 Recording is on. Okay, love you. Thank you. Okay, great. Let's see. This is a reminder. Take my clothes. Hi, greetings. Is the sound and video getting through? I'm not though, but I can... Oh yeah, now I can see a video. Okay, excellent. Hey, greetings. Hi, greetings. I think you usually start a meeting with good local time, don't you? That's right. Yes, good local time. Live long and prosper. The usual. Good local time to you as well. Thank you so, so much for joining us today. I'm really, really, really thrilled and happy to hear that. I'm not the only one. You were proposed by not only one person and to me as someone who would just be... Everyone would be thrilled to get the chance to ask a few questions. I will perhaps give you just a little bit of a brief intro of what this group is all about. Just that you have some contacts for who you're speaking to today, because I'm sure that your schedule is, I think, busy enough that I expect no pre-knowledge from your end that you can perhaps prime yourself a little bit. And then I'm going to do the proper intro for the rest of the group that is usual. And I would encourage everyone in the group, if they want, to put their videos on, unless you put them off, because I'm lagging in bandwidth. Okay. Well, I'm looking at a pretty healthy bar, so I should be good. But anyway, go ahead. Okay. Great. Well, I'm Alison, and it's really fantastic to see you. And oh, we have more and more people joining. Great. I'm the coordinator of the Intelligent Corporation group. This group is co-chaired by Mark Miller. And Mark is really like a pioneer in object-oriented programming. And Mark Christine and I have been co-authoring a book together on intelligent cooperation. And to us, that means better ways in which humans can cooperate, but also increasingly using crypto commerce technologies to better cooperate with other humans, but also with other emerging intelligences. And I think, you know, you have done fantastic work on this so far. So we're really, really excited to have you here. And perhaps to get the group a little bit up to speed. So I think to locate you a little bit, welcome everyone to another meeting of the Intelligent Corporation group. Thank you all for joining. For Audrey, I think maybe one cool thing for you to know is that most of the people you have a background in technology and many of the people here are really, really interested in using technology to help humans and other intelligence cooperate better. So I think you can expect some technical understanding here. And I'm hoping for quite a fruitful back and forth. But all of you guys who we've been meeting now for the third month and a little bit about the speed after, I think we really discussed a little bit what is driving cooperation and civilization at large with great presentations by Vernon Smith and Rebecca Fee, Robert Axelrod and Tyler Cohen in the past few weeks. We are now moving on what it means to continue cooperation in the digital realm. And today we will particularly investigate tools for openness and there really is no better person to do that with them with Audrey Tang. So I'm really, really excited to have you here. Audrey is Taiwan's digital minister in charge of social innovation, open governance and youth engagement. They are Taiwan's first transgender government member and became the youngest minister in the country's history at the age of 35. And you have to tell us more about this, how you got head hunted by the Taiwanese president, I think in a sec. And you're known really well. It's easy. We just occupied the parliament for three weeks. We invited ourselves in, but go ahead. Okay. Well, that's nice. That's the way to go, I guess. And well, I think, yeah. Well, so just to perhaps wrap this up before I want to leave the floor up to you, but you're really known for civic hacking and strengthening democracy using a variety of different technology tools. You served on the Taiwanese National Development Councils Open Data Committee and our really active contributor to GOF, which is a community. I think that one that you were just referring to. Zero. Yes. Yes. Zero is not silent. Yeah, she's zero. Not silent. And yeah, you really play, I think, a very cute role in Taiwan's also in Taiwan's COVID response. I've seen a few videos of how you found a few hilarious ways, I think, to combat misinformation with humor. So thank you very much for joining us today. And you suggested a really cool way, I think, to collect questions from this group. And after a few of my starting questions, three in particular, we will just use that tool and let that tool guide us. And so what I want to do quickly is read out to everyone here a few of the questions that have already been submitted in the hope that this inspires other people here in this group right now to open up this tool. And if you haven't done so yet, upvote the questions that are on the tool that I shared with you via email. Okay, great. There it is already. Okay, well, so here we go. Now we have questions of what can the different Asian approaches to technology learn from the U.S. approach and vice versa. Open up Taiwan. How has COVID-19 affected the role of government and technologies in people's lives in Asia? When will we have an automated future? What to do to keep humans in the loop? What does it mean to be a conservative anarchist while working for the Taiwanese government? What have you found to be the most useful in helping people re-engage with their systems of governance as surveillance technology becomes increasingly ubiquitous? What are the best ways to prevent it from being abused? What is the number one global development or technology you're excited or worried about? What is the best existing application of distributed ledgers? What is the worst? Is it true as a claim that the new China