Automatic transcription, it may contain errors.

Alessandro: Welcome to another episode of Democracy Innovators Podcast. Our guest today is Gianluca Sgueo. Thank you for being here and for your time.

Gianluca: Thank you very much for having me.

Alessandro: I can see from your experience that you have a lot of expertise in this field. On your LinkedIn, you describe yourself as working in digital transformation, democracy, and global affairs. When I look at your website, I can see you really have extensive experience, and I honestly don't know where to start.

So as a first question, I would like to ask you: when did you first think that technology could be a helpful tool for democratic systems and citizens?

Gianluca: Actually, I think I have the kind of professional profile that could be described as a hybrid profile, which is not necessarily always a good thing. Sometimes you feel like you don't belong professionally to a specific field. But I really think it's my trademark—combining different sectors. The sectors are technological innovation, or if you prefer, digital transition, democratic participation, and interest in representation as well, all in a global sphere.

I'm telling you this because my interest in technology, academically speaking, came later compared with my interest in democracy. I am a lawyer by education, so I have a degree in law and one in political sciences—or science of public administration, to be precise. Then I enrolled in a PhD in public and administrative law, and my PhD thesis was about participatory mechanisms across different legal systems: Italy, a few European states, the European Union, and the United States. So I compared how different systems consult citizens and engage them in policy-making.

My PhD was done between 2007 and 2010, roughly. So technologies were of course already there, but if I go back and read my thesis—which was actually published as a book—my focus was not on technology. Technology is there, there's a little bit of it, but the focus was about the globalization of democracy. The title of the book is "Experiments with Global Democracy" (it's an Italian book).

I was interested in that, and then little by little, after that period, I realized that I was exploring more and more the impact of digital technology within the mechanisms to consult citizens. So the balance between my interest in democracy and my interest in technology changed. I can say that now I am still interested in both, but I'm starting more from observing the technology and how this technology is changing the democratic sphere. Over the years, technology has become more relevant as an element of my analysis—artificial intelligence, digital platforms, and so on.

Alessandro: You mentioned participation, which is something very interesting to me. I think in our society, people do not really participate a lot. I'm thinking about gamification as a way to help citizens participate. I notice you've written a book about this.

Gianluca: Correct. So yes, I don't want to make too many distinctions, but when you study democracy, when you look at democracy, you at least learn to distinguish between participatory democracy and representative democracy. Both are touched by the relevance of technology, of course, but what I'm interested in looking at is in particular participatory democracy.

I think both participatory democracy and representative democracy—elections in the latter case—are affected by the same critical elements. One of these critical elements is the fact that people are less engaged. People are going to vote in lower numbers compared with the past, and they're just not interested.

That applies also to how we as citizens engage in decision-making with administrations—what I would call more exactly participatory democracy. This is a very common problem. It's something that has been acknowledged already a few years ago.

But the interesting thing is that when digital technology became widespread across Western governments, there was a clear moment in which many scholars, politicians, and practitioners thought that this technological implementation could be used to solve the problem of participation. In other words, since we now have digital tools to interact, it will be much easier for me to be interested and for policymakers to listen to what citizens have to say.

But that unfortunately did not happen. We have plenty of very good examples—in podcasts we hear about a lot of very nice best practices—but on the other hand, I think the problem remains and it's even more striking. This is because while it's true that digital technology helps people in principle to be in touch without much effort, the fundamental issues persist.

So you mentioned gamification—it's something I've been studying for a while and, as you said, something I've been publishing about. The idea is quite simple. I'll just summarize it, and then of course if you want to know more, we can dig into it a little more.

The idea is that we can design—and "design" is another word that I really like—we can design participatory spaces with some game elements. Some elements that resemble a game, not a pure game, but something that resembles a game. Ideally, this should help citizens to be more motivated because we all like to play. It's something that is part of our learning experience. We as children learn things by playing.

The use of games is something that we as humans use for a long part of our life in order to learn things. Then there's a moment in which we think that gaming is trivial and is not for adults any longer, but actually there's a lot of game design in many things that we do—in marketing strategies, for example.

