Automatic transcription of the Interview with Daniel Mackisack: it may contain errors.

Alessandro: Welcome to another episode of Democracy Innovator Podcast. Our guest today is Daniel Mackisack. Thank you for your time and welcome, Daniel. You've worked at the edge between technology and democracy for the last decade, so if you'd like to share with us your experience and what you work on?

Daniel: Yeah, sure. So I guess in some way, shape, or form I've been at the intersection of democracy and technology for 10 or so years in a range of different capacities. Originally, going back to 2010 - so 15 years now - I was based in Cairo when the Arab Spring started. And that's where my interest in democracy and learning more about democracy became a lifelong passion.

That whole era and set of processes that happened in multiple countries was not only a really significant personal experience and a significant piece of history, but it was also incredibly educational as to the complexities and practical realities of political change - democratic change in particular - and just how hard it can be, and the sorts of underlying social processes that affected it.

So that was probably the most significant life event that led to a deeper interest and a career change in this direction - wanting to be involved in democracy, innovating democracy, and understanding more about it. I was there for about five years. In that time, I was a researcher. My research focused on what we call the social geometry, or the shape of social trust networks between individuals as these sorts of political processes took place. So I was actually interviewing people and mapping shifts in trust networks and how they changed over the course of that five-year period, which was just fascinating.

There were a lot of assumptions that I went into that research with - a lot that were borne out, but a lot that were shattered in some way as well. But it was just incredibly interesting to see, as a student at the beginning and then a researcher further on, the assumptions that political science and social science had bought into regarding big processes like this, and to see basically the academic circles scratch their heads about it as well - thinking that A, it couldn't happen, and then B, not understanding the exact nature of what was happening and getting a lot of things wrong basically all the way through.

In any case, that whole experience led me to want to be more deeply involved in understanding and shaping democracy. We talk about democracy innovation a lot, but I'm really interested in democratic sustainability as much as anything else, because I feel like there are a lot of things that erode democracy, and there are a lot of things that are neglected when it comes to keeping democracy afloat - most notable of which, from my perspective, are these sorts of foundational social trust relationships between people in society.

It's a problem that we are all too happy to write about and think about when it comes to authoritarian societies - places where it's very obvious that people are shut off from each other and walls are built everywhere. But it's a problem that really affects every society in the world to a greater or lesser degree. And that's one of the things that I realized coming out of that as well - that every society, regardless of whether it was authoritarian or ostensibly democratic, was essentially having the same problem to different degrees.

So coming out of that whole thing, I worked as a diplomat for a while, but I also co-founded a startup company that develops transparency software for journalists. So that was the beginning of the work at the intersection of democracy and technology.

We wanted to address this - because this is like 10 years ago around Trump's first election - we wanted to address the issue of disinformation and the crisis of trust. At the time, a lot of people were putting forth solutions like "we're going to use AI to just correct all the facts and correct all the data in an article as you read it," or "we're going to have a gold star or a green tick that a whole bunch of news organizations give to each other and pat each other on the back." We didn't think either of those solutions were really addressing the core problem of human trust.

So we thought a sort of radical transparency approach to the research behind journalism was a better way of going about it. We developed software that allowed journalists and other researchers to record the work that they were doing and annotate it - basically just talking to the camera and explaining what they were doing - and then embedding a kind of highlight reel of things in the story once they published it. So anybody reading an article could A, have a quality signal that yes, a real person did this, and B, they get to follow the story behind the story and see the epistemological journey that the journalist went on. Like, this is a real person doing real work, I can relate to them, and build trust from that. So that was our approach, and as I said, that was my first touch on democracy technology.

I'd been involved in other projects before then. I'd also started a company earlier that was more of a consulting/team building workshop company where we would work with companies - small to medium-sized businesses and NGOs - and do team building workshops where we took their decisions and the sort of decisions they would make on a daily basis and gamified them a little bit and introduced other decision-making methodologies to get creative, to find out what people found most effective. At the time we were working with a number of different tools to facilitate that process as well.

