Suzette Brooks Masters

Okay.

Can I piggyback on one thing John said?

Well, I was going to talk about tech, actually.

Good.

So what does give me hope is that there are many governments, and I would say mostly state and local, that I'm aware of in the U.S.

that are viewing tech and engagement with the public as a way for them to do their jobs better.

Right.

So instead of we want to keep the public out, we want to keep it to a minimum.

It's just something we have to do, you know, check the box, do the minimum thing that technically meets the spec of having to involve the public.

But really, with no desire or belief that truly answering to what the public wants is a core asset.

Of doing your job better and essential to gain and keep the trust of the people.

So I think there's something that's starting to shift where people are using technology to say, OK, we need to deliver services better.

We need to understand from people what works, what doesn't work.

We need to reimagine our way of eliciting technology.

opinions from the public about what matters, what doesn't matter, because that's essential to us securing their trust and securing our ability to keep doing our jobs, right?

Because that has failed.

Yeah.

And so I'm seeing, you know, this really does give me hope, whether it's Engage California, which is a big new platform that Governor Newsom put together using an engagement platform to get scale,

in terms of public opinion on things, but then using AI to make sense of what people are doing, similar to what happened in Taiwan with Audrey Tang.

And the fact that these radical, so-called radical experiments are starting to gain purchase in the US, I think is very exciting.