Automatic transcription, there could be errors:
Alessandro Oppo (00:00)
Welcome to another episode of the Democracy Innovators Podcast and our guest of today is Antoine Vergne. Sorry for the pronunciation and thank you for your time.
Antoine (00:08)
No problem.
Alessandro Oppo (00:10)
And I was reading the description on your LinkedIn profile and I like the phrase like, "Bringing citizens into global policy? Working on it." So, I mean, you are working at Missions Publiques, right? And would you like to tell us something about it?
Antoine (00:29)
Yes.
Yeah, of course. So,
As you say it very well, my name is Antoine, the last name is still difficult to pronounce. I'm originally from France, living in Germany for over 20 years. And I'm working at Missions Publiques. I'm one of the co-directors of Missions Publiques. And we are a team of 15, around 15. We are based in Paris, Brussels and Bonn in Germany. So the three countries. But we focus our work at all levels of government.
And what we do is, as you said at the beginning, understanding how to innovate in the way we take collective decisions, in the way we do governance for the 21st century. And it's really about that question of how do you reinvent processes and ways to take collective decisions that are fit for the challenges we have and the opportunities we have.
Because many of the ways we take decisions nowadays are inherited from the 19th century or the 20th century. If you take the elections that are a tool from the 19th century.
Or opinion polls, which are based in science from the 20th century, still working, but you can question their fitness for the 21st century and the way society has evolved. So what we do at Missions Publiques is trying to design and implement those kinds of new ways of taking collective decisions.
Alessandro Oppo (02:12)
Would you like to share something about your personal or academic background and also how did you start working at this intersection of technology and politics?
Antoine (02:26)
Yeah.
So on my personal background, I studied political sciences. Yes, I was interested in politics for a long time. But there was, as I started my study, there was one question that kind of bothered me. It was the question of how liberal democracies work and the question which was already back then, 1998, 1999, about the question of the crisis of liberal democracies and
crisis of trust between citizens and elites, between representatives and represented. And I was really wondering how to..
solve that crisis or improve the situation, and I discovered, so one day I was working from one lecture to another and in the floor I saw an announcement for a conference which was about a stochastic system and it was, there was a picture saying why shouldn't we elect our representative through random selection, so the members of the parliament.
And I thought: wow, OK, that's crazy. But that's interesting. And then I went to the conference and I was completely, how you say, convinced or at least very interested in understanding what that could mean to go for random selection in politics. And then I kind of entered the rabbit hole of random selection in politics. I wrote my thesis at the end of the study about random selection in politics.
And then I started a master on the topic and then I started a PhD on the topic. And in 2011, had, so I finished my PhD on the topic of random selection and politics and the question around the expectation, because at that time it was the moment where it really grew that idea. And many authors rediscovered the ancient Athens.
or the Italian experiences of Florence and Venice of having random selection as part of the box, the tooling box of selection and procedures and how you take collective decisions. And it was forgotten for a long time, but in the seventies and eighties and the nineties, again, people started to..
think about it, to research it and to propose random selection as one way to take decisions, not only to select people as citizens assemblies, but also to take decisions or to rank decisions. There was, for example, full discussion at the end of the 70s about difficult choices. So if you were, for example, to pick someone for dialysis, so it was the moment where also
those medical treatments were becoming possible but very expensive. So was the question of how to distribute that in a fair way. So there was a full discussion in philosophy around that. And it grew, it grew. And at the same time, the practice of having randomly selected citizens grew in places like Germany or the US where the mini-publics were invented. But there was kind of a disconnect between the full theory and the practice because
practitioners were doing it, theoreticians were thinking about it, but there were few connections. My PhD was about the question of the expectation of the theory versus the realization of the practice. So are the expectations of the theory realized in the practice of mini-publics? And that was kind of the big question My answer was yes, with conditions about scaling.
We are going to come back to that. And at the same time, when I, one of the field sites of my PhD was a citizens' assembly implemented by Missions Publiques. So that's when I encountered the team from Missions Publiques and I started to work with the team and since 2011, I'm there and I worked at Missions Publiques.
Alessandro Oppo (06:57)
Regarding random selection applied to, let's say, our times, how do you imagine it in a way that can actually work and integrate with the system that we have now?
