 how are you pretty good it's 8 p.m. here and it's afternoon for you yet is it is just had lunch so where do you want to start where do I want to start it's probably the question the catalyst is that I can't yeah I think I sent you a document about the catalyst there's been many catalysts and given where we are given the the huge issues we face a lot of the decision-making seems to be not just here but all over the world it's firefighting and so it occurred to me that if we when we make a decision if we looked at the causes of the of the of the issue that we're trying to treat well the first one is actually ask that question what do we trying to what we trying to solve because quite often that that doesn't get asked so if we stated the issue rather than just come up with the solution out of a vacuum we might understand better why we why our solution is tackling that issue and if we then if we if we stated that issue it then might be possible to say well actually is there any other way of dealing with this issue and we've got one in the UK at the moment where we've got a housing crisis so this is a probably a good example and so the solution is to build more houses which sounds obvious until you start looking at the real reasons why we the housing crisis actually it's because houses are more expensive people aren't be able to afford the houses so then the question comes why they more expensive and so on so so it occurred to me that if we actually recorded and publicly recorded the issues we're actually trying to address and because what happens when it comes down to to my locality we the experience we have we just get a new a new housing development and the only thing we can do we can really do as a jet we've got no choice to do anything else or accept and so there seems to be a disjuncture there so and and this is a parallel with this when there was a competition I don't know whether you knew about the global challenge challenge yeah to to come up with this with an alternative to the UN well lots of questions to come up there when you're not going to create an alternative out of again out of nothing so and I was referring back to the sunflower moon the sensible thing to me is seems to be to create another platform where you can actually discuss the same issues or similar issues the problem of course then comes is that generally I don't know I don't know Taiwan I think you're probably more engaged in the UK the general population and very disengaged with politics because it's just one of those things that happens and we just put up with it so that's that's possibly an issue but when you've got a local problem like we have with these so so put in context I live in a village with about 850 houses and it's evolved over the years so we have we don't have roads we have lanes and they're the width of a good tractor so one the modern tractor completely fills the lane and so we've got 850 houses connected with these lanes and there's a few you could arguably say two two lane but most of them are one lane because they've got cars parked along so there's there's a restriction there with the infrastructure and we are currently fighting 250 houses extra and it's just not gonna and it's not gonna work but we've got no no alternative we've got no way to debate an alternative and when you discuss it with local people they say well what can we do as well at least we could just plan what we want and present at least we've got a starting point but we don't even have that so there's there's a there's a gap to my mind a gap in our deliberative processes not just for the way we deliberate but in the places and how we deliberate so the sunflower movement was a great example of how it might be done differently so I set up a group to to have a look at this challenge using the sunflower model as a mirroring and then we needed a decision-making process how we're gonna make decision so that's where I came up with this let's let's try and hook it in with this system you familiar with systems theory yes yeah so so if we hooked it into systems theory and we could then get a bigger picture and say well actually why we what are we doing first and why are we doing it and then when you've come up with a proposal we can actually examine that proposal and say well what are the effects of that proposal what are the knock-on effects the unseen side of things and and if we record them then we can debate them late at a later stage we could actually invite experts in because we're going to find places where we don't have knowledge most of time and so we could we could then have this deliberation get as far as we can and then say well we need we need experts we need to understand the data we need to find the truth because there's what tends to happen in these and we've had a few meetings recently they get very heated and people come up with their version of why it's blame it on the capitalists the immigrants the lazy folk whatever some so let's look at the actual the truth what is that what are the figures of what are the figures of immigration immigration what are the figures for capitalism and we know let's look at the numbers and within our community we probably don't have the expertise so but we can call on the expertise what came out of that was then if we had a deliberating process say in our village and we recorded it and we recorded it next to the as a structure that identified the systems that we're connecting to any other community if they came up with a similar issue could say as soon as they punch in land building housing shortage our deliberation can also come up and they can see what we've done and so that could knock on and knock on knock on knock on so that's I think that's the core of what what I'm trying we don't have the software I've been playing with the the schema I've got a background in linguistics and database so that's happy territory for me but again again you come up with how far do you normalize and how for efficiency how far do you do you normalize the data or how vague do you make it so that it still works so there's a place to sort out what's efficient and what's not efficient so that's it's the structure I've sort of got but I'm not sure until it's tried and tested I don't know whether it's the right structure and we don't have the software so lots of catch-22s and I don't know I don't I'm not quite sure how your the the system you have with the parallel mirror quite how that works and whether there's any prompts for where you're out of your depth and do you ask somebody else and how you how you work