Welcome everybody. My name is Marnes Tikker. I'm very happy that you're live via the internet and that you participate in the first steps, the first moments of the public spaces conference. It's three parts. We have tonight, we have an international introduction. It's a whole evening until 10 o'clock, I think, so you can really spend a lot of time sharing ideas and learning from people that are working on a more fair and open inclusive internet. Tomorrow, there's a full day conference with also sessions in Dutch and in English and there's an evening talk show where people explore the internet with a host of guests. So it's quite a full programme. We are very aware that where the whole purpose of public spaces is to find, to reclaim the internet and being tracking free and have privacy as design as a principle, we're using a platform, Hopin, that doesn't really fit those criteria. We're working on it. I will share some spaces that we opened at Matrix.org, which do fit our criteria. So at the moment we feel a little bit awkward that we invite you on a platform that doesn't really fully commit to the idea of the public. But I think we are all together in a journey, in a transition and that we all here and that we can bring all these people together that are working on this, both from a technology perspective, from a political perspective, from policymaking, from activism, from human rights, from creativity, from the whole concept of sovereignty. I think it's great that we have this moment. And I'm pretty sure that this is moment, and I'm pretty sure that this is only a moment in time that we can fully support being supported by public value and technologies that are based on public values. Maybe I share with you the program, and I can do that by myself for a moment, just a moment. So here we are. We are in the public spaces conference towards a common internet. And this is the kickoff conference. So these are the first moments of the conference. And this is what I just mentioned. We created some spaces on matrix. And of course this is very difficult to immediately comprehend. So it will be in the chat. So then you can join us at these two spaces. One is an international public space room. And the other one is Dutch speaking. So that helps maybe to navigate it. And today, this afternoon, we will listen to three keynotes by Paul Keller, Katja Bego and Eli Pariser. And we have some opportunities for Q&A in there. And then there's a break and we will have a lot of community announcements. And my colleague Sander will take over from there. And then later tonight we have a beautiful panel with very, very busy speakers. And then around 9 o'clock we will wrap up and have a preview for the next day. But I would really love to listen to the three people that we invited for today, Paul Keller, Katja Bergo, and Hilaire Pariser. Paul is a co-founder and policy director at Open Futures. It's pretty new and an effort to bring this idea about openness towards the European policymaking and bringing a lot of different movements around open technologies, creative commons and so on together. So Paul will tell us more about that. Katia Bego is a senior researcher at Nesta and is very much involved in the programme Next Generation Internet. And also a European programme where a lot of activities have been done to define the Next Generation Internet but also to work and to really to build the next generation internet. So I'm really really curious what she can bring us and what is the next steps for for NGI, the next generation internet forward project. And then Eli Parise will present, he's co-director of the Civic Signals Initiative and also initiator of the new public initiative. Also a movement to come to more public value-based technologies and further digital public spaces. So I will stop sharing now and invite Paul to share his... Oh, sorry. I'm sorry. Katja. To invite Katja to the presentation. Katja, are you there? You have to click and participate, to participate. There you are. Yeah, I'm here. So good to see you. Perfect. It's so good to see you. Yes, I would love to, I think you will have like 10 minutes to present and you have slides yourself so please share that with us and we listen to you. Maybe see, oh this goes with Hopin. Can everyone see me? So can you see my slides now? Yes Okay, you see my slides now? Yes. Okay, perfect. So hi everyone, I'm Katja Begel and I'm a principal researcher at Nesta where I, wait a second, I'm missing the slides. Where I lead our work on future of the internet. So Nesta is a London-based innovation foundation, and we focus a lot on thinking about how new innovation can support solving some of today's most important challenges, which is a climate emergency, worsening inequality, those kind of topics, but we also think about the flip side. So how can emerging technologies also lead to new challenges? How can we ensure we proactively mitigate for some of those harms? So as part of that agenda, I lead the NGI Forward project that Marlene just mentioned, which is a seven-partner, Europe-wide consortium, which helps the European Commission come up with a vision for the Next Generation Internet Initiative Which is a large flagship program that seeks to build a more democratic and inclusive internet by 2030 So we help the European Commission in the capacity kind of as a policy or strategy arm Of the initiative to come up with an ambitious future for the future internet Where do we really want to be by the end of the decade and we help to identify also the concrete building blocks that we need to bring us towards that vision so that can be policy interventions technical solutions and we convene an ecosystem from europe and beyond of policy makers from the city level up civil society technologists a very wide group. And this is really to make sure that the NGI is not just a top-down initiative, but also a bottom-up one. And a lot of the solutions to today's problems with the internet lie in building a strong ecosystem for change rather than relying on one single silver bullet solution implemented from above. Sorry, yeah, okay, that worked. So the topic of today is this idea of building a common internet, right? An internet that serves the public interest. So when we talk about the internet today, we talk a lot about the problems. We've been very good at diagnosing the many issues. But what kind of internet do we want to see instead, though? Where are the remedies? So if we want to take a more practical, pragmatic approach, in my view, towards building public alternatives, we need to address the root causes that are the source of so many of the big challenges we face today in the internet and um yeah and should like be ensured we lay the right foundations build the right new public infrastructures self-resilient infrastructure ecosystems and break through those vicious cycles currently so core to the digital economy um so in my view we're at an incredibly important moment to have this discussion. This is a very pivotal moment for Europe, both in terms of upcoming policy agendas, which I think Paul will be talking about next, and also when it comes to the wider geopolitics around a lot of these topics. So I'm very excited to be having these conversations over the next two days. So I'll note the irony that I'm starting with telling you a bit about problems when I just said that we shouldn't be talking about problems, but I do think it's very important to understand the kind of fundamental dynamics that we're trying to challenge today. Because again and again, when we look at sort of the various layers of the internet as a system, from the very underlying physical infrastructures, things as undersea cables or the resources, taking a connected car to the way, all the way up in the system and the internet itself are impacting our cities, communities. Across all those layers, we see the same self-reinforcing dynamics, which we need to try and challenge. And that is this idea of more, more, more. So more concentration, more fragmentation, and simply more things. So I guess some of you have seen similar thoughts than me before, maybe seen this image before. One second, I can't see it myself now. And that is this is an art project that we commissioned for NGi Forward by Belgian artist Dries de Roek. He asked children in Senegal and Belgium to draw the internet. How do children today see the internet as a concept? It's really a bit sad in some ways, but the result was from that exercise. If you ask young children today to draw the internet, they just think of a series of applications. Wild gardens rather than the still more free and kind of open internet previous generations. These many of us still got to enjoy. So yeah, I'm basically not telling anyone here anything new when I say that on today's internet. Power is concentrated in the hands of only a very few actors who increasingly control what we read, what we see. We are living in a winner-takes-all digital economy where the tendency really tends to be that we always end up with a small number of winners across all layers of the system, leaving the rest of us behind. Especially those now that we see a larger encroachment in a digital divide. So, and as this vicious cycle continues, those who currently dominate have most access to data are just best able to seize on the next wave of innovation. They can also continue to ensure they stay so powerful in the future. So we think a lot of the root of this is basically the business models underpinning the current digital economy reward this kind of concentration, right? With the most powerful actors basically not increasingly acting as infrastructures in their own right. Infrastructures they get to set the rules for too. And that we all have to rely on. So, I guess many of