Automatic transcription of the interview with Margo Loor from CitizenOS: there may be errors.

Alessandro Oppo: Welcome to another episode of Democracy Innovator podcast. Our guest today is Margo Loor from CitizenOS. Welcome and thank you for your time.

Margo Loor: Hi, Alessandro. Thank you for having us. Very happy to be here for this podcast.

Alessandro Oppo: Thank you. As a first question, I'll ask you: what is CitizenOS?

Margo Loor: Sure. CitizenOS is an online tool that grassroots communities, organizations, networks, people, villages can use to make decisions jointly. It has several functions. You can use it for idea gathering at the beginning of the decision-making process. You can then move on to discussion where people present their arguments and have an online discussion about the ideas. Then you can move on to a voting phase or seek consensus, depending on what you're after. Finally, there's a follow-up stage where the proposals that have been accepted by the community are followed up on to see if they've actually been put into practice. It's an online tool for grassroots joint decision-making.

Alessandro Oppo: And how does it work for the citizen? Is there an interface they can use?

Margo Loor: Yeah, so it's a SaaS tool - software as a service. You go on the website, log into the web app. You can use your mobile device or your laptop desktop. There's an interface that you use to interact with these functions.

Alessandro Oppo: At the moment, can citizens also organize idea gathering discussions, or is it more for institutions that decide to use the software?

Margo Loor: Institutions can use the software, but we intended it for grassroots networks, for non-formal citizen groups. They can be formal - there may be an NGO, there may be a local municipality. For example, we have several of them using CitizenOS. But the original design was done so that either individual people or small unorganized groups of people, or slightly organized groups of people, movements and the like, can initiate idea gathering and discussions. It's not primarily - or first and foremost - it's not an involvement tool or participatory policymaking tool where it's top-down. Its primary design is bottom-up.

Alessandro Oppo: Do you have any use case that was used by some community, by some institutions, some topic that was discussed?

Margo Loor: Let's look at a couple of examples. One example comes from Indonesia. In Indonesia, on a number of islands - the smaller islands, as Indonesia is a nation of islands with very many - there was a big issue with waste management. In a lot of places, waste management was fairly non-existent. It was piled together and then torched occasionally - I don't know if you can call that waste management. So people were having that problem, and discussions were initiated about what could be the possible solutions. During those discussions, people took photos from their islands, different areas of the problem, and they posted them on CitizenOS into these discussions. Then they were talking about what the possible solutions could be. Some potential solution ideas emerged, and these were voted on. At that point, the government became involved because, due to logistics, it required the participation of some government institutions to implement some of the ideas that had been originally initiated by citizens from these islands. Working solutions came from that.

The other example is very recent - it's actually ongoing. It comes from the country that I'm in, Estonia. It was initiated by a group of people who felt that we need to set, as a nation or as a people, Estonians need to set a future vision and direction for the country. Obviously there's a constitution which says the purpose of the country is to maintain the nation and the culture. But there was a sort of spreading feeling among people that there's no agreed vision of where do we want to go as Estonians, as a people.

Alessandro Oppo: I was wondering, is this tool mainly used inside Estonia or also outside?

Margo Loor: CitizenOS can be used anywhere, but the most recent example was within Estonia, where the idea gathering was about the dreams that people have about where they want the country to be in 30 years' time. It's ongoing, so people are right now submitting different dreams. There are these groups of people gathering in different places around the country. They're doing the dreaming of the future and then writing things into CitizenOS. In a few months' time, it will be taken and written into a sort of cohesive text about where we see the country going. But it's very much grassroots-initiated. It wasn't even an organization - it was just a group of people that started it.

Alessandro Oppo: I like it. I was thinking, how is the relationship with institutions? Because I know that in some places, politicians or people working inside institutions are not aware of the solutions that can be used - technological solutions, software that can be used for political engagement with citizens.

Margo Loor: We don't actively seek them out. However, if there is someone - and usually the story is that someone who has been a civic activist joins a movement or a party and then ends up, not ends up, but starts working for a local government or maybe even goes to the national parliament - and because they are already aware of civic tools, including CitizenOS, they sort of take us with them. But we don't directly market to or somehow do directed contacts with either national or local governments.

Alessandro Oppo: So they contact you basically - you or CitizenOS - to use the tool for some...

Margo Loor: Sometimes they do. Sometimes I just notice that they've started using it, because you don't need to tell us. You can just come to the website, start up the web app, register an account, and you can start creating a public topic or a private topic or an idea gathering. But sometimes if they feel that they need us to do some training for them beforehand on how to use the tool in the best way, then they do contact us. We're actually in the process of writing up - we had some good cooperation with some local governments - and in the next month or so we're writing up a better-described use case about how CitizenOS was used by a local municipality to engage citizens, just to showcase that you can use it the other way around too. Even though the primary design is bottom-up, it can be used for participatory policymaking as well.

Alessandro Oppo: I was curious about the design of the platform. What is the story behind it? Was there someone that designed it, a team of people? How old is CitizenOS?

Margo Loor: I'll try to make it brief. CitizenOS grew out of another civic movement, which was called at first "Let's Do It Estonia" and later "World Cleanup." It was an ecological movement. Different countries were doing these massive national cleanups where people would come out and in one or two days clean up their country of garbage that was lying around in nature and places where it's not supposed to be. Then a few countries, after they had done it for a few years - once a year - but then the next year they see that it needs to be done again because waste management wasn't proper and people were still throwing garbage in places it shouldn't be. They asked, "Okay, so how long do we keep doing this?" And that's what led us to think that maybe we should create a tool that enables - or what if there were a tool that would enable people to jointly think about how would we like the waste to be managed so that we wouldn't have to clean the country every year? And that sort of started the thinking towards, let's create this tool.

Design-wise, we're right now on our third version of design, so there have been iterations towards where we are now. There are a number of design choices which you - maybe if you go to the portal for the first time, you don't consciously notice, but a lot of thought has gone into them. For example, I think in most places these days, you can create a personal profile, you can put your photo and things. We don't - I mean, there is somewhat a very minimal profile, but we don't show whenever you post an argument, we don't show your picture next to it because we don't want it to be about persons or people. We want the discussion to be about the content, the arguments. So unlike many other places where people can comment - and for example, there's no comments. You can post arguments. So it asks, "Okay, so what's your point? And how do you explain and prove it?" So there are these design choices or design features that aim to make it a rational discussion instead of something that becomes emotionally bloated.

Alessandro Oppo: Absolutely. I was thinking, you are probably updating the software with new ideas. Is there anything you're working on right now, new features?

Margo Loor: There's a bunch of things in the pipeline, but the past two months, two or three months and the upcoming few are difficult for us right now. So right now, within the next, I would say two or three months, we're solving some bugs and issues, but we're not coming out with big new features. Obviously, there's a lot of thinking around - and so far we've been very careful about AI due to all kinds of different reasons, but the world seems to be moving in that direction so powerfully that it may still be useful in what we do as well. If I give you one quick example, then if very many people give their idea or opinion or argument about something, then it becomes overwhelming. And it's difficult to have an overview of, okay, so what's the general mindset that is being expressed? And in such things, AI obviously has its strengths. However, it also has the things we're careful of, like the biases and things. So, are we maintaining the code? Yes. Are there features we're thinking about or that are in the backlog? Yes. Right now, it's a slower period for us within a half-year period or so.

Alessandro Oppo: It's interesting because some other projects that we - people that we interviewed - they were working on some new software for civic tech and the software was new and was also using AI, while CitizenOS is pre-AI. And so at the moment it doesn't use AI at all, right? So you're trying to find a way to implement it in a cautious way.

