 Hello. Can you hear me? Yes I can hear you now. Can you hear me all right? Yes I can hear you all right. Fantastic. Well thank you so much for doing this. Well I can leap straight into it so it's not to take too much of your time but you had from me the explanation about who we are and what the party is and so the context in which this will show is of course at our party conference and it's ahead of a debate around whether data driven technology can help create equality or is part of the problem or both things so that's the context and we'll just get a segment of this conversation for broadcast and we'll show you what it is obviously before we do. Okay this sounds great. So I'll have the entire recording right you're already recording and I'm free to publish it afterwards after you had your display and so time-wise I have two hours so we can talk about pretty much anything. Okay well we're certainly we're intending to have a much shorter exit but I'm happy to talk to you for longer because there's a lot I think I can learn from you so well thank you thank you very much. I'll begin as as for this segment now. Minister thank you very much for finding the time to talk to us today I'm very excited to talk to you because there are very few politicians who I would say are engaged in transformative politics and there are fewer still who are finding ways to harness technology to that transformation. I wanted to talk to you in the beginning about the sunflower mood there wasn't as much publicity around that in the UK as you might have imagined so would you mind starting by explaining the sunflower movement and your involvement in it because it was really something quite amazing. Certainly the sunflower movement was a occupant movement for 22 days in March to April 2014 and during those 22 days students and activists occupied the parliament and they did this for demonstration but not demonstration in a protesting sense but rather demonstration in a demo kind of sense and the reason of the occupation was that the MPs at a time were refusing to deliberate a trade service agreement with Beijing for constituents and so because of that the students did the deliberation for the MPs because they kind of went on strike so they occupied the parliament and did the deliberation with the people at the height of the occupy there's about half a million of people on the street and even more people online watching the live stream the real-time transcripts the various discussion boards and all the different products of this massive occupied movement and two things is distinguished this occupied movement from other occupied movements around the world. The first one I think is very important is that during the 22 days mostly nonviolent every day people converge a little bit more on what they think about the trade service agreement and this means that more than 20 NGOs concerning labor concerning equality of agendas concerning for example environmental protection and so on each had their own kind of corner around the occupied place but they were all linked with a kind of nervous system that channels all the consensus made all the points made all the people's feelings into a shared document that is shared by all the more than 20 NGOs in the occupy and the end result is that like cross-pollinating ideas people would just go from one NGO's boost to another over the course of the day maybe they will visit five different corners and at the end of the day people did a recap a synthetic document so by the beginning of the next day people just talk about other things but they did not yet have consensus and so that's the first distinguishing factor in that it converges rather than diverges and the second I think is equally yes sorry sorry to interrupt but so in turn there had been there had been a a dearth of democracy um you had a government that was not listening to the people and instead what you got through the occupy movement was not only people coming in to have them to make their views heard but you found a way of having a discussion that created greater understanding around the issue and greater consensus around the issue so you moved away from that that's exactly right and was that that's exactly right already and this is already using technology for this as well as live debate that's right so the second distinguishing factor is that we allowed people who participate in any corner in the street to view a real-time live streaming of what's happening inside the occupied parliament and there's also a live chat channel where people just type in what exactly they were hearing from the 20 or more um debate stations um so that people can just at a glance see what the topics are being debated as well as getting the consensus that's being made from this debate on the street and so this is a ICT technology but it is for enabling people to listen to hundreds of thousands of people rather than speaking to hundreds of thousands of people we often see social media or even television and radio used in a broadcasting manner that is to say it enables people to obey or follow the party line or to somehow you know get a talking points from one or two people with power but this is the inverse of that this technology enables tens of thousands of people to listen to one another and it enabled the people who did occupy in the occupied parliament to kind of listen to those people and get them their voice as a single voice so this is a deployment of what we call assistive civic technology that let people as points being heard in a way that is accountable so it's moving away from echo chambers and towards a way of a way of facilitating debate and a way of creating information which um you know sitting here in in England where