwan is definitely not dead, but, the platform itself has been inactive for a very long time. And then I also think there's really a very intense focus on democratic backsliding that is understandable. But without making democracy something that's worth defending, it's very difficult to defend. And so I think there needs to be much more of a forward looking perspective. And these tools could be that. But because of these these various problems, there's kind of a loss of traction on the present. And so we can't stop from sliding into the past. And we also can't get the traction that we would need to go into the future and to guide this the development of this new and emerging practice. So the solution to this problem of the gap between theory and practice is the theory and practice project, aiming to bridge these two sides. So I'm with this project. It's mostly this kind of these first stages are targeted at practitioners, because Medigob is mostly a practitioner organization. But that's gonna be involving kind of exploring what we should be doing, not just what these tools are capable of, but what the vision of democracy that we should have as we're developing these tools is and giving practitioners tools that they need to be thinking through these problems and not just relying on academic political theorists because I don't think that you need to be a professional political theorist to do political theory. So I think political theorists can do a lot to bring these concepts and these very very relevant elements of democratic theory into practitioner spaces and make them more comprehensible and more applicable. And that's gonna involve some other seminars. This one's kind of just introducing the project, but some other seminars may be on specific topics later this month, early next month, and then kind of see where that goes depending on reception, but also some readings, resources, potentially research guides. People have raised the idea of reading groups that they might be interested in, and I'm very interested during the q and a or, there will be a survey linked at the end if anybody has thoughts on other things that this project could be doing that would be useful in your spaces. And then on the theorist side, I think it means introducing political theorists and academics to what we already can do and learning from what's already being done, whether or not there's always a concrete, or a a fully thought out theoretical explanation behind it. New political practice is developing in the present, and there needs to be a lot more attention to that. And there also, I think, can be a lot of valuable inductive study of this new practice that can lead us towards a new theory. So I don't think that this is a one way theorist coming in and teaching political practitioners what they should be doing. But there's also a lot of political practitioners who are already doing these things and have practical experience with them, helping theorists understand the values that are implicit in these methods, but also, what these new forms of political practice allow us to think and imagine about democracy. So that's this new democratic theory. And then, finally, I'm I'm still kind of thinking this one through. We'll we'll see what works. But I think part of this is gonna be helping political practitioners frame their tools in ways that are and their communication around their tools in ways that are more comprehensible for political theorists. A lot of people that I've worked with, you know, they are they're not the most tech literate people in the world, I'll say. And so I think framing things in a way that is more comprehensible and the goals in a way that's more comprehensible to academics is going to be very valuable at attracting academic interest to these spaces. And then maybe some practical resources. Kind of thinking through what that might be I've been collecting for one podcasts from political practitioners and people in the democracy innovation space. So if you have any other links, that would be great, but it's gonna be more than just a podcast list, hopefully. So now the first of two examples that I wanna talk about for benefits that can kind of come from bridging this divide. This one is a problem for practitioners and that we can benefit by bringing existing political theory into these spaces and into these conversations. So this is something that I've I think I've discussed with some of you on this call already, in the interviews I've been doing as part of this project. But there's this question around why should we value democracy? Why should we care about it? Why is it something that's worth having, let alone improving? And a very common, argument in favor of democracy goes like democracy delivers a lot of instrumental benefits to us. It has what in political theory is called epistemic benefits, meaning it helps us make good decisions, benefit from collective intelligence benefit from diversity, either of viewpoints or of ways of thinking or social levels of social standing. It helps kind of induce competition among competing parties or competing sort of factions in society or competing ideas in a way that's beneficial. And then secondly, democracy, this argument goes grants legitimacy to political institutions. So it increases trust in society generally, but especially in governing institutions. It produces stability and ensures social peace. But I think if if we understand democracy primarily is delivering these sorts of instrumental benefits, then we have to ask, what if another system, a dictatorship or a monarchy or a technocracy or a kind of party government could do these things just as well or even better. And whether or not that's possible is another matter. But, hypothetically, if we said, here, I'm I've got this, like, dictatorship or rule by Chat GPT or something that I can prove to you is going to deliver equal or better epistemic benefits or equal or better legitimacy. Would we just say, okay. If they're the same, we can flip a coin on whether or not we're gonna have democracy. It doesn't really matter. Or if they're even better, would we immediately abandon democracy? Or would there be something holding us back? Is there something else that we're looking for from democracy besides just these instrumental benefits? And I suspect most people will have this intuitive attachment to democracy and this feeling that something would not really be right with that. Even if hypothetically we buy into these benefits coming from a non democratic system, there would still be something else to value in democracy. So I think this for most people is going to be an understanding of these intrinsic benefits of democracy. And so I just worked on a essay with Liz about this, which maybe we can share soon. But I think these can be kind of categorized in two ways. One empowerment that comes from democracy. So democracy is not just about being governed well, it's about governing ourselves. And there's something important when we are governing ourselves. And you can see I have Republican self government again that's not Republican in the American sense, but in the kind of classic sense. And there's this understanding in the Republican tradition and in the history of political theory that there's something intrinsically valuable. There's it's a form of freedom and human well-being that comes from making the rules ourselves. And even if a technocrat could come in and make really good rules for me, that's worse for me in some important way than if I'm together with my community, making rules for myself in my own life and also my community and the shared social world that I live in. And then the second important element on these this intrinsic side, which also, as we've discussed in this essay, kind of spills over into instrumental benefits as well, but is the development that comes from participation in democracy. And this is especially something that political theorists, especially Carol Payton, very famously made this case is valued in the participatory strand of democratic theory that you realize your potential as a person and you flourish as a human being and you reach better self understanding and you develop collective self understanding, collective solidarity, a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging, a sense of identity through your participation in politics with others. And