Now, the idea is that we could engage citizens more by offering them gamified environments. Now, if you ask me, "Is this working or not?" my answer would be: it depends. It's not the solution to the problem. We have some very nice examples to tell, but on the other hand, we have many examples that don't work.

Alessandro: So we have very good examples of best practices, but what is missing? Is this related to how institutions work? Why are these solutions not implemented or tested more widely?

Gianluca: That's an excellent question because it's actually the picture of the problem. As you said, we have many examples. When I published my book and also occasionally when I write on the topic, it's always nice to have a list of examples—there are plenty of those at all levels, from the very local level to the national level, even some supranational examples that work very well.

In order to answer your question, I need to make a step back to how game design works, and then give a possible explanation of why gamification didn't work so far in participatory experiments.

Game design basically replicates elements of a game within participatory processes, which means that you have basically three elements: you have a set of rules, you have a competition—the competition could be against other people or could be against yourself, it doesn't really matter—and third, you have a reward. Again, don't think necessarily about money or something tangible. It can be anything like passing to another level or being acknowledged to have succeeded in something. The reward is, let's say, the conclusion of your journey and maybe the beginning of a new step.

Now, all these elements, if well-combined and well-designed within participatory processes, as we said, could work very well. What is the problem? It's another concept that is very familiar to all those who study gaming or video gaming, and this is called the "curve of engagement."

It really looks like a curve, and I'd like you to think of any game you might have played over the last few years—could be anything from something very simple on a mobile phone or maybe you're into video gaming or anything related to console gaming, or a board game.

You see that we have this curve that goes up because if the game is well-designed, it looks interesting, it looks fascinating, we want to spend more time with it. The complexity of the game is well-balanced, so we see that if we play, maybe we fail, but we can improve, and so next time we will defeat, for example, the boss of the level, and we scale up to the next level. So it's actually increasing.

And then there's a moment—sooner or later, even with the best possible game—there's a moment in which either you feel that it's too complicated, or you don't have time to play that game in order to progress, or instead you become so good that it's a little boring. So the curve starts to descend and you are less engaged.

This is in pure gaming, okay? But the same mechanism, as I said, could be applied to participatory processes. You have obviously a set of rules, but you can have incentives, and you have a sort of competition between participants, and you have a sort of reward.

That's the problem: it is not meant to last for too long. You have to reinvent the system in order to re-engage the participants. You don't have a single solution that will work forever. There is no video game—even Super Mario—I think everybody has played Super Mario. After more than thirty years, we still have new versions of Super Mario, and the concept is similar. I still enjoy going back to Super Mario and playing it a little bit, but even Super Mario, the classic, has a curve. After a while, it's too complex, or it's too easy, or I'm changing.

So the same applies to game design in participatory processes. That explains why we have a lot of single-shot great examples. Some of them last a little longer, but nothing that we could say, "Okay, this is the benchmark—this is how you design gaming into democratic participation because it returns great results." There's nothing like that. The reason is that, as in any other game, people—participants in this case—need to be stimulated in different ways.

Alessandro: I'm thinking about forms of communication. Can we think about the school system as a sort of gamification? Because it has a set of rules, it has some sort of competition, and also some kind of rewards. Also, can we think about gamification in terms of collaboration instead of competition?

Gianluca: I think—I will answer your second remark first—I think you can cooperate, you can collaborate in order to achieve something, and that is a sort of competition. The concept of competition has to be understood in a very broad way, so it doesn't necessarily mean me against you or me and you against X and Z or something like that. It could be something like that, but it could also be me and you—we have to cooperate in order to achieve a certain result.

I'm going to give you an example. There's a very nice experiment that was done a few years ago by a municipality in the United States. The idea of the municipality was: we are expanding over the years, and so the social bonds have been weakening. We want our local population—we still have a small municipality but growing in numbers—and so we want to try to have social bonds reestablished between different communities that are living in the same area.

