INTERFACED Interviews: Marietta Le - Civic participation, research and practice

Interfaced
1

The framing here is that you have been involved in INTERFACED both as a practitioner, someone who works with civic participation, and as a collaborator working with the research team. For me, it is especially interesting because you also have an ethnographic background.

So I structured this interview in two parts. First, I am going to ask you about your experiences and observations working with civil society, participatory processes, and communities. Then I will ask a few meta-level questions about your work with our project, and about how research and practice intersect in a project like this. How does that sound?

2

That sounds all right.

3

Great. To start with, and this is similar to what we talked about in the fellows interview, though in a somewhat different context, can you tell me how you first became involved in civic participation or community-based work?

And what kinds of projects have most shaped how you think about participation and democracy today?

4

The first thing I joined that had something to do with participation was when I was a teenager. I joined a peer support group, or something like that. It was designed for young people to support one another by talking to each other, and they taught us a kind of conversation framework that I would now compare to coaching or something similar.

I did that training because I wanted to be more involved with my community, although in the end I did not actually continue with it.

5

What was your community like? And when you say “community,” what do you mean?

6

It was designed for young people to talk to young people, and I was in high school at the time.

So in the end I did not start doing these peer support conversations. I do not know why, maybe I just did not dare, or I did not take the first step. But I joined the training and went through the whole process, so I was clearly curious about how I could do it.

Then, later, after university, I joined NGOs that worked on participatory issues. For example, I worked for an investigative journalism website that teaches people to use Freedom of Information requests to get more information about things happening in their communities, on any topic, from the municipal level to the central government level.

I started working with them and teaching people how to use FOIA as an advocacy tool. And I think my most formative experience was starting a website called Járókelő, which is a street-fixing website. You can report issues in public space there, and volunteers scan the reports and distribute them to the municipal institutions that are supposed to solve them.

I worked on that project for, I think, seven years.

7

Thank you for that. Our project is called INTERFACED, and before the fellows came on board, the partners and the different work packages had a lot of fairly robust conceptual discussions about what exactly an interface is, especially as an interface between citizens, broadly speaking, and power or decision-makers.

So from your perspective, as someone involved in community work and as a practitioner, what is an interface? What is it in practice?

8

I think I first approached that from a technology background. I also used to work as a product manager, designing digital products to help people engage with important issues.

For me, especially around the 2010s, an interface always meant some kind of digital tool, civic technology. So there is a website that helps you do something in order to be an active citizen.

For example, when I was working on the FOIA project, we had a website, which is still running, that helped people send structured emails to governmental institutions. Your only job was, and still is, to add the topic you are interested in. For example: “I would like all the contracts the municipal government spent on planting trees last year.” The rest of the email is structured by the website and sent to the institution you are asking.

That was one interface.

The other one, the street-fixing website, worked in a similar way. There is a form designed exactly in the way municipal governments expect people to send information. So, if you are walking down the street and you see a pothole, you take a picture of it, because the municipal employee who will go there needs to be able to find it. If they cannot find it, they will just start asking more and more questions. So you need a photo, a text description, and we also geolocate the person with the help of their mobile phone. Everything is structured around making it easier for the local government to work with the issue you are sending them.

So that was how I used to think about interfaces.

But now, since I have been doing these interviews, that has changed a bit. Sometimes interfaces are more meta. I interviewed an activist who created an API for a database of electoral constituencies. What he did is not necessarily visible to the end user, but it is a cornerstone of something that helped people participate in the primaries.

So I think that was also an interface, because he was trying to create the structure that would allow people to participate. And, of course, an API is literally an application programming interface, so technically it is an interface too. But what I found interesting was how he thought about the database itself as being so important in order to enable participation.

And the other thing I realised is that people have these meeting points with power and institutions, and they do not always take the form of civic technology. Sometimes they take the form of a meeting, or of a new community that plays a facilitative role, like a union.

One of the people I interviewed is working on creating a new union for delivery workers. I think of that as a new interface between delivery workers and legislation, because what they are trying to solve is a problem in the legal framework: at the moment, they are not considered workers of the delivery companies. So I also think of these communities as interfaces, and that came out of the interviews I have done so far.

9

I am actually going to follow up on that now, even though in my script it is a later question, because you are already talking about digital tools and helping people fill out forms and so on. I am going to jump to the AI question.

AI came up a lot in the FOSDEM interviews, and we have all been asking people about it. Some people think AI tools could make it easier for citizens to interact with institutions, for example by helping people draft paperwork or summarise policy discussions. I was just doing an interview with Thomas, and he thought that in online discussions AI could even take on a facilitator role, for example, if someone has not spoken for a while, it could ask them what they think.

But others worry about the ethics of it, the environmental impact of it, or the fact that, because these tools are largely controlled by corporations, they may further centralise power. So from your perspective, what role, if any, can AI play in civic participation, now or in the future?

10

I still do not know.

A couple of years ago there was a pilot project that was imitating AI facilitation. I think it was around the time of the Nobel Peace Prize, and I think it was done by UCLA or some American institution. I wanted to join because I wanted to see how it worked.

The facilitation was very machine-like. It did not create any human connection among the people who were talking to each other. We did try to do what it asked us to do: we were given topics, there was a timer, and we had to talk about the topic. We were not allowed to talk over each other, so it was not much like a real debate. The AI was giving the floor to people in sequence, and you could not really jump in, the way you would in a real conversation.

So I am still trying to figure out how this would help with facilitation, because I also do facilitation myself, and I see that work as something that also helps create human connection.

