In this episode of International Horizons, we present the recording of a book talk by John Torpey, Ralph Bunche Institute director, with Beth Noveck, author of Solving Public Problems: How to Fix our Government and Change our World.  Noveck begins by underlining that we humans are doing better than ever materially, but we are not doing as well as we must to address the problems we face. The author also talks about the need to address governance to cope with the change we need and the ways in which this can be done through a combination of engaging with communities and training government officials in problem-solving. This training will develop skills to use quantitative and qualitative evidence to source solutions from the citizenry.  Noveck also discusses some examples of these practices in Iceland, Canada, and the State of New Jersey and the ways in which AI can help to streamline governance and participatory democracy.

Transcript: 

John Torpey

Hello and welcome to international horizons a podcast is the Ralph Bunche. Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is John Torpey, and I’m director of the Ralph Bunche Institute at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Today we present the recording of the book talk with Beth Noveck, author of Solving Public Problems: How to Fix our Government and Change our World.

Okay. Hello, everybody. Thanks for joining us. My name is John Torpey, I’m. Director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the City University of New York Graduate School and University Center, usually known as the Graduate Center, and it’s a pleasure to be here today. 

John Torpey

We’re fortunate to have with us Beth Noveck, who is professor at Northeastern University where she directs the Burnes Center for Social change, and its partner project the Governance Lab, aka, the Govlab, and its MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance. She’s the author of a recent book, Solving Public Problems: How to Fix our Government and Change our World, which was published by Yale University Press in 2021, and the book was named a best book of 2,021 by the Stanford Social Innovation Review. New Jersey. Governor Phil Murphy, my governor, as it happens, appointed her as the State’s first Chief Innovation Officer and Chair of the State’s Future of Work task force. and between 2018 and 2021, she served on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Digital Council.

John Torpey

So I need to tell you that we’re gonna be recording this event. So please take a moment to anonymize yourself. If you wish to do that. We will share the video from the discussion after the event, as well as putting out the audio of the interview with Professor Noveck as an episode of our podcast, which is called International Horizons. You can find International Horizons on the New Books Network of academic podcasts, as well as on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. And so we’ll begin with an interview that’ll last about 45 min or so, and then open up the Q&A. And if you have questions for Professor Noveck, please put them in the chat which we are using for today’s Q&A.

John Torpey

So, Professor Noveck, thank you so much for joining us,; great to have you with us, and to discover that we have lots of people in our past in common that we didn’t know we had. But in any case we’re gonna mainly talk about your book, and you know, it seems to me the book reads like a kind of an antidote at least to some of the causes of right-wing populism, which is in part a response to the sense that people don’t have a say in government decision-making, I would say.

John Torpey

The pollsters at Pew [Research Center] have found public trust in government in the US near historic lows. Recently the media are held in low regard, etc. Poor governance tends to promote skepticism about government, which in turn fuels unhappiness with elites, and hence populism and extremism. So could you talk a bit about the relationship in your work between citizens, loss of trust in government and government institutions and effective government.

Beth Noveck 

John, Thank you so much for having me here today, and we have current people also in common, Lea Diaz and Merrill Sovner. I want to thank them for enabling me to be here. Lea is a persistent attendant at the lecture series that I ran for many years, called “Reimagining Democracy,” where we try to solve a lot of the challenges that you just mentioned. That’s led to my being able to be here today. So I appreciate that very much, and I think you’ve hit the nail on the head exactly in terms of what motivated the writing of this book, which is this declining trust in government. Rates of trust at their lowest ebb, and continuing to decline in at least in modern democracies. Of course, we see the opposite in some authoritarian regimes, which is even perhaps more frightening.