Antoine (07:10)
Yes, I think it's really interesting because for me random selection is one of the tools we can use. But we need to put a bit aside for a moment. I don't know if it's normativity, but the question of
perception also. So we are used to, for example, elections. Let's say, or rather even more basic. When we take collective decisions, we can do it in a variety of ways. And you can, for example, indeed have a vote, but you can also very often, for example, collective decision is made through market processes. So when you have a price, which is the way to
put an equilibrium between offer and demand. And that's a way to aggregate preferences and have a collective decision through the price. And in a vote, it's the way you do it in the sense that you aggregate suffrages or votes, and then you have a collective decision. And another way we are used to do it is through criteria. So you take a list of criteria and you say, for example,
Yeah, someone needs something. So because you have low income, for example, you could put a system of criteria on need, or you could say a system of criteria on merit, and because someone has been good in school, good grades, so this person has the right to go to university, which is numerus clausus, like it was for a long time in Germany. But there is another way also, and that's the fourth big mechanism.
to take collective decisions is random selection. And in this case, the aggregation, the fact that you have a set of options and you go to less options is made through a random moment, so random. And that's interesting because it has a couple of use cases where it's very useful. For example, if you want to prevent corruption, corruption is a big use case of random selection because
When you randomly select, you lower the incentives for every actor to be successful with corruption. Let's imagine, for example, you have a public tender for building a big highway and you have different companies that put a tender. But at the end, the three best companies are in a lottery and you can pick one of the three to be the one winning.
contract.
So what you do with that is you lower by two thirds the probability of being successful when you want to corrupt. And that's very interesting because with that, the strategies of the actors are very different. Imagine, for example, that in the FIFA World Cup system, it wouldn't be a vote, but it would be a random selection. And that would be very interesting because all the corruption incentives would be much different. And that's the same when you
select judges, you select jury members, for example, that's why so many places in the world select their jury members through random selection. So random selection has a lot of very interesting use cases in decision making.
Alessandro Oppo (10:47)
And how to go back to scaling, how to scale this new mechanism or old mechanism, because as we say, the random selection was also used in the past. And about the concept of scaling, how we can scale participation, how can we..
Antoine (11:12)
So scaling is something like..
a focus of our work at Missions Publiques and personally. Because when we started in 2008, 2009, 2010 to think about the next step for deliberative democracy, and particularly for mini-public citizens assemblies, we had that big question to understand, OK, it seemed to be working at the local level. It seemed to be working at the regional level. How do we scale that to the national?
transnational or global level because the questions we are addressing, for example, we were working on citizens' theory on climate change in one city or one region. And that makes sense, of course, because you can have competencies and the people are living there.
But it's also limited because those are global challenges and questions of global governance that should be also handled at the global level, which they are. If you take climate, for example, it's the UNFCCC and the COP process. around 2010-11, we started at Missions Publiques to think about how to scale those processes for those kinds of questions or those kinds of governance.
And we had a first step, which was national level in 2011-12-13, where we managed to scale a deliberative process to the national level in France about energy transition. That was the starting point of a new law on energy transition and the energy mix in France. And that was a very good experience. And after that, we..
wondered how to scale from there to international level and to the global level. And that's when we started a cooperation with the Danish Board of Technologies. And we started and deployed World Wide Views, which was the largest ever citizens deliberation. We managed to have around 10,000 citizens in 76 countries as a preparation to COP21 in Paris. And we had an official agreement.
with the UN, UNFCCC, and the French government to bring the results of those deliberations into the Paris negotiation on the Paris Agreement. And that was a pure vertical scaling. So scaling in the sense of going from local to global. But it was then when we..
had a very important lesson that you can't only scale out in terms of going further, but you also need to understand how to scale high. And I will come back to this concept a bit later. Scaling high meaning having a very strong connection to decision making. So you can do a very nice process at
global level, but if you have no impact, you scale something, but you miss some scale, the dimension of scaling. And indeed for the worldwide use on climate, we had a very good dissemination and communication, but it was very hard to understand the impact on policy. that..
That changed a bit later, when we managed in 2020 to work with the French government on the Citizens Climate Assembly and that one was very interesting because we managed to both have a national process which was kind of scaling out at national level and something that never happened before because over 70 % of the French population knew about the process.
