Complexity Leadership #2 - Protecting the safe co-creation space

A cautionary tale for women about the violation of this principle by the Sortition Foundation

Way back in 1976, I was a young girl doing Biology A-Level at Bolton School, a direct grant grammar school in the North of England. I dreamed of some day saving the world’s food problems, perhaps by creating genetically modifed crops that incorporated nitrogen-fixing nodules from other plants in their roots (though I’ve rather gone off the idea of gene editing since). As an aspiring scientist, wearing rose-tinted spectacles that showed all great scientists as truth-seeking heroes, I had no idea, then, that the reality of the scientific enterprise could be just as brutal as a commercial one. And equally misogynist. So I was quite unprepared for what hit me when our rather dry and quirky teacher, Miss Stocks, asked us to write a book review of James Watson's The Double Helix.

Upon reading it, I was hit with the full force of a particular type of man’s hatred and jealousy of women. (Something unknown to me then, probably because the school was single-sex.) And I struggled greatly with that. It distressed me.

Normally I would hand in my homework on time but this was different. ‘Does not compute, does not compute,’ said my brain, over and over again. I battled in vain to align my rose-tinted vision of science with what Watson quite unashamedly depicted. A part of me simply could not digest his belittling, portrayal of the scientist Rosalind Franklin, whose famous x-ray crystallography photo of DNA was vital to the discovery of its structure. Watson, however, described this already acclaimed woman scientist as barely more than a lab assistant, and an ungainly, awkward ‘bluestocking’. A deliberate stylistic ploy in order to downplay her role in the world-shattering discovery, and to justify his theft of her photo – to make it seem amusing, even.(1)

And as I struggled with that homework assignment, rewriting my essay over and over again but not able to finish it, I never expected that, over 40 years later, something of a similar nature would happen to me. I never thought, either, that such an experience would feel like a physical violation. Which has led to the dry and relatively unthreatening term ‘intellectual property theft’ being called colloquially much more colourfully as ‘brain rape’.[1]

Women scientists everywhere – be warned. Because that’s exactly how it feels: like rape. If, moreover, it is perpetrated by people you once admired and trusted (like I did), it can feel like even more of a betrayal, with even more devastating psychological consequences. And it can take just as long as a physical act of rape to recover from.

Take it from me.

20 July 1976, a Bolton School Lower Sixth class, with aspiring young scientist Deborah W.A. Foulkes (bottom left). Photo: Janice Drake.

One of the things I most appreciate about my time at that ‘safe space for women’, Bolton School - and which influenced me in this cautionary little tale you're reading now - is how we were encouraged to think of a life of public service as being the highest good. Visiting the sick with my best friend on Friday afternoons devoted to charity work at the school brought this ideal to life. And it led to this fateful, late-career decision... …influenced by, yes, another book. (Aah, what tales books would tell of their readers, if only they could: of lives uplifted and waylaid.)

It was a book on existential risk called The Precipice, written by Oxford philosopher Toby Ord.(2) He was also a founder of the Effective Altruism movement and the related organisation 80,000 Hours. The latter recommends that people try and figure out how they can do ‘most good’ within the hours of their working life (the eponymous 80,000 hours, based on the length of a typical career). So, after a long career in translation followed by university lecturing, I decided to become one of those altruists (though uncertain as to whether I would indeed be ‘effective’; still – nothing ventured, nothing gained, as they say). Supported by my partner, we decided jointly in 2020 that I would retire early to devote the rest of my life to improving humanity’s collective intelligence for dealing with existential risks. One path to this, we figured, would be through implementing well-proven instruments of deliberative democracy like citizens' assemblies - and I thought my language and intercultural skills could best be leveraged here at the global level.

After a thorough examination of state-of-the-art global deliberative democracy research, I saw that the main stumbling block to the implementation of a global citizens' assembly was lack of an adequate random participant selection method. Electoral registers and postcode databases were used to find them in developed countries but these were not available or up to date in developing ones. Also, refugees, nomads, the homeless and immigrants (whether legal or illegal) would 'fall through the cracks'. This would delegitimise any policy recommendations by such instruments.

I devoted quite some time to working out how to crack this tough methodological nut, and eventually came up with the idea of participant selection via random geographical location (shortly later refined to include weighting by human population density), and stratified according to UN demographic criteria.

This was new. No-one had thought of that yet. So I looked for an organisation to work with on actually coding such a method, and with which I could partner to bring about the world's first global citizens' assembly. And by dint of a good chance (or so I thought) I found my ideal partner: the Sortition Foundation. It seemed a great match, not only because they had lots of experience in programming selection algorithms for citizens’ assemblies but also because they said on their website that they were all about restoring trust in politics. What could possibly go wrong…?

