Welcome to tech stuff. This is the story today. A conversation with Yasmin Green, the CEO of Jigsaw. Jigsaw is a unit within Google that focuses on finding ways to harness technology as a solution for societal issues at a
global and local scale. The Jigsaw team doesn't have any revenue goals, and Google grants it the time and resources to study intricate problems around the world, from scient extremism to political censorship, to determine why it's happening and what could be done about it, all from a technology and solution oriented point of view. Jigsaw's most recent project took Yasmin and her team to a small city in Kentucky
called Bowling Green. The challenge was to use AI tools to create a town hall meeting for the technological age, civic engagement that can be seen, heard, and considered all beyond the walls of city hall. I've only has been green for many years, and in an age where big tech consistently drives negative headlines, I wanted to hear from someone on the inside working to find best case scenarios for the deluge of new tools and technologies that we're
now contending with. We sat down to talk about Bowling Green and Jigsaw's past and future ambitions. He has been Green. Welcome back to Well, last time we spoke was on Sleepwalkers. This is tech stuff, but welcome back to the studio.
Follow you around from podcast to podcasts.
I think it's the other way around. Tell me a bit about Jigsaw and your mission there.
Yeah, Digsaw is an incubator inside Google. We developed technology to give people voice and choice in the world around them. And I have the privilege of being the CEO.
And last time we met you at the director of research, and now you're the CEO.
I have broad a shoulders. Now my voice is a little lower.
But what have you brought to the new role? Like, how have you put your stamp on the organization?
So I came to New York actually fourteen years ago to help start Jigsaw. So I feel like I've been while I bleed Jigsaw. I've been with jigsaf from the beginning and then three years ago I took over as CEO and it just coincided with a time of incredible change and volatility. But one of the things is the kind of mainstreaming of conversational AI and both I think the power of the air models and also the kind of public discourse and public awareness about AI, and that
really changed. I think also the tempo inside all of the tech companies around releasing and iterating and you know, the near term gain is really clear, and then maybe the long term pain is less in focus. But that's kind of what we think we exist to do. A jigsaw is be where the major tech companies and Google aren't what our kind of highest and best use would be are the things that other people aren't doing right now.
Last time we met, we talked about a program you ran to serve targeted ads to people considering the path of terrorism.
Right, yeah. Yeah. When we started working on radicalization, which was one of our first focus areas over a decade ago, the idea that the Internet would have anything to do with why anyone would go and join the majorhaden in Afghanistan was so unfathomable, both to people who are experts about you know, Islamism and the people who are experts
in the Internet. Now, those you know, areas of kind of extremism and hate, and you know, those things are they are not solved problems, but they're also not in anyone's behind spots like they are very crowded that the
subject of regulation, et cetera. And now we're much more interested in, like, what if this all goes right and we do build this incredibly powerful technology and it's prevalent, how do we make sure that people have a voice and choice in the world around them, because it's not inevitable that that will come along with the intelligence.
How did your sort of personal experience prepare you for this role? I know you worked to Google beforehand, I think in sales in Middle East and Africa and Europe, and I know that you left Iran I think as a young child as well. I mean, how how has your kind of personal experience contributed to you being the technologist that you are today based.
In Paris for Google, managing strategy and ops for the sales teams. And I got, of course, thing, do you want to come to New York and help start Jigsaw? And the original frame of Jigsaw was actually kind of looking at geopolitical threats. The revolution that happened in Iran which led to me leaving, where the religious extremists took over. They were those were violent extremists, you know, and sometimes they do they make big moves and they take over land,
and they can you know, oppress people. For such a long time, we had this view that was prevalent in tech then, which was, you know, the Internet will be a democratizing technology. I don't have to worry it's going to be bumpy along the way, but like, one thing you can be sure is this is going to bring
people together and connect them to information. And I was like, yeah, I think there are a lot of people going to have their own idea about that, and so I wanted to work on things to do with the Internet that
were very kind of discerning about what might happen. So I think this idea of alays looking around the corner and saying where's where's crowded now and where people aren't looking, and having the luxury to kind of have this incredible group of people be thinking about what's going to happen next, and you know, having the resources of Google to try to affect that.
Jigsaw is a division of Google with I don't think has any revenue. Doesn't have a revenue line, right, It's a.
