 So now we are recording for you. Right, so you mentioned there's clear differences between the French version of me. There's that, there's RSV, there's the pop. Yeah, you send me the link, and I read through the link, including the collaborators and so on. Because yeah, it's a new thing. I put the website online a few days ago. In the few hours I had before my flight. Well, it's a pretty good website for a first touch, in short time frame. Yeah, for three hours of coding, it's pretty decent. It's very decent. It's a good boilerplate that you'd have used. Let me grab the computer just in case we need that. So yeah, how much time do we have? 40 minutes, up to an hour. Okay, and one last thing before we get into business. Okay, do you want the chocolates? Ah, thank you, yes, right now. Slice of life, yes. The French equivalent assessor, they mostly seem to make the link between the governments, including small startups and stuff like that. It's an economy focused position. Now this doesn't seem to be your case. I do that too. I mean, I'm the digital minister, but I'm also in charge of, in addition to the government social enterprise, and social enterprise by definition involves the linking between the public sector and the private sector because they want to be sustainable, but also the civil society because they want to solve problems that actually affect the society. So it is a link, but it includes the civil society at least as important as the private sector. So I strive to balance between the social and economic interests, but I wouldn't say that. I don't touch the economic. Okay, but it seems that a lot of what you're doing is open data. Open knowledge, open collaboration, open spaces. Try to create a public discussion. That's right. That comes also from the Sunflower movement. The design, there is a strong public design for that. Of course, there is a strong public design. And also because Taiwan's pretty unique in that we have one of the highest network readiness, meaning that pretty much anywhere in Taiwan if you want broadband, you have broadband. How much of the population? It's around 98% if you remove the offshore islands and so on. But this is network readiness. It means that the broadband is there if they want to. But it doesn't mean that people actually go and use it. For that, our numbers are pretty, I think 76, 78. 76, 78 are what? Of the population, which is roughly similar. Has broadband or? Use is broadband, which is roughly the same as Taiwan's fireside. Yeah, but what interests me is the rest of the population, because if you have 70 or 80%, it doesn't change that much. What matters is in France we have, I think, 70% of the population who never use the computer. That is problematic with the ones above the debate that happens online. If they are three years old, I wouldn't worry, but if they are not their adult stand, of course, it's a case of concern. For Taiwan, we have developed what we call assistive civic technologies, meaning that, for example, for one of the deliberations around Taipei's social housing distribution, the mayor said that the stakeholders themselves must determine the agenda. But the stakeholders are, of course, homeless people, mentally and physically handicapped people, single parents, people living with HIV, and so on. Like, they could not get landlords to rent to them, even if they have the money, because they were stigmatized or something, right? So by saying these people must determine the agenda, it of course doesn't mean that we need to set up a website that has all the upper region needs and everybody to go on their website. That would be catastrophe, right? So what they did in the Taipei City and I observed and held a little bit is that we used the traditional rolling survey method to discover stakeholders, to draw their family diagrams, like in standard social workers' fashion, and then try to go beyond the proxy that purpose to speak to them, but actually reaching them. But the problem is, of course, we can't get everybody, like the one who are paralyzed and so on, to get into the same city hall for discussion, right? So which is why we still use technology, we use live streaming, we use 360 video, we use, like, sign language interpreters, real-time captioning, and also for people who can only type and not speak, there's the other way of channel as well and so on. And these are, of course, the very basic to get them, to understand that it is really the mayor's will to be bound to the agenda that was set by the stakeholders and not just random general public who may or may not understand what they're about. And it's quite magical because after a few this kind of virtual or real face-to-face discussions, they come to see each other as comrades instead of someone who, one day, is less of a pie, bigger than they are. And we even get, like, an Aboriginal model who say, you know, those autistic people, they deserve this more, and they're willing to pick their fights at elsewhere and so on. So it does have a good coherent effort. What I'm saying is that technology... And it unites them, though. It unites the will. What I'm saying is that technology is a necessary but never a sufficient condition. And for things like these social disadvantaged people, the technologies must behave in an assistive way. That is to say, to enable them to speak for themselves instead of creating technology as a proxy to speak for their will, which never works. Because... Quick question. What do you think of online voting? And I'm saying voting for general elections. Well, I think building for policies is easier online because it's easier to have a fact-based or evidence-based discussion on policies. I don't know about voting about people. Voting about people, in my experience at least, is seldom based on an actual real connection to the person. Of course, you can have any number of QA forums and so on, but it doesn't really mean that you really know this person. So I'm much more in favor of voting to determine their relative priority of policies. Exactly. That's the idea of POP. Even if you vote for a party or a person, the agenda sets, only part of it will correspond to what you want. And then, once they get in power or not, they have to change their agendas to fit with other politicians. And in the end, maybe you can add someone who will implement none of the policies you want. Right. It's an intermediary problem when we know this very well. But about how it's used, whether it's for policies or for people, they very interface the fact that the voting could be online. Do you think it would be dangerous? First, it has two big problems. The first is that the 20 percent people who don't really have internet access might not. They might not participate. I mean, there are ways around that. We've heard that there are countries who's considering automatic Taylor machines ATMs as a voting boost that increases the reach of internet a lot. If you can use an ATM, you can watch the policy description on the ATM screen and then press buttons to vote. And it also doubles as a cheap, not exactly secure, but cheap authorization and authentication mechanism and so on. So what I'm saying is that if we introduce technology and the technology strictly speaking expands people's reach, for example, people who cannot go outside can now also a bit. But doesn't take things away from the existing people's mechanism. It's not like we're taking those paper ballots with a way any time soon, right? So as long as it's complementary, I don't see any dangers in introducing new vehicles, but I would say it replaces the original. Well, the problem is that you do have the security critical points. Their voting system is catastrophically vulnerable, but they're still using it. Well, they say that they have a few defenses, right? You can always override your previous votes. You can always go to the physical books and override your online votes and so on. Yeah, but even then you remember the team that... I do, yeah. Right, what I'm saying is that it's, of course it has a security flaws, but it was designed so that the flaws in one layer doesn't completely turn over the legitimacy of the whole system. It was designed that way. And I'm not saying that we're adopting the voting system. Because the thing is that that's actually, to answer some of your questions, or it's V, that's one of the nice features. It's an online system that doesn't have to be online. And I mean, I don't think you have time to read the documentation on that because it's long. Yeah, I have some some basic ideas. Yeah, there's sampling, there's this very interesting fake tickets. There's this washing of... Like basically making it, it's not paid too bad, but I got that main point. I haven't gone through the mathematical descriptions. Well, the mathematical, the really nice mathematical feature, are you familiar with three ballots? Well, the mathematical feature is that it's mathematically secure, that you can hack the system. And if you manage to hack the system, the best you can get, and that means that it's hard to get it, but the best you can get is the identity of the people who vote and not what they voted for. And you can't change the result. Right, exactly. Because it's set to a very, very far. Yeah, I understand that much. At least we've got the security parts. The thing that we tried recently in practice, and it actually works quite well, is that you can reach the people who don't have internet because we're in a conference and a lot of people don't. That's right. And the thing is that you can vote through a proxy, but without actually telling them what you voted for. And while being able to verify that they voted later. So you're really voting by proxy could be a very nice way to access the last 20 or 30 percent. And that's good because then you don't have to trust the ATM mission dealers. You just tell the people, well, if you want, you can vote online. If you can't, you can just ask anyone in your family or even come to the city hall. And anyone will help you vote and will not know what you voted for. And you will be able to check that your vote was counted. So I think as a way to do that, it could be the future of the problem that we have. It's that how do you get people to trust that? Very exactly. Because the usual way, of course, is the sociology problem. The usual way for a high-state election is that you get experts from all the parties and then they jointly witness the process and all your process beforehand. So it's basically delegating the trust to the parties, like five or six parties. But it doesn't quite work if you, for example, have one large party, one medium party, and several small parties, there's always room for an inclination. Do you know the error rate in the Paris Provalo voting? I don't know. Because France has one of the best systems. I mean, we really are secure in everything. And in the end, we still have about 10% of our accounting offices reporting errors. Right. So, I mean, but it's each time one or two ballots. So really doesn't change anything. But people really overestimate the ability, the correctness. Well, here we allow live streaming of the opening of the ballots, of the reading of the ballots, and by individual verifiers. So that doesn't happen as much. That is nice. When did you implement that? Last election. Which was, like last year. I don't think you have that. I think it's a bit too late to implement it. I mean, the election isn't a few days. Well, I'm not interfering with any other countries elections. It may come to that. That would be surprising. Okay, so, yeah, it would. But, yeah, the problem is that, well, online voting, people could be