Thank you so much.

I have this kind of mess, but I really appreciate a nicer version.

Thank you.

It’s really interesting to imagine putting something together along this front, in terms of digital infrastructure and potentially the legal implications of natural personhood. Let’s keep pursuing this.

I wonder if that’s part of the, let’s say, shadow agenda around some of these bilateral agreements.

It’s both mutual accountability but also political cover. Something you were saying before was if if someone does it somewhere in a small way, then you can say “they did it there” and create a political cover in a useful way.

That’s exciting.

This is interesting. It goes beyond this idea of international networks, which we’ve all been part of and in most cases, fall flat. There’s not much to them. Superficially, what we are describing looks the same, but it’s a much deeper, a more robust theory of change.

There might be some that are at different points. Therefore, you could combine them even if they’re strange bedfellows for every other reason.

It’s interesting to imagine that same asynchronous condition for other examples of digital or political transformation. How do you cohortize groups of countries or municipalities or whatever according to some sort of progression toward a transformative legal agenda or a transformative economic agenda?

It’s something that strikes me from the beginning of our conversation just now. In a way, we’re having a synchronous conversation at two different moments in timeline of COVID’s progression.

You know where’s zero COVID, Jayne is Halifax. I was talking to…You can at least set foot in Canada.

We should get one of those little Audrey robots that we had at the Regulatory Experimentation workshop.

I’d be curious, Jayne, to hear your thoughts on how some of this can be re applied to the opportunities at hand in Canada right now with the infrastructure department.

I like that, that slow build of digital infrastructure. Jayne and I were talking earlier today about the question of what qualifies as infrastructure. Jayne, we’ve had a lot of opportunities to talk about that through our work with Infrastructure Canada.

For me, it’s not immediately clear. But regardless, I want to learn from what you’ve done and potentially adapt these approaches and apply them to some of these longer crises that we’re facing as a society.

How do we build on these principles of co-creation, swift apology, agile methodology, and get to some of the deeper, more substantive issues like ecological crisis or crisis of representation and sovereignty of natural phenomena? Is it responsible to address long-term crises, when there are immediate crises and lives to ...

Right now there’s not enough attention being given to how we can do things differently because there are people dying. I’m thinking a lot about the next step, as we emerge from the crisis. How do we build on the kind of thinking that you’ve done? How do we build ...

These are all top of mind for me, in an actionable sense. Tomorrow morning I’m going to be on a call with the State Department of Public Health, and then I’m going to be on the phone with a van guy to figure out how we send a van to ...

Since last we talked, I’ve started working for a company that does COVID response, essentially. It’s a healthcare company. I’m dealing with issues like, getting vaccines to rural communities and getting vaccines to underserved populations, such as elderly people who you can’t log on to a computer.

The question is, how do we maintain these code bases, of course, but then continue to re adapt them and improve them for other conditions? Conditions where potentially you couldn’t be pulling levers like the distribution modality. In many places, you can’t be pulling levers in the same way that ...

That’s exactly it. I mean, I was talking to Ben Cerveny recently. He’s the guy behind the Foundation for Public Code. He thinks carefully about stewardship, because that’s the whole purpose of the organization.

I’m curious, in the case that you spin up something like the mask searching app (what has now turned into a broader healthcare app) – once it becomes .g0v, whose responsibility is it to maintain that codebase from a strictly software perspective?

Yeah, which speaks to the replication problem: enabling substantive change across different agencies and departments in government and across countries.

My question is the stewardship one. Once that service has been semi-internalized by government, semi legitimized, does government then assume the responsibility for stewarding it? How do you maintain these code bases? How do you continue to adapt them?

Exactly. I wonder, that seems to be an interesting way of connecting it and legitimizing it, but not necessarily introducing the risk of connecting it to government.

Something that you described potently is if someone hacks together a thing, it doesn’t make sense to try and replicate it by government. It doesn’t make sense to try and stifle it. Instead, you put a .gov on it. You’re also recreating a secondary…It’s not necessarily .gov, but it’s something, ...

One idea that’s struck with me, whether it’s ecologically focused or otherwise, is ongoing stewardship.