with all that more how you struggle at all well it's almost entirely dependent on the size of the group how well the group knows each other and how far physically are the group members from each other how their life experiences overlap there's three factors can almost determine the tool that we use to facilitate the process for tightly made groups like a hundred people or less who already know each other digital tools are just for archival it's just for recording as you said for like-minded groups or for follow-up discussions but what's really key at that scale is professional facilitation it is a facilitator that can get people into the right emotion which is after everybody share their life experience their story their narratives toad get into the sense of okay so we have very different life experiences but are there some common values and so this facilitation we found was the key to small group who already share some life experience my main work is on how to create empathy among groups who share no life experience at all who have no personal connection to speak of to each other and using language of experts of different domains and to kind of put them on a shared mind map so that everybody can understand the issue at hand but using the vocabulary and structure that they are comfortable with so it is a little bit like simultaneous interpretation but not between languages but rather between worldviews and so so that's the main work but for a hundred people or less who already know each other and share the same language like British English that's overkill to be frank so normally a like weekly or bi-weekly gathering a ongoing relationship plenty of food which people can bring by themselves a good recording or capturing device is all you need and the capturing device could be this course is pretty popular for very tiny groups Lumio is even better and so there are already ready-made tools for exactly this purpose for capturing structured data and the context so yeah that that's the main feedback I have because it seems that in your case most people share somewhat similar experiences until you scale up and then it gets then it gets more diverse or until there's vested interest with this which is an issue going back to my example here the the people that turn up in the meeting are generally the articulate the confident the comfortable arguably the wealthy that's not so true the last one is not so true but the I don't know the demographic is definitely not representative of the community and the question my question really my my concern really is how we get a representative form matches the demographic well I'm not sure about statistical representation because even if you do sortation and get a demographically sound part that's just the first half of the problem the second half is to get the people who share the demographic who did not get chosen for the sortation or invited to the quorum to somehow accept the result as something that they're willing to get along with that they're okay to live with because no decisions about it without us right so anyone who can claim to be a stakeholder but did not get discovered or was not drawn in the sortation or someone who shares their background did get drawn into the sortation but they don't have the rhetorics and oratory skills and so they lost their argument and so on all those different conditions may arise that makes the statistical representation void now of course if you compare it to the representative democratic system arguably you can say well but that's still useful input to the MPs and and to that degree everybody would agree like this is useful input this is useful agenda setting this determines what may be overlooked by the MPs and their crew or the city council and the crew to this point everybody will agree but if you try to replace even part of the policymaking or budget-making power of the existing representative system then just statistical representation or statistical representativeness is not enough because it does not factor in as I said the capability of propagation back to the community as well as the still unequal rhetorics feel of the people who did get chosen for the program you sure about that I'm pretty pretty sure about it yeah there's quite a few examples that I've personally worked with and we kind of went with the hybrid model where we get stakeholders experts so-called representative from communities deliberating in one room of maybe 30 people and have a town hall where hundreds thousands of people can watch the live stream of the experts doing the deliberation and so it's a one-way live stream because the town hall there may be people who want to protest there may be people who want to derail the discussion but I'm personally in the town hall part so so they can come to the main and make their point or make the voice heard on a pretty good platform for Slido SL IDL designed for this kind of real-time crowdsourced agenda but a smaller room which is being broadcasted to the larger room gets to focus on the discussion at hunt uninterrupted and so my role is like a I don't know ESPN anchor or something who explains what happens in the smaller room live stream to the larger room to the larger town hall people so that they know in their lay person's language what's at play for each play each move that the experts make in the smaller room but in this express room we don't mean academic experts only we mean people with live experience that are generally honored and recognized and so on and people in the town hall can see that they are group of person performing real-time and informing their discussion through asynchronous and online participation so that's one of the ways that we try to maintain both the scale and the quality of the discussion but still with this is rearrangement it accommodates maybe to one thousand people scaling beyond that we don't have a very good experience scaling beyond one thousand people we resort back to AI power conversations which is crowdsourced but it's almost takes only there's very little supporting material and so we can only do the problem discovery part and check each other's feelings in design thinking terms that's just first quarter or a little bit over first quarter of the first diamond but everything else that how may we questions and so on we still have to do it face to face there's some active research going on in virtually out here and so on but I would say they're not mature for this purpose for at least another two or three years yeah yeah yeah I mean the other the other problem is