But it was after all of that and the startup companies - so getting to 2018, 2019, 2020 - I came to Europe, came to Germany, and started writing about democracy technologies, started working with the Innovation in Politics Institute on projects related to democracy technologies, exploring all the other projects that were going on, not just around Europe but around the world, and have since undertaken a couple of my own.

So now one of the big projects that I'm working on is kind of the fusion of lifelong passions, actually, because I've always been a democracy nerd - it's the kind of thing that I know - but I've also been a lifelong space nerd. And so a couple of years ago, I started asking myself, how could I combine these things together?

At the moment, I'm working with half a dozen other people from across four different countries on a participatory space policy platform. We've got partners in the space sector, public sector, private sector, and we are trying to create a participatory space policy platform that can be introduced to the grassroots of the policy creation process - to political parties and others. So leveraging some of the technology and some of the projects that are out there at the moment. Sorry, that's a bit long-winded, but that brings us up to date, I think.

Alessandro: I'm quite interested by this platform. If you'd like to tell us a little bit more - how should it work?

Daniel: Yeah, sure. There are a number of platforms out there at the moment that facilitate participatory processes, deliberative processes, digital tools for facilitating those and scaling those upwards. In particular, the use of AI has been leveraged to scale participatory and deliberative processes by quite a margin in the last few years. It used to be a matter of - you'd have to have an army of volunteers to sift through everything and make sure it was all above board.

So there's all that sort of stuff going on at the moment, which I think is fantastic. I mean, I have my own cynicism about the use of AI, but that is not when the dataset that you're drawing upon and that you're synthesizing is consciously and consensually offered inputs and responses. I think that's one of the great use cases for AI in democracy technologies.

Obviously, there is still an issue of having humans in the loop to make sure that whatever work the AI is doing to synthesize inputs is double-checked, triple-checked, and made sure that there are people going through and going, "Does this - when it shows a receipt, when it says here's the half dozen or 50 or 100 responses that I drew this summary statement from - does that summary statement authentically line up with the responses that it's pulling from?" So you still need to go through and make sure that it is actually representative and accurate. But nevertheless, it scales your ability to undertake those sorts of big participatory and deliberative projects.

So we wanted to take something like that - take that capacity to collaboratively develop, to leverage collective creativity to develop complex actionable documents like policy documents, like policy platforms - and bring it to a space (pardon the pun) that was basically outside of the focus of the general public.

And this is where the space nerd in me comes in and starts talking. I think the area of space policy, the area of space development in general, is one that is massively overlooked and that, on its current trajectory, could present quite a large problem in the future. It's a massive opportunity and it's also a massive problem.

The reason I say that is because there's this almost self-fulfilling prophecy, a kind of negative feedback loop that exists presently that's only gotten worse in the last couple of years, where because people feel alienated and disconnected and they feel like it's irrelevant - like what happens in space isn't really of interest, it's just for Air Force pilots, engineers, billionaires, et cetera, or it's the realm of science fiction - they disconnect and there's a cynicism that develops.

If you ask people what humanity's future in space is going to look like, people will usually cite you one cynical dystopia or another, right? It's either going to be dominated by giant corporate oligarchs who are drilling out moons, or it's going to be an extension of present-day geopolitical squabbles. And the thing is, buying into that narrative - however much truth there may be to it - only makes it more likely to happen that way, because you sort of divest yourself from the process of determining what shape the industry takes and what shape our involvement in space takes and how benefits are shared and how international treaties are developed.

Once you divest yourself from a policy area like that - and I'm going to use another pun - the vacuum just gets filled by whatever vested interests there are. And all of those vested interests that are already operating in that space are all too happy for the general public to just ignore it and pretend that it doesn't exist because they get to do whatever they want in that space.

So from my perspective, that's a big problem. In order to prevent mistakes of the past, like environmental damage, being repeated, in order to prevent issues of the present, like massive inequality, being exacerbated, the public needs to be treating it like another important policy issue. Otherwise, it'll wind up like climate change or financial regulation or something like this - you get a few decades down the road and all of a sudden it's a giant tidal wave that's just wrecking everything and we don't know what to do about it, right?