I’d already joined in 2019 but it took me til June 20^th, 2020 to pluck up my courage and ‘go public’. All went well, on the surface. I presented my ideas at their online AGM and Strategy Meeting(3), and they seemed very enthusiastic. One of the Directors wrote an email to me immediately afterwards, asking me to present my proposal verbally to the members.

My instincts for danger weren’t lying completely dormant, thank goodness, and a little warning siren sounded when I read that. So instead of notes for an oral presentation, I submitted a lengthy project proposal in written form.(4) Not long after that, I sought out a population database expert at a UK university who had published on this topic in the journal Nature(5) and over the next few months we worked on elaborating the geospatial sortition methodology, while keeping the Sortition Foundation Directors up to date on our progress via a series of highly technical emails. We even let them see a draft of a scientific paper we were going to publish together, assuming there was nothing to worry about. Because of all that trumpeting about restoring trust in politics on their website – these were the good guys, surely?

To cut a very long and painful story short: in December 2020, the Sortition Foundation stole my and my partner's ideas, and without our knowledge set up the world's first Global Assembly on the Climate and Ecological Crisis with other organisations, claiming authorship of the novel sortition methodology as their own. Without that method of legitimately selecting participants, this historic event could never have happened. Yet I and my fellow researcher were (and still are) out in the cold. Due to a lack of a clearly defined legal structure, my formal complaint to the Chairs of the Governance Committees of the Global Assembly resulted in the organisers washing their hands of it, saying it’s nothing to do with them and we should battle it out with the Sortition Foundation. Which we are. At the time of writing, the Sortition Foundation has very belatedly agreed to a mediation process but has yet to supply the name of their lawyer. An additional complaint to the Research Ethics and Integrity Department of the University of Canberra (where a Chair of one of the Global Assembly Governance Committees is based) has resulted not in our vindication but in a recommendation from an external ethics expert that the authorship of the novel sortition methodology be labelled ‘contested’.

It’s been a soul-destroying process. At times I’ve been close to breaking point. So my success in achieving my goal of helping improve humanity's collective intelligence (by suplying the missing puzzle piece that had been stymying progress on global citizens’ assemblies) is no longer anything I can rejoice in - even though the novel geospatial sortition methodology has been listed as the top methodological innovation in the Global Assembly report:

“Key achievements (…) Methodological innovation: There were dozens of methodological innovations required to deliver the Global Assembly. For example: — New sortition methodology: A multi-step global civic lottery was developed,including an algorithm for location lottery and method of local recruitment.”(6)

Nowhere have I or my academic partner been accredited for our part in designing the novel geospatial sortition concept. And because of that we can't even access funding for research to develop it further.

The locations of participants in the world’s first global citizens’ assembly, the 2021 Global Assembly on the Climate & Ecological Crisis, selected using Foulkes’s novel geospatial sortition design. (Source: Report of the 2021 Global Assembly on the Climate and Ecological Crisis, p. 54.(7))

After sharing that picture of our happy, smiling class of ‘76 on our WhatsApp group recently, Sue McCann joked that it was taken ‘before life hit us’. And indeed, when I first found out about the Sortition Foundation’s betrayal, I felt like I’d been hit by a train.

This is why I feel obliged to warn women working in science about it, because such experiences can be deeply traumatising. The Sortition Foundation’s founding Director, Brett Hennig, has even written misogynistic emails to his collaborators (accomplices) in a style uncannily similar to James Watson’s, in order to downplay my role and justify his own unethical behaviour. Nothing much has changed in the world of science, it seems, since I tried (and failed, because it was too upsetting) to write that A-Level Biology essay on The Double Helix for Miss Stocks.

Deborah W.A. Foulkes shown holding an excerpt from the Report of the 2021 Global Assembly on the Climate and Ecological Crisis, to which she contributed the novel geospatial sortition concept (random geographical location selection weighted by human population density) but was unacknowledged for it – the Sortition Foundation took all the credit. Photo: Marlene Liebeskind

How could such a thing happen? And how can you stop it happening to you, dear fellow Old Girls?

One mistake I made was to extrapolate too rigorously from my experience with one non-governmental organization (NGO) to another. I'd been politically active in the Electoral Reform Society (ERS), you see, and thought that the directors of the Sortition Foundation would be decent people like the ones I met there. (I even met the retired father of one of my old Bolton School boyfriends at the ERS's AGM in London one time, which brought back fond memories.) After putting forward several motions for debate at the AGM, I was asked by a group of women members to consider candidating for the Board. (Thanks here are due again to Bolton School for giving me the opportunity to practise speaking skills at the Debating Society, eventually becoming co-President.) However, I declined, finding myself unable eventually to fully commit to the ERS's narrow promotion of only the Single Transferable Vote system rather than embracing more fully proportional voting systems.