Margo Loor: Yeah, to take what's valuable but without the problems that have already been identified. I'm not saying AI is bad or it's good summarily. I think if it's a considered, aware design choice and you build your tool so that you know about the possible problems and you design for them, then I don't see a problem with it. I'm certain that we will be using some. In fact, this isn't right now a feature of CitizenOS, but the Estonian Dreaming project that I described - there actually AI is going to be used because if 35,000 or 50,000 people submit their dreams, then it will be very difficult to work with that amount of information without using a large language model. So one will be used to detect common themes and bring out the common dreams that people have about the country. So yeah, that's the direction it's going to take anyway.

Alessandro Oppo: I was curious about all the other ideas in the pipeline. I suppose ideas that maybe will require maybe a lot of time to be developed, or maybe they are just ideas at the moment. But if you can share any of them, or maybe you can't, I don't know.

Margo Loor: There's a number of things that have to do with integrations, which aren't that exciting to talk about. But maybe it's more important or relevant to say that if someone is listening and they have been using CitizenOS, say, a few years ago - because we've been around for a number of years now - then what they haven't seen and they should come and see on the platform is the idea gathering functionality, which we released quite recently. It's the latest big, big, big update to the platform. Because again, we put a lot of thought into it. I've been doing as a moderator - I've been helping some of the processes in Estonia where people have come together for citizen assemblies and joint decision-making processes. And sometimes in the beginning of those, idea gathering was done using very simplistic tools like "here's a Google form, submit," and nobody could comment on or upvote or downvote each other's ideas or any of that. All of the dreams that we had about what would an ideal idea gathering look like - we put into the design brief and then eventually released as a big feature update. So I would say, if you haven't used that but you're aware of CitizenOS, then come and give that a try. It's something that I'm excited about and excited to use.

Alessandro Oppo: I'm also curious to try it. And I was thinking about integrations. Could it be also integration with other civic tech software?

Margo Loor: That's a very interesting one. I mean, we can definitely talk about that one because now when I said integrations, I was thinking more along the lines of integrations with identification tools because one big area in civic or participatory tools is how do you make sure that the people that are participating are real people at the same time without endangering people's identities somehow if a bad actor wants to target them. So it's a big thinking area.

But the question that you actually asked about integration with other civic tech tools - I've been thinking about it for almost as long as CitizenOS has existed. We have data formats for a number of things. So if you have a spreadsheet, then we have data formats that you can use. If you open the file up in Excel, it will look like a table. And if you open it up in Google Sheets, it will still look like a table and all the data will be there and correctly formatted. Or to look at a larger example, something that I'm also working with are online courses. Online learning and online courses have this data format called SCORM. If you create an online course, you can import it into many different learning management systems, and it will still look more or less the same because the SCORM format is recognized.

We don't have that - or at least I'm not aware. Maybe you are. But I don't think we have that for a decision. But I think we should because when we started thinking about CitizenOS in the beginning, and we thought, "Okay, what are the stages of decision-making?" Then we thought - or we still think - that they're fairly standard stages. So gather ideas, talk about ideas, select the ones that you want to vote on, vote, follow up. So why couldn't we? We can't do it single-handedly, but why couldn't we create a sort of data interchange format where if you have a - and I think it's less likely that in the middle of the process, you would want to transfer from CitizenOS to Moodamos to the Icelandic software, etc. It's more realistic, though, that if you have - say you're Fridays for Future and you've been using a civic tech tool and you have a history of decisions you've made and then the civic tech tool, I don't know, closes down, something happens and you want to migrate it so that you wouldn't lose all of your history of the past decisions. And maybe some of them are still being applied. That's where something like this would be immensely helpful. So if there are people listening to this podcast that are aware of maybe already a pre-existing tool or are running other civic tech tools and have also thought about the same thing, I think this would be extremely interesting if it came out of this.

Alessandro Oppo: Yeah, interoperability. I know that Metagov is working on that and also other organizations are very interested by maybe creating this standard between so that... Yeah, that is interesting about recovering the history and moving it to a new software, but also thinking about maybe doing brainstorming with a platform and then voting on another platform and so on. But also, that seems not so easy to do at the moment, but I know that there are people that are working on it.