this is obviously the famous Zoon Politikon from the ancient Greeks, this idea that humans are naturally political animals, naturally political beings, and that if we were just to go live as an all powerful entity off in the forest on our own, never being infringed upon in any other way by other people, we maybe in our common liberal way of thinking of freedom today, we would say that person is totally free. But if we understand that we need to be integrated into political self governing communities, we would say that person is really missing something essential in their life. And that's what we can achieve through this type of participatory democracy. And so sorry, just to wrap that up, I got a little lost there, but just to wrap this up, I think this is a justification and understanding of democracy that is intuitive to most of us, whether or not we're working on these sorts of new democratic practices, but is not really fully understood in public. And I think it's very important to understand why we are concerned with democracy so that we can understand, one why we should remain committed to it, and how we might be kind of going astray of our own values in certain forms of practice like liz's ai simulation that I'm sure she's talked to a lot of people here about. But we also talked about that essay, but also understanding why we're trying to improve democracy and what it means to improve it and what kind of the goal that we're trying to move towards is. Then on the, theorist side, a problem for theorists that I think is really being figured out right now in these practitioner spaces without theorists noticing this is a different understanding of what it means to make decisions. And so in especially liberal democratic theory, but kind of in mainstream political theory, there's and especially in kind of popular understandings of democracy, there's this idea that democracy is consent to government that is expressed by voting. And that could be I'm consenting to the rule of, politicians and elected representatives by authorizing them to be decision makers via elections. That's the way that most democracies or what would be called democracies work today. And then there's this idea of direct democracy, and this is, kind of a pet peeve of mine. One of the one of the reasons I don't use the phrase direct democracy very often is that direct democracy is so often just boiled down to we have a referendum about everything. But then there's a lot of really important questions there, like who who made the referendum question? Who is deciding when there's gonna be a referendum? Who does all the framing in public about what this referendum is about and what the considerations are on each side? And I think there's something very important. There's a very important difference between voting on a question that is posed to me by somebody else already prefit framed and preset up, and they're the ones deciding to even ask the question in the first place, let alone what the question is gonna be versus contributing to making this decision and then voting on it, which I'm going to get to in a second. But then there's also this critique in feminist theory that I'm personally very interested in and kind of working on in my studies by some of these scholars. This idea that consent as an ethic is necessarily inegalitarian. And as soon as you're talking about consent, you're already accepting, you're already baking into your thinking this active passive agent object actor consenter dichotomy where the person who is consenting is understood to have a less full form of agency than the person who is proposing the thing that is being consented to. And so in in feminist theory, there's this discussion of consent as kind of always being gendered in the way that we talk about it and this assumption that men are active and women are kind of passive and that we can take this same critique and apply it to political consent and understand that when we're talking about political consent and democracy's consent to government, we're talking about passive people accepting the rule of an active political lead that decides what are going to be the questions, what's going to be the framing, when are we going to decide on this or that? And then if you live in a so called direct democracy, you get to authorize or not authorize those decisions. And if you live in actual democracy as they exist today, you are not even voting on that. You're just voting on who gets to make those decisions. So I think political theory lacks a sufficient understanding of what it means to make a decision. And I think this exact problem is being explored in really, really interesting ways that are very deserving of close attention and inductive study in these e democracy practitioner spaces right now. So just a couple quick examples, and you can see I've got question marks after all of these because even I don't know kind of what the theory of decision making that's operating in these different cases is, but I think it's worth studying in these e democracy platforms like decidine. You've got the ability to not just vote on the final decision but to deliberate and shape the decision and even to initiate. The fact that there's going to even be a decision at all comes from a person initiating this process on one of these platforms. And then on platforms like Polus, I think we have this sort of persuading and being persuaded in turn form of agency where you are actively contributing to making the decision such that even if the final decision you still don't disagree with, it's different than it would have been had you not participated. And I don't think that political theory really has a good account of that type of agency right now, but I think it is being put into practice right now in tools like Polis. And so I think we can think through what that type of agency is and what type of agency we should be aiming for in democracy by paying attention to what's happening in these kinds of tools. And then the last one, this is the one that's maybe the most on the fence or the most kind of controversial, is this idea of AI summarized deliberations where you take a bunch of people and you maybe split them out into digital Zoom rooms like Stanford's open deliberative online deliberation platform does, or maybe you put them in small rooms and then, sort of have them talk around, like, one of those old conference call, boxes, except it has some sort of AI agent in it that's summarizing what people are are saying, and then it's sort of bringing all these contributions together and summarizing that in an output. And I think there's definitely a more robust form of agency going on there than if I'm just going to the voting booth and voting blue, red, orange. That's it. But is there is there as much of a full form of agency as these other tools? I don't know. But I think these are the sorts of things that practitioners are having to decide and having to make decisions on in their engineering choices about their tools and about the processes. And I think political theorists could benefit a lot from paying attention to what is being done there and joining those conversations and contributing their perspective as well to these debates. So that's the end of this little introduction. We've got this five minute survey QR code here for anybody that's interested and wants to kind of have some input on what this project might be able to do going forward or just sort of share your perspective and where you're coming from. There's also this project page here that has a couple of links. So if you want just one thing to throw into your browser, grab this link and you will find the survey and a couple other things there. That will also be where, the other seminars and the reading list and stuff, and stuff, that's where that will start appearing. And then there's this new theory practice channel in Slack where there's not a lot of activity yet. I've got a couple of things I'm gonna post soon, but we'll also be posting updates about, the upcoming seminars and resources and other things in that channel. And then also just happy to have discussion with anybody who's interested in these topics there as well. So with that, I will close and, yeah, open it up to any questions. Or I don't know if, Liz, you want to, bring us into the next section or anything, but that's it for my presentation.

