Thanks, Nathan and everyone. Really excited to to get into conversation with y'all. These are some of my favorite favorite topics that you're thinking about, and I'm just I'm really excited to think together. And I was encouraged to present kind of work in in progress as opposed to something that's fully baked. So I'm I'm gonna kinda do two two pieces. One is sort of sharing our theory of the case on the public, which I would describe as, like, not not fully baked, but more baked. And then one is I actually wanna bounce off people here. This sounds a little crazy, but I'm I'm kind of trying to conceptualize what the project of democracy invention entails, and I would love to share a a schema that I'm thinking about for that and get folks, very candid reactions to that. So that's kind of my my agenda, and I'll try to do about, like, ten minutes on each. So, I'm gonna just share some slides. So first, let me let me just sort of tell you that so Nathan referred to civic signals Civic Signals let me actually move this to a different screen. Hold on. Civic Signals was kind of like the the research project that spawned the stand between now, which is called New Republic. And Civic Signals is really trying to understand I'm gonna let me pull everyone's faces over here. Great. Trying to understand what how might we conceive of the qualities of healthy public spaces. And with Talia Stroud, who's a communications professor at the University of Texas Austin, We we talked to a whole bunch of folks from different disciplines, from political science to sociology to economics. We sort of reduced that down to kind of 14 core qualities, bounce that off a whole bunch of people around the world, through surveys and focus groups, and then, like, on our website is sort of where where we landed, from that. But in in that process and I'll I'll post the link. I think it's madepublic.org/signals. In that process, I became increasingly convinced that or Talia and I both did that we really needed to start to conceive of digital public spaces that were organized around public service kind of values and outcomes rather than just trying to get private companies like Facebook and Twitter to make themselves better in some particular way. Like, we we we a little bit candidly, like, lost faith that this was, like, a metrics problem where they just didn't know what to measure and began to see, you know, what this is, kind of the the incentives that these institutions are built around are just kind of the wrong incentives to do all of the work that we want that that needs to be done in order to cohere communities digitally. And so that led us to this work that we're doing now, which is really about trying to kind of build some of these digital public spaces. So I just wanna walk you all through, like, our theory of the case on that and what we're actually trying to do. So we start from a point of view that, you know, when we talk about democracy and a healthy democracy, people tend to focus on kind of formal mechanisms. But, actually, our belief is people people gain trust and faith in democratic processes through experiences where they come together with other people and do stuff. And it's that experience of kind of like influence and the ability to engage in spaces of influence that then, like, build the foundation that ladders up to trust in a a government. And, you know, historically, that has happened in a bunch of different for for different groups of people, could be membership groups, all of Putnam, could be unions, could be editorial agents. There's lots of places where that's happened. But that basically for for a whole host of reasons, those kind of association all spaces where people found influence have eroded in the last fifty years. And, obviously, they were never accessible to a whole big chunk of of the population to begin with. And and as a result, you know, we have this kind of teetering democratic project. And I I like this word influence rather than agency because agency to me is kind of a purely individual notion of freedom or ability, whereas the influence is like, I'm I'm with other people. I get some say, but not all the same. But I guess the point is when people feel like they have no influence, then that's a right kind of breeding ground for for autocratic inclinations. And so, you know, that's where we think we find ourselves. And so for for a new public, you know what we're trying to do is think about how do we build a future for democracy that builds these spaces of influence in a way that fits with how people are living and relating and communicating today. And, so partly that's about digital, but partly that's about kind of human scale spaces. So our our premise, is that you really can't have an experience of of influence or agency at a scale of billions of people at a time that that we have to be thinking about sort of what are smaller scale spaces where people can engage that are useful to people, that are fun, that are actually participatory, that build social trust, and that are organized around sort of public, public benefit and public values. And so what we're trying to do is really start to move that toward, like, what's a product that actually does those things? So we've added DeepDi Doshi, who's our our third partner with Talia and I who comes from Facebook, did a bunch of product development and community work there. You know? And our our mission is basically to bring together people who are smart about thinking about community, people who are smart about thinking about tech products, researchers, futurists to basically sort of envision what digital public spaces might look like, start to architect them, and then figure out how do we how do we scale