So going back to where we were a moment ago, we were thinking, well, how can we bring this capacity to allow large volumes of the general public, large numbers of individuals, to collaborate around something into the space sector? And also address the fact that this is kind of a dreamy Neverland for everybody that's not really real, you know?

It was a perfect fit really, because what we realized is that the space sector has been going around - let's say the positive side of the space sector, like big public agencies like NASA and things like that that do all that cool stuff - they've been saying things like "space is for everybody" for the last 50 years. And it's not really - it's just a platitude, right? It's not really the case unless you actually make it so. And they've been trying to play the PR game and that's all they're continuing to do. Most of these organizations are just playing the PR game.

But in order to give people some skin in the game, give them a sense of actual connection, you need to find other ways for them to be involved. So we thought, what if rather than asking sort of loaded cynical questions, we embraced the fact that it was kind of a dreamy Neverland and we asked them fundamentally optimistic questions, kept it really simple, lowered the barriers to entry?

Because a lot of the challenges that we got to this idea initially were things like, "Well, you know, the general public doesn't have anything really relevant to say about the topic," by saying things like, "Well, we're developing a policy around lunar timekeeping and what to do with special interest zones," and blah, blah, blah, right? And on those technical topics, yeah, perhaps not everybody has something particularly poignant to add to that conversation. But that's not what we're addressing. The problem we're addressing is the sense of disconnect and alienation.

So we don't go and alienate people by asking them all those detailed questions because that's not what we need. We bring them into the fold by asking them first and foremost - and I know it sounds a little silly at first - what do you want the future to look like? What do you want humanity's future in space to look like? How do you want it to affect your life? What role do you want it to play, et cetera?

And the answers to those questions are limitless in scope. People can say whatever they want. In some of the responses we've had to this question, some have been a simple sentence, others have been a paragraph, others have been like virtual essays. We allow people to write their answers, we allow people to provide them in video or audio. And then the follow-ups - the answers to that question synthesized - give us a kind of vision statement, right? Like, this is what we want the future to look like.

Then our second question - and the survey is only really two questions, there are a few others, but the meat of it is only really two questions - the second question is, "Well, OK, let's bring it back to the present. What do you think governments and businesses and other stakeholders should be doing right now in order to make that a reality?"

So everybody has an idea about what they want the future to look like, and everybody - most people - will have an opinion about what they think governments could be doing better. So we've structured it that way to avoid alienating people and to make sure that anybody we speak to, whether they're a teacher in Rio de Janeiro or a taxi driver in Seoul or wherever you happen to be, can answer that question.

And what we've found is A, everybody has an opinion, right? And once you get people going, they're really excited to talk about it because it's not something that they ever expected to be asked, because the nature of our political environment, democratic environments these days, is that we are so focused on the problems - the many very real and very understandable problems. It's very understandable why we're focused on all these problems right in front of us, and it's at the root of that objection that you very often hear towards focusing on or talking about the space sector, which is some variation of "what about all the problems here on Earth," right? It's totally understandable.

It just so happens that they're all interconnected, and we know that what happens in the rest of the world is important because of how it's connected to us, and space is exactly the same. But we're so focused on these problems in front of us that we don't ask people what they actually want the future to look like. We don't ask them what kind of thing we should be building towards. And political parties, political leaders - in fact, leaders generally - don't do a particularly good job of actually articulating a vision for the future. It's all sort of reactive problem-solving. So that's the gulf we thought we could fill.

Alessandro: I was thinking maybe this alienation came from these questions that are not asked to the people - so what do you think about this or what do you think about this policy or the other one? Because I was thinking why people are alienated. I also have this impression.

Daniel: You mean alienated from that particular topic?

Alessandro: No, I mean why people - in some way, why people do not participate, why people do not think that they can change the place where they are. And also I'm thinking about civic tech software - often to help people to participate in some policymaking or discussing about something. And so I'm thinking if asking people to participate is also a way to remove that kind of alienation.

Daniel: Yeah, I absolutely think that's true. And I think that problem of alienation - you're right - it stretches far beyond space policy, right? It's not just space as a topic. People are alienated from politics in general and a lot of public engagement, a lot of citizen engagement, certainly because when we talk about citizen engagement, we talk about public participation, we're not just talking about the digital platforms and things like this that we're working on at the moment. We're talking about town hall meetings and the media and social media and protest movements and all sorts of stuff as well, right?

And yeah, people can be alienated from it and there can be a discourse around it - all of these different things, all of the problems that are identified - that can be very alienating to people. And we can all add to that and exacerbate it and make it worse in our daily lives through the sort of general antagonism of a lot of the discourse and the way we interact with each other.

And I think - and this goes back to one of the things I learned out of the Arab Spring - it's a lot easier to form solidarity against something than it is to form solidarity for something new. But it is also the case that it is a lot easier to form solidarity around what we want than how we want to actually get there. And a lot of contemporary politics focuses almost exclusively on conflict around process and methodology and the minutiae of policy.

It's not that that isn't important. It's just that it needs to be complemented by a vision, by a destination. Those sorts of things that bring people together, right? And I think it's the case that even in some of the more polarized political environments in the world at the moment, if you go out and ask - for example, people in the United States - what they want the future to look like 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now, you'll find a lot greater overlap and solidarity in the answers to those questions than you will around, "What do you want people to do tomorrow? What do you think the Democrats should be doing?"

So by not asking those questions, by not baking those questions into our political process, we are really depriving ourselves of a core mechanism for building solidarity, as well as one of the things that helps contextualize and explain a lot of the smaller day-to-day policy stuff that we have to do, right? It makes it a lot easier to explain to people why you're passing this bill, for example, if you can explain it in terms of the destination - how it gets you towards an end goal - than it is just all by itself. So it helps to contextualize and explain things. And that's why I think it's so important.

And that is one of the huge benefits that I think these technologies can provide, as they offer us the ability to almost create this parallel kind of politics. You have the representative politics, the sort of standardized democratic processes and institutions around decision-making and policymaking and what we're doing today and tomorrow and so on and so forth. But we also have this ability to leverage collective intelligence and collaboratively create visions for the future about the goals we're actually working towards, and then use those to hold decision-makers to account and say, "This is your job. This is your marching orders. This is what you're supposed to be doing, where you're supposed to be taking us," and establish some form of accountability as to whether or not they've actually made any ground or gotten us there.

I mean, we see limited forms of that - largely toothless forms of that. We've had the Paris Accords, for example, around climate, where these actual goals are set, but because there's no formal process of accountability around them at the domestic political level, individual countries within their own politics can just push them to the side and not really focus on them.

There are other countries like the UK that have established independent councils that set targets for the government to meet - making it legally binding to meet certain targets around climate. That's closer to the thing that I'm pushing for - that by having a collaborative public process, basically collaborative goal-setting, if you can establish "this is what the people want, this is the sort of general direction, or this is the kind of future that people want you to build," then you can actually start holding governments accountable to whether or not they're getting there.

Alessandro: I was thinking about how people - if you ask something about, if you ask a specific question, as you said, like "what would you like to see," it's easier for people to say something, while often where people fight is "how would you like to do it." That was the second question of the poll. And I was thinking that also, a lot of times people are divided because they think that "I'm leftist" or "I'm from the right party," whatever. Well, if you ask the question, often there are people from different parties, different political positions, that often they think the same about a specific topic. So if you really analyze the problem, I mean, it's better than just being partisans. I don't know if...

Daniel: Yeah, it's the other side of the coin, right? It's the other side of the vital part of political progress that we've sidelined for a long time. And again, understandably, because there's so much going on and there are so many problems - what do you want to call it, the polycrisis or what have you. But it's also one of the things that can help to pull us out of there.

And I've always been a big fan of this idea of, for lack of a better way of putting it, working backwards towards the future - establishing a goal and then asking yourself, "What would that require?" You take a step backwards, and then "What would that require?" And you take a step backwards, and then "What would that require?" And you take a step backwards, and you keep doing that until you arrive at the present. And then you sort of have your roadmap and you have your priorities, right?

So much of politics is starting from the present and just asking ourselves, "What can we do?" and abandoning the creative process from the outset. And I think it was Stephen Boucher - I think I've had him on - who was saying to me last year, "Constraint is the mother of creativity." And so if you start out with what you can do, then you're not really engaging in the creative process to begin with. You start out with what you must do, then you actually get the gears turning. You can actually start - "OK, well, that is what we have to do, then how do we get there?" Right? And suddenly you're forced into a creative process where you have to start doing interesting things.

So yeah, again, I think it's this missing component of our political process. I think that the technology now - these technologies that you've interviewed a bunch of the people who are building them, who are using them, growing them, promoting them - one of the things that they can do is give us the capacity to scale up these sorts of collective creativity, this mass collaboration. And the other benefit that it offers, of course, as I said before, is that it provides context and sort of explanation for all of the other stuff that we have to do right now.

Alessandro: I'm thinking about the experiments that can be done at the moment with these tools. And then thinking about what you said before about the binding. I mean, when people discuss, citizens discuss about something, institutions should take that - I don't know, report or whatever - and try to apply or at least to consider what came out, the output of the participatory process. But often they don't really have to. I mean, if they want, they can do it. Otherwise, they can also decide to not do it.

Daniel: Yeah, it is a bit of a problem. And we've taken a bit of a different route with this problem. I guess this goes back - this is kind of unique to the space sector, right? I don't think this applies in every area, but this is also one of the reasons why we've designed this particular project like this.

There are already perhaps a dozen civil society organizations in this sort of burgeoning space civil society sector internationally that conduct top-level advocacy - government level, state level, intergovernmental level advocacy - whether it's lobbying governments and agencies directly or going to the UNOOSA events in Vienna and promoting these sorts of ideas. And it is incredibly difficult to navigate because by the time policy gets to that level, there are all sorts of different fingers in the pie, right? And there's all sorts of different vested interests at play. It's an incredibly difficult space to navigate and it changes dramatically from state to state, from context to context.

So because our project is a grassroots project, right - we're trying to get citizens to collaborate to produce a citizens' policy document - we've been thinking about what would be the best place to take this. And again, it's not entirely unique to the space sector - space policy is one area where it is particularly prominent. And what I mean by that is, with a lot of the beginning of the policy creation process in not just full democracies, but to a certain extent partial democracies as well - any multi-party system - it begins at this party level, right?

And for what you'd call tentpole policy areas - and there are big ones that are pretty common across the world, and then there are some that vary depending on which country or political context you're in - but pretty much across the board, everywhere you go, space is not a tentpole policy area. It's not climate, it's not housing, it's not education and healthcare, it's not immigration. It's not one of those things where everybody wants to have a say, everybody wants to be part of deciding what the platform is going to be.

For pretty much all political parties in the world - space policy is, and I might be generalizing a little too much, I might be being unfair to some political parties - but generally speaking, it's a few people who will have an interest, who have some expertise, and they draft a policy proposal and it gets passed by, voted on by a committee, and that becomes the baseline policy platform in that area, in space in this case.

And so at the same time, political parties, again almost across the board, are looking for policy validation. They're looking to attract attention to what they're doing. They're looking to develop and have thoughtful policy in these emergent domains. I mean, space is one, AI of course is another, but there's a lot more attention, I think, on AI at the moment because of how it cuts so obviously across the board and affects everybody's lives in ways that are a lot more obvious than they are, for example, in the space sector.

So in the space sector, the point of germination for policy is, in a lot of cases, a few interested parties, right? A few interested people or collections of individuals who just happen to care a lot about this topic. So we want to introduce - rather than, as you were right before, most effective and honest participation processes or projects depend on state-level or high-level political investment and will in order to validate the entire thing, right? So you need somebody at the other end to say, "Look, we are really seriously going to listen to you and we're going to take what you say seriously and we're going to integrate it or we're going to do this, that, or the other thing with it."

I don't think it's universally the case that every participation project has to manifest itself as government policy at the other end. I think that just doesn't happen. It is true, however, that every participation project - every effective participation project - has to be honest about what the possibilities are.

So I think if you go to a bunch of people, either in a city or a country or a town or globally, whatever, and you say, "Look, we're doing this project. We want to hear what you have to say. Great things are going to happen. All the politicians are going to listen and it's going to be amazing," and that's not actually what happens, then people are going to go away pretty pissed off, right?