we're now living with the results of a referendum which in some way looks like people power but of course was based on only partial and very polarized information is a very very interesting uh piece of history and and with an incredibly interesting outcome so so what happened after all of these debates so afterwards i think at the 21st day or so um the general occupiers as well as participants converged on the set of recommendations um to where the trade service agreement and um the head of the parliament the head of the MPs accepted every single one of them and so the occupy was a victory so the idea very simply put is that people want the treatment with spacing to be treated as any other foreign treaty to be deliberated by the MPs in exactly the same way and they're also called for a national forum on making a real-time responsive deliberation system modeled after the ICT system deployed doing the occupy so that people can look at any part of the budget look at any part of regulation and do e-petitions and so on so that they don't have to occupy again uh if some other controversial topic comes up and so during the national forum it was decided that we did a national e-participation platform called the joint platform and of the 23 million people in Taiwan about five million at the moment is using the joint platform five million five million people using it on a basis that helps form an active basis that that's right so about one quarter of people who can use internet of course that number can still grow but still I think we're performing much better than other countries and what was your role in this and you came into this as somebody with Silicon Valley experience which is also fairly a new politician yeah um so at the time of the occupy I was a independent consultant to a company called social text which is called a wiki company we make wikis we make microblogging we make a lot of so-called social media tools but for fortune 500 companies as well as large nonprofits in order to enhance their internal communication and make sure that the knowledge is captured within the organization rather than inside specific silos and so make basically would be something that's like um facebook plus twitter plus wikipedia but with the aim of getting people's things done in the flow of work rather than just keeping them on the website and watching as many advertisements as possible so it's the same set of technology social technology but with a very different goal in mind because it is deployed to people's you know business hours rather than off hours so that's my background I've been working with social text since 2008 so quite a long time and at the same time I'm also a consultant independent contractor in apple's theory team so I'm also working on machine learning on cross language understanding on semantic understanding and things like that so I bring my contribution to the occupying mostly by setting up the communication network and making sure that facts spreads faster than rumors now this is easier said than done because rumors have a way to provoke outrage and outrage makes people share messages even before they fact check them right and so the only way we discover that makes facts spread faster than rumors is to make facts fun is to make facts something that's interactive something that you can just type in your accompanying registration number or your tree you're doing and you see a very interactive graphics that shows exactly how the trade service agreement affects you and so of course all this are done by a wider civic tech community and my main role is just to maintain kind of the portal the information portal of the occupy movement and making sure that all the different endeavors that makes it possible to have informed discussion is aware of each other's existence as well as maintaining the back end infrastructure against the cyber security attacks and things like that I don't know of any other part of the occupy movement that's actually ended up in government anywhere in the world so you you actually you actually went from this this uprising this popular popular uprising to actually being in government and putting these things into practice from the top down even though what you're talking about is something with much more participation and civic engagement yeah it is somewhat comparable with the 15m movement in Spain where many occupiers at at the time was also becoming like Madrid mayors and also people in various important cities but you you are now digital minister so as I say you're bringing you're bringing all of this to bear as as not just something that is part of a protest but something that is everyday politics and that that's right because we see our dev demonstration as a demo right so now I'm deploying demo into production as we talk about this yes um when you were in Silicon Valley you also saw at close hand some of the difficulties with that culture you know one of the things that people worry about technology is that it's being made by a small and not very diverse group of people with certain ideas about what it can do do you do you worry about this as well and do you do you think that technology can be the answer to the work to the concerns around technology yeah it is a concern because at the beginning when we're doing the mobile version of the social text what we call signals which is very much like Twitter we didn't anticipate that it kind of has a effect on the habit of people like back in 2010 or so it's like if a person only installs one messaging system on their phones it actually increased their productivity but if a person installs three or four instant message systems it's like a cocktail effect on the mind because the mind would be constantly