 Okay, thanks so much for agreeing to interview with me for my research. I really appreciate it So I guess I'll just jump right into it my research is is about the relationship between digital governance and democracy Because like throughout the world obviously we're seeing like a huge recession of democracy Including in Europe in the United States But Taiwan seems to be the exception to this like Taiwan's democracy is only Getting stronger in a lot of the democracy reporting data shows this So I guess my first question is what role do you think that taiwan's digital policies play in this and how significant? Do you think they were in driving this trend? I think universal broadband access and universal healthcare universal digital competence and media competence in basic education These are the main motivators for inclusive digital democracy And I think we think about democracy as a form of social technology So it's not a fixed like three bits uploaded every person every four year thing But rather is a continuous thing where everybody can participate. It's everyone's business with everyone's help So I think it's not two things like internet democracy, but rather it's intertwined Exactly. So what aspects do you think of taiwan's like e-democracy and e-government solutions like? Radical transparency or these participation tools that you guys have put together What do you think are the greatest advantages of this of this approach that taiwan has? Yeah, it's now so prevalent that I don't think about the e-dash anymore, right? We would just say let's mail each other. We don't say e-dash mail anymore because that's kind of the default We will say paper-based mail if it's paper-based mail And so similarly we now just say the national petition website or the participation website Instead of the e petition website or the e participation website And that shows that it really is inclusive that's people of all the different age groups Especially the people younger than 18 and the people around like 60 70 years old They find a lot more to contribute in a day to day fashion to the everyday life Including as I mentioned through petitions, but also through participatory budgeting sandbox applications presidential hackathon Well, even just calling the toll free number 1922 to contribute to counterpandemic Effort and so on and all these shows that the government works now with the citizens not just for the citizens That is the main change Okay, so it's establishing this sort of like collaborative Ecosystem where citizens can communicate with the government. Okay. Um, so then what do you think what what kind of like policy ground work? Um, do you think is required before you start implementing these kinds of things these? Participation platforms and stuff. I mentioned universal broadband universal media competence universal digital competence And also healthcare since we're still during the pandemic. Uh, and and these are actually constitutionally protected in time Okay, interesting. Um, so that how How popular are you at these participation tools in taiwan right now and are you like do you have Any policies that are that you're going to get them to a wider I can't hear you anymore Shall we make another call? Center for computation and things like that. Uh, and I noticed that you just started recording, but it's fine I've got my local recording has been sent. Okay. Sorry And so, um, yeah, so so the point is that it's not directly Translatable to citizen engagement If you do not empower the public service to trust the citizens with those digital tools for pro-social communication Right. So, uh, what we're getting at with the participation office and network Among other things is to get a culture of starting a weekly survey right across source agenda setting As easy as you would starting a google farm Okay, exactly. So do you think that there's a little bit more? More work to be done here to get the Like the civil service and the bureaucrats and the government to really trust these tools a lot more Yeah, certainly. Um, so of course we use free software Polis is a gpl Sandstorm, I think is gpl or something. Uh, and so we make sure that they can actually Work to customize to their heart's content if they want to add new functionalities And also we make sure that the public service Work with professional penetration testers white hat hackers to make sure that there's no separate security issues when using these tools and so And so I think a healthy relationship with the civic tech community and the white hat hackers Community that is essential in getting people to trust these tools Okay, exactly. Um, so do you think that there's a possibilities for Countries in europe in north america to sort of replicate the success that taiwan has had in this if they Allocate for universal broadband health care and these kinds of things And definitely I mean polis is from seattle And participatory budgeting is inspired by among other things console and decedent From margaret and basalona. The petition website Is almost an exact adaptation of the better the kavik from island and many other things And so what we're doing is in some sense just making sure that the public service Trust this Method of listening at scale without getting tied to any particular form of technology So they may actually procure new technology when new technology is called for And so it's more of a culture change thing rather than a single piece of technology And so if a similar culture is being Deliberated in other parts of the world I'm sure that since this is free software Any place probably has their own self hosting capabilities and their own separate security auditing teams Exactly. Okay. So a lot of it has to do with The political will more social technology And and also the norm the the habits of policymaking because in the public service What's important is to reduce the risk, right? If you collect far more noise than signal, you're actually increasing the risk And also the another interest is to save time if you collect a lot more Controversy and polarization than workable feasible Shared good enough consensus that you actually waste everybody's time. So without Increasing anyone's risk or wasting anyone's time the public service is much More willing than to work on the mutual trust part, which is the part we want to get to right But you can't trust one to the other the three Axis of reducing risk and saving time and improving trust cannot be traded against each other Exactly. Okay. And this