Beth Noveck 

But I think that while there are many root causes to the predisposition to authoritarianism, predisposition now to also the rise of new authoritarian leaders, a new playbook around election subversion and election denial that we’re seeing in this country. And there are again a myriad of root causes at play. One of the big issues here is the fact that people don’t trust government because the government doesn’t deserve to be trusted. And that is because government is not as effective as it needs to be in addressing the challenges of our time. So you only need to open the paper this week to see again – my son reminded me this morning that The Onion put out yet again the headline that they do every time there’s a mass shooting, and they do this every single time meant to drive home the reminder. I’ve forgotten the funny headline that’s unfortunately – never good to start something where you don’t know the punchline – but that we are not addressing challenges, whether it’s gun violence, whether it’s climate change, whether it’s COVID. As we’ve seen in public health crises or other existential threats, we’re not as good as we need to be at solving these problems, and then it’s just the very micro level. We’re not doing as good a job as we need to even to distribute resources that we have. So where we have benefits, where we have services, they’re not getting into people’s hands, and we’re not doing as much as we can to improve people’s lives. 

Beth Noveck 

Of course let me be clear that there are many things that we’re doing right, and there’s compared to a generation ago. It’s not that things are necessarily worse on some measures in many ways. We’re doing better, but we’re not doing as well as we need to. And so the essence of the book, to make a long story short, is to say that we can make government more effective if we can train people to work differently in government and that’s what it’s about. It’s about, you know, very pedantically, it’s a book about upskilling. It’s about the need to invest in training the public sector, workforce as well as the private sector, workforce and others in solving problems in new ways. So the book is really meant not to be exclusively, I should say, about government, although it is based on my experience largely focused on that. But really about a learnable set of skills for solving problems in the world for taking a project. From idea to implementation, a set of skills that, I think, is only going to expand and grow with the new AI tools that are available to us today. But let me pause with that, and say, spot on, and my hope is that if we can make government more effective. We can restore more trust in government which will help to stave off the sense of insecurity and chaos that leads to people’s susceptibility to authoritarianism

John Torpey 

Right, great. So maybe you could tell us about what those skills are. You said it’s all about upskilling and for certain kinds of skills that people need to effectively address public problems. But what skills do you have in mind?

Beth Noveck 

So the skills that I’m talking about? And I say the word skills intentionally to make this specific, concrete and practical, so that it feels very so that it feels doable. But in many ways, and it takes us from the world of political theory and conversations about more engagement and government in the world of theory into talking about. What does that mean in practice? So the skills I’m talking about really have to do with first and foremost, how do we engage with communities in solving problems. Number one. And how do we use data to help us complement that qualitative understanding of what problems are and what the solutions could be to help us come up with better problems. So data and people. Really nothing more than that. 

Beth Noveck

But as a practical matter, what I see as somebody who both sits in the academy and in government is that we pay lip service to participatory democracy. But in practice people don’t know how to do it. And now, with the tools available, the methods are out there. They’re well honed. It really comes down to learning how. So I see lots of interest among people, and I just had conversations about this yesterday.

Beth Noveck

I was talking to somebody who trains people in what’s often called Human Centered Design, an idea that’s been borrowed from several disciplines such as design, the arts in many ways, business, etc. [It incorporates] the notion of saying [that] we should talk to our customers to understand their problems as we design products for them. And so now that’s been borrowed into policy and government to say we need to actually talk to the people we’re serving to understand their challenges. And co-design services and policies with them.

Beth Noveck

So that all sounds very well and good. And again I would say, now everybody understands those concepts. If I said human centered design, people have heard of that term. If I say co-creation, people have heard of that term, but what that means in practice, in terms of actually doing it is not so simple. 

Beth Noveck

So, coming back to your question. The skills, the core skills, in my view, are the ability to define a problem, both using data using quantitative evidence and qualitative evidence engaging with communities, the ability to source solutions again, using technology to help us get smarter quickly from sources that are out there about what’s already worked. And learning how to partner with other people and across sectors to be able to undertake partnerships that can allow us to get more done more quickly. Learning a set of research skills that allow us to learn quickly again what works, what’s out there, one.

Beth Noveck

And skills like the increasingly popular skill of learning how to design, a behavioral insight, how to draw from the research literature about human behavior, what changes people’s behavior so that you can use that to transform services and policies, and also how to measure what works. So I’m just sketching these very briefly here, but I outline a couple. I don’t mind a longer list of skills, but that all come down to ways of using data and engagement with communities at each stage of a policy making or problem-solving process, whether it’s defining the problem, looking for solutions, implementing solutions or measuring what works at each stage we can look at how we can get better and smarter and more democratic at how we do things than we’ve done in the past.

