Podcast: The Political Forums of the Future

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This article contains the script of Episode 13 of the Tela Network Podcast.

Episode host: Guillermo Pablos Murphy, MA International Relations and CCO @ Tela Network.

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Podcast Script

Welcome to the Tela Network Podcast. My name is Guillermo Pablos Murphy, and I’m the Chief Content Officer at Tela Network and I recently graduated from a Master of Arts degree in International Relations.

The topic of this short episode is “The Political Forums of the Future”. It explores the uses of digital forums for remote collective decision making. I draw heavily on a research paper I presented in April 2024 as a requirement for my degree. There will be a link to an Executive Summary of that research in the description.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, you can contact me on Tela. My contact link will be in the description below.

A Quick Overview

A one-sentence summary of this episode:

Political forums can enhance digital decision-making by organizing existing tools into a formal process, allowing for genuine collaborative decision-making and consultation of network members.

A one-paragraph summary of this episode:

Digital organizations often struggle with inefficient and divisive decision-making methods. By organizing existing digital tools into a formal forum process, platforms like Tela Network can create spaces for genuine collaborative decision-making and consultation. Research shows that framing forums around clear challenges and using familiar platforms are successful strategies, while relying solely on text exchanges and short voting periods are less effective. Future political forums could be either broad and 'Consultative', or narrow and 'Deliberative', potentially incorporating mechanisms like micropayments to reinforce careful behavior and ensure meaningful participation.

Why Political Forums?

Digital organizations lack a clear method to consult their community. Digital communities often use crude, time-consuming methods for collective decision-making. These methods do not use members’ time effectively, do not reach resolutions effectively, and often generate division instead of consensus. By organizing existing digital tools around a formal forum, we can build spaces for genuine collaborative decision-making.

The Internet is not a good place to be a lot of the time, and even when you are in those online spaces that are worth your time and energy, you have no say in how anything gets done. Now, that’s fine for the average web surfer that doesn’t spend much time on any given site and doesn’t have much to gain from having a say. But for the small business-owner, the influencer, or the freelance worker? Or for most of us that rely on digital platforms for our information, our research, or our friendship and family networks? Most platforms are fundamentally organized like fiefdoms: One group making all the decisions, and that one group’s algorithm.

Everyone can see it. Everyone experiences it.

Tela Network believes that our attention has value. This ideology influenced how we built the Tela App, allowing users to charge for messages they receive, thus eliminating spam and revaluing their attention. Our product attracts people who value their attention and whose time is valuable.

A network like Tela benefits from consulting its members. Tela is always improving and always growing. A formal process, using existing tech, that can remotely consult a network on new features, new decisions, and new policy, would allow these valuable members of the network to influence the future of their platform.

Who gets to be in a Political Forum?

Speculating about the governance of digital platforms is fundamentally a political exercise. And talking about political forums is fundamentally a democratic proposition. It invites the question: Who gets to participate? Who is the demos to our democracy? This is an important point; one I intend to tackle in another episode.

For now, I will say: Those with stake in the network can influence the network.

How do Political Forums work?

As part of my research, I prototyped a process that existing digital forums could host. I tested this prototype twice with two different groups of about twenty participants. In my prototype, a group of participants proposes and discusses policy solutions to a ‘Challenge’. A 'Challenge' is a defined, existing problem. For example, one of the tests used the 'Challenge': ‘How should democracies tackle low voter turnout among young people?’. Using the features of a forum you would expect, ‘Posts’, ‘Comments’, and ‘Likes’ among them; participants spent seven days exchanging proposed solutions to the 'Challenge' and an eighth day voting on their preferred choice from among the three most popular proposals.

Of the features prototyped in this design, a few were markedly successful, while some were not as successful as expected. I will highlight two successful inclusions and two less successful ones here. You can find more detail in the article linked in the description.