No, it does not.
And Google's now in this moment where I think we'll have a lot more questions about the larger role of technology companies in our society. But then also the business model with search and with the rise of AI is more threatened. And so how does an organization like the one you lead deal with those two things? On the one hand, maybe being odds or surfacing things at the
parent company doesn't want to be surfaced. On the other hand, operating in a more economically constrain the environment where there are cuts and buyouts and stuff going on. How do those two things affect you up day to day.
I mean, there are so many parts of all the tech companies that work on the things that are challenges. You know, they will have these massive trust and safety machinery that are actually looking all the time and like a trillion pieces of content and everything from child sexual assault imagery to the you know, the worst of it and scams. So the tech companies are full of people who are looking at where things aren't going well and
trying to affect them. I think maybe the thing that's different is that Jigsaw is providing a public commentary and there I think it probably helps that we have our own brand, and so we go off and do our things, and sometimes sometimes we try things that don't work, and
in which case Google's not too bollied. And then when we do things that you really are very significant contributions to helping make people better off with the Internet and AI, then Google's like, this is Google Jigsaw everyone, we take full credit. So it seems to be a good kind of arrangement that really works for Google. But you're right that we often are in that we are looking at
like what what is not necessarily going to go? Well, it is in Google's long term interest to have a group that does that and that makes significant progress that they can rightfully take credit for.
You're sort of in a sense you're not red teaming particular products, but you're read teaming the cult that the wider tech industry.
Yeah, and e specifically with the view to like, what are we going to do about it? Yeah. I assure you that there are many many teams that are red teaming internally. They just don't come and talk to you about it, or maybe they can maybe actually got an advocate work. It was so great. That was really great.
Can you describe for our audience that text stuff, what ethnographic research looks like and how you used it. If you're projecting Bowling Green Kentucky.
Yeah, depending on where you sit, you then press that jigs or does it or you're kind of appalled that
not every part of a tech company does this. But it's basically the very patient type of research that involves going in and spending time with people and observing how they live in their community and people are making sense of using the Internet, which is the part we care about as part of an existence that extends beyond technology obviously, like who they are, what their identity is, what they do, who their family is with their community is how they identify,
and so we bring that wide angle lens to how we think about challenges. So we had built this big AI, really helpful tool that was used by platforms and publishers around the Internet to try to have conversations that serve their communities. But last year we thought to ourselves, maybe we could help enable conversations, large conversations that happen not just online between people, but between policymakers and their constituents.
And we end up doing something which we've just completed, which I'm excited to talk about in Kentucky, in this town called Bonling Green. But we kind of understood that they wanted to have a town wide conversation, but that nobody participated. There was no public input when they were given space to contribute.
In fact, the only place you obviously a town hall in America Arizona, Cinno, Fox News too use for the election, right. The concept of the town hall is like more or less a cliche. So how do you use technology to actually have what would have the town hall in premodernaty?
Actually? Okay, So we went to meet with the judge executive of this county. It's like the mayor of this county who's called Doug Norman. Incredible, I'm gonna call him Doug. This town is a doubling in size over the next twenty years. It's going from one hundred and forty eight manation. Might not be getting those rights those numbers right, it might be doubling even more. But it's basically like adding another bowling green to the county, which sounds great like
growth and jobs and development. And at the same time we're a mixed bag of emotions in the community. So there's a big farming constituency and they are concerned about land use. In the irreversible decision to let people develop on your land, lifelong residents are concerned about the preserving their culture and their building, and there's a lot of concern about migration. And it's interesting that in Kentucky and Bowling Green the concern is not about migration from foreigners
but from people from Nashville, Tennessee. Really, they're like, we don't want to become like Nashville extended here. So there's all like valid concerns that they have, and they're going to have to have all you know, all this growth. And actually the words from Doug capture it best. He said to them, do we want this growth to happen to us or do we want the growth to happen for us? If we want to chappen for us, we have to come together and set a vision for Bowling Green,
which is really amazing. But then you are similarly perfectly, how's it going like with you know, Townholls, And he's like, yeah, we get about eight or nine people, and so we're like, maybe we can help because we have a lot of experience with tech and large girl conversations. But it always starts like product them always starts with like field work.