So they basically created this virtual currency—it was called "Mason Money" (I don't remember in which state of the United States it was, but the name of the city was Mason or Macon). They basically created this virtual currency and they distributed tasks among citizens that would participate in this sort of competition in order to find the other half of the currency and create a social bond.

So you see, in this case there was a clear cooperation aim, but there was a competition as well. So absolutely, you can cooperate, and that could also be a sort of competition against yourself in order to achieve another level. It also resembles education or schooling systems in a way.

There are a lot of theories that suggest having gamification used as a learning system. Actually, many of the platforms that provide online learning are based on gamification dynamics. You can think about a very famous platform—the one that is meant to teach languages—or you can also go on very big platforms like Coursera, in which you basically access learning in different subjects. All of them are based on very clear gamification dynamics, so you have progress, you are awarded points or stars or levels, whatever it is, and you progress. You achieve credits—it's a very simple metric that can work very well in education.

Alessandro: Do you have any other examples of gamification to share?

Gianluca: Yeah, sure. There are many, many of those. One very interesting example which has a story behind it that's worth knowing is the story of "Evoke," which was created by the World Bank.

So we're talking about a very important international institution. For those who don't know, the World Bank is an international institution that was created after the Bretton Woods agreements in order to—not regulate global finance, but actually to loan money to countries that would get this money and in exchange would apply democratic reforms. That is still the role of the World Bank, and also the International Monetary Fund, which is the sister organization that was also created in the same period.

If you go on the website of the World Bank, it's an incredible source of information. They have very highly profiled professionals that are producing very interesting datasets about a lot of topics—really a lot of topics. It's very broad, and it's truly an incredible source of information.

A few years ago—and all this information is actually available for free, it's just there, you go online and you can download the papers and reports, there are plenty of those—the World Bank did a sort of internal investigation. The aim was to see what was the reaction by the general public. So what would people take from all this material?

The result—I don't remember the exact numbers, but the result was striking—just a very tiny percent of the total amount of documents that were published by the World Bank (when I say tiny, I mean like one or two percent, something like that) had been downloaded at least once. And part of these downloads was done by people working at the World Bank.

So what was the result? We have this incredible amount of information which nobody knows, nobody uses, and people, in the best-case scenario, think that we are technocrats that are imposing draconian measures on national economies. That was the perception of people who knew something—actually, who didn't know much about the World Bank.

So the institution tried to create something, an initiative that could bring people into knowing the institution, and they created this e-book called "Evoke." It was a sort of board game that was played globally, and every week you would have a mission. This mission consisted of different tasks. The idea was: the world is on the verge of a global crisis, a very hard global crisis, and we have to intervene by doing something. What should we do? Famine, disruption of chains of production, this kind of stuff.

So people would engage in different tasks on a weekly basis. They would go through a process that obviously was meant to teach people what the World Bank does, because these are typical tasks that people at the World Bank handle in their daily job.

The final task was to find an original idea to be possibly implemented by the World Bank, and the best idea would be called to Washington D.C., where the World Bank headquarters is located, and be awarded a cash prize—I think in that case it was a small amount.

What was—obviously the World Bank doesn't need just people suggesting ideas; that was part of the game design, but it wasn't the main goal. The main goal was to have as many people as possible sharing information, learning about the World Bank, sharing information with other participants, and increasing interest in the institution.

The results—and this is something that I discuss in a few publications in which I described this example—one possible question is: okay, so how many people participated? Was it something that attracted hundreds of thousands of participants? No.

I think the total number of participants was in the thousands globally, so you realize it's quite a tiny number. But the question that I think is important to ask is not just how many, but how engaged these people were.

If you look at the pure volume, again, you don't have an incredible response by citizens. But if you look at the interest of these people, you might have a different result. So you could see that these people were actually quite engaged in the experiment, so it was in that sense quite successful.

Alessandro: I was wondering why people act a certain way. It's a very hard question.

Gianluca: What do you mean exactly? Can you help me understand better?

