 Good morning, everyone. We're gonna get started in about five minutes. So grab coffee, water, snacks, whatever you want. Three minutes. Seems to be working. Maybe we get started. Hi, morning. Welcome. We're so glad you could join us and special welcome to our guests from Taiwan. We have AU. I'm not gonna use last name, so I don't go to them, but also we'd be friends by the end of this. AU, Avros, Shu, Shu Yang, Patricia Tiffany, and Thang. Welcome, welcome, everyone. Over the next, I'll just sort of talk about the way we've been thinking about this workshop and what we've been hoping to get at here. So the next two days, what we will hear from our guests from Taiwan is all of the experiments they've been doing around how citizens and government can collaborate and tackle really difficult issues and craft legislation and policies and programs together so we can all sort of govern how we live in a collaborative fashion. And in turn, it would be really great if you can share your expertise and experiences and stories with everyone, whether you're in government or private sector or an activist design. We have a lot of different backgrounds here. So this is an opportunity for all of us to get to know each other and share our experiences and ideas and hopefully build a practice or a community of practice around new approaches to governing ourselves and thinking about our communities and societies. Some logistics. The Wi-Fi password is up there, PPNY, Prime Produce One, bathrooms on both sides of the openings that are two on either side. We want to thank our partners, Composites Collective, The Awesome Foundation, Serapis, BetaNYC, Civic Hall, everyone's contributed in these really amazing, excellent ways ThoughtWorks, a special shout-out to Prime Produce, which is the space in our hosts for tonight. And Prime Produce is not just a location, they are, and David gave me points to say, that a community of practice, no thanks, David, that a community of practice committed to sowing our health here tomorrow. And we've witnessed this first-hand, their hospitality has been amazing and coordinating with them is amazing. We actually, like, we all built this space out together last night. Yeah, and it's been really fun. And they've been supporting projects like us and projects with social and civic outlooks and sort of aims for a very long time now. And I'm gonna hand this to Shu Yang, who's going to introduce, yes? Oh, no, we're gonna do icebreakers. Sorry. I'm gonna hand this to C.S., who's gonna do a quick round of icebreakers so that we can get to know each other a little bit better. And then Shu Yang. Good morning, everyone. All right, so for this little icebreaker, we're gonna have to get up and move around a little bit. So here's how it works. It's called constellations. I'm gonna read some statements and you are going to identify with them as you please. If you really identify with the statements, we'll have you cluster up here. And if you don't, you can move kind of further to the back and then place yourself in the middle as you see fit, all right? And then at the end of each statement, we'll offer an opportunity for anyone to, like, share why they place themselves, where they are, if you want to. You don't have to. But the idea of this is to just get a feel for who's here in the room and to help us all, like, see who's here, get to know each other. This is a super small and intimate group by design so that we can talk, so that we can share and communicate. So we hope that this gives us a little bit of knowledge without having to do the obligatory go around the room and state your name game. All right, so let's keep this simple. For the first one, yeah, this works better. For the first one, I'm excited to be here. If you're super, super excited, you can stand here. If you're mildly excited and not awake, it's okay. We won't judge. You can go a little bit further to the back. Fabulous. Well, this is excellent. Now we all know we're on the same page. Would anyone like to share why they're excited to be here or why they're interested in being here? Just short snippet. If not. Perfect. Please state your name and where you've come from when you do. Hi, my name is Noel Noel. I'm a Gemini. I have two names. It's perfectly okay. I'm from Beta NYC. Several years ago, I met this wonderful open source hacker, CL, and he was talking about some of the practices and it was so fortunate to have him come through town via Liz Berry. That was almost like three years ago to hear about the different work that all the work that's being done in Taiwan. And so it's been exciting to see how that movement has grown and so happy to be here to actually be taught by the people who have been participating in that leadership. So I'm really excited to learn from all of you. There's no pressure. All right, let's make a new constellation. I work for or in government. So if you work for in government, please stand up here. If you don't, stand there. And if maybe you collaborate or consult with government, you can put yourself in the middle. All right, so take a look at the spread. See who's in your close constellation group. Who's not in your close constellation group. Would anyone in the government group that's not from Taiwan like to share which government you work for or where you're coming from? Sure. I'm Adrian Schmoker. I work for the government of this place, this city. I work for the city of New York. I work in the mayor's office of data analytics. I'm Cordelia. I work at 18F in the US federal government. Although our lawyers probably really like me to say that I'm here on my own time. So love you. All right, fantastic. So how about this? Let's try another. Oh, did anyone else? Nathan story. I work for New York City government as well. Although I am on childcare leave right now, so I'm on here at my own time. Great. All right, let's try one more and see what we have for the room. So how about this? I work at a research institution, a lab or a think tank over here that may or may not be associated with government and everyone else that way. All right, so I'll open up. I'll open up the whole floor for anyone that would like to state where they work or why they place themselves where they are. Yeah. I'm Stephanie Sung. This is my colleague Joe Kereganis. We're both from the American Assembly at Columbia University and we just ran a small pilot project with Polis in Bowling Green, Kentucky. All right. How about this? I have been experimenting with the tools, methodologies from the Taiwan. So this is either if you've used Polis or Slido or you're working with some of the facilitation methods. In any capacity, if you have or you have it here, if you have, if you are over here, if you have it. All right, folks over here, like to share how they're using these tools. We've heard from we heard from us. Everyone, Devin, do you want to put you on the spot? I'll put you on the spot. I mean, I had the privilege of running for office trying to promote these these tools here. So got maybe 30 to 40 inputs, the Polis, the Polis and also the Madrid style city council voting platform to see that I'm Devin Devin Devin It sounds, it sounds hard with the microphone. Okay, how about this? I'm pretty new to be Taiwan. Maybe I've read articles, I've seen some talks, but I'm still kind of wrapping my head around what's what this process is over here. If you're closely affiliated and over there would be like, I know what's going on here. So I'd expect to see some movement. All right, this might be one of the most interesting shapes. We've got some news in the middle some on the edge. So how about over here for the folks that are relatively new. What brought you here? Why are you here? Why are you excited to learn about these methodologies? Anyone like to put on the spot? Yes. I read your blog post with Darshina, I guess on Civic Hall. So that was a couple months ago. And I didn't think I would ever see those people. So it's really cool to see it actualized in New York right now. Yeah. Oh, sorry, Casey. Anyone else over here? Hi, I'm Dino. I use all pronouns. So however you feel, call me like that. And I work at the GoVLAV and been designing some public engagement models with Latin American cities. And I was about to start exploring how police works and what you were doing. So these just comes perfect timing. Fantastic. Yeah. I run my name is Nikki. I run a girl parking sign redesign project and in doing that and talking to some cities I realized so there are some cities that are piloting the signs and a couple that I've spoken to who are sort of on the fence and in talking to them realize that there was no basically asked them what what needs to be true for you to run a pilot and realize in that process that there was like no formal process really for them to do. Gauge public opinion of any sort. And so I thought this was as curious about how how this whole thing worked. Fantastic. Okay, so the last one. I believe we can alter and change the future of democracy to be more participatory and inclusive. If you really think this is the case here and push yourself back and that's okay. We can be skeptics. All right. Okay. We've got a lot of clusters here and the little out here. Do you want to share why you're. Yeah. No, no, well, again, I'm not all the way against the wall, but I'm just skeptical because there's a lot of private financial interest that controls government and it's really hard to fight that. So it's a constant vigilant battle. Thank you for sharing. It's very important. Anyone in the close affinity group that wants to share. Yeah, there we go. Hi, everyone. I'm Matt Stempeck. I'm working at Civic Hall right now more than anyone else, I guess. I hear you know, I also think that there's so much we can improve that that's a lot of opportunity and that actually designing and educating people around new tools helps them do what they've always wanted to do. But maybe you didn't have a process for it before. Not that it's like going to be easy, but that I think tools like this can really help that happen. Hi, I'm David Colby Reed. My affiliations are several FUSA, New School, MIT Media Lab and I. The reason why I mean, I think like there's a big tension between democracy and expertise like broad based participation and subject matter expertise. And so I'm interested in tools that help like collapse some of that distance and allow for, you know, like, like really, I think like a lot of policy interventions have focused on like, oh, can we do a new program or tool and not a new method. And so I'm really interested in methods that help bridge that gap between participation and expertise. So that's just a little bit of. All right, thank you everyone for participating. That was our icebreaker get to set the stage and get to know each other a little bit more. So I hope that helped you identify who's here to and you found folks that you can chat with and connect with throughout your time here. So I'm going to pass it off to Shu Yang for an overview. Peter's team. Thank you. Yes. Okay. So hi, everyone. Yay. We're all here. Half of the