(upbeat music) My name’s Jessica Clark. And I am Kamal Sinclair. Since 2017, we’ve been collaborating on a research project, turn publication called Making a New Reality. It aligns with the theme of this conference, The Role of Lived Experience in Driving Lasting Change. We’ll share the origins of this research, how we came to collaborate and some of the results so far. Before we get started though, I just wanted to acknowledge that, today is an intense news day on top of about, six intense news years so, let’s all take a breath before we plunge ahead. (both breath deep) Thank you, Jessica. So a little context. Today we are talking about what we consider a sacred thing, the stories of lived experiences, stories that each of us carry, each of us have to contribute to what my friend calls, the cosmos seeking to know itself and each of these stories, adds to our collective understanding of reality. As presented at the Constellation’s Conference in 2020, a single story is like a star, there are billions in the universe and each one is a valuable part of our shared reality, however a narrative, is a way in which we imagine the connections between those stars to draw a constellation, to make meaning and to find patterns and so, we often say that story and narrative, are the code for humanity’s operating system. ‘Cause those stories and narratives, have been the way people have contextualized and responded to their realities since the beginning. Stories and narratives are how we understand the world, how we create social norms, and how we influence the way we design our systems and how we treat each other. It’s basically how we deal with going from the known, to the unknown and it is how we catalyze a massive people, to head west to create a hoped for utopia for some and what became a dystopia for others and we’ve seen a dynamic play out in cycles, throughout our history, in which some ways those narratives are drawn, can silence, erase, dehumanize or be reinterpreted by ignorance, malice or even good intentions. When these dynamics are not mitigated, we all lose a bit more of our collective ability, to understand our reality. However when those narratives, are mitigated by the inclusion and amplification of people’s lived experiences, the systems change in very different ways. For example, the publication of Frederick Douglass’ Slave Narrative, was critical in the abolitionist movement. So myself, in 2007, I felt like I was falling through the rabbit hole, when I entered the world of emerging technology and science and I found incredible makers and thinkers and storytellers from all kinds of backgrounds and ways of thinking, trying to make meaning out of almost daily disruptions, to our sense of reality and including Jessica, (laughs) who had already been in this wonderland for over a decade, when I landed. (Jessica chuckles) And whether it was virtual worlds, that some people said felt more real, than their physical worlds or if it was machine learning, social AI, that was challenging our sense of sentient superiority or if it was cyborgs and wetware robots, that were challenging the fiction in the science fiction of, shows like Westworld, or even the fact that a scientist engineered a child, to have three biological parents. Basically reality was getting disrupted as I knew it and as the Director of Sundance Institute’s, New Frontier Labs, I was invited into some rarefied spaces, heads of tech, media, finance, higher education, philanthropy institutions, I got to go to the World Economic Forum, speak at Facebook and Google headquarters, go to the Skoll World Forum, even the Vatican’s Art and Technology Conference, in the Pope’s Academy of The Sciences, where Galileo was the first director. So although I was one Black woman, from a low income background, that grew up in a religious minority community, in the these rarefied spaces, I was certainly one of very few and I also saw that many other people were not there and that diversity of thought was absent. I started to see with my own eyes, some of the cycles of extractive power, inequitable resources and perceptually limited narratives, that my collaborator Jessica and others had seen in this wonderland and had been working to mitigate since web 1.0 and so more and more, I started to understand the incredible high stakes, of limited inclusion, of people from very different lived experiences. We were already in the world of, web 2.0. The infrastructure for web 3.0 was being laid and we were already prototyping web 4.0 and yet we were using the same design principles, that had failed us in previous industrial revolutions, entering into this fourth industrial revolutions. In fact, some of those design principles, were even more faulty than previous innovation cycles and, you know, I asked myself and Jessica and I asked each other, whose stories and narratives were left out, of the things that influenced this design process before and then you think about Heather Rae’s statement, about what the cost of that limited inclusion, in that previous 400 years of industrialization cost us and the bill, what she calls the bill, which was climate change. So Cara Mertes who commissioned this work, was the head of JustFilms at the Ford Foundation, at the time and she heard me and others raising these concerns in various meetings and she told me that when TV was an emerging medium, it was in the halls of Ford that they decided to intervene, in that commercial only space, to create public media. However, although we got incredibly great results and cherished results like Sesame Street and PBS, she said we didn’t, they didn’t hit the mark. We did hit the mark in terms of the original vision of the blueprint, the footprint, of public media that was envisioned for public, for television and that, she had said that they identified it was because, they were 25 years too late in creating that space, in the development of the TV industry and so, so we went around asking people, how can we not be 25 years too late in emerging media? And talked to a lot of people from various backgrounds and asked them what are a few concerns that you have? And then for each concern we asked them to, imagine a possible way to intervene or to create a mitigation and this toolkit offers the synthesis of their responses, but one idea emerged repeatedly and that was, democratized the imagination of our future and use co-creation to develop new systems, not for altruism or equity or moral or because it’s the moral thing to do, but because it’s actually critical, to all of our collective wellbeing. So with that, I will pass it to Jessica, who will share more about the research and some of the experiments and actions that we’ve seen since. Thanks Kamal. So by the time the pandemic rolled around, the work that Kamal and I had done together, was really