Automatic transcription, it may contain errors:
Alessandro Oppo (00:00)
Welcome to another episode of the Democracy Innovator podcast and our guests of today are Cecil Green and Seth Frey. So thank you both for your time. You're working on the economy standard, right? ⁓ So would you like to tell us something about it?
Seth Frey (00:26)
Go ahead, Cecile.
Cecile Green (00:28)
Yeah.
Yeah, thank you. It's a delight to be here. And I guess a short summary of the commoning standard might be that we are attempting to bring together researchers, practitioners, and anyone who has a deep interest in this question of what it takes to self-govern well to weave together a synthesis of our best knowledge ⁓ and wisdom around what that takes, including the theory, the practice, the skills, and the traits that go into enabling us to self-govern effectively over time.
And that work we're intending to make ⁓ available publicly and also potentially put it into some kind of a platform or integrate a number of tools in an interoperable way to enable that digitally as well. But starting with the basis of bringing together a community of knowledge around this topic, which we hope to sustain long into the future to continue to improve what we know about self-governance.
What would you add, Seth?
Alessandro Oppo (01:30)
you
Seth Frey (01:32)
We're doing that under a specific ⁓ theory that what's really needed is a social substrate in which everybody knows leadership. ⁓ We're really approaching assuming... ⁓
the entire cache of leadership skills from note taking, building an organization, getting people together, ⁓ cooking to bring them together. ⁓
conflict and so on ⁓ as ⁓ a universal literacy and we've really set the bar that nothing short of that, nothing short of universal training and commons stewardship ⁓ as the most general ⁓ articulation of self-governance skills in any domain is our goal.
Maybe it's worth introductions. ⁓ I'm Seth Fry. ⁓ I'm an expert in ⁓ governance ⁓ at University of California Davis with a background in ⁓ computational cognitive science, computational social science. And I've found ⁓ this very non-computational.
20 years ⁓ as a practitioner of cooperation, mostly through intentional community ⁓ as a co-founder, ⁓ leader, and little volunteer developer.
Alessandro Oppo (03:10)
So you mentioned ⁓ bringing together people and you said ⁓ creating a social substrate where everyone knows leadership. And so I was thinking, because both are related to power. ⁓ So, also for you, what is...
power.
Cecile Green (03:33)
Such a great question, Sandro, and ⁓ I'll take a crack at that and also introduce myself a little. I have a background as a social entrepreneur and in that process of launching many different and running many different types of mission-driven organizations, I ran into this ⁓ issue that people don't really know how to share power well over time. That often, ⁓ even very well-intentioned people with incredible
visions run aground on our inability to reliably and consistently over time share power well. And so that inspired me to do a deep dive into this question of what is power and how do we mechanize, how do we enable us to share it well over time.
And so did research and published some papers on it and also an ecology of practices which have in practice over the last 10 years or so shown themselves capable of people using these in a wide range of different environments to reliably be able to share power better.
So yeah, back to your question, what is power? And I think that this ultimately for me feels like the most important thing is for us to be asking that question ⁓ and continually answering it for ourselves. ⁓ For me, I found that answering it in the biggest possible way was helpful. So the force of enactment, something that is present in all of creation. ⁓ So it helps to also define, say things at the,
quantum
level as well as at the social level. But my particular interest was at the social level. And so within that very broad definition of power as the force of enactment, I then sought to understand what is most critical when we are working together. What forms of power are operationally relevant? And I chose to define four at the time. There's many more. I'm not claiming these are comprehensive, but these are four that I believe if we don't have a really good handle on,
we won't really be able to self-govern. so the power matrix describes four forms of power. The vertical matrix is at the top is autonomous power, at the bottom is collective power, and on the left there is implicit power, and on the right there's explicit power. And these four forms of power are all active at any point when we are trying to coordinate, we're trying to make decisions, we're deliberating anything that involves coordinating together. These four forms of power are active.
whether we're aware of them or not. And the invitation then is to understand what kinds of power are active in any, like primarily active? Are there imbalances? Is there congestion? Like is somebody using too much autonomous power when we really need more collective power? Or the opposite, are we using too much collective power when we really need to give power to individuals in the situation? So it becomes a tool for analysis and then taking action concretely.
in our groups to be able to share power ⁓ and develop healthy power for ourselves.
