I quit a PhD in biotech 15 years ago to explore how to use the web to improve our collective sense-making and decision making. At the time many people either laughed at me or were shocked but I was frustrated to see our political leaders be perceived to fail even when they succeeded, or more often to fail to deliver on their promises and occasionally to see them succeed personally even when they wilfully failed the country collectively.

Motivation & Plan

My motivation is primarily for as many people, including our leaders, to be as happy as possible. To do that through democracy at the practical level I believe requires 3 things:

1. Good leadership

I wanted to help support our politicians to write cheques they can cash, to make promises they can keep and that inspire confidence in them and our democracy by all our citizens. Hearing Sir Keir Starmer complain about how difficult it is to effect change is predictable and still a clarion call for me. As is hearing politicians make promises that at best you know have no substance beneath them and at worst will be actively harmful. Or experts seeming to totally disagree with each other when actually there's 99% they agree on and to get 100% agreement we just need to help them uncover the question we need to collectively ask next.

2. Better informed citizens, voters and consumers

I want to see if we can better support ourselves as citizens, voters, consumers, to understand what's actually going on, what plans add up and make sense, and then act, vote and "consume" accordingly, responsibly, calmly, and joyfully. I'm not naïve, I don't expect most people to care or engage in depth, but history is full of examples of a small percentage of the population being able to have an outsized impact on the world, and I want to help support those aiming for win-win positive outcomes, whilst avoiding or mitigating negative outcomes.

3. Connect with others

To achieve the first two, I want to connect with others who are pro-democracy, pro collective flourishing. I want to find or create spaces to act as a rallying point for others to connect, to share what they're working on, where the funding is, where it's not, support each other and raise the profile of, raise the importance of, democratic innovation, protection and rejuvenation.

Action

Finding others

The third point is the most important to address first. There are clearly many people and organisations working on these issues, but from my perspective, they appear siloed and disconnected. I have yet to find the networks of pro-democratic innovators, funders, and thinkers coalesce in one place. I have been fortunate to increasingly find pockets of them, recently ARIA's Collective Flourishing, Sense about Science and many other previous endeavours like Cambridge's CSAP - Centre for Science and Policy and MIT's CCC - Center for Constructive Communication which I am aware of but don't yet see on a bigger map of coordinated actors.

Clarifying the problems

The goals and the opportunities should be clearly stated. This is obviously important for when we find others as we need to make sure we're speaking the same language and if we're working towards the same goal then at least avoiding duplicating efforts and at best joining forces. And it also relates to WikiSim.org (below) as well as the "1. Good leadership" above in that defining terms is essential for constructive conversations to minimise misunderstanding. For example this JAMA discussion had a significant focus on lockdowns but it was only at the end of the discussion did the two debaters then give two very different definitions of lockdown. Let's do less of that and more defining terms up front please 🙏

WikiSim.org

The first two points "1. Good leadership" and "2. Better informed citizens, voters and consumers" will benefit from multiple intersecting interventions. As I said I'm interested in how the internet can support better individual and collective sense making. The latest iteration of that experiment is WikiSim.org. Previously DataCurator.org, TheWorldSim.org, contructivediscussion.com and other smaller experiments in utilising the web for better "Barn raisings" as Jimmy Wales wrote in his latest book.

And as I said at the end of Conversation Upgrade #1 I have a bias:

I don't care who you vote for, or what you voted for, I just want us all to be slightly better informed. I want to see better conversations, I want to see people using existing tools better, and having better tools to help them make sense of our complex world. I want them to help themselves, others and me.

If we don't provide the necessary tools/mediums, and the access to pre-analysed data, how can we expect meaningful conversations, effective sense-making, or healthy democracies that depend on them?

Say hello!

If you're working on any of the above, or want to, please get in touch. If you know of any spaces where pro-democracy, pro-collective flourishing people are gathering please let me know: hello@wikisim.org