But if you go to people and you say, "Look, we want to hear what you have to say and we might take it seriously, we might not, but it's just going to be really interesting. It's going to inform our thinking," people will still want to give their opinion. So it's just really important to be honest about what's going to happen. More important, I think, than political will is honesty and transparency on the part of the people who are actually conducting the project, I would say.

In our case, we're being honest and transparent about the project and where it's going. And we're not promising anything to anybody because we're embracing the fact that people already assume that nothing's going to happen on this topic anyway because they're alienated from it. And they go into it with this sort of attitude of like, "Well, space is all just fluff anyway, and this is just a fun exercise to paint a picture of the future."

So our logic is, well, if we can embrace the fact that it's kind of, like I said before, this dreamy Neverland, and then we can go away and we can move the ball or move the dial - whatever metaphor you want to use - even a little bit, then it creates, in the place of this negative feedback loop that existed before where people are being driven further and further away from caring about this policy area, all of a sudden they're like, "Oh, well, OK, somebody listened, somebody that people actually are thinking about what I said."

So our strategy is to take this collaborative policy document, the citizens' policy document, and introduce it to those organizations at the grassroots level of policy formation and ask them to treat it as a foundational document, to treat it as a reference. Say, "OK, well, if you need a space policy, if you are writing a space policy, even if you already have a space policy, here is what people are saying. Here's what people are saying internationally. Here's what people are saying in your geography and your political catchment that is relevant. And we would like you to reference this document. We would like you to look it over and incorporate some of the ideas that are in this document into your policy platform."

We will say that to political parties, civil society organizations, and any organization that is increasingly in need of a policy on this emergent domain. And what we want to come out of that is two things. One, that it will trickle up rather than trickle down. So as I said, all the advocacy is happening at the top level, right? So if we introduce these ideas at the bottom level, perhaps they meet in the middle.

We can introduce it to multiple political parties within a given party system. We don't have to be picky and choosy about who we are introducing it to. Everybody can see it. Everybody can access it. Everybody can reference it.

And so it also, hopefully - this is the idea - is that it helps to generate not just effective citizen-derived policy that promotes public benefit over the long term and addresses some of those problems that I mentioned earlier, but that it also, in so doing, because it's an international project, helps generate policy alignment, which is one of the big issues when it comes to topics like this. When it comes to things like climate and financial policy and other things, it's not just enough to have, as we've seen, one country that has a pretty decent climate policy or financial regulation policy because businesses and everybody else will just go, "OK, well, we'll go somewhere else. We'll go to New Zealand, for example, or somewhere that doesn't have as effective policy and we'll find a loophole."

So yeah, that's the logic. We're not going for top-level political will as a prerequisite. We're going at the bottom.

Alessandro: OK. And you shared something about your background related to democracy and technology. If you'd like to share something about your academic background, I saw that you started in IT, then you moved to... how it happened? And also something related to your personal background - where did you live? Where do you live now?

Daniel: Yeah, I started in IT while I was at university. I was going to be an IT guy. And then I worked in international development for a while with refugees and wanted to learn languages and was thinking about international development and diplomacy for a while.

But then I found myself just fascinated with democratic systems and practices and the social foundations of democracy and how it all worked. And in reality, the revolutions I mentioned were a big part of that. And so yeah, just that's the thread that was winding its way through the last 10 to 15 years.

In the course of the last 20 years - I don't know how many years it is now - but I mean, I've lived all over the place. I was in the Middle East for ages. I've been in India, Ethiopia, Turkey. I was in the US for a while, Australia for a bit. I'm in Germany now. I was in Malta for a while. I've been in Germany for the last few years.

And yeah, I think I just wanted to work on projects and help build things that... I mean, if I'm honest, I was always a Star Trek nerd. So I was always working backwards from that Star Trek future, and asking myself, "Well, that's the future I want. What is - taking one step back - what does that require? Then what does that require? And then what does that require?" So that's my real motivation - just trying to identify the things that I think make good first or second steps towards that.