them. And we we look at something like front porch forum in Vermont as just a kind of, example of what can happen when you're not building around sort of VC type growth incentives. So, one interesting design intervention, the front porch forum, which is basically like a local, you know, local talk about local stuff with other people right in your vicinity, digital space. You know, they decided, well, if we don't have to optimize for engagement, what if we actually go the other direction and say, like, we're we're only gonna people can only really reach other people once a day. That then allows for both, like, lower lower throughput, higher quality content, which is then more possible to moderate. So then that means that you can actually moderate every single post. And what that means is that you can then maintain a high level quality. And the result is that while people in Vermont certainly use Facebook and Twitter and all these other things, there's a huge number of households that use front porch form for a particular kind of conversation. So to me, that's sort of like a a existence proof of what we might be looking for we think about these kind of digital public spaces. Worth saying, like, this is this is a huge challenge. It's not easy as you all know. And, basically, partly what we're we we see these kind of three core challenges. So one is, like, we we assert that these are good for people, that they build positive democratic externalities, but how do we know? Second is, like, there's a million civic projects that are worthy, but that nobody ever uses. So how do you actually get people to use that? And then third is, what is sustainable funding look like? So as far as kind of this impact piece, one you know, we we we think about this two ways. So one is really co design that that places kind of intelligence about product right next to intelligence about people and community structure and doesn't assume that technologists necessarily know how to build spaces that where people engage well. And then I think the second piece is, you know, how do we start to develop metrics that people can track? And and then Divya is on the call with me about, like, pluralism is one of those metric, you know, metric metric pieces. But, like, how do we start to give people the tools to actually know, like, am I am I delivering something positive, for socially or or not? On the second piece, you know, there's this question of how do we get people to use these things at scale? And I think there, you know, we find libraries instructive as a example. You know people don't go to libraries to be part of a democracy or perform a useful civic function, or anything like that like they go because they need WiFi, or they need to book, or they need access to a form or help filling it out. And so the point is just like, I think, in a in a market driven society. It's easy to forget that there are just a whole bunch of real needs that people have that are not gonna be met by market forces that public institutions can be better, and we should start there in terms of how we think about. How do we build these public spaces? So what can we do for people that markets are not going to do that offer a way into community and cohesion and cross connection? Another big piece for us is just, like, making this fun and and delightful. So a lot of the time kind of civic or democratic projects tend to be kind of obligatory. And we think a lot in terms of kind of like public art as an example. You know, how do you how do you build stuff that is is engaging and makes people want to be in in space together? And then, you know, a lot of what we're thinking about is kind of how do we meld a kind of growth tagging approach for the community organizing approach that says the people who show up aren't necessarily the people that we wanna serve. We actually need to be really targeted and specific about sort of which communities we wanna be serving with this product and how to how to bring them in. And then the last point I'll I'll just say is, like, we're we're not looking to build, like, a Facebook alternative, a Twitter alternative. We really are thinking in terms of, like, institutions like libraries and parks where there's a whole bunch of them. They have some common qualities and some common infrastructures, but actually they exist and are governed locally as part of the local specificity that makes them such such powerful and viable institutions. And then I think the last piece is just like, do we build the funding ecosystem to support this? And so we we did a deep dive into sort of the history of library funding, and it's fascinating. You know, Andrew Carnegie, whose his name is very associated with it actually comes, you know, comes into the story a one hundred years after it starts. But really, you see sort of these initial core profit models of associational libraries. And then at some point as public schools were taking off, there was this idea of like, well, why don't we open school libraries to everyone in the community? And New York passed the Public Library Act to basically like open up school libraries to everyone. And that was sort of a big inflection point in this idea of a public library. And so I think the takeaway there is both, you know, there's room for kind of public and private funding models for these kinds of institutions, but also that there's value in, like, piggybacking off of existing like, partly, maybe that's a story about leveraging existing institutions to support the development of new ones rather than trying to develop things de novo. So there's a lot more to, like, the details of where we're headed that I'm happy to share. But just in the interest of time, let me, like, pause