Alessandro: Yeah, I was thinking because you said that actually the datasets were downloaded by just a very small amount of people. And when there was the sort of economic incentive, then not so many people, but still a good amount of people explored this kind of data. So I think about the economic incentive, but I'm also thinking about why, without the economic incentive, people do not look for something that actually could be very interesting. I mean, maybe people read books about topics and they could obtain the same information, maybe in a different way.

Gianluca: Absolutely. I get your question, and it brings us back to the reason for gamification, which is one possible solution, and also brings us back to your first question about technology and what is the reason why technology is now so interesting to analyze for someone who has an interest in democracy as a possible solution, but also as a crisis.

The principle is that for many people, participating in democratic processes is not perceived as a solution any longer. So if you look at civic engagement in all its forms—electoral participation, engaging in charity (for example, donating money for a civic cause), or any other activity that we would consider part of democratic civic life—if you look at what our parents and grandparents (I'm talking about the seventies, the sixties, and before) were doing compared with what people do now, you would probably agree with saying that civic capital has been shrinking over time, so that people are spending less time in civic activities.

We said it before: fewer people go to vote. If you look at, for example, a country like Italy—it depends on the country, of course—but in a country like Italy, in the seventies there were millions of Italians who had a subscription to a political party, and now political parties have very low numbers of people. It's very tiny—it's like seventy percent less than twenty or thirty years ago.

So the principle is: it's not appealing anymore, for a lot of reasons related to the crisis of democracy—the lack of social mobility, the fact that we feel there are fewer opportunities, and also the fact that digital platforms have captured much of the attention of people. All these reasons are contributing.

Now we go to game design. You mentioned the financial incentive. Let me say that it's not necessarily a financial incentive—that is one possibility. It can work very well, but it can also be something completely unrelated to giving you money. It could be having your name mentioned in the first place of a ranking. I'm going to give you an example in a second—it's another very interesting example.

But before that, that's the potential of game design. The potential is: what if I give you a framework that will make the experience more appealing? So it's not just the fact that we will win, I don't know, ten euros, but also the fact that maybe we could spend one hour together thinking about how to solve a problem, and maybe you have a resource, I have a contact, and maybe we can get closer to that result, and we can do that in an engaging way—maybe, at least in the short term. Let's remember the short-termism of these kinds of experiments, but maybe in the short term this results in some interest.

In other words, people need to be stimulated in order to find interesting a participatory experiment. I'm not—this is not original—I'm just quoting the very basic idea of behavioral sciences, all the theory of nudging. You know, Richard Thaler or Cass Sunstein—all these theories are precisely that you can create a framework in which you push people, you give a sort of nudge to people in order to find more interesting an experience.

And if you allow me, I'm going to mention another very interesting case which did not include a financial incentive. It was gamified and resulted in a very interesting outcome.

Now we are in Latin America, more precisely in the capital city of Peru—Lima—which was at least one of the most polluted cities in the world. One of the reasons for this pollution was the fact that the city is very large and it has a number of places where people just throw their garbage, and these places are not controlled. So as you can imagine, this contributes to air pollution and environmental problems, causing a lot of troubles.

But the municipality didn't have the resources to make more controls, to hire people that would control how the garbage was treated by the population. So what the municipality decided to do was to create this participatory experiment, and they called it "Gallinazo Avisa" (which means "the vultures are checking").

They trained—I think it was ten vultures, this animal that lives in that area of the world—in order to spot this garbage. So they enjoy finding places where they can find food, and they put a GoPro camera on the bodies of these vultures. So when they fly, they actually record the area, and then what the municipality does is take these videos and upload them on a website and ask citizens: "Can you help us watch these videos? We don't have the capacity, but if you can help us—it's hours and hours of footage—and you can spot illegal sites within the city, you can actually tell us and we will at least try to intervene."

It was a huge success, and the reward was that the names of those who had spent hours watching these videos were mentioned on the official website. It was so successful that at a certain point, there were citizens who were taking videos with their mobile phones and they were sending them to the municipality to say, "This is also where you should intervene."

Again, an example—in this case, no money even—but the fact that watching very boring two or three hours of footage of an aerial vision of the city resulted in something helpful for the municipality that could intervene on illegal sites.

