As recorded by Ulisses Santamaria
¶ Background
This meeting serves as a working session for the progress made for the hyperdemocracy project workshop that was done on July 2023. During that workshop, the notes of which can be found atHyperdemocracy Workshop notes from that session.
¶ Progress Made
Since the workshop, the group has focused primarily among:
- Gabriel
- Forrest
- Calli
- Andrew
There has been a separate website app based off of streamlit called www.hyperdemocracy.space. This website gives the dream that the original workshop was aiming for. That dream being:
What if we could have a ChatGPT like interface for understanding laws, rules, and regulations?
When I'm in my travels, I describe the hyperdemocracy project as:
Let's say that you wanted to know when was the last time congress wrote a bill about animal welfare. You could ask this ChatGPT like program, and it would tell you, " the 105th congress in 1997 wrote a bill about this. Here's the text they wrote" wouldn't that be awesome? It would be handy for a lot of people.
¶ Hyperdemocracy.space
Taking a look through the site, we'll start with a general interface picture
In the interface, we see:
- A sidebar that contains:
- a link to hyperdemocracy.us, a landing page for the hyperdemocracy project.
- a link to nomic.ai, a graphical interface for the corpus we are using (2023 Bills published by the 118th US Congress.
- A dropdown menu that allows the user to choose a Large Language Model
- Retrieval parameters
- This allows you to select how many different "chunks" of information are pulled from each individual bill that appears in your query.
- Generative parameters
- Temperature
- Is a setting that adjust the likelihood of the model to either select a more random token. A hotter setting means that it may select results that are different each time.
- low means deterministic, it will always choose the token of best fit.
- High means less deterministic and may choose different tokens of best fit.
- Top_P
- is a setting that allows you to adjust how much of the total language that you use to meet the criteria. For example, a setting of .90 for top_p means that the next string of generated text meets the criteria for 90% fit for the previous words.
- Temperature
- A middle window that contains background information about the program, as well as a window to ask the model a question about the 118th congress.
- Another two sections open when a query is made, one showing the bills relevant to the query, and the other showing a summary of relevant bills in a single paragraph.
¶ Next Directions
¶ Forms of Hyperdemocracy
- Hyperdemocracy Core
- Boilerplate code and resources
- Hyperdemocracy Research
- Platform for adding datasets and tools to the core
- Hyperdemocracy Community
- Network of local non-profits who use the core and research tools for the benefit of the local community
¶ Recruiting more help
- List as grand project under petri dish (if desired)
- Post hyperdemocracy meetings on meetup under HacDC for the time being.
- Posting online through linkedin and other channels for people who want to help.
¶ Outreach
- think tanks
- local non-profits
- general public
¶ Cadence
- Weekly meetings
- Wednesdays evening (time unknown)
- Monthly in-person meetings
- At thinknimble
- Discussion done through Discord in the hyperdemocracy channels in the HacDC discord.
¶ Roadmap
- Hyperdemocracy Research
- Gabriel and Forrest continue their work in optimizing the the models and code to learn, explore, and improve the program.
- Goals:
- Produce an open source github repo that people can access.
- Hyperdemocracy Core
- A team to form that is responsible for forming a polished and stable version of the research version that can be used by a regular version.
- Goals:
- Produce a webapp that is simple to use for a non-technical person to query the information amassed by the models.
- Maintain updates for stability and usability for future community users.
- Hyperdemocracy Community
- A team to do outreach and communication about the hyperdemocracy core version to use, test, give feedback, and produce meaningful change in the community.
- Goals:
- Find community partners that can use the product produced by the Core group for feedback and use.
- Be a resource and source of funding once useful applications are found in the community.
¶ Last issues
- Organizational Convolution
- It was mentioned by Calli that Hyperdemocracy is a legal entity in the form of a non-profit.
- At a similar time, a second non-profit called open democracy was also established by Calli.
- Hyperdemocracy = technology development
- Open Democracy = Legal development/Advcacy
- Many of the scripts, code, and physical hardware used for the hyperdemocracy group is on equipment owned by Calli's LLC, assembled.app
- What to do about this?
- Assembled may be discontinued so the property angle may be irrelevant
- There are different pathways the hyperdemocracy project can take to stay operational over time. They are listed below:
- Hyperdemocracy is a DBA (doing business as) for open democracy.
- This puts both projects under one roof and retains Calli's official leadership over the project when the core and community aspects of hyper democracy are built.
- Hyperdemocracy maintains itself as a separate non-profit.
- This is creates a structure similar to apache and the apache foundation. The foundation supports the development of the program through handling overhead and resources.
- This pathway will involve handing over the organizational responsibilities of hyperdemocracy to someone else as Calli wishes to focus on open democracy for income.
- Hyperdemocracy runs as a project of a 3rd party non-profit
- One possibility is having the board of HacDC elect to take it under their wing.
- Second possibility is to have DMV Petri Dish take it under their wing.
- the 3rd party non-profit becomes the organizational resource of the hyperdemocracy project.
- Hyperdemocracy is a DBA (doing business as) for open democracy.
- Whatever the outcome, this is Calli's choice to make
- Management
- Ulisses to step in for a little bit and act as a task manager for the project until further developments are made.
- Be warned that this will be a bit sporadic on my end as I have a lot of different projects under my purview.
- Be warned again that I'm not well knowledgeable in this field, I'm just willing to help with taking notes like this.
- Ulisses to step in for a little bit and act as a task manager for the project until further developments are made.