on this track here, which is to say, you know, basically, what we're trying to do is is this part two of this flow here. So how do we actually start to try sort of minimum viable producting these kinds of spaces? And we're really focusing in a handful of verticals where we think that there is an opportunity to kind of do that, you know, to to to to leverage existing sort of community structures or is it or institutions to do some really socially generative work. And so the first one that we just are in the middle of is the school parent situation, and the thesis there is like, hey, you know, parents around a particular public school. You know, they may not be as as, schools themselves are still pretty segregated. But still, you you often have, like, a fair amount of class diversity, a fair amount of race diversity, fair amount of political diversity. And yet we're not actually doing anything to create infrastructures that or or products that help bring people intentionally into community and to contact with each other across those divides. And so how can we develop some lightweight interventions that build the kind of like soft cross connection that might then down the road help with some of the harder governance problems that schools are facing. When you look at school boards and sort of all of the drama that is happening right now. And so again, I could talk more about all of these different pieces, but I'll I'll pause on new public for for now. So so but this is, you know, so so our project again in a nutshell is how do we build nonprofit maximizing digital spaces that serve communities and and sort of cross cohesion, give people a sense of influence. How can we build those at scale? That's our our big project. Now I'm gonna kind of, like, share one other it looks like this. So let me let me share this other piece, which is maybe even more far flung, please. This is a very rough draft. And so I welcome harsh harsh criticism, but also just know that it's, like, just the beginning of my, thinking at it. But part of in in talking about new public, I realized, like, there's a bunch of implicit assumptions that we have that that are worth spelling out explicitly about kind of the project of democracy invention. And I guess the way that I think about it is that there are sort of two urgent projects for those of us who care about democracy and sort of dignity and people powered governance. One is kind of autocracy prevention, and the other is democracy invention. And in my life, I've spent a lot of my time in the autocracy prevention kind of camp, which is a lot about politics and being at the barricades trying to stop autocratic movements and threats. But I think there's this other project, which is, like which is really pretty strategically and tactically different, which is, I think, what a a lot of y'all are thinking about, which is, like, it seems implausible to me that we get to 2070 by incrementally tweaking the kinds of democratic governance systems that we have now. I I I'm I just struggle to figure out what that story is. And so it feels to me like it's useful mentally to separate, like, on the one hand, we've kinda gotta hold our existing systems together. But on the other hand, we really have this especially if we're interested in multiracial democracy, we have this project of invention that we've never really built the systems to do these kinds of projects. And so I'm trying to like I see new public as one small part of that project, and I was trying to kind of build the framework for what what is that whole project that we're a tiny part of? And so I'm gonna share with you this graph that or this image that is my best theory of this, but but, would love folks' feedback. So this is this is my premise here. And so if if you think about it, this goes kind of from, like, soft power to hard power is one way to think about it. Like, higher on the pyramid is is hard power. But, basically, that, you know, at the top of the pyramid is, like, make make governance systems actually deliver good things for real people in a in an easy way. Right? Like, it's like it works. And there's a bunch of interesting stuff happening. I don't know if you can see the slide well, but, like, The US digital service and code for America and get CalFresh are, like, examples to me of what that looks like. Then there's this sort of middle tier, which is, like, invent, reinvent formal participatory governance, which is, like, actual power, actual live m o. How do we make decisions together about real things in a way that is participatory and inclusive and actually yields good results? And so the Taiwan and Vesterdemon are are some examples. There's also a lot of really interesting stuff I think happening in web three world and radical exchange. And then at the bottom is this kind of, like, building building the culture that supports all of these things because I really believe that you can't, this isn't a problem you solve at a formal level. And I think, you know, to to fill on another sort of observers of democracy would agree that, like, there is there is a set of cultural attributes that are really critical to build in order to in order to foster healthy participatory, healthy multistakeholder, multiracial systems. And so how do we build the institutions that are necessary for that? And I would sort of put new public, like, somewhere between these bottom, you know, the the the bottom center and bottom right quadrant of that. So anyway, that's just that's that's what I've been thinking about all morning, and and would love to, like, get folks, feedback on thoughts on, any of this. And, also, just happy to share more detail about any piece of it that are interesting. Thank you.

