INTERFACED Interviews: Thomas Kemps - Designing participation

Interfaced
1

I already did this with Alin, and because you’ve been involved with INTERFACED both as a practitioner, someone working with civic participation, and as a collaborator working with our research team, I structured the interview in two parts.

First, I’m going to ask you about your experiences and observations as someone who has worked with participatory processes and communities. Basically, the reasons you ended up with INTERFACED as a fellow. Then I’ll ask some meta-level questions about your work with us in INTERFACED and about how research and practice intersect in projects like this.

How does that sound?

2

Great.

3

Good. Let’s start with something similar to what we discussed when we did the interview for your fellows position, but in a different context. Can you tell me a bit about how you first became involved in participation or community work, and what kinds of projects have most shaped how you think about participation and democracy today?

4

Yes. I’ll go quite far back, but then move quickly to more recent things.

When I was a child, and I still am an introvert, I struggled a lot with participating and playing games with other kids at school. I realised quite early that I was very curious about social dynamics. I remember that, at some point, when I was around twelve, I thought: what if I print some money and distribute it in my classroom, and then just observe what happens?

Of course, nothing really happened, because you can’t just start a parallel economy like that. But for me, looking back, that was a hint that I had always been interested in how people govern themselves.

So I studied European Studies in Maastricht, then continued with Political Science in my master’s. Quite quickly, I moved from studying institutional governance at the European level, how the European Union works, to being more interested in how grassroots participation works.

I think the key moment for me was when I joined a couple of actions with Ende Gelände, the German movement that mainly does occupations of open-pit coal mines in Germany, and nowadays also in other countries.

For me, that was transformative. I still remember the image of this huge black hole in the ground, this enormous open-pit mine, and then thousands of activists running down and literally occupying the coal mine.

What struck me was seeing these thousands of activists organising without a central body or a leader. They were using affinity groups, consensus decision-making, facilitated assemblies, and all sorts of methods like that. It felt like: wow, this is what a colourful and well-organised mass of people can achieve, and this is the kind of impact they can create if they get organised well.

After that, I became an activist in Extinction Rebellion, started learning about facilitation and decision-making methods, and then gradually made it my job. I started learning about sociocracy, participatory processes, and so on. So that is really how it all started: I was first a participant myself, and then I moved more into a facilitator or enabler role.

5

Enabler in a good sense.

6

Yes, exactly.

7

It is funny, because in the US “enabler” as a noun often has a negative meaning, someone who helps another person continue a harmful habit, like drinking or addiction.

8

Oh wow, okay. Then maybe I should explain what I mean.

I mean it in the sense that I am not the one giving people power. People already have the power to create change. What I can do is support them with methods, practices, training, and continued support so that they can express their own power. That is what I mean by “enabler.”

9

That makes sense. So, as you know, our project is called INTERFACED, and before the fellows came on board there were a lot of quite robust discussions among the partners and work packages about what an interface actually is, especially an interface between citizens, in a broad sense, and decision-makers.

From your perspective as a practitioner, what is an interface? What does it actually look like in practice?

10

At one point, I thought interfaces were mainly digital interfaces. Years ago, when I was at university, I studied a lot of what the Five Star Movement was doing, and for me that was an interface: how do we design digital experiences so that people can create something together, whether that means creating shared meaning or collective action?

But once I joined actual movements, I realised that there are not only digital spaces like online forums, instant messaging platforms, and so on. There are also physical spaces. In Extinction Rebellion, for example, there was a lot of care about how to design an assembly, a local assembly, a people’s assembly, and how to design people working together in a local group or a national chapter.

So for me, interfaces are really about how we design digital and physical spaces so that people can collaborate, exchange, and create meaning together.

11

Wonderful. Based on your work, whether from Italy or elsewhere, can you give one or two concrete examples where participation actually worked, where citizens genuinely influenced a decision, and what made that process work, in your opinion?

12

A recent example is from last year, when I supported Extinction Rebellion in Italy in designing and leading a process to review their second demand.

Extinction Rebellion internationally had, for years, a second demand around reaching net-zero emissions and stopping biodiversity loss by 2025. Of course it is now 2026, so the movement had to face the fact that one of its core demands had become obsolete. The question was: what do you do when one of the demands that holds a decentralised movement together no longer fits reality?

The decision in Italy was that the whole movement should be involved. Similar processes happened in other national chapters as well.

So we designed a process through which the several hundred active activists in Italy could share their opinions, and we could track, roughly, how much agreement or disagreement there was around different alternatives and different possible directions for the movement, given how much the political, social, and environmental context had changed.

We used Polis for that, and it was the first time XR Italy had used it. Afterwards, a group synthesised all of those opinions into a proposal, and then we used a simpler form to gather consent on that proposal, with a defined threshold — a quorum, basically. For example, at least 200 activists had to respond for the decision to count.

So this was a recent example of how a grassroots organisation can handle an internal participatory process for something it really cares about.

13

What do you mean by “rough consensus”?

14

Actually, I probably phrased it wrongly. The first phase was more about sense-making: understanding where people stood, what patterns were emerging, and so on. The second phase, the actual decision-making moment, was proper consensus, where people could say: I agree, I agree but with reservations, I abstain, or I veto.

So yes, the first phase was sense-making, and the second was consensus.

15

Going back to the question of what an interface is: would you say that a process with multiple stages can itself be an interface? Or is an interface one specific stage, one medium, one technology, digital or physical, that facilitates the transmission of ideas and agency toward power?

16

It is tricky, because for me interfaces are somewhat intangible. Even this Zoom call is an interface, right?

So in the example I just described, I would say the process had multiple interfaces. It used different interfaces depending on the phase of the process and on what we wanted to achieve at that specific moment.

That whole process took more than six months. It required a group to design the process. There were informational calls before the sense-making phase started. We invited a scientist, one of the co-founders of Extinction Rebellion UK, and a political scientist to explain what had changed since Extinction Rebellion was founded. Then there was Polis for the sense-making, then the consensus phase, and throughout the whole thing there were different tools and different modes of interaction.

Each stage had different interfaces, and each one allowed people to interact differently. In a Zoom call with fifty activists, for example, people could ask clarifying questions. Polis was something new for XR Italy; it mapped how people felt about certain statements and created a kind of map of opinion groups.

That was actually quite funny, because you could also start seeing which local groups had more affinity with anarchist tendencies, for example, because they were consistently expressing themselves as a distinct opinion group compared with groups in bigger cities or other places.

And there is one more thing that might be relevant here: every local group also had in-person assemblies to discuss these issues before activists expressed themselves individually online. So it was not just an online process lasting six months. There were also in-person moments that helped people get the information they needed and form an opinion.

17

hat leads well into another question. One of the other people I interviewed, I think it was Valentin from FOSDEM, thought that the best interfaces were hybrid: a combination of online and in-person. His point was that online work can be much more efficient, but knowing each other in person builds trust and community, and that in turn makes the online work much more effective. What do you think?

18

I totally agree.

Personally, I work mainly in fully remote teams. But one thing I think remote work cannot really provide is the kind of conviviality and informality that comes naturally with office work, in-person gatherings, events, or meetings.

Once we finish this meeting, we close Zoom and we are in two different parts of the world. But after an in-person meeting, like a plenary assembly of a local group, there is all that informal social life: let’s get a beer, let’s eat something together, let’s chat.

That creates deeper connections. At the same time, online spaces make things possible that would never have happened otherwise. We probably would never have met in our lifetime without them. So yes, I agree: hybrid models work best.

19

Specifically regarding the kinds of activism you have been involved in: in many participatory processes, citizens can give input, but they are not actually part of governance. How does a more sociocratic approach change that dynamic? And do you think sociocratic structures can scale beyond small communities?

20

In the past, I was very fond of direct democracy, the idea that everyone should be able to vote directly on certain matters. And at the very local, very small scale, I still think that should be true. I should be able, for instance, to decide what the street I live on should look like.

At the same time, there is a principle that is hard to move away from: listening in many, deciding in few.

For example, when a local government runs a consultation process and says: we want to do this project, but we want to hear from our citizens first, I think that is a good practice, because it means they are acknowledging that they do not have the full picture and that they should listen to those who will be affected.

So for me, that is one important way institutions can improve.

What I have always found very powerful in sociocracy is that it creates a space where everyone who works together can also govern together. I often translate sociocracy as: those who work together, design together.

In a workplace, a community, or a grassroots movement, I do not want merely to execute decisions imposed from above. If I take care of a certain part of the work, and I am responsible for it, then I also want to have authority over that part. I want to be part of how that piece is designed, not just how it is executed.

Because sociocracy today is mainly used as a governance system for organisations, I often try to bring some of its principles into looser participatory processes. For example, taking a fifty-person assembly, splitting it into smaller groups with a facilitator and a note-taker, speaking in rounds, following the pattern of understanding the issue, exploring options, and then making a decision together by consent.

We did something like this a couple of years ago for the youth network of Slow Food. Slow Food International wanted to listen to the youth network so that, a few months later, there could be some sort of youth manifesto on food, climate, rights, and related issues.

So the central body of the organisation listened to the youth network through a process that did not just gather 200 people in one big room and say, “Who wants to speak?” Instead, everyone had a way to contribute.

For me, that matters a lot, because as an introvert I would always struggle to speak in a large open assembly. And I think the same goes for many others, women, younger people, more reflective people, people of colour, and many others who may find open, unstructured participation more difficult.