0:00  

So with that, I’m super excited about our next guest and his talk and about his new social network that is building as a public utility, which, as you know, with the Facebook whistleblower, you know, everything that is in the news today, I think this is a very relevant talk, and why we need something like this. So let me introduce George, Georgie. Plesner is the founder of the nonprofit civic works. Prior to founding civic works, George works in product development, Performance Engineering, service design, and Management at Oracle Corporation. He published his rights resignation letter from Oracle as a protest when the CO CEO of Oracle joined the Trump administration’s transition team. His letter was covered by major news outlets and was viewed over 350,000 times. Please welcome, George.

1:03  

Thanks very much, Shilpi for the introduction as well.

1:10  

I want to start this conversation by asking you about I mean, I can’t let you go on to your job without asking you about this letter of resignation. That is so much talked about, right. So you want to give a brief overview to our viewers and audience and then we’ll, we’ll talk about your social network.

1:27  

Sure. There’s a funny backstory to it as well. But there was no communication internally at Oracle. And I actually just found out in the news back in, I think it was around November, December 2016 timeframe that the CO CEO Safra Catz, she was co CEO at the time, had joined the Trump transition team and had stated that we’re here to help you in any way that we can. And I had very strong concerns as anyone that saw the letter that was published on LinkedIn because, at the same time, the administration was talking about the creation of a Muslim database, and other issues that of course, this audience would be very sensitive to and would probably respond in the same way that I did. And so I wrote a very pointed letter. I mean, I recognise too, that I was at a point in time in my career, where I was able to make that statement. I mean, I, I’m an old guy, Michael, in the last presentation was talking about data as the new oil. And I’m thinking, Well, I’m a dinosaur. So that’s the perfect transition over to my presentation. But in any event, a lot of the things that I pointed out in that letter, I think it was about two pages, about my concerns, with Oracle with Safra Catz joining the transition team and with the kind of future that I thought this country would have in an administration that was making fear and hate, you know, key parts of the platform lies. And so anyways, when I, when I published that letter, my kids had joined me for winter break. And we were watching on LinkedIn. And I remember seeing, you know, about 1000, people had seen the letter. And so we were thinking, wow, this is, this is impressive. And within I think about a week it going to about 350,000 views, and then have coverage by the New York Times and The Guardian. And so, at the same time, I was having great discussions with Golda Velez, whose presentation folks heard a little while ago, and it’s very hard to follow Golda because she’s brilliant. And, and I am really deeply grateful and honoured for the types of things that she’s doing and the impacts that she’s having in the area of human rights. But Golda, as well as Adam Lake, and I was having discussions about the potential, what SIP works would look like and I’ll talk about that a little bit in the presentation.

4:22  

I’ll let you continue. George, do you have slides to share?

4:26  

I do. I think I can share my screen. Let’s see. Let’s see. Here we go. Let me see if I can do this. And show P or folks seen the presentation at this point.

4:44  

George, I don’t see it in the green room yet. Once I see it, I can add it to the stage.

4:50  

Okay. Let me see. So So choose what to share. And is that showing up now?

5:21  

It is showing up now and you can present more charges.

5:25  

Oh, very good. Okay. So civics and as a social media company as a public utility, first a couple of key things. Most slides that you will see in this presentation won’t be as text-heavy as the next one. And I’ve consumed copious amounts of coffee. And so don’t worry, we’re going to get through the next 34 slides rapidly. So there’ll be some time for questions. And first off, I wanted to thank you, she’ll be in the data ethics for all teams for putting this together. And all of you out there that are listening now or may see this presentation later on-demand. I wanted to share just a few brief oversimplifications from my long technology career, which is almost 40 years, which also means I’m a very bad investor, because most of my friends, retired, retired long ago, they got into Unix and the industry when I did, but in terms of my observations, the very first phase of the industry was really a data collection, processing and storage phase. The second phase was, now that we have some datasets, how do we harness that data to drive business outcomes, or public sector outcomes in the area of sales, profits, record-keeping efficiency, the third phase is the big data, advanced analytics, and starting to use psychometrics to track and drive behaviours, whether they be consumer behaviours, or political behaviours. And the fourth phase that we’re talking about really now is the application of AI to drive outcomes, automation, and the potential that we’re seeing to exacerbate inequality by being able to create economic models, like things like Uber and others in a gig-based economy, where money is really flowing to, to an investor class in a very concentrated way. And my other observation again, this is an oversimplification that ethics and technology are largely long-banned related to some checkbox data privacy language, usually in a 20-page Terms of Use. And so again, the thinking behind data ethics for all and really trying to move ethics into the DNA of the technology space is something that I really applaud and am very grateful for knowing Shilpi and the work that the team is doing. So ethics and social media, we know from Facebook and Twitter and other models. Yes, your presentation is not moving forward are you moving it forward?