Yeah. I mean, I think well, I think, arguably, you know, some kind of newsletters operate that way, and that's part of what people like about that format when it's working is it's kind of there there is this back and forth with the audience, but it's slow and thoughtful and mediated rather than, like, everybody speaking at once. You know, I think I'm really eager to figure out I think there's, like, slow and unidirectional and fast and, like, multidirectional. And I think, like, slow and multidirectional is, like, a really interesting category to explore more. But I, like, am less. I I have less examples there other than front porch forum of of, like, you know, sort of and and front porch forum isn't it's not super slow. It's just slow enough that you can do some some things with the kind of conversation that you can't otherwise.

Yeah. That's fascinating. I'd have to think about it more, but I I think it's, like, a great I mean, I guess my my, like there's a part of this that's just sort of, like, a culture eat strategy for breakfast, but culture is also generated by particular kinds of relationships and institutions. And so, like, that's where I start in the pyramid, but that may be wrong. I'm not sure it speaks to what you're saying.

Can we put the pyramid back up? I really wanna talk about it with you. I will I'll I'll be not too long, but the pyramid is awesome. So let's what what really stands out to me about the pyramid is that, you know, the from top to bottom, the top is the most constrained and the bottom is the least constrained. So if you think of it like very physical space, like, I don't know, like a people mover is at the top and it's just like you go there. And, you know, like maybe like an open field that we can hang out in is at the bottom. And, like, somewhere in between, we've got, like, hallways and stuff. And so, like, at least from my perspective, you know, you're characterizing digital space in a way that sort of emphasizes, and I think you used the term sort of horizontal versus vertical scaling in your in your other slides. And so, like, things near the bottom are very horizontally scalable. They're open spaces with lots of degrees of freedom, but it doesn't mean they don't have any structure. So, like, you can create structures that are conducive to, like, horizontal scaling and very like, they're not very heavy handed. They provide a lot of opportunity for people to express themselves and both as individuals and as groups. But the space that you've created is, like very low constraints, minimalist in a sense of how much structure you impose on people. And as you go up the pyramid, you basically go narrower and narrower, more and more constrained. And I think one of the reasons why I think this is so important is because in the middle layer, and I do a lot of work in the middle layer too, like, I think people are overly constraining. I think they're drawing too many models from the red and not enough models from the purple and that if we understand that a lot of the real lived experience value happens you know, you can certainly have enablement through constraints, but, like, I think there's just way too much emphasis on constraints and trying to create determinism through constraints rather than creating spaces that are conducive to the desired outcomes, from the perspective of the lived experience of the participants. So in a world where I sort of imagine that pyramid being flipped upside down, So the red is as thin as possible and it's only what is really necessary. The yellow, again, sort of as thin as possible and only what's really necessary. And then, like, the vast majority of life should happen in near purple.

I don't know.

Anyway, so, like, it really spoke to me, and I just wanted to, like, riff on it with you a little bit.

Cool. Yeah. No. I I I like that. And one thing I've been thinking about is just, like I mean, this is all models are bad or whatever. Fail to capture reality. This there's something I wanted to capture that sort of what you were saying spoke to, which has to do with, like I do think, you know, I put, mutualism down here. You know, when I think about like the coop like there's a bunch of stuff that sort of between formal participatory. Maybe this is like formal participatory public governance. But then there's actually like a bunch of governance that here that I think is actually super valuable and is is maybe like well, yeah. I'm just having this problem of, like

It's nested.

It's I

I'm with you. I mean, like, inevitably, if I zoom in onto one of those like, let's just zoom in on a thing that's in the purple layer. You could imagine another one of these pyramids sitting in it where there's, like, some really, like, rig let's do our budgeting really carefully and, like, you know so like and again, this for me borrows from something like the organizational cybernetics and Stafford Beer and all that work which is inherently, recursive. So if you view this at the level, like a really broad level and we see red, yellow, purple, and then you zoom in to an organization at any point that fulfills some functions, you're gonna see another sort of red, yellow, purple.

Mhmm.