you have probably heard the recent example of Google and that they're sort of ambition, that they're promised to phase out third-party cookies on Chrome in the next two years, which is at first they kind of set it as a privacy initiative, but if you think about it, Google on its own, despite everything else it purports to be, is the world's largest advertising company and owns the world's largest browser and gets to set the rules for that browser to effectively exclude all fellow advertising companies for making use of the things work at least set the rules for how they get to engage well i'm not per se a friend of third-party cookies it is an interesting way to show how this sort of gatekeeper power works. We really want a single entity to be able to wield so much power, right? And the second dynamic I'd like to talk about a bit more is this idea of more fragmentation. So while we see a lot more concentration sort of within silos of the internet or behind the walled gardens, we also see the global internet itself increasingly on a path towards fragmentation. So COVID-19 has clearly accelerated the sort of balkanization, fragmentation, and breakdown of governance systems that was already a long time in the making. And as technology has really emerged as one of the main theatres of geopolitical tension, we see a growing distrust about technologies between countries, we see a strong push towards national sovereignty, decoupling, reducing dependencies, things for example, a lot of the recent news stories about semiconductor shortages and or countries trying to control standard setting processes, for example. And I think there is a real risk that we end up with a sort of fully functional splinter net if we continue down this road. Yeah, and then the third is this idea of simply more things, more of everything. And this is this dynamic of just more scale. So the internet is becoming more pervasive as a system. It's almost no longer something we can understand as one, right? And we have very little control over the way it grows. The digital economy is optimized for growth rather than for enabling good new connectivity. More than us than ever before are connected to the internet. We on average use more devices per person, use those devices in ever more energy intensive ways. So for example, one hour of streaming our favorite TV show takes much more energy than it takes if you would spend it reading Wikipedia, for example. And it's also increasing explosively. And I think particularly interesting example of this, of course, sort of strange revival of interesting cryptocurrencies in past weeks. As a particularly sort of, I guess, grandiose example of that. So this volume does not just have a large environmental impact, but also a social one. Information overload and the addictive nature of a lot of technologies that we use every day is eroding our democracies, simply just quite hard for our brains to handle. I guess all of you have had a lot of cases of Zoom fatigue in the recent year, or past year. So how do we stay within planetary and cognitive balance and how do we collectively decide when more connectivity or more devices is simply too much? So if we know about those three dynamics, it's now time, as I promised, to move to some other solutions. And what can we do about it? So as we've seen, many of the most discussed problems on the internet today are symptoms of a fundamentally broken digital economy, which is mostly enabled by unfair access to data and a lack of open global governance systems that can respond to kind of in some ways quite unique problems. I think that the internet has brought to the fore at least existing governance systems have proven ill-equipped to respond to. But it's also not so that we're kind of stuck in this, right? Like things don't have to be this way. So these systems are ultimately the product of our own choices, our own design. It's not impossible to make different ones, design things entirely differently. So if we want to build new public spaces online and really centralize the internet, we need to move beyond trying to fix sort of excesses within a broken system. So it's a bit of an old school image, or maybe quite a Dutch image in some way, but throwing buckets of water out of a sinking ship. But we need to really think about how we can actually fundamentally rethink the systems we rely on rather than tweak at the margins and get at the roots of these problems and break through the cycle. So the next two days we'll be talking a lot about what Europe can do about all of this, right? So and I think that's a very important question. So this conference is really about what we as a community but also probably the Commission can do to make a change. So for many years now, many in Europe and beyond have looked to Europe or Brussels institutions to solve some of these growing problems. I know that Paul next will be talking quite a bit about this too. So it is this slightly nebulous idea, of course, of European values, preserved privacy, human dignity, agency. What does that mean? And Europe has of course been quite active or very active rather on the regulatory front. And there are also very many very interesting initiatives all over the continent trying to do things differently. But there have been some quite like notable successes, I think. And I think if you now see this sort of really global push for much more regulation of the internet, I think Europe can take a lot of credit for that. We won't see this sort of wholesale radical change. We want to see if we don't become bolder and a lot more imaginative about what kind of role a powerful institution like the European Commission, as well as the broader European ecosystem can play in making this happen. So in my view, there couldn't be a more urgent moment to have this conversation as well, because we find ourselves at an important hinge moment in these discussions about Europe's role in rethinking the internet. So for years many of us in this room with us at BEYOND have argued that if Europe truly wants to become a true superpower, a leader in really making a change in this space, it can't just be the referee, right? It can't just be the global regulator. We have to build our own alternatives. And now we finally reached a point, I think, where particularly the significant COVID-19 recovery funds, of which a really substantial 20% is our earmark to help sort of twin green and digital transition gives us a really unique opportunity to suddenly invest a lot in these alternatives. And then there's also on the highest level suddenly this big push for digital sovereignty. So let's build things here on the continent. Let's no longer be so reliant on technology and supply chain build and owned by others. It's the only way we can have our voices be heard in the development process. But I personally think it also comes at a very big risk because while internet sovereignty is a nice evocative image, it's also a very muddled term and it means very many different things to different people. And in my view, this whole debate is very quickly turning into something that's really about creating national champions, joining the R&D bandwagon to sort of build our own European alternatives that can compete with Silicon Valley, with Shenzhen. But simply because the technology is made in Europe, it doesn't magically embed European values, right? And this whole idea that if we only built our own gigantic companies that would somehow be better doesn't get at the fact that they, even if they intend to do things better, would still have to rely on the same business models, still have to operate within the same conditions of the digital economy if they want to be a success. So if we know that, I think this is actually a very urgent moment to, as a community, come up with something else. So I know I don't know how I'm doing for time. Not great, I think. But as long as I'm not stopped, stop me when I'm too long. We have some alternatives and I think that we need to come together as a community of practice across Europe that we need to come together as a community of practice across Europe and propose urgently to the Commission our own sort of pragmatic but really bold alternatives. Because rather than have the Commission try to build the next Google, we really should be focusing or pushing them to build the kind of infrastructures that would prevent the next Google instead. So I particularly think that the commission can play a very new rather sort of interesting role in making some of that happen. And we've recently published a big paper, NGI Forward, I'll post the link in the chat later. So explaining some of these ideas, but I quickly wanted to give some flavor of what I think needs to happen to make some of these sort of alternatives come to be. So there's first this idea kind of of democratic digital infrastructures. So we need new, commonly owned and secure underlying digital infrastructures if we want to sort of challenge this sort of concentration that the existing business models lead to. So that is using new data governance models and innovations in identity to really allow each of us as citizens to share the data in a fair and accountable way, do it shared in our own terms, be able to retract access whenever we want to. That's one piece of the puzzle. But we also need to give access to data in a fair way to new organizations that want to compete. Not everyone here, I guess, might agree. But I do think we've passed the hurdle where you can say we're not going to share any of this. It will happen. And at least let's design a process for it to happen in an equitable, good, accountable way. I believe the Commission could fund the models for this, not control it, but empower the open source community a lot more. Take