So we went to Bowling Green to go and spend time with people, people who are really marginalized from politics, like the elder, these students, recent migrants, et cetera, people who've just been left incarceration, to figure out what what would stop them from participating, And so we do things like we took a couple to like a tree planting meeting. We took like this college graduate to a city planning commission get together about whether someone should be allowed to
add to the back of their pub. We took all of them and so you can observe what is holding them back, and it was the things that they said resonated so much with me. They don't think that there they have the expertise, they don't think they matter, they don't think that if they use their voice it would
be listened to. And it's all stuff that who hasn't been in like a large meeting where you're like, I don't really understand what we're talking about, or I don't understand my role in this discussion, or like if I use my voice, you know my boss going to hear me, or is it going to go anywhere? So if we can relate to it, they get that level. The fact that people really show up to their local community, whether it's like their refugee community or their LGBTQ community, or
the sports club or the church. But then when you like come to the town conversation, the civic oh, I don't know, I don't look or sound the part. You know, the college student we took to the city planning commission thing, he was like, I can't go to that. I'm not a lawyer. And of course when he went there were no lawyers. But like, that's what we have in our head, is like, I am the expertise.
Can you tell me a little bit more about perspective API. I know it's developed by Jigsaw and it's now used by Wikipedia and Wall Street Journal, And essentially what it does is regulate the comments sections using AI to understand the impact any given comment might have on other commenters or participants and score that impact. But I'm curious, is the Bowling Green Project an extension of Jigsaw's work on perspective.
It's hard to even remember that, you know, nine or ten years ago, all these publishers are closing their comment spaces because they couldn't even have a civil conversation, and so Perspective was a you know, an AI that helps with managing online conversations. They get ranks all different types of things, everything from like ad hominem attacks too, is something constructive and what explained like it scores them for publishers to decide what kind of conversation you want to have.
But in the case of policymakers in there, you know the people they represent, they need to be in conversation too. There's this quote that I love, which is that conversation is the soul of democracy. What gives democracies legitimacy is our ability to have a free and open exchange of ideas. And so the thing that we wanted to help Doug with, which kind of informed what we developed, which we call sense making, was he wants to tell his people come
and be in a conversation with me. People weren't showing up.
So it wasn't like there's an existing conversation happening. How do we make it more provatal inclusive? It was how do we create the environment for a conversation to happen?
Yes, and they need to believe that he will hear their voice if they express it. People who study this say, if there's nothing that's worse than not asking people for their opinion.
Asking people ignoring them because that's truly demotivating.
So we realized that he would need to be able to tell them that their voice would be heard, and so we worked. We ended up working with a platform called polist to solicit input and it was just open ended, open ended like answers, so it was really in your own words and on your own terms, So people were free to say what they wanted. They're free to do it at their own time, in their bedroom, you know, an anonymously. So it was really like a lot of what we heard in the ethnography we were trying to
account for. My team sat down with two sisters that were recently relocated Bowling Green from Afghanistan, and they went and in their home like with like over tree. Then they were like you know, with the headscarves everything. They were asking them like what what would it take for you to come and be part of this conversation And they were just like that, they had no idea what civic participation referred to, the idea of like even attending a town hall, never mind being asked to speak, was
a complete anathema to them. So this conversation that we set up, which is called what could Bowling Green be, which we did with this incredible partner on the ground called Innovation an Engine. The conversation was like designed to be like you are free to say what you want, where you want, whenever you want. And it was a month long conversation and we did it through this POSE platform and the idea was speak and you'll be heard.
And the part that we used AI for was making sense of what everybody said in a way that could be shared back to them, that they would see their voices in the conversation and could be shared back with the policymaker so he could take an action.
After the break, the largest town hall in US history and how Jigsaw made it happen. Welcome back to tech stuff. Before the break, we were talking with Yasmin Green, CEO of Jigsaw, about how the initial pieces of an ambitious project using AI to create a more inclusive and active town hall came together in the town of Bowling Green, Kentucky. So, taking a few steps back, how does this come about? Like,
how do you choose a community to partner with? And I guess what are the stakes for you to be working with government versus just in a purely online arena, Like how much pressure and also opportunities.