convinced, I'm guessing. But the fundamental of RSV is that you take a sample. You take 10,000 people. That's right. That's what allows you to have policy questions every day, if you want, because if you ask 10,000 people each time, they're random. In Taiwan, they would get one question every one year, meaning it doesn't matter. You can actually fiddle with it so that people have a reasonable amount. Like, there's probably a sweet spot before people have election fatigue, but also not too long away between two votes, so that they don't feel disenfranchised or left out. And the problem is, do you think that people would be ready to accept that? Well, they're doing that every day on social media anyway. What? They're doing this kind of discussion on policy, on social media anyway, with their friends and their friends and friends. Yeah, but having some group of people chosen randomly choose for the rest, because it wouldn't be their friend. It wouldn't be... No, but of course, these people's families and friends and so on, of course, will also be involved because these people will ask. Yes, friends and so on. So it still ends up being a society's discussion. Well, that's the goal of POP, is to say, well, even if we use RSV, which we're considering it, if we want to have the legitimacy of 10,000 people choosing for the rest, then the only way to have that is to have the rest informed for 10,000. And how do we get that? We get that by public debate. And you've been using police. That's right. That's one of the things that's really interesting. I mean, I looked how to set it up. Right. Identify the principal component of a diversity of high-dimensional opinions. It works well in practice. It works very well in practice. It scales to 10,000 very easily. Yeah, the problem is, does it scale to 20 or 60 million? Maybe. We're going to try that. Because that would be a... But I mean, the visualization is designed so that it does clustering and also allows you to see consensus among clusters. And because the system rewards people who can get more consensus in their groups and also rewards people who can propose things that are consensus among groups. And because we... How does it work? Okay, so it's... Well, just by virtue of being shown, it's just like Reddit, right? Right, okay. Right, so it's really not that magical. So for some of us, this is the over X case. And... Right, so far as we can see, the first thing it shows is the global consensus. And we can say that it's accepted by pretty much every group, except for this one, which has a little bit of descent. And there is always where I am. It's sad not to speak about it, but it's certainly a problem. But anyway, the point is its interaction, right? So if you click to a group, then you can see this group's consensus or this group, which has a consensus that's... Pretty much doesn't agree by this one. And this separate. And then this separate. So, and then within each group, you can see its consensus. But the majority opinion allows opinions that are pretty much everybody agrees or disagrees to surface to the top. And this is better in social media, because the social media kind to reward things that are fringe, like these, or these opinions. They become very loud. But this rewards the majority of the audience. This diagram, I mean, there's actually a metric in there. Yeah, sure. Okay. Yeah. It's very easy to calculate, because everybody can't propose a yes or no question. And I'm just wondering about the metric on that graph. Yeah. So basically what it tries to do is a dimensional reduction between everybody's pointing this high-dimensional space and then reduce it so that the principal component of a vector that's most representative of the most divisive point becomes the x-axis and the one most orthogonal to that the second stop subcomponent becomes the y-axis. Oh, that is. And that's it. This is very easy. There's no magic in it. Yeah, I'm just that. I mean, there is one piece of, could be magic, but then it's sufficiently classical. Sure, yeah. Which is that how it finds that biggest vector. Right, that the source code is there. I mean, it's written in closure, I think. But yeah, the math is pretty easy to go through and it's open source, so. I read a bit some documentation, but I mean, it's a representation of high-dimensional data, no dimension, but this is the vector base, the best one. I mean, because of course, they have to estimate the basis through algorithms, which I don't know how they do it, obviously. But it would be, is that a basis determination algorithm that just makes, I mean, it seems to work. Right, it seems to work. It's a game, of course. It seems to work if somebody proposes a new question that polarizes everybody, then that becomes one of the new factors in the principal component. So you can see the group shuffling just by somebody proposing a really uniting or a divisive opinion. So it's very dynamic. When this thing is ongoing, you see everybody's position changing all the time. Which, as a good psychological effect, that first is all your friends that's shown here. So they're not your enemies. All the preference, yes. So they're not your enemies. They just didn't talk about this over dinner. And the other thing is that it shows that it is possible to have majority opinion even among people who are very divided. And this part is the thing that we don't usually see in social media. Yeah, it is quite a favor of approval systems. That's right. That's right. Yeah, what happens is that you find a consensus instead of finding the best or the highest ranked. As long as people are honest. Right, so and then, of course, these are not anonymous votes. If you lock in, your position is shown to everybody else. So they have a kind of moral peer pressure to vote honestly. Because Facebook friends see it. All right. But that was