charge of this and design the open governance systems to make this work. Oops. Yeah, that was this bit. I'll be quick for the next two. There's also this idea of healthy, interoperable ecosystems. The EC can play an important convening role to bring a lot of the disparate initiatives across Europe together. I think conferences like this are very important, simply because currently there is so much reinvention of the wheel, a lot of fragmentation between member states, people not being aware of what's going on. It's a real waste. But I think we can even go a step further, and I know that public spaces, or at least here at Janssen recently, in a talk I heard that I really liked, about creating a fully interoperable open source set of alternative tools and solutions. And I think that will be the key, kind of the crux to a lot of this. It's like rather than have a lot of very small solutions, try to sort of compete with their centralized analog. Can they work together? Can we make it easier to share data between different tools? Is it easier to like have the same identity across? I think the recent exodus from WhatsApp to Signal kind of showcased how that continues to be an issue, right? If you don't have clear rules for data portability, interoperability, these kind of things. So can we collaboratively work as an ecosystem and strengthen sort of the market for alternatives or the comments for alternatives, I should say. alternatives, or the comments for alternatives, I should say. And then lastly, very briefly, this idea of open governance systems, and I won't go into details of this, but it is to me become very clear that unless governments kind of practice institutional innovation, come up with new models for how to think things through, we simply cannot respond to the pressures of the digital economy or the pace of development. The governance systems are not open, they're not shared, there are not enough people involved in the process that needs to be opened up. But we also need to think a lot more about how you can be much more proactive about shaping the direction of new innovation rather than doing this sort of Hydra exercise where we keep chopping up the head of various problems that keep emerging, yet they all still have that same root cause that I talked about before. That's where we need to get that. And that's, I'm quite keen to discuss that more over the next two days and see how people think sort of new governance models for the digital economy could work. And I encourage you to have a read of our paper as well on this. And yeah, I'll leave it at that. Thank you. Great, Katja. Thank you so much. Maybe if you stop sharing your screen, your little screen becomes a bit bigger. We have only seen a very small... Oh, you left the whole meeting. I wanted to ask you some questions, but maybe I can also wait. You join me. Okay, great. Because I think this whole research into the next generation internet is a program for some years now. Do you see any progression? Do you see that things that is being researched, that it becomes more strengthened or does it really has some impacts yeah maybe I can explain a little bit about a kind of party and I work so it's kind of rear I get of this initiative but the other half of these things and I guess it might be quite interesting for lots listening today, is this kind of R&D arm of the commission. So they've come up with a new funding model that is not kind of a very small startup or a little grassroots initiative trying to apply for commission funding, which is very, very difficult. They have this cascaded funding model where they're kind of themable grants from the Commission to try things out. I think the model is very interesting. It's been only two years since they have been funding these ideas. I think there's lots of, I don't know the exact numbers, but probably 400 or 500 things must have been funded to this now, projects across Europe, which is very exciting. It will take maybe a bit of time to know the outcomes. But what I think personally is a success, and I hope something that could be scaled in different ways, is this idea kind of of themes and building blocks that the NGI is trying to achieve. So it's not we're going to scatter funding to loads of hundreds of different things. There's no connection between, but it's really about can we build bridges in between? Can they collaborate? Can they become an ecosystem rather than a sort of scatters thing of funding, basically. What I think is interesting is that it's both, I think your field is more awareness policy making, finding the ground rules for how we have to build the new next generation internet, but there are also really building blocks built. I think this is very interesting that people are actually creating these technologies based on public values and so on. So I think that together makes it a very strong program. Yeah, I think that is quite maybe quite a unique feature, at least for a commission side of things to combine those two things, which you tend to have like early program or policy program. And this is the one where they really try to make a cohesive kind of narrative and link the both, which I think is quite powerful. Very good very good well thank you so much for the moment you come back later um i want to ask paul keller to uh to join the stage uh paul is uh working on the whole concept of commons and creative commons for a long time uh has spent a lot of time in in getting more into how the policy making on that level is being done and you founded the open future foundation and you're co-director of that and but i think you're going to tell us a bit more about what's happening in the european level and maybe even abroad so paul take the technique Yes, hello everyone. Hello Marlene. Thanks for having me here. Marlene and I are actually in the same room. Not the same room, but the same building in Amsterdam, but we're still playing the virtual game. So yeah, I'm Paul Keller. I'm co-founder of Open Future, which is a new think tank that works for Shared Digital Europe. I've founded Open Futures together with Alec Tarkovsky, who will join us later today. He will moderate the panel towards the end of the day. And I'm here to talk a little bit about our ideas for a shared digital Europe. And I can share my screen for that, which hopefully works. This is a bit confusing. Can you see the screen now? I hope so. I have no feedback anymore, so I'm assuming that you can see the screen now. So towards a shared digital Europe, the question we're really trying to answer, I guess, with our activities, our think tank, with this idea of a shared digital Europe, but also with this conference in the end is how we can build digital public infrastructures for Europe, how we can fix the internet, right? And in answering this question, it makes sense to go back and look at how the European policymakers have looked at the internet as it evolved, right? And if we go back to the beginning of this century, a time that I think a lot of us are looking back towards for inspiration when the internet was still a space of opportunity, when it was not dominated by a very small number of platform players. Around that time, like the most common or one of the dominant ways of European policymakers to refer to the digital space was the information society, which actually, I think, is still a fairly beautiful term, because it does put society as the center of this analysis of what's changing, right? Like it assumes that the information revolution, as it was called then, has an impact on all of society. This is reflected in policy documents from around this time and reflects this initial enthusiasm about digital policies. Digital policies were not very much central at the European level. So the European policymakers, the European Union, have not really looked at the digital space as something that is there at the core of their policymaking for a long while. This is something that really stepped up in the 2010s. And you see a market change of the terminology they use like from 2014 2015 onwards the the main way of talking about the digital environment and how europe needs to influence the digital environment is this idea of a digital single market right like which is on the one hand, the single market has always been the core object of European policymaking and claiming that there is a digital single market is also an effect or an attempt to claim jurisdiction in a way. But it is also a very, very limited frame, of course, because it is in the end conceptualizing the digital space as a market and as something that is in the end shaped by market forces and where it is the task of the policymakers on the European level and on national levels to create the conditions for a healthy market. And that is something that is, I think, one of what we think one of the core problems that are one of the core elements that contributed to the situation that we're in right now, that Katja also described in much more detail in her previous presentation. We are essentially in a situation where the shape of the digital environment is really dominated by big market players who've risen to power and there is a logic of the biggest one wins. And if you are, as I have been, and many people here in the room, I guess, like have been involved in trying to shape the way the EU makes policy on the digital field, you also come to realize relatively quickly that if policymakers look at the internet primarily as a marketplace, there is a very limited room for imagination of intervention, right? Like things need to be framed in terms of market failure in order for them to have an idea to intervene there. So issues around cultural policies, issues about public space are not necessarily things that even fit in this overall