Alessandro: I'm thinking about this crisis of democracy and why people do not feel that participating is a solution. I think about how information is power in two different ways: because on one hand, there are social media that, as you say, capture people's attention, and at the same time, information is power because if there's something wrong in my town, in the place where I live, and I know that I can send an email to the mayor or someone in the administration of the town, I can actually do something and change the place where I live.

Before I thought about why people are not participating—because they have more distractions, yes, as you said, rather than media—but it's not related to time...

Gianluca: No, it probably is another problem. The intangible assets that you need in order to participate could make the difference between types of participants. Let me explain myself. Time is an intangible asset, so let's say in your life there are moments in which you feel you have more time and moments in which you feel your time is limited.

Typically when you are younger and you are in your school age, you feel you have plenty of time to dedicate yourself to whatever you like. And then maybe you grow up, have a family, work, and so most of your time is used in commitments, and the feeling of available time is low.

But in order to participate, you need some time, as you said. For example, I need to have the time to connect online and listen to the meeting and maybe make interventions, share what I want, and then I have to follow up. That can discriminate between certain types of participants. That's why, and that's another reason why, in participatory experiments online, we typically have certain categories that are more represented than others.

These categories that are overrepresented are people aged over fifty-five or even sixty-five, for a clear reason: that is the age of your life in which you return to have more free time for yourself. It's also possible that you are more civically engaged—you start feeling the need to give a contribution or to think about future generations. There are many reasons, but one reason is also that you have more time than you used to have ten years before.

And also men compared with women, because unfortunately in many social systems, it's the woman who is taking care of the family. So you can imagine, if you're a mother, you have to take care of the babies and the family—you don't have the time to do this.

Then there are other categories. So the reason of time, I think, is relevant. It is an explanation—not of why people don't participate, or at least it's a partial explanation of why people don't participate—but more of the fact that there are certain participants that are overrepresented and other participants that are underrepresented.

But in general, I think that the lack of participation is explainable by a missing link between what am I achieving by participating and what is the effort that I need to take in order to participate. It's never a pure trade-off, right? It's never like "I pay a ticket, then I watch a movie"—it's not like that. But it's also true that if I have a feeling that even if I am contributing, it's not really changing anything, I will probably lose interest, and my interest is also attracted by other stuff. There's always a chance to do something engaging by watching a movie or surfing the web or playing a video game or stuff like that.

Alessandro: So what do we have to fix in order to have better democracy? I think about your book that in Italian is "La Democrazia Similare" and in English, I don't know—"Best Democracy Maybe"?

Gianluca: The subtitle is also important because it says "the technologies that are changing power," so we return to the original point.

Obviously, I don't have the recipe for solving the problems of democracy. I think it's part of the debate—people, scholars, practitioners, politicians are debating the crisis of democracy and the many possible solutions.

A word that I'm really interested in—it's not in the title, I mean it's in the book, not in the title—but the word that I'm really focused on and that I think is key is the word "design," which I mentioned at the beginning. I think it's nice to mention: how do we want to design our digital interactions?

This solution implies as a precondition the fact that we accept that most of the democratic participation will be happening on digital platforms, right? And how do we want to design these platforms?

I think there are a number of elements that could help citizens to engage a little more. One is the topic we've been discussing for most part of this interview: making the participation more entertaining, so including elements that can engage people. Obviously, game design is the main idea, but it's not the only one.

The other one is: how do we narrate the participatory process? I think that good storytelling of the participatory process is very important. I think even if I don't believe it was a successful case, the Conference on the Future of Europe—I think that the storytelling behind it was quite powerful. The idea was: "I'm giving you, European citizen, the possibility to tell me, you policymaker, what is the future of Europe that you want to imagine? What Europe would you like to live in ten years from now?"

It was very well constructed, it was powerful. It came—it was designed before the pandemic, but it actually came during the pandemic, so it was a moment in which we were all in a way questioning these ideas of "okay, what's going to happen next? How will the world be changing after this?" So it was a very nice storytelling.