Does that add? Kentucky's actually a really pioneering state, and partly a little bit by it because now I spent much time there, but the cross even not in Bonling Green, other places do. They're doing a lot of civic tech work and they're very forward. And Bowling Green in particular was known because they had done something several years ago where they had done public participation with the local newspaper. Okay, and we had heard that they're putting together the stake vision for twenty fifty.
So what do we want Bowling Green? Yeah, so you'd heard about this, you knew that they would take forward.
Yes, and we're like, maybe we can actually they come and give them something really useful. Maybe we can co develop something with them. And so they said, okay, let's do this month and conversation to hear what people have to say. And then they actually did like super local like ground game marketing campaign.
Where you involved with a marketing campaign or.
Yeah, we partnered with them, but it was like local creative agencies that came up with the creators.
So basically get people to be aware and think it was fun, evangelize interact with the platform.
Yeah, yeah, and exactly, And the main thing was just to be local. So things were translated into nine languages. They they put them in you know, they fly at international supermarkets, they went to make a church is, they went to basketball games.
So you created awareness and then whether like QR codes that people like clicked on their phones and they would take it into the conversational platform or like how what was the.
Yeah, basically you look, yes, they're working on code. Do you go to what could be GB? In fact, you can stop it. What could Bowling Green be? Is the website dot com and you can see the report. But people would log in and then you just get like a question prompt what do you want for Bowling Green in the future, Which that's that depended you put your answers in and.
Only one single prompt.
There's one question and could you could put you could keep putting more of what you want. You probably have lots. It's pretty open. You might have ideas for education or infrastructure, you know, restaurants. But then there's voting, so you you
vote on other people's input. And that was a really important signal to see like where, if anywhere, do we agree right and where we put so much effort into trying to make a like make this local and be make it accessible and still like you know, the beginning of the month long conversation, we were like, is anyone is anyone going to turn up to this? Yeah? Because maybe we do all this effort and it's eight people.
Did you show a tumble.
Right? Right? So the baseline's eight okay, So we were like, thirty will be good. Thirty will be good. Now, so we're like, if we could get a one thousand or two thousand, and so it was eight.
Thousand, eight thousand respondents.
This kind of like AI enabled town hall was a thousand times larger than the regular town hall, and one in every ten residents basically the equivalent of one every ten residents participated. So as far as like that's what the folks on the ground and say, is that it meant that people were discussing this topic even outside of the actual platform because there was that much participation, So it kind of pas the tipping point. So it was
really nice to see the numbers go up. They did go up, they did spike a bit towards the end, and it was actually the largest digital town hall in US history. So it's the most that anyone's come together, and that's US partnering with a town in Kentucky. So if you like imagine what is possible at the state level or across states if you bring people together to share their view. Although there was before like advocating for more of those type of CIF conversations, I think the
first big apprehension was is anyone could show up? Ye? The second was, well, you know, if this is a scaled version of an in person town hall, we might kind of be in trouble because the eight people that come to an in person town hall detractors detracted typically, right, the ambivalent people don't go and show up, or people who are like quite like the idea and also could see why not the idea? That's not the people that get you motivated to get off the counch and drive
all the way and wait there. It's usually people who really don't want the thing to happen. So I think local leaders were like, well, we're just going to get eight thousand of them entrance, you know, because they don't want to scale in that sense, And that was why it's so important to do like such a broad marketing campaign to like all these different constituencies, but the bigger side of relief from local leaders when they looked at
their feedback and a lot of stuff they anticipated. There was like in a growing town, you need more infrastructure, you need more roads. Lots of really interesting thoughts on education, on like restaurants. There was just one submission on the restaurant and interesting kind of like unexpected proposals on a number of fronts, but the one that makes me giggles
in the area of like food and restaurants. One person submitted an idea to pass a law to mandate restaurants to include ketchup saches in the takeaway like the takeaway bags of like fast food restaurants. So you know, that's how you know that people are really expressing their views. And we've got good mixed views but didn't have much support.
How did people express support for one another? Like I go on the platform, answer this is you know, I want more free ketchup saches? Is that that Now I don't live in Boling. I read that it was Geo Geo fence. Otherwise it would have been me. But then is that then like available for other people to comment on? Okay, so it's like a message boarders, it's not just a one.