one, I guess is is it Not directly related with the participation but on Especially in the west on social media and online forums They've often become sort of the host of very toxic communities that engage maybe in hate speech traffic in Conspiracy theories and these kinds of things So how can a government in collaboration with citizens Work to reduce these anti-democratic influences while still maintaining the right of free speech I mean, I think there is a Room for the more antisocial or tension Oriented conflict oriented parts of social media. Just like there is a room for the non-live district very loud bars In the city, right? People go there for entertainment. I'm sure and Even though it's, you know, selling addictive drinks private bouncers very loud music You have to shout to get hurt. There is of course a population a a cultural Meet for have such places. What's not good is to try to hold town hall meetings as such places right and So what the government should do is to Fund and give substantial social sector control to the equivalent of public parks of public libraries National parks even for this sort of things, right? And this is what we call digital public infrastructure and is classified since 2016 As infrastructure, even though it's nothing concrete like not made out of concrete Still it provides the digital equivalent of the town hall like places for people to act in a pro-social manner for deliberative democracy But we're not banning or chasing down, you know, the antisocial corner of social media That's for entertainment that has its role in the society exactly, okay So then my next question is how do you find this balance between The the various actors that work to sort of moderate Um content online, especially like for example disinformation and these kinds of things How has taiwan sort of like built this balance of Civic society the private owners and the government to uh to effectively counter it Yeah, by creating a strong norm, uh, it's just like counter-spot, right? If sufficient amount of people flag things as fun then organizations such as one house has sufficient signals to contextualize each part of the email To kind of find the fingerprints that will then divert further emails from a spammer to people's junkman photo rather than inbox But this doesn't work if any single actor from this multi-state holder situation Suddenly says I want to be the intermediary and all your message have to pass through me that of course would not work In the email case. Uh, and so I think in taiwan We have a really vibrant ecosystem the leading anti-virus company trend micro for example offers the farm jar darin or the virus buster uh the scans for scams and um like um conspiracy theories also this information packages and so on because it's a journal purpose system for flagging and for a real-time contextualization And also in the private sector, there's the who's call, uh, which is a unsolicited caller it identification app And they also offer a maybe which is a similar service for even in into an encrypted channel They can scan incoming messages and contextualize it on the social sector There is zero with the covax community like a wikipedia like community for real-time fact checking and there's also For example, um, the town fact check center, which is by a professional journalist Providing the service so that's the Widely spread rumors can be actually investigated upon and again Providing the kind of mandatory what we call notice and public notice So on the private sector the companies such as facebook are strongly pressured by the social norm so that they have to Show the contextualizer Services whenever anything that is trending or goes viral And so what we found is that if we provide clarification and counter disinformation context Within a couple hours of each viral piece of disinformation then they tend to not to make too much Of a negative social impact is what we call humor over rumor The memes to make people kind of laugh as a contextualizer that also helps a lot Awesome. Okay. Um, so my second last question actually is um And feel free to speculate as wildly as you want on this one But how do you um, how do you foresee the relationship between citizens and the state changing as more digital technologies? like for example Cryptocurrency are adopted that are taking sort of the power away from the state Where they used to have a monopoly over, you know currencies and commerce these kinds of things And it's being sort of democratized in a in a new way I think democracy as a form of technology as I mentioned at very beginning is what I'm seeing And it's not in a far future. I mean, um, for example, the aetherian community Now that they're under a very strong social pressure to adopt a net zero climate impact transition, right and that is Like changing the the governance priorities for that particular crypto community They also Navigated a good coin experiment pretty well using new forms of funding called quadratic funding Which is then inspired by quadratic voting, which is a new voting system So democracy is a new form of technology. It's not some abstract thing Right, it's something that's being experimented in the crypto space as well and we take Though not yet Best but better practices or maybe we should call it next practices and then use it in our Government functions like the presidential hackathon their presidential cultural award both has been used in quadratic funding now Sorry, quadratic voting now And so I think a lot more kind of cross-pollination of the democracy as a technology Is now happening between the digital spaces and the more traditional state functions And so I think this is pretty good in the sense that this iteration makes people think of government As something that people can fork and also merge back And so I think this fork and merge relationship is what I have in mind when I think about future what I call people public private partnerships Okay, awesome That's actually all of my questions that I you answered them amazingly. It was great Okay, excellent, uh, and we should talk about the Recording usually I just uh posted on youtube under creative commas attribution if you're okay with that Yeah, that works perfectly for me action Okay, okay, and it will continue your audio, but not your video. It will continue just my video because it's a local recording Sure. Okay. Okay. Excellent. I'll just send you the links. Okay, perfect. Thanks a lot Okay, cheers. Bye. Live long and prosper. Thank you