Margo Loor: Okay, that's excellent. At the moment, I think it's quite difficult to do this, or there's a lot of manual copy-pasting or whatnot. But if that would be the case at one point, I think that would be a tremendous addition to the whole civic tech field.

Alessandro Oppo: Yes, maybe at the moment some trials with human in the middle can be done to see if it works and then automatize everything. Also, I'm thinking that probably in the next few years with this increasing - I mean, AI is becoming better every month. And so probably we will see also a new kind of civic tech software that maybe revolutionizes everything. I don't know, I'm very curious actually.

Margo Loor: Yeah, I just had a discussion today with some people about the moment in history where we are. I don't know, maybe you or someone else has other ideas. I personally think that it looks like AI is going to free up people's time. It looks like there's going to be more people who have less to do. Now, there's a bad way to think about it or a negative way to think about it, and a positive way to think about it. The negative way to think about it is, "Okay, lots of people unemployed." But I have a good friend who says that it is strange that in the 21st century, countries still measure their success by how many people have to work.

So, if we combine the ongoing AI revolution with things like civic salary - I'm not sure about the English term - basic universal income, something like that. So, if we imagine a positive future around this scenario where we go from a five-day work week to a four-day work week to a three-day work week - okay, three is maybe thinking too far, maybe four-day work week. And then there's an element of universal basic income. Then there's a question of, so people have extra time. Right now, in a lot of cases, the counter-argument to more civic participation has been, "I don't have time. I work nine to six, nine to seven. I don't have mental space, I don't have physically, I don't have time." Then more people would have more time. My hope is that as it goes on, we can increase the amount of input people have into running their societies and running their communities. But I'm an optimist.

Alessandro Oppo: Yeah, I'm thinking also about what is work, because now it seems that one of the most important things are data. And so if we are talking, that can also be like a sort of data extraction, data mining. So in some way, we are also working just if we talk. So I imagine with some civic software, the transcription of what we say can actually be like the production of something valuable.

Margo Loor: We do, and I think a lot of civic tech tools work with universities because there are researchers looking into the data that is coming out of civic tech tools to better understand digital participation and how to govern communities and societies digitally. We also have cooperation with and are right now negotiating a new cooperation with Italian University here in Estonia, but a few others too that we've cooperated with in other countries over the years. So I very much think that civic tools are a source of valuable data as long as it's properly managed and guarded.

Alessandro Oppo: Absolutely. And I was thinking also about motivation, because it is true what you say - a lot of times people say, "Yeah, I have to work, I cannot participate in the public life." And so I thought, yeah, of course in the future if people have more time, maybe they can participate. It's also true that apparently now people have more time than in the past, but still there are a lot of distractions, media and so on. So I'm wondering if there could be other ways to motivate people. So I'm thinking about gamification and also thought about systems where I don't know if a student decides to participate in something related to climate change, to environment and so on. Maybe they can receive a free bus ticket or a free pizza in a restaurant. Because I also feel that there are a lot of people that could be the owner of a pizzeria that maybe he is - he has a political sensibility, but maybe he doesn't have time or he doesn't have the energy or maybe he doesn't know where to start. Because it's also like, usually young people are the ones that want to change the world, while older people usually they're demotivated in some way.

Margo Loor: Well, let me quickly share a dream that I have and it relates to what you say. You talked about it on a more granular level and I think it's interesting, especially if you think about how could we create a sort of wider system where civic participation would be a value to trade, but not in the bad sense. But I do think we in certain areas should, and in fact, in certain areas we do compensate civic participation.

The dream then is that in Estonia we have a one-chamber parliament. So it's only elected representatives that sit in the one chamber of the parliament. But I've asked people, "What if we had two chambers where one chamber is the representatives, the elected representatives, and the second chamber is a sort of permanent people's assembly where a random but representative body of people would participate or discuss the most important issues for some period of time, let's say half a year?"

