 Okay. Hello everyone. Can you hear us? Yes I can hear you. I can't see you though. Can you see me? Well that's great, that's great. So we have what 10 minutes for some Q&A? Yes we do roughly that. Have you got any questions on the Slido that have come up? Yeah, yeah so let's just dive into the Slido questions. The top question at the moment is from Kirsten saying how do you include those without access to technology? Interestingly I just came back from one of the most rural areas. It's not even in Taiwan, it's in Penghu, a very remote island close to Taiwan and in an even more remote island in the Penghu area was just at the first marine national park that was recently introduced for just three years and there was a dispute with the local fishes people and when people petitioned for a total banning of fisheries especially like the drill nets and so on and so we went there and so to put a very quick answer to the question we do it by bringing the tech to people. We're not asking people to come to the websites if it's just for the internet voting or whatever of course the local fishes people will protest because they don't have the same access to the internet and they're not very used to it anyway so because of this we use this huge town hall style meeting where people both see the people in the room doing deliberation and also have their own open mic moments and the whole endeavor was 360 recorded so the net net effect is that for a local person you either just walk into a nearby town hall or just you use your own phone and on slido or you can call your friend and ask them to relay your message and so on and so the the whole idea is that the local mayors and local representatives see it as an extension of their face-to-face deliberation methods and other replacements whenever it's replacement I think there's a lot of worry but we're not trying to replace face-to-face meetings we're trying to augment it and trying using 360 live streaming and VR to make best use of people's time because people can then enter the previous discussion as if they're there and then have a you know five minutes ten minutes experience of what it's like to to be diving there to be fishing there and so on before entering the discussion so that they share the some common effects so it was pretty successful the deliberation yesterday was I think the most peaceful any similar meetings the place has ever seen and we actually managed to come up with some consensus so I think that's a pretty good sign of what we call an assistive civic technology it's not trying to replace any existing technologies but just like good assistive tech they disappear when people use it and using ambient computing people just speak naturally and then their consensus is mapped automatically into posted notes we transcribe everything everybody says and the mind maps and everything into the stakeholder maps the posted notes and everything and then so people after walking away from the meeting they don't just remember one or two sentences but actually the full map of what was being discussed and then this carries on to the next meetings and so on the next question is how do you prevent urban government from manipulation by root actors with malicious intent so the answer is two vote the first one is of course we work on very good cyber security measures sandboxing active you know white hat penetration testing everything to make sure the infrastructure itself is safe I think that's the the foundation of urban government now on the top level on the content level we design the space so that you can't reply to anyone so there's a similarity between Slido and the polis which you just saw we use in the uber case and the petition platform that we use and they all have the same design in that people are free to voice their concerns and post their ideas but you can't ever reply to each other so basically the best way to counter a argument that you don't agree with is posting a better counter argument and have it up voted and so throughout these designs it doesn't pay to be a troll because you can't really consume other people's attention and this is the idea of troll control or troll hugging that we use when we design spaces like this is just taking away the replies and use crowd moderation what is the most important piece of digital infrastructure that has yet to be developed we'll notice that for machine learning for AI we currently use it only for cases where it will be the same just more time consuming if it's a human doing the same thing we don't actually use AI for places where you know it needs value judgments and so on but we I think in order for AI to enter that part a full development of what we call explainable AI x AI is essential it's important that like a good assistant the the AI doesn't just tell you it's a cat but actually tells you the the reasoning behind it and it's a very new development field we expect maybe two or three years before we have a good understanding of how explainable AI could work but I think this is a very important part of digital infrastructure if we are going to automate more of the human in this uh the elaboration process George would like to know your lip-frogging uh slow political um evolutionary changes in modern tech how do you handle people generational gaps well as I explained for the older people for people who are not used to uh keyboard and mouse actually they're pretty comfortable with a 360 camera they're pretty comfortable with vr and ar because you know it doesn't require learning a new modality it's basically just acting naturally and with the room itself acting as a computer and so that's where our current research mostly lies we're not really focusing on getting people to use more keyboard and more mass but rather to use computing devices as a way to connect uh disparate spaces but each space is still a community space and I think that that has brought implications even for elders who can't travel they have to remain at home but they can feel connected through this kind of public forums in augmented reality or through ambient computing technologies so that's that's our current focus has your approach to urban government found any uptake in other countries yes I think um the new york city uh there's a um I think called civic hall is looking into our methodology and making a documentary and a write-up uh and one of our architect and impetus is now in tokyo and working with um the people in japan and there's also um like corporations between the et al lab in france the people in madrid I just virtually visited Barcelona uh and so on so there's many city-level governments who very much want this thing because their mayors were elected on this platform and there's a wider internet community just focusing on this so we think we're just one of the larger labs but we certainly are very willing to share and include methodology developed elsewhere as well well can technology direct their energies to realize your optimistic future well I encourage you to realize your optimistic future is not my optimistic future but I think what what helps is of course to to publish in an open source in a reproducible way and write good post mortems because in conferences like this it's it's generally not what what the failures or the the lessons learned were not explored in depth they're mentioned but kind of just part of the narrative and uh what I like most uh and I try to do myself is this idea of radical transparency if something doesn't work it's as important to document it and learn from it as as it works right so I think that's something that I'm also uh focusing myself and I would encourage you to also try is just to try all sort of different things and fail early and provide write-ups do a few you're a bit better able to influence from within the government than as a activist well well the funny thing is that I'm still an activist inside the government I don't as a condition of joining the cabinet I don't look at any confidential or top secret information so there's no chance of you know ever snowdening the government so in exchange I am I'm able to publish everything literally ISC as a freedom of information compatible documents so I am very much thinking that this works bidirectionally I'm both lowering the fear and certainly doubt of public servants when it comes to civic participation but as a activist I'm also letting other activists know that there are career public servants who are willing to work this way they were you know muted or something but I'm kind of their their voice as well to try to make them more visible and also more more vocal and when people see career public servants help with their activist agenda their built reports right so how do you make sure that crowdsource solutions and governance doesn't end up on emotional as communities we don't have the largest numbers it's easy we don't vote we don't ever vote the petitions you see the crowd consensus you see everything we don't count the numbers if there are a hundred people having the same question it's just one card on this mind map it's just one dot on the polis it's just one sentence on slide there so all the all the tech that we use we look for diversity we're not looking for sheer numbers and it doesn't it really work to to have a crowd that votes exactly the same way it doesn't influence the process at all so what we value is a point that is different from everybody else but can somehow work everybody else's points how do you balance transparency and privacy what these two are not at all at arts I think when people entrust their data in the government to store it's where it's still their data right we're just a data controller or data processor and in that that case we will not be you know thinking this is transparent we need to be accountable in how we store and process those private data but when we publish something under FOIA or under open data we always do it in a statistical form and I think it's much easier much better and especially under a GDPR regime for the scholarly community to propose algorithms but for the data owners and controller to run it locally so instead of publishing private data as data we need to make sure that is less or there's no privacy impact before running those statistics algorithms right so they're telling me it's the last question Mr. Danja in this system become a mechanism for pushing a populist agenda I think when when when everybody has a a way to push a populist agenda this is what democracy means right so what we're trying to do is that we are making everybody a potential agitator a potential activist and not just centering it to two or three so-called thought leaders so like every Friday we process a petition and everybody takes turns to become a populist leader and once that's demystified I think there's much more chance of a true democracy developing based on listening to each other so thank you for listening