beta and team is here today and tomorrow, most of the time of this week was also hoping here for a couple days to set out the place and it was a very great time to to to sit with you all and prepare for the event. So I'm going to give a little very brief introduction of my team, please. Maybe I can introduce a bit who we are over here from Taiwan. Maybe firstly, Aldrei Aldrei town, the distal minister with our portfolio of Taiwan and and our design consultant found Ray Chung over there. She'll be hosting the workshop tomorrow. And everyone who's busy with the slides. Thank you. She'll be hosting the V-Taiwan workshop today, maybe after introduction. And we have two participate participation officers from National Development Council, Tiffany and from Agriculture Committee of Agriculture. Yeah. Cool. Nice. And also, also Zach Zach is the right hand of Audrey and the truth secretary of our office. Yes. Oh yeah. And that's me. So I'm Shuyang. I'm also working in the PDs office and PD stands for Public Digital Innovation Space. It's a new office started from 2016 from one and a half years ago. And we are an innovation lab sort of unit working in the central government. And our main test is to work on opening the government from inside the government. Yeah. So I can go with my slides then. So again, I'm Shuyang Ling. Work as the re-architect of PDs and PD stands for Public Digital Innovation Space. In the beginning, actually me and Audrey and Zach, we three together from the very first day. We sat and come out with this name because we think it should be public and digital innovative and should be a space that is without any wall to divide people from inside and outside of the office. And our team has this very decentralized culture, meaning there's no, merely no hierarchy in our team. Everyone can ask or request anything we want to work on. And we work on the opening, the open government from within. And many of us or some of us are from a community, a CVTEC community called GovZero. So how many of you have heard of GovZero? Well, that's quite a lot. So we in GovZero, there's a motto called for the government, meaning if the government has already provide some service, then we try to create a fork and try to make it better and hope the government would measure back. So the government hasn't provided anything we want yet. Then we'll just try to make a new version. Okay. And I'll bring this here. Yeah. Better. Cool. Yeah. So there's another thing. We have another concept. We have this called be nobody. This concept is about when you think there's nothing haven't been done yet, you might be asking why nobody has done it already. But our culture is to be let nobody, meaning don't ask why nobody did this. Just first admit you're let nobody and take action first. So after we joined the government and we started PDs, not police, we had some observations to the government and we took some actions according to them. So I'll just quickly go through some of them. The first is the processing government through communications pretty slow. We've observed from the beginning and our action to is to actually recruit many passionate public servants. So we send out a quote poster on one of the electronic boards on the internet and ask for people to join our office and create a virtual network in the central government. And then we encouraged them to be brave and ask for help whenever they need it. And we also observed that they are not only good in writing, they're good in writing, but we have many people in our office good at listening. So Audrey actually has her office hour every Wednesday from in the beginning was from 10 to 2 and now it's becoming from 10 to 10. Yeah. Every week. So there's an open space in the center of Taipei City. You can just go there and book her time and talk to her. Yeah. And then after a few months when the network became more and more mature, the POs or participation officers, they started to create this culture of bring topics they want to discuss about to the monthly PO meeting and started to find out there are more projects that needed a cross ministry collaboration. So we start to have people helping us to empower PO to work on workshop stuff. So mainly we're bringing concepts like from surface design, from civic tech community to help and empower POs to work on their daily work. Right. And the goal is not only to have PDs work with PO only is also to have POs work in their ministries. Eventually they will spread this culture of collaboration with a greater group of people in the end. And we also document everything and bring the survey design concept to the government, bringing the user to the very beginning of the process and try to create this collaborative culture. So in a nutshell, we call this whole movement pro-typing future democracy. And I want to share a little bit about how it happened. Maybe some little bit of background of how Taiwan has all this thing happened from a few years ago. So this movement writes on years of revolution of public participation in Taiwan because from around 10, 20 years ago, public participation has been developed in several formats from, you can see a face to face public hearing from maybe 20 years ago. And then you have TV debate, election debates over TV or radio broadcast, people can have telephone coins, and we start to have live stream debate over the internet. So you can see this trajectory coincides quite nicely with the advancement of technology. When technology arrived, democracy also evolved through that. And around four years ago in 2014, there's a movement called Soundflip Movement. That's when we have this new trend of technology called self-media. When people or native natives, they are not afraid of using, you know, becoming YouTubers or posting videos or selfies online. That time the Soundflip Movement also started, and the students in Taiwan wouldn't bear with the unwillingness of MP to discuss on the selfish trade deal with the Beijing office. They actually occupied the parliament for 22 days. And with all the process, the diversion process, conduct inside and with everything recorded and left turned over the internet. And after that, there's a sense, there's an atmosphere in Taiwan. People are requesting to have a platform to allow the entire society to work together, to think together, and have regional discussions. And then the former minister with a portfolio in charge of cyberspace, Jacqueline Tai, she materialized this idea with a sentence and proposed that idea in one of the Gua Siro's hackathon, saying we need to have a platform to allow the entire society to engage in rational discussion. And that was the start of V-Taiwan. So today Neville Rose will talk and host most of the introduction of V-Taiwan and we'll have a simulation on how it actually works. And I will just introduce it very briefly a little bit. V-Taiwan is actually not only a platform nor a website, it's also a consultation process for society to come together and discuss about social issues and really have influence in regulations. So if you look at V-Taiwan, it has several touch points like a website, a process, hackathons and consultation meetings. And every cases in V-Taiwan are different. It has a process, but the process is a different process. Everyone can change the process also. They can propose to have a modification to the process in the weekly hackathons. But every case come to V-Taiwan are different and they go with different phases on the process. So it will be very important to see how do we decide each step transparently. And if you come to V-Taiwan's hackathon you will see participants, they are always different. So maybe one day you will see a bunch of hackers working on the website. But maybe a few months later there will be another group of people working on the same website and making design and so on. And people join V-Taiwan's hackathon with different backgrounds and most of the time they are attracted by the cases discussed on V-Taiwan. When Uber case was discussed you can see Uber drivers or taxi drivers they can discuss. And when aviation vehicle case was discussed you can see people like strong vendor or people in charge of this regulation will be in the discussion. So V-Taiwan is an ongoing experiment. In the beginning we were trying to have this fellowship model to try the V-Taiwan open consultation process. And now in this moment after we fought V-Taiwan into the government we are also asking ourselves this question of if V-Taiwan should be institutionalized. So I will probably pass on this question to today's discussion. And the next challenge was to look at the three elements we introduced. The case, the process, the participants to make it more scalable, sustainable and diverse. So after we keep doing on this experiment of V-Taiwan we also work on something more experiments. We start to use a tool called Polis that is made by some people over here. And we start to play with them to make it more inclusive and more playful to people who ever want to participate. So one of the experiments is HoloPolis chatbot. We try to use Polis API and make chatbots. So that the V-Taiwan user can not only come to the website but actually the website can come to them. So you can actually efferent with Slack account or Skype account. And when you ask the chatbot what's the topic under discussion right now, it will tell you the ones under discussion. And the second experiment is called Polis M-Mark. We try to imagine a near future world where everyone can have probably a contact lens with a digital layer in front of you. So you can discuss about social issue whenever you visit. So for example, if there's a priority seat over there, you can have this layer of discussion and you can talk about your opinion about priority seats. And the last experiments called HoloPolis Wi-Fi, not Wi-Fi, is where we imagine a virtual comments where people can log in and have discussion in the virtual space. So you can have more experiments inside not only having a say to the public policy but also you can try to prototype an experiment inside. So that's a very brief introduction of what we've done and I'll pass it to Evros or CS for the rest. Thanks. The way you operate as a team is very unusual. It's unusual not just for government but unusual in general. And what challenges have you faced in sort of sticking to your guns and operating in this leaderless fashion? Within government. Let's see. So when I was appointed digital minister, that's 2016 August. I waited for a month because I was independent contractor, consultant with Apple. I have to give them a 30 day notice. So during that 30 day notice, there's a very public negotiation going on because I don't accept private interviews. So our journalists, they can ask me anything but only answer publicly. And so they build upon each other's questions and also the public also. So the idea of this kind of wide open multi-stakeholderism was communicated with the society for an entire month. So people gradually learned that what I mean by me being a conservative anarchist, which is a more radical way