You are similar to sort of national - okay, maybe mandatory national service isn't a good idea. Maybe US jury service is a good example. So when they select the jury, they look at the voters list and then they randomly pick the people from the voters list and then they invite them for jury service. And if you don't have a good reason to say no, you can't say no. So in the same manner, citizens would receive invitations to participate in this permanent people's assembly or the second chamber of the parliament. And while they are participating for that half a year, their time would be compensated. And that would then mean they would need to look at jointly and discuss the most important or the bills that influence people's lives the most. They couldn't be expected to look at everything that the parliament works with because there's lots of small amendments and things, but look at the big bills. Then in half a year's time, they are thanked, they go their own way, and then a new body of people is invited. If something like that were to happen, then I think we can't make it happen or shouldn't make it happen by saying to people that, "This is something you must do and we won't compensate." I think compensating people's civic participation would be very much appropriate.

Alessandro Oppo: Absolutely. Also, I'm thinking like in ancient Greek democracy, citizens were compensated because they were losing their day because they had to vote and so they could not work. And also it's the same with professional politicians. So they are paid and so should be citizens. And I think about many times I asked myself, what could be the future of democracy? I think maybe in 20 or 30 years. And that could also be a question if you have any idea about it. But also, it's very interesting, the approach that can be taken to arrive at that kind of democracy. So because now we have a certain kind - mainly in Europe or in the US, Western democracy, liberal democracy system. And yeah, I'm thinking about what you proposed is a sort of maybe hybridization, a sort of test. And then other tests can be done. So the system doesn't change from day to night. So if you have anything to share.

Margo Loor: Yeah, I think like revolutions where we throw out everything that has pre-existed and then try to put a new thing in place. I think those are dangerous. Karl Popper said that you shouldn't experiment on people and societies. You should sort of properly think about and create all the best arguments, but best arguments require good evidence. And evidence isn't readily available unless you run these tests, unless you try things out and see how it goes. And therefore, whenever either a city like Paris or some other place uses either participatory or online participatory methods, I always look at them with curiosity because how they go provides arguments for or evidence for arguments for or against change.

Well, I mean, the most common sentence that you hear around - and I agree with that sentence - is that we're trying to run 21st century, highly technological societies using 16th or 17th century political technology or political system. And the gap is growing.

On the one hand, I'm worried, a great deal worried when I look at democracy indexes, which year on year are showing the decline of democracy. So less democratic countries and within the countries, less democracy or less civic space. But at the same time, on the other hand, I think it might be that what we're seeing is transformation of democracy. And if we measure the sort of old classical indicators, then we see decline. But if we looked at a new changed set of indicators, we would actually see more activism and more desire and wish to participate by people. But it looks different. It's not the same type of legitimacy that we were looking for in democracy in the previous century and not the same type of formal organized participation that we were looking for.

So in terms of the future, I can't paint an exact picture, obviously, but it definitely has a strong technological component because that's what the human future tends to look like in all areas. And it seems to, and that's something I'm happy about, it seems to also have a strong participatory component because people seem to be willing to - not just willing to, but demanding to participate in certain aspects of society. If any chance at all is given to them, obviously, if everything is suppressed, then they can't do it, which, worryingly, is also a trend in some countries.

Alessandro Oppo: I agree with you. I'm also thinking like this - I mean less people are voting, but I'm thinking that a lot of people are using social networks and also if putting "like" is not as voting, it's like a sort of necessity to participate and express in this way because those are the tools that most of the people are using at the moment.

Margo Loor: Well, most people in the world don't have the experience of online voting because only a few countries in the world have it. But, you know, I've had that experience luckily in Estonia for 10 years now where liking something on social media and voting in national or local elections is only very slightly different. The difference, I mean, in terms of what it involves as a process, the only step that goes in there is the identification step that I need to verify my identity with the ID infrastructure. But otherwise, it's I'm selecting who I like on screen and then clicking like and voting for them.

It's been very, very controversial in the world. In Estonia, too, there are people that have arguments against it. But I think we would see a lot more voting if this was available in more countries.

Alessandro Oppo: Interesting also, I know that Estonia on this side is quite progressive. How would you define it compared to other countries?