8:29  

I can so let me see it’s moving forward on my screen and unfortunately it sounds like it’s not moving forward on anyone else’s let me just see. Sometimes it does that and technology can’t live without it.

9:18  

True. So I don’t know if it’s okay there now it is not moving. To try the present more jobs that will it’ll become a little bit bigger.

9:46  

Jobs on the right-hand corner of your screen where there is a slider for zoom. The fourth button is right next to the slider. The left of the sliders are present more

9:59  

Oh Okay. Okay, good. And hopefully, this will update the screen as I move through. So let me know shall be if this is

10:10  

it did not go in present mode and it’s not. Can you not sure? Can you move the slide one up or down? It’s, again, going to the present mode. Let

10:19  

I remove it and add it again. Let’s not worry about the present mode. Charge, can you try going up or down the slide? Sure.

10:36  

Is that updating?

10:38  

I think it’s updating. So

10:40  

Yeah, very good. So sorry about the eye test, folks. But anyway, I’ll talk to these slides and am happy to certainly share them with folks that are interested in seeing the actual presentation deck. But anyway, we know that social platforms thrive on conflict and controversy. And we also know that user interactions with commercial platforms like Facebook, the user interactions are the product you are essentially the product so your posts and comments. Your profile is really a goldmine for sales and marketing efforts, as well as political operatives that we saw in the 2016 presidential campaign as well as in Brexit. We know that Facebook was working very closely with Cambridge Analytica, we know that Steve Bannon was very involved in Cambridge Analytica, and I think everyone here knows this story, that there was involvement by a billionaire in the US, Robert Mercer, Steve Bannon, Cambridge and Facebook. And they were very influential in sending targeted messages based upon psychometric data that they collected on individual users. And they did this to support both Brexit and the Trump administration. And so here we see Robert Mercer working on one side. We know that state actors in Russia as part of the Robert Muller investigation, we’re also working to disseminate propaganda, and lies to influence the election in the US as well as the vote in the UK. We also know that in any kind of publicly traded entity, commercial entity, the thought of data protection represents a cost or an investment that somebody like Facebook or Twitter, or any of the commercial entities need to make. And, you know, one would ask if their core mission is not to protect people’s data, how much money are they really going to be spending to protect information. And here we see some fairly, fairly recent information from another huge data breach at Facebook. And Facebook’s response internally was, you know, pretty much the whole hum. That’s the way it goes. And so anyways, we know that democracy demands a well educated, well informed and engaged society. And we also know from experience that democracy and the kind of extreme wealth concentration that we see now, in the US and around the world simply cannot coexist, you have too much wealth and power concentrated into the hands of a few. And so that certainly makes any aspiration of democracy a very large challenge. It’s an impediment. Not that everybody should essentially just be distributed equal amounts of wealth, but certainly not the kind of inequity that exists within the system now, that has been coloured by generations of bias and racism and misogyny. So, sip works. Joe was told not to be political. I hope I’m not being political.