So that was really also a scaling in the sense of knowledge and awareness of the population of the process. And at the same time, it was scaling in the sense of a very strong connection with governmental work. Because now, five years, five and a half years later, around 70, 75 % of the measures that were recommended by the citizens of the convention.
were implemented in the French system. So that's another dimension of scaling because you have that impact between democratic innovation and decision making. And that was also for us a learning. Then we still had one question, which is, okay, now you have done a one-off, but how do you understand how this embeddedness in the system?
goes over time. So that's not just a one-off, but over time a repetition. And it's kind of the question we like to call scaling deep, in the sense that how does scaling work not only as an institutional one-off, but also over time, and penetrates a system, an institution.
And for that we have the chance to have a good example, which is the European Commission. Because we've been working with the European Commission since 2021 on the transnational citizens deliberation called the Conference on the Future of Europe, which was a very large participatory exercise in 2021, 2022. And what is interesting is that after that experience,
the European Commission decided to embed the process in its policy making and since then the Commission has organized and commissioned
Now I have to turn eight more European citizens panels with the same format. And here what happens is over time you have kind of a continuity. So it's also another form of scaling. It's not because one of the panel has had impact. It's because the process itself is being embedded in the way the commission does policy. And that's really, really interesting.
And of course, all over those years, what we have been learning is that the process is an iteration because we are in a a democratic innovation space. And it means that it's like an Apollo program or a rocket. The one you launch is going to explode. And when you have launched 13 or 15, and then you manage to have a product which works or the system or an innovation network. So what we learned
also that scaling was also a question of iterating on your own innovation and that's being reflective and improving the process over time and that's something that is still ongoing and maybe will go forever but that's another dimension of scaling on how you scale the process itself, the quality of the process. And now I told you the story of what we learned but it's
It has been transformed over the past year and a half into something else and we can talk about it.
Alessandro Oppo (18:50)
Exactly, my question was about what I was thinking about is maybe something that you discovered that also you were not expecting regarding the scaling mechanism because as you say there is a scaling is a process is an iteration so I'm thinking about maybe it's also as you say there is an experiment
And we have to experiment to find the right way of scaling. And also I can imagine there could be like multiple ways of scaling. Maybe something work more in a country, something else work more in another one. yeah, what are your thoughts about it? Something that..
Antoine (19:36)
So maybe one thing to, that's a big question, which is still quite open. But we have the chance to be in a European research and innovation project. mean, a project from Horizon Europe. So an EU-funded program, which is called ScaleDem. And ScaleDem is exactly that question of how do you scale democratic innovation? So here we go from all those questions and learnings into
proper process of three and a half years that we do with 13 partners across the EU. And we are together exactly.
tackling that question of scaling and what does it take to scale democratic innovations? What are the obstacles and leverages in doing so? it was born from our questioning around that and the question from many other, course, because scaling is a very shared question in the field of democratic innovation. We had the chance to put together that project and we are working on it now for about a year and a half.
here. maybe before I go on, in that project and more generally, we try to understand which kind of democratic innovations are around there. So there is a full part also about conceptualizing what kinds of democratic innovation we are talking about. And because many of the most of the spotlight since 10, 15 years has been around deliberative democracy.
and the questions of mini-publics that we were talking about and that of course we are working mostly with. But there are other ways to do democratic innovation. There are a lot of things happening in electoral democratic innovations about new algorithms for voting, about new ways to create campaigns and political campaigns, new ways to have party politics, mean, beyond electoral politics, beyond parties. So there are also a full lot of innovation there and scaling questions.
another family is, of course, the administrative democratic innovation. How do you make administration more transparent, more responsive and there a lot of innovations happening here. Of course direct democracy is a big chunk of democratic innovation here too. Many innovations happening all over the world.