Alessandro: Yeah, I hope that answers your question. And are you, in your research now, in your project, do you have any problems that you're struggling with right now? Also, maybe someone will listen. I don't know, maybe also some collaboration that you'd like to do with someone.

Daniel: Yeah, sure. Yeah, there's always problems. So it's very difficult to translate when you're working across sectors as diverse as the democracy innovation space and the space sector - it's completely different languages, right? And it's two completely different bubbles.

So we're trying to bust this space bubble with real-world citizen input, and they all say that they want it. Like, you go to the big conferences and they'll say, "We need to know, we need to bring the public on board. We need to get people caring about space. We need to have all this input." But it's just a giant - they won't mind me saying this because they know it's true - it is just a giant bubble where everybody talks to each other and there is really no significant public outreach beyond journalism and stories about cool telescopes and rocket launches and things like that. I'm generalizing perhaps a bit much there, but it is a terrible bubble and it needs bursting. And it needs bursting with authentic public opinion at scale, saying "this is what we want. This is how you're going to get public support," because of course they're all paranoid about losing public support, the little public support that they have at the moment.

So they all want that, they need it. And then on the other side, you've got the sort of democracy innovation - more generally the democracy advocacy activism sort of area. And a lot of people in this area will just think space, like "what the hell, who cares?" So they're also part of this negative feedback loop.

And we've obviously picked it - we're doing this for reasons that I think I explained before - but there's a real huge problem of trying to get these two areas to talk to each other and care about, or see the potential in this connection.

So that's a problem - translating between those very different worlds. And it makes bridge-building quite difficult. So I guess if I was to say anything to anybody who might be listening is if you are a democracy nerd that is also a space nerd or a space nerd that's also a democracy nerd and governance nerd, then please get in touch because we could use your assistance bridging that divide.

And there's a real opportunity here, because it is an opportunity to do something really significant and practice collaborative policymaking at scale and have it get listened to, not just hopefully within political parties and at the grassroots of the policy formation process, but also I know that there is a huge interest in hearing what people have to say at big industry conferences like IAC and the UN World Space Forum and places like this as well. So there's a real opportunity. So yeah, please reach out.

The other problems are logistical, organizational, financial - the usual. Yeah, usual problems.

Alessandro: And I was thinking, in the latest 15 years, if you have seen - I suppose yes, maybe also AI - changes... When you started getting interested in civic tech, in technology and politics, compared to now, of course there are a lot of differences, but if there is something that really is particular, and also because you traveled between many countries, if you have seen any particular difference related to the places and not spaces?

Daniel: So I guess the first part of that question was around technology, the difference in the possibilities, you mean?

Alessandro: Yeah, I was thinking, so this idea about technology that could help people for their socio-economic political life is not very new. I mean, it's been some time that there is this idea. Now we have new technologies like generative AI and so on. I was thinking maybe in the... I don't know how people, let's call them civic hackers, how they are approaching. I don't know if you have seen any...

Daniel: Yeah, you know, I think - OK, so my first encounter with what I would call DemTech... I mean, I've always thought about it as people talk about GovTech and CivicTech, and then obviously we write about democracy technologies. I view GovTech as about improving government processes. And CivicTech - the beneficiary is the citizen itself, right? Helping out the citizen do things and inform the citizen and things like that. This is really difficult, but everybody has a different opinion on where the circles in this Venn diagram are called. Democracy tech is something where, in my view, the institution, the practice of democracy itself is the beneficiary, right? Like it becomes more democratic than it was.

And my first encounter with democracy tech, something that we considered democracy tech, was probably - yeah, I want to say 15 years ago. And it was a piece of open source software called Better Means that I think is defunct now. And I was a huge fan of - I still am a huge fan of liquid democracy. It's this - some people will laugh, but I'm still a fanboy of liquid democracy. It's this kind of cool halfway point between representative and direct democracy where tokens shift around, influence shifts around. It's not hyper-responsive, so you can still have policy consistency, but it's not hyper-stagnant. I love it. Anyway.