of saying it always depends. Same thing, right? So it's all voluntary. So while Peter does have like 20 something full-timers, 30 something interns every year, everybody joins voluntarily. But because that was my kind of condition going into the government. People learned that I'm not going to look at a minister of defense or minister of foreign affairs or whatever and force them to do things our way. So because it's all voluntary, I think there's no challenges or resistance. It's mostly because people know that we're a public service public servant. So we service the public service, not the other way around. So as a purely facilitative minister, I was able to just present our presence in the national central government just to people who really want those innovative methods without us, you know, commanding or forcing it to them. And so just I think initially people who joined was just driven by curiosity. But after a few cases that went pretty successful, people started joining for the credit, not just for reducing risk and for automation. That's the short answer. Thank you. Have other ministers started adopting your ways? Yes, essentially. We work very closely with the National Development Council, the NDC. And in fact, we work on basically the research arm is the V-Taiwan. And whenever we settle on some methods or some components and things like that, that works pretty well. The NDC will adopt it at the joint platform. And so it's always a research and deployment relationship between Peter's and the NDC. And the NDC also coordinates training programs with not just other ministries, but also local governments. So, for example, the joint platform is not just a petition or open spending or regulatory pre-announcement program, but it's also evolving to become the participatory budget program for local governments. So the NDC people spend a lot of time with the local government and regional governments and try to infuse this kind of open innovation thinking. The other direction, not with the NDC is with the presidential office. So the presidential office organized this three-month-long presidential hackathon using more or less the same ideas and methods here. And because it's a presidential office, they could get a lot more data than we could. And it could work across all the different branches of the government. And the five winners of this annual presidential hackathon, there's no monetary reward. There's a very nice-looking trophy, but there's no monetary reward. The reward is for those five innovative ideas to become part of public service starting next year. And so that kind of innovation is also being adopted on a presidential scale. So basically, we're the ones who prototype and research and fail a lot and very publicly. But if we settle on something that really works, then it gets propagated upward and downward. So I just want to clarify if I understand. So I'm going to try to say what I understand so far and correct me if I'm wrong. So you are the experts on digital services, but you have a specific methodology. So you tell government, you want to work with me under my methodology, voluntarily. But legally, you have no binding power or authority over any other branches of government. That's exactly right. There's no digital ministry. All the binding power came from the participation officers. So the POs, they report to their CIOs in each ministry and we're just a facilitator to facilitate the PO network. That's the idea. So every ministry, like 30 of them, has a team of participation officers. That's by regulation. We have a regulation for them to set up this network. But my position in it is just as a facilitator, I can't really force any participation officer to do anything. And do you work with agencies that may have sensitive information or things that you cannot do open because of the nature of the information? In that case, they just don't come to us. They don't come to us. Because it's voluntary. Real quick. What percentage of these 30 ministries would you say the bosses of the POs, the CIOs are like, this is the best thing? Or what percentage of them would you say the CIOs are allies versus just not particularly enthusiastic or view this enterprise as dangerous? So half of the ministries actually have to work very closely with constituents and protesters and petitioners. And for them, it's gradually seen as a way to leverage the power of the new power, the horizontal power to channel them into really contributors of their mandates. But for the less citizen facing ministries, I'm talking about the ministries of HR, of internal movement and issues. It took us a year or so to see the public servants themselves, the frontline staff and so on. They're also constituents. They're also potentially petitioners. And if you just set up the space just right, they will also fight for their well-being. And it also makes a lot of sense to include them early in the presbytery process. So there's two waves. The first wave is the more citizen facing ones like the Council of Agriculture right there. And then the second wave is the more public servant facing ones. And there are, of course, still ministries that primarily deal with, for example, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. That is one of the ministries that we work closely for, like, public relationship and then other campaigns, but they don't yet use this methodology to use citizen inputs to inform trade service agreements, negotiations and things like that. So I think there's the third wave, like they're traditionally not dealing with any Taiwanese citizen, really. Their main constituents are abroad or are on some other ways. But they're still not, like, resistant. There's just less cases. Less people go to the streets because of that ministry. So I think it's just a natural correspondence between how much they have to face citizens and how much they want to adopt these methods. Hello. Is there any fiscal requirement that you have set up for other agencies to pay you or do you accept payment from other agencies? That's a very AT&F question. A fee for service? Are you required to charge other agencies or do you have a voluntary charging model? How do you recuperate any costs as a government agency? Right. So the short answer is that we ask for human resources. We don't ask for budgets. So in many cases when an agency wants to work with this method, we ask them to allocate a team according to the criteria of skills that we identify as needed for that particular case. And they do have to pay for the expertise and HR requirements. But our service itself, because we use exclusively free software and gratis software, so there's very little that needs to be paid operation-wise if you have the right people at the right points. Part of the GovZero's very thrifty innovation method is that we know all the ways to use software in that zero cost to achieve methods. So I think that's one of the ways we resist hijacking by private sector vendors. We always find open source alternatives and if they start being proprietary like Polis, we use peer pressure to convince them to open source. So that's one of the ways that we move forward without requiring monetary licensing fees and things like that. So what would be your three wishes in terms of you've opened so far participation, who is getting to you and who are you not being able to get to attract and what are your wishes or you're thinking around to get to the people that haven't been involved so far in what you're doing? That is right. That is one of the pivotal points in the V-Taiwan history is that we start handling only digital issues. But for some issues like there was a call for the company law to include a special chapter on benefit corporations and social enterprises and things like that. And we discovered that primarily the stakeholders, they may be on the internet but they're not used to communicate in a written way. And even they follow all their live streams or whatever it still doesn't translate into an actionable participation. So instead of bringing them to the website, we need to bring the technology to people, which is why we organized some 15 tour around Taiwan, so just to all the different regional places and like indigenous places, rural places, anywhere that has social entrepreneurship going on and just me and the crew listening to what they have to say in their natural habitat. They're using live stream and all those things to capture what is going on in the town hall and people in Taipei, like 12 different ministries using teleconference, they have to respond to their inquiries in real time. So just like really V-Taiwan style but using teleconference to bring the regions together. So that's one of the necessary process improvements that we did because the constituents are located and their preferred modality of action is not that of a written or yes or no questionnaire. So we do adapt the process a lot based on the constituents. What was the name of the annual hackathon, the presidential hackathon? Yeah, it's just the presidential. Thank you. So maybe this isn't the right time for this question but I'm wondering just thinking comparatively about how other governments, city level or national level structure their digital innovation initiatives and what, I don't know if you've done any sort of comparative thinking about how these initiatives emerge around the world and what the advantages and disadvantages of the V-Taiwan experiences in that context. That's a very question. So Taiwan I think geographically and historically there's some very different, I would say unique points about Taiwan because we're like 23 million people but the internet use penetration rate as measured by NDC is over 80%. Yeah, it's over 80% and it's very important that our presidents with her promise of broadband as human right and we see many countries declaring that but very few countries actually deliver and we're one of the countries that actually deliver us in the sense that in any indigenous or rural places if you don't have broadband access it's the government's fault, it's the simple right. So we basically say like the joint website of the E-Petition since the one of the 23 million people there's about 5 million people now on it like regular users and things like that. So I think that's one of the unique points in that when we see digital gap or digital divide or whatever instead of shoehorning our process to fit the fact that there are some people who doesn't have broadband access we just assume that they do have broadband access and fix it if they don't and that's one of the I think very different things. It's more comparable to city level or Estonia city-state level philosophies than a really large span of country level digital services which will necessarily have to take care of heterogeneous digital connection situations. That's the first one. And the second one is that all the pressure of open government actually come from the civil society. That is a very different from other special Asian countries because Taiwan just 30 years ago lifted ourselves out of the