So they're routing so you you put your idea and then they're routing ideas for you to vote on. And it's actually much You get a much higher percentage of people like the The votes are much higher than the actual submissions. Yeah, because it's much easier to vote and you're kind of in there and it's a little addictive. And I think that's one of the really really cool things about this conversation is that it was designed to advance a very large conversation. It wasn't designed to have
like eight thousand and one on ones. That's not what we're trying to do when we're trying to have a long conversation. And that that's interesting because there isn't the option to reply the way that purchases platform is set up. You have an idea, and you can vote on other people's ideas, and if you really don't like the catch up idea and you actually think it should be mustered,
put your idea in the area. Yeah, but we're not you're not telling you know, you're not going to get into some you know, back and forth with the person who suggested Ki jump is you know, from the wrong part of town, and everyone's asking that part of town. You know, here's no point going down that you know, spiral of the ad hominym attacks, et cetera. That happens
a not on social media. So the conversations dis like designed differently from the get go that you put your ideas, you vote, if you want to keep going after you've given your thumbs up your thumbs down, you're welcome to put your idea in there. And it well. So then when we had to take stock of like, well did any of these ideas they resonate with other people? So there were four thousand policy proposals and over half of them had near universal support.
Near universal support over half. So in other words, what you take from it is the community knows what's good for it.
Well yeah, and and that you know, there are so many opportunities for us to hear from the people who are the angriest or at least well informed.
Or did you know the voter registration of the participants or I mean.
Was this no, but it's it's it is a it's a purpolish place, so it's quite a mix. And you saw some of the things that you see you know, nationally, but most of the things that local people care about are you know, what is going to happen to their K through twelve education. It turns out they want more vocational skills, you know, like they want their university, which is the pride of like you know, Western Kentucky University, they want it to be more integrated into their economy
and their like workforce development. And there's a lot of things that they want. And the perspective of not just dog actually but even like private section leaders was like, that's great. Now we have now we can go and lead and build and make changes knowing that we have
broad public support. Otherwise, if you're just based basing you know, your like sentiment gauging on public calls and social media, just thinking that like no one wants anything to happen, you know, or that like you might have some supporters, but also like everyone else is an avid, you know, avid distractor. So so I think those are two really
important essons. One people really will show up, they really do want to shape their future, you know, And two that there is more that unites us then divides us, which is kind of imperative for us to keep you know, in our minds and cultivate at this moment.
And what was Jigsaw's role or technology deployment because the marketing campaign was like panel by local agencies, the polished platform was it's not a Jigsaw platform, right, So what did what was the layer that you guys added It was.
The making sense of the conversation. So if you can get lots of people to contribute, how can you guarantee that their voice will be heard? And so it really is using this case, Google's aigemini using an eye for what it does best, which is they take large amounts of information that it expressed in a very local and personal way, understand it, organize it, they sort it, prioritize it,
and then give it back to people. So like, you know the thing if you go to what could bowlinggreenpeed dot com, you'll see the report and it's like, you know, Google Maps, we think at Google mapps, you started very high level. If you'll look at like the states of in America, that's the first thing that you see, and then you're like, actually, I'm kind of interested in New York. And then you're like interest in my neighborhood and they're interesting.
You're like, oh, how can you see my front door? You know, And that's how it is with this map of opinions, like not geographical terrain, but opinion terrain. But you start the top and you're like, what do people have born and green care about? And then it has
those you know, instructural education, et cetera. And then you're driven You're like, actually, what I really care about is you know, education, and then go through, you know, you just keep digging and most people, most people have specific areas of interest. But the truth is people want to know where they sit relative to their neighbors, and so
people want to actually find where they are. Because there's this plot graph on there that has a distribution of all the proposals and how much agreement they got, and so you can see am I like on the am I the fringe opinion holder even though like me and all my two friends agree with me, or actually is something that I've been scared to say out loud, something that a lot of other people believe. So you can go in there and see that, which is really powerful.
And of course most people agreed with most things. So I think it does restore our sense of you know, like it's a funhouse of mirror sometimes social media where you're like, oh my goodness, everyone's extreme. It's just me here that doesn't want to have like an extreme mistake on things.
What are the key policy ideas that have emerged and will you measure success based on whether or not they're enacted or are you, in a sense now passing the bat on the lull.
