Ed Maklouf discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Ed Maklouf attended school in England before moving to the USA to study at Stanford University, where he conducted specialized research into group communication and how people make decisions together. After graduating, he went on to found several start-up companies in the emerging field of “democracy technology,” building tools designed to improve participation, representation, and large-scale deliberation.

His work eventually led him to Barcelona, where he began a sustained research project on voting systems. During this period, he came to know and collaborate with leaders of the Arhuaco tribe in Colombia, whose sophisticated traditions of consensus and guardianship of the Sierra Nevada deeply influenced his thinking. Maklouf now serves as ambassador for the Arhuaco Sen Foundation, helping to connect Indigenous perspectives on agreement with contemporary debates about democracy and governance.

The Majority Myth grows out of several years of research into Collective Agreement: a framework that combines formal voting theory and Indigenous knowledge systems to ask when a decision can truly claim to speak for ‘the people’. It is available at https://bit.ly/MajorityMyth.

1. The truth about Voting and its origins https://www.ft.com/content/4df5c927-00d1-43dc-9731-b1fac4980dca

2. The Arhuaco Indigenous Tribe https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20190329-the-ancient-guardians-of-the-earth

3. Friendship https://www.townandcountrymag.com/education-college/a38866811/boarding-school-friends-memoir-admissions-kendra-james/

1. My Mum's Paintings My dad is a well known sculptor, Raphael Maklouf, who sculpted the portrait of the Queen on UK coins, but my mum never shows her work.

2. Trees Roots https://www.trees.org.uk/Trees.org.uk/files/61/6181f2b7-e35d-4075-832f-5e230d16aa9e.pdf

3. Etymology https://www.youtube.com/RobWords

This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm