Our Tomorrow starts Today
What do I mean by Our Tomorrow** starts Today?
Well obviously, its a play on the fact I am starting this project today.
But it’s also a reference to the fact that if we* want a better tomorrow we have to plan for it, and we need to start today.
We have to bend the things that happen each today towards that future we want as the opportunity arises - even if only by a little bit.
And we need to keep moving towards it bit by bit - even if the path in front of us tomorrow is not yet certain, and even if today’s path takes us sideways for a bit rather than forwards: the key thing is to keep going, each day until we reach that tomorrow.
And we need to do this together.
Not my tomorrow, but our tomorrow.
The why…
I’ve worked in politics and the public sector for most of my professional life.
I’ve also worked in restaurants, on farms doing ‘wheat rogueing’, in a ‘spacies’ arcade in NZ and a bingo hall in the UK, in offices and many many other things. Just like most people.
I believe from all those experiences that there is much more that we have more in common than that which divides us^ and I think many others do too. So I aim to put that belief to the test with this project.
I’m still trying to find a succinct way to explain exactly what I am trying to build here.
So what follows is way too long, but I hope gives a flavour of what we are trying to do, and encourage others to get involved in the project.
Ideas? Time to help? A shorter way of saying all this??
Message me via one of the social links or email paul.comer@ourtomorrow.nz
First and foremost - Help us talk about the hard stuff
In a world of increasingly divisive politics and fractured media around the world including here in Aotearoa New Zealand, the aim is simple - to help us find better ways to talk about the hard stuff - especially the things that we disagree on but all know would be better if we had a plan we could all stick to. Like dieting - crash diets don't work, but making small realistic changes and sticking to them does.
We want to make it easier for Kiwi’s to understand how other Kiwi’s see our future. The aim is to create a community and a space where we can explore together what that future might look like, to find the areas where we agree and those where we might compromise, and to surface that information for all to see.
From politicians to business people, from charities to the long term insights briefings produced by the public sector which make it clear many of these issues will only be solved across multiple parliaments and multiple governments, and from our citizens most of all and their increasing distrust in institutions - there are calls for more bi-partisan approaches to the big issues facing us:
-From how we tackle climate change and respond to the increasing frequency of severe weather events,
-to how we pay for pensions and healthcare as our population ages,
-to what infrastructure it is most important for us to build,
-or how we can create the sorts of jobs in our economy that attract more of our young people stay here rather than heading off to work overseas for long periods (like I did).
-and how we create a cohesive community, where difference is harnessed for our mutual advantage, and how we respect others and the obligations made to each other.
-and many more…
But bi-partisanship starts with us as a body politic.
It is our responsibility to find it.
The politicians we elect do what we elect them to do to a greater or lesser degrees. Working closely with many over the years, I’ve never doubted that the vast, vast majority of politicians start in politics in order to make the world a better place. They have hugely different views on how to do that, and represent the interests of different parts of our society.
Politicians in my experience are very willing to be bi-partisan - to find the solutions that work best and will stick longest. I call this bit their statesmanship persona - wanting to make a positive difference and to be remembered for it.
But Politicians also need to win elections to put their solutions into practice. And by their very nature elections require politicians to 'get more votes than the other lot' - which means taking different positions on different issues in order to attract enough votes to do that. And so long term bi-partisanship becomes secondary to short term political advantage. That's not because politicians are venal - but because our competitive election system in a modern attention economy requires it. And that's not a criticism of democracy - as Churchill said, its still the least worst system we've ever had.
But it doesn't always need to be that way. At least the excesses can be moderated. And that's where we come in - the voters and the citizens.
The clearer we can be as a people about the future we want, the easier we can make it for our politicians to deliver that for us.
All of these issues are complex. If they weren’t we would have solved them already.
And they all have a multitude of possible inter-related solutions. Some of these solutions are highly political - and views vary depending on people’s world view.
This is normal, and this is politics. There should be a contest of ideas for public support. That’s democracy.