John Torpey

So I guess I’m sort of not entirely clear about one thing. There are three, let’s say, general kind of categories of actors in a political system. The politicians, the bureaucracies, people who are not elected, but who are in the government and the citizenry. And I mean, who needs to learn about these skills? Or is this the idea that everybody should be doing this? Or who is this really intended for?

Beth Noveck

So I would say it is intended for everybody [with some exceptions]. Let’s take each one of them in turn very briefly. So the primary people, with responsibility for delivery of solutions, if you will, for delivery of policies and services, etc., are the bureaucrats in any organization. And again, whether this is a government organization or a business or a nonprofit, there are the day to day people who are responsible for designing and implementing 150 projects, shall we say? And so I think it’s extraordinarily important for them to transform how they work, and that represents a significant departure, especially in government, from how we’ve done things in the past where previously secrecy has been prized working behind closed doors.

Beth Noveck

We’ve had a very expert vision of the bureaucrat, as the anointed professional in the sort of barbarian conception of this mandarin who possesses all the expertise, and will make this decision shielded from influence that will allow them to make a fairer decision that will be in people’s best interest, the sort of best and brightest concept, and I think we’ve long come to understand, as David Halberstein pointed out a long time ago, that the best and brightest are not always in the best position to make decisions. We now know that the person sitting behind closed doors in a bureaucracy does not have the best information at their fingertips, but they’re under resourced in terms of the ability to understand either problems or even solutions that are out there, and that even if they’re able to come up with a great idea, it may lack legitimacy, and therefore be difficult to implement. If they’re not engaged with the communities they’re trying to serve for the citizens. 

Beth Noveck

Even so, if even if we can create bureaucrats, and therefore institutions that are better at listening and learning and engaging in ways that that go beyond manning the barricades, to actually be able to work together with institutions to come up with solutions that improve people’s lives, and we need politicians who are cognizant of the way that we need to solve problems with communities. I think it’s extraordinarily important for political leaders to know that they shouldn’t… In Canada, for example, there are various ministers in Canada across certain states who have changed how they do things, where they say you cannot give me a proposal. “You cannot give me a policy unless it’s backed up with evidence that you have used data, that you have engaged with communities, that you’ve engaged with the academic research literature, that you have essentially an evidence base to support what you’re doing.” So we need politicians who are making demands of the other two sectors to ensure that they are putting forward proposals that are actually going to succeed.

John Torpey

So I’m interested also in this issue of what are public problems, what makes for a public problem? I mean it occurs to me that in thinking about that term that second wave feminism famously redefined in a certain sense, what private or public problems were, and said the personal is political. And, you know, how do you draw that line? How did feminism change in a way, what we think about as public. How is that defined? How does it get on an agenda as a public problem?

Beth Noveck

So that’s really so interesting; the connection to second wave feminism is a really interesting question that no one has ever asked me before. I’ll answer it, but then I also want to hear your answer to your own question. Let me say first why I chose the term and sort of what it’s a reaction to and part of the book and all. 

Beth Noveck 

One of the terms I use in the book a lot is the term public entrepreneurship. Now I did not coin that term. That term was coined by Elinor Ostrom, the Nobel Prize winning economist, in her dissertation that really looked at the entrepreneurial spirit within the public sector, and how the public sector solves problems. But I chose that term in particular, starting with that, to subvert in some way the relentless emphasis on private entrepreneurship that universities have been investing in over the last two decades. 

Beth Noveck

So we have seen an explosion in terms of the number of programs and courses. I’m sure you have them. We have them that are focused on entrepreneurship, which are all about how the private sector solves problems. It’s all about market problems. It’s all about, how do I get rich? Maybe there is some emphasis on social entrepreneurship, so maybe I can do well by doing good. You know charity water, or I could sell a product. Toms shoes, where I sell a product where I give something back. But there is essentially been very much a focus on market based solutions to problems that are driven by the profit motive.