1. Framing the forum around a clearly defined challenge was a success. Collaborative endeavours work when there is a common issue to tackle. Providing a large group of strangers with a common challenge allowed them to fruitfully exchange proposals and reasons on it. I suspect such a result would not have emerged if they were asked to solve an abstract or ill-defined problem, or if they were asked to ‘Come up with an improvement’.
2. Using an existing platform to host the forum was also a success. Testing the prototype proved that it was capable of being hosted with the state of digital technology as-is.
3. Relying solely on text exchanges for discussion was less successful than hoped. Expressing ideas clearly and concisely is time-consuming, and deliberating over public text exchanges is slow and can feel pointless.
4. Finally, the final poll saw very low turnout. Each forum was asked to vote on a twenty-four hour poll for their preferred option of the three most popular proposals. Less than a third of participants in each simulation cast their vote. Its hard to say from the research if this was because more time was needed for the vote, or whether the feature was redundant. Interestingly, that low turnout co-existed with moderately positive rates of consensus around the result of the vote.

The Forums of the Future

This research has led me to conclude that that future political forums will either be broad and shallow, which I will call ‘Consultative’; or narrow and deep, ‘Deliberative’.

A ‘Consultative’ forum has a large cohort of participants with stake in the outcome but without incentive or desire to spend large amounts of time exchanging reasons or coming up with solutions themselves. The main function of a ‘Consultative’ forum is to consult the population for approval or disapproval on policy or minor aspects of policy. A forum of this kind may include a large number of policy ‘points’ that participants can answer in the form of a ‘Like or ‘Dislike’. This forum would not need to be run for long periods of time. The ‘Consultative’ forum therefore narrows the forum into a series of micro-decisions, essentially a series of referenda, which policymakers can use to determine legitimacy and support. Such a process has already been implemented in Taiwan with Polis (Pol.is) for country-wide consultation.

A ‘Deliberative’  forum has a smaller, motivated cohort of participants with stake in the outcome and incentive and desire to dedicate time and energy to the exchange of ideas. The main function of a ‘Deliberative’ forum is to create a digital space and formal process for traceable and transparent policy deliberation. A forum of this kind should involve methods of communication other than public texts and it should last at least a week but could be longer.

Future iterations could experiment with implementing Tela’s ‘monetize your inbox’ mechanism, where the commenter, upvoter, and post-er must make a micropayment alongside the in-forum action. Hopefully, this would reinforce careful behavior. Furthermore, incorporating both 'Consultative' and 'Deliberative' forums during the development of policy would allow a network's more invested cohort to lay out acceptable policy options, before opening the process for consultation with the wider network membership.

That is the end of this episode. I hope you found it interesting and informative. Thank you for watching.

If you have any thoughts, questions, comments, or suggestions - you can contact me on Tela. My contact link will be in the description below.

A brief request: If you have enjoyed this content, please do share it with someone else who would also like it. Thank you.

Let's wrap up with a relevant Latin phrase: res publica, which means "the public thing" and is the origin of the word: Republic.

Yours from the more invested cohort,

I am Guillermo Pablos Murphy, of Tela Network.

Podcast Description

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🔹 "By organizing existing digital tools around a formal forum, we can build spaces for genuine collaborative decision-making."

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This is Episode 13 of the Tela Network Podcast.

Episode host: Guillermo Pablos Murphy, MA International Relations & CCO @ Tela Network.

📩 Contact Guillermo Pablos Murphy on Tela:
tela.app/id/guillermo_pablos_murphy/621afa

🤝 Add Guillermo Pablos Murphy on LinkedIn:
linkedin.com/in/guillermo-pablos-murphy

🌎 How to join Tela Network:
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💡Executive Summary of 'Digital Forums for Policy Making':
https://telablog.com/digital-forums-for-policy-making/

📺 Watch a demo of Tela:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EgKNrvjj1c

👉 A quick overview of Tela, with screenshots:
https://telablog.com/tela-2-0-is-live-modern-design

📖 Read this content as an article:
https://telablog.com/podcast-the-political-forums-of-the-internet-future/

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