digital currency will enable individual identities to be private, although transactions will be visible to the government? As global institutions continue to lose trust, which emerging attractors for non-coercive coordination do you find most promising? What does intelligent cooperation mean to you? And so on and so forth. I'm not going to go through them all. This is really just to get everyone here in this group who hasn't done so excited about opening the tool up that I shared via email and actually upvoting questions. So you make sure that the question that you find most exciting makes it to the front. And please add your name so you can ask them yourself. If your name's there, then I'll just try to call on you here in the chat. Well, I had a few questions prepared, but I think we should just go down that list and make sure that we hit them all and have more folks and develop them as they move in. So question number one, what can the different Asian approaches to technology learn from the US approach and vice versa? I'm sure you're not there. You don't get that question for the first time. In Taiwan, I think I'll quote Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, our president when she became president first time in 2016. She said, before we think of democracy as just showdown between two opposing values, but now democracy must be reimagined to become a conversation between diverse, many diverse values. And I think whether you label this as the Asian approach or not, I think it's just a matter of labeling. But really, we think about democracy differently because Taiwan is a very young democracy. We had our first presidential election in 1996, which is already after the Wild Web, so much like, I don't know, Estonia and to a lesser extent Spain and so on. What we're seeing here is that we imagine democracy and internet as intertwined, as essentially the same plane. And so we talk about openly the bitrate of democracy, right? Voting is like three bits per person every four years. We talk about constitutional designs. We've got like six constitutional amendment, one is still upcoming. And just like a kernel of the operating system, we're constantly tweaking it to make sure that there is more bitrate to listen at scale, for example. And all this relies on this idea of listening at scale enabled by end-to-end communications as shaped by internet technology as opposed to the earlier democratic substratas which mostly run on, I don't know, pencil and paper. And if you're, of course, goes to ancient Greek then by ancient stone tools, things like that. So each generation of tool has a different imagination of democracy. And I think democracy as a form of social technology is our approach to technology. It's not just about its industrial applications of natural science and things like that. And U.S., because it's the original democratic experiment, many systems are still running on the more ancient substratas. And I think that's what we can share a little bit about. Thank you so much. Yeah, I think the next question ties in nicely into that. And we just, you know, oh, well, it just got downloaded. But I think what does it mean to be a conservative anarchist while working for the Taiwanese government? It's not downloaded. It's highlighted. I'm doing the highlighting. So, yeah, would it help if I share the screen on another browser so that people can look at the, or if you all have the slider open locally then I won't bother doing screen. I think it's nice to see your face. I shared it just now in the chat again in the hope that... Oh, excellent. Okay, okay. I think people are... Okay, okay. We'll just do this edge computing thing, right? And rely on your browsers and your phones and so on. So, yeah, I used the term anarchist in its pure meaning in that I don't give orders. I don't take orders. All the people who work with me do so by voluntary association, not because they're co-est to work in the space. And this is the same as the core internet principles. It's called end-to-end innovation. And I mean conservative by, well, respecting the traditions. That's what conservative means, right? In Taiwan, we have 20 or more national languages, many of which indigenous. And we need to make improvements based on the rough consensus, again, a core internet value of these different cultures instead of making quote-unquote progress on any particular culture to the detriment or sacrificing the other cultures. So that is to say, if we listen as across all those cultural differences, then we just like Taiwan is literally caught between the Eurasian plate and the Philippine sea plate bump into one another. The tip of Taiwan, the Saviard, the Eushan mountain grows by two centimeters every year. And that to me speaks to this idea of conserving the two plates, but then growing upward, skyward, instead of in particular to the left wing or the right wing, I mean tectonic plate-wise. And so that's my imagination. And I mean, I could also say I'm just a, you know, practically a Taoist. But in the Western context, maybe associate that with, I don't know, spiritual Taoism, which I, of course, share some roots with, but I mean it in a very practical way. So I hope that explains a little bit of what Consolidate Anarchists mean. Yes, thank you very much. Yeah, part of the sub-latel in the book is Intelligent Volunteer Cooperation. So I think, you know, one of the principles that we would like is this voluntary association, which is also how this book came about, actually. Yeah, and just for the record, I don't work for the Taiwanese government. I don't work for the people. I work with the people. Otherwise, I cannot call myself anarchist in good conscience. Yeah, okay. That's a great qualification, actually. And, okay, well, moving on to the next one. What techniques and tools have you found