Beth Noveck

So I was interested, first and foremost in saying, look, there are problems that are out there that many people would refer to as wicked problems where there is no clear consensus about what the problem even is, and especially in this highly fractured political environment, we may disagree that there even is a problem. There is definitely no agreement about what the solution is. And there’s no agreement about how to get between the problem and the solution. So these problems that exist in a highly politicized environment, and that affect societal outcomes, and that are driven by not just micro, but meso and macro conditions and forces are really what I’m talking about when I refer to public problems, and I want to make very clear that that although I commit this sin repeatedly, you can’t actually solve public problems, they are problems that change and more as soon as you try to tackle them. And again we can make incremental progress. But we all very often do. We’re not going to solve climate change and gun violence by Christmas.

Beth Noveck

So it’s very much intended to provoke some discussion about these kinds of problems, but it’s also meant to focus the conversation on, as they say, doing stuff that matters, and working on the solutions that in the end are about improving other people’s lives rather than simply about getting rich or making a buck, and are not limited to market based solutions. So it’s meant to subvert the sort of very prevalent discussion about entrepreneurship that I’m having a little bit of success, although with great patience in my own university, where we’re trying to remake the entrepreneurship curriculum, working with our colleagues in the business school to reinvent how we teach that topic, and what we mean by that, to include a focus on institutions, to include a discussion of the role of government, and very much to focus on public and wicked problems which, above all, are what students I’m seeing are very much interested in, and all the data shows that Millennials want to do stuff that matters. They want to work for employers that have a social good dimension. They want to make a difference in their own communities.

Beth Noveck 

And so the long and the short of it is that this is just about problems in political context. The solution to which can improve the lives of individuals and communities. So let me put it back to you for a second, John, if I can ask you for more about the question, if I’m allowed to do that because I’m really interested in the feminist angle here.

John Torpey

Sure. Well, the idea was simply that in second wave feminism that there were problems that were not dealt with on the public agenda because they were not seen, essentially, I guess, as worthy of being seen at that level or in that context. And I think what it primarily did was to change the kind of the dividing line, the line between the public and the private. And not all together unproblematically. I mean, I remember Eastern Europeans, some of whom we know in common, who lived through a system in which the dividing line between public and private was also drawn, you know, rather problematically. And so they were not necessarily all that enthusiastic about what they understood this feminism to be. But the other issue is simply that as you know from the political science literature, one of the things about power is whether or not things are put on the public agenda or not at all. Right? And that that’s a kind of crucial way of exercising power is to keep certain kinds of problems simply off the agenda.

John Torpey

But I think the point you make about how problems don’t get solved in some absolute kind of sense, or in the ways that those words seem to suggest. And I think that’s worth elaborating on. I was listening to something yesterday on NPR, WNYC, in which the Commissioner of Sanitation in New York is moving the set out times for garbage. And what inevitably is going to happen is maybe it will help reduce the rat population. But there will be knock on effects, or unintended consequences of this that nobody has yet foreseen. Or perhaps were foreseen and they’re deciding to go ahead with this plan anyway, because I think it’s the best approach to dealing with the most salient problem right now, which is rats. But I think the point you make is that you don’t really solve these things. They don’t really go away forever and always. They sort of bump up against other things and create different kinds of, as we by now say, challenges rather than problems. So I think that’s an important point to make. 

John Torpey

And nonetheless we do have this problem that, as you say, launched the writing of this book, which is that a lot of people are very unhappy with government, and they feel like it doesn’t speak to their needs, and I do think the bureaucracies are often the target, because they’re the permanent actor right? The politicians come and go. But, as we know from Weber, the bureaucracy is more or less permanent. And so those people have a certain level of power and a kind of you know, tenure in office often that makes them a target of unhappiness. And I think that’s part of what’s going on in the scenario that, as you say, led you to write this book.

Beth Noveck

So I just want to pick up on a couple of things you said here in no particular order. With the rats, at some level it’s also one of the kind of questions here, especially as we think about power, is just reducing the granularity of the conversation. And to say, we need to focus on these very small things sometimes that we can do. It’s not that the discussion about uses of data engagement has to be limited by virtue of it, involving community engagement only to small things like what time we take out the trash and that we can’t have more ambitious plans to how we take back New York from the rats, or as she’s now become famous for, the new Commissioner of Sanitation.