Nevertheless, the ERS's sound organisational governance impressed me. And when I became a member of the Sortition Foundation I thought I would follow a similar path: put in good work as a volunteer to show your worth, work on and present policies to the AGM to be voted on by the membership, then put yourself up for election to the Board - on a platform of developing your novel geospatial sortition methodology to enable a global citizens' assembly finally to be implemented.

Never in a million years did I think they would steal my ideas. They pretended to be trustworthy - their web page when I first encountered it (though they've changed it now) was all about fixing people's broken trust in politics. It was unimaginable to me that an organisation like that would actually betray my trust so profoundly. And even shake my faith in humanity as a whole.

Perhaps if I'd read a book back then when I was doing my Biology A-Level about the nefarious ways in which Rosalind Franklin was betrayed, even by her own (male) colleagues at King's College, I might not have been so trusting. So another donation to the Bolton School libraries is on its way: Rosalind Franklin and DNA, by Anne Sayre. (Following on from an earlier donation to it of Ord’s The Precipice.)

I hope by reading this book, and my own story here, that other women won't have to go through what I did, especially if they choose a career in science. Intellectual property theft is rife, not only by the peer reviewers of journal articles (https://www.researchgate.net/post/A-reviewer-rejects-your-manuscript-and-then-uses-your-idea-and-then-publishes-it-afterwards-elsewhere) but also regarding grant  applications (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03750-0) and even PhD theses (https://www.quora.com/How-frequent-is-it-for-professors-to-steal-ideas-of-PhD-students-that-they-invent-How-do-you-prevent-it). The situation seems to be getting worse, not better, and it is my hope that, women will both become more aware of the possibility of IP theft and take steps to protect themselves against it. Work is also desperately needed at the political and institutional level to improve safeguards. In my opinion, the wheels of science will slowly but surely grind to a halt otherwise. (I already know people who left promising careers as researchers because of this and related issues.)

Finally, to bring this cautionary little tale to a - I hope - more uplifting end: I have managed to salvage, somehow, a sliver of my faith in humanity. And I have identified the next leverage point in my mission to enhance our species' collective intelligence, to save us from extinction – a project in the field of Futures Studies. Which may well be launched in Bolton. Watch this space!

References

1.        B. Maddox, The double helix and the “wronged heroine.” Nature. 421, 407–408 (2003).

2.        T. Ord, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020).

3.        D. W. A. Foulkes, Verbal presentation of proposal for development of novel geospatial sortition and stratification methodology for global citizens’ assemblies, Zoom Meeting, Sortition Foundation Online-AGM (2020).

4.        D. W. A. Foulkes, Project Proposal for the Sortition Foundation: To Convene a Working Group to Develop a Methodology for Global Sortition. Unpublished manuscript. (2020).

5.        C. T. Lloyd, High resolution global gridded data for use in population studies. Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spat. Inf. Sci. - ISPRS Arch. 42, 117–120 (2017).

6.        J. Stormonth-Darling, S. Nakyung Lee, C. Mellier, E. Sow Ebion, F. Devine, I. Elbeiti, J. Kelsie-Fry, J. Stever, R. Wilson, S. Whitley, Y. Bermejo, Report of the 2021 Global Assembly on the Climate and Ecological Crisis: Executive Summary (2022) (available at https://globalassembly.org/resources/downloads/GlobalAssembly2021-ExecutiveSummary.pdf).

7.        S. Nakyung Lee, J. M. Stormonth-Darling, G. Baloch, Y. Bermejo Abati, F. Devine, E. Sow Ebion, I. Elbeiti, B. Hennig, M. Kamugisha, J. Kelsey-Fry, C. Mellier, J. Stever, R. van der Stoep, S. Whitley, R. Wilson, F. Zamba, Report of the 2021 Global Assembly on the Climate and Ecological Crisis (2022) (available at https://globalassembly.org/resources/downloads/GlobalAssembly2021-FullReport.pdf).

8.        Brain Rape. Silicon Val. Dict., (available at https://svdictionary.com/words/brain-rape).

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[1] The term ‘brain rape’ was originally coined to mean ‘Intellectual property robbery thinly disguised as acquisition talk. Usually committed by a big company on a startup. Yelp got brainraped by Google back in the day.’(8) Now expanded to include IP theft generally.