that quite often you you're in any technical solution cuts people out because they don't have the internet there's still quite a few I don't know what the percentage is but you know it's a measurable but certainly here there's a measurable percentage that just don't have the internet and don't want to have the internet well certainly you can bring the internet to them though you just organize a offline meeting and then make sure that it's well captured like we did in rural island we capture everything 360 video but we had to post-process it and upload it afterwards yeah yeah yeah so how do you bootstrap something like that from here well Taiwan Taiwan has kind of a very recent history with democracy right we only had democracy for 30 years so I still remember the martial law so for us democracy is a very new thing as is the war web and so because of this it's somewhat easier because people find that there's so much room to experiment with they don't think democracy as just some other process because this is a very new thing to us and in the UK as far as I understand because I'm traveling as I mentioned to Edinburgh later next week they share this model of the so-called highland and island development agency yeah which there's a lot of grassroots organizing but they still use technology but social technology to empower the local decision-making by essentially putting more and more of the building in the commons and have the decision-making power vested especially to the younger generation but also to people who are invested their life their career to the development the betterment of this region in general but just not to them personally and so I think it's been quite well known in the international social enterprise community as a web model but I don't know how well versed you are in this community organization I'm familiar and familiar with I know of it but like that and in some ways the highlands are probably because of their situation and the necessity they've needed to get the communication because they're very disbred out and it's actually difficult to get to be so they've had to facilitate it in some ways and in many ways they leapfrog the UK the rest of the UK as the England and Wales I don't Wales is actually there's some interesting things going on in Wales for much the same reason you know it's been margin isn't it's difficult to to get from from your neighbor to neighbor they're not all next door they're not walking distance so so they've had to leverage technology to actually get things done and the knock on effect of that is actually they've got a I think they're a more connected more engaged community with decision-making whereas in the bulk of the UK we just go yeah it's going to happen and yeah okay fine let me get on with the rest of my life and people are disengaged I mean worse than that that they're probably because the only the only thing that they know how to do is to object that's we tend to do that all the time that's how modus operandi so the unfortunate side effect and going back to the situation here is that the local council we have parish council which is the very local council and then we have the district council which is next to no other and they're both seen as the enemy so that's not helpful and it's we to my mind we need to find some way to to to break that them and us so that it's just us that's not them as well so have anyone in the nearby civic council or whatever tried for example participatory budgeting or any of those new devices that connects the the people who object with people who make the decisions okay not not what I'm aware of well then then I think the most practical way is just to find a friendly or at least attentive person with facilitation training or with social work training that often helps and so on in the local city bureaucracy if the council is not helping often the career public servants are sympathetic with it but I mean they're largely anonymous so they probably would not come out and just say you know I think there should be more lurking engagement but surely there must be someone in a correct position to start piloting a a dialogue to break the ice so to speak you can import facilitators from anywhere even from the highland islands but it really needs buy-in at least from a career public servant in the city to start even turning the wheel so to speak if the council as you mentioned is generally seen as the enemy at least some people would still trust for example people working in the I don't know statistics department people working in the planning department and things like that because they're career public servants yeah I think the problem I'm like I'm guessing on on um if a problem's looking ahead I'm not looking for problems but I suspect that the I don't know if it'd be an interesting one to to because I can think of a couple of names and I think they might feel be interesting to try because they might feel they might like conflicted interest conflict of interest not sure that's that's a good one to to look at yeah I'm not talking about forcing them to make a change to the decision-making process I'm just saying building a report like like just trust between people yeah that's a good good point so I'd be interested to hear what what are your thoughts about the sort of system side of it and because I see that as quite important as a way of of explaining the bigger picture to people because we are faced with some huge issues that most people I talk to go well what can we do about it and they don't think there is there is I think you know the only way we're going to do it do anything about all these you know pollution climate change you know there's a the list the list is big by diversity and they're all connected and they seem to be so big that we we can we can we can we can't do anything about them and so it's left to governments to make agreements and we can we've seen what happens when someone like America for example pulls out stops so how you know I'm because I'm thinking if we had this had a system like the one you've got and it was scalable and I think there's the issue where you're saying about the scalable and how do you scale with because the only way you can I can see you can actually scale is to have some form of representation um at some level you're going to need because you can't just have everybody connected saying we we should do this and we should do that but there isn't some scaling where we can actually engage the public to understand the issues and then make and and get buy-in for the solutions because