And you have also of course the question of digital democracy and AI-based democratic innovation, which are also taking a lot of momentum and space around civic tech and that question of how do you scale. And that's also a key question of that family of innovation is how do you go from small numbers of involved people to very large numbers.
being mostly in digital democracy, the question of scaling out, so how you reach more people. So that's what we work on. And indeed, work with, at the moment, have conceptualized those four dimensions of scaling. I was kind of mentioning through the story, but I can give you a bit more on that. It's because we are trying to understand
How is scaling happening? And we have that framework with those four dimensions. So scaling out, what I was mentioning, is how an innovation is spreading kind of horizontally, reaching more people, new places, going from local to global, that kind of things. New policy areas. So that's the scaling, what we call the scaling out. Then there is the scaling high. It's the question of how do you integrate that into
policy making in the sense of what is the impact and the uptake of the results of the democratic innovation of what comes out of a democratic innovation process. Then we have the third dimension which is scaling deep is how does those democratic innovations also connect to people as emotional beings, as the culture around democratic innovation because as we
we are human beings and human beings have a lot to do with emotions and not only with our cognitive brain but we have the emotional brain and the body and so how does that happen and how does a democratic innovation connects to our bodies which is very important nowadays and we can come back to that a bit later in a moment of distrust towards classical
liberal democracies, but we can come back to that. And then the fourth dimension is scaling in, which I was mentioning at the end, which was about how do you improve the process. So, now you ask me about what have we learned. We are at the beginning of that research, as we still have some way to go.
Alessandro Oppo (24:45)
you
Antoine (25:00)
But what we are trying to identify are the kind of leverages that make scaling in one dimension easier. And what are the blockages? And in terms of blockages, we can identify things like the administrative rules or rigid procedures, lack of capacity, so that kind of thing. So we are at the moment now identifying those barriers, those leverages.
So
it's a work in progress and I'd be happy to report back in a year and a half what we have finally found out. But the question is really what you say, it's a dynamic process. in any case, even if we identify leverages and blockages, it's a question of how people can take that and work in their own context. That's also one of the big questions.
Alessandro Oppo (25:55)
And let's say that some scaling mechanisms are found and they are effective. How do you see society? How could work in a society where people participate in a way or in another one? Like, would it be like the full society, just some part of it? Would it change like the..
Can we call that new system still a sort of liberal democracy? Because it will be different, maybe it will be less connected to representative democracy. What are your thoughts about it?
Antoine (26:35)
Yeah, I mean, if I have a dream, it's a really important question because indeed we see the pressure on classical liberal democracies is building up. So there is a need to understand what can be a good option, a good offering to citizens. Because one of the key, of course, of that question is the distrust.
between the way decisions are taken and the lives of the people. For me, we manage to scale, the end goal is you have a situation in which people are happy to live in the political system they live in.
and really happy. It's not about only effectiveness output can be one dimension of that. They are happy because there are good policies but I think it's more than that. It's also they're happy because they feel happy and it's something that has been a growing conviction on my part that
I had that strange realization over time that if you look at liberal democracies, they are really output oriented more and more. Because when you have an electoral cycle, the candidates, they promise to do stuff. And it's based on doing things that would improve the situation.
And what is interesting is that populist candidates don't really do that. I mean, they do it too, but they have something more they offer than others don't, and it's belonging.
So that's a very interesting for me thing to see. There is good research showing that if you look at the output of policies made by populists, they are not necessarily in the advantage or in the service of the people who vote for them. So if we take an example in the US, for example, the policies that are being implemented by the government
at the moment are hurting the people that vote for that government.
in a sense that they become poorer, for example, they are not becoming richer, it's more difficult for them. Inflation, is more inflation, the tariffs are hurting their own interests, and now the war and that kind of thing. So it's really interesting too, but the level of support is not decreasing as fast as you would imagine, despite policies being of the output of the system being against the people they vote for.
And that's really interesting because that's something that does not happen in other liberal democracies where sometimes you have policies that objectively improve the situation of the people but at the same time the support is going down. So there is something which is a disconnection. And there is good research around the fact that also what people want is belonging. And that's something that populists can offer very well.
more classical liberal democracies have stopped offering. And it's the same with many other institutions like religions, I mean, at least in Europe, religions, party politics and partisanship is something that has declined. Unions have declined. And these were all those places of belonging. So over the time, I am..
came to the realization and the conviction that something that we love and we need is belonging. And that's also very well documented in the neurobiology and neurosciences that when we are together and we are in interaction, we start producing hormones, we start producing oxytocin, which is that hormone of the well-being and belonging and that kind of thing. And that happens when we are together.
discuss things together, in a way that, I mean we know it, humans are social beings and social species. So if you ask me what does a scaled democracy look like, it's also a democracy that can help in that sense.