context switching and it actually from a mental health perspective puts people in a always adrenaline rush or a fear of missing out state that is not conductive to the kind of deep listening or deliberation that we were just talking about so we were part of the problem I guess and but we're I think also aware that it is possible to have technologies that reduce the demand on attention and indeed the inherent bias that certain technology has introduced in early 2000 I also participated in the so-called spam wars at that point people thought that email is helpless and email may soon go away because it costs nothing to send junk mail and with everybody's time and it also degrades the trust that people put on each other's messages around the internet but the solution to the spam problem was not a single top-down action a law or an act neither was it a single technological change neither was it at a protocol change neither was it a single intervention by any civil society rather it is all the different points that I talked about coordinating in a way that is accessible to all the stakeholders involved that every single action increased the cost by spammers just a little bit and reduced their expected reward just a little bit and taken together over maybe three or four years we delivered a coordinated action that made it much more manageable and now people don't complain much about spams anymore and I think this is one of the blueprints that I'm using in order to look at the manufactured addiction problem the inherent bias problem machine learning the people's distrust in general for example algorithmic decided outcomes and things like that all of it is much easier to solve if we get all the stakeholders on the same table in a continuous relationship and mapping out exactly what everybody stakes it and keeps it transparent and accountable just as we did in the internet society and related organizations during the spam war days so I think there are a set of technologies civic technologies that can help solving these problems but I don't deny that there are also actors that would like to maintain the monopoly precision persuasion for lack of better terms so this is an ongoing dialogue and also that if you are building these kinds of things it's very important presumably to have real diversity in terms of who is inputting to these technologies because otherwise they're going to reflect already and you talk about bias but there is presumably you would see a danger if there are too few women as as we know there are in stem for example that this this can replicate biases then in in terms of what is produced yeah when I founded my first startup in 1996 in Taiwan actually people majoring in computer science are working on IT and so on the gender ratio is very healthy it's close to one one so I think when I got online I discovered that the free software community the maker community and so on many women are forced to use male sounding nicknames not because they identify as transgender but rather they did is to avoid harassment and it's apparently a very important and significant issue on the western english speaking world and that took me completely by surprise because Taiwan is not like that so I think this is highlights a the importance of participation because in Taiwan we have different problems for example the indigenous people they don't participate enough in the design of everyday technology that affects them as are the other ethnicities because Taiwan is like 98% so the other ethnicities voices don't often get heard simply because of the language or the lived experience differences and so I think one of the main points in diversity is not just getting sufficient number of people although that helps like our spokesperson now is a indigenous women our president is also partly indigenous and she's a woman and not anyone's daughter or wife we think this is very important but rather than just diversity I think real inclusion means that all the different people participating in the end result of the designs such as for example in our k212 education would emphasize that people use technology to work with children they must prefer open source technology that is to say that students have a say in where the technology is doing like the access to machine learning and computation resources if there must be no difference between the city and indigenous or rural areas and things like that and also broadband as a human right what I'm saying is that it is very important to have diversity in the community that makes things but I think even more important is to have full inclusion in a set of users in a set of people who use these technologies so they can fully inform where the technology is doing and in in so doing democratize the production of technology itself thank you that's an incredibly useful way of looking at it and I'm interested if you have any particular thoughts about how we as a small party operating in a system that is in many ways stacked against us might use technology ourselves or think about using technology ourselves I'll give you one example there was a lot of concern here around the Cambridge Analytica controversy and what that actually showed although this again got very little coverage was not just about that one incident but in fact there are many people who legitimately provide such services you know where they get a great deal of big data around the electorate and they analyze it and they are able to zero in on what that means and the parties the bigger parties that can afford to pay for that therefore have an advantage when it comes to particularly in a first pass the post system in terms of targeting their voters so one of the things we have to think about is how we