martial law and ban on just look at PRC today to know what's Taiwan like 30 years ago. So basically it's a radical transparency. It's a call from the civil society so that people who still remember the martial law will not want to go back there. So all those absolute freedom of speech, assembly and so on is taken as like the axiom to the generation of my generation and the younger generations. So we are seen actually as conservative units in the central government and the demand for even more radical transparency and persuasion is always there from the civil society and we don't see that in other Asian countries. That's the other difference. All right. Thank you so much Shu and Audrey and those that ask questions. I'm going to give a short overview of the GovZero Network or really the group of people that have put this together and how we got here and also I hope an invitation to anyone who is interested in continuing to work with these methodologies and tools and practices. So really we view ourselves as a collection of nobodies that was really moved by the work that happened in Taiwan. And here today we have myself, Liz Berry, Devin and Darshana, maybe some newer members like Nikki and Tina, Christina, some other folks and Cordelia. And so I want to kind of share how we came together because I think it's a really interesting story and adds to this vibrancy. For us, I mean there was Sunflower and then there was this great article in the Civicist v. Taiwan public participation methods on the cyberpunk frontier of democracy written by Liz Berry. And this was my introduction to v. Taiwan. So please chat with Liz about her experience being there during our breaks. But Darshana introduced this to me. Darshana and I would meet in the park and chat about organizational structures. And we were both really moved by this and really like keen on understanding what was behind this and all the tools and methodologies. So, you know, some people bemoaned that we didn't have like an Arab Spring with Twitter, but I'd like to say that Twitter was really kind of the catalyst of how we all met each other. So I sent out these tweets in June. I was working on a talk and I was basically like, we need to start embracing this stuff. This is really actually possible. No hashtags here, you'll see. I just kind of sent it out. And found out later on that that led me to on the 18th of July. This is Cordelia. And I've known Cordelia for a few years and this is yet another tweet and Cordelia basically replies it's hard to see. But she says, Deliberative Democracy in Taiwan and Gov Zero has been my major research focus for the last 12 months. I was like, oh my gosh, what? So we had a chat with Cordelia and that kind of pulled us all together. And so now we are more connected and chatting. And then what happens? Well, on July 24th, basically Shu here started doing some research and started to find all the mentions of V-Taiwan on the Internet. And Liz Berry and another member who's not here, Patrick Connolly from Toronto, whose tweet is featured here, were already in a Slack and they reached out to us and they were like, hey, we are, we are, where's this thing going? No, looks like it's missing one here. Aha, here it is. Is that about that? Aha, July 18th. We're going to meet, we're here in New York, we're all here in New York and we're going to meet at Progressive Hack Night, which is a bi-weekly hack night that happens here in New York City. If you haven't gone, I highly encourage that you go. It happens at ThoughtWorks every Tuesday. And it was our first. And Liz was like, sent me a DM and I had no idea. Darshana and I were hanging out and I was like, Darshana, it's Liz. It's the person that wrote the article. Like what's going on? We're going to go meet them. So you can imagine that we're just like really excited. Here we are in our like little world, like really into this and trying to connect to people. So that's what happened on July 18th. We went and we met Liz, I believe Devin came and also Joe, who's here. Joe came and we had a small little chat about these tools and methodologies and we're like, okay, wow, we're all connected now. This is great. And then this little back one this week was really embarked. We met up again because Patrick who lives in Toronto was here and we met up at Orbital NYC. And I know there's a few, there's a lot of folks here from Orbital NYC. I just like to give a big shout out to them because I think that one of the things that we need as we embark on rethinking is spaces that let us gather. And so Orbital opened their doors to us and let us come in as a group. And we've actually been meeting regularly there every Friday to organize this and you're all like anyone who's interested is also invited to join. So that was our first week of meeting each other here. And then so just to share a bit, we've also all been kind of working on our own little experiments. Pat Khan launched an experiment up in Toronto using Polis early on. And then Darshan and I launched an experiment in the summer called Talk to NYC, which revolved around trying out some of these tools and methodologies to figure out, you know, could we increase participation? Are candidates actually interested in it? And then the really exciting thing happened. We went to Taiwan. And this is when we met Shu. We went to Taiwan for a civic tech fest, but really we went to go meet meet the folks in Taiwan and try to like understand more really what's going on here. And this was also the first time that we were introduced to the PO network. And I remember listening to Shu's talk and being like, oh my gosh, there's a whole other piece to this puzzle. Wow, like this is incredible. So those who will be here tomorrow, you will get to hear about the PO network portion, which we talk a lot about be Taiwan. But there's a lot of pieces at play. So it's equally as important. And this is when we met Avros, who will be facilitating. And we got to attend a V-Taiwan consultation. Avros is working on the was a facilitator for the non-consensual images. Got to go to the PEDAS offices. Just really like meeting who is there and just establishing relationships and friendships. And then Darshan and I published our work also in Civicist. It's called Two Weeks in Taipei and it's a list of our travels and people that we met and interviewed. And yeah, so that kind of that brings us to this point here today. And at least personally speaking for myself, it's really fascinating to think about this as about a year. So in about a year, we've gotten here. And so we now are super excited to connect and to open this up to other people who are interested. And you can join us. GovZero.network is just a mailing list, but we really recommend that you come join us where we like really hang out, which is in the GovZero Slack. When you get to the GovZero Slack, you'll get dumped into the general channel. If you look for a V-Network channel, there's also the NYC, but the V-Network is where we hang out. Please come hang out with us. And also over the next few days, as you think about like this network and you're interested in being a part of it, I want to, we'll post these out. But I would like to say that we are in the process of trying to establish an identity and logo. And I would like to thank Nikki, who's here for taking the time to work with us on these. So these are some options. We'll print them out. You can like think about it. I just want to be a part of this or interested in it. Think about which one of these might identify with you. This one's pretty neat. The idea is that like every city or every location can kind of customize it and make it their own. So yeah, I just hope this was a nice little overview about how we actually got to this moment. And really welcome to the V-Network. So we have a little bit of time. We're going to take a break right now. Please feel free to grab coffee, grab snacks, get some fresh air, meet some folks that you might be interested in chatting with. And we'll come back in around 15 minutes for the start of the V-Taiwan consultation methods led by Averus. So, what was it that you got to do for the online discussion? The online discussion. Oh, so I am the... So I just joined the V-Network. Okay. Today. Today. Today? Yeah. The V-Network results. Yeah. I have more questions than I thought. Who's next? No, I should keep this in mind. No, you can like... Yeah. Hi. Keep the right table. Who's next? I'm not sure. No, I'm sure. No, I'm sure. No, I'm sure. No, I'm sure. No, I'm sure. No, I'm sure. No, I'm sure. No, I'm sure. No, I'm sure. I'm sure. Hi, nice to meet you. I'm your fan of V-Network. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, we are fans of V-Network. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The cross not being open. Like, is it something, for example, when you're saying like, your life's too big? Or like, is that also being like, transcribed, stored somewhere? Is this searchable? Yeah. What point do you get on? So, to what point? To what point? So, we, in our office, we try to do this transparance passport in our office. So, not every employee is subscribed to that. So, meaning, all of your adversaries are transcribers. So, every meeting will be recorded and transcribed. Transcribed, transcribed, stored. And stored. And often able to find the internet. There's a check in our website. You can see all the meetings, not the thousands of them already. Yeah. Yeah. So, you can search. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. I can show you. Do you have a similar, you know, track of? No, because what's happening in the government. The thing, the reason I'm asking is because many government's got like, asked us how to do that. Oh, okay. So, for example, when you say, these are very specific. When you say transcribe, transcribe. We hire someone who is the best type of person. But now she's getting help from a robot. Okay. Yeah. But she wants to type 20s. It's a hassle to transcribe to us, you know. So, the robot is helping her on English part. Yeah. So, this is the track we have. Yeah. See all the meetings from 2016. It was transcription or YouTube videos. Just go somewhere else. Yeah. But there's nobody that doesn't say automatic. No, no, no. Yeah. I saw that in conferences. I think, I think that mending voice to text to a station would be so, within these two years. Yeah, it's not, it's just that. Governments never want to pay. They are not. No, they are not. Yeah. So, and there's cost associated. Yes, cost. It's around 30 bucks per hour. Yeah. Is this used? Like, is there demand for this data? Or is there just their product? So, I used it. Yeah. For preparing for slides. You can go, always go back to meetings and what they talk. And how to work in different ideas to other people. So, it's, I think it's very helpful for the team. Okay. For the journalists, they use it a lot too. Yeah. We also have a special protocol for journalists. When they want to interview us, it has to be open source. So, all the questions they ask will be open source directly. So, the next one is wouldn't have to ask again. Although, in a real life, people still ask the same questions again and again. Because that's their disability point. So, what's your point in coming to that? Yeah. So, recently we met with some justices of the Supreme Electoral Court in Mexico. And they have a figure of private audiences that they want to meet. But they were wondering how that's going to happen. That's why I'm asking them just to understand the process. Because I see a lot of, I feel like there's going to be demand. For government women to meet at this way. But just extreme lighting. So, to know where the cost of being open is going to be something like the private family. Yeah. And they have a data, like, it's what it says on the list. You know what it is. In a few minutes, we'll get started with the next portion of the training. So, if you want to grab coffee, water, and wrap up your conversation soon. We could all make our way back to seats. What do you need? Thank you, Matt. I just want to also give a big thanks to Jolly, who's here from the Internet Society, who's recording everything. We will be editing this down. And our goal is to release a video of this training so that folks can take this back and share it with other people. So, keep your eyes out for our Kickstarter next month. All right. Turn it over to Avros to get us started with the V-Taiwan consultation process. Great. Whoa. Hello? Clear? Yeah. Okay. Huh? Closer? Like this? Okay, good. Okay. Since I have my audience in live streaming, I should do a live show, right? All I need is a guitar and a hat right there. Collecting money. Okay, I know. I'm a volunteer in the government, so I do this for charity. I'm Avros, and it's my pleasure to give an introduction, a probably brief introduction on V-Taiwan, and firstly about its historical background, then the methods, culture, and then some, our brain-to-case studies. And I'm a senior legal consultant, and because most of the cases on V-Taiwan were resolved with policy regulations and legislation, so that's probably why I was needed in this process. And I used the subtitle as how did democracy go from offline to on-offline. And generally it was offline, it was online, but then I thought, because it's not just online, we want to see people meet in person and feel what they feel to talk and to interact with them in person, so then I brow-rolled this term from HTML attributes, and it's on-offline. I think that's a good mix of online and offline. Yeah, it's just a little nice thing. And first of all, Shru, thanks Shru for just giving a brief, it's like a trigger in the historical background of V-Taiwan, and we can't, I mean we just keep talking about the sunflower move in 2014, because it's really important. And it's just some quick facts, and I believe some of you might already read lots of news and pieces on this movement, and yeah, this is the timing from March 18th to April 10th, lasting 23 days. And it's a protest against a deal with Beijing China, it's a trade deal, and the then government lost its legitimacy of passing this deal. So the students and the communities, they went on the street and did a protest and erased the awareness of open-source community and citizen participation. So that's when it's like a seed, spreading the seeds across Taiwan, and also the Gulf Zero community in Wachau, that's when they got its popularity across Taiwan. And then at the end of December, at the end of 2014, Jacqueline Tai, the then minister without a portfolio, she went to a hackathon at Gulf Zero, and she proposed that we need a platform to allow a rational discussion. So that's like a, this proposal keeps started V-Taiwan, and so here it is, and I heard that within two weeks, like in two weeks, V-Taiwan was born, and I believe that Audrey contributed a lot to this formation of the birth of V-Taiwan. And this is the URL, you can check it on your laptop or mobile phone. So since 2015, there have been 26 cases of disgust through V-Taiwan process. So okay, we're then talk about the culture and the people, which are probably the most important part and the key that makes V-Taiwan so great. First, but I would like to share a book that inspired me a lot. It's by Kaz Zangstein, and he's a legal American legal scholar, and the most frequently cited legal scholar from 2009 to 2013. And I really like this book. It's a divided democracy in the age of social media. It talks about a lot, it talks a lot about the fragmentation and the polarization of ideas and comments on social networks. So it also contributed this to the Facebook to the formation of echo chambers. And there are two lines cited from this book, and I find it interesting because it said many people are mostly hearing more and louder of their own voices. So it feels like Facebook is like a mirror, it's like reflecting yourself. So what you see and what you watch on your Facebook feeds are probably reflecting what you are. And also the data and the comments generated by you just appears to be a product of your own values and identity. So this is just like the background of what internet or what social network are right now. And under this circumstance, so we try to think about how we can build a virtual or physical space that gives people or community members, contributors autonomy and empowerment. And these are some of the models that we do on V-Taiwan and like consensus-based process. So the participants get to decide the process based on their own consensus. And also the agenda is participant-oriented so they get to know and they get to decide to determine what we are going to talk about through the whole process. And also there is an idea called rolling correction. So we keep reflecting ourselves and improve ourselves by reflecting or looking back at what should be corrected. And so it's like a rolling basis. And the model could be a recursive public. And I think that recursive is a design term which means in a repeated way, I guess so, or so you want to talk about that. And what's a recursive public? I always have this kind of, yeah, sure, recursive public. It's actually a research term coined by Keltie Christopher. He has a paper with a title and a recursive public. It means you have this environment that is always interactive and participants inside can define the rules, how they want to round the space. Yeah, he has a paper around it. So in an interactive way and in a repeated way? Inside this place, this public is organic. Participants inside can define what the space will look like and how it functions. So it's recursive in a way and it's public because it's an open space. Oh, okay. Just a little bit. So it's also, we have the open format and also open source and open space. What we have here is open and not closed. And also no strict rules. So it also may overlap the definition of consensus-based process and participant-oriented. So they get to choose what they want and decide what the rule should be. So this is actually how we deliver this workshop. So every participant and organizer get to know and get to speak what they want to know and what they want to think about. And so the above mentioned models can be summarized by a term called etocracy. And it's a term I have listed. I have borrowed a definition from Oxford Dictionary and it says it's a system of flexible and informal organization and management. So this is the core spirit of free Taiwan that's etocracy. So it's the opposite of bureaucracy. So it's interesting that we have this kind of spirit inside the central government. Sometimes I feel like personally it's like a protest against the existing system and the existing bureaucracy. So while I do have some difficulties when doing my own mission, like when I do the volunteer work, I don't feel like reported to my boss. But the boss might think that I haven't done so much. But my boss is not Audrey. It's just because I work for a nonprofit organization. But my boss generally didn't realize what I have been doing actually. Because it's not the work that I have done should be reported to the boss. But actually she or he or maybe my supervisor maybe not agree with what I have been doing as a volunteer because that would be like a huge cause without benefit to him or her, I'm not sure. So this is like the personal difficulties working as a volunteer in the opposite of bureaucracy. Yeah, okay. I'm a little bit aggrieved, sorry. And this is the critical roles of V-Taiwan that I think I should... I think I'm worth mentioning. It's the facilitator editors and contributors. But the facilitator can be one or two or more. But generally we have one facilitator to host a issue. And these are the features that the facilitator editors and contributors should have. Like the facilitator should be knowledgeable about the issue. And he or she should participate through the pro process. But sometimes it doesn't happen that way. But we encourage the facilitator to participate as early as possible. And he or she should stay neutral and at best with no direct interest with the topic itself. And he or she should be familiar with the ORID method which I would talk about later. And the editors would be like editors of the website. So he or she should be capable of maintaining the websites. So it's in here V-Taiwan. He or she should be capable of uploading the contents and know how to log in and passwords. And he or she should know where the contents should be posted. So that's like a maintaining editors of the websites. And should be responsive and active in V-Taiwan community. So generally he or she should participate in mini hackathon regularly. So that's what editors should do. So like the third feature. And the contributors can be anyone, anyone who is interested in this process or interested in a specific issue. So it could be anyone. And so there's also some policy like on written rules that they should behave themselves and be honest with themselves so no lies. So because once you want to participate in resolving the hot topic or issues and there is no need to lie. So that's what contributors should do. So these are the three critical rules that I think it's worth mentioning. And these are the typical scene of mini hackathon. And so you can see... So here it's Audrey and... So here is Audrey. And PDS like Shoo and contributor. And they are maybe from various backgrounds like engineering or a researcher or PhD program students. And also maybe there may sometimes be a research team appointed by a competent authority. So there's a research team sometimes for some case. And also I serve as an editor of V-Taiwan platform. Yeah. Okay, so here comes to the process and maybe this can give you a clear view of what exactly V-Taiwan is. And also please note that our upcoming sessions will be divided by the process, according to the process. Yes, so later on for the afternoon there will be a proposal of stage one and then stage two opinion, stage three reflection and stage four legislation. And so our process is simple. There are four stages across the whole V-Taiwan process. But also this is a... Like a participant-oriented agenda. So we try not to be that institutionalized