But for that you need indeed to offer something. And I think that democratic innovation can be one answer, can be part of the answer to offer that in different ways, in different kinds of democratic innovations. So for me, a scaled system is the one in which each citizen has the chance and the capacity to take part to those processes, to take part to democratic
which shouldn't be democratic innovation anymore, but to democratic processes in different ways, in different manners. But then indeed it's a huge challenge because now I had done the math if you would like to have, let's take the European level for example, and you want each and every citizen to at least take
one time part in such a deliberative process like a European citizens panel, which is kind of the place where citizens really have that interaction with EU policy which is impacting them. And if you imagine now at the moment you have two to four groups a year of 150 citizens, so you have 300 to 600 citizens that are taking part to such an experience a year. And it's very strong as an experience
on all the dimensions of scaling that I was mentioning before. Because when you ask people at the end of a citizens' panel what they retain, what they take home, very often they don't say that they have produced a list of very important or very smart recommendations. What they say is: "I feel European now." I mean, that's what they say. They feel European. They understand what it is to be European.
and they feel it. imagine now that every European over the course of their life has the chance to take part at least once to such a process. And then you would have indeed at the end 450 million people feeling European. What a difference it would make. Because you could feel critical European, you mean even you could go home with a very lot of critics or being against some of the policies.
Alessandro Oppo (33:30)
Antoine (33:55)
but that feeling of belonging would be very different. And I played the math and it's a bit tricky.
Because what you would need for, imagine you have your active citizenship between 16 and 80, let's say, and you have to go at least once in your life through such a process. It would mean more or less that you would need to have every week or every weekend, if we put that on weekend, 10,000 to 15,000 citizens taking part to such a panel.
Which means that in terms of infrastructure, it would mean something like the Eiffel Tower or Euro Disney, because these are the kind of infrastructure that see that kind of level of people. So the Eiffel Tower is three million people a year and that's more or less what you would need. So you would need to build or you would need to take over the parliament in Strasbourg or in Brussels and transform it into a huge complex
You would need a train station and an airport and you would need to have 15,000 people a week going there. But it's not impossible because physically it works at the Eiffel Tower, it works at Euro Disney and it's of course as good an experience as Euro Disney I suppose.
Alessandro Oppo (35:26)
Yeah, and I'm also imagining that, I mean, with technology, it is also maybe possible to have a kind of asynchronous participation. So I'm thinking nowadays everyone has a phone or a laptop. And so..
could be maybe if there is the culture of participation and people are aware of, could be citizen assembly or other systems to maybe replicate them also like in a more autonomous way could be also this something so people don't have to really move to a place to take part in a participatory process but they can just
let's say have a discussion in their neighborhood and maybe those information are helpful to write policies for their neighborhood.
I'm thinking, I mean nowadays software is easy to produce software and do we need new software, new ideas, new.. what do we need?
Antoine (36:47)
So we need a chip in our brain to be even faster in coding. Maybe one thing before, I think. So that's a very big question for me because the question of physical embodiment and co-presence is very..
very unique because that's when you produce that kind of bonding hormones and happiness which is not happening or less happening when you're online.
and almost not when you are async online. there is a, if we talk together now online, you and me, we kind of create that kind of bonding, not as much as if we in the same room, but more than if we were interacting over messages or over social media. So you have a kind of a clear hierarchy of the kind of level of engagement. And by the way, it's interesting because in the metaverse, so when you are
wearing a 3D glasses in 3D environment, you are almost at the level of the physical co-presence. There are good experiences, for example, in terms of when you train, when you do sports training. They have been testing between training in a fitness studio with a trainer, then training at home alone, and training in the metaverse. And the metaverse is almost..
you spend almost as much calories as when you are in the trainer in the fitness studio. So there is an effect on that. But for me, it's a real difference if you really move the people because it's also where you get to experience in your flesh, bones and heart and..
that connection, that embodiment of what it means to be together. But of course I'm with you that the decentralization or parallelization is of course one way to go. If you have thousands of local assemblies or so thousands of local processes, they layer up like lasagna. You know myself to take an Italian reference with you. So it's because then of course
the course of a life you would go one time here, one time here, one time here, and of course then you would have some kind of deliberation, some kind of online participation, some kind of direct democratic. So of course you build up a full system of engagement and good experience with that, which is not the case today because today we are really limited to elections and that's the top of what you can do normally in terms of civic experience and civic
engagement. So that's of course it plays a role that you have those many breaks that are in parallel. On the question of digital participation, for now I'm becoming more and more skeptical because of what you said, because of vibe coding. It's incredible what can be done.