the position I should submit. Now, by the way, that one way of getting rid of the inherent problem of ranking of approval systems is that ranking system is just getting rid of anonymity. Exactly. Well, yeah. I mean, are we ready to get rid of anonymity? For cases like this, of course, because it's essentially idea gathering. It's brainstorming stage, right? It's not decisional and it's not electing a person. So for brainstorming, of course, we can be. Do you know, I learned that recently about the French parliament, that we have, the people don't have secret ballots, except for a single reason. There's a single type of vote where they have secret ballots and it's to elect the leader of the Assembly for that matter. And it's, yeah, as long as you vote on policies and not people, it's reasonable. And if someone votes on something that might have been influenced or corrupted, then at least you know that they voted for that. Yeah, exactly. You can check. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I see the reason for, say, referendum to be anonymous, but for things like MPs or a small deliberative setting, I can very easily argue that it's the process of someone's position changing, that actually chronicles that person's ability to have a conversation rather than just forcing, like everything was dark room, the vote was anonymous, you don't even know how the debate went. Yeah, and I think that for elected members, public officials, anonymity is not a good thing. Because they have to show what they didn't do. It's good to have, say, private discussions, but when it's binding, it needs to happen in the light of the public. So, yeah, the idea behind this, to have such a platform where people can discuss, and not just that, but to hack democracy through it, by trying to get elected officials, getting people to be elected officials for that platform who are bound, by their word, to actually vote the way that the platform will be gathered and voted. And one interesting thing that Gesar Tishini, he's the person behind the idea, is that he's very interested in that, and it might be quite interesting, is that the person who's chosen as representative, who's elected, can debate all they want and fight really hard against the idea. As long as they vote, they have the freedom speech, but they don't have freedom of choosing what they vote for. They have no way of this, school of thought. Yeah, it's nice. But for that, we need a public discussion. We need a platform. We had one for the Republic of America. I know, and it's not open source. I tried to get them open sourcing it, but they didn't, so we ended up running our own. Oh, wait, how did that happen? Well, the VTaiwan system was open source, created common zero, like it's public domain from the start. But we really liked the Republic of America's ability to have a discussion, a sub-discussion to every single line of the text. We didn't have that. We had a discourse discussion board, and we manually kind of... You couldn't integrate that kind of thing? Well, that was before I was digital minister. So I went to France. I got to this night of ideas. I think that was last January. And then the new, these Republic of America folks, they were just discussing the Republic of America bill online at that point. So, and I saw the system. I thought it's a very nice system. And I checked with the developer, I think also last year when we went to the same... About the year. The Nesta event in the UK, in the parliament, where we talked about our respective projects. And of course, the Icelandic project about, they have this system where the pro-income are voted or ranked differently. So that you never reply to each other. Instead, you choose the best pro argument, the best common argument in the petition. And then the debate centers around the best cream of the crop pro-income argument. So it's too agenda-setting, pro-income, this idea. And the same person may propose pro-income. So it's not a yes or no vote, it's a vote of ideas. And then, but they were bound so that they must discuss the best, say, three pro and three common ideas from the platform. And I think that's pretty good. So anyway, this is open source. Our VTOW assistant, including politics, is open source. But the Republic of America system from France, not so much. Well, because they have a business model, I think, around selling this to local cities, customizing it and something. I don't really know. And it is a upfront cost to open source, something you need to clean the co-base or something. I don't really scrub the co-base. But we did adapt the best ideas from the Atlantic and the French system into the next version of VTOW and enjoying platforms here in Taiwan. So that in a few months, the Taiwan petition system will also have this pro-income interface and the VTOW system. Now has this line-by-line section by section discussion built in. We basically rewrote from scratch because we thought, yes, that's a better user experience. I think it was. The people from my lab were quite involved in that thing because for quite weird things, because they were against quite a lot of proposals because it put into law that, for example, a scientist, our work is as much as we have the freedom to share it however we want and to put it on our plan and such. After, I think it was six months ago. And the open access cost. Yeah, yeah. And the people were really against it for a very good reason, which is that it went against our current practices, which is that it was open access from the stocks. Exactly. And putting it into law, because in law, you couldn't really put from the start it's open access. So it restricted our freedoms by actually putting them in. Discouraged your current practice. Yeah, I saw that argument online. And there's one part of the Republic of America that was in the assembly