I have a question. I'm super curious, Joseph, to hear a little bit more about how you're thinking about rolling this program out on a practical level just in the sense of, like, I heard you say that you wanted to host some seminars, but, like, do you imagine us, like, having these conversations in different deliberative tool environments and feeling like the like, having those experiences and discussing theoretical concepts? Is it, like, a in a practical sense, a blend of theory plus practice, or is it, like, discussion format? Curious your thinking on that.

That's a really interesting question that I had totally not thought of at all, until just this moment. And the idea of doing some of these discussions in some of these tools and in some of these spaces, that's very interesting. No. I had not thought of that. I'm definitely thinking about that now, and I'm gonna think about that. But, the plan was to do, some seminars outside of the main MediGov seminar slot, but kind of specifically on these topics. I have a couple questions in that survey about what topics would you be most interested in attending seminars on, or what are you most interested in, or what do you feel like you have the forest understanding of, the things like that that I'm going to kind of be collating those results. And, one, I'm gonna be publishing an anonymized version of the results just for people's interest, but also using that to inform the topics of those discussions. So probably the first one it's looking like is gonna be on something like theories of democracy or theories of representation. That's something that a lot of people have expressed interest in, And that will probably be a sort of open discussion where there will be maybe a little bit of ahead of time reading, not like whole books or anything, but a a little bit of kind of key excerpts from from important sources and then a discussion. And, yeah, a couple people have raised the ideas of reading groups that they would really like to do, things like that. But it's gonna start with those two smaller seminars and then sort of see where it goes, see what could be beneficial to people from there.