But too often that difference in views delays us moving forward. Too often we let ‘perfect’ be the enemy of ‘good’.
So, you may be wondering…
Is this project overtly political?
Yes - it is seeking to influence the political decisions taken by the politicians we elect. It is seeking to strengthen the weighting they give towards the longer term changes needed to benefit us all, and seeks to act as a counter balance the short term interests that we are all subject to.
Is this project partisan?
No - it is NOT trying to favour one future over another in party political terms. It is critical that not only is this project NOT partisan, but also that it is not perceived as such. Without that trust it will almost certainly fail. The aim is to find what combinations of solutions, from any and all political and world perspectives might help us get to that future together.
So it needs to be alive to political debate, and political realities, but not partisan in how it represents those.
We aim encourage respectful debate, and use the latest in polling methods and AI technology as well as collaborative tools to surface what others think and allow you to chat with ‘virtual Kiwi’s’ with opposing points of view.
To find common ground and share that back to you and everyone else.
Is it trying to tell politicians what to do?
No - it is trying to share with the public what ‘we’ collectively think and through that allow our politicians to get a clearer picture of how we might move forward together.
As well as a competition of ideas, politics is at its heart a collective project - finding common ground to progress. We want to act simply as a way to surface those areas of common ground, and encourage debate about how we can move forward together.
Not my opinion, but our opinions.
Secondly - Put that information in our hands
I want to put the data and information about what people think and why, into the hands of the public.
Traditionally, polling companies involved in public opinion research collect lots information from individuals, and then publish headline results.
Often, they and their clients build up a lot more detailed information over time that help them shape their products or their policies. This is completely normal and useful to our democracy. This is not a criticism - its how businesses build jobs.
But in general that information is used to advance an existing aim of their client who is competing for more business - or a political party competing for more votes.
And we, the public, don’t get to see all the information they have. We only get to see the information they choose to present.
So our aim is to try and turn that on its head - allowing people who respond to our surveys to see where they fit on the spectrum for each issue, allow them to explore why others think differently, and to identify those areas of commonality and compromise together - directly - rather than moderated through political parties and media discourse.
Ambitious? Yep
Idealistic? Probably
Worth a crack Nigel? Definitely.
The how…
All of this is just a theory at the moment - it still needs to be built.
But I’m confident it can.
The tech is there - in fact much of it has been used for many years by marketers and political polling companies. I’ve used many of the tools in the past in political campaigning myself. None of it is particularly revolutionary.
But combining those existing techniques with new and emerging AI tools, and putting that all in people’s hands can allow us all to see each other in different ways.
At least that’s the plan.
By combining quantitative survey results with people’s demographic information, and matching that to other consumer information such as purchase history its long been possible to build a good representation of what people think about issues as a population, and who else is likely to think the same. That’s how political parties target voters in elections - both in the real world and online.
And qualitative focus groups allow those pollsters and businesses to explore the ‘why’ behind specific decisions, understand how different types of people respond to different ideas and how to ‘frame’ those ideas in order to persuade the group they want to persuade the best… just like marketing a product.
But both these techniques are costly and take a long time - and in part that’s why pollsters keep much of the information private because they need clients to pay for it in order to be able to support their business.
AI is changing this world rapidly - already marketers are building ‘virtual populations’ to test their ideas on rather than testing it with real people, and almost certainly political pollsters will follow soon. You can already do a very simple version of this yourself using the free versions of most AI tools.
Go on - give it a try.
Ask your favourite AI tool - the free version is usually enough - to create a set of 100 personas that represent the New Zealand voting population. Once it has done that, ask it to test a policy proposal with those personas - or better yet test their response to a range of options. And ask which idea or combination of ideas would win the broadest support.
Its pretty nifty what it can do. It draws on billions and billions of bits of information from the internet.
But these AI models ‘drift’ - ie they get less and less specific over time and become more and more generic. They also just make stuff up or get facts wrong - that’s because at the end of the day AI doesn’t think like people (yet). So its critical to make sure your ‘virtual population’ is constantly updated with real world information from real people - that’s called ‘anchoring’ the data. And that’s where marrying traditional polling to the new world of AI comes in.
