The Internet's Missing Link: Tools for Turning Talk Into Action
Ben Knight
Personal Democracy Forum 2014
Thanks a lot Micheal and thanks everyone
for having me this very faraway place.
A few years ago I started a PhD
researching the evolution of
collective intelligence and humans.
I was really obsessed with this
one question which was why is it that
humans as far as we know are the only
species that's getting collectively more
and more intelligent over time ? With
every generation we're able to do things
that are more complex than the previous
generation. Naturally I was
sent to Texas and ended up working with
chimpanzees, teaching them to use
touch screens so to try and get to the
the bottom of this.
The question that i was asking every
night when I went home from the primate
Center I'd open my computer and I'd see
all this evidence of things going
seriously wrong in the world.
Things like ecosystem collapse,
out-of-control extractive economy on a
global scale and income inequality just
going through the roof and everywhere
you look. My initial research
question was pushed out by a much more
urgent question which is how is it that
if we're getting so much smarter all the
time
how is it that our biggest institutions
are just behaving in a way that's less and
less intelligent. So unintelligent
that it's putting the future of the
planet and everyone on it at risk.
The internet has been heralded for
decades now as a potentially
transformative force. In terms of
accumulating knowledge and making
communication instantaneous and
accessible at connecting people more
than they've ever been connected. And it
really does have that potential when you
see things like Wikipedia which we take
for granted every day where a group of
people have set up to to make the sum
total of all human knowledge accessible
to anyone anywhere. And they're doing it
and it's amazing. That brings up
another question which is
you know if this is the case, why has the
internet not helped in terms of, you know,
our largest institutions behaving in a
severely unintelligent way that's
putting everything at risk.
Well at the moment, the internet feels
like immensely powerful but
disembodied brain. You hear this metaphor
a lot about the internet being like this
distributed global brain. At the moment
it feels like it's sort of floating off
somewhere in space disconnected from the
distributed global body or like the
limbs in the physical world that are
deeply impacting on our environment.
That's where the big institutions are
coming. The things that really affect
our ecology and our living
conditions on a huge scale. These are
things without a brain. Theses are huge
institutions driven by self-interest and
without anyone really at the helm.
Just driven by these processes
that would we've put in place over decades
and totally disconnected from this
amazing wealth of collective
intelligence that's increasing
exponentially. In 2011 something
really interesting started happening.
I have been sitting in Texas getting so
disillusioned with the slow pace of
academic research, translating into
real-world impact that I started feeling
more and more guilt. I've started feeling
irresponsible for pouring my life into
this academic pursuit that was
interesting but just felt so slow
compared to the urgency of the problems
we're facing. So I came back to New
Zealand and i got involved in grassroots
community organizing and social justice
activism. I just felt this real need
to connect with real people in real
communities. Then in 2011,
largely through social media
seeing as many people
in this room would have experienced
seeing these images flooding through
all the new kind of social movement a
social movement that looked
distinctively different to anything I've
seen before. Starting in Tunisia
in january 2011 and then
spreading through to the arab spring
protests in Egypt and then the
indignados and 15M mouvements
in Latin America and Spain and then
the Occupy movement and Wall Street
starting in Wall Street and then spreading
to literally hundreds of cities around
the world even as far away as New
Zealand. So this felt to me and I'm sure
to many other people here like the first
time the internet had spoken out into
the real world. The first time this
sort of massive interconnexion had lead
people in really large numbers to get
out on the streets. And so if this is
the first time the Internet has really
spoken
what do you think its first word was ?
The internet more than anything else
that was seen in the last few years has
provided this massive infrastructure
immensely powerful for mobilizing huge
numbers of people to come together and
all say no at once. But then what
happened ?
We were sort of left with this
situation this vacuum once the
oppressive regime has been deposed once
the petition has been successful
the sort of once something's been
taken away when you mobilized in
opposition to something
how do you then transition to sustain
constructive collective action ? So how do
we get from this situation to this
situation how do we get from the angry
infant that doesn't say yes until
they're you know six months further down
the track ? And how do we sort of take
this mass of information that we're all
exchanging at an ever-increasing pace
and translate it into constructive
generative shared action ? That's
what a bunch of us in Wellington,
a bunch of technologists open source
developers facilitators and activists
have been working on for the last 18 to
24 months. It came out of
this experience of collective
decision-making on a large scale and
knowing that this was happening in
cities all over the world on every
continent that people who've never met
are coming together were talking they
were deliberating and they were
organizing a directly democratic way,
where every voice could be heard with diverse
perspectives could contribute to a
process that would lead groups to come
to better outcomes than any individual
would buy themselves. Seeing the
power of that process and the potential
on a really large scale for it to have a
transformative effect. But also seeing
the flip side of that. Seeing the just a
practical constraints of needing to be
in the same place at the same time
seeing what happens to people when
they're in meetings for five hours and
nothing gets decided.