Cool. Yeah. I was just gonna say, I I just like, my ears perked up when you were talking about Stanford's, like, deliberative tool, and I'm like, I am curious what all these different communities that are thinking about this kind of, you know, in like, on their separate paths, but we're all, like just like MediGo, but not, and, you know, what they're using and how they're thinking about these things and playing with these things. So, yeah, that was kind of where that that question came from was like, what's Stanford's deliberative tool look like? Fancy Stanford.

How

that's the thing I'm interested in to in in GravityDAO, one of the things that we're doing is creating a suite of tools that will not will do very similar kinds of things, not necessarily toward governance because I always think of governance as, like, do this because I said so. You know? Like, how do you actually how do you actually figure out where you are within the consent model? So that's why I included Betty Martin's thing. So we're actually gonna be creating a bunch of tooling around that stuff to be able to make decisions and stuff too. So I'm super interested in what you guys are doing and how you're going about doing it. So we're gonna be hiring developers and everything. And so, yeah, how do we do it less than a governance mindset, but more of a cocreative or iterative mindset? So it's a it's assumed that all of us are here together, and we're all cocreating this thing as opposed to creating some kind of governance framework, which then ossifies into something over time. And and then we have to send lawyers in to fix laws that continue to be applicable a hundred and fifty years after the fact. Do you know what I mean? So, like, so I

I I have a question for him in the sense that would you like to participate in creating a a tool that accurately assesses consent?

Yeah. I mean, I definitely think for me, kind of like I laid out, I think consent itself is a problematic concept, and consent is a sort of preconstrained view of political agency or just agency in general, but political agency specifically. So I might maybe put out maybe that'll be one of the kind of topics that I put out a list of accessible readings on. But I'm definitely interested in any conversations, any, work that's happening around that. So if maybe you can drop, like, a link to the work that you guys are doing on that in that Slack channel that I posted, and I'll post the name of again in the chat. And, yeah, I'm definitely interested in having more conversations about that.

I'm almost done with it.

Yeah. I mean, this is always going to be attention, I think, in any human community, but I think this this is honestly one of the arguments as much as many critiques as I have of representative government. One of the arguments that people often have in favor of it is that it's very difficult to equalize people's participation when anybody can participate, and then you're kind of opening you're you're kind of expanding the gap between, like, people who are really good at participating and maybe very talented speakers and very knowledgeable of the topics and then people who maybe have strong opinions but are not very good at expressing them or maybe don't really understand the issues as well even though their interests are very relevant there. And so people will say that, having these people just elect representatives that they trust and betting them kind of speak on their behalf and equalize the influence of of these two people because they both get the same vote. And so if you condense all of their political agency down to this binary yes, no, red, blue, you're equalizing them in that way. And I think that kind of applies to these cases you were talking about as well where if I have two groups that maybe, for various reasons, it's very hard for them to participate together in the same space, maybe there's space for electoral mechanisms there or maybe instead there's space for kind of facilitated mini publics or various forms of statistical representation. But at the end of the day, if one group is feeling like they're kind of insulted by a process or they just can't tolerate participating in the same space as another group, I think that's kind of a pre political or maybe not pre political, but, that's an inevitable problem that's gonna exist everywhere that I think is just comes down to facilitation skills and community building, I guess. Sorry. That's not a clear answer, but it's a very, very good very difficult question.

Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. No. I definitely think that's very interesting. And one of the things one some of the projects that I've worked on, I'm I'm a member of the NDP in Canada, which is our kind of social democratic party. And what some of the big projects that I've done have been using these tools. Like, we used Polis at our national convention in October 2023 and then for a couple other kind of public engagement projects. And I think that these tools can sort of democratize a party as well. It doesn't they don't always have to start right away at the national level and be doing, like, millions and millions and millions of people deliberating on one specific topic. But if you can democratize a party, like, obviously, as the five star movement tried to do with, sort of middling level of success in Italy, but also there's Podemos has tried similar things. I think some of the pirate parties in, Northern Europe have tried this. The Green Party here in Canada has tried this. I think there's ways to implement these tools that don't just start with going to national governments and saying, hey. Use this tool tomorrow. You can start low and work your way up. And democratizing the organizations that interface with government is a way of democratizing government to the extent that those groups are influencing them. So that's a very clear linkage in terms of political parties, but also one of the other projects that we ran was with a lot of civil society organizations. And I was working with, like, the Farmers Union in Ontario on one of these Polish projects and a couple other experts on some other projects, and they're really, really excited about these tools. And I think that activists and organizers and, I'll call them old politics people, people involved in old politics, that is not old people involved in politics, though they can be both, are they're they really get it as soon as they see these tools. And as long as they're explained in a way that makes sense in their world, they immediately see the promise here. And so I do think there's a lot of potential to be working with those kinds of groups to get adoption of these tools and to sort of build this new practice. Maybe I can throw it to Ian.

Hey. Really, really interesting talk, so thank you. I have a couple of somewhat poorly formed questions. But one, I was curious, particularly, I think, in the Canadian context, right, there's a a different notion of indigenous and first nation self governance and self management and a different legacy of settler colonialism. And so I'm kind of curious how you reconcile that with some of the theories and some of the particularly, I think, like, the narratives about democracy that do kind of reflect a a a very Eurocentric notion, right, or this kind of assumption that, like, democracy comes from ancient Greece and then kinda follows the western canon. But there are all kinds of community self management practices and forms across history, but also that indigenous, and non Western ones often account for the kind of decision making or consideration of things beyond humans. Right? So, like, the more than human nature, the natural world, and, you know, and some more sort of western theories like Bruno Latour developed the idea, right, of, like, the parliament of things and the sort of more than human governance systems. So I'm curious what you think about that. But then also you know, my background is that I'm a social worker. So I've worked a lot with communities that are I mean, for instance, right now, often just being kind of dehumanized, right, and sort of denied the very idea of rights under current more authoritarian states either because of backsliding on not just democratic practices, but, like, government policies or cultural norms of inclusion and the expansion of a sort of universal subjectivity, right, or a humanism. But there's always that kind of dark side of leaving people out in these institutions and processes, and kind of denying them the same equality. And often people are in positions where they don't have the resources, you know, be that time or social capital or political capital to be able to participate and kind of acculturate themselves into these tools. And that could even be as something as simple as, like, not familiarity with, technical tools or access to the Internet in the same way. So I'm just kinda curious how you think about these in relation to your project and theorizing, but also practice.