And the third element, which is probably the most important, is this: the narration of democracy should retake on board the concept of complexity.

I'm giving you a one-minute explanation, which is something I've been researching and writing about for quite a long time now. The design of commercial technology is based on very simple elements: one is simplicity, another one is the speed of service, and the third one is the tailored nature of the services.

So we have very simple-to-use digital devices, we have devices that are trying to sell us the idea of very fast service, and that are also tailored to your needs. Now, all these elements are what we expect when we engage digitally with anything.

But in democratic participation, this is not possible. Decision-making takes time, it implies a high level of conflict—at least one part or one opinion—and it is time-consuming, going back to time.

So a good way to have people at least aware and not disappointed by what participatory processes online in digital formats would imply is to bring back the concept of complexity—not selling the idea that by clicking (which was very popular when digitalization came into democracy) you just click and you are participating in democracy. Because that type of narration created the disappointed citizens that we are dealing with right now—people that don't see any actual change when they actually see the results of participation.

Alessandro: I have a couple more questions if you have some more time.

Gianluca: Sure.

Alessandro: So how do you imagine our social or political system in twenty or fifty years? I know it's very difficult to reply, but do you have any idea about some possibilities?

Gianluca: Well, I'm very interested and really fascinated by futures studies. It's a very interesting field of debate. At this very moment, I'm reading a book on the history of future thinking—so how thinking about the future has changed over the years. It went through different stages, and today we actually have a science for that. We have foresight, which is the scientific approach to thinking strategically about the future—so quite an interesting element.

So I believe that we will have to face a situation in which we will probably have more time for ourselves, and this more time will be the result of the use of technology. I know that what I just said has a lot of exceptions and it's probably very Western-focused. I know that it's not a global way of thinking, so I'm now looking more at the situation with which I'm more familiar—the Western world.

In the Western world, technology will give us more time to do things. Think about artificial intelligence and how quickly you can have certain results compared with the past. What will we make of this extra time? That is quite a problem that we need to think about, and I'm not just talking about the labor-related aspects. I'm also thinking about what do you do when you start thinking of a society in which not all of your time is spent working in an office or in a factory, which is the model we've been part of over the last fifty years.

So the last fifty years, the broad idea is that once you finish studying, you enter work, and most of your life will be spent—you do a lot of stuff, but most of the time you are at work. What happens when you don't have that necessity any longer?

That will have very interesting democratic implications. It's not exactly a description of the future world that I imagine, but I think it's one crucial challenge that we will have in the not-so-far future.

The gain of time—a very bad use of this gain of time is to be more engaged in trivial uses of our digital tools: scrolling and watching ephemeral content. That would be a very bad way of using it. A better way could be re-engaging in social spaces, and that's why I describe it as a challenge.

Alessandro: I haven't asked anything about you yet. I mean, just about your professional background. So I would like to ask you if you want to share something related to when you were a child, where did you grow up, what were your interests?

Gianluca: Sure, absolutely. I think I am the typical middle-class man. I was born in a typical middle-class family, and I am very aware of not using the word "normal" because there's a very interesting book about this—the word "normal" has very different meanings wherever you are, so it's very misleading what is normal, what is normality.

In Italy, I was born in 1976, so at the end of the seventies. Let's say I was a child in the eighties, and it was in Rome, the capital city. Both my parents were working in the private sector, and I have a brother. So I would describe myself as quite an ordinary middle-class family living in a big city.

If I have to remember some facts from my childhood, I think books were an important part of it, and I was—this is something I'm doing with my daughters now—I was taught to like books. My house was full of books, and I remember there was a moment—summertime when you have a lot of time and you're bored because you didn't know what to do—and I started to enjoy taking a book and reading it. That was an enjoyment that I remember very well.

I also remembered that my mother—both my parents, but my father was working full-time, my mother was working part-time—so my afternoons were with my mother and my brother. They were very strict with the use of television. In my generation, the distraction was TV—we didn't have digital mobile phones, of course, or stuff like that.