But also it's incredible what's happening. if you have read a statistic that now it's estimated that at least a quarter of content on social media is synthetic. So it's not human, but it's artificial intelligence generated. And it's not even a question of it being malevolent actors, because more and more people
have just their agent, their AI agent, doing stuff for them online. And we are going to see more and more agents being active on social media, on commerce platform and everything. So it's not even only kind of disinformation, disinformation, but it's an evolution of how we use social media. And what is going to happen is that you are going to have more and more synthetic content and less and less authentic or
original content. So if you base your system of participation or if you bet on digital participation, you take the risk of having an infinite loop because it's going to be synthetic content which is going to be synthesized and summarized by AI which are going to send that back to produce more content and you have kind of a loop. So if you start
basing some collective decision making on that, you are going to have a drift between the synthetic loop and the real loop. And that's where I think it's very bit scary. And we really need to think about the value and the role of digital participation in all of that. I said that after, I mean, I was mentioning that the end of study, my end of study research was about random selection.
politics and I had called that the digital stochocratic democracy, digital Stochocratic democracy and I had imagined at that time that everyone would have a little box or little watch actually on their wrist and it would be connected to the internet and could vote on everything.
like a liquid democratic system and that was 2003 so there was no smartphone and I was really convinced that it could be a way to go but what I really hadn't in mind was the synthetic drift which I think is a really big warning and we need really to understand what it means to be online and then I would say the advantage of course is that the kind of
and ubiquity is something fantastic. So using online participation in synchronous systems or in synchronous way can be a very powerful system. But I think we need to be aware of what's happening with AI.
Alessandro Oppo (43:17)
Yeah, I totally agree about in-person participation and what I was imaging is a sort of, as you said, I would say maybe hybrid participation, so sometimes online, sometimes offline, and maybe like the best thing will be I would say in-person participation but connection through
the internet. So if we do a citizen assembly in Bologna then it's connected to the citizen assembly done in Paris maybe and then I don't know if someone else in a small town want to participate they can just basically record what they say around the table with their friends.
and that content maybe can be part of the collective intelligence that we are producing.
Antoine (44:16)
We tested that, so first when we do the European Citizens Panel, there are three sessions and the second one is online. So that's also something that is a good compromise because you do the first session on site, people get to know each other, they get to bond, they get to create that dynamic. And then the second session is online, so you save costs of traveling, you save kind of logistical organization. People are decentralized, so it is also a good way of representing all over Europe having people and then for the third session they come back to Brussels. So it's interesting because you have that pattern force between online and physical and I think that's very powerful. And in 2020 we had a global citizens dialogue on the future of the internet and that dialogue was decentralized in over 75 countries of the world and we had because it was the year of the COVID pandemic so we
had
to invent a lot of hybrid formats. And for example, in some countries, what they did was to have the very small groups of five to seven, which was the kind of upper limit of what was allowed in physical co-presence. And they were connected to the plenary or to other subgroups. But they were in five, for example, in Rwanda, we had 12 or 14 places in the country where the people were meeting locally on site.
and they were connected then all together for the plenary. That was a very good hybrid system because the people could talk with one another in the subgroup and when it was plenary they could join together and then go back and that was a good system. But of course there is one thing with that is that in terms of kind of experience, what you can't do with an overly decentralized system is the transnational or translocal because of course you don't
that experience of sitting near to a Finn or Italian, if we take the European level, or a Rwandan person sitting together with a Bolivian person, that's something of course that you can't, it's more difficult. Although I think that is going to be also slowly solved with AI and that's the positive side of AI with the arrival of real-time translation tools and the fact that we are going to have translation in a very easy way and that's going also to help those systems of transnational deliberation when you can have online and in any case be online and talk with someone where you don't understand the language so that of course that has an advantage.