concept. Then there is, in 2018, a point which is extremely interesting for two reasons. One, which we won't go into here, is that the GDPR is an interesting part of regulation on the European level. But the other and maybe the most important part about the GDPR is the change that it brought in the mindset of European policymakers. The fact that the GDPR came into effect, that the GDPR is something that changed the behavior of Internet platforms, big and small, but something that also changed or forced Internet platforms outside of Europe to change behavior and that has inspired legislation in other jurisdictions other than Europe, is something that has really empowered the imagination of European policymakers, right? Like it's really a yes, we can make rules for the digital space moment. You see like really a time before 2018 and a time after 2018 where like there's really a feeling of empowerment with policy makers on all levels, on the European level but also I guess that tickles down to national levels as well. And in this environment we teamed up with a number of people and a number of organizations, and that includes Marlene, that includes Katja. And so there's also no surprise that some of these ideas that I'm presenting here are really much converging with what Katja told us before, to work on something which became a vision for a shared digital Europe, which we published together with our partners from the Commons Network in 2019, and which outlines an idea for how a European policy frame for thinking about digital policymaking should look like that is not a market policy frame first. And we identified at that time in 2019 four different design principles that we think really should underpin policymaking for the digital space. And they are very generic, very high level design principles. And I want to walk you through these four principles for a moment. that we think that digital policies should be aimed at enabling self-determination of citizens and of civic communities at the core of it. So this needs to be one of the main objectives of any policy interventions that we're not steered by the digital environment, but that the digital environment actually contributes to agency of citizens, of the participants in the digital environment actually contributes to agency of citizens, of the participants in the digital environment, right? So this is a core principle. This also puts a little bit like you can take this also on the European level, on the national level and say like really like countries need to be or policy spaces like the European policy space need to be in control of their own digital tools and digital environment. The second principle that we have is to cultivate the commons, right? Like we really believe that the internet enables other forms of collaborations, commons-based forms of collaborations that put communities that act on common principles in a position to act and to shape environments and to provide services to each other in a way that was not necessarily possible in the pre-internet environment. So this is a way and this is something that policies aimed at the digital space should encourage. policies aimed at the digital space should encourage. Policymaking needs to empower these types of non-state, non-market activities that shape society. Our third principle is the principle of decentralizing infrastructure. So we really see that a lot of, and I think that's also what Katja mentioned before, that a lot of the problems are there because of increasing centralization of internet infrastructure, of internet platforms. And we see the best way against this is to radically rethink the way we deal with infrastructure and to work with decentralized infrastructures. This has also shaped into a discussion about interoperability over the last couple of years. I think that's at the moment maybe even like the more powerful idea than decentralization, but both of them are more or less two sides of the same coin. And then finally, our fourth principle is the idea that we really need to empower public institutions, right? Like we have in Europe a history of public institutions that have a very strong role in civic life, in shaping our societies, in safeguarding democratic values. And we see that public institutions, be that libraries, museums, archives, but also things like public service broadcasters, are really pushed to the margins in the digital environment. They are seen as users. They are not seen as core elements of this digital environment. And we really think that European policymaking around the digital space needs to be based on this recognition of the important role that public institutions can build in shaping a digital space that is not a market alone. So where are we now in 2020, 2021? Like in 2020 we got a new European Commission and this new European Commission comes with a new European policy agenda and I think we almost nailed it when we called our thing Shared Digital Europe because they called this policy agenda, this new policy strategy, shaping Europe's digital future. So you see like there's the references to the digital single market are a little bit in the background like it's not the core policy framework anymore. And we are in a situation where this European Commission really, as Katja also mentioned already, like sees regulating and shaping the digital space as one of its core policy objectives, right? Like it's moved even further to the top of the policy agenda. And you see that in the past couple of years with really a flurry of policy initiatives that have taken place that have been launched by the European Commission. And the underlying ideas, and I think, again, Katja stole a little bit of my thunder already, are these ideas of digital sovereignty, European digital sovereignty, and what Katja called a vague concept of European values. So our digital space needs to be governed by European values. This, by the way, is a referral back also to the GDPR, which is always seen as the core example of how European values can shape a policy intervention into this room. So there are really a lot of policy interventions in this European policy agenda, but there's three main ones that I briefly want to say a couple of words about. The first one is known by its acronym, the DSA, which stands for the Digital Services Act and is really a piece of very ambitious legislation, ambitious legislation that will apply directly through Europe, like the GDPR, that seeks to, at the core of it, enable more transparency for digital services, for large digital platforms. So this deals very much with issues like content moderation, the rules for sharing content on these platforms, and is something that goes in a good direction. It tries to bring more control over how these services operate. But in its essence, it is, in the end, one of these, like the metaphor that Katja had on her side with the boat, it is in the end regulating a broken system, right? Like we know that these platforms that are based on targeted advertising are fundamentally broken, that they are not necessarily tools of empowerment and regulating them to a larger degree is a good thing, but it will probably not fix the underlying problems. Which brings us to the next policy initiative that's ongoing, which is the Digital Markets Act, DMA. The Digital Markets Act is in essence about more competition. So it tries to, it is based on the assumption that some of these platforms have gotten way too big and need to comply with additional rules in the field of competition, right? Like, so they need to be more transparent that certain types of activities are not allowed for platforms above a certain size. But at the essence, again, this is also another example of regulation of basically trying to fix something that is broken that's fundamentally broken and where we can fix some of the excesses but that does not fundamentally change the system at least these two the dsa and the dma are i think the the current like really dominating the policy conversation in brussels about uh the digital space. But I would argue here that they are also, because they are essentially fixing, like fixes to a broken system, applying regulation to something that needs more fundamental change, are things that are not going far enough. And in that sense, are maybe not the most interesting pieces of legislation. There is a third thing with three letters, and that's called the Data Governance Act. So in this case, it's not digital, what the D stands for, but Data Governance Act. And this is a fairly ambitious effort to build a European data space, right? Like the European or the Data Governance Act is essentially an attempt to create more data for the European economy, right? Like it tries to interfere at the exchange of data between private entities, between citizens and private entities, and tries fundamentally to build a European competitive advantage by making more data available to the European economy, which is, in that sense, interesting, because it really is an attempt to build something new, not to regulate something existing, but to build something new to shape a landscape that we do not have at the moment. But in the end, this idea of increasing the flows of data and making more data available to the economy seemed to be at the first sight a very dangerous idea as well. Like most of our problems that we have at the moment probably stem from the idea that there is too much data available and that there's too little control over the use of this data. And from our perspective, this Data Governance Act will be like a very interesting fight that will show us like what direction we're going. If these ideas about sharing or building policy tools based on European values, on values that need to empower citizens