because institutionalization... There's not much flexibility in institutionalization. But sometimes we still... I mean this is a process based on the consensus so far according to the participants of V-Taiwan. So this is what we have for now so far of the process. But it can be changed. It can be flexible. So it depends on what the participant wants. If someone can bring up a better process then if he or she is convincing enough so all the participants and all agree that we can change the process. But this is what we have based on the consensus so far. And for the stage two opinion collection we generally host an online opinion collection survey. So it's right here. And also we will do that as a trial or experiment. And then for a stage three reflection we will have a consultation meeting. This is when the online line happened. I mean we do it live streaming and also in person. And you will see it later. We will break this into details later. And also across the hostages there should be mini hackathons on Wednesdays. That's what we do for V-Taiwan and occasional internal meetings throughout the whole process. So it's just kind of like filling the gaps between these stages. So whenever we need to discuss more about some like even about topic, substantial topic or procedural process then we can bring up these issues at mini hackathons. So then people get to know what people get to keep track on what's happening. And sometimes according to well if some public officials are not able to do that on Wednesdays then we can switch or be flexible with the process and then we can host some occasional internal meetings and remember to record it on the internet. We use Hackpad as a recording tool so people that cannot join occasional internal meetings but they probably participate on mini hackathon they get to know what's happening on Hackpad. And this is my personal view on how the idea flows converge and diverge. It's a diagram but just my personal perception on this. So firstly starting from the proposal stage there may be like people may be going extreme like an echo chamber or the polarization of ideas and then throughout the process maybe somehow like here between the proposal stage and opinion stage this may be how the idea flows converge. And then we bring up an online opinion collection so into the opinion stage then we claim more opinions then somehow it may diverge at a certain point and then go between the reflection and opinion and reflection then our editors or the facilitator and also the contributors can try to think about all the comments and we try to find out where the idea flows can converge. And then in the reflection we have consultation meeting so we have more comments and opinions and ideas so it diverges again and then luckily and eventually it should all converge at the best level so then we go into the legislation but this is the best model or like the most best model of that should happen that can happen but generally sometimes will diverge too much and then so when we were at the reflection we have some unexpected comments or unexpected solutions or problems and out of our own expected range so then we can go back to the opinion stage and to think about how we should narrow down our scope so here's the word recursive public in an interactive environment so this is just a diagram to show how throughout the whole four stages the VITA1 can let the idea flows converge and diverge and here we have, I have two case study one is UberX and the second one is the NCII non-consensual intimate image UberX is its feature includes being the first VITA1 case that use police and also together the highest number of votes and also it's a proposal that be top down and also bottom up because I'll talk about that later so here's the timeline of UberX so it's proposal happening on 2015 and then we have an online opinion collection running for a month and then we go to and then we went into the reflection stage which is a consultation meeting in August and then in 2016 we had the amended legislation so also we have the mini hackathon on Wednesdays throughout the four stages so this is just what I just mentioned that we have a bottom down sorry, bottom down top down and bottom up proposal because we have the request from several government authorities including Ministry of Telecommunication and Communications Ministry of Economic Affairs and also Ministry of Finance so they all think that Uber is a case that worth discussing and really need to be resolved and also we have a topic poll at mini hackathon and 31 out of 33 think this is a topic that worth discussing about so here's the Uber sorry, it's in Chinese so we have these two way of request one is top down and bottom up the other one is bottom up so this is how it makes it worth UberX worth a year of mentioning and so this is the stats of police survey we have 145 statements and 925 participants and the highest number of votes so far okay and this is the screenshot of the UberX online opinion collection so you can see here is group A and group B and we will go into the details of police later so this is a brief example of how UberX works and so the group A we have collected a majority I mean a consensus from group A that it says I think it is the responsibility of the Ministry to actively outlaw online license to passenger vehicle and according to the group B most of the participants in group B thought that it's great to have UberX and it has subverted this on written rule so they think it was quite awesome also they think that UberX according to the group B is like a really nice business model so UberX is quite welcomed in V-Taiwan but also both group A and group B agree that the rights of the driver and the passenger the rights of both matters so safety is the top priority so even though UberX is quite welcomed and widely known and used across Taiwan but both all of the passengers and drivers may all agree that safety is the top priority so here we have the suggestion from the majority so it says that the government should do something like having a fair regulation and UberX has to address the tax issue and also UberX should follow the rules of taxis and transportation should be regulated just like food or drugs and UberX should be registered so you can see that people really care about the safety of passengers and also the drivers so these are the consensus from the majority and this is the seating plan of the consultation meeting so you can see that here is the government sitting here and here is like the scholar part sitting here so later in our session we also have this U-shaped table and according to your dots your color dots, that's the secret mission according to the other dots we have appointed it as different stakeholders so then you will play a role of the stakeholder and you will be seated according to the seating plan so here is like the civil society and here will be the corporates or the private sectors and here is the facilitator so we have this U-shaped table for the consultation meeting and also we will have a camera here for live streaming so this is like a preview of what we are going to do in the afternoon so based on the consensus collected from online opinion collection and consultation meeting in 2016 Ministry of Telecommunication Ministry of Transportation and Communication pledged to ratify all the police consensus and to amend the regulation the relating regulation of taxi and so it came out in October so the amendment went into effect so this is the achievement of the Uber X-Case and then here is the non-consensual pornography but this is the wildly used term but somehow we think that non-consensual images may be better and this case has its feature including its proposed by one of the contributors so it's a bottom-up proposal and the proposer serves as the facilitator and he happened to meet me so I can share with my first person point of view of hosting this topic and so this is the timeline of NCI case so in 2017 last year it was proposed in a mini hackathon and then from June to July well generally we have a one-month opinion collection but for NCI case somehow we didn't have the many of participants that we generally expected so we extended it with two more weeks then we have a longer duration for online opinion collection and then in September we have the consultation meeting and right now it's still pending well there are four draft bills over having or impart or as a whole discussing and trying to resolve this problem in Taiwan so we still try to think about the strategy of legislation so far and we have lots of discussion and brainstorming at mini hackathon on Wednesday or some occasional internal meetings to think about how we should go into the next step but now it's like in the middle of reflection and legislation and maybe we can go back to opinion stage sometimes but it's based on the consensus of the contributors at mini hackathon so back then at the proposal stage in April we had the mini hackathon and then I proposed two statements so as general it's originally tried to criminalize the actor of NCI and then maybe according to Taiwan law it may be included in the personal information protection act but throughout the whole process I mean over almost a year it has changed a little bit but this was the original proposal and then here is the link, the URL you can access you can have access to the hackpad to see the record but it's in Chinese and here are the stats so you can see that we didn't have many participants so it reminds me and it says as an alert to me that we should focus more on the promotion and like the marketing of vTaiwan I mean it has to be viral we have a Facebook fan page and we did spread the news but also we also communicated with an online community in Taiwan focusing on women and feminism issue but we are not that successful on the promotion of this topic so we are still trying to think how we can improve this so we only have 100 participants not like what happened to UberX but we have over 10,000 views on the live streaming videos of consultation meeting and this is the screenshot of Polish online opinion collection and we have group A and group B also like the two groups and this is the, well because we have talked a lot about how we should narrow down the scope of this topic because this topic includes lots of aspects including the responsibility of internet service provider or the criminal whether we should criminalize the actor also how we should improve the procedural process of law enforcement but in the first place we thought that we should only focus on the definition of pornography or the definition of intimate images that's the definition part and it matters a lot from a legal standpoint so we have had the police survey as a way to collect and a way to collect how people imagine what intimate images should be like so for group A they think well this is a subjective part as a facilitator so I label group A as conservative group and label group B as liberal group so the conservative group A think that plans kissing should not be or should not account