Justin Allen: I’ve looked up and read Mei-Chun Lee’s dissertation. Very interesting and very comprehensive. I love what she put together. I still need to find time to read Yu-Tung Hsiao’s work. I aim to read those. I wanted to speak with you first before talking with them.

Justin Allen: Would it be OK if I briefly introduce myself?

Audrey Tang: Of course.

Justin Allen: How would I say this? I’ve had the opportunity to work in leadership development and organization strategy for the last 20 years with my partner Dr. Dave Ulrich. I don’t know if you’ve heard of him. He’s known as the father of modern-day HR, University of Michigan professor.

Justin Allen: We’ve been able to work with companies like Disney, McDonald’s, Ikea, Microsoft, and also with a number of governments like Mauritius, or Singapore, UAE. It’s been fascinating throughout my career. When the pandemic hit, like many of us, I had this existential question of, what am I doing in life? Where am I going? Those sorts of things.

Justin Allen: I decided that I really wanted to focus my work to the extent possible working with organizations that are specifically targeting improvement against the global sustainable development goals. I decided I wanted to learn more about that. I enrolled in Harvard’s program and have been doing that. Through the program, I was introduced to your work and have become a huge fan.

Justin Allen: In the meantime, my firm has also been very fortunate to contract with the kingdom of Bhutan. They’re going through a civil service reform. Last year, the king said, “We need to change the way we’re doing civil service across the board.” We’re very lucky that they asked us to help them think about how to build leaders who can then enact that reform.

Justin Allen: Sorry for the long intro. That’s a little bit of a background on where I’m coming from and how I’ve been introduced to Polis and the other work you’ve been doing.

Justin Allen: As I said, I’m super excited about it. I would love to talk about the research of Dr. Li and Dr. Hsiao. Before we get into that, I wanted to hear anything you had to say about Polis. We’re currently planning in January to launch probably 125 unique Polis, I guess you could call them surveys.

Audrey Tang: Conversations. Wikisurveys.

Justin Allen: Conversations is better…with 125 ministers and educators in Bhutan around the topics that are most interesting to them. During this, as we’ve begun our program with them, we started by helping them to initiate.

Justin Allen: We’re going to have over 7,500 one-to-one conversations face-to-face, in-person for the most part conversations about reform. What does it mean? How do we think about this? What do we think about our nation? What do we want to do as the people to make an improvement? They’re going to share information from there that will help us create…

Justin Allen: Each one of these ministers will create their own Polis conversation to elicit ideas and prioritize those ideas. That will start in January. I’d love any thoughts you have as you created this, have done this so many times, around any recommendations in that regard.

Audrey Tang: First of all, you say it’s ultimately consultative, the agenda that was produced. What Polis produced is what I call a good-enough consensus. Say if there is a very high degree of consensus, maybe 3 or 10 resonated feeling despite the different positions, what’s the direct action that will be the result of that?

Audrey Tang: For each of our Polis conversations in the past, like the Uber case and so on, the agenda-setting was the power we gave them. A, everyone who raised those top-scored resonating statements will be invited to the face-to-face meeting with the minister that leads this policy.

Audrey Tang: Also, B, all the stakeholders will be invited to respond to and only to these consensus statements. That has been the formula since 2015 of our use of Polis. I was wondering what’s your formula of what we call the binding power of the result.

Justin Allen: This is something we’re still exploring with them and are going to try to work out between now and the next probably six weeks. Not quite sure. The intent is after all of these face-to-face conversations, each minister will have a focus group discussion with the individuals who are conducting the conversations.

Justin Allen: That will lead them to create their own Polis conversation with an invitation to the same people they spoke with face-to-face and, hopefully, many others to suggest, “OK, in agriculture and forestry, or in transportation, or in education, what do you recommend we do if we were to try to do one thing?” Does that answer your question?

Audrey Tang: I see. Yes, it does. It’s a priority-setting thing, which is great. Also, would the reports generated by Polis including the data? In the Polis configuration, there is a tick that says, “Open data.” Would that be open for third-party analysis or it’s just by the organizer themselves?