14:28  

Self works is a 501 C three nonprofit that we launched back in February of 2017. It was launched fairly quickly after the elections in the US. What we wanted to do is to provide an advertising-free, subscription-based social platform that did not sell any subscriber data or share any data and we think of ourselves as a long term, countervailing infrastructure to address Lewis Powell memo. And I granted that’s not a good tagline for a business. But just to provide a little context I’ll get into, I’ll get into what I mean by that in just a minute. This is a look at the web-based platform for SIP works. And so it is a social network that’s providing an outlet, a mechanism for people to post and perform a lot of your fundamental resources that you would expect from a social media, social network. Obviously, we don’t have the kind of funding that a Facebook or Twitter or another model would have as a nonprofit we rely on really subscribers that want to support us and provide a small monthly recurring donation to support our operations and development. Earlier this year, we launched native iOS and Android versions of civil works. And so I was very, very happy to get that done and get that effort funded. It’s something that’s been on our engineering list for a while. And so we’ll continue to make improvements as we can to the web, iOS and Android areas. Why Civ works, one, we don’t sell or share subscriber data, we’re ad-free, it’s free to use our platform. Although we certainly appreciate when folks that want to jump in and chip in a few bucks a month, we think of it as kind of the Netflix for democracy model. We want to gamify civic actions and education. And, and so when people take an action, when people attend a town hall meeting with a local official, or a senator or Congressperson, or where they send a letter to an editor, for an issue, other types of civic actions, we want to gamify that because we know hardcore activists are going to do it. And that’s great. But we see that there is a massive part of the centre, the middle part of any society that really needs to be nurtured and supported in terms of their engagement. And so we seek to provide civic action opportunities for them and to also provide a feedback mechanism for them to continue to support even competitive behaviour with regard to taking action. And for our future, we are very anxious to be able to get to the point where we can incorporate some of the ideas that gold is spoken about earlier. And others of you have spoken about in terms of really being anti-propaganda to be able to have new source ratings and information ratings on the site. We also want to extend to provide information about corporate social behaviour, how a company is behaving, are they are mitigating their environmental footprint? Are they providing an equitable salary fair in embracing fair labour, we want to be able to provide information to people that can either act civically, politically or economically in terms of how they spend their money, or how they invest their money. And we’ll also talk a little bit briefly about our future in terms of really trying to facilitate discussions and outcomes among people that may not politically agree. We think that that’s very, very important, instead of just people shouting at each other, which has become the common method of communication, sadly, in the US and around the world. Just briefly, when I talk about the lewis Powell memo, we know that in the 1960s

19:12  

That there were many different entities that really came together and united across traditional lines, whether it be the peace movement, the Labour movements, women’s rights, civil rights, they came together, they saw that through protest, and through marching through activism, they were really able to make significant gains in the 1960s with regard to civil rights and women’s rights and peace and the union, the strengthening of unions, and what we saw in the 1970s. For folks that haven’t read it, it’s really important repeating in terms of at least US history, because a lot of of what we see today, in terms of the concentration of wealth, the media propagation of media messages really started with the lewis Powell memo that he wrote. It’s a brilliant memo, it has been used for purposes that really have supported the 1%, the further of wealth concentration in the US and around the world. But it’s, it’s very written very collegially. And it’s a very smart architecture for long term infrastructure for the 1%. And it’s been very successfully applied over the last 50 years. And, and so I encourage everybody that hasn’t seen it to, to look for the memo from August 23 1971. It defined the conservative machine that talked about the formation of ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. Many of you know that this is an entity that is behind a lot of very bad policy and legislation in the US Stand Your Ground laws, voter suppression, and so-called Right to Work is all emanated from what Powell wrote about the emergence of right-wing think tanks, which has led to climate change denial, a lot of propaganda around climate change in the oil companies for generations, media consolidation. At one point time, there were about 90 independent media companies, which are now down to I think, five or six, and tying academic funding university funding to conservative representation and propagate propagation of conservative ideas and thought, is all part of the lewis Powell memo. And so from that, we see this, it’s the GOP is very connected to ALEC. And a lot of the funding that comes out of the Koch brothers, the Walton family, and others that work to really further laws that will concentrate wealth and exacerbate wealth inequality, and climate change, denial, and privatisation and erosion of public schools and universities. And so, a lot of propaganda emanated, from the evolution of what Lewis Powell wrote about, as well as the distribution of hate and fear-based messaging across various networks, whether they be radio, TV broadcasts, or social media and wealth inequality. Again, it’s our fundamental belief that you cannot have massive wealth, inequity and support democracy at the same time, you just can’t concentrate extreme wealth and power into the hands of a few and expect to have a representative democracy. And this problem, of course, for those that are familiar with the Citizens United, versus the FEC decision, has been exacerbated by that Supreme Court decision.