most useful for opening up Taiwan this far? Sure. One particularly useful idea is called radical transparency. Like, I understand that you're recording this conversation. I'm going to ask a copy to publish to the commons. And usually we publish either the video or the transcript after 10 days of co-editing. And this is the condition of all the visits to me, including a lobbyist journalist and things like that. And I discovered that this is a really good quality of conversation because people are going to be mindful that the generation's down the line is going to watch this video or transcript. And so we tend not to make arguments that will benefit the current generation at the expense of future generation or younger generations because they are watching in a sense. But if we do closed or private meetings and so on, then more often than not, people will propose something for short-term gain at a long-term loss. Right? So I think this intergenerational solidarity is built upon this idea of radical transparency and us contributing to the commons, not just what a policy is made, but also the why and how of policymaking. And that also tends to include people who are not yet 18 years old, so that they don't have to, you know, I don't know, go to strike on Fridays with audio respect. But they can read the context around which the policies such as since I made and start, say, citizen initiatives, collecting petitions on the government-sponsored public infrastructure, join the GOV.TW. And once they get 5,000 signatures, the policies actually change and we run a collaboration. Meetings with them, even if they are immigrants or non-citizen residents or very young people who doesn't have the right to vote, they're not excluded from the hearing. And now, again, radical transparency helps with communicating the context. Do you ever think there's something to be said for a timed release, so, you know, like, let's say, 10 to 15? Yeah, because people, of course, during conversations, sometimes we talk about anecdotes of our friends who have not cleared this for publication. So it has a kind of privacy protection mechanism built in for these 10 days of co-editing. And so, yeah, people do go back to the transcript and anonymize or de-identify a certain part of their speech. But of course, each person is responsible for their segments in a speech. So in the more extreme cases, for example, I had a conversation with the senior leadership team of a certain corporation called Microsoft, and they decided to de-identify themselves very thoroughly so you don't see anything. And if you look at the transcript, which I posted on the chat here, then you can see that it's just an interviewer speaks and you can't de-identify and find out which senior leadership person in Microsoft said what. But everything I said is still radically open. So at the most extreme cases, they can, I guess, do that, but it's not a secret or whatever other concerns. But my side, at least, is contextualized. Didn't that kick off the Barbara Streisand effect? Well, the fact that I'm bringing this up as a... You are! It means that I'm intentionally using the Barbara Streisand effect, which may actually render the effect mid-right paradoxical prescription. That may or may not work, depending on whether you share it, I guess. All right. So, I think, what co-founded Forsyte and many people here in this group know and cherish a lot, he once said that, you know, if, let's say, for example, the government was saying that it could only have... that it has to keep information private, you could perhaps have something like a clause of, like, okay, time release in, like, let's say, many years, then at least you are now discussing time horizon. You can bargain them down, rather than just have a statement on that so it was more like a foot in the wall with a similar arrangement in our National Secret Laws and our Freedom of Information Act and so on. But the fact is that the Internet enabled the communities to work on faster iterations. So, the reason why it's 10 days and not 10 years is basically otherwise, we're on this very long iteration cycle, but the people in the social sector and the economic sector are already doing agile sprints in, like, 10 days, or it's 14 days or 7 days cycles, and that will render the public sector irrelevant unless we respond in a similar iteration cycle. Well done, okay. Well, let's move down the list as questions get reshuffled. As surveillance technology becomes increasingly ubiquitous, what are the best ways to prevent it from being abused? Well, it will be abused. There's no getting around that. You can't prevent it from being abused. But I think what's important here is to make sure that the abuse of the surveillance technology is not a norm. That is to say it is called out and it is stopped by popular demand. And in order to effect such a popular demand, one needs to have feasible alternatives. One example. In Taiwan, during the height of the COVID, which for us was last April, it's been like 10 months with no COVID. But anyway, last April, we had a scare where the hostess, from the hostess bar in the Nileife district, get an exoscope in 19. And for the first day, she didn't tell the contact tracers. She said that she remained at home. On the second day, she finally said, you know, I want to preserve the anonymity of my patrons. Now, any other East Asian jurisdiction will probably say, you know, agreed to stay surveillance or be put into jail or find a lot because this is endangering public health, right? But we didn't do that. We co-created with the Nileife district this idea of participatory self-surveillance, where the patrons only need to enter a like throw away SIM card number, SMS number, or a throw away, I don't know, a protomail email address, making sure that they could be contacted without