that's the that's that's the hardest part it doesn't it does I mean we've got well I think we've got more buying for example now with plastic you know people understand and that's due to a television program you know people understand it so now the tide is shifting a bit where people are looking at things encased in plastic saying well actually I'd rather buy that without the plastic so that it is happening but whether it's happening it's at the right sufficient speed I'm not sure well I think there's three kinds of scaling I like to mention there is of course horizontal scaling scaling out and you're correct in saying that there needs to be some kind of model if not representation outright at least some delegates like small world network to maintain when you scale out there's also scaling up which is a single message reinforced and more and more people join like in a traditional social movement for that you don't need that much representation you just need a actionable connected extensible message that that's all you need to scale up but of course it's kind of narrow it's not all the sustainable development goes here it could be it would be just one and a very single simple one at that like the I don't know ice bucket challenge me too or whatever and it's pretty good at scaling up right and there's the third dimension which I often mention is scaling deeply meaning that in places where the cross-sectoral relationship is absent or toxic one can scale deeply meaning get fellows from each sector relate to do that problem to be in the shoes of the other stakeholders at play by just shipping people around having fellowship building report sharing food and so on and that scales in a deep way meaning if you have a for example university that inbox on a social responsibility program that have their students solve social problems as part of the course then it actually determines how those students view the world down the line maybe for the next 30 years or so and ceiling deeply early works of course informative yes because it's very hard to change someone's worldview without resorting to like existential level stuff and that's also works so I'm not saying that adults are hopeless I'm just saying it's much easier if you start your base in basic education in the college and looking face that right I mean I'm 37 now so I'm hopelessly optimistic I don't think anything will change that as part of my core personality but what I'm saying is that that's because I joined the world web and the open source development in its formative days and so that ethics I carry with me no matter where I go and that's what I mean by scaling deeply and so I think education is a large part of it but it's not education system or institute per se but just getting kids in the habits of doing meaningful environmental and social work and identifying with the purpose but not the instrument or the skill of the tools and that's the third dimension I would like to mention which also skills but you just need to wait longer yeah yeah yeah yeah that's that goes back to the education thing which again you know takes time doesn't it I mean part of my thinking with that with the process I've been designing is that if you if you collect a lot of people say we've you know we've got an issue say with housing take this example it's a real example and you actually then say well okay what what is the causes of this it gets people thinking and it's a form it's a sort of critical thinking but at a very basic level um but once that started and then you say well okay well so you think that's it doesn't matter whether it is the cause so much but if you think it's the cause then we can discuss it you might want to want to discuss it with um so say we are you familiar probably familiar with with world cafe in open space so so world cafe does have a they both got the different advantages at world cafe is quite useful in that it can help people who don't feel comfortable in large groups to to actually participate and get little discussions going there so once you start looking at the cause and you can say well okay what's the cause of that and this is the socratic question and and until you get you could ask them or say well you know when we're doing this this this discovery until you can get back to nature says it so then you can find a cause that we can do something about perhaps depending on the circumstance and that that opens up a lot of a lot of thinking well actually what we've got now is not necessarily a given so what could we do to make it better whether we can is not so much important but it's the education the understanding and likewise and they say when somebody comes up with a proposal you say well what are the what are the knock-on effects of this proposal what are the actual what's actually going to happen you know the cost consumption and materials and the societal harm necessarily and so on and so forth so it's a form of education to me I mean again I don't know I've never really tried it yet that's worked but I have tried it it's not worked but that's in my in my defense I tried it as a as a for a protest group I mean you've got a protest it's all we're going to do as a test they don't want to hear the other side so I think in a if you if you can get it neutral and say okay we've got this issue let's just have a get all the people to talk about it and once you start looking at the knock-on effects of the proposals you can see because we're you know we don't have much room for maneuver now whatever we decide to do and I was looking at a thing today about Greece they've got a smart city and there's all they're doing all sorts of things and they all sound good but I'm just thinking about well actually some of that doesn't sound too good sounds like a good idea and good fun but where's the power going to come from where's the people going to come from we know where's the employment going to come from because that's a big issue and so there's all these knock-on effects if you get automated vehicles you've done people out of a job so it's it's it's I think the structure would help people understand the situation as much as the bigger picture yeah and then if my office in Taipei is called social innovation lab we have autonomous vehicles on trial and it's an experiment and they're tricycles they're just slow-ish tricycles and I live just close to this Jian Guo flower market and they solve a very real social problem which is elderly people strolling along the central park of Taipei at the Dan Forest Park go into flower market bought a lot of flowers pots and things like that and they're kind of heavy but they don't want to rent a taxi because it's just you know 15 minutes walks away and and they they want to keep shopping right they don't want to be dragged down and so there's just so much they can do with the autonomy without enlisting I don't know their grandchildren or something so so having a tricycle they're just accompanying them and you can just put stuff on it and at the end of it you can just hop on it and drive to home it's actually very helpful I don't think it made anyone lose any jobs I think it is a purely socially beneficial device uh yeah but I think it's worth asking the question so so you so I don't want to go necessarily on the specifics but so on that particular one and you you actually said they don't want to ask their friends and family so there's a connection they've lost they've lost a reason to make that connection so that could have a knock-on effect no but if they ask their family but their family is just there to help picking and carrying stuff then they can't do as much as real conversation as they would do if they have invited on a normal a company trip you know it this is that taking the trivial part out of the connection because I don't think that the grandchildren or teenagers are very happy if they're just reduced to you know a carrier or something yeah yeah yeah so that that's what I mean by by kind of equalizing the relationship between humans uh by automating part of the work that is not a seen as a desirable job but as a kind of I don't know uh filial piety I I know this concept doesn't quite mean as much in the UK but yeah um something a obligation to your family so so it makes the family dynamic more more dynamic is what all what I'm saying um so I don't think it really deprives any social connection but again we're just on field trial here but what I'm going on is because this is open source technology and the local students loves to modify the build and it's slow enough it collects useful data open data but it doesn't hurt anyone even if it runs into something it has the right to road as any pedestrian and so we're basically saying you know these kind of automations because are the key to deepen the understanding between AI and collective intelligence and instead of seeing something that you know pulls them apart it ties them together it may may not be the perfect example but it's the one that springs to my mind but you understand what I was saying about asking those other questions that you know it's useful to ask them because it's very easy to get beguiled into thinking this is wonderful very much so so so we really need to do quantitative studies before and after and that that's why we run experiments yeah yeah um all right so so given what we've talked about how how can we and apart from this apart from the um the human side where I can I can find the right people to I mean facilitators isn't so much a problem because it's open open space technologies there's enough people understand that stuff um probably to be able to you to to get somebody to facilitate that's less of an issue um but engaging with the authorities on that I have to give that some thought um the deep thing is is the long-term thing um is if I am going to use this structure with um issues causes and effects proposals and effects ratings is how because you mentioned Lumio it has some of that but it doesn't have that structure um it's getting the software to what what software would be available to you I mean I the only thing I can think is to build something from scratch well um we're we're working on some early prototypes the one we actually use day to day is called real-time board but real-time board is just post-it notes online collaboratively uh and so it all depends on how you organize those post-it notes uh and that takes skill uh and we use the actually the policy lab uk um policy making toolkit um and and their way of using the post-it notes uh so at least that's something that your government invented and therefore should understand uh but I think the policy lab people um the policy uh toolkit the lab developed is worth looking into if just for the shared vocabulary because as career public servants they are kind of required to know the stuff uh that's policy lab uk um and um we're developing ourselves as you said in has quite a few software to automate the process of just putting post-it notes of the right color on the right points to connect the course in fact and effects and stakeholders and so on and there's currently two efforts in Taiwan but they're both I think being developed in a kind of early stages one is called sense sense that tw which is just you know making sense of something so sense that tw um and it's trying to basically link um I don't know whether you know the idea of web annotations uh which is a web standard that you can take a pdf file a local development planning picture a website whatever n-star highlighting and annotating on any part of it without the support from the site administrator it's overlay right so what it tries to do firefox plugin that does that that does exactly right so sense is trying to turn that overlay and mark it with the causing the effect lines as you said and make a mind map out of it so you can have a bird's eye view but you can also zoom in to the actual sources where there's um evidences or uh fact or whatever are being presented and so that's sense tw's project structure again the the the the thing I think the first thing that comes to mind there is that affected you've got to create the back to the curated library thing which is great if you've got lots of create curators um and what I'm what I'm sort of aiming for is this the process is self-curating yeah um so the the other thing is uh wikam wikam so it's like wiki and a foreign so so so it causes self-wikam uh and what what it does is that you take a unstructured conversation as you said lumino discourse read it you name it but then it recursively enables people who participate to build mind maps that summarize fragments of discussions until you have a bird's eyes picture so unlike sense tw it doesn't come from library or citational sources where it comes from a live dialogue uh that takes place in a threaded discussion uh and the author is now working on putting the same technology to slack which is kind of different right because it's real time and it's far more back and forth than a forum which uh it tends to be self-containing but if they solve it for slack then it also solves for capture transcript of