and enable democracy are true, then this should be reflected in attempts like this. And this probably calls for limits on data sharing instead of encouragements on data sharing. This, again, is something that is currently discussed in the European Parliament. So the European Commission has made a proposal and this is making its way through the European Parliament. It is a discussion that I would encourage people here to follow more closely than it's currently followed by a lot of people. So that brings me to the last part of my presentation. And this is reflecting on what we've seen so far are really attempts to fix things by fighting the existing reality. And I'm quoting here Buckminster Fuller, who says, like, if you really want to change something, you build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. model obsolete. And we, I would argue, at this stage in the European policy circle, at this moment with the conviction that things really need to change and with the conviction that things can be changed in Europe, we as a civil society have a unique opportunity to present alternatives. At the moment, the European Commission seems to have some ideas that things need to change, but it also does not have a very clear orientation in what direction things need to change. We're seeing that this mainly comes down at the moment to efforts to regulate down and to project things into the future that are already ongoing. But there is a certain lack of imagination on the behalf of European policymakers at the moment that creates an opportunity for imagination on our side. And this is the space that I really hope that this conference can fill. Like we have been working based on our shared digital Europe in the past on ideas, really. How can we make this operational? Like what we are in the process of proposing is like efforts for an interoperable public civic ecosystem. So this builds on this idea that the ecosystems that we build need to be based on three elements. They need to be interoperable, they need to be public, and they need to be driven by public institutions and civic forces. This is the idea where we need to claim this agency and we need to claim this opportunity of imagination and run with it. And I really hope that with this conference here today and with the discussions we have this evening and tomorrow, we will make steps towards this and we will be able to develop concrete proposals for policy alternatives that we can bring into this European policy discussion. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Paul. This is an interoperable public-civic ecosystem. That's quite a mouthful. Maybe if you end your slide, we can see you a bit better. Because I have a question. Don't leave. I have a question for you. Don't leave, I have a question for you. Do you believe we are ready as public institutions, the civic movement, is it ready to take up that role? It's a good question. Like if we were ready to take up this role, we probably wouldn't be sitting in conference rooms or in virtual conference rooms and talk about like what we should do next right um but i would argue we really have the opportunity here and we have if i look at uh katja's presentation i look at my presentation i had a sneak preview at what the next presentation will gonna be like i know a couple of the presentations that will be tomorrow we are really converging on these ideas that like what is essentially lacking in today's um in today's online environment are is is a sense of public ownership of infrastructures a sense of a stronger role of parties that do not operate from a market logic. Like we're all convening on these ideas. So we are ready. We just need to figure out how we put these things on the agenda. I think that's the step that we haven't really taken yet. Right. Like we're trying, we're experimenting with this. Like our shared digital Europe, was an attempt to say like, hey, here's a policy frame that you can use to build your next set of policy intervention. Like we launched that explicitly before the new European Commission developed its work program. Like maybe we have influenced that a little bit because like to some degree like, some elements are in there. But, like, we really need to push through. And I think we have more opportunity than we may sense that we have at the moment. So, yes, we're ready. We're ready. Wow. Wow. Really? I never hear you being so optimistic, really. This is really a great moment to share here with everybody. Yes, I think I think I already want to ask you to join us and to prepare because it's interesting that we approach this very much from a European perspective, but it's also a global movement. And I think you can share that with us as initiator of also the, I have to say it right, the new public initiative. I think this is all we have discussed is also part of that movement. And you can share a bit more about that with us. Yeah, even Americans are getting on board with this whole premise. So, yeah, happy to be here and really excited by what I just heard from Paul and Katya about what folks are thinking about. I think there is, as you'll see, a lot of convergence and a lot of shared thinking. So let me see if I can share my screen here. All right. Can folks see this? Hopefully, yes. Great. So I want to take you through a little bit of research that we've done recently on what are the qualities of healthy digital public spaces. And I work for an initiative called New Public. We were called Civic Signals. Now we're New Public. It's a little confusing. And I'll share a little bit about that as well. So New Public is a community of designers and builders and thinkers who are thinking about how do we build more public-friendly digital spaces. And I co-founded it with Talia Stroud, who's a professor of communications at the University of Texas, Austin. And what I want to present is some research that we've done that we hope kind of helps ground this conversation in a set of kind of values or qualities that we could use to evaluate. You know, if we want to build better digital public spaces, what does better really mean? How would we know? And we don't think that we've hit on the kind of final recipe, but we do think that we've found a number of elements that are really important. think that we've found a number of elements that are really important. We think this framework can both allow us to evaluate where are our existing public digital platforms falling short, and also be a kind of roadmap for these new initiatives that we heard Paul reference and Katya reference about how we might build things differently. So before we get into the framework itself, I want to just share a little bit of kind of how Talia and I got here, which was really thinking about if we think about the role of public spaces and physical communities, we believe they play a really critical role. And I'm sure given the name of this conference, given everyone who's here, this is not a very controversial point. But that certainly, at least in the United States, I think we tend to overlook the incredibly important social value and the positive externalities that come out of places like parks and libraries and town squares. And that in some ways, like if you want to have a pluralistic democracy, these are the places that make that possible, that they're the operating system for democracy. And so without them, societies become unstable and pull apart. And at the same time, we have this shift where public life is happening in new places. And in particular, in digital platforms like Facebook and Twitter, that kind of act like public spaces, but weren't actually built with any of the public goals that physical public spaces ideally are built with. And in many cases, as you'll see, these platforms just aren't up to the task of serving the public needs that public spaces need to serve. So the way that Tali and I kind of approached this set of questions was really thinking about what does it mean to flip back and forth between thinking about digital communities and physical communities. And we really tried to move away from a kind of pure information and feeds model that centers content and imagines people as kind of exchangers of content towards something that was much more thinking about people in space. And we think thinking about people in space is really valuable because it gets us to all of the ways that humans relate and interact that are not about kind of the rational exchange of facts, but that are about group behavior, that are about nonverbal communication, emotionality, all of these things that appear when you start to observe any group of people in space. And I think our thesis is there's also a wealth of knowledge that we have that we can draw from, from physical spaces to inform our digital ones. So, you know, humans have been designing spaces for millennia, and there are lessons here that can be really helpful for digital life. When it comes to publicness, this is, I think, I'm sure there's a whole track over the next couple days or something of, like, how do we exactly want to define public publicness? But our scope here was kind of spaces where anyone is ostensibly welcome to enter and engage. We're not talking about public in the sense of publicly owned or publicly governed. Although, as you'll see, I think those ideas are closely adjacent. And we're starting to understand what it means to be public in the sense of anyone being able to enter without being public in the sense of anyone is able to govern or exert power over the space. So when we started doing this exercise of kind of what can we learn from physical spaces about digital spaces. There were a bunch of pieces that really came out very quickly. So one is, you know, from talking to urban planners and