It's definitely in the court of their leaders, and it's their process so to begin with. So I think they genuinely do want people's input because the process kind of proceeded our involvement. But one example was they had wanted to do a riverside development. They built building up the area along the riverside, and when they had got tried to get public input, very few people pay and they were detractors. But then if you look at the feedback on that one topic in the reports, like seventy five
plus percent of people support it. So I think they're now going to accelerate that. What we did, in terms of like really trying to gauge people's sense of like whether it mattered for them, was we say it on whether they felt their voice mattered. We asked them whether they felt they understanded other people's perspectives better than they did before. And then third was where they think they
believe their input will lead to a better outcoming. On all of those, it was like eighty percent plus satisfaction.
And were you surprised by the outcome? And how do you how do you kind of measure the success of a project like this.
I think it was that that people wanted to come out and they did. I think that there's two There's like, there's two parts of my brain. There's a part of brains like did we achieve our you know, like our product development goals or are like whatever engagement goals? And then there's an other part of me that's like can I retain my hope for like society thriving as we get more at Amize And so I feel like on
both of those I felt really good. I felt good because obviously the technology wor I also, you know, the sense of the team is that we can push to do more. And so now we're exploring what other types of conversations in the conversation space. How could we Maybe it's a different scale, you know, maybe it's a different
nature of conversation. Maybe we're using different capabilities of Gemini to do more to bring people together, to have them understand each other more and then having it count for them. So that's the kind of fun and exploration phase that we're in. Now.
There's another thing that came out of the research I think called grounding.
Yeah, can you talk a bit about rounding. Groundings their sister to hallucinations, So, which is a funny term that has widespread adoption to describe when air models may make stuff up.
Because of course that the very bad scenario. Who would be that the air was making up policy of pro puzzles and no one asked for.
Oh my goodness, imagine that in such a high stakes context where people are trying and talk to their policy maker. And there were some funny things that in our early testing we were finding it would kind of conflate two topics that seem like they're about the same thing, or that like you would it would have only one. There'd be like one post about you know, there should not
be some any sweet tuitets offered at in kindergarten. And then the summarizing AI would be like the people of Bowling Green, you do not want to have like cakes and chocolates and candy and they would rather have like keep compisation. It's just like wait, whatever that wasn't said, yos,
that's out of lines. So part of kind of making sure that we understood the ways that the AI might misfire was doing a ton of testing with humor reviews and on previous data sets, and then we did it kind of kind of like a small private trial a few months earlier with Bowling Green and the local partners reviewing them and just seeing like how might it go wrong? And then some of the tweets we made with to
make sure that we batched appropriately. So grounding is every output that the AI produces is that it's like appended with citations. So everything that the AI says was a theme in the report, you can say, you know, show me receipts and it will take you to the underlying policy proposals or words, the actual words of the people at Bowling Green, so you don't have to you know, you actually don't have to trust the AI.
Super interesting. Could grounding be used beyond this context? Do you think?
Yeah? Yeah, and it is it's used broadly. Have you ever used notebook M Yes, So they use grounding. So when they you know, when they summarize a you can give it like one hundred reports or whatever backad Democrat. Of course, if you're don't research and it'll tell you the themes and then it gives you like like footnotes so that you can see where the source material and have confidence that at accurate.
What's the wider hope with a project like Bowling Green? I mean, do you is that, like, is there an ideal community size? Why this is will be perfect for towns that are growing of around one hundred thousand people because like you have enough people in the community, you're invested in the future because it's growing, it's not so large that you get so many proposals that it's like
impossible to sort. And therefore maybe there's like another one hundred Bowling Greens in the US, or is it more like, Wow, the greatest problem in US politics today is that participation and is low and conversation is toxic, and therefore, like this could be a much wider solution, Like how do you between those two things? Like where do you feel for me?
The more conversation, the better. I think the reverse is also true, the less conversation the worst, the worst we ended up. I understand each other, and that was kind of where we had taken perspective for over the last couple of years, was actually not just helping publisher score things that they might want to see less of, like toxicity, but actually doing the bridging attributes as well, which was the things that kind of help people who disagree stay
in the conversation together. So I would like to see more of it. And I think we've also shown we show that the appetite is there from people and that it can go really well. That I think the judge executive Doug Gorman in our case, was really really brave to try and do that. Why brave because the safe nobody shows up, or say if they show up and you know it's Cook Coffinus. But now seeing what Doug's that actually Doug came to So Google has a developer
conference equal to I Air. That just happened, and Google invited Doug to go and participate in the local leaders track, and he went and told all these like other mayors and local leaders and they were They really lit up. And so from what I understand, I think there is a lot of appetite to do this, and I think him going first and having the bowling green kind of proof of concept will inspire others to adopt it to.
