You could build the Pol.is visualization on the fly, and help everyone in the room -- and maybe in other rooms, or maybe on the Internet, clicking it manually -- participate in building that understanding, like the emotional landscape. I don’t know if I have time for a project while ...

Using the sociometric badges, you could know, we’ve asked who agrees, who disagrees. Everyone’s staying still. That was the answer to this.

Like, “Why are you unsure?” Is that statement a combination statement? Could you tease it apart? Could you frame it in a better way? There’s something that feels very satisfying about that, but I guess if we had to add an extra step, where we brought all of that into ...

It felt really successful, because people saw, they were feeling who they spent more time with. They were crossing paths with people. They were recognizing who’s never beside them. The really cool part was that everyone could participate in, for lack of a better word, interrogating the unsure people.

Yeah, was that the one that, did CS run that part?

In a physical space. It’s people are spending time together.

We say, “OK, over there, that corner is agree. That corner is disagree. If you unsure, go behind me.” You’re moving back and forth in between three spots, as you’re announcing the statements. “Who agrees, who disagrees?”

I’m informationing, sending lots of information, but that’s not an equitable conversation if you’re not sharing information, because you know lots of things. The badges, I’m so curious whether they could be used to take data from...We’ve run workshops inspired by Pol.is and vTaiwan, where we do this live in ...

Then it also has a microphone that points up. It knows how much sharing of the building of the conversation is happening. It knows, “I’m talking too much, and probably have been since I came in the room.”

As people move around through real physical worlds, talk, join groups, and spend time together, and then move, split up, and join other groups, and spend time together, they’re building a data set of how much time they spend together.

His lab has developed an open source, they call them sociometric badges. It can tie to lots of other data, but at its simplest, you go in and put on a lanyard for a conference, and it has a thing that knows what all the other lanyards’ IDs are.

I have a big intellectual crush on him. I’m still trying to grapple with the math.

[laughs] “Of course.” It was a very frank response.

Do you know him?

Has anyone thought much about the in-person experience of creating an in-person analogue of Pol.is interactions? I’ve been really interested in a guy named Alex Pentland.

I think I don’t always know where to fall on that thinking. I feel like sometimes the system needs to standardize how much aggregation is happening, and how much anonymization. That’s the only thought there. Could I have a question on vTaiwan?

Yeah, if it’s a slow opt out, potentially like your policy sort of thing, where people have to know to ask for each little bit they want to take back. Then you might not get this unique, standardized experience of metadata.

I think it feels like maybe that’s not what I get, if it was a system where the default was fully open, and everyone else wrangled back the amount of data they put into a system.

It’s the information. I don’t want full information. I’d prefer that I was able to set this default, and others knew that I had a very strong feeling for very strong reasons. There’s a bit of coercion in there, I guess.

I think this is where I was going with it. By default, I want to keep some entropy in our interaction. I want there to be a disorder. I don’t want to know who you are. That’s not full data, but that’s a very particular choice that not everyone who ...

Sometimes, I’m not knowing where Creative Commons Zero comes in or not.

When you then are trying to figure out, what am I working on? What should I pivot to? You don’t ask anyone. You look into yourself, and you have this, like, “Oh, all my supporters, what do they want me to do?” It’s a little bit like looking to a ...

Maybe you don’t want to know who I am, because then it changes our relationship. It collapses the possibility of the money. When the money defaults to not having identity and not having strings, then it’s like every possible person you meet is a potential donor of some amount.

It does change the dynamics a bit.

I think on Patreon, it’s easy for the giver to override. The default is very weak.

I think it’s the giver. I think the giver gets to decide.

Patreon can have identities attached.

By default, the platform did not assume that I wanted you to know who I was. I would start giving to you, and it would be continuous and recurring, but you wouldn’t know. When we next spoke, you wouldn’t feel like I was your micro-boss.

It’s totally Patreon, before Patreon came around, when after it started. It was based on an economy of gratitude, gifts, gifts where the money is detoxified. I give to you, because you’re doing something I like, and I want to give $5 a week, or a very small amount.

What it was trying to do was trying to create a world where, when people recognized they were getting value from someone, and that value was recurring, consistent, and it was forthcoming all the time, they could, on the platform give a weekly amount, a regular amount, that would come ...

I worked on a crowdfunding platform at one point. It’s funny, with money, it feels...

Sometimes, the transparency becomes passive if the system hides it, and people don’t know what’s being taken. They don’t know the granularity that it’s being taken with, whether it’s really coarse, or whether it’s super fine-grained.

You become understood and legible to systems.

I don’t know, just that idea of transparency as a gift.

Yeah, it’s a gift to the commons. It feels like there’s a lot of that around data. Maybe the most fine-grain data that we might store in personal data stores, but also anonymized versions of that, which maybe the value to the commons is still very high, but the loss ...

I’m really attached to the idea of gifts, because I think that’s something that we all really, a lot of understanding.

When people feel entitled to the gift of a transparent record. It’s hard to, mental models for that, for discussing it. Some people feel entitlement to government data, which is perhaps maybe more understandable, but to transcripts sometimes, to on-the-record discussions.

She does like discussing property and identity, yeah. Do you have any thoughts on transparency as...I sometimes find it difficult when people are very hard-line on transparency, which I think I sometimes imagined you were, but it doesn’t seem like you are.

It’s that vTaiwan is like a “weightless exoskeleton of technology and documentation.” That feels so true. Do you still stick by that?

It’s funny. There’s a quote that I think Liz got from you, just in personal conversation. It was in a draft, but then I’ve never seen it anywhere else in the world. I love it, I use it a lot, and I try to attribute you every time.

Like, “That’s in another slide.” I guess I have to just write this for myself, and maybe make a little form for people to fill out in advance. I get nervous about the interviews, I think. I’m taking my time to understand, and had lots of meetings, but at some ...

Audrey, I’m honored to get the “it’s on the next slide” version of your life.

So awesome.

Maybe having a timer in the middle of the table, where you know the time code, and they can say, “Oh, four minutes back from this point,” to make it so when they review, it’s easy for them. It’s not painful. It’s not something that...

I guess we were also wondering how to account for if someone’s talking, they start feeling really natural, and they’re just like, talk, talk, talk. Maybe then they realize, maybe three minutes into a certain part of the conversation, that they’ve been talking very liberally about a person who they’re ...

It was also navigating the situation where maybe you have Open Space Technology. People are wandering in and out, and they maybe aren’t aware that there’s a recorder on the table. It’s not making itself known.

I’m trying to think through all the pieces that we discussed separately, I guess. Another was around, we were calling it “humane transparency,” I think was the term that we used, which you might have come across the...

How did I miss all of this?

What about the license? Is that ever negotiable?

Some people, I guess it would seem like a bad outcome if someone who was comfortable asking lots of probing questions -- “Oh, can I do this? Can I do this? Can I do this?” -- then they would have more understanding than someone who was a little reluctant or ...