23:40  

So in countervailing the power machine, as I talked about, we want to gather essentially, we want to provide a social media platform for people to use as they would a conventional social platform, but to also to be able to cultivate virtual flash mobs to help drive policy and action that can provide human rights, civic rights, expand civic rights, address, climate and do other things to support, issue-focused campaigns and political advocacy groups. And so in working with organisations, like the below anti-corruption, climate action, racial justice, and other organisations, LGBTQ community, we want to really help drive resist first of all bad policy and legislation and strategically drive comprehensive good policy where we can that can strengthen democracy over time.

24:53  

To more minutes charge,

24:55  

Okay. And so it slides it’s about 15 seconds this slide But no worries. And so anyways, Golda Adam and I started talking about what can we do about the corrupting influence of money and the demise of democracy. This was coverage from The Guardian on the resignation letter that I wrote back in November, December of 2016. And civics was formed. And we started as a concept. We wanted to be the people’s out like initially and be an index database of good policy and Model law and legislation that people could use. But we determine working directly with legislation and policy is a pretty heavy lift. For the average citizen, we wanted to support sustained and effective civic action. We didn’t want to be another site, just simply collecting petitions, like hey, Mitch McConnell, just sneezed, sign our petition and send us money, we really wanted to have an impact on state, local, regional, national, and even international actions. And so we started to develop mechanisms and what you probably can’t see in this eye chart. But on our site, what we do is we publish actions that people can take, that are effective actions, either toward civic education, or taking direct action showing up at a local school board candidate debate or showing up at a town hall meeting, or other opportunities for action, and education for themselves, their families, and communities. And so there it is, looking a little bit bigger, you can see act now is featured. We want to support sustained, meaning meaningful civic action. So there’s a spectrum of actions which are effective, really a hierarchy of actions that go all the way from going to a town hall meeting to show your interest in political decisions that are being made by elected officials, through letters to the editor all the way to supporting a run for office, which is a pretty heavy lift from a civic action perspective. We also continue to work on making sure that civic actions have visibility directly to a user a subscriber, something that’s happening in their own backyard or at their local library, we want to let them know. And so we do some cross-matching between a subscriber’s location what their issue interest or focus is, and the actions that flow through our system. And people register to sign up for free and identify they self identify the issues that are of interest to them. And, and then our engineering priorities over the next few years as we can afford to fund them are can we built the native mobile apps, we want to provide the index legislative database and model policy and law that people can find and select maybe anti-fracking bills for their counties or local areas. We want to develop a comprehensive education curriculum around effective civic action. And we want to be able to provide new sources and journalists trust ratings. Even in a very even in their infancy, they’re very, very important to combat propaganda and issues that we have seen. And we’ll continue to see that will evolve very, very quickly and create more of a threat to democracy in the US and around the world. And some other things that we’re exploring, such as blockchain, and offshoring, a subpoena approved database to protect privacy for our community, and enhance security for the site. And marketing. Marketing priorities are, of course, interesting to us. Facebook often takes care of a lot of our marketing for us, because every two or three months are in the news, doing some pretty bad things, which makes people more interested in our work. And so anyway, I hope this has been useful. And shortly I’m happy to answer any questions, if there any questions folks may have.

29:36  

Thank you, George. Very interesting talk and the work that you Golda and Adam are doing and the team at Civic works. Kudos to you all. Any special questions we have from the audience? So Golda says that I think the payment model First civic works is what makes it have unique drivers.

30:05  

We, it’s interesting, when we initially started with the platform, we wanted to make it free for students and teachers to use. And we wanted to then have paid subscribers as well. And what we found was putting any kind of economic barrier in place really greatly constrains growth. And so we decided to open the platform up for free for anyone, but then adopt the Guardian type subscription model where folks that really believe in our concept and work can contribute a small, recurring monthly donation, which helps us offset our operations costs, as well as developing new features and functions as quickly as we can.