can be clever and do things do things that that try and mitigate some of these inbuilt disadvantages under which we we are acting do you have any any particular tips for us about what that might look like so in the Gov-zero movement which is not just about supporting sunflower occupies but also about making more attractive and fun open alternatives to the government websites for all the government websites that Gov-zero people don't think are useful or you know attractive enough they end in GOVTW those government websites and so like the legislative is LIGOVTW and so the Gov-zero people would just make a new domain name LIGOVTW basically by changing to a zero you get into the shadow government that is more attractive and more participatory and so one of the recent interventions that Gov-zero community did which get a lot of press attention is the councilor's voting guide which includes the mayor's voting guide because we have a local election coming up in about 90 days from now and the councilor's voting guide is designed to maximize the people's informed information before going into the voting booth so not only does it include all the voting records and all the you know political career over a candidate's career what they voted what they advocated and what are their disclosures spending and things like that but also it's innovates by if you go to your precinct or your region it lists all the councillors in a random order and with random color and what this means is that all the smaller parties candidates and all the independent candidates get as much the same coverage as the large parties in the voter's guide and they also crowdsource for newcomers their platforms in the form of a small short youtube video or they also allow people to sign in in their social media profiles and vote for the people they want and they even have some grants for people who receive the most number of people's likes and things like that so in in all these cases they act with what we call the ACE principle A means actionable it means that if you support a small parties candidate there's something that you can do with five seconds time there's something you can do with your five minutes time there's something you can do with five hours time that's the actionable part and it's connected meaning that whenever you do this it raises your relative status among your PS so that people would feel proud to endorse a candidate or to ask a candidate a relevant question or to make a summary of a candidate's position and so on that makes it social so that people see on their social media profiles all the time those independent candidates for example there is a so-called oba-san coalition oba-san is a japanese loan word literally means elder women and so there is a loose coalition of elder women councillor candidates who are all running for the first time that maximize the use of social media through this use of the councillor's voting guide and they're not just doing it on the internet but rather it crowdsources the agenda that people care about on the internet and hold face-to-face deliberations based on the topics that the people on the internet feel as important and that bring us to the third which is extensible extensible means like you know the me too hashtag nobody controls that hashtag everybody is allowed to add to it without asking permission so this kind of permissionless innovation also lies behind zero philosophy because the entire code the entire data set everything is under what we call creative commas zero which means no rights reserved everybody is allowed to take it to wildly different directions and to make mix remixes and re-remixes and so on and so we're already seeing a lot of local campaigns that use this as a canvassing tool and that develops a much more targeted way based on the collective information on the councillor's voting guide so but that's pretty particular to taiwan i'm not sure whether how much that helps you but this is how we're doing it no well i think that i i think there are some wonderful ideas in there how feasible they are i don't know just because you know different legislative environment and different cost base for these things but i absolutely believe that we should be exploring all of this and and seeing seeing what we can do because it's not it's not as if technology is going to go away you know so that's the other thing it's about it's about what what we see becoming towards us um what what do you what we can see is the as the sort of the technologies that are heading our way that might make a might make a difference as well so um in this um in the social innovation scene here in taiwan we're seeing a lot of work around mutual distributed ledges i try to avoid the blockchain world because it is just one of the many technologies that can yeah that can deliver a mutual distributed ledger right so that and the newer generation distributed ledgers they're not even using chains anymore they're using acyclic grav and so on but without getting too technical i think what's important is that it's a ledger that people can add to but not delete that people can audit but they cannot censor and that is the important part of it it's not the the ico part of it although i'm sure that people are interested in that as well but for my purposes uh what this means is is a relatively cheap way to build accountability to build something that people can reasonably sure that will not be changed or to be censored or modified and so we're already seeing it in use for example in campaign donations and even in disaster relief donations for example a lot of taiwan people donated to the nipal flooding disaster and people want to know that their donation is being used in a conscious and