face-to-face open space technology because it's like slack if you type it down right so so wikam i think it's also something you can look into that that's just to wikam wikum kum yeah come across that don't you it's from emmy chung yeah so yeah wikum i think i think the you know i'm i'm old school i'm xml schema you know that sort of technology where it's defa predefined um which has its issues obviously if you pre at some point you have to define your category somewhere along with that eventually you've got to you've got to give them field names somehow and that's the conundrum whether you start with field names or whether you have a general concept field fields as opposed to field specific field names and i've gone for the specific field names in a sort of general sense so the specific field name would be issue or actually the specific field name there would be point of interest type as issue so because they're all points of interest on the on the system or a circle so it's fairly fairly generic and the other going the other thing i'm i'm hope if it if i pursue this which is another question altogether um is that you could have a place for um somebody who comes up with a solution for an issue and says well i'd like to store this and and enter it into a database so that so that people can actually use it and benefit from it and they could do that too but it would ask them what issue and what what cycle it's what part of what cycle it's trying to address um so that it could actually act as a sort of potentially global repository there's what there's you know i could talk to you about it for hours but um there's there's the other aspect or another aspect of it is that um going on this like the domain name registrar's model you could have multiple registrar's of this data who could do their own manipulation of it if they wanted to examine it in their own way or even if if there's a because again you and i are talking from a from a place of a democracy there are places where they don't have democracy and it's it's not so easy to do what we're talking about so the model i i i think would work in places of slightly more or more strife because it enables communities to do it in a sort of protected way so they don't have to connect to some central server so they can actually run it from their smartphones and then they can put it in one of these repositories and they can learn from that sort of so so is there other aspect of it which i can discuss if you want to but yeah i have a bunch of friends who's working on it they call themselves the secure scuttlebutt consortium they're in new zealand and they're doing something that's well i've pasted you the link but the idea very simply put and i think mozilla has some support of it now but it is exactly as you said a distributed secure offline capable land enabled peer-to-peer social network and and they have built a lot of infrastructure so that you can do git development on it and if you can do git development on it then you can do everything really because then everything else on top of it is just a overlay and so if you want to build an implication this this could save you some time is what i what i'm saying yeah certainly would i mean and again you know that could be set if they could my thinking is that they could output their meeting data as an xml file validated against the schema stick it anywhere on any public space and then the the bots if when they arrive and when some people build them can search for these xml slugs incorporate them and they've got the data right right and so the schema we are using for our deliberation it's called akamantosa which is a proper xml vocabulary for parliamentary legislative and judiciary documents but it just so happens it can work for deliberations as well and the primary the flagship product of the akamantosa movement is also a uk product called say it and say it is in my society project and i keep all my meeting records in say it and and i think the the good thing about this is that just as you said if i have a meeting transcript say this one i just append dot a in after it to get the xml representation and so it people are not restricted to the visualization people can do a lot of cross culture even comparisons like compare between constitutions compare between judiciary decisions and so on based on the akamantosa vocabulary so there's also a useful foundation to build on give you a link to mine and i mean this is very early very early days so this is this came from a hackathon in capetown meeting which again it was it was very linear and it was it was done in in discourse actually and put in an osc days but it was a used discourse within that and of course you lose stuff it gets disappears so that's that's a bit styled at xml so then what you're what you're viewing on you'll probably see if you view source and see it's got yeah i think this is pretty good as a as a way to capture the um proposal at the issue level i think this is pretty good and i've got to give you a i've got a document i can which i've been playing with she probably explains a bit more i mean it's interesting it's very interesting talking to you because there's this is the first time i've talked to people who understand seem to understand the biggest bigger picture of what's going on um and i've done this pretty pretty much for a long time in a in a sort of vacuum so um yeah i called it climate change because that document on have you eaten it i'm sorry have you eaten i'm not holding up your supper no it's fun yeah i eat um xml pack suit that's good because most people get xml it's dead that's right which it isn't it's very much alive it's just not visible it's just become you know like democracy in the old democracies it just functions in the background yeah i mean in many ways i had i had a sort of a useful grounding in because i started with postscript um trying to do stuff on printers and we've come across postscript it is that postscript is actually that where pdfs came from as the pre pre pdf is just an encapsulated version of postscript this is before the web and then from there i went straight into xml because i was trying to do something with the mobile phones and they had a thing called wap again disappeared um technology overtook me yeah i i started coding in 89 so i still remember the days before the web yeah what were you coding in basic back at the time well logo of course but also basic yes well i've got friends who started in assembler hmm which is a which is a form of madness and i think yeah i learned that much later