Of course, as a facilitator, you are trying to help people have a conversation that is open and welcoming to everyone, and there are rules to that. For example: we listen to everyone, we do not use harsh language with each other, and when you notice something like that, you intervene and try to steer the conversation so that everyone feels welcome.

I have not yet seen AI do that. That does not mean it could not, but it would also be a bit odd in a way.

So when I try to imagine myself actually using AI, I still fall back on what a lot of people say: maybe it will help with checking information while you are facilitating a topic and do not know the answer.

Often, for example in a citizens’ assembly, you have an expert who talks to the participants. They may give a thirty-minute lecture and then stay for another thirty minutes while the groups ask questions. Then the expert leaves. But afterwards, something else may come up in the discussion, and the expert is no longer there. So in that case, why not ask AI for help?

Especially if there is a citizens’ assembly and we already know the topic, we could prepare materials and feed them into an AI that supports that specific assembly. In Budapest, for example, we had climate assemblies, so one could imagine loading climate data, policy information, and similar materials into an AI to support the process.

The other thing AI might help with is something you know very well: the tedious work of summarising what people said in these conversations. Of course there are offline tools for that, like harvesting via sticky notes, and then you go through the sticky notes and look for patterns. AI could perhaps make that a bit faster.

I am still concerned, though, that AI could make mistakes. Of course, I could make mistakes too. I could overlook a sticky note hidden somewhere with one important word on it because there are just too many stickies. So yes, I can imagine AI helping with that. But I can also imagine AI missing something or hallucinating something that is not there, which still happens when I use it. So that is still concerning to me.

11

That makes sense. It is interesting how wide the range of responses about AI has been.

So, going back to participation and efficacy: can you give a concrete example, either from your own work or from what you have heard in the course of this project, where citizens — in the broad sense — genuinely influenced a decision, and what made that work?

12

I am biased, because I have worked on participatory budgeting three times, in different contexts.

But I honestly believe that participatory budgeting changes a lot of systems, especially internal systems in municipal governments, in ways that have not otherwise changed, or that perhaps could not be changed from the outside.

I do not know why those transformations needed so much time and needed this specific methodology. But I feel that even if a participatory budget is done in a way that can be criticised, because the voting process is not perfect, or the listing of the ideas is not perfect, or any other part of it can be improved, it still changes something fundamental.

Participatory budgeting is very complex, and there is always something to fix somewhere. But even then, I feel that nothing else I have seen changes the approach of municipal governments that much, because what it says is: I am willing to think like you. You give me your ideas, and I will work only with your ideas and nothing else.

Sometimes those ideas are contested. In Budapest we have lots of conversations about whose ideas are represented. Is it only cyclists? Is it only people who want to plant trees? But I think those conflicts are normal in a city, and those contests are always there. Participatory budgeting just makes them visible.

And I find that fascinating, because it means people can actually see how the city works, and they can do something about it. For example, if you see that too many ideas are focused on cycling infrastructure, then maybe you need to reach out to people who walk more, or who drive cars, and include their perspectives too. It makes all of this visible.

So for me, having a say in this context means forcing the municipal government to actually work for you, and this methodology does that.

13

That makes sense. In the work you have done, whether with participatory budgeting or with other groups, especially younger people, what kinds of issues or forms of participation do you think resonate most strongly with that demographic?

14

In the activist context, I feel that young people are very interested in in-person initiatives, movements, and meetings. They are looking for human-to-human interaction.

That is my perception, at least, because I work a lot with urban planning issues. I can see that people are not that interested anymore in just sending pictures of potholes. When I was younger, that felt cool. Now it does not. What feels meaningful or attractive to them now is something more direct and genuine.

For example, if you manage to convince the local government to give you a small neglected space, then you go there with your community, renovate it, refurbish it, and organise community programmes there — that is something young people in Budapest are interested in. I can only really speak from that context, but there, that is what seems engaging and inviting to them.

15

When you say “cool,” what do you mean?

16

I mean something that feels genuine and popular.

17

Okay. All right, now I am going to shift gears and ask you a few meta-level questions related to your work with us. As a practitioner — someone who works directly with communities and as an activist — how do the goals of the INTERFACED project align, or not align, with what you see happening in real participatory processes?

18

Something I am struggling with a little in my interviews is that the activists I am talking to seem to be on the verge of burnout.

I see them constantly looking for new ways of participation. They tell me: I tried this, then I tried that, nothing worked, the government never spoke to my community, or they built something that I did not want them to build anyway. I keep hearing these kinds of stories.

So although there are examples where they have influence, or where they influence their own communities, I can also see why they are struggling all the time: they are trying to work against a very authoritarian regime.

And sometimes I feel that it is difficult even to make them think about positive things. I do not know if I am explaining that well.

19

It sounds like what you are saying is that the project, or at least the way it is designed, focuses more on efficacy — what works and what does not work — but does not necessarily take into account the emotional labour, the burnout, and the discouragement. Am I understanding that correctly?

20

Yes. When I ask them something like, “Where did you feel your participation was meaningful?”, they almost always start with something negative.

And I do not want to judge their experience. I do not mean negative in the sense that it was bad, but rather that they always return to the question of success. As an activist, or as someone in an advocacy group, you are always trying to create change, and they often feel that it is impossible to create change in this context. So we always fall back on talking about the broader regime that surrounds them.

And I think that is why they themselves often start talking about the municipal level, where there is still some space to talk to power and to influence decisions made by power.