Beth Noveck

But it is about saying that new kinds of actors, including the most marginalized communities are as valid and as important as that of either the mandarins in the bureaucracy, or even in the academy. And that is taking things down from the level of these large, impossible geopolitical conversations into saying, everyday people’s experience matters. So this is the everyday bureaucracy conception is that my experience. 

Beth Noveck

For example, if I suffer of a disease, let’s say I have diabetes, that automatically makes me a certain kind of expert in diabetes, in managing my condition. I just finished a book by a law professor named Orly Lobel, and she begins the book by starting immediately with her experience as the parent of a child with diabetes, and all the things they have to do to manage her condition, and what that’s taught them about what it means to be a suffer of this disease, and how that’s helped them to devise solutions to manage the child’s care.

Beth Noveck

So this kind of everyday experience gives people remarkable expertise in navigating all kinds of situations, and we’re missing out institutionally in tapping into that expertise. And so that’s a lot about empowerment. And it’s a lot about empowering undervalued knowhow, practical experience day-to-day lived experience that we have previously viewed as unimportant. Frankly, I mean, we don’t compensate a lot of that work. We don’t value it in an economic sense, either, but we’re also not valuing it, and that the academy, I think, is very complicit also in some of that work. And I will say that I think that the academy, in particular a lot of people who have worked on ironically democratic deliberation and engagement, have played a role in reducing and distrusting the role of citizens in the process, because we have for so long in the academy talked about the role of citizens as simply deliberating in the church basement, but never about how citizens could actually set the agenda, could actually wield real power, could actually spend real money. 

Beth Noveck

And then you fast forward today to experiments and things like participatory budgeting, where across now thousands of communities around the world to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, including the kiosks, the LinkNYC Kiosks, now everywhere talking about participatory budgeting, and how ordinary citizens can actually spend money and decide what we spend it on. Or how in Iceland, a fifth of the population in Reykjavik is helping to choose the issues that every month the mayor gets to vote on. Or, in Taiwan 250,000 citizens are helping to write legislation. The real practitioners are showing that citizens can do something very, very different, and that’s much more powerful, frankly, than academics credited people with before. I think you know many exceptions to that people who focus obviously on activism and on communities. I think people in sociology have been much more effective at really looking at the power of communities more so than I fear in disciplines like political science, I would say so. I’ll put that out there. That might be a provocative concept, but I’ll throw it out there.

John Torpey

Well, that’s interesting, not least because I’m going to Reykjavik in about 3 months, so I’ll look around and see what I can see of what you’re describing. But in the meantime I’m sort of intrigued. I mentioned in the introduction that you had worked on a Digital Council for German Chancellor Angela Merkel and you’ve had other experiences with government in New Jersey as well, so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the way in which you were – I’m assuming this was work rather than field work, so to speak – but I’m curious how your experience in government helped inform what’s in the book.

Beth Noveck 

So you and I were talking earlier about other topics, about historical topics, and I’ll tell you it’s very much related to this, because I’m a student of history, and I’ve always been interested in the question of what makes for strong democratic institutions. What causes some institutions to succeed in other institutions to break under the weight of economic or other forces. And so it’s because of this long standing interest in institutions, and also an interest in the fact or recognition of the fact that institutions are where the power resides.

Beth Noveck 

They have the budgets, they have the convening power. They have the decision making authority that I have for a long time been interested in the way that institutions work, and the way the people inside institutions work, which is what makes this book different from other work that I’ve done before. In the press, I’ve written about institutions and democratic engagement, and this book is again very tactical and practical about the individuals within those organizations, again not limited to government, but, I think, without changing the institutions if we only work from the outside. And there are many wonderful people doing work, for example, to create the tools for engagement. Or obviously many people now thinking about how do we use data to solve problems and how do we create the machine learning tools that help us to ingest and make sense of that data, so that we can spot patterns in the traffic or cause patterns in our weather and how it changes.Or patterns in public health and the disparate impact for communities based on race or gender or economic status. So all of that work is extraordinarily important.