We would watch one hour—we could choose one hour to watch TV in the afternoon. There was a very popular TV show back then which was cartoons and a little entertainment, and once that was finished, we had to turn off the TV and do something else.

We were lucky because despite living in a big city, we were living in a building which had some internal gardens, so when the weather was nice, we would go out and play with other kids and sing songs, or we would engage in reading or drawing stuff. And again, this is something that I'm also doing with my daughters right now—they have a little time they can use digital devices. I'm not prohibiting them from using digital tools—they are still young—but only for a limited time. The rest of the time they have to do something else.

That was a very important part of my education. I am not saying that I'm fully safe from digital dependencies—in the sense that, like many of us, I am attached to my mobile phone and I sometimes feel phantom vibration syndrome when I don't have reliable signal. I'm not saying that this saved me from being affected by digital tools, but it gave me some elements to train my brain, and I still like to read books in paper format, for example.

This is what I remember from my childhood—it was a very quiet childhood.

One last thing—it's something I am passionate about: I am very passionate about fantasy. I still play Dungeons & Dragons—it's something that I really love. So everything that's related with Lord of the Rings, dragons, fantasy—in movies, in games, or in board games—it's something that I still enjoy doing. And that also came from when I was thirteen.

Alessandro: So I was thinking about Dungeons & Dragons in relation to gamification, and maybe...

Gianluca: Exactly! That's true. I was a dungeon master—I was the one who was telling the story to the others.

Alessandro: Do you have any books that you were passionate about when you were a kid?

Gianluca: Yeah, okay. I have a couple of books that I really remember. One is a classic—I think when I turned ten, a friend of mine gave me a present: The Hobbit from Tolkien.

I remember I didn't read the book immediately. I probably thought it was not interesting, so I didn't read it right after that. Maybe one or two years later, I went back to that book and it was mind-blowing. It was precisely the type of story that I like: elves, dwarves, the hobbit, the dragon—the classic. And then obviously The Lord of the Rings came later.

So that's one—I would say everything that Tolkien has produced, but if I had to pick one book, I would say The Hobbit.

The other one is The Lord of the Flies, which is a book which I read by chance. I think maybe it was in the house of my uncle where I would spend the summertime, and I really enjoyed the dark side of the book. For those who—I hope you've read it, it's another classic—you see how human dynamics work, and even with children, how power balances are established to the point that things fall out of control with these young people. So that was also something that I really remember. I enjoyed it and I thought it was a very nice reading.

Alessandro: I also love The Lord of the Rings, but I have to read The Lord of the Flies.

Gianluca: It's a very, very nice book. It's a narration of human society, basically. The story looks like a children's story, but it's not. It's really worth it. Actually, there are some movie adaptations—they're quite old—but I would suggest reading the book.

Alessandro: Thank you. And the last question: for people that are working in the field and are searching and experimenting with new solutions in relation to participation...

Gianluca: What I would like to see more—let's put it this way—I would like to see more cross-pollination of different disciplines. To a certain extent, we have it, however I still see there are a little bit of silos between people working in the field.

For example, Europeanists are very engaged in participation—it's really part of people studying European landscapes—but these people do not talk much with, for example, European policymakers, or at least with people interested in supranational governance. On the same side, people looking at global dynamics tend to ignore or consider less relevant what is happening in certain fields.

Lawyers, political scientists, sociologists—they don't know designers. So it's now more frequent to find this type of cross-pollination. I am, for example, contributing to a project in which we have lawyers, political science scientists like me, but also designers. So we try to compare different perspectives, and I think that it would be nice to have more of that.

More, because sometimes you feel you're not talking the same language, and obviously you see the world from different angles. But it's actually when you find a common point, it's a very strong one, because it means it's been found from different perspectives. So it's more difficult to achieve, but it's also more rewarding to achieve.

Gianluca: Thank you very much. It was very nice to be part of this podcast. I look forward to your next episodes, and now that I'm a subscriber to the podcast, I'll be following the new episodes every time you publish them.

Alessandro: Really, really thank you.