it's not my native language yeah i don't remember punch cards either so we're the relatively personal computerized generation well i think i mean we're we're digressing slightly but there was a very interesting jack called richard feinman probably heard of and he fought for a while to keep one of the old computers going that was that was analog had an analog weather computer and for a long time it was much better because it had no the steplers because it was analog and i think that's this there's a there's something there that i think we might have missed i think there's a there's something useful there about that um because digital is always there's always steps somewhere you could have defined your resolution whereas analog it's it's at an atomic level you know i don't know quantum level i don't know what level this it's it's very deep i've i've encountered a fabulous education tool i don't know whether you know it or not it's a computer game called democracy through um no you're no you are kidding me and its user interface is like 80 percent the same similar as the document as you just sent me it shows through green lines reinforcing causing effect through red lines a negative externality and the speed corresponds to how fast it's affecting other externalities and it has a very detailed policy model after populations are affected by policies and you can also add on some you know downloadable parts such as social engineering or clones and drones or election nearing or africa so i i felt this as an extremely good education tool so much so that i made a model for taiwan using our national development council's data just so that i can explain policies and i think this is a good way if not accurate for actual policy making to get everybody on the mindset of system think yeah yeah yeah that's that's very important i'm the thing i haven't mentioned which actually i'm not sure it is entirely relevant and tell me when you when you've got to go because i could i can talk to you for another couple of days i think um is when i started looking at this thinking well um and it got i i like i like to go back not quite to assembler but somewhere close so looking something i need to i like to like to um like to uh there's a ligma grab the google link um understand the you know the causation as i said so when you go back and you go back and you go back and i think well you know let's look at our history and most people go back to the poly and the polyonic they might go back to the middle age they might go back to the dark ages but actually if you to see where we with the inflection the inflection point is 10 000 years ago and there's an awful lot of interest i i i think i don't know whether it'll be of interest to you but there's an awful lot of changes and there's a couple of books i can give you some books as well if you want to illustrate what happens and it's a mindset thing you know so we have this we have this sort of duality of um nurturing empathy and as you were saying about getting getting people on board in that frame helps in the meeting otherwise they're competing for their square or their circle space or their whatever and and they don't know they're doing it people don't know they're doing it they don't know they're in sort of war footing or or loving footing you know there's these two two footings and what happened when when there's lots of arguments about why we we went from agrar from hunter-gatherer to agrarian there's juries to that on that but what happened was that suddenly things had value and worth whereas they weren't exactly worthless before but they weren't ascribed a value could then park and say it's worth that much so my this year's harvest i know how long it's taken me how much it hurt how much the work in effort and so so in my head it's worth i've got a figure and i can see what the equivalent is and it's mine which is a very different mindset to um so so you were you were talking about in the meetings where people bring food and if somebody goes to a table and and it gets a plate and piles it so he can't get anything more on the plate he'll get looks from other people and he won't and and if he started filling his pockets as well somebody would say something whereas if it's if it's when it's converted to money and a token it's then not connected with any sort of emotional worth somehow it seems okay to collect it and hoard it and gather more it's a very different mindset so there's some there's there's some really interesting um um understandings i think from the from the bushman and there's a lovely another another one this is my this is my favorite subject and so do tell me when i'm boring otherwise i'll just carry on um there's a lovely story of say east meets west it's not east meets west but it's that sort of thing where an anthropologist fell foul of the sort of the the innate rules that he didn't understand um for this you know this isn't this is an extract from a book by a previous an earlier anthropologist where he he falls foul of the of the unwritten rules it's a lovely story and he should have known really but he didn't it's part of his anthropology he should have really understood what he was doing but it didn't he had to explain to him in simple words and they have this thing they call it cursing the meat which it's a way of as he as the previous writer um sus james susman um course calls it fiercely egalitarian so they are fiercely egalitarian they will actually um rather than just expect it they will actually enforce it which is which is unusual and i'm not sure you'd get away with that today and in our current culture it's it's sort of counterintuitive what does um many parallels in that um like recently a um like taiwan has a trade agreement with new zealand but within their trade agreement there's a parallel chapter between the maori people and the indigenous people here because uh all of the austral nation and polynesian culture they came out from taiwan so taiwan is likely originating place for them for the language and um the the cultures and in taiwan we have more than a dozen nations of indigenous people some still pretty much around and they have a like separate diplomatic track with the maori people so recently just a bunch of maori people came and to kind of visit their their heritage their their ancestry and i think part of the lure of this is that a lot of the culture you just described is fiercely egalitarian culture um in some nations it's um matriarchical so it's not without its gender biases but uh but with good um environmental um consciousness