accountable way across many different actors in many jurisdictions and previously to buy this kind of accountability is very expensive because you have to hire i don't know kpmg or equivalent uh you know accountants in all the different jurisdictions to make sure that the numbers add up and it's pretty expert language and people cannot easily verify it by themselves so they're still doing that but they're now also using distributed ledgers to make sure that even if the crowd sourcing or crowdfunding like go away they can still reconstruct the entire accountability trail from the ethereum public distributed ledger alone and we're also seeing a lot of people doing public discourse this way because they know they will not be censored by editors they will not cave to pressure by you know powerful sovereign entities if they try to censor them just even attempt of censorship will be very apparent on the distributed ledger and is often a lost cause so it's also important to get people's voice heard in a way that preserve integrity so i think accountability and integrity are the two not often advised but i think it is actually a primary value that distributed ledgers offer us today much more than its financial potentials one of the things that strikes me about a lot of conversation about what distributed ledger technology which yes people here mostly know as blockchain would create is that people don't always think about the different impacts for on gender and the different ways this would affect us so for example there some women and certainly people from minority populations for example who would be very worried by something that that was irrevocable and which identified them and held information about them irrevocably because they have spent a lot of time actually trying not to be seen or not to be defined in a particular way how should we approach these different strains if you like in evolving technology where you know that the art you can see the beauty of something that can't be censored and can't be changed for in some cases but then it may have other unintended consequences that's right so the two use cases that i mentioned one for the use of public charity donations and the second for people's public discourse those two i think are definitely in the public sphere and not at all in a private or friend or whatever family is setting i would not advise the use of mutual distributed ledgers at this point in time for any actions that you just mentioned that has a privacy part in it i understand that there's many mathematicians working on privacy preserving so-called zero knowledge mathematics that they are far from mature at this point and so if people are intending to use distributed ledgers in a way that interacts with private data sensitive data that was limited distribution and things like that there are other cryptographic tools such as end to end messaging and you know publicly auditable forward secrecy preserving chat tools like for example personally i use wire but signal also has a lot of users and things like that that are much more useful than distributed ledgers for this setting so i think one part of literacy or one part of awareness is just to make sure that people understand the material of technology and the property that they uphold because code in this case is like law and not like jurisdiction law it's like physical law each different technology imbues with itself a different set of physical law that makes things easy that makes things possible that makes things impossible so i think one of the most important thing when we did our k212 curriculum is learning with the children how they want technology to behave and then make technologies or allocate technologies that respond to their expectations about a social setting and not the other way around many buzzword makers would like it to be other way around advising that is actually detrimental to the autonomy of people with various different ideas and different social reflections that seems to me a very important principle for anybody who is trying to make policy around these issues to to understand that aspect um can i ask you about i think it's called polis uh we were talking before about the ways in which you were able to find consensus from very strongly polarized viewpoints is polis something that we as a party could be using and what would it look like if you applied it to some some very polarized debates that there are within feminism for example yeah polis is great if you may use it as a agenda setting tool by that i mean that is surfaces what people's common values are despite their differences and it enables people to find possible solutions that follows those common values what is not so great is to work out the details of those ideas for that you need other tools um but the great thing about polis and other technologies that i'm sorry i'm just going to interrupt briefly to yes so polis i mean for people who haven't read or heard about it it's a it's a platform yes that right so so i'll just explain it very quickly um so polis is like a it's like a open questionnaire uh when you go to polis you're seeing one of the few what we call seed questions that ask simple yes or no questions about how you feel about one particular issue um the first time we use polis in towering government we talked about uh private right sharing in the form of uber x so for example the first time when one goes to polis one can see a yes or no question like i think um private passengers still need to have protection from accidents by commercial insurance providers and you can click yes or no on that particular sentiment and as you do so there is a face of the crowd uh underneath this yes or no question that shows the clusters the