Or when the loudest voices in the room
dominate the discussion have a
disproportionate influence over the
decision-making and over the course of
weeks seeing the disintegration that
selection pressure leads to. The
same entrenched power structures emerged
from these groups that had an explicit
commitment to and two deep deliberative
Democratic inclusive process end up with
these emergent informal sort of
accidental dictatorships. We felt like
we're using the internet to communicate
every day
surely there's tool out there surely
there's some way of using that
infrastructure to not just talk but to
have discussions, then lead to
building a shared understanding and
eventually to agreed outcomes that can
be implemented. The platform
that we came up with came to be known as
Loomio which has got two
elements in the name via the idea of a
loom weaving disparity threads
together into a coherent whole. Also
the illumination that comes with from
the collective wisdom of a group of
people with diverse perspectives feeding
together. Where we're at now is
we've got a robust beta
prototype that's being used by thousands
of groups around the world and it looks
a bit like this. It's a really
simple user-friendly tool that allows
groups to have a discussion, start a
discussion on any topic. If the group
gets to a point where it makes sense to
try and make a decision together it
then anyone can put up a proposal. So a
good proposal is just a very clear
course of action I think the group
should do this. Like an in-person
group that works really well together
you have this flexibility where
you can change your position at any time.
So someone makes a compelling point that
you hadn't thought of you can go from
disagreeing to agreeing. This is sort of
taking the basic protocol the sort
of the name of collective
decision-making that was so that was
really spread through social media
around the Occupy movement and around
the other the other social movements and
the wave in 2011 and putting it into the
the most accessible online environment
that that we can design. When you
get to the end of the process you always
have a clear outcome. An actionable clear
outcome. This is where
all of these groups that are currently
trying to make decisions through
facebook trying to make decisions
through email these platforms that were
just not built for having that
convergence around a shared outcome that
works for everyone. As soon as
we had a prototype up and running it was
taken up by just such a diverse range of
of groups that it ended up being
used for things that we could never have
anticipated. One of the first groups
use in a large-scale was the same city
council that 12 months previously had
been sending us eviction notices to
clear us from the City Square. They used
it for a large-scale public consultation.
Just in the last little while we
have groups set up in a group of
community gardens in Bulgaria a
Community Hospital in Vietnam we've got
Bitcoin mining coops using it right
through two groups of twelve-year-olds
making decisions in their school
councils.
Something that's appealing
to everyone from anarchist
collectives through to government
departments feels like something that's
got a lot of potential for widespread
uptake. We've built this
beta version over the next six months
we'll be bringing out of beta to a full
mobile release. We've just run a
crowdfunding campaign that I know some
people in this room contributed to.
So we're deeply grateful for now having
resources to take it through to a full
release that can scale.
We're really just driving forward
and building with the open source
community something that we see as
public infrastructure for distributed
group decision making. Some of the groups
that are using it. Where we're at now
I feel in history is a really really
interesting place to be. And it's a
a really hopeful time in some ways and I
think that's what the the spirit of this
conference really captures, that we've
got this infrastructure with more
potential for liberation for inter
connection. For genuine distributed
meaningful democracy. And with the same
infrastructure is increasingly under
threat. We've got this digital Commons
that's increasingly being enclosed.
We've got all these these spaces that
feel public and really are not. Space
that feels like you can freely
participate when every single behavior
that you perform is being monetized, and
is being sold to the highest bidder.
The challenge now is to support the
ecosystem of tools that are developing
that are held publicly but held in the
public good that a purpose-driven not
profit maximizing. And they're some
really amazing tools coming out.
There's a group in Argentina called
"Democracy always" who've built the first
user-friendly platform for liquid
democracy for proxy voting. Really
impressive project. And I feel like the
challenge is really to to look at what's
already there.
This burgeoning sphere of publicly-held
Civic tech infrastructure and support it
and see what we can do to support other
projects coming up. As it's only when
we're all participating in meaningful
democracy. Democracy as a distributed
network of real people in real
communities coming together to make
decisions that work for everyone.
Only then will the public internet have
delivered on its real potential.
Thank you very much.