starting to change our lives, our work and our realities. The ways that we thought about the role of inclusion and lived experience in the systems we’re all embedded in, was transforming. Kamal had started her unusual new gig, as the Executive Director of the Guild of Future Architects, an experimental new organization, founded by Sharon Chang. The Guild is designed to bring together diverse innovators, from many different disciplines, to think and learn together, about how to make the world more just and collaborative. On my end, a key client for my consultancy, Dot Conductor Studio was Farai Chideya, a program officer in journalism, who had spent her career exploring the connections between, identity, politics, pop culture and power. We didn’t know it then, but all of us were primed, to respond to the wholesale collapse of systems, caused by COVID-19. In the midst of editing The Making a New Reality Toolkit, we stepped back, to take stock of the poisonous, racial dynamics of social media and artificial intelligence. The public struggles around mis and disinformation, related to COVID and the election. The distortions caused by politicians spreading lies, from the podium on down. We talked about how to work across the fields of, philanthropy, production and the big business of making media, to expand the range of voices being heard. We practiced a new language together, moving away from narratives of scarcity and victimhood, towards stories of joint prosperity, shared beauty, collective flourishing. We also lamented the unintended consequences, of our past media systems. Even the ones we’d had a hand in helping to build or promote and as the shocking pandemic spring, turned into a summer of racial reckoning, the Guild convened its members, allies and partners in a series of workshops. Together we learned how to look forwards and backwards, in order to gain perspective on how systems work and how to intervene in them. The goal was to open up a set of practices, world building, futurism, that are usually limited to elite settings, like think tanks and movie studios. We were aiming to democratize the stories we tell, about what’s possible, Out of these workshops designed with other Guild member, which we called futurist writers rooms, came analyses, imaginary artifacts, new visions of systems and laws. One series of 10 workshops called 20 Decades of 2020, invited participants to travel a hundred years, in either direction with, the pandemic as a catalyst for change and inclusion and difference, as a central operating principle. We’re currently editing the narratives, that emerged from that project into a beautiful and surprising book. For the Omidyar media network, we synthesized insights, from hundreds of hours of these other sessions and then had Guild members write four stories, to explore futures with characters, expanding the boundaries, of our current understanding of family life, work, wellbeing and shared understanding. It was in this moment of experimentation and longing, that we decided to bring the work I had been doing, with Farai at Ford, together with The Making a New Reality work. To land both at the Guild, to launch a new sort of incubator, a news incubator, a new news incubator. So the New News Initiative was born. GoFA had already piloted an incubator with members and we took that blueprint and looked around at the universe of other accelerators and organizations, in media, DEI and futurism and saw a gap that we could fill. We also filtered in learnings, from the research we’d been doing with Farai, in the Reconstructing American News Report. I’d encourage you to read it and the companion one that, GoFA member Wilneida Negron worked on, but really it came down to this, we needed to reimagine what it meant to innovate, in the media space. If you wanna change media and center the lives of lived experiences, center the lived experiences of makers, instead of talking about new products or platforms, we needed new people processes of power relationships. So these are the principles we had in mind, when we selected two teams led by Guild members, to participate in the New News incubator. One key learning was that lots of incubators are exhaustful, exhausting and stressful. They don’t take into account, the needs of people working day jobs, dealing with childcare or managing community based organizations. So along with supporting the projects of these teams, we really prioritized rest, rejuvenation, space and time for experimentation over the course of the process. Tauhid led the project at the IF Lab newsroom in, based in Philly and Aaron, a project called HBCUX, which brings together, departments for performing arts, across a coalition of HBCU colleges. So we just the wrapped the incubator in February. We’re still unpacking our insights, but in January, I wrote a bit about what it was teaching me, about how we might construct a journalism system, that is regenerative instead of extractive. How can we create news that’s healthy, for both the media workers and the communities they report on? How can we privilege lived experience, over stories manufactured by those in power? Here are a few take aways again for individuals, institutions and systems. So we start with the journalists ’cause those were, that’s our, our key audience. They need to recognize themselves as workers and not let a sense of mission allow them to be taken, to be taken advantage of. They need to understand that their active citizens, in a faltering democracy and not, disinterested observers, who are objective about what’s going on in the world. They need to inhabit their embodied experience, by bringing their whole selves to the work, while simultaneously addressing the physical and emotional trauma that journalism entails, especially given the headlines today and in terms of the shifts in organizations and the eco system, outlets need to own up to their histories and offer concrete steps for reporting more responsibly. We’re seeing that happen in LA and here in Philadelphia where I live. Funders need to acknowledge the power dynamics at play, in their choices about who’s worth supporting and we’ve seen actually a sea change over the last year or two in this area in funding diverse media. Well we’ll see how long it lasts and then investors need to step up to the plate, to support BIPOC-led media and you’ll find in the chat many different, links to teach you about all of this. There’s so much more we could share, but hopefully that gives you a taste of, how The Making a New Reality project, has inspired many different conversations and projects. The story isn’t over. We’re seeing this work being assigned in universities, used in production studios and more, but our presentation is over. We hope it inspired you and are happy to talk more in the future. Thank you so much.