Better Means was this sort of - it allowed you to, it was kind of like a combination of Trello and these sort of project management tools that we have now with democratic elements introduced and collaborative decision-making around work assignments and how much somebody should get paid for something and how much this would be worth and what priority this should be and all of this kind of stuff, right? It wasn't entirely liquid democratic, but there were all sorts of different democratic components baked into it. I loved that, right? I loved it and I wanted to build something like that and to actually build a platform.

At the time, this was when I was a lot younger, I wanted to build a platform at the time that allowed people to sort of connect nodes - connect issues that they encountered, ideas that they had, people that they knew - and draw these nodes together into a new node which would create a collaborative workspace. So kind of like a cooperative formation tool.

And that was my first encounter, my first dream in terms of "this is the thing I'd really love to build if I had the tools and the time and the resources." What came out of that was Democracy Works, which was the consulting team building workshop thing that I mentioned before. And I never wound up building the actual tool itself. But the difference back then is all that sort of stuff was just pie in the sky, right? It was dreamy. It was like, "Wouldn't this be amazing and cool?" The reality of actually catching on, becoming marketable, and people using it at scale was not very likely, right? Because the idea of civic tech, gov tech, and democracy tech had not become as established as it certainly is now.

Over the last five to ten years, it's just been making leaps and bounds. Now there are city governments, national governments all over the world doing really cool, innovative stuff, building their own tools. There are companies that build tools. There are nonprofit organizations that build tools. There's closed source, open source. It's just all sorts of stuff and it's getting traction and it's a growing industry. And so all of those ideas now are coming out and they're real, right? And you can actually do things differently. I think that's amazing, right? That's awesome.

And I know this is going to sound a little silly, so I apologize. But that's also one of the things that attracts me to space as a... I don't know what word to use, like as a paradigm of human development as well, is because a lot of people out there will look at space as being like, "We can go and mine asteroids and make a lot of money" or "We can settle Mars and do whatever." There's obviously also the science and technology element to it as well. I look at space and I think this is our first real opportunity, perhaps ever, disconnected from the moral and ethical - the terrible moral and ethical implications of colonialism and all the phases of historical human settlement and colonialism throughout history - where we've had the opportunity to actually try out new systems of government, new ways of working together, new iterations on this idea of democracy in a vacuum - pardon the pun.

This is like we get to do things new. We need to try authentically new things here because we're going somewhere where there's not already an established way of doing things. It is kind of the Wild West, right? And so to pass up that opportunity would just be a huge tragedy, right? Like to just say, "OK, well, we're just gonna let the big companies and China, Russia, and the United States just bash it out and do whatever they want because space is irrelevant to our lives and we don't care anyway." That - I mean, again, I understand why people have that perspective, but I also see it as a huge tragedy because there is also the opportunity... Like the environment is so dangerous and so crazy difficult to do anything in, it necessitates cooperation in a way that is just unprecedented. And with that comes the opportunity to actually create new governance structures and new ways of working together and new ways of making decisions together and things like that.

So I see that as a huge opportunity. And I just really, really hope that we seize it. So I think that is also the point of connection between that democracy innovation space and the space sector that I mentioned before that I hope people can recognize.

Alessandro: Yeah. Does that answer your question? I think there is a part to your question.

Daniel: No, it was a vague question. So I'm thinking that, you know, this way to say, "If you don't care about politics, politics will care about you." Maybe it's the same with space. If you don't care about space, space in some way will care about you. I mean, you will not participate in the policy related to space.

Alessandro: And if you have any message for the people that are working on similar tools that are researching on similar tools...

Daniel: Yeah, I think all the tools that are being developed are fantastic. There's going to be nuances about each situation and each context that make one tool slightly more useful than another one. So it's good to have a market of tools that are available to people. And I think that market is growing, and that's wonderful. And as far as people who might be working on similar projects, I think we're more powerful together. So if you also happen to be trying to bridge this particular gap, please get in touch, and we'll see how we can work together.

Alessandro: Yeah. That's it. So thank you a lot, Daniel, if you have anything else to add that you'd like.

Daniel: No, thank you. Thank you very much for having me on. I apologize for talking your ear off so much. But yeah, really, really grateful for the invite. Thank you.

Alessandro: You're welcome. And thank you again.