Is that part of your work or in a sense you like the fire and it's of other people to kindle it bad metaphor, but I mean otherwise do what are you going to do the same experiment again in another community or a larger community? Or do you feel like you have the proof point that you think you know?
I think it's you know this question, like what is Jigsaw's highest and best use. I think if we if now we've done the concept, if there's another proof like another place that we'd want to do it, I think we would be up into that if it felt that it was some additive like materially additive, if it were you know, maybe at the state level or you know, some other kind of complex conversation that we felt that
we could we could advance. I think there will be others, like kind of implementers who will I think this will become a kind of a commercial opportunity for others to help with. I don't think we do you know, that's the best use of Jigsaw to do many many more of the same thing in towns.
So in other words, like a polling firm could take it over as a business. Liane Audrey Tang, who I know that you were, you know, to spend time with. Recently an interview with Nick Thompson and Audrey spoke about the Bowling Green project and in the context of how in California post fires, Newsome is sort of using this tech enabled participatory democratic technology to understand what people want
from the rebuild of like burnt areas of LA. Where does this fit in with the kind of larger tech enabled digital democracy trend.
I think it is. I think they're pioneering there because they're doing at the state level in California's a massive state. And interestingly, when we did it in Bowling Green, which was you know, Well or Warren County, much much smaller, super open question. In the case of California, that asking
a really narrow question. I mean, it's big in itself, but it's much more focused question, which is, you know, how are we going to where do we go from here after the wildfire specifically, So I think that's really instructive, Like doesn't once you go to the state level, doesn't need to be so focused And they've already got quite a bit of engagement and is she going to talk to them about how they're going to make sense of it because I don't know what they do. Well, yeah,
we're in touch with them. And Audrey, who's you know, it was the former the kind of in agural like I guess did a digital minister for Taiwan is like this just she's just a global matchmaker. So she's advising California as well, and she's advised us a lot. She's been very instructive for our work.
Two questions are close, I guess the first. Obviously, it's a moment where Google is being you know, the subject of the Justice Department and Chrome. All this kind of stuff, in other words, is a target of federal investigation when you work with government, like do you are there people who say this is a conflict of interest or Jigsaw being in bed with local estate governments is somehow advancing Google's corporate motives elsewhere, and that's a problem.
In this case. We didn't actually have any commercial relationship with the government. We were actually partnered with the group the I told you about Innovation Engine and they did the kind of execution. But we did care a lot about making the tech work for the hotesty maker and the people because it seemed it seems like such an important thing for us to get right. And if we want policy makers to make good policy, even about tech, they should kind of understand it and see how it
shows up for them. And in this case, I think Voluningroom was so attractible was so because it was so mixed in terms of politics. So, yeah, we've always kind of been in and we've always been around governments, and actually still this point you haven't actually directly partnered with the government. But it felt really gratifying to feel like you are helping that dynamic work better.
What do you still have to achieve a Jigsaw and what kind of future signature projects can you tease for us Today.
We're noticing a change in the culture at Jigsaw internally that actually mirrors what's happening externally. That things are moving so fast, like the technology is moving so fast, and we are inside this incredible tech company, and so I think we sometimes maybe things appear to us before they mate to others. I think we could help a lot
by kind of sharing as we're going. So I think the change in the coming year that I'd like to see is more rapid iteration and more, sharing more frequently, and being more public about what we're doing.
Well, you know where to come. Thank you, Thank you us for tech Stuff. I'm oz Vaaloshian. This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Adriana Topia. It was executive produced by me Karaen Price and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvel for iHeart Podcasts. Jack Insley mixed this episode, and Kyle Murdoch Rodelphime Song join us on Friday for the Week in Tech, when we'll run through the tech
headlines you may have missed. Please rate, review, and reach out to us at tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com.