for bodily intimate image and also like sweet talk and group B think that even moaning or men's nipples and the disclosure of one sexual orientation could be seen as bodily intimate images so there are two different maybe two different ends of a spectrum but for both group A and group B the consensus I mean over 75% think that they all think that this act like the non-consensual intimate image should be a crime and also it doesn't happen to couples only so this is what the majority or the consensus comments that we have collected on police survey and this is the sitting plan of the consultation meeting of the NCI case and we have the format of the sitting plan so facilitators would sit here and above here would be the government including national development council NCI national communications and committee, okay and ministry of education and ministry of health and welfare ministry of justice and also here are the scholar including lawyers and law professor and TWRF is a non-profit organization for feminism and women and also here we have a legislator representative here sitting here and we kind of categorize this as a or maybe also be included it may be also seen as a civil society but well this is another part another part that how we can I mean this one is under the executive so it's in the executive branch so far but once the legislation I mean the legislator would like to participate in then we should think about its role I mean what the legislator should be categorized as in this, I mean as in the stakeholders yeah so because we have executive legislative and okay so yeah this is the cross branch problem then we need to think about where the legislator should be where should belong to okay so this is the brief introduction of the veto and veto on historical background methods and culture and people so do you have any kinds of questions or because we will go into detail of each stages and you can also have the chance to practice and to feel I mean personally feel how it works so yeah or you want me to sing with a guitar well well I can do that well okay so yeah sure Devin, top of what sorry what's going on at the top of the you across from the facilitators presentation or what do you project I mean this one, the projection screen like what kind of content are you putting up there during these things are you putting up like statistics about the issue are you, do you have like a live feed of other people who are watching on live stream like what does that look like sometimes the facilitator will have a presentation or like several slides for what have been happening so far just to keep people, keep the participants helping keep track of what's happening with the latest status and also after the facilitation slides the government or the competent authority of each topic should be responsible for representing or also doing a presentation or slides on what their role, what their position is right now so let people see to understand what they have been doing in terms of that specific topic and let them know I mean and also what research that they have been done to let the participant know so this and after the presentation of the competent authority the facilitators can also utilize the projection screen as a like a use right now as a note so I can write down anything I want and let the participants understand what's in my mind and what I have learned and listened from the participants so I can like do a summary and just keep writing and let them know the mind of the facilitator, yeah so that's the purpose of the projection screen yes Casey I was just wondering who chooses the community contributors and especially if you have a divisive issue on a finite table, how do those people end up at the table from this online or distributed community? We have a written rule that because we can't just open the space for everyone just as we are afraid that maybe there are too many people but this place, I mean this for the civil society should be open only to the participants that have contributed in the earlier stages, like if I'm the one who have posted comments or have voted on police survey and then I get the tickets and well we got the invitation letter from the editor of the VITAL1 platform and I get to join to this meeting so I can sit here and also we have some lists we have a list of some long-time contributors of VITAL1 like an old friends or an old community or groups and also they will get an invitation letter from the editors so they got invited and they can get registered on the KKTX web page then they can get to sit here. So the written rule is that if you want to sit right on the table then you need to at least have contributed to the earlier stages so we won't have like a sudden or something out of nowhere and then interfere with the process hello how do you prioritize that selection so if say for this issue there have been 100 people who participated in the earlier part so then how do you prioritize the three that get selected or invited um um sorry so basically the written rule is that we invite people who have made constructive contributions from the earlier stages but it's subjective what's constructive so we end up mostly just sending out invites to everybody but out of the hundreds of people who participated online because they know there will be a live stream that they can enter into the live stream in the comfort of their living room and it will be channeled by the facilitator it turns out it's just people with really a lot to say will actually show up in the face to face meetings so out of the hundreds of contributors or dozens of contributors we actually the most problem is that we only get like three or four people interested in it or even two people that like more people to join we never had to deal with the issue of like more than 20 people want to join the face to face meeting I think mostly because they know that they can participate also very effectively through the live stream but yes it will be a problem if more than 20 people register but we never had to deal with that so yeah now that we are we have to a few people willing to travel all the way or yeah to be present in person but people would like to participate online preferably from our experiences yeah okay so this is just a question of like outlook and orientation but like is the aspiration to have as broad a population of people as possible participating or is it to get like really motivated stakeholder groups participating I'll just give a quick example from the US context right like you know everyone in this room I'm familiar with the National Rifle Association and we see this like the NRA has a degree of we see like asymmetric intensity of preferences like most Americans feel like there should be certain kinds of gun control and so on and a very vocal minority you know often exhibits outsized power to block that in this case you know like the NRA is a group of like we could call them like asymmetrically partisan or asymmetrically motivated right do we want in the V-Taiwan example do you do you want to see like the people who are most passionate about an issue so the advocates for for victims of online bullying or you know non-consensual image sharing in this example do we want them do we do you want like as representative a subsection of the Taiwanese population generally to participate how do you think about like goals for this because I'm that influences the interface and the design and the process too you know so I mean to be more inclusive and also include in the I mean the people with direct interest like because we did have a problem that how we attract people especially those like the victims and actual actors came or herself to be present at this meeting but we find that it's almost impossible for them to be to be in person participating in this this consultation meeting so we use the live streaming channel and also open up a chat room for them so maybe we with WRF the nonprofit organization they did have lots of cases helping the victims of NCI case so we encourage the TWRF to send the link of this live streaming channel to the victims and also maybe the the actors maybe I'm not sure to invite and encourage them to participate online so that they can get the details that they should from exposing their identity and they get to express their comments but I'm not sure according to the chat room the records I'm not sure whether they did participate in this consultation meeting Yeah so let's start No. My question is about how the issues are defined at the outset for at the start of this process. I mean once you've gotten to this point you have a lot of buy-in already that these are important issues that everybody needs to be talking about but how does that process start? I mean from this proposal stage original the proposal because I I have I have said the proposal including the two points as the criminalization of this act because it was not that specifically resolved with the criminal act of vTaiwan current criminal code so originally it was about all about the criminal criminalization of this action but then after consulting with or interacting or discussing with so many participants then we do find that it's it could be bother but well personally I as a facilitator I thought I think that it's really hard to to figure out I mean to prioritize what what should be the top issue and then the second issue then because this should be calm as a whole so so some also some of the participants did do not did not agree with the original proposal as a criminalization of the actors so are you can you help me with this how do we converge yet there's no prioritization vTaiwan has concurrently processed I think like up to five topics concurrently so as long as there is interest and time really from the civil society actors who want to work on a process and that responsive authorities are willing to at least give a binding response to the synthesized outcome that's like the minimum requirements like some buying from the civil society and some buying from the computer and authorities but they need not to go all the way to the ministry as long as there's some agency who want to show up in the mini hackathon that's the like bare minimum so it's actually very easy to to create a new vTaiwan topic but it doesn't always end up in this full process sometimes after a few rounds of discussion we amend the scope for example the sharing economy proposal eventually became the platform economy proposal and things like that so all of this is very flexible and it's all dependent really on the people who show up at mini hackathon every week as long as people feel it's ready well then it's up for the polis or whatever other online opinion gathering but that cooking stage it may take half a year it did take half a year for uber x hi so I think you mentioned earlier that you do 15 tours around Taiwan so for people who have a disability who are unable to join your live stream or people with low tech proficiency or no access to the internet what where in the process can they be participate in one of the case studies or