version, that was removed from the Senate version, which is that all the regulations must be proposed online for 60 days or so of discussion between the proposing and assembly actually debating it so that the assembly can get input. And I think it was ultimately removed. But we enacted it last year. So we got that. So all the regulations in Taiwan now, that that was before I was the additional minister. I was just rallying for it. But now everything must be deliberated online for most of the time 60 days. What do you mean everything? So all the regulation change. And that is to say things that usually the parliament hear. They look at the regulations change that the each ministry proposes. And they have a right to basically put it into a hearing or a parliamentary debate for, I think it requires a one third or a majority, I don't know, to convert a regulation into a process that's like a law prop process. But they usually do it without a public debate period. So what we're doing now is for all the regulation and all the laws that affects trade, intellectual property or the law. There's not all the laws. But not all the laws because the laws already went through this MP debate period. The thing is that for regulations, the MPs don't have to. And indeed, they almost never debate it. And then the regulation takes effect after seven days or 14 days. What we're now doing. I'm not sure about the respective domains of what is a law and regulation. Okay, right. So a law is something that requires parliamentary authorization. Yes. A regulation is something that has a law already. And they authorize the ministry to make some rules based on this law. Okay, okay, I see the French terms are different. All right, sorry. No, no, I don't know how we... Right, right, right. So regulation... It's basically a variation on the implementation of a given law. That's right, that's right, that's right. So for the implementation regulations, the ministries did not actually have to ask for the public debate previously. And if they announced the regulation change, usually it used to take effect after seven or 14 days. And within those seven or 14 days, of course, the MPs can say, but we need to have a wider discussion. But they almost never say that. Right, so this makes it very easy for the ministry to push through changes. That may or may not be a good idea. Right, so now we're lengthening it to 60 days and mandating that for anything that's 60 days review period, it must be first posted on the online forum. And then the MPs can make an informed decision of whether to convert it into a new process based on the input on the online forum. So which I think it's very... What he very wants to find. How many people are among the citizens? I mean, does it have a far reach? Are people actually participating? Yeah, sure. We had some members. I saw that you were quite good at getting the people to do the thing by making it easy and taking a few seconds. I mean, how many of those regulations give rise to public debate per week? Right, so yeah. At the moment we have 114 ongoing regulation debates. So about two per day? About two per day, but over 60 days. So yeah, more or less. And then there's 127 that's finished. So yeah, around two per day, that'd be good. And then it's a lot of comments really. I mean, bye bye. This looks like Chinese to me. Yeah, but I mean at least you can see there's 13,000 replies. Yeah, I'm actually curious about the long tail. Yeah, well it is a long tail. I mean the first page is around a thousand or so and there's a plot to around hundreds or so. Okay, and so yeah, you've got maximum, you've got like 10, 15,000 comments. Is that comments or commenters? Comments, but also commenters I think because people usually just... Because the comment is actually very, very time-intensive. Most people just like the idea or not, which is a higher number I think. Okay. Taken together, I don't know, hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. You still have a potential problem with that, which is a democracy where the ones who are heard are the ones who shout. Because basically the ones who are interested. Sure, but they're not binding in any way. No, they're not binding, which is why it's okay. But you know if you just had a platform with binding regulations where people could just upload downloads, one of the most active users would have more political power. Yeah, which is what we don't do that. Yeah, the power still is in the MPs. But yeah, the people should inform them. Yeah, we were wondering about, for Pop, about between just letting the whole platform choose, which is a possibility, but then it won't be representative. That's right. It's representative of the members of the party, which is still okay in a way, but... And the other way around is basically to take a random sample among that, which should give the same, but also maybe half and half, with half going to the global population, which also has the added impact of maybe pushing some people to draw the movement, because they can express their voices and have an impact. That's great. Now, we still wonder how, I mean, I think if we could use similar stuff as police or not that, we could get a nice public debate platform if people join it. But then the question is, how do we get to the binding point and how do we make it fair? Right, if you start with just, you know, basically asking me anything, where you bind by having the most consensus and the most controversial opinions, a guaranteed response from an elected official, but it's not binding in the sense that they will vote according to this, then this is a software, right? It guarantees a response, a authentic, long-form, maybe a video, life-streamed response, but then you can delay the problem. You don't have to stop the representative problem, right? But still, it is a way