30:51  

Yeah, so I heard that there is a freemium model. And then but it’s not enforced. It’s free for anybody, it is a 501 C 3, and you would like support. And so if anybody wants to pay and get on the premium model, they can just for supporting you. So is there any long term sustainable plan for this?

31:15  

There there are, there are several that we’re exploring, but certainly, require us to grow to a certain scale. And one of them that we want to support is, folks that sit out interact with social media quite frequently, you might see Governor Kate Brown up in Oregon, meeting with first responders and publishing a post on Facebook about wildfire and climate change. And typically, there’ll be some supportive messages. And then there’ll be 1000s of divisive, derisive messages from people in West Virginia or elsewhere that have are not part of our constituency. What we want to do is to incorporate once we gain a little scale, a model in which elected officials can effectively have rooms that are with their validated constituents, and that they can do direct polling, and really conduct virtual town halls as a way to support more participatory democracy. And so that is a model where we would shift this a premium subscription option to the elected official or the elected agency or body, which can then really help our growth. And so there is that we also as part of that model, are looking to have constituents or our subscribers, verify themselves, so verify their physical location. And so we would charge an annual a small annual fee for that, and that, again, would help us generate operational and development revenue. But right now, we are all volunteers. And, and some of us are really old. So that makes it even even worse, she’ll be

33:04  

Four, let’s go to Georgia. And I know that I want to say this publicly. You’re so good. And I have had the honour of inviting you to become a data ethics adviser. And I hope that you will consider it and you will accept it. And I’m still waiting on your confirmation. I know, verbally, you have but it isn’t official yet. So I love everything that you’re doing. And I would love to have you on board.

33:30  

Well, I’m honoured Shilpi and with witnesses on this call, I will say. But now I really support the concept. And the ideas are so important to our future. I tend to think of reacting to the fires that are burning out of control right now, from a societal and global perspective. And you’re already you already are optimistic thinking that I can solve some of those problems and that we can have a future in which ethics will be incredibly important.

34:02  

We are all optimistic giants, who know where we will go and what we will be able to accomplish. But we have to start somewhere. And that’s what all of us are doing. I want to take a question from Rakesh Ranjan. He says, George, your effort in creating an alternative platform to address the big issues is commendable. And you touched upon the elected officials and he touched upon that exactly. Does this platform take issues with our elected officials? So can we take our grievances to our politicians?

34:32  

We dealt with, we definitely want to have that dialogue. And another friend of ours who is I’m a huge fan of hers is Colleen Hardwick and she created up in Canada, a platform called place speak. Pl A C E speaks and a lot of the concepts in that platform we want to integrate into SIP works, which will allow That verified constituent dialogue with a public official. And so we want we what if I think about the future of civil works, I think of perhaps, say, a state legislator up in Oregon, talking directly to his district, and people that are verified to be part of his district, saying, hey, there’s a vote coming up next week on alternative fuels. Here are the issues here. I’m thinking, here’s what I’m thinking about in terms of voting. What are your thoughts about this and being able to have votes from the community because when you think about it, the physical town hall meetings, city council meetings, Supervisory meetings, they’re typically at night, you get a very small, narrow cross-section of people that can attend those meetings. And so I really would like to open this up to an entire community of people that are working two jobs to just be able to pay rent, if they’re lucky enough to have jobs aren’t going to be able to go to those meetings, but being able to attend virtually, and weigh in on issues. To me, that’s what democracy is all about.

36:10  

I love this choice, because this is truly inclusion, diversity, inclusion and action, right? I mean, it’s like people who, who we think their voices, like another thing, their voices are not as important or they cannot give the time of the day. You’re making it accessible and you’re making it democratising it to make everyone is important and heard. And I love that. So kudos to you and your team George. And yes, we are already seeing welcome advisor posts in the comments. Thank you so much for your time today. Great talk and we’ll continue the conversation. Take care. Thank you very much up Bye, everyone.