And then you're gonna zoom in to, like, a working group and they're gonna have, like, a red, yellow, purple. And just first understanding that the this is an inherently recursive thing and then just accepting that we're looking at one layer or whatever it is. I think it's really powerful to say, look, there's some really rigid, constrained stuff that provides, for lack of a better term, the sort of most important shared resource sharing to make sure that, you know, there aren't, like I won't go into details. But, like, you know, there's something that needs to be governed very carefully and very tightly, And then we have a more, like, a more open, less constrained environment for making proposals and or voting on things and or whatever procedures. So you end up designing you design procedures around a wider set of, let's say, expressions, but that's still constrained because you can only code for or codify so much, you know, expression, like, expressivity, like, capacity for expression. And then as you move further down, you need to have things that are capable of expressing richer things, like, you know, showing up next to the whatever sculpture with a stereo and three friends and having an impromptu dance party, no way that you are actually pre codifying that. And so, this notion of constrainedness is really natural in digital space because you are actually digital space because you are actually codifying the the completeness and the incompleteness. And and I'm gonna let this go to the next discussion shortly, but I I wanna kinda point out that really reasoning about the, degrees of freedom in the very formal mathematical sense gives you a sense of how constrained something is. And, obviously, any piece of software has got, like, a sort of bounded interface or bounded surface with only so many degrees of freedom. And as we move into the physical world in particular, the sort of dimensionality of what we could express, you know, sort of achieves that, like, you know, sort of complexity level that's that's on that can't be fully codified. And so we need to really think of life as happening in the the bottom most layer because none of the red or orange can actually, you know, ever capture a lot of the things from which, value as we experience it is derived. Sorry. That was a mini monologue. But, basically, I love your diagram, and I really just wanna flip it upside down.

I like that. Yeah.

No. I mean, I I it's great thought. I I'm thinking about it.

Right. And I think it raises this question. I mean, I mean, let me let me so so I think it's interesting. There's there's there's a piece in here about government versus governance, and I guess I share the conviction that, again, if I think about sort of a good scenario in 2070 where the values that we care about are instantiated in the power structures, either, like, those power structures aren't all down you know, territorially bounded at all. And I also I mean, I guess this is part of the little stick that I'm working on it. But but, probably, you know, I think people a lot of people feel a lot of near despair and fear about the rise of authoritarianism and the, like, downfall of democratic government. And I see I I share that, but I also feel like one of the a very good piece of news is that people are coming to care about digital digital goods, and that gives us an opportunity to kind of experiment with other forms of governance that we just, like, didn't really have. Like, basically, you can get on you you know, you can go around, and you can get unstuck, and you can start to experiment. And so I guess when I imagine, like, how do we get to to a good situation, a lot of it has to do with developing models there that then, in some cases, apply back over to what we think of now as physical or or, some territorially bound government. And some in some cases, just, like, go off in their own direction, and it's like, yeah. I'm part of this, you know, whatever the future of decentralized Minecraft is that gives me the sense of belonging and and connection that is, like, totally outside of outside of sort of a formal government structure. So I that's all. I think but I love the I love the sub subsidiary concept, and I also like I'm fascinated by, you know, the there's some interesting, like, right, left, or, like, nonideologically peckable ideas percolating in that vein that seem, like, fascinating to me just as someone who's been involved in left politics a lot. Like Mhmm. It feels like there's there's room for a new kind of ideological consensus around that.

I'm,

Well, but I mean, as tongue in cheek as that is, I mean, this is how you deal with measurement with things that are sort of complex and rich. You recognize that the phenomena itself is richer than any one measurement, including any measurement of measurements. You maintain a body of knowledge. This becomes a commons a digital commons in its own right. The the rep the the measurement and analysis of the measurements accounting for their implicit index. Obviously, you make their assumptions as explicit as possible. You collect them into a sort of, you know, again, this sort of, I guess, GitHub repo collection of GitHub repos, whatever, analyses of findings. And then by virtue of emphasizing the process of of collection computation and assessment as opposed to on the metric itself. You can actually preserve essentially preserve plurality in your assessment of plurality as a way of kind of, I guess, wrapping the snake's tail on itself. It it really feels funny to describe it that way. But I think that is, in fact, the only answer for anything, even things beyond pluralism, things that are in that sort of complex phenomena level that we have a a sense of whether something is true but we don't have a way of defining it canonically in terms of the formalism, then we necessarily say, here's a perspective as characterized by a formalism. Here's a mechanism through which we measure and analyze those results. And, you know, alternative formalisms and alternative measurements are viewed as potentially complementary as opposed to competitive. That is, in a way, an application of the concepts of pluralism to the concept of pluralism, which makes it actually a really cool project.