to sway a politician's will because they will hear questions representing the things that they've never considered, right? So I think it's a softer bridge than jumping to finding votes. That's my personal view. Do you think that people would be ready? I think that is the main question that's been bothering me for a moment yet. Well, it's not that long, but that's when I started working on the whole thing, so I couldn't have been working on that longer. Do you think that people would be ready to accept the legitimacy of a random subset? For a jury, people have already accepted it? Yes, more or less, although we're going back on that. But you are? Okay. No, I mean, every country, I mean, countries are slowly restricting the usage of juries. I mean, Australia not rid of it, so did South Africa. And France, I think, restricted their usage to only certain types of cases. Right, of course, the non-polarizing ones. But it's funny because we don't have a jury system. We are considering to implement it this year. That's fine. You know what I'm saying about juries systems, which is that the problem with the juries is that they're composed of the only people dumb enough not to actually get out of it. And it's a bit sad. Right, so no, we're not going all the way of the juries doing the decision. We're just doing a judge, and the jury's finding power to the judge is limited, and how limited exactly is now being deliberated in the national deliberation. So I think it's at least a direction we're still in. What I'm saying is that talent's very much into experimentation, and if the form doesn't work, at least we're talking about how it fails for the rest of the world to see. Why is it that you're so ready to experiment and move forward? I'm jealous. I'm also jealous of your transit system. Right, and I think one of the reasons is that we had press freedom only since the 90s. The freedom of press, the ban was lifted in 89, and then the first crop of media was in the 90s. But in the 90s, it's already the era of facts, the era of international real-time news. The wide web came like four years afterwards, so the new media, there's no long tradition of traditional media, that the media came when the digital revolution is happening. So it's the same bunch of people doing political work, doing media work, and the same bunch of people who experimented with internet, and there's no traditional values of five generations of labor unions or something that tells the civil society or the media people how to behave. We don't have inertia, that's right. Well, we have more inertia than Estonia, of course they were founded after the internet, but we don't have that much inertia. Yeah, whereas we've been there. Where the revolution was invented. No, the bourgeois revolution was invented. Okay. I was quite impressed actually to see that Colombia is actually much older and has been stable. I think it's the same republic as was founded actually. Whereas France, at some point during 100 years, went through a bit more than 100 years, went through 13 major regime changes. That's right. And I mean we really can't decide. Although I don't know if you've seen, but quite a lot of people are calling for a new republic. Yeah. It will be our sixth. Yeah, every time I went to Paris, there's people who pitched this idea of the sixth republic. Yeah. I wouldn't interfere. Maybe that change can be more inclusive by using some of the technology. Yeah, because these things really, for me it's constitutional, meaning not necessarily requiring constitution change, but it changes constitution between people's relationship and the governance system, that's for sure. And everybody now, at least in Taiwan, understand that the representational system isn't that representational anyway. But we still need, of course, full-time lawmakers because they are good at it. So then how to balance these two, it is the question. One way I was considering was to basically, so you have a public debate, right? You have lawmakers using a system or like the public debate, because I don't know how the Taiwan works. Yeah, sure, but it's pretty similar. So public debates, lawmakers amend the law and put it in legal form, but the ultimate choice is actually made by a group of random citizens. So the random citizens are informed that by the debate, by how the public chose each amendment and such, and then the government says, well, the lawmakers say, well, we changed the law so that we didn't implement everything because, for example, that's what happened for quite a few amendments to the Brigham marriage is that they went against European treaties. That's right. And they don't have the political power to change this. So lawmakers change it, and then eventually the citizens choose and we cannot actually even go a bit further, which is if the citizens choose but the margin is too small, then it says, you know, we want the public to be sure. If you win by 51%, the following day you can lose by 1%. The population has changed its opinion quite frequently, not by much, but it also dates. So you want to have actually a strong mandate. And I think today, for politicians to get elected, they can't have a strong mandate because the whole political system is based around them winning by the closest margin possible. But you're remembering. Not remembering, which is hard on French presidential. Really? Well, yeah, because, you know, we have the, we don't have, you know, the level of scholarship. Ah, you don't have an extra college. But that's great. Ah, yeah, we do have some, more or less, gerrymandering with, you know, local elections and stuff like that. But it's really not on the same scale. But we do have, okay, I'm losing for a while. It's good. I understand the general point. Do you have a point? Yeah. Yeah, was that... We had this bill in the parliament called a citizen