leaving their real names. And if this is like literally on pieces of paper, which are shredded after four weeks of no local transmission in that particular business place, and that never needs to be sent to any local health authorities or to the Central Epidemic Commencement in the national government. So in that sense, we didn't drive them underground, as, for example, the prohibition did in the U.S. But rather concluded that if we federate, we've decentralized the surveillance in a way that is still appropriate with the privacy norms of those Nileife businesses, then they too can be part of the response team to counter coronavirus, because we trust the people more. We expect people to trust each other more as well. But without this feasible alternative co-created, I'm sure that out of popularity, demand will succumb to the state surveillance impulses. So this system of co-creation of real-time feedback is really important, especially when the times are caused for like testing of these principles. Wow, so it was protomail and then like just like a paper trail? Yeah, you basically buy a pre-pacing card which is not linked to your other phone and you frequent a host bar or host's bar and just leave that number and not any of your names or handles or whatever. And that's enabled the contact tracer to find you if they need to find you while preserving your anonymity and this is then shredded after four weeks and at which time you can just delete that protomail account or just throw away that pre-pacing card. Wow, and were there any problems with that or did it run rather smoothly? No, the nightclub's resume operation after just a few weeks after this idea of what we call real contact system is implemented and we don't have any outbreaks and compare nearby jurisdictions in East Asia which did drive the Nileife District Underground and they actually had the second or third wave because of this like underground activities. Well, okay, well, that's a good segue into the next question which is how has COVID-19 affected the world, government and tech and people's lives in Asia? Well, I would first say that it really justified encroachment on privacy. It justified a lot of state surveillance and it made a lot of new norms which are not necessarily healthy for the health of social sector, unfortunately. But in Taiwan, we counter the pandemic with no lockdown so we escaped the worst of it because we did not have to instate a state of emergency where the administration could do pretty much anything and for the legislature to forgive them later, right? We didn't have that, everything we did it need to be preordained by the legislature and we never invent new data collection touchpoints during the pandemic, using pandemic as a justification so this is very similar of how we fought the infodemic with no administrative takedown because people remember the martial law, they actually remember the 2003 SARS experience where a lockdown at the hospital leaves everyone traumatized so we don't want to go back there but Taiwan is probably an outlier here for most Asian jurisdictions we do see because of the takedowns and the lockdowns the state of surveillance and concentration of power became increased and democracy have just declined or decimated like literally cut by 10% in many jurisdictions Cut by 10% could you elaborate on that? Like I'm referring to the Freedom House Freedom Indexes and things like that the latest report and also Economist has a recent report that says the degree of democracy like from fully democratic to partially democratic and so what the number of fully open or fully democratic countries especially in our corner of the world have declined by about 10% which is a like a joke because dexamate reduced by 10% Oh wow, okay Well the next one is on China digital currency and that one is not from me is it from anyone else here and if so would you like to ask it yourself? Sure, I could ask Hi, I was listening to another online digital currency event and the claim was that China's digital currency will preserve individual privacy but not transactional privacy and I can't understand what that means and do you know anything about this? Can you explain it? Does it even make sense? Well from what I understand if you participate in a public ledger system say Bitcoin or Ethereum the idea is that the wallet number is public for everyone to see but the wallet number can be linked to you or it could be somehow remixed and not linked to you and there's a series of ways to distance yourself so to speak with varying difficulties to a certain wallet address so in that I don't think there is anything that's uncommon about this ideas but of course because in the PRC the Republic of China regime the very act of using cryptography or the very act of logging into the public internet requires a real name identification and sometimes with the face recognition stuff and so I think the state if it wanted could always very reliably re-identify individuals but it may be possible that the customer cannot re-identify the seller for example during a transaction that's certainly possible Okay, thank you The next question in case you don't want to remain anonymous but want to ask it yourself helping people re-engage with their systems Okay, I think what's most useful is to trust the citizens and apologize swiftly if they find out that a mistake has been done and show some real competence by inviting them to then work on better alternative for example during the pandemic we had this idea of publishing the real-time availability of medical mask in pharmacies and initially our national health insurance agency published just in regular tables on their website and so on but nobody has time to look at PDF files or the Excel sorry, open documents tables but on the other hand there's civic hackers that invented