Ben Knight, "The Internet's Missing Link: Tools for Turning Talk Into Action"

"The Internet's Missing Link: Tools for Turning Talk Into Action"
A talk by Ben Knight, at Personal Democracy Forum 2014.
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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.