Justin Allen: I think we’ll be open to quality analysis. It gets to my second question around academics.

Audrey Tang: Yes. The Uber conversation has been analyzed very rigorously by academic people even years after the actual conversation happened. It’s a great way to keep the academic community engaged. They understand that there’s no license restrictions. They won’t be sued for copyright violations when they do some analysis over this qualitative data.

Justin Allen: Are default settings in Polis set up to allow for that?

Audrey Tang: You have to check “Open Data”. I don’t think it’s a default. It’s just a check box though.

Justin Allen: We’ll make sure we do that. Once we do that, then the data will be available to anybody in the world, I suppose.

Audrey Tang: Right. What we do is that we export the data. We also share the report. There’s a Polis report thing. Both the machine-generated summary and the raw data that backs up the summary is available to all. Of course, the conversation would end at some point. Afterwards, they become read-only.

Justin Allen: I’m not the decisionmaker there. We’ll have to check with them. My preference would be to make it open if they feel comfortable with that. There might be some that they leave open and others that they might close out depending on the topic.

Audrey Tang: Of course. It could be a moderated conversation. Even when people post, if you find something wrong with the comments like personal text or something, you can always take it down before releasing the data. It’s no problem.

Justin Allen: That’s wonderful. Any other recommendations or thoughts as I’ve just shared this initial idea?

Audrey Tang: No. It looks really solid. You said the second question is about academic engagement.

Justin Allen: Yeah. It links first to the quadratic voting that I saw you talk about both in the global classroom and then also in your TED Talk. Do you have software for quadratic voting that you use? Is that something that’s just been done individually?

Audrey Tang: There’s existing software like RxC Voice, which we already deploy internally. For the public-facing, like in a Presidential Hackathon, we roll out our own quadratic voting solutions. For the board vote of the RadicalxChange, we just use a spreadsheet. We also share that spreadsheet template. It’s a very easy idea. It could be implemented rather easily.

Audrey Tang: If you’re looking for something that you can host yourself and after trying out for a while, then you can use this RxC Voice website. Just like Polis, it’s a hosted mode where you can try it out on the hosted website. It also has an on-premise mode where you can set it up yourself with your technical team.

Justin Allen: Thank you. We’ll definitely look into that with my team. That’s fantastic. That does lead to the second question of academia. This has been so fascinating to me and so aligned with where I would like to take the rest of my career. I’ve been in a couple conversations with different universities.

Justin Allen: Even pursuing a PhD focused on this, I was recently in a conversation with a gentleman at Oxford in their Social Policy and Intervention Department saying, “Hey, if I were to submit a thesis proposal, would this be the kind of thing?” He indicated that this would be very interesting. I wanted to make sure on two fronts.

Justin Allen: Number one, do you have any recommendations as I think about this and think about trying to pursue this from an academic standpoint and promote the ideas that you’re pioneering in so many ways? Number two, are there any other individuals in addition to Dr. Hsiao and Dr. Lee that you recommend that I connect with?

Audrey Tang: Both of them will be able to connect you to more researchers. To answer your both questions, Fang-Jui Chang, my colleague and also a service designer and strategy designer at Dark Matter Labs, is worth contacting.

Audrey Tang: I’m pasting you the link of a really recent work that she’s done that applies to conversation beyond a simple single-policy use like Uber or the kind of conversations you outlined but rather, integrated into re-empowering the civic infrastructures including but not limited to the token formation from the self-sovereign identity tradition, the many-to-many agreements like natural personhood and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Some more out-there ideas, but it’s backed by the same philosophy. Maybe you can also get in touch with Fang-Jui. Her contact is in the report somewhere.