people who think similarly about things and you can see all your facebook and twitter friends if you sign in if you don't sign in you see random famous people uh and how they uh locate within the different clusters so perhaps there's people who care about innovation there's people who cares about safety there's people who care about insurance there's people text about taxation and so on then they will form different clusters and as you answer yes or no questions your avatar will move toward the cluster that most resemble your ideas but the beauty of polis um there are two um distinguishing factors first there is no reply button you can just press yes or no like upvote and download other people's sentiments but you can never reply to them so trolling at hominid attacks and so on has no place on polis if you can get 5 000 people voting exactly the same way there's still one dot in the two-dimensional map so it doesn't pay to troll in a polis environment that's the first thing and the second thing is that after you answer a few yes or no questions you can contribute your own feelings and the more resonance you have for your own feelings the higher the score is so it's still engaged people in competitive way that people compete to win resonance people across the aisle so it's just to win that that that competing to win people over to their viewpoint so it's almost right so basically like a game almost like a game yeah it is actually a game so just to make it more visual here is how it looks like i hope you can see the screen and so on the top you can see one yes or no question and on the below you have an avatar moving as you answer and you can see the cluster of people and after a few weeks we always see something like this where people identify the devices things that they agree to disagree but people spend far more time on consensus statements that they want to win over people from other aisles and other clusters and so whenever we see a shape like this which is always actually we always know that people want to spend much more time to work out the details of what they feel as important as everybody and it also lets people know that although there are a few like five devices question that tells people apart no matter which groups you are there's like 99 percent of people 98 percent of people who share the common values after all but on normal social media people spend it's like flip around people say most of your time arguing their differences while spending very little time arguing about their consensus so um is that is that platform something that that anyone can use oh yeah it is entirely open source and uh we have a instance running here in the taiwan national government um but you don't have to be a Taiwanese citizen you can still use our instance but you can it's easy to set up your own if you know a technological people who can set up a machine yeah as we've been speaking I've been imagining the very few people that we actually have in our in our team with their heads in their hands because I they know I'm going to come away from this conversation going we should do polish we should do polish should be um as you say the the websites that look like government websites but I actually have the information in them that the government websites don't you know but that all of those things we've found like a lot of work so my question to you is how how is this actually done practically who is doing the work here yes so um we actually start normally with a easier version which is not Polish and it's called Slido actually Slido is something that I use for all my public lectures and so I just came up from a conference called Tai Chi which is a Taiwan computer human interface conference and the Slido idea is similar to polis you go to slido.com you enter a number or a code and you get to start asking questions unlike polis there is no clustering there's no moving around but you can still like each other's questions and you can make things that people like the most flow to the top and similarly there is no reply button and similarly the only way to get something floating to the top is not attacking the current top question or top idea but actually proposing something that resonates with more people so Slido is best used in a town hall setting with 200 or 2000 people in the same room synchronously while polis is best used over weeks several weeks time so that people have more time to come up with nuanced statements so we often mix the two for example we will have a kickoff meeting where the people in the civil service people who care about this the activists the various stakeholder groups and so on we first do a kickoff meeting where we talk about how to define the topic of this conversation for example just the name private right sharing while charging people for it took us like three meetings to arrive to this definition for example we had another important conversation on polis where we again took two or three pre-meetings talk where we talk about non-consensual distribution of intimate images so like everywhere it was hotly debated because people want each stakeholder group to feel as comfortable as possible with the definition of the name and so for this kind of meeting we don't use polis we use regular teleconference or face-to-face discussion with deliberation facilitators and with Slido so that people can feel comfortable raising their points in those face-to-face meetings without you know the people who hoard the microphone taking all the time about it but then after a few such meetings where we then converge on the well-defined topic of what we can talk about then each stakeholder goes back to their group and we give them the same URL the same web address for polis in