Margo Loor: Yeah. The thing we all carry around, the national identity card, because it has an electronic identification side to it, so it's not just a physical card, enables, if I need to or if I want to, to identify myself beyond any doubt or hack or anything online, which means that when I talk online or interact online with my government or my country, then my government or my country knows that it's me. And that enables a lot of other things. So it enables a lot of e-services and it also enables online voting. And it is this component, I think mostly even this component, which is something that people oppose in many countries. Like they don't want a government-issued national identity system enabling your identification online. And historically, I can understand their reasons, but in the modern day and age, I think, you're traceable online anyway, maybe doing the good stuff online with online identities is something that we should be more open to.

Alessandro Oppo: Yeah, I agree that it's a quite sensible topic. I can understand why some people disagree. It can be... But going back to...

Margo Loor: Yeah. And by the way, the last comment is that that's because on CitizenOS we enable people to either use their hard identification, the ID system in Estonia, or then use the soft identification, just use their Google or whatnot logins, because some of those decisions that communities or people make if they want them to be sent forward for implementation in Estonia to local government or even as a proposal to the national government, then it needs to have strong identification. However, if you're just making a decision for your own village, there's no reason to necessarily do the strong identification. You can just do your Google login and then use CitizenOS that way. So we enable both.

Alessandro Oppo: Different layers of authentication. It makes sense. And I was wondering about the team, because about the team of CitizenOS, how many people are working there? What are the...

Margo Loor: Like modern organizations, it's difficult to say an exact number. It's more like a cloud of people. We have more people in Indonesia than we have in Estonia. We have two main locations. So one is Indonesia and one is Estonia. But between those two locations, I think I'm not incorrect when I say that altogether around 25 people are in one way or another contributing to CitizenOS. So they might be working, they might be volunteering, they might be contributing part-time. Like I said, we're in a difficult period right now, so we've had to scale that back. But that applies to mostly Estonian side. Indonesia is doing great.

Alessandro Oppo: And what are you struggling with as an organization? Or you specifically, if you're working on something or someone in the organization, you're working on a new future or something, but you need... I don't know, maybe you're not able to solve something and you're thinking day and night about... Maybe someone that listens can decide to contact you with a very good idea.

Margo Loor: So, I mean, organizationally, but that I think isn't something that would interest your listeners. We're reworking our financial model. So, we used to have for many years a very good and steady source of income and that has recently changed. And now we're in a fairly short period of time having to rework our financial model, which does actually mean that we're looking for, especially within EU countries, we're looking for sort of cooperation partners that we can join to because different EU projects require organizations from other member states to coordinate. And we've done that in the past, but it would be interesting to find maybe new partners as well.

But otherwise, I think a few years ago, we wrote down these big unsolved issues in participatory decision-making. And I've mentioned them here during the discussion already, but to sort of clearly name them, one is the issue of identification. So it's easy when a country has some kind of national system. A lot of countries don't. And then it becomes even more problematic - like, how can you? We've talked to Switzerland and a lot of time they're trying to move their very excellent offline participatory system into more online because of younger generation and struggling with identification among other things.

So the second big thing is the problem of massive participation. So if you have to say you're the European Commission, you ask for citizens of EU to participate on a decision and then five million people participate and contribute their opinion and then you're like, "Okay, what do we do with five million opinions? How do we understand what people actually want to say?" So that's another one. And I think there are interesting solutions or interesting ideas that have been created. But it's not, I wouldn't say like check mark solved, AI came and solved it due to the sort of biases it can have and some of the other known issues.

Then obviously there's the big problem of deliberate bad actors. So if you have someone inserting, you know, fake news or information attacks into the decision-making, it was interesting when we started creating in Estonia a separate tool which was originally based on CitizenOS code - we have an open source code so anybody can come and take the code and do with it what they wish and also check it. And people have. But we created a separate tool for the Estonian parliament so that people could do petitions or people's - yeah, let's say petition. And you need a thousand people to sign it in Estonia in order for it to be considered by the national parliament.