placemakers, that this idea of programming and this whole kind of organization of social activities layer of this problem is really critical. I think designers tend to think about sort of the built environment as the core of what makes a space work. And what we heard again and again was that actually it's the combination of the design affordances and the kind of social infrastructure and social building that's happening that makes a space flourish or not. We also heard that spaces often do a lot of work to kind of visually signal what is this space for? What is invited here? What is not invited here? And there's some specificity that's really in contrast to the kind of like formless, you know, emergent quality of a lot of digital contexts. We noted that, you know, especially in the last 30 years, there's been a lot of attention to accessibility and to making spaces physically accessible and attractive to lots of different populations and really designing with those populations in mind. And then also that a key quality of healthy spaces was that there were people who took responsibility for them, sometimes paid, sometimes unpaid, sometimes paid, sometimes unpaid, but that this quality of kind of stewardship and maintenance was really critical to the spaces flourishing. And finally, you know, that there was this kind of feedback loop where spaces were designed in partnership with communities that use them, which seems so obvious in some ways, and yet contrasts with a lot of the technocratic top-down impulses that we see online. So all of this led us to ask whether partly what's needed is a move, and again, this echoes some of what you heard from Katya and Paul, from a user-friendly design framework, which is really focused on kind of how do I optimize a metric for a given person. And you can do that in a beneficial or a benevolent way, right? You can say, I'm going to try to optimize for your sense of mental well-being. Still, that's different than what we would call public friendly design, which would actually be designing for publics and for quality public experiences. And I'll give you an example of how these two things can run into some pretty extreme tension. So for example, if you are a big platform that optimizes content in a feed, and you said, let's optimize for individual well-being, you might find that what you wanted to do was spur more conversations with people you knew well. And that might be most easily done with conversation that were around sort of polarizing political topics. were around sort of polarizing political topics. And that might, in turn, create actually more tribalism and polarization at the macro level, even as it creates more well-being because I'm having a fun time, you know, dunking on people I don't like with my friends. And so the point is, maximizing each individual's well-being is not the same as maximizing group well-being, maximizing each individual's well-being is not the same as maximizing group well-being, and that we really need spaces that put that second category at the forefront of their design intent. And finally, I'll just say, you know, a premise that we walked in with was there is no universal solution to public space. Public spaces in the real world are all contextual. They're situated. They have local character. That's what makes them great. And, you know, I think there's a fundamental premise that we accept in some digital conversations that we can have one algorithm that stretches across the whole world. We don't really think that that's possible. And so we need to look toward a model of digital space making that is pluralistic and federated rather than, you know, one algorithm for everybody. So we found that there are a number of elements, what we're calling signals, that do recur in flourishing public spaces. And just so that we can get into the conversation, I'm going to kind of move quickly through this. But this is all on our website, newpublic.org slash signals. I'll put it in the chat afterwards. And you can really look through all of these signals that I'm about to talk about. So our question with the signals was really what are the critical qualities of flourishing public spaces and we really focused on sort of the the positive qualities so you know we think there's incredibly important work happening to identify all the challenges with current spaces but we asked you know how would we evaluate if a space was really doing a great job of being a flourishing public space? And the premise is, you know, an absence of harm doesn't necessarily indicate the presence of goodness. So just because people aren't being horribly harassed or there isn't virulent misinformation does not mean that we're, you know, in the clear in the same way that, you know, just the fact that you're not having a heart attack right now doesn't mean that you're a healthy person. So we interviewed experts from a range of fields. We did a big research review and then we conducted focus groups in five countries and survey in 20 countries to really figure out how do people actually out in public who use platforms feel about these qualities. I'm going to skip over this slide just for time. One interesting thing that came out of this, and then I'll get into kind of what we found, is that there were some places where we kind of diverged from the common conversation around what good looks like. So I'll just give you one example, which is civility is a thing that we like to talk about a lot. But civility in a lot of contexts actually seems to represent adhering to whatever the dominant group in that space's norms are. And so you're being civil if you're kind of conforming to those norms, you're being uncivil if you're not. And it turned out just not to be a very helpful framework for us for thinking about this. So what do we find? Well, we found that these signals, we found 14 design principles or signals, and we found that they clustered in these four key categories, welcome, connect, understand, and act. And our view is that, you know, these, not all public spaces online will have all 14 of the signals, but generally like a thriving, mutually beneficial digital space will build on a lot of them. And so our view as a kind of mission statement is a flourishing digital space should be publishing, should be welcoming and safe for diverse publics, should help us understand and make sense of the world, should connect people near and far across hierarchies and divides and enable us to act together. So welcome is the first category. And what's interesting about welcome is it's kind of, you know, if you want to think about kind of Maslow's hierarchy, welcome is the bottom tier. If people don't feel welcome, and we saw this again and again across a whole bunch of different countries and a whole bunch of different demographics, if you don't feel welcome in a place, none of this other stuff matters. And so making sure that people feel actually invited to participate, that they feel humanized to others, that they feel like they're safe and secure. These are really critical sort of bedrock qualities for spaces before you get to any of these higher order kind of democratic tasks. Connect, obviously, you know, Mark Zuckerberg famously set out to connect the world. And so obviously connection is a double edged sword. I think what we looked at in these signals is how do you cultivate healthy connection? I think what we looked at in these signals is how do you cultivate healthy connection? So how do you cultivate belonging that gives people that sense of inclusion and agency that's really important? How do you build bridges between these groups? And then how do you strengthen ties to both, on the one hand, local identity and power? Understanding, you know, really this is about how do we make meaning together? So this is the kind of public version of understanding, not the individual version of understanding. But it's about in what ways are these platforms actually allowing us to collaborate to come out with some shared framework or shared understanding that we wouldn't otherwise have? And then finally, action. And I think this is really important. And then finally, action. And I think this is really important. It's not just about kind of civic action or voting, but it's about the fact that when we talk to theorists of democracy and theorists of pluralism again and again, they came back to this thing that like, it's and common purpose and a virtuous cycle that reinforces the idea of healthy spaces unless we're actually doing stuff. And so this action component, I think, is really key. We talked to a whole bunch of super users of these different platforms. Again, there's extensive details on how people felt about every different platform on the website. But just to give you a little taste, so for Twitter, for example, Twitter super users said that what was most important for that platform was to keep people's information secure, to build civic competence, and to show reliable information. You can see that one of the most important signals is to show reliable information. That's also one of the lowest performing ratings. So this kind of indicates a clear gap between what people want from Twitter, the platform and what they're getting. Facebook is similar, actually. The two most important signals by a decent margin were keep people's information secure and show reliable information. And then those two were also the lowest performing ratings across our 20 country survey. Reddit was really interesting. Reddit users gave the highest rating on any signal for any platform on cultivating belonging. And I think there's a lot of interesting things to unpack there about why Reddit users feel that way about Reddit. But it also scored some very low ratings on humanization, on reliability, and