participation in constitutional reform procedure or law. And, yeah, very short. And the idea is for a civil society constitutional deliberation that's, that's, that's island-wide. And it's buttoned up, decides exactly the topics and the general consensus degree in which the members of the parliament are acting more as proxies, as you said, that they need to be bound as lawmakers just to translate these consensus into legal form. And then they need to do a good enough job so that it will eventually pass a very high barrier of referendum which will then enact a new constitution, essentially making a new republic of Taiwan. And the procedure was pretty nicely designed by constitutional scholars and so on. That the thing with this whole system is that it's not a technology. It's how many of the MPs and party leaders actually want to remember republic, which is why it's been sitting in the parliament for quite a bit. We have a problem with, I was discussing it with my boss actually yesterday who told me he saw some one of our major political weather TV or talking about sortition and attacking and treating the other with such disdain. And there's maybe reason for that is that sortition is basically the death of the political gas. Because once you give power to the people, ultimate power, maybe you have low makers and maybe they are elected. That is not absurd. But in the end, the real power lies with the people. And that means the death of the professional political. Yes, but what I'm saying in this constitutional reform procedure law is that it says that for each MPs district constituents, it randomly draws samples one man and one woman. And the overall assembly need to reflect overall demographics in age and in other criteria of the national population. So it actually mandates a sortition method that that will say these 146 people will... You say that it has to represent, do you mean that you check? Right, sure, of course. The idea is that I think it's modeled after the Britain Columbia in British Columbia in Canada where they had a very similar process before. The idea is that the MPs do represent the district. But in order to form this kind of button-up assembly, a random sample of a man and woman also from the district acts as a proxy, a re-presentation of the representative of the district's person. And these people first have a consensus. And then the MPs of that district, of course, can also participate but in the sense that they are merely enacting the legal translation of their consensus. That's very interesting. Yeah, I can send you the link to the law. I think it's pretty well written. It's just the political mandate of passing it. Is this in English? I don't know, but I think machine translation is good enough that you get the basic idea. Yeah, it's proposed to the parliament about exactly one year ago, but we haven't seen a political wing yet. I... yeah, okay, I have two more questions. Sure, that's fine. Or three maybe. The first thing is, yeah, here you had a bottom-up system. I mean, people called for such a platform. You had a movement that created... That demands this platform, really. Yeah, that demanded it. And you mentioned in one of your other interviews GOV as a consumer. And how basically the government has a need because it has needs. It has to answer to the people. And so part of your job is creating the tools for the government to answer as well. That's right. Now, do you think that you could actually have a top-down initiative because we're creating BOP? And there might be a will of the people, but there isn't an organized thing as big as what you have here. Do you think it can succeed? Like, you know, listen to the people, but the masses aren't really organized yet and propose a tool. Well, I think it only happens when the legitimacy of the whole government system is in crisis. Should I wish for a friendship candidate to be elected in France then? I don't know. We had a few who are very nice. Thankfully, one of them didn't get in our signatures, but he really wanted to send nuclear bombs. Yeah, we had one who, you know, within six months of being president, would have started World War III. So in any case, I'll tell you the idea of Mayor Cohen in the participatory budget when he became Mayor late 2014. He's independent. He belongs to no parties, just like our Premier and the previous group. Mayor of... ...Typey City, right? So, and famously, he said at the point that the whole city council is his opposition because we don't have a... We have a direct vote to the mayor and then we have votes to the city council. This is unlike, say, the French or Paris system where the mayor is simply the majority in the city council or the district council, right? And because he's independent, but most of his city council is partisan, it basically means that the entire city council doesn't have to listen or have to agree with what the mayor says. So by doing participatory budget and by doing all sorts of direct connection between the city public servants and the public, the citizens, essentially, his shortcutting, the relationship between an independent mayor and the citizens. And it did cost backlash in the city council, but it couldn't really overturn the entire participatory budget idea. So it now becomes, say, a kind of balance between the partisan. When you talk about the participatory budget, what's exactly doing about that? We have a participatory budget in Paris. Right, it's the same thing. Very, very, very similar because we also had a city-wide campaign and also every district sets its own participatory methods and there's a visualization, conveniently, the website addresses budget that I pay. How much of the budget is actually... And it is a percentage of the budget, of the city budget. Let's see what they are doing. All right, so it's... Mayor Kostar is saying