Justin Allen: Wonderful. I will definitely reach out to her. That sounds right up the line of what I’d like to look into. Do you have any hesitation or any preferences? I’m looking to what you’ve done and saying, “Wow! This is a model that I think so many people in the world can learn from.” Do you have anything that you would like me to do or not do? [laughs]

Audrey Tang: No. It’s fine. It’s about innovation. I don’t think I’m in any position to tell you what to do or what not to do. What we’re offering is a set of, like bubble tea, recipes.

Audrey Tang: You will have to necessarily use different kind of tea like rooibos or something in different locals, different kind of soy milk or different kind of tapioca. [laughs] I don’t have specific ideas about ingredients which necessarily differ from place to place. The way that it’s put together, our experience can share.

Justin Allen: I’m very much looking forward to this implementation and using these in Bhutan, and then, hopefully, elsewhere as I continue to encourage other folks to look at this approach to collective sensing and collective decision-making and prioritization.

Audrey Tang: Yes, definitely.

Justin Allen: Any other advice for me? You’ve been at this, you’re changing the world in so many ways. I would open to any ideas or recommendations you have.

Audrey Tang: Start small. The main lesson we’ve learned is to involve career public servers, as low-level as possible. The actual section chiefs that will be in charge of implementing the recommendations. The reason why is that if you involve them, they have a lot of ideas that they may previously have no budget to do.

Audrey Tang: They may be a avid reformer that’s previously limited by the political power of their superiors and things like that. In such environments, because it’s pseudonymous or they can pester suggestions to their civil society friends and/or to different departments, some truly good idea that has been shelved forever do shine on these platforms.

Audrey Tang: We have regularized this system called Participation Offices where we intently assign the facilitation role of the breakout groups to the people who have nothing to do with the implementation, the similar level of section chiefs but on the other way. For example, when we deliberate about tax reform, then maybe the facilitator would be a coastal guard.

Audrey Tang: When we talk about the amateur fishing or surfing, then maybe it’s the tax agency. The reason why is that the coastal guard also files their own tax and the ocean reform need the tax agency people who actually are avid surfers.

Audrey Tang: When face-to-face especially, but also online meetings, people feel that such breakout groups hosted by someone who knows the public service, because they’re career public servants, but takes the citizens’ side is the perfect bridge to get the public servants and the public, in general, to link together.

Audrey Tang: Once they feel empowered in this fashion, they will be much more open to slightly larger scope and slightly larger duties, conversations in the future. Just start with something that’s not very ambitious but involve people who both would implement it and also people with nothing to do with but knows the people who would implement it.

Audrey Tang: That’s the recipe of more sustainable success. It will be then empowering the career public service. They, at the end of the day, see this as nothing different from a Google form survey, things that they can use. It’s just free software after all. Then it will become a culture.

Justin Allen: That’s very powerful. Thank you. I’ll think about that, and share those ideas with them, and recommend that type of a process. I love the notion of starting simple, something that can change relatively easily, so they can begin to get their arms around it.

Justin Allen: I know we’re at the half of the hour. If you have any other advice or anything else to tell me, I’d love to hear it. If not, I will take this and begin working on it. Then, if it’s OK with you, let you know how things go.

Audrey Tang: Definitely. Best of luck.

Justin Allen: The reason I didn’t want to talk yet to Dr. Hsiao and Dr. Lee yet is, are you comfortable if I explain to them that you gave me their contact information?

Audrey Tang: Of course, go ahead. You have this recording to prove, the transcript to prove it…

Justin Allen: I don’t know if I need proof. I just did not want to overstep my bounds with your generosity.

Audrey Tang: The easiest way, usually, is for you to write to them including Fang-Jui, and then CC me.

Justin Allen: OK.

Audrey Tang: By the time they reply, maybe they move me to the BCC. If they want something from our shared transcript, at which point this transcript will be very useful as a context setter. Then we can move forward together.

Justin Allen: Perfect. Thank you so much. You are incredible. Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Justin Allen: I really appreciate it. Have a wonderful morning.

Audrey Tang: You too. Live long and prosper.

Justin Allen: You too. [laughs]

Justin Allen: Cheers. Talk to you soon.