the same time so that people can share at the same minute and it's important because if people come to polis and they see like they're alone in one corner while 90 percent of people was dominated by some other infection they will be turned off and they will not share the polis conversation and so it's important that a balanced number of stakeholders gets the polis conversation at same time and we find ourselves saying after I don't know a month or so any popular opinion any resonating feeling that surface in the polis that's convinced a super majority of people meaning that in all the different cluster it convinced the majority the more resonating it is the easier for us to use this as an agenda for our next multi-stakeholder meeting which is usually live streamed and which the facilitator just checks the consensus from the people one by one with the stakeholders saying the people have spoken so what do you feel about it is this feasible it is possible if it is what actions are we committing to deliver on those shared values and so this is a three-part thing the first one is a stakeholder building trust deciding on exactly what topic to talk about the longer asynchronous polis stage which usually lasts for three or four weeks until we get a set of consensus and then the same stakeholders or even more stakeholders because people become aware of it after the fact go back to the same room live stream or at least take a recording or transcript and everybody responds just to the points from the polis that gets everybody's consensus and then we find ourselves into coordinated action so this is how often it's done in a v-time one lesson and then and then at the end of all of that you might have a vote on something in in the way that you would you would expect in a democracy presumably so you you go through this process of of deliberation and and moving people using both direct surprisingly um barely about 20 percent of v-time cases led into a law change uh in which case of course the parliament need to do uh their conversation and they need to vote on it but they mostly know that it's already the people's consensus so other than one case the other cases the mps just you know accepted the the consensus on polis but on the other hand the other 80 percent which is regulatory change policy change or even behavior change it doesn't need a full conversation by the parliament so just people committing to the actions deliver and work through those actions and they hold themselves accountable to it and that's it and so for many things like for example cyberbullying um what we did was not making a new law but rather making sure that each ministry and each department uh deliver their responsibility in doing um their part of work against cyberbullying and so it doesn't always lead to a vote maybe just one in five cases led to a vote you said you were using it on a consultation around the sharing of image of the non-consensus intimate images that's right images might refer to as as revenge porn for example yeah that's right uh that was the initial name actually um but then uh people um pointed out that it's often not porn and uh calling it porn actually um obscures the original image collection which was to show intimacy and not at all for arousal uh or not always for arousal it is mostly to show intimacy so people eventually change the name to to NCII um I'm neutral on this matter as I must uh but this is just how it happened in Taiwan so I think in NCII it's very interesting also because um people started talking uh on it as a primarily affecting women um thing but then we discovered that there's also um NCII cases uh around lgbt uh groups there's also uh NCII um things in basically anywhere that has a unequal potentially oppressive power structure uh NCII is used as one of the power vehicles and so while women are of course uh one of those groups they're not the only group and uh this is the idea of intersectionality right people are vulnerable on various different parts uh and and any um humiliation or any power struggle in any of those intersectional parts um can reinforce each other's um power when we want to talk about this saying this is wrong and we don't have to resort to calling it um you know pornography or calling it um indecent image or things like that because people need to have control of their own intimate images uh no matter which gender or which social status they are and so I think this is a more inclusive way of having a dialogue because stakeholders just um discover this conversation and then uh we learn about news stories that we did not anticipate that they are also victims of NCII that's completely fascinating um I am very aware that I'm talking to you for much longer than I intended to but um no it's fine it's fine there are so many things here that that I want to know about um I mentioned before your um your that you actually grew up in in Silicon or you came to Silicon Valley ridiculously young didn't you um well 19 is 19 is not ridiculously young uh I I stayed in Germany for a year when I was 11 uh and then one year in the valley when I was 18 or 19 um so so no I'm mostly based in Taiwan actually oh I thought you'd uh so I may be misinformed here I thought you had founded a startup very young I did I did uh when I was 15 actually that was my first startup and then a series of startup but no it was yeah well it got invested eventually by Intel and and was one of the dot-com stories in Taiwan but at that time um I think everything is very international and then we don't call ourselves a Silicon Valley company we're still at that time mostly based in Asia um but yeah it's my first startup when I was 15 right yeah uh but I mean I've been wondering um I'm very glad that