Alessandro Oppo (06:50)
You said to have any answer
Seth Frey (06:54)
⁓
I think I come to ⁓ the same place from a...
from the same experiences, know, really independent. ⁓ I've observed ⁓ in my experiences as, you first I absolutely hold ⁓ that daily practice of democracy is essential for ⁓ an educated ⁓
citizenry and it says a citizenry that can successfully steward democracy. always ⁓
cared abstractly about democracy, experiencing economic and political empowerment in a community where I was doing it every day was very transformative for me. But also I observed that I think every community I've been in really actually in some ways fell short of its potential to transform people because as intentional as we were, we weren't intentional about developing everybody's. ⁓
leadership potential, everybody's capacity for being a really kind of mature and proficient. Everybody's latent capacity for being qualified to run the place. Whether they're good at it or not, just reaching some basic level of literacy can accomplish for a community a certain amount of herd immunity against what de Tocqueville calls municipal discord.
when your political education as a community is complete. ⁓ So seeing communities so often fall short is what's made me become a student of Cecile's because she has such an integrated sense of what it means through all the work she's done getting her head around power. ⁓ All.
the work you have to do on yourself and all the different dimensions you have to develop yourself and your skills and your knowledge ⁓ in order for community to replace the crutch of hierarchy. ⁓ Hierarchy... ⁓
you know, say what you want, it's pretty easy. You can really kind of plug it in anywhere. It scales really well. It works on every type of person. It doesn't work on a specific type of person. And to kick that habit, to, you know, to take off the training wheels,
of social organization that hierarchy constitutes and really like go under your own power, you have to give every person a huge amount of talent. ⁓
you have to do it the hard way. And if you're not fixing things the hard way, you're not really fixing things. So that's a conviction that Cecile and I both share. ⁓ And I think for both of us, it comes out of our analysis of power.
Alessandro Oppo (10:11)
Yeah, I see it associated with the concept of meritocracy that a lot of times, you know, someone has merit so he's like or she is the best but I think that we should find the way to give merit to everyone so that we find the special talent superpowers that we have and and then
I was thinking about these things, is it possible to share power or to... ⁓ or you, as you were saying, giving the possibility to everyone to find their power? So let's say the three of us, how can... because as you said Cecil,
Sharing power is not something that happens often, also in relation to hierarchies. ⁓ So I wonder these things about sharing power and at the same time giving the possibility to people to express their own power so that they can take the power without the other person having to share it.
Cecile Green (11:33)
⁓ Yeah, if I understand your question, Alessandro, it's how do we encourage people to step up into power as well as, and not just have it given to them. Is that accurate? Is that your question?
Alessandro Oppo (11:50)
Yeah,
like ⁓ let's say that Now I decide to speak for the podcast all the time like and I only want that speak So I will take all the power in that way ⁓ At the same time you can also interrupt me and so you will use your power to speak so
I think that it would be good that everyone like respect the other people so that we share the power of speaking. At the same time, like all the people should take their power of speaking.
Cecile Green (12:35)
Yes, that's a wonderful question. If I'm following your logic, there's something I would call personal development needed for people to be willing and able to step in and say, interrupt if they need to. ⁓
And there's also the responsibility of the collective to provide space or structure so that stepping in is okay. It's actually accepted. ⁓ And ⁓ I think both are really true. Both are needed. And so this approach, the commoning standard, is really taking on both a collective and an individual approach to this question of what is power and how do we share it. We're not saying it's just the collective's responsibility to create space, but the individual also really needs to grow.