Beth Noveck 

But we have to connect it back to the way that institutions spend money and wield power, because in the end that’s where the big bucks are, frankly. So that’s been a lot of the motivation of spending time also in governments. So, for example, in Germany, one of the things that I’m very excited about, and it’s related to some of this work, I was being an advisor to an effort now to stand up what they call the Digital Academy in Germany, which is a free program to train the whole of the public sector, and they use it in English. They call it “New Work” in English, as in new ways of working. How do I use data? How do I use human-centered design? How do I use community engagement? There has been an articulation of, from on high, to say we want the public sector to change how we do things, to be more engaged, to be more data driven, to be more agile, and a recognition that people are not going to just get there by themselves. They have to actually receive training, and how they do that. 

Beth Noveck 

So they’ve created this Digital Academy and training has become a centerpiece of the government strategy for how to achieve better governance in Germany. I want to contrast that to the United States, where, although the government here is the largest employer in the country, we have no training strategy. We do not have a training academy. We do not provide free training to people in government at the federal level. The Office of Personnel Management does provide training. If you want to take a course in human-centered design, it’ll cost you $3,000, so maybe you have a budget in your agency to pay for that. But in all likelihood you don’t, because no one has thought to set aside the money for training. So the uptake of those resources is very limited. 

Beth Noveck 

Biden is putting out executive orders about equity, but no one has stopped to say, do people in government actually know what it means to do equitable engagement? And I would argue that they don’t. It’s why one of the projects my center is doing is to create an equitable engagement lab where what we do is we teach people how to do equitable engagement, and we provide them with platforms. Including platforms built in Iceland, I might add, so we’ll make sure that you get connected to those people because they’re building some great stuff there. We don’t have to build the tools anymore. In the beginning of my career, I spent a lot of time building the tools.

Beth Noveck

I don’t have to do that because the tools are there, but the “know about how to use them” is still limited, because I’m guessing that there is no one on this call who, either in their undergraduate or graduate education, learned necessarily [the following]: “how do I actually – and then surely people in government today haven’t been trained in –  define a problem? How do I do that with data? How do I sit down with the community in New Jersey?” I see with my own team who are are trained in these methods. A lot of what we do is to train other people in what it means to do human-centered design. So, for example, tomorrow – I’ll scoop myself – but tomorrow there’ll be a press release about transgender.nj.gov, a new website that the team built and they did it by sitting down with members of the transgender community to understand what their needs were before building that service. And there’s an ongoing sort of focus group, if you will, of individuals who are participating. There’s a place where you can get feedback on the site, etc. So it’s just a different way of doing things. It’s also different in that the project is very much just a first stage project, and it’s being announced as we’re launching it today, and we’re going to improve it 3 weeks from now, in another 6 weeks from now, which is just different from how things have been done in the past. 

Beth Noveck

But people aren’t born with the skills for how to do that, and it needs to be taught, and it’s going to eventually find its way into how we’re training people in college and in graduate schools. But in the meantime we also need to think about professional education. And let me just stop talking here for a second by saying it’s not just for people in government. I think of this idea of learning as, how do I get more effective at solving problems with communities, is something that is useful for everybody to learn.

John Torpey 

Now that you’ve started talking about technology in a somewhat more central way. I’m afraid I have a question for you that maybe on other people’s minds because it’s in the news a lot, and that is, you know what’s happening with AI. There’s a lot of, there was always a lot of concern about the prospects for disinformation and things like that. But now you’ve got a lot of pretty distinguished people in this world saying maybe we should pause. I mean it’s kind of the shocking thing to me in a way that this group of people has said [that] they’re sufficiently worried about our ability to kind of regulate these technologies in a way that makes them good for everybody.

John Torpey

All these people are signing this document and saying that we should sort of have a pause for developing this stuff and that there’s this breakneck competition to improve it and all these things. So you surely understand these technologies better than I do. But the question really is, of course, about the relevant social place of these technologies in our lives. And since, understandably, you think these technologies can be used for good purposes, and surely that’s true of AI. I just wonder how you react to what’s going on in this area?