and the consciousness is uh permeating to everything they do not just uh for the sake of the environment but uh it's part of their part of their identity uh and so and so so all this you know is without the help of quote unquote sustainable development goals or quote unquote social enterprise because that's part of their national identity and so a lot of what we do here in taiwan is just to honor the the nations as they are and also unlock what we do um from a han ethnic very much currency financial trade oriented culture to the ways of living of the still very much living indigenous um people and i think um that is also one of the i think very useful ways to think about it because then these people they also all over polinesia and all the way to the madagascar i think all share similar lifestyles yeah yeah did yeah yeah well still do um and many of them are still like uh re invigorating uh when i came to new zealand i visited three times uh in the past two years many different places they're just revitalizing this because they realize that may be the shortcut uh the because their constitution is the treaty right uh so they have to honor for example the Maori people consider a river have a person who'd so they actually give that river legal person who'd so they can take place in you know board meetings and and things like that and i think all this helps us to answer more more there answer more fight the externalities more yes yes answer more fights the the externalities the negative externalities so that we can all see that we're harming the river which is not a river god like like some shinto belief that it helps to think in shinto beliefs and in maori i mean indigenous questions yeah i'm like i'm i'm i'll throw in a um a curve born into that lot because when you look at the the early migrations actually the ones that where the marries came out of that branch and the later than the native and native american branch they actually caused a huge amount of damage yeah that's what it's our what to do well it's not so much that i think it's because the the the the the tribes that are in that if you look at the megafauna loss in in africa it's far less than anywhere else because what happened that the megafauna and the humans evolved together so the megafauna in africa were aware of how dangerous humans were and they avoided them whereas and when they landed when the then how then humans landed in you know the in in asia and in in america broadly asia and america those two two migrations they found fauna that just didn't understand what humans were and they just well stood there and bang gone that's right and so so the the the the amount of extinctions that we caused in outside of africa is phenomenal yes and these and these are the early these are the early humans that's right this is premarie pre-average these these are pre those aboriginal where the aborigines came from i'm talking about maybe i'm talking about maybe four thousand years ago so it's already pretty late in in the game so to speak it's mostly cultural migration not actual human migration yeah because they because the bushman the calahari on that that sort of central africa stuff um that had taken hundreds of thousands of years to evolve to a state stage where they were in harmony in effect in there was no there was no such thing as an externality because if you didn't you died so there's there's a lot of interesting i think a lot of very interesting lessons and actually probably deeper there's probably interesting lessons to look at the different indigenous communities to see how in balance they are compared compared to the calahari yeah i think i i i've seen this word before it's a it's a pack of icons for the ubuntu operating system uh they just chose the name calahari to to honor the calahari people yeah yeah well i mean ubuntu came out of that culture so i guess it's yeah zulu language yeah yeah yeah and there's a buntu um social movement now as well which is reusing it i think in fact the buntu is a bit the word ubuntu has been been i've i've seen it used by social groups and weren't even aware of the operating system well they've taken a good thing i guess taking it straight from the zulu and appropriated again without being without realizing it's already been used and yeah that's a funny one because i actually helped somebody build a website and i said but you do realize ubuntu has other meanings to a lot of other people you know so they said you're gonna you're gonna lose that on the web if you if you search term is ubuntu because you would just won't be found it's like when sales force try to trademark social enterprise without being aware that it has a meaning in the uk uh and and then and then of course they they graciously gave it back because well there's just no way they're going to win on search engines yeah all right um i i think i i'd have to move on to dinner um sometimes sometimes i think we've got to the point where we're we're now we're at the water table what the water cooler that's right um so you okay was as publishing this video or yeah the video is fine okay that's great yeah it's been good to talk good to talk and ask any questions you want um down the line um because i'm still thinking that this this has a place maybe not so much i mean we could we could do without we could survive without it in the uk you could survive without but i think i still think it has a place somewhere and i'll explore it and see what what comes out of it no i'm sure it does uh i'm just saying well first you are not alone uh doing this there's many different groups of people uh doing this and the good thing about open innovation is that it doesn't have to scale right in in open source um the 99 percent of projects they just push on github and then and then disappeared but but i mean people just pick up and run with it and and that's like it doesn't even need to scale in any of the three dimensions we'll just talk about it's just there all right so that's one comfort that's right that's one comforting thought yeah good all right enjoy take care yeah have a good little time if you if you have if you want to meet up and when you're in london just just give me a shout out now hop on i'm sure i'm i'm still uh finalizing my schedule but i'm a legend yeah and be interesting to hear your your your take on the the scottish experience because i think you're going up there first and then coming down to london that's right that's right you're interesting comparison very interesting comparison okay well cheers then see you next time bye