Yeah. These are I know I keep saying this, to everybody's question, but these these are very good questions. And, I think I'll kind of, really quickly on the nonhuman democracy thing. I know this is definitely a thing that gets discussed a lot. And if you for anyone who's interested in this topic of, like, expanding democratic rights beyond human beings that hasn't already, I would very, very highly recommend reading Hartmut Rozas. I'll put the name in chat, but, he's a philosopher. I think he's Dutch or some some, one of those Western European countries, and he has some really interesting work on, like, resonance and how we interface with, with nonhuman kind of elements in the world. I'm skeptical that it is meaningful to discuss democracy beyond the bounds of human beings. That's not to say that nonhuman elements of the environment are not worth caring about. That's definitely that's obviously, on its face not true as we can see with climate change. But also I think you can definitely say that we owe a certain level of respect, of dignity, of rights to nonhuman organiza organisms and, beings without necessarily expanding democratic participation to those groups. Because then I think you've really run into a lot of problems and what does it mean for, like, a mycelium to participate in governing society, society, you know. If we're really trying to equalize agency, I think it is kind of, an unsolvable problem. So that aside, but it's definitely it's a very interesting question and mine is only one view of many that you could have on that. In terms of indigenous traditions of government, definitely agree that there's a lot to draw on there. And I think political theory in pop conversations, maybe not, but I think political theory is much better now than it was in the past at recognizing the non Western elements or non Western traditions that are, even when they haven't used the word democracy, basically doing the same thing. I kind of have an argument that I think human beings are a naturally democratic species, and I think there's some kind of emerging cognitive science work that supports that that I won't get into in the last few minutes we have. But I think on one side, I would I think we can be critical of certain forms of non and anti democratic indigenous government while also recognizing the really interesting contributions. Like, for example, it sounded like you're in Canada, but, for anybody who also doesn't know, our northern territories, especially Nunavut, have these traditions of nonpartisan government that are currently in their formal institutions, where they have, like, a roundtable style of government with consent based or consensus based decision making, and they have no political parties. And I think the leadership chair even rotates regularly during the meetings and stuff. A very, very interesting form of government governance, that I think deserves a lot more study, but I think is probably better known. My guess would be that if I was to go around and talk to do a survey of political theorists in Canada, 10 times more of them would be able to describe something about Nunavut's form of government than even know the name Ghassadin, or Polis, or, the five star movements Rousseau thing. So I think there's more attention on that. Even though there could be even more, there's more attention on that than there is on these tools. And then lastly, on the comments that you had about inviting other people to participate, I definitely think that is one of the huge benefits of these tools. And I I will tell the story some other time maybe because I I see we're running low on time. But I some from some of my experiences implementing these tools, it has, like, been extremely inspiring how much power these bring to people who would not be able to participate using traditional methods of political participation. And the way that it equalizes their power in these organizations is one of the best methods that they have, I think. But, yeah, maybe I'll throw it to Steve really quick. Sorry about my long answer there.

I'll I'll try to answer that and and correct me if I'm misunderstanding the question. Are you asking if market forms of pricing things that kind of try to account for externalities are relevant to this first politics?

I think that that's interesting. I'm as I sort of hinted at a little bit, in my slides, I'm very skeptical of these, economic forms of politics, and I got to write a nice little article about this that maybe I'll drop in the chat really quick. But Alright.

Great. Drop it out. Yeah.

Drop it in the chat. There you go. But, yeah, I do think that I think that there's a lot of interesting stuff going on there. I'm just skeptical that that form of market balancing of interests is equivalent to meaningful political participation.

I I definitely think that it is worth considering it worth bringing

For me. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, thank you very much, everybody, for attending. This was, really great and really amazing thoughts. I was kind of taking a lot of notes here. So even though I didn't get to address everything, I definitely am happy to continue these discussions in this Slack channel that is linked here and the survey. Anybody that wants to, I'm more than happy to get, more contributions on that. It's really been helpful for me in understanding where people are at, what people are interested in. And you can follow this web page for, and everything to do with this project will be there. If you want one thing to follow, it should be that. But, also, I will be trying to post as many updates in the Slack as possible. And there will probably be some kind of interim discussions before the first, theory and practice seminars, which are probably gonna be in late April, early May. I'm kind of looking at two of them right now, and then we'll sort of see where we go from there if that format's working for people. But, yeah, otherwise happy to continue these discussions with people and really looking forward to where this project takes us and what people can learn from each other here and what I can learn from all of you. So thanks again, and hope to speak to you guys soon.

Thank you so much. If we wanna unmute and give Joseph a round of applause as we always do, let's do it before we all head on with our days. So three, two, one, go. Cool. Yay. Thank you.

Yeah. Thanks for doing great work.

Appreciate it. Everyone. K. Bye. Bye.