Beth Noveck

Well, this is the next book. I hope I mean so. What but part of my sign here is, I think, a lot of us are facing the complete level of “overwhelmedness” (Is that a word?) by just the volume of commentary about AI coming at us. I just got added to a group called AI Chatter, a Whatsapp group, and it is probably like every five minutes something is going on this list serve. So it’s some level for people who are interested in this topic of technology. It’s an overwhelming moment. But, when I catch my breath after drowning under the latest large language model. And this Chat GPT, and the other thing fundamentally and all of the discussions about, “well, the robots eat our jobs” and “the singularity is at this is end of humanity,” “and robots will take over the world,” and all of that. I am more dismayed about the lack of focus on the use of technology for social good and for democracy.

Beth Noveck

I am actually more concerned that we are spending so much air time on talking about abuses, and talking about the parade of horrible things that we are not spending our time on, all the ways that we can do good with these amazing tools.

Beth Noveck

So I’ve been invoking Iceland a lot, so I’ll go back to them for a moment. Citizens foundation in Iceland, which builds open source free tools for democratic engagement and has already integrated ChatGPT into their primary platform, called “Your Priorities,” which has been used for 20,000 different resident engagements around the world to help. For example, people who are on the site use Chat GPT to summarize everything that everybody is saying on the site, so you can have a conversation at great volume with lots of people talking, and these tools actually enable you to get a handle of what’s going on.

Beth Noveck

They enable ordinary people, especially people who may not speak the language. Let’s imagine you’re a migrant who decides. John, you’re going to stay in Iceland. For a lot of reasons it’s beautiful, so could happen. Icelandic is not so easy to master–nor should you [master it]; they all speak English, and, moreover, ChatGPT speaks Icelandic. So they’re working on a project to preserve the language with the Government there. But they also make it possible for you then to translate what people are saying. It’s a Google translate, which is also an AI algorithm, uses machine learning and natural language processing to help you do just that enables people, though to not only to translate from one language to another. But maybe I’m not the world’s best speaker. I don’t know how to express what I want to say. These large language model tools are wonderful for actually helping you to compose what you want to say.

Beth Noveck 

Or let me give you another example. I was on a webinar a few weeks ago with the ABA [American Bar Association] and a group of very distinguished law professors, all talking about the question of citizen engagement in regulatory rule making. Some people here may know that since 1946, Americans have had a right, anybody has had a right. But in American law is codified the right to comment on draft rulemakings before federal agencies before regulations are enacted. So AI has already been put to use, for example, to make it possible for the people writing the rules to reduce duplication in the comments they’re seeing, because what happens is interest groups tell everybody go to FCC.gov and tell them why you don’t want net neutrality, or go to this agency and tell them why you want snowmobiling in public parks. Or go to this agency and tell them why you want them to increase fuel efficiency standards and reduce fuel efficiency standards. And people hit the send key 10,000 times with an electronic comment.

Beth Noveck 

It suddenly becomes possible using AI to actually make sense of the comments, so that people can actually be heard. Because without these tools, you have 20 million comments; it becomes very hard to sift through the noise, and therefore, people who actually have something meaningful to say get lost. So these are just a few examples of the myriad ways in which we can use these tools for engagement. And these are just today’s uses that are very mundane. I’m not even talking about reimagining, as Sam Altman, the CEO of open AI has already talked about, the idea of creating a global constitutional convention around the uses of AI. That’s something you can only do with AI tools. 

Beth Noveck

And I could go on in terms of the examples, both mundane and then imaginative, for tomorrow about the ways in which we might address the challenges of our democracy, foster more participatory democracy. Precisely using these tools.

John Torpey

Right. Well, thanks so much for taking the time to talk about all this. It’s been very interesting and encouraging and optimistic. So it’s been great to have Beth Noveck with us. Beth Noveck is a Professor in Politics at Northeastern University where she directs Burnes Center for Social Change and its partner project the Governance Lab. She’s the author of Solving Public Problems: How to Fix Our Government and Change our World from Yale University Press in 2021. And you should check it out. I want to thank Merrill Sovner and Lea Diaz, our visiting scholar, for helping make this possible and putting it together. My name is John Torpey and I’m from the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. I look forward to seeing you at our next event.