Alessandro Oppo (47:05)
And what are the next steps in terms of scaling or also next steps for Missions Publiques?
Antoine (47:14)
Yeah, so in terms of scaling is going, so for us, as Missions Publiques now for our work, we see a couple of directions. Indeed, one direction is the, and if we take back that scaling framework that I was talking about, if we start with the end, the scaling in, so on the processes, we think that there is a lot of work still to be done on the experience
for citizens. So because if you take a referendum or if you take a process of democratic innovation, a referendum is not really a..
a perfect experience for a citizen because you have a yes and no, you have to position yourself. So the idea is how do we make it as good an experience as going to a Euro Disney? So there is a lot of work to be done on the attractiveness of those things. The same with the deliberative process. How do you make it not a very burdensome, heavy process, but something which is joy, where you feel joy.
joy when you join and you're happy because it's good. It's like a good party or a good concert. And so I think there is somewhat to be done there. At the same time, and it's interconnected, it's also scaling in but also a bit scaling out is how do you embed
actors or stakeholders that are not there. In any of those democratic innovations, we, for example, it's starting, but children, I mean, they are not really heard in all those systems, but you can even extend. So future generations, they have a stake in what we decide today, but they are not embedded in those processes. So for us, scaling is also breaking that wall and going further and understanding who should be part of that discussion.
And if we talk about future generations, we also should talk about the very long term. So for us, the big question is intergenerational decision making. How do we create and extend decision, collective decision making into that intergenerational dimension? Which also means, and for us, this is another very important..
field of experimentation research is how do we extend to more than human because of course as humans we have a lot of impact on our environment but we have no good way to get the environment to talk in those processes of collective decision making. So how do we iterate, what do we think about to embed those more than human voices into democratic innovations and collective decision making.
was a big chunk of work. And then of course there is the full question which we started to address of AI and the future of kind of work because what is happening now and we see it is that AI seems not to be
the same story as with past disruptive technologies with those kinds of disruptive technologies because there is a strong discourse about AI being like electricity or steam engine that it's going to displace a lot of jobs. But at the end, it's going to end up being a net positive on employment, on value creation, on that kind of thing. But it seems that this time may be different because AI is kind of a transversal technology. So it's not sectorial.
It is not only about energy, production, or transportation. It's about everything. So every layer is impacted because it's about commoditization of intelligence and knowledge. And that's something that is in any kind of work. And if you add up on that, the fact that we are approaching embodied AI with robotics, we are going to see that even there, where you would say it has no impact because it's purely
let's say mind and not body, we are going to see also a shift here. I mean, it's happening already. So it's a very important question for us to understand. If AI is that kind of transformative evolution, how do we govern it? And how do we talk about the value that is produced and where the value goes? And for me, at least scaling..
in terms of democratic innovation is partly thinking about how do we manage that revolution and understand how we redistribute, how we talk about the value distribution with very new ways of collective decision. Because at the moment, the classical way it is being handled is either because it's a private company which can decide what to do with the value they create. So it's a system which
As I mentioned at the beginning, it is a market-driven system and very often a hierarchical system in companies, which is very legitimate in many cases. But the question is, what happens if it's about the full value chain of the society?
And the other way it's being done at the moment is through regulation and through international negotiation. But here too, there is a big issue, which is those processes do not include the end users in the, we could call them the end users, but actually it's the impacted people, the citizens. And here for us, scaling is also about entering those arenas of discussion and understanding how we can take those collective decisions with the citizens.
So that's on the agenda and yes, working on it, as you were saying
Alessandro Oppo (53:29)
So I was thinking also about political parties that in a way could also scale the participation mechanism. And there has been some experiments in the past and also now in some parts of the world. And I wonder like, yeah, what could be the role of political parties in this
scaling mechanism.