And every individual is different. Not everybody has trouble speaking up and jumping in and taking up space, right? ⁓ Some of us do. And for those of us who do, ⁓ and I would just mention that there's historical precedence here, which influence how much people are comfortable with stepping in and speaking up. And I believe it's the collective's responsibility to account for that historical damage that's been caused and
create ⁓ training wheels, training grounds for people to learn and to step in in ways that are safe because I'll just speak for myself. I've been in situations where I did take the risk of speaking up and I was punished for that, right, in those contexts. And so many human contexts actually punish people who dare to overstep the power boundaries and step up ⁓ and speak or interrupt somebody who say is in a high position of high status.
can be very costly for people who say don't have as much status in a group. And this is where the collective comes in to redistribute those assumptions about status and power and says, no, actually, we really want to hear from you. We're going to make space. We're going to ask the facilitators, going to deliberately ask that person who's been speaking too long to stop and then make space and invite that other person in. And then as these imbalances are redressed, once they're more naturally encoded,
coded
in a group's cultural code, then it's much more easy to sort of flow and to share power more readily. But there is a training ground that's absolutely needed to move out of our toxic relationship to power into one that's generative. ⁓ And I don't think it's fair to ask the individuals only to take up that burden ⁓ of stepping in when it's not actually safe for them to do so. ⁓ So both are needed.
Seth Frey (15:16)
to build out one part of what Cecile's saying powers very much a two-way street. Maybe you've been in the situation where you built something intending for it to be a flat organization. ⁓
but people ⁓ put you ⁓ in power. Maybe because you're the founder, maybe because you have the clearest vision. People give you power, and if you're not used to wielding it, don't exactly know, realize what's happening. ⁓ Maybe when you do realize what's happening, ⁓ you try to pass the ball, but there's no one there to hold it. No one has the stake, the investment, and it's partly ⁓ their fault, but it's probably your fault that you haven't cultivated those people
to have that level of investment and that sense of capability and all the things they need to take the ball. ⁓
I've been in very few really kind of successfully flat participatory equal organizations, organizations that succeed at maintaining this kind of sense of equality, the sense that we're all peers, the sense that we're all responsible.
⁓ In every case, ⁓ the ones that manage that are the ones in which every member has tried and failed to create one of those before and has become that leader ⁓ who wants to pass the ball, but there's no one there to catch it. ⁓ I think we all have to be through the crucible of ⁓ experiencing ⁓ both sides of power ⁓ in order to ⁓ steward it responsibly, wield it responsibly, hold it responsibly, pass it responsibly.
There's just a lot of basic... ⁓
Lessons, I think a lot of people don't realize what corruption feels like What it feels like to be corrupted what it feels like to use power inappropriately, you know It's a simple. Yeah in the same way. We don't always understand ⁓ our effect on children, you know children will make Really make anything their fault because they're used to this idea of control and and so it's not enough to just live your life and be Responsible and making choices. You also have to interpret what you're doing
⁓ for a child to make sure that they kind of... ⁓
to see that they're not responsible for everything that happens in their lives. ⁓ And I think we're all children when it comes to power. ⁓ We can get ourselves into any tricky situations and only with, again, this kind of herd immunity, where it's not just you have an awareness that this happening, but everybody you're responsible for. ⁓ And everyone who's responsible for you is aware of the failure modes. I see it, my favorite example has really
become conflict resolution, nonviolent communication. ⁓ Turns out there are some pretty violent uses of nonviolent communication, especially if you identify as someone in that tradition as a nonviolent communicator, you become blind to your potential for violence. And it's only with a ⁓ general training, universal training in something like nonviolent communication that we can be robust to those failure modes.
And that's worthwhile because maybe you've seen a conflict being resolved because there was a skilled, trained mediator between two individuals in the middle of something. Maybe you're impressed by how that turned out, but it's nothing compared to watching a conflict being resolved between two people with no moderator who are highly trained in nonviolent communication. ⁓ It's seeing them go at it that makes you want to get into more conflicts. It's seeing someone highly trained in meetings that makes you want to have more meetings. ⁓
And
that's really inspiring, and it really illustrates the potential. When we stop treating ⁓ democratic literacies, commissorship literacies, leadership literacies as something that's only for people who have been put at the top of an org, that's something that's only for people who already have all the other steps of Maslow's hierarchy in place, and it's really for everybody.
