Suzette Brooks Masters

And it's still very early days, but I think it's promising.

Yeah.

I would say it's still pretty early days.

I think even focusing on the tech piece of how to enhance civic engagement using tech and think of civic engagement.

Honestly, there's been a real bias in the U.S.

I don't know if this is true in other countries, but of equating civic engagement with getting people to vote.

And it was all focused on voting, as if voting were the only way that you could express your power in a democracy.

And I think what's happened since we've elected authoritarians is this realization that voting alone is insufficient to guarantee a democracy.

And I think that's been very healthy.

It's depressing, but healthy.

That civic engagement is so much more than that.

And if you get back to what I was saying earlier about how you express your opinion locally in the spaces that you understand with your neighbors or whatever, there are ways...

to use tech to enhance those processes.

Can you outline some of those?

Well, you mentioned it earlier, you know, there are town halls that are now being curated by lottery so that processes that are hijacked, that are public and good in name only can actually be reimagined.

There's a woman named Jillian Youngblood at Civic Genius.

She's now at the National Civic League doing this work, rethinking processes.

elected official town halls.

And I think it's only been done twice so far.

But if you want to go to your representatives, your congressperson's town hall, you have to apply.