how else have you been able to reach out to those communities and reach them vTaiwan is now funded by National Development Council so now most of the cases on vTaiwan are according to the policy of NDC and we so vTaiwan now most discuss about the issues related to technology and law so we think that according to the the substantial I mean the nature of these issues because they are all about internet and technology so now the participants are also should be someone who have the access to internet so that's there there should be the rise stakeholders but as also you mentioned that so for the I mean near future or distant future that we might need to include more also those without the access to the internet vTaiwan but for now because all the cases and topics resolved on vTaiwan cases are all about technology and law so we yeah this right stakeholders that that's right because whatever us talk about is the minimum requirement but there's many people who show up in mini hackathon for example the Human Rights Association that they care a lot about for example the quality of access of disadvantaged people and they will go go around and run their own meetings their own consultation meetings and some legislators actually run their own consultation meetings in the social enterprise case and things like that and the good thing with vTaiwan is that as long as the organizers show up in the mini hackathon and as long as they want to they agree to publish the transcript or the recording under a creative commons license we do include it in the vTaiwan website proper so so what we just talk about is the like the minimum amount of meetings that would go into a vTaiwan process but in reality people actually go to their constituents and hold complimentary meetings that are nevertheless added to the vTaiwan timeline and become their census like documents still become the agenda for the further stage discussions but that that can't the NDC cannot you know fund all those meetings so basically it's up to the organizers in the mini hackathon to say hey where I'm going to the indigenous you know nations to to have another discussion about this and please add it back to the synthetic document that's more or less but often happens when people strongly feel that there is a component that cannot be reached by the usual venues following question how are those comments integrated back into the the master document so to say they're very carefully know that there is a manual process that there is no automatical process in doing it so which is why we emphasize so much the need for facilitator to be involved as early as possible right so if the facilitator for a specific topic as neutral ish to this topic and is involved from the very early stage then they can work with the organizers other organizers who shop at a mini hackathon and work out a strategy that works for both of them to integrate these into the hackpad and since it's like documents and it really varies a lot case by case there really is no SOPS standard operation procedure for this but the facilitator being you know recognized by the mini hackathon contributors as their bona fide of you know holding a neutral and inclusive ground I think is what makes vTaiwan working so far but yeah there's going to be a large debate about two months from now when the National Digital Communication Act is passed and vTaiwan has a chance of being institutionalized in regulation at that point we will have to figure out the parameters of how much to institutionalize how much not to but so far that discussion has not been happening yeah all right we'll save our the rest of our questions for the for the workshop part of it or the interactive part of it but now we're going to move into the lunch part where I'm going to introduce Tina who's both a designer and a chef and who has designed for us and cooked for us this amazing meal and Tina will tell us a little bit about her thought process and how she was inspired by vTaiwan to cook us this wonderful meal. Sorry I worked in tech for six years and don't know how to use it so that's just how things are cool so I hope you guys are hungry because we're about to have lunch and I just want to talk a little bit about how I thought about this lunch I wanted to create something that would help you process the themes that you talked about so far and encountered him briefly also give you a chance to like socialize and get to know one another because it's a very rare opportunity that such a diverse and like wonderful group of people are together in the room and lastly approach this as a very playful experience so you know they're talking about very like important topics so I want lunch to be an opportunity where you can kind of play and employ your senses so these are when I was designing the lunch I was thinking about sort of reflecting the themes that we you will have encountered so far and since the first day is focused on the vTaiwan process I looked at these things specifically how it's very consensus driven and invites diverse perspectives into the room and at some level it requires the diverse perspectives to come together and compromise to draft a final like proposal and also a transparency throughout the process so it's broadcast for all to see and you can understand each piece of decision-making that goes into it and so when I was thinking about like consensus and bringing multiple things into the room I immediately gravitated to hot pot and so I thought about how this is of an opportunity for different flavors or perspectives to mesh in a single very participatory format of eating and the interesting thing about hot pot is that it exists in many other cultures as well and the bottom left there is Oden which is you can sort of think of it as Japanese hot pot it's like this big container of broth that different ingredients cook in all day and the broth slowly takes on the flavor of whatever was added to it on the bottom right we have Jamaican pepper pot which sometimes is thought of as like a big pot that you can bring ingredients and add to and it always varies depending on who makes it as well as you know different different forms of like stocks and broths and soups every every culture kind of has its own idea of like this this like melting pot or like like using water as the vehicle to mesh flavors and as funny while I was doing the research for this Cordelia where is she hi she sent me this video which turns out that the V-Taiwan or all of our Taiwan friends have come up with the same idea and used it to create a video about how hot pot is the perfect collaborative consensus building scenario so I invite you to find the link later and check this out because this video is awesome so introducing our lunch exercise consensus hot pot and it will be a giant pot of broth that we will all collaborate on to determine the final flavor so for this to work I need everybody to look at the wait where's Darshina and CS okay that's cool you just like popped up so could you guys help people form five teams and then yes they could be by the color of the dots so the dots will come in later too because that's how that those are the teams you'll form for the workshop so find find your teammates now and then each of you will receive a placard with ingredients on it now when you receive the placard you will see that every team has different ingredients assigned to them and your task is to deliberate amongst your group and nominate two or three ingredients from this and at the end we will all come together and I will put all the ingredients up on the board and you can see like kind of what the other groups have nominated and we will do a final deliberation process as an entire group to determine what goes in the pot so let's get started if you don't have a dot that will also form a group somewhere so pair here with your colors maybe we can get red red dots red dots where Devin is orange dots over here where Noel is yellow dots over here where Matt is blue dots back here hang out with the blue dots so we've got yellow dots red dots yellow yellow dots are over here at this far table or wait are you over here okay yellows here orange red green green group blue group if you don't have a dot join a group join a group any group join a group this blue group could use some people ever so don't you come back okay I'm gonna hand out some sheets to your groups and there you go so you want to pick two two three if you want to join a group feel free to join that one two to three options all right how's everyone doing do we have a final decision amongst your group can I get your attention please clap once if you can hear me clap twice if you can hear me awesome that works so well so do you guys have a decision excellent let's get started with the final deliberation I hope this works um who's who's at the computer right now can can you click on the link that says let's begin thank you see us enter anonymously that's fine yay cool this works yes technology worked um cool so let's go through each of the groups and I would like you to tell me which ones you've nominated for the pot and I will drag them into the circle to indicate your selection so let's begin here team one uh remiso and ginger and we agreed on a mild moderate portion of oat babe I do know how to represent that in the mural but yes roughly on the chef will keep that in mind okay where is group two are you guys group two all right what are your selections we we have fermented black bean and garlic with a request to make the Franks red Hots available to people but not actually in the pot so they can apply as desired on an individual basis three yeah garlic sorry garlic and fermented black bean we would like to put forth Sichuan peppercorns and tahini and a mild amount of chili powder unless everyone likes spicy food then put it all in hi this is team four our consensus was around black peppercorns peppercini and sake hopefully we can drink the sake as well what was our decision we wanted onion and kombu we wanted the kimchi on the side and then we had a question about how well the carrot would actually work would anyone else like to risk it we're saying maybe not carrot juice that was our feeling to so we'll keep it out the motion has been denied all right so onion was the last one all right cool how does everyone feel about this we have old bay ginger garlic red miso fermented black beans peppercorn pepperon chini I can never read that Sichuan peppercorn chili powder kombu which is seaweed and tahini sake and yellow onion yes are there any allergies I should be aware of right now the broth is currently vegan yep and all of the hot pot skewers are gonna be vegan as well so anyone if not we have plenty of dumplings as well all right no objections going once twice and done move over there please bring your chairs with you and you can see wherever you like there are these little clusters of tiny crate tables so just grab a seat you can go ahead and start mixing your dipping sauce in your little like cardboard boat container and I will start making the broth and bringing out skewers as they get ready