Alessandro Oppo (19:33)
yeah I was thinking about many different things like yeah it would be cool if in school there could be like some
classes about conflict resolution, about how to communicate and so on, because I see a lot of polarisation happening and we are not used to communicate.
I was saying also like when someone is very interested in trying to do his or her own best to communicate, it's quite hard and we see it also in personal relationship. And then, yeah, I wanted to ask you like, as you said, if I understood correctly, like that,
Let's say someone that could be ⁓ a good leader often has failed in other communities. ⁓
And so I wonder like which kind of experiences you had, because I agree about this and in the different communities and also when you realized that horizontally is something ⁓ I would say better than hierarchies. ⁓
Yeah, if you remember like some personal moment, like... ⁓
Seth Frey (21:09)
⁓ Only if you'll share yours.
Cecile Green (21:09)
I can...
Yeah, would be great to hear all of ours because I think we've all probably had these experiences. I'll just briefly mention for myself that one of the things that was so exciting for me about learning some of these tools and practices for sharing power that afforded clarity not just for me but for the people around me was that I realized I had been making myself small. I had been holding back because I was afraid of using my power. I did not want to be that dominating.
Alessandro Oppo (21:18)
Yeah.
Cecile Green (21:44)
hierarchical leader. I just did not want it from coming out of me. ⁓ I didn't want to experience it from anyone else and I thought that, well, I better start with myself, right? But the way I went about it was to just hold back my power as opposed to stepping fully into my authenticity and my capacity, which is what's really needed. And so having the structures that enabled me to see for myself where's the boundaries for me, where are the boundaries for them, where do those boundaries change, how do we change them collectively, changed my experience as a leader.
and I was able to really start stepping in fully to expressing myself and bringing all of my gifts forward instead of making myself small. And that's just one example of the transformation and where I realized that the assumptions behind flat organizing that I had were not helping and they weren't helping me or anyone else. ⁓
Seth Frey (22:38)
Yeah, so this emphasis of Cecile that we get so many of our ideas for what leadership looks like, for what power looks like from ⁓ ideology, from ideas, from sort of theoretical constructs that we sort of picked up that sound right, rather than from experience, which is a much finer tool. ⁓
that's capable of the same ideals, but it's just a lot more nuanced and complicated. I got my sense of all that.
I think the most dramatic lesson I learned was being part of a consensus organization that was an intentional community that was renting. I was the only person who experienced community that owned and my diagnosis was what the community needed to be sustainable, to really have a culture of sense of ownership, to last forever, to serve everybody the best that community would have to own. And I had a hard time convincing everybody of that. So I was constantly checking
in with myself. Do I really think this is important? Do I really think this is the right thing? And I kept coming to the answer yes. Even as I became more political, even as I started ⁓ asking forgiveness instead of permission to build a project, to lead a project, ⁓ even as I started managing information, calling in favors, cashing in five years of social capital to get something done, ⁓ I found myself
really kind of pulling this org in a certain direction, constantly navigating my own. ⁓
my energy, ⁓ my sense of what was right and the community and kind of where it was at and when it was needed. it gave me this realization that democracy is not a set of rules that you follow. It's the tension. It's the process of navigating the tension between what you think is right, ⁓ no matter how popular or unpopular it is, ⁓ and ⁓ your trust, the trust that you're given by everybody.
and you can trade ⁓ more of what you think is right for that trust, or you can pause on what you think is right to build that trust, or you can ⁓ work to minimize the difference between what you think is right and what everyone else thinks is right. But that's fundamentally in personal process. ⁓ So democracy is really like...
less about this set of rules or procedures that we've set up around ourselves. And it's really entirely about the relationships we're managing as we try to do something coherent together. So that was my lesson. I really, really experienced it. How about you, Alison?