And then we asked the Parliament Information Office, we said, "You know, what if a hostile country will pay a thousand people, I don't know, 500 euros a piece and ask them to submit three petitions per day and sort of overwhelm the parliament?" So do a denial of service attack, not the technical one, but like a content one. But they seemed very, very unfazed. They said, "Let's solve the problem when we get there." But I see it as an issue. One thing is if someone does an overwhelming information attack. The other thing is if you're being clever about it and inserting bits of false data or false information into a public or participatory decision making. Those kinds of things is a third thing that not only we, but I think many others are thinking about. So does it keep us up at night? Not really, but is it something we think about? Then yeah, absolutely.

Alessandro Oppo: Yeah. Both the registration and how to scale the information system are both, I would say, interesting problems. I also thought a little bit about the identification systems. I don't know if I have any solution. Not now, not at the moment. I haven't asked anything about you, so if you'd like to share anything about your professional background and also academic, how it happened that you became passionate about civic tech participation.

Margo Loor: So everything I've done in my adult life falls into a triangle - is technology, then open society and education. Within that triangle is where I operate, even though I originally studied law and I even worked in a law firm for four or five years.

The technology part is simple. I grew up in the first wave of home accessible computers and the early internet where you had to write your own tools and coding was massively exciting. And that sort of got me started on the technology. And I'm like an early adopter of things. CitizenOS isn't using AI at the moment. I myself am a heavy user. So that part is easy.

Now, the open society part, that came to me via something called the debate movement, which is something I got involved in when I was in high school. And that led me to the ideas of Karl Popper and having good arguments and trying to make rational decisions and building processes where you don't primarily look at the emotion, but look at what is the reason and what is the evidence. And that sort of grew into also at the time in Estonia, the whole organized civic sector was starting up. So we established the first bigger NGOs which are still around. And so that sort of got me started. So it's been these kinds of activities that have brought me to where CitizenOS was initiated and is today.

Alessandro Oppo: And do you have anything to share about your personal life? Like, did you grow up? Also related to your childhood?

Margo Loor: Well, I mean, Estonia was occupied by the Soviet Union at the time when I was born and during my early childhood. And so I have a vague memory of what the sort of repressive communist regime looks like from the inside. Obviously, I didn't bear the brunt of it because I was a kid.

I vividly remember the moment where Estonia was nearing the regaining of our independence. I had to before that on my school uniform, I had to wear the red flag of the Soviet Union. So I took it off and I remember the bush on my school street where I sort of threw it in the bush and replaced it with our national flag. And I've often been said that I couldn't picture myself living in a non-open society. This is, it's something which is a very vital part of me. And that's why I do what I can to preserve the participation, the discussion, the openness of talking about decisions and jointly making decisions that influence people's lives. So it's sort of personally important.

Alessandro Oppo: Thank you. As maybe the last question, if you have any message for the people in the civic tech space that are working, I don't know, creating new tools or maybe trying to do what you're doing but in other countries.

Margo Loor: Sure. I mean, like, keep innovating. There's a number of fields where outside of civic tech, I mean, where we can say that, "Okay, we've arrived at some plateau." Civic tech isn't one of them. I think it's a vibrant area. There's challenges to address. Maybe I'm a little, sometimes I'm a little not worried, but it makes me think that there are e-governance tools, but maybe a little less e-democracy tools. So I would be even more enthusiastic or joyful if I saw that within the whole civic tech field, the e-democracy tools part of it, grow more or more innovation happening there. You know, some of them will only be sort of time-limited tests, as you said, but those tests are valuable. So even if we're doing something with like project funding for a limited time period, then if you're able to document and leave the results you achieved somehow to last, even when the tool maybe shuts down, then that is very valuable because it provides evidence for the arguments for a new type of democracy that is in the process of being born. I think it's very, very exciting to see where it goes. So keep innovating.

Alessandro Oppo: So thank you a lot, Margo. It was a pleasure, really.

Margo Loor: Thank you. Yes, very nice. Really enjoyed the discussion.

Alessandro Oppo: Thank you.

End of Interview