safety. And obviously, we saw a number of shifts across political and demographic and geographic differences. And these were kind of different perspectives, both in like, what should we actually expect from these platforms? And then how did they deliver? And I can share more about that if you're interested. you know, defining what good looks like and understanding which platforms deliver what and why, so that we can then use those learnings to ground effective public domain platforms. And for me, that's the end goal is not to do that job of bailing out the boat, but actually to start building our own democratic boat for digital spaces. But we need to kind of understand what do we want to be building toward and how can we learn from the successes and failures, both in digital platforms and in public life throughout history. And that's what we're trying to do. So I'm so delighted to be in conversation with all of you and look forward to continuing. Yes, great. Thank you so much, Eli. And I think I also want to ask Paul and Katja to join us again. But a question for you. I think it's very interesting to hear if we want to build the next generation internet in a certain way, and it has been discussed before, then you already say, well, we have to be very clear about how we create this space. It's not just another protocol, the terminology of interoperability, distributed, decentralized. This is all, of course, necessary, but it's also how to create a space that's welcoming that helps people to to have agency so do you think you you already have a vision of can you already give examples where you can find these qualities because definitely in in the in the in the you did this um sort of assessment of the existing platforms and And most of them will talk the talk, but they don't, well, they don't talk the talk. They say they will do it and they don't. Yeah. It's quite a difficult field, I guess. Yeah. Well, so I think I want to reflect on two points that you just raised. So one is, I do think there are a bunch of technical problems that we need to solve at the technical level on interoperability and transportability of the social graph and that kind of stuff. But I actually think there's a danger in taking a too technological approach to solving these problems. Like this is a techno-social system. And unless we're thinking at the social level and the technical level, I think we actually may just replicate some of these same dynamics because they're social problems as much as they're technical ones or design ones. And so I just do think that's a really important part of this conversation is kind of figuring out how we want those pieces to relate to each other. And then also making sure that the kind of conversation that we're having is inclusive of people who have a lot of wisdom and brilliance on community formation or the social layer and may not actually be, you know, adept at coding on the technical layer. Like we need both of those groups at the table. I think to the other question, well, sorry, I got carried away on that one and lost the other piece of the question. Can you bring me back? Well, if you already can, did you already find examples of where you are? Oh, right. Okay. Yeah. So one example that I like to look at is in the United States, in Vermont, there's a platform called Front Porch Forum. And Front Porch Forum is basically a heavily moderated once a, local discussion email. So you have to sign up and prove that you live where you live. Anyone can post, but you have to agree to a set of norms. And every message is read carefully. If your message doesn't conform to the norms, it's sent back to you with a nice note saying like, Eli, you seem a little angry today. Can you rework this? And what's great about this design dynamic is that the conversation is generally pretty thoughtful. That's partly because if you want to have a flame war with someone, you'd have to be willing to carry it out over a whole series of days, which generally like you lose interest. But what's notable about Front Porch Forum is, you know, if you were designing for engagement, you would never design a platform this way. Because in a way, it's trying to reduce some kinds of engagement in order to amplify the signal and reduce the noise. And that's from a commercial standpoint, not that desirable, but from a conversational standpoint, it really makes a huge difference. Yes. Thank you so much. I think Katja, are you also joining? Katja just messaged us that her internet connection is not working the way she wants it to work, but maybe she can join us later on. I think it's interesting that it's kind of scopic what we have at the moment, I think, after listening to three of the talks. Something is of course about this readiness, this is like, there is a, things come together, both a political need and urge and the belief that we can't stick to the current situation, so we have to act. But also an awareness that is there. And also, but I think that the switch to, so not only being pushing back on the power that is there already in a platform, but also thinking about if we can put our energy on creating the new, then what are we creating? And how can we... The danger, of course, is that you just copycat what's already there. We make another Google, but it's actually working like Google. We make another social media and it functions with likes and the same type of interaction and nudging that we already use. So it's also about rethinking what social means in the digital domain, for example. And you already gave some examples. Paul, do you feel that this idea about what this next generation internet is, what a public space is, a digital public space is, that we already have enough thought about it? Do we have enough design knowledge about that? It's a good question. I think the temptation is to sort of replicate things and do them public. And that is not necessarily wrong. Maybe the best example for that would be something like what happened very much at the beginning of the pandemic, where we all realized that we're all relevant on Zoom. For example, like I was at the university at that time and like the university just like the default survival thing was to buy a Zoom license from public money, right? Like all of the universities did that. And those who didn't like were probably not all, I shouldn't be too, probably someone did the right thing, but like most of the other ones who didn't buy Zoom licenses went to Microsoft or to Google to get conferencing. And that's a massive transfer of public funds into private companies, right? Like, so if we had a public alternative there, like that would provide the exact same functionality, but at least would keep money in the system and build out infrastructures, right? Like imagine all the universities hosting notes on an open system that's expensable, where like the money actually goes to development of these systems and building them out. That would be better, right? So sometimes it's like, I agree with you, like it is necessary that we also imagine things being different especially in this space where these platforms prey on our communications patterns what elie just described but to some degree on the very basic infrastructures things like video conferencing emailing like we also like we're still not even there of having replicated reliable systems that can can scale up in the same way. Right. And I think to some degree, like there's also the logic of first comes first. Right. So we first have to replace the systems that we already use and then we can imagine. One of the questions that was raised by the listeners is, is there enough imagination? Do we all have enough ability to imagine that it can be different? Katia, do you believe we have enough imagination? That's a good question, I guess. As you're trying to solve, I suppose. Yeah, it's interesting. So I think it's what Paul also said during his talk and even literally converging a lot to a sort of similar way of thinking about maybe underlying systems or underlying principles for how things should work. And that I think is interesting, but there is indeed also something about maybe elevating that beyond what we maybe what we already have, right? So, if you just get, like, oh, what is the Twitter knockoff tends to be, like, oh, what is the open source Twitter? Like, it's a bit or what is the open source whatever, basically. And that tends to be kind of where the conversation ends. I agree in that sense, as I said before, it's a bit like a tricky conversation, I guess. Maybe it's easier to build that cloud to get that traction if it is like that, if it's things that people already understand and it's clearly phrased as this is an alternative, we all move to Signal because it's safer than WhatsApp. And maybe you have to add a second layer on top of that, that is,, we all move to Signal because it's safer than WhatsApp. And maybe if you have to add a second layer on top of that, that is, and we're gonna radically imagine even how these solutions work and do much more, say about empowering people, try one of those things that ought to be happening. And I think some of that is happening, but maybe it's the second battle to try and win once we maybe have the conditions, but yeah. I guess that imagination is is there maybe one one thing that i do think is interesting on this is that maybe when we talk a lot about building alternatives we're talking about building alternatives for last generations or in a sense technologies or solutions and not so much thinking about if there is a lot of development happening and something i don't know personally work a lot on but something like say you're going to have a lot more use of augmented reality or technology pervading our public spaces in different ways