Alessandro Oppo (25:26)
you
Yeah,
I was also thinking about my experiences. I would say some political assemblies in ⁓ university, that, ⁓ you know, that all people are sitting down in a circle, but sometimes the circle is very calm, sometimes it's not very calm, people scream and so on. And, ⁓ you know, it's part of the game.
⁓ But at the same time it made me think a lot. I will say after the experience I had a lot of thinking about it. ⁓ And also I will say also family situation. ⁓ I saw that ⁓ let's say some places of the house were not ⁓
Like, let's say I was going in the kitchen, there was my mother that was... It was not easy to, let's say, to share the power in the kitchen. And then... ⁓ It was interesting because... ⁓ When I also told to a psychologist, he was saying that we are animals and sometimes we defend ⁓ the place where we live.
in some animal way. ⁓ And I said yes, it is true. Like a ⁓ dog would bark if there is another dog. Also, we sometimes we feel the same. ⁓ But we should know this because otherwise we think that it's the fault of the other person. ⁓
Probably also other reasons, but these are the ones that came to my mind now.
And the
And yeah, again about the common in standard, how you will say that ⁓ because it's about this, how to, we say how to share power, how to maybe empower people and... ⁓
Yeah, if you'd to tell us more about all the research and also what are you working on at the moment, if you're stuck in some way, conceptual way, I don't know. ⁓
Cecile Green (28:04)
There's a lot of potential places to go with that question. I think what's inspiring me right now is to talk a little bit practically about what might we do in the three situations that we just sort of laid out.
you know, what the commoning standard offers is a set of practices and understandings that help us build certain skills which then mature into traits and ⁓ our sort of practice evolves from there but the, you know, in say my instance, the example I gave, the relatively simple fix was to begin and initiate the set of what our meeting practices as a place to learn
and practice together collectively and to set some of the clarity that's necessary to collectively say decide that, ⁓ yes, to take Seth's example, we are going to, even if it's not a fully popular decision, we are collectively going to decide to own this thing. We're going to move forward together in that way and we're going to work out the bugs along the way. But having a concrete place and an effective decision-making process that allows us to get to that without devolving into
to yelling.
or barking at each other. ⁓ Because those things create trauma in our systems, And they shut down our frontal lobes and we're not able to actually make good decisions or to share power well once we sort of devolve in that way ⁓ into barking at each other. So having a container where we can practice, you know, staying calm and making contentious decisions together really enables a whole lot to shift. ⁓ And not just once, right? So the idea is this is a dojo. We're entering into this
space where we're going to practice something new together. We're going to apply that outside of the space that we're practicing, but then we're going to come back to that practice space. Just like you would if you were practicing any martial art or anything. You would just keep coming back, keep coming back. That's the only way we're going to develop these is through practice repeated over time. ⁓ And that's the essence of what the Commining Standard offers is a place to identify what are these essential practices and to get groups launched in that direction.
because from there the natural learning of the group will unfold ⁓ and we'll each get the learning opportunities we need depending upon where we're coming from.
Seth Frey (30:32)
Actually, one thing that might help to motivate, I happen to have a couple of slides from something I'm working on that illustrate a sort of hidden congruence that has really sparked our imagination. That's really motivated a lot of our work on the common standard. ⁓ If I may, let's see if I can pull this off. Great, great. Let's see, let's see, let's see if I can get away with this.
Alessandro Oppo (30:52)
Feel free to share them here.
Seth Frey (30:59)
Here we are. Let me know if this pops up. ⁓
Alessandro Oppo (31:03)
Okay, just remember
that ⁓ for some people will be just audio, so... Okay.
Seth Frey (31:11)
⁓ I see. see. OK, I'll
keep that in mind. Is this showing up?
Alessandro Oppo (31:16)
Yes.