you're in Taiwan and doing what you're doing but you know there was part of me that was wishing that you were in America maybe doing finding ways to um revitalize the democracy there right now yeah we we hope actually um workshops in New York City and many people in the NYC and actually also people from 18F from the federal government and we also talk about people from the U.S. digital service and and usual suspects and and I think um there's still a lot of people doing useful work around civic participation and open government especially on a state and city level because to think about it Taiwan is actually just a larger city the northmost city Taipei and the south in Gaosheng taking high-speed rails is just an hour and a half so while we're 23 million people admittedly is on a relatively small um geographic island uh which is why we can sit problem as a human right and so on but it also means that the technologies we develop um are mostly scaled uh to this geographic scale and to maybe uh five million people give or take and which in the United States is you know just maybe have a New York state or something like that so I think it makes sense to start our experiments and start our coordination and workshops and so on on this um self-ruling to a degree um cities or states uh in this kind of size sorry I just lost the sound for a second there okay well I'm recording my side of the sound so we can always stitch everything together yes no no that's good I just just at the end you froze for a second um I'll I'll finish with a question that we're going to go on and debate at this women's equality party conference and that's really whether um data-driven technology can actually help to resolve inequality do you have views on that issue yes strong views also um well good right I I I think data agency data as a relationship and not as an asset um is something that even with the GDPR many policy makers still have not um internalized uh this view on data um and and I'm not just quoting GDPR because uh in Taiwan the Privacy Protection Act the PIPA says the same thing it basically says if a organization or institution holds my data it begins a relationship where I can always ask what's happening with this data I can update it if they want it to be used in a way that goes beyond the original collection purposes I need to be given a chance to be informed and even update about it because the alternative is just to have a pale shadow of a um data-driven um simulacrum as me four years ago a small uh you know part of my behavior that would be extrapolated often wrongly about my current status and uh if we see data as an asset and not a relationship uh we will end up with the data that are there but uh are basically reinforcing biases not just from our past selves but also from past social conditions and this is very important to see that only a living relationship between the data so-called producers and so-called data processors and so-called data um users or consumers um they need to trust each other through a accountability framework that enables constant interrogation constant relationship between all those different people involved and only at that time can we get the agency of the people back to the people so-called producing the data for collection and I think if the people producing data or people collecting data are generally aware of this then they see them their contributions as in the comments for example in Taiwan we're now working with the Mozilla Foundation on a project called Common Voice which is basically us reading aloud random fragments of public domain text and basically informing the machine learning algorithm so they can recognize the different accent the different ways people use language even ethnic minorities indigenous people and things like that instead of forcing everybody to speak in an accent that most resembles whatever the original voice actors that the machine learning company is contracted with and so this commas that resembles the way people actually speak are entirely done by voluntary contributions and with the people knowing that they can also use the voice data in this commas for whatever purpose they like and they can also update it and reflect what they want things to to go through again democratization of this technology and if this is in the commas if this is managed by a social enterprise or a cooperative that everybody can openly join then this is seen as something that shares everybody's stewardship responsibilities but also rights but if on the other hand the collection itself is opaque if on the other hand the collection itself makes biased assumptions that people are not aware of not even the data scientists themselves are aware of then we get a situation where like we get a lot of food we feed it into a machine learning algorithm but there's no nutrition labels we don't know that whether they highest get overdose on one thing or another and then the data agency will be much harder to be built as a kind of ad hoc or post facto way because the mathematics is just not there yet so it need to be privacy enhancing by design and if people choose to contribute to the commas this is by their voluntary action and again the stewardship need to be designed in the beginning not as a tack on kind of law or regulation because that doesn't work frankly speaking thank you that's such an excellent answer great way to set the scene for the debate and incredibly useful insights into what we might be doing so thank you again so much for speaking to me well thank you so i'll send you my and our voice recordings and you send me the video recordings on your end so we'll have a very high quality stitched version okay so thank you so that's right thank you bye