Antoine (54:03)
I think it's interesting because I would put it as part of the democratic innovation on the electoral system and the way that political parties could enter into that. But at the same time, it's already the case. mean, if you look in many places and
I'm not an expert on that, but if you start with the campaign from Barack Obama and going from there, mean, the kind of innovations they have implemented to go get people that were not voting, to do those canvassing systems, to do that messaging. You have had a lot of innovation in that, on the ground in a good way, because also then it has been used, as we know, through the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
to really indeed target people to move the needle based on data collected on social media. I think there have been a lot of innovation. There have been also lot of changes if you take France and the explosion of the traditional landscape of political parties. Macron, they call it a movement, not a party. In Italy, you had the
and all these are movements and not parties. So that's interesting because they kind of use the.. They go to elections but with different logics and I think that there could be very interesting innovation there. I mean in Germany there have been a lot of innovation in the 2010s with liquid democracy and the pirate party they had a system of liquid democracy where you could delegate your vote.
to candidates and take them back. there is a, the thing is, and also some, for example, the SPD, so the Progressive Party in Germany, they also had a lot of trials with more deliberative approaches to program crafting. We have been working in France with the Green Party and the Socialist Party where they had a deliberative process with random.
selected citizens to help draft the program, which was really interesting because it was also about having people that are not classical supporters of that party working on the program of the party. that was really, really interesting to see how then the program evolved a bit based on a broader view and not only people were already convinced in a way. So I think there are a lot of interactions between
the different families of democratic innovation for party politics. At the same time, I see a very huge challenge, the problem is the kind of self, not self-fulfilling prophecy, but the loop because people have less trust in parties. So if you come with a new party, you kind of..
start with the distrust. and then you may win or lose and then you will be caught in the reality of what it means to make policies. And maybe it's even worse then because you promise something new. I don't know. but on that I think the question is but still the key question is at some point in our democratic systems you have to
be in charge through votes to do something. when you asked for political parties, yes, it seems to be a must at some point to kind of gain the institutional positioning that you need to take decisions. yeah, so is it clear?
Alessandro Oppo (58:08)
that I'm thinking about is commitment, because I see also a sort of tension between these new kind of participatory practices and at the same time, someone that..
is in charge. Power usually do not give away power. You have to take the power. And so I wonder how this tension can be solved. And I'm thinking like an institution that maybe organize a citizen assembly or participation process.
and then that have to decide because maybe there is not it's not mandatory that they have to take into account what has been discussed by citizens and yeah I wonder how to solve this issue because as we said we are still experimenting so
All these kind of processes are not still perfect. It's new. I mean, using technology for politics. yeah, I don't know how many..
Many things in my mind now. I was also thinking about a conversation that I had for the podcast with Massimo Bugani that was inside the Five Star Movement and he worked also on the Rousseau platform. And he was telling me like, I mean, back then the Five Star Movement was a new movement, movement party. And I remember that he was saying that
Because it was new, he didn't have really a local base of citizens. They have now some sort of meet-up. But back then that was not the case. So I'm thinking about political parties that we have now.
that sometimes they use technology but not so much for participation. At the same time, new political parties that could be created, they miss the local base. And all political parties should, I think they will start using some technologies soon, but at the same time I still see this tension about
you know, someone has power and maybe wants to keep it. It doesn't want that the base decide.
Antoine (1:01:19)
I mean,
that's the basic tension about power. How do we manage to, it's not new, of course, it's an eternal question. How do you keep enough check and balances on power to keep innovation and to prevent things to be too..
you say, too rigid and not able to let power flow, which is the biggest problem that we kind of ever had since we have massive societies.
Alessandro Oppo (1:02:04)
Do we have a message for the people who are working in the same field? I mean, there are many people, someone is working on a software, someone else is maybe.. Yeah, people that are putting their effort in this collective dream, let's say.
Antoine (1:02:22)
I think one thing is to think about joy. How do we bring joy to people? By doing what we do, because at the end, it is about joy. And I think if we focus on that, we can do things differently.
We can think differently about how we do stuff. So it's about something very, how you would say, serious. Of course it's serious, but it's also about joy. Yeah, I would say that.
Alessandro Oppo (1:02:53)
Thank you a lot Antoine. If.. Would you like to add something else?
Antoine (1:02:59)
No, thanks a lot for the time. Of course, I invite you to go and see our ScaleDem project. Maybe we can put it in the show notes or something like that, because that's what we are doing now. And we are happy to have contributions. And we are happy to be in interaction in that. And otherwise, feel free to get in touch.
Alessandro Oppo (1:03:19)
Thank you again.
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