Seth Frey (31:17)
Okay, great, great, great. So ⁓ I'm gonna share four examples of groups that have approached, like us, the problem of developing ⁓ people, developing leaders, developing self-managers, developing communities, as an educational project. And I'm gonna give a sense of what their systems are. So I'm starting off with one called the Inter-Development Goals. The Inter-Development Goals, they have a big list of stuff that everyone has to learn.
and those include the traits of trust and empathy and compassion, the skills of critical thinking and goal setting, the values of, ⁓ let's see, the properties or capabilities of emotional regulation, of ⁓ self-esteem and decision-making. ⁓
and basic collaboration skills like, you know.
doing teamwork and having assertive communication. ⁓ These are broken up into kind of five bigger bodies ⁓ that more or less map onto this idea that you have to be a certain way, you have to know certain stuff, and you need to have certain skills. ⁓ And ⁓ here's a completely different framework. There's one, the Council of Europe has defined something called the competences for democratic culture. And this again is a rubric.
It's actually, I think, intended to be taught to instill in every European. There's this recognition that every European needs certain values, certain skills, certain knowledge, and certain what they call attitudes. Again, empathy's here, right? And this value of cultural diversity and this sense of civic mindedness, this ability to hold respect, this knowledge of oneself, this knowledge that other cultures exist, you know? These are ⁓ things that are taught that are broken down into skills ⁓ that can be assessed in individuals because
of this recognition that to be ⁓ competent in a democratic culture, you need certain stuff. So here's a third completely different group. The Center for Engaged Democracy in the United States did research on what they understand as the core competencies for civic engagement. And they reviewed scientific literature, they reviewed national reports, and they reviewed the syllabi and materials of academic programs. And once again, they have a
breakdown into the things you know, the ways you are, and the skills and practices you put into place. So we've had three orgs, and I'm going to give you a fourth real wild card. The United States Army has a conception of ⁓ leadership that embraces subsidiarity, this idea that people should take initiative, even if it means breaking orders, under certain conditions. And the military recognizes that
⁓
You can't, ⁓ that's not just a structural property that you need a certain type of person for that kind of system to work. they take what you can.
really unprecedented ⁓ view that every person in the military at any level is leader and has capability for leadership. So they have a be, do, no breakdown ⁓ and very narrow, specific, and well-defined rubrics in this 100-page document, ADP 6-22, for how to teach this and instill these three areas of talent in ⁓ any human.
And so what I want to call your attention to is these are really different from each other, but they all have really fundamental things in common. So they're all doing the same thing. So all these people have independently converged on one recipe ⁓ for ⁓ and one premise that you just have to train everybody. You have to do it for everybody for us to have the social substrate of a democratic culture.
the project of the commoning standard is to make sure that those don't talk past each other, to make sure that they're all complete, that something identified by this one isn't missed by another, and to create the sort of... ⁓
⁓ web that makes it possible ⁓ that in your context, with your history, in your community, if you have to do this as well, if you come to these conclusions as well, that you have a nice head start for adapting some of these to your context, to your problem. ⁓ When we have a common language across all of these standards, across all of these approaches, that recognizes they're all the same thing. They're all about producing people who are ⁓ skillful in common.
stewardship, we get the first step towards this world that's prepared that acknowledges that everybody needs these skills that these are basic literacy.
Alessandro Oppo (36:32)
And I was thinking what are like I mean Maybe in some way you also explain it with the document, but what are for you like this some specific things that every person should do and experience if the person want to be able to share power
and at the same time also to know the power that that person has. Because I'm thinking that every one of us experience ⁓ also different positions that could be, let's say, in a hierarchy. So not always the person at the top of the hierarchy is ⁓ conscious of, sometimes also, of the violent power over people.
So if you have anything to advise about which kind of experience a person should do and also maybe in relationship with technology. ⁓ So I think the question is quite broad because I'm thinking that with Civic Tech tools
⁓ it is possible maybe ⁓ to have some sort of conversation that can lead to a deliberation that we were saying that can lead also to ⁓ coordination and so I was thinking how to use technology to
Yeah, to on one side empower people and on the other side make people ⁓ to share their power.
Cecile Green (38:27)
to take a crack at that first stuff or shall I?
Seth Frey (38:30)
that's generous.