I don't feel that we may be talking that much about those kinds of things that are clearly be what we will be using in five years and maybe we should also try to maybe avoid trying to replicate things that are going to be replaced and think more about what comes next and maybe preempt some of that before you kind of cement the power of an existence of a new platform that's going to fill that space basically. Well I think what I was saying about that we because as I already expressed we're not happy to use Open or all the other platforms. So we're trying to figure out which is user-friendly, which also beyond nerds and hackers and early movers. But I'm really happy about Matrix. I think this is a place where you can build upon. For the first time I felt this would be a base from which you can build upon and create your own. Together our creative designers and developers and people with social backgrounds together public and social media to use this as a as like the base to build upon new but now you are challenging us to uh It's okay, I might have brought a small bridge to Eli. I would think for real big platforms, and the assessment, you look what they want and what they really do, so this big bearing of data that you get about this, did you already look into new platforms like matrix did you already made an assessment on of brave for the class the the the the one that already tried to replace certain uh services uh this was a limit of our methodology that we were basically this was public polling so um we could only get data on platforms that people were using at a fairly large level we actually didn't even get uh tick tock the first time through just because uh it wasn't a big wasn't a big deal then back in the back in the days of late 2019 early 2020 um so uh so that's a limit to to what to the way that we were assessing this. And I think we're gonna try to do some assessment of, for example, Front Porch Forum and see if we can validate that there are some different qualities there. But I think just returning to the question of imagination for a moment, I do think certainly at least in the United States, there is this problem of either imagining like how do we manage these things within Facebook? How do we regulate Facebook to be better? Or how do we build the public Facebook? How do we regulate Facebook to be better? Or how do we build the public Facebook? And I actually think this is where this kind of geographic model or the public or thinking in terms of actual physical spaces is really useful to me in that, you know, community institutions aren't designed to do the same thing. A library isn't a bookstore, but public. It's a fundamentally different kind of thing that serves a pretty acute need for a particular population of people. That's a much clearer, easier place to build than we're going to take a bookstore but somehow make it public. a bookstore but somehow make it public. There's a set of very urgent public needs that people have. And so I think that's the kind of problem that we have in front of us, which is, and it's an exciting one, which is like, you know, libraries came about in the United States in the turn of the century, public libraries, as a movement that was linked to, like, there was a growing literate population, but books were too expensive. Yeah, there are all these social forces that led to, okay, we can identify this need for this new kind of institution. And I think that's really how we need to be thinking about this project is, you know, how do we shape out what those new institutions are? They're probably partly dictated by what people need and partly dict are? They're probably partly dictated by what people need and partly dictated by technical opportunity and partly dictated by the white space of the market's not going to serve these needs. And that's where we want to build our public infrastructure. We have only a few minutes left, so I want to give you all another moment to say something about it. I think, Paul, you're also referring to the role of public institutions and organizations, the societal and civic society. which is now being presented that we maybe have to bring the physical spaces, public spaces, people that are already taking care of certain parts of our physical public spaces, and the digital, that we reconnect them and make them even more aware and responsible. Do you feel that something there could happen? So it's interesting that you say like that you this comparison is between the digital space and the physical space with public institutions we have something in between right like we had public broadcasters they are not necessarily i mean they are flesh and blood people working there with cameras that you can touch, but the distribution was also like an intangible space. In the ether, we created this idea of that there needs to be space for public conversation that is not structured by commercial interests. In European countries, but also in the US, there was a prevailing idea that communication infrastructure is so important to the functioning of democratic societies that we cannot leave it to the market, right? Like we had that structure of these public broadcast systems all over Europe in different things. Like we have, they are structured very differently, but they form fundamentally the same function, right? very differently, but they form fundamentally the same function, right? And so when we switched over to the digital environment, like we tried to push them, well not we, but governments basically, and governments driven by commercial interests, tried to push them out of the way. They said like the internet is our space that the commercial companies, this is where we sell advertising, like the provision of news by public service broadcasters online was for a very long time and by a lot of people is still seen as something that is fundamentally anti-competitive because like it takes away attention from commercial websites right like and we had these these we need to fight this fight again, right? Like it wasn't easy to establish public libraries alongside booksellers, but like people said, this is important. It wasn't necessarily easy to scope out the space for public service broadcasters alongside commercial broadcasters, although in that case, the public service broadcasters were there earlier. Right. Like but but to preserve their space wasn't easy. It was a fight. But we prevailed to some degree. That's crumbling right now. Right. And we have the same fight for the digital space. I think we I think we have to because there's a lot still coming after us. So we I think we were laying the the ground for the coming evening and tomorrow. And already, well, I think we already started a more interesting discussion and just say we need to repair the internet. We have also something to gain, to rethink, to imagine. To me it opens up a lot of new ideas and possibilities. I would like to finish with asking you what would you like to happen in the current day or so? What would you like to see as an output of this conference? Maybe Eli, do you have a suggestion for what you'd like to see as an output of this conference? Maybe Eli, do you have a suggestion for what you'd like to happen in the coming hours and days? I think, I mean, there's a bunch of levels that work needs to happen on. So the policy and kind of protocol level, there's this public imagination level. And then there's this experimental level where, you know, I think we'll learn to some degree by like identifying some specific projects and problems and trying. And so I would love to see, you know, some collaboration come out of this conversation that leads to like, let's try some stuff and see how it's how it's working. What's what are the what are the actual hurdles in the real world? And then how do we how do we circumvent them? So much. Thank you so much. Katja? I think I'm a teeny bit late, so sorry for interrupting before. I guess what I would be really happy with is indeed also this idea of collaboration, but also maybe self-confidence, I guess, that we have in institutions that it is quite an impressive group and a lot of institutions that we might not traditionally see as kind of, sorry for the word, innovators in a digital space, like a lot of, indeed, as Paul mentioned, public broadcasters, et cetera, that have have really important role to play in this and I think Harnessing that and that thinking about how we can use that maybe use imagination and knowledge from other spaces in the context of the internet Is I think very important very excited to to have the space to do that. Yes. Thank you so much paul Yeah, I think I would I would like to see us figuring out how we can hold policymakers accountable, right? Like we see a lot of talk towards like, okay, this needs to be value-based, this needs to be open, this needs to be, someone in the chat pointed out, obviously, there's also a strong connection to the Green Deal. This needs to contribute to economic and ecological sustainability. How can we point policymakers to things where this is actually making these contributions? How can we hold them accountable? Great. Thank you so much. Reena, thank you so much for your contribution and I hope you will join us later on. I'm not sure if you have the ability to do that, but great that you helped us to kick off the public spaces conference. Thank you so much. For now we have a little break. Some people asked actually at the chat where Paul and I are. We are in the same building. It's the WAG. It's one of those public places that also has the responsibility towards the digital public space. We have a break now and then we have some presentations of initiatives from Europe around the whole topic of digital public space. We see you back in 25 minutes.