2023-12-12 I created this document to discuss what Plurality is within Cybozu, but I thought it would be beneficial to share it with people outside the company as well.
- What is Plurality?
- A concept advocated by Audrey Tang and Glen Weyl.
- Plurality: Technology for Collaborative Diversity and Democracy.
- Cybozu’s goal: Building a society brimming with teamwork.
- These are ideals with the same direction.
- Empathy (Empathy towards ideals)
Since I can’t introduce everything, let’s take a bite of interesting topics.
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- With the advancement of technology that replicates and delivers information, it has become easier for one person to convey their thoughts to a large number of people.
- However, when a large number of people communicate information, the amount of information received by one person becomes overwhelming, leading to information overload.
- In a society or company where people actively communicate, it is important to have technology that supports listening to a large number of opinions.
- The figure is from an article I contributed to the Information Processing Society of Japan’s ChatGPT special issue, titled “Not Subjective or Objective, but from One Subjectivity to Many Subjectivities.”
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(Technological progress) enables “broad listening,” where millions of people can hear the essence extracted from the distribution of their peers’ opinions, thereby enhancing large-scale and democratic deliberation.
- Polis used in vTaiwan
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- In the past, media was controlled by specific companies such as newspapers and television stations, determining what to communicate.
- With the advent of social media, a world where anyone can communicate anything has arrived.
- This is beneficial, but there is also distortion caused by being sustained by advertising revenue. It is designed to capture more of users’ time as it leads to increased engagement.
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Selling productivity improvement software…is a high-profit business model. This type of software often includes elements of social media and is sold to companies to improve productivity…The purpose of this software is for employees to work together to achieve common goals and adapt to change.
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New pro-social media will naturally grow in such an environment and then be sold to other organizations interested in solidarity and dynamism in a broader social context.
- What Audrey Tang calls productivity improvement software is what Cybozu has been calling groupware.
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- In “democracy,” representatives are elected through elections to discuss on behalf of the people, known as “representative democracy.”
- This was only a practice for an era when information processing technology was immature. Better technology brings better teamwork.
- In the future, various local governments will make various attempts to “communicate better with citizens.”
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It is the key to advancing democracy for teenagers and young people to come up with really good ideas and shorten the time it takes for them to be understood and implemented by senior people. Young people, being digital natives, do not think that once every four years is enough for uploading bandwidth, and the latency is too high. They prefer to collaborate on a daily basis.
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If we open up the authority for agenda setting to the people, we can return people’s support or opposition to each agenda. Public servants can no longer exclusively own the agenda.
Plurality and Cybozu
- Cybozu originally sold groupware (= productivity improvement software) for private companies.
- → The target is expanding to local governments and NPOs.
- Audrey Tang originally thought about better governance by the government.
- → As a result, she believes that technology to support collaboration among a large number of people and the information system that supports it are necessary.
- The goals pursued by Plurality and Cybozu are in the same direction.
- → It is beneficial to learn from each other’s perspectives.
Want to know more about Plurality? Please join the forum!
- A book is being written by Audrey Tang and Glen Weyl.
- This is the official Japanese translation repository managed by Nishio.
- Implemented a system to automatically translate it every day using Github Actions and the ChatGPT API.
- A lively forum has been created where you can have fun using these translations as a starting point.
- You can write questions and impressions while reading the manuscript, or write about your research.
- Please come and join the excitement!
- /plurality-japanese
This page is auto-translated from [/nishio/Plurality and Cybozu](https://scrapbox.io/nishio/Plurality and Cybozu) using DeepL. If you looks something interesting but the auto-translated English is not good enough to understand it, feel free to let me know at @nishio_en. I’m very happy to spread my thought to non-Japanese readers.