So that’s the project.
-Persuade people to share their opinions - in real life.
-Anonymise that data and use it to create a ‘mirror’ of the real population - a ‘virtual population’ balanced to represent the whole population.
-Use that ‘mirror’ to create ‘personas’ representing those different views - a ‘virtual village’ if you like.
-And share that mirror back to each of us to interact with so we can talk with our ‘virtual village’ and:
-Find out where you ‘fit’ in the spectrum,
-what you agree on,
-where you disagree
-and understand other people’s why
We’ll also use the survey data and interactions to constantly update the ‘virtual population’ model - so we can make it better AND track changes over time.
The more of us who participate, the more realistic the interactions will become over time.
Easier said than done…
So, what’s first
As I said up top - if you want to get to tomorrow - you need to make a plan.
So this week the focus is on a few quite practical things - before I start reaching out to others to come and be part of the project.
Make a plan - map out the time between now and the general election - and what are the key phases and deliverables
this includes doing a bit of a ‘pitch deck’ - to explain all this to people and organisations who might want to support the project with their time, their skills or their resources.
the general election is the focus - because if you can’t build a polling organisation in an election year - you’ll never be able to do it!
2. Find a place to work from - home is great - but this is planned to be a collaborative project so I want to find a professional (and hopefully free) base to work from.
3. Get key governance decisions made and entities starting to be set up - we aim to make this a not-for-profit, maybe even a charity. Why?
That’s because for the project to work it is actually more about the community we create than the technology we develop. Its also about trust - because to persuade people to share their data willingly we want them to feel like they have a stake in the project.
We’ll almost certainly need to deliver some products to paying clients to make the maths work (to be clear, NEVER personal data, and NEVER to political parties) but are hoping that donations from individuals and organisations will mean we can keep the project, and most importantly your data, ‘owned’ by all Kiwis rather than any individual like me.
That comes with some decisions about the best form for the entity - company, association or trust - or a combination. And becoming a charity takes time, so we need to get cracking.
4. Start blogging regularly - like this, so people can see what we are doing, how we are getting on, and how they can help.
I’ll blog again Friday and let you know how I’ve done this week.
So here’s to our tomorrow, starting today.
Paul Comer - paul.comer@ourtomorrow.nz
Notes
*A quick note on pronoun use. I use ‘we’ throughout this blog, because I am not trying to build this by myself. But for complete transparency, as at today 23 Feb 26 it genuinely is just me - so take the pronoun as aspirational rather than literal.
For this whole project to work it needs to not just serve the wider public interest, but also to be built by a community of people all interested in helping find our tomorrow together - and it is that community that I am setting out to try and build. Starting Today.
**A quick note on Our Tomorrow as a name. This is a working title and it may change. I used a ‘virtual population’ (see above in ‘the how’) to test the name to try and make sure it wasn’t viewed as politically partisan, but was viewed as a collaborative thing that people could feel part of. As with everything AI - it needs to be tested with real humans too - and that will be a task for us as we get going.
^This quote is taken from the maiden speech of Jo Cox MP to the House of Commons in the UK on 3rd June 2015. Jo was murdered in the run up to the Brexit referendum just 370 odd days year after that speech. I never knew Jo, but I do know her husband. And I was working on the Remain campaign for VBrexit when it happened. So this quote is personally poignant for me.
Since then the foundation set up in Jo’s name has campaigned to strengthen social cohesion in an increasingly fractured age. One of the ways they do that is by funding a think tank pollster called More in Common which started in the UK but now operates in eight countries. They work on a non-partisan basis across the political and cultural divides. I find that inspiring, and my aim is to bring some of those techniques into this project - and focus them not only on cohesion but also on finding agreement around solutions to our long term problems as well. I hope we may learn from their 10 year journey, and may be even link up with them where it makes sense for us both.
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