for the first year it's going to be 12.5 million euros. Okay, 12.5 million euros for the first year. I don't know what that pays budget is. Well, it is, I'm just doing this, but I really should let it come to you later, do it. Yeah, so percentage-wise, it's 0.3%. But it's not fair because a lot of it is maintenance budget that the city doesn't have a discretion anyway. Right, so out of the investment budget, I think it's a higher amount. Let me get you the numbers, right. So in any case, it's accompanied by this diagram of how much went to the education and how much went to social welfare and so on and whether these things are... This is one project? Removed, yeah, this is one project. And not one PB project, one city project. Yeah, I'm talking about the circles. Yeah, yeah, yes. Each circle is a project? It's a group of project and then you can draw them and then look basically the entire report that they send to the city council. So for people who are interested in only the transport and so on, you can see the details of the entire city budget basically. But the idea is that during the PB, the first three weeks or so, this every single item had a discussion forum next to it so that people can ask questions. And after three weeks, all the public servants of all the cities of Bureaus went on and replied to every single one of them. So basically it's a Q&A platform for the existing budget so that people can be more informed when they're proposing ideas. Yeah, the people could propose ideas that are not already done, that are really innovative, and they know how to fit it into the existing budget structure. I am quite in favor of that kind of thing. I think the Paris budget is a bit higher in proportion. Yes, it's pretty high. It's a lot of money. It might have been something like 20% of the investment budget so I have to check it. Is something burning? No, maybe the 3D printer is not working. Yeah, so you said you had another question. What do you think of the potential impact of public debate platforms which are not public but which are private and run the effects of Facebook should the state try to regulate? No, there's always the private sphere where people talk about non-policy issues. It's silly to regulate people's privacy. But of course people use Facebook now also as a public discussion forum and it's very hard to draw the line. And people get information. We saw people talking about Facebook news at the Saturday's meeting and major tech companies control the information in a way which can completely change the budget debate. Of course. And then which is why they are also now self-regulating because they don't want to lose legitimacy all together. So they need to put some balancing fact-checking next to the news and so on. And we welcome these efforts but we would not say that we regulate these efforts. It would be silly. Of course by fact-checking they need actual factual information in short one URL per fact form and so on. And this is something that the government can help preparing for things that we originate. But we're not special in any way. Any effective party anyone who says they are being defamed or all should be empowered to create this kind of instant clarifications. And but I think ultimately it's a matter of self-regulation and the thing that we have and the Facebook doesn't is that we are we have the potential to be a recursive public in the sense that our platforms rules our platforms constitutional principles and everything it could be affected by people's input and our algorithm the policy visualization everything is there for people to change and they did change it. And I think in the long run it is it may be more effective than Facebook but but we don't know so it pays to try. One thing is that I'm afraid of such technologies like Facebook or Google and I think at some point there could be a role of the states to people it would be unfair in addition but at some point when the private power becomes too big it becomes hard for the public to keep it in check and one thing that is just to create an open source and viable alternative like what you're doing except your thing is just for the public deliberation but if someone were to create a state-sponsored search and indicate to Google that might be an idea to you know eventually give the ultimate control to the stakeholders because at some point it becomes a public good. Google is a public good because it affects society so much that it is grave if people can't control what's happening and if it's really close to your problem is if they finish this consistency of Google partially relies on... Well I don't know I mean personally I used .build but in any case I don't think it's just algorithm though it's the user contributed content that allows Google to to see what's important and what's not important is the data also not just the algorithm given exactly the same algorithm but none of the data that Google gains by their telemetrics and especially user input it wouldn't be possible to to tune the algorithm as they did. I mostly meant to like the problem with Google algorithm when public is that people could you know change their website to game it and that's like it's harder to game when it's secret problem is you know it's easier to... Well but I mean they have incorporated so much machine learning component in such that even if they publish the algorithm but not the the actual models that's being trained it's hard to game it anyway because it's just like an alternate form of intelligence now and and we can't very easily get a human understandable explanation of why it thinks this way. Well we can get a printout but it would take 500 years to read through it so yeah. Well I think that's our time. Thanks a lot. It was very enjoyable. Yeah and giving me the opportunity to spend some more time in the tunnel.