Yeah. Thanks. I was just wondering about the

pyramid, going back to the pyramid.

I really like the tree idea that you proposed, Nathan. I think that's a really cool other way to look at it too. But regarding the sort of yeah. Just kind of thoughts on where this meets sort of existing social media. I'm trying to understand in my own head also, like, are we trying to get people off networks to somewhere else, or do we see them like, how do we see these other public spaces coexisting alongside social media? So I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on that.

Yeah. No. That's a good question. And I guess my you know, I I am a bit reasoning from thinking about physical community structures. And so in that context, I think there's plenty of room for private spaces and private institutions, amusement parks, whatever your metaphor of choice is for what social media does. I think it's just like, saying, like, that doesn't, that that I would argue normatively, like, that should live alongside institutions that exist for the purpose of public benefit and public conversation. You know that a park coffee shops are great, and coffee shops are private businesses. And as we know, they're you know, code spaces where a lot of important sociological things happen, but they are not the same as, like, a a park. And there's a whole bunch of functions that a park serves that a coffee shop won't by definition. And so so I guess I'm imagining I I think I have I have, like, a predictive I'm just saying this out loud because it's like like, I have a prediction that for a whole bunch of reasons. Anyway, the pendulum is swinging away from sort of, I guess, in your terminology, Nathan, it would be, like, scaled social media Like, that that one algorithm for 3,000,000,000 people type solutions is increasingly gonna seem, like, unworkable as I think it it it is, and people are gonna look for more approximate ways of communicating. So that's, like, just a prediction. And then I think this hypothesis is, like, that you have this sort of, like, layered and federated approach where you have a bunch of, like, more profit oriented or business type social spaces, and you have a bunch of more you know, that might be, like, Slack or Discord. And then it might and then you have more sort of public service oriented type spaces. And there's, like, people use both. And I think, like, why yeah. I could talk more about technically why I think the the network effects that were so powerful seem less so to me now, but I don't know that we'd wanna go down that rabbit hole.

Yeah. I'm I'm interested also in hearing, like, yeah, if you think, of, like, regulation needs to help out the, like, upcoming, like, the newcomers or not. But maybe yeah. I don't know. Maybe that's on the rabbit hole we can leave for later from other people. So we have a chance.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. No. I do believe that, just as an like, I think, like, regulate regulation can create the context in which, we don't have the privatization of everything.

Yeah. Cool. Thanks.

Alright. Nikola.

Yeah. I mean, this is where my brain starts to hurt and just digulate wildly. But I do I guess when I try to imagine this, like, pluralistic, multilayered subsidiary, what's the word for have possessing the quality of subsidiary? Anyway, whatever that is like, when I try to imagine that that landscape, I do feel like there start to be, you know, kind of interstate compacts and federations that you start to imagine that are like literal meta governance structures that help solve some of those problems. And I don't really know what that means beyond just saying that, but that's that's like I'm fascinated by that set of questions as well. You know, just sort of like it feels like federation tech or whatever. Like, not not meaning to code necessarily, but meaning, like, the practice of federation needs to advance a lot in order for this whole kind of thing to work out well. But I don't that's not an area I've studied enough to really know what that looks like. And if anyone here does or has, I'd love to learn.

No. No. Last thought. Go ahead. Oh, well, let's see. I appreciate that you're focusing kind of in physical lesson online because of my own kind of bias towards I think democracy, I love it, and I think it's really a lot of work and more work than people are willing to do unless the stakes are high. So I do think it's strategic to focus on, like, actual live problems and and potential technology for the real world. Nevertheless, I love you name calling Minecraft, which is super high stakes for the kids who build it. And I can say that Yeah. With a lot of affection.

It's also great how much data they have and how fun that is to work with.

Thanks so much.

Just say I mean, we could use any and all help intellectually or otherwise as we work on this stuff. So I'm gonna just put my email on the chat. I just would love to, like, stay in touch with the folks who get excited about this kind of work because we we're we're trying to crack some hard problems and, you know, the smarts we can get.

Thank you all. Thank you. Cheers.

Yeah.