⁓ I'm happy to do it mainly because I was going to share a framework of Cecile's that's been influential on me. It's recognizing that to break this habit, to take off the training wheels, a hierarchy, and really ⁓ run a community in a way that everybody is proficient in power. ⁓
You have to do a lot of work. There's seven conversations you have to constantly be having and cycling through. You have to constantly be double checking your shared purpose together. You have to ⁓ constantly ⁓ be discussing your strategy of the second, right? ⁓
Cecile Green (39:11)
business
model.
Seth Frey (39:12)
your model, right, right, how you're gonna, what you're essentially what your constraints are in the world that could keep you from doing that together forever. ⁓ Your strategy for how you're going to get to where you need to be, where you've decided as a group you need to be from where you are. ⁓ There's always operational conversations about what actual work everybody should be doing week to week in order to accomplish that strategy toward that shared purpose. There's the
Cecile Green (39:14)
All right.
Seth Frey (39:42)
the governance work, there's a governance conversation, there's an interpersonal conversation, there's a personal development conversation. This acknowledges sometimes the thing holding an org back is me. ⁓ And everybody has to approach the organization with that preparedness to be wrong ⁓ or that eagerness to learn and to see themselves as a student in their org. So only by cycling through these seven conversations ⁓
Can
we, as a group, be doing the work that lets us be as effective as a hierarchy ⁓ without it? And that might sound like a lot of work, but it also sounds really worthy, doesn't it, right? ⁓ If we're really committed to this idea that, yeah, some people aren't born to be leaders, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't train them up to be leaders. Because some people aren't born to be readers. And we have a...
this commitment as a society to teach everybody to read, regardless. That's not a relevant piece of information in our decision to teach everybody to read, that not everyone's born to do it. That's not the point. The point is creating a social substrate of readers, of literacy, right? Because ⁓ someone who literally can't read, who's, you know, could do whatever circumstances in their life or biology will benefit from a society that can read in the same way
that a child too young to receive vaccinations is safer against ⁓ infection when there's herd immunity, when everyone else is vaccinated. So there's these synergistic immersion benefits of this kind of universal training that you can only get with universal training.
Cecile Green (41:28)
want to double click on what Seth is pointing to there which is
the importance of the individual working with a collective. So in your question, Alessandro, you asked, well, what can an individual do? What training can we do? How could we interface with tools that might help us? And what I want to emphasize here is that individuals can obviously have agency and take and learn stuff, but what they need to do is to learn that within a group, within a collective context, and not just with a tool, unless that tool, that platform is
literally connecting them with a small group that they can practice with. And especially, you know, ⁓ we're beginning our learning journey, it's essential to find a group that's friendly to practice within. ⁓ But we can't learn this work in a vacuum. We cannot learn this individually. I cannot learn it just by reading a book. I must engage a collective to have those conversations that Seth was just pointing to and to do so within a structured manner.
that enables us to reliably share power. Because just having those unstructured conversations, we will be repeating the power patterns of our past. And so in order to achieve this literacy, we need a period for ourselves as a species to do this training together in a new way of being so that we can ditch the crutches, as Seth was pointing to, and move into this other way as a collective. ⁓ But it's not an individual journey.
That can be really challenging for people to actually find a collective within which they can learn and practice. But that's the first move ⁓ to make.
Alessandro Oppo (43:14)
Yeah, I just was thinking of that a couple of years ago here in the university I made a small poll and not a lot of people replied but around 50 and they saw that half of them they actually wanted to find a community where to practice like sort of political activity but they were not able to find a community that was matching their
So I'm thinking that there is a lot of people that would like to find a community and maybe experience also this. ⁓ And also, I haven't read your book, but I think that it talks about it, ⁓ about all the topics that we...
Cecile Green (44:08)
Yes, ⁓ yes for sure and there's more work coming out so it's yes never never too late to learn learn about all this stuff.
Alessandro Oppo (44:18)
And would you like to share something about what is coming up?
Cecile Green (44:24)
⁓
yes, well I can say that ⁓ some of the work currently that we're doing within the standard is to work with folks in the field of deliberation. So citizens' assemblies and various deliberative platforms are obviously on the cutting edge in one regard of developing our skills for self-governance. ⁓
And deliberation in and of itself is not self-governance. It can start us there, can give us a place to learn some things, but ⁓ ultimately there's coordination tools that deliberation doesn't give us. But there's some very important understandings that can be woven across the field of deliberators to what are the basic practices of deliberation that essentially work. And so we're beginning a process of working with some of
the players in that field to weave together an understanding of the basics of deliberation. And that feels really exciting. ⁓ And that will also bear on tool use, so deliberative platforms, as you were mentioning earlier, Alessandro. ⁓ How do we integrate those platforms in ways that really provide us with the best outcomes possible reliably?
Alessandro Oppo (45:42)
And you said, are you working on something?
Seth Frey (45:46)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. ⁓
I'd say we're all interested in technology. I'm a technologist by trade. As much as I might sound like a Luddite sometimes, as much as I believe more and more ⁓ in this idea that what we need is education more than a new tool. ⁓
And where I'm coming from a little bit is there is a place for technology, but it's not where we think. If you're seeing ⁓ these literacies as fundamentally an educational project, not ⁓ not about new mechanisms, new procedures or processes, a new box, then then you start to see things really differently. You start to see, for example, the potential of AI really differently. You start to get this feeling that when we build
⁓ new tools that when we build new procedures or processes with certain formal properties, we are taking an artifact that was built by, that's left over from a past world that we've found. The people are extinct, but they've left behind this structure. And ⁓ we think, wow, what an interesting structure. This works for them. Let's build it. Let's build it. Let's say our incantation, you know, ⁓
We hold these truths to be self-evident. And then we think the people come. ⁓ But that's cargo called democracy. ⁓
that it was the people that we had to build. And the artifact is just left over by really skillful people. And so the place of AI, the place of platforms, the place of all this is to make education motivated, to make it well structured, and to make it consistent across people, to make it a tool that people are using to come together.
I'm developing the argument and I'm developing. And by serving the standard, we're working towards ⁓ the technology that ⁓ I think can work, this developmental ⁓ approach to these skills.
Cecile Green (47:46)
Yeah.
Alessandro Oppo (48:00)
Do you have any message for the people that are working in the civic tech field or other different ⁓ or similar field?
Cecile Green (48:14)
Okay.
Seth Frey (48:15)
I will remember it's an educational project.
Cecile Green (48:15)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, just underscoring the fact that what we have to get right first is the what and the how, not the mechanisms of the tools. And that we can get really distracted by focusing on the tech first. And then what's needed is something that can operate outside of tech that can be used completely offline. And if it passes that test, that it can be used offline, then we can embed it and it will do good work for us.
it from the other angle, I believe we get into these places where we're kind of building ourselves into boxes that don't enable us to do what we actually really need and want to do. So that's what I'd be. I'd be very careful about approaching this from a single topic angle and that the need is to go big, go meta, go comprehensive, understand that first, weave that first, and then go specific.
I lost you Alessandro. you're You're back.
Alessandro Oppo (49:17)
I'm back, I'm back. If
you have a message.
Seth Frey (49:23)
Oh, I think we've had enough messages. Me and Sissy are all pretty aligned, so I'm happy piggybacking on ours.
Alessandro Oppo (49:30)
Thank you a lot and if you'd like to add something else to the conversation... ⁓
Cecile Green (49:41)
Well, I'd add thank you for having this podcast. And you know, I feel it's really important to being able to these ideas out there and to be just talking about this territory. I do believe that it is the nexus that we need to be putting our attention on in order to solve any of the larger metacrisis, polycrisis issues is to get this, we need to figure out how to share power. ⁓ So thank you to any of you out there who are working on this.
deeply needed and yeah happy to be in partnership around around these topics.
Seth Frey (50:18)
Thank you for having us. ⁓
Alessandro Oppo (50:21)
Thank you both, Seth and Cecile.