Don’t let me put words in your mouth, Audrey, but if you can recognize those rights, and tie them to this broader package including the right to sue, and recognize that the city has jurisdiction over certain, let’s say, functions that infringed on some of these other rights, like the ...

Audrey was saying there’s all these rights that are hinted at in legal code, with the exception of the right to sue. As long as you can recognize those and then tie it to…

That in and of itself is just so exciting as a sphere of work, an agenda. I love that. Jayne, is that something you think you could pull off in Canada as part of the civic indigenous work or the rights of the nature work?

That’s really interesting. Maybe the tip of the awl, in a sense, to achieve this transformative legal structure is just to have one instance of a natural system being politically recognized. Then it’s a watershed, as long as legal rights can be re adapted in other systems.

I wonder if the same can be said of the natural personhood of a river?

What you had mentioned was the idea of building up metadata for any given project, so that you understand the conditions around it. That way it can be abstracted and transposed and re adapted in any context. For example, I’m not copying the mask initiative that you did and pasting ...

That is such a different condition than the United States, where we’re not even checking off the boxes with mathematics and reading, let alone digital competence. I was thinking, how can we even compare the initiatives that you’re doing with open government in Taiwan with the present conditions in the ...

We were talking about digital competence instead of literacy. Digital competence means that, from a very young age, people feel like they have ownership and authority, and that they are contributing as well as receiving information.

One of the things, Audrey, that you had said the last time we spoke — it’s one of those things that gets lodged in the back of my head and I have not forgotten it — was the idea of transposing any given learning.

What we’re describing is almost a new social contract, a new protocol for a social contract, where these ideas of plurinationalism in a geographic territory speaks to a new social and political construct that’s beyond the nation state. Those protocols can be transposable from Canada to Taiwan.

I wonder now though, as we emerge from the pandemic, we need to give some careful thought to how society is structured. We are restructuring, whether we like it or not. How do we restructure?

Right. A crisis is not the moment for certain kinds of experiments. My doctoral work was around civic experimentation. You don’t do an experiment if you have no idea what the variables are.

The question is, how do we meaningfully restructure? I appreciate what you were saying: in the midst of a crisis, don’t create new data points because you don’t know what the implications will be. But after the crisis, how do we re-build in light of what has been learned?

That’s exactly the right question. “Who is we?” is exactly right, because it would be a missed opportunity if those who were making decisions before the pandemic are the same ones making the same kinds of decision after the pandemic.

Now, how do we stick with and act on all the imagination that emerged? What’s the possibility space of actual transformative politics or transformative economics, today? So much of what existed before the pandemic is clearly not something we want to replicate, or it’s not going to work anymore. Real ...

The crisis, the pandemic, cracked open the door of the status quo, in both good and bad ways. It was a moment of exception. There were all sorts of crazy intrusions into personal privacy, but it also allowed us to imagine in new ways. That moment was generative, problematic, and ...

This is exactly it, Audrey. This is truly the basis of why I wanted to talk today. We had talked during this moment of the early days of the pandemic. Now, there’s this disparity. You’re post pandemic. Many of us, especially in the United States or Canada, we’re still mid ...

Jayne, please jump in. I want you to share as much as you can. Jayne’s speaking so much about civic imagination. I’ve learned so much from Jayne about what that sphere of possibility is.

Building on all of the work that you’ve done and the thesis that you’ve proven in the moment of the pandemic, what is now up for grabs in this open government, digital hackathon space? Are you actually saying healthcare delivery broadly, hack away, or is it…

This is terrifically interesting. It’s a scope of technology that became available in the moment of the pandemic. Obviously, before the pandemic we weren’t thinking that much about mask and PPE production. Then this became a terrain that was up for grabs because of the moment of the crisis. I ...

No, I mean more like how much is up for grabs, in a way? When you and I had last spoken, it was the early days of the pandemic. You were talking about open digital infrastructure for real time mask availability. That was very pandemic-specific, and it was a new ...

I appreciate that. It’s really interesting as an approach to accountability in government. I’m curious, what is the scope of technologies or digital services that you’re playing with right now?