As with IWORD 2022, the goal was to bring together a diverse set of thinkers and practitioners to talk about how democracy might be reimagined for the twenty-first century.
Modern democracy was invented in the mid-eighteenth century, using mid-eighteenth-century technology.
Were democracy to be invented from scratch today, with today's technologies, it would look very different.
Resource allocation and reallocation would look different.
Everyone seems to be talking about ways to reform our existing systems.
IWORD 2023 was equally fantastic, easily the most intellectually stimulating two days of my year.
The event is like that; the format results in a firehose of interesting.
Summaries of all the talks are in the first set of comments below.
Next year, I hope to take the workshop out of Harvard and somewhere else.
Now, I really want to explain the format in detail, because it works so well.
I used a workshop format I and others invented for another interdisciplinary workshop: Security and Human Behavior, or SHB. It's a two-day event.
Each panel has six speakers, each of whom presents for ten minutes.
The workshop is limited to forty-eight attendees, which means that everyone is on a panel.
Attendees commit to being there for the whole workshop; no giving your talk and then leaving.
The final piece of the workshop is the social events.
We have a night-before opening reception, a conference dinner after the first day, and a final closing reception after the second day.
Even though a shorter event would be easier to deal with, the numbers all fit together in a way that's hard to change.
A one-day event means only twenty-four attendees/speakers, and that's not a critical mass.
Not everyone speaking creates a speaker/audience hierarchy, which I want to avoid.
I've thought about it long and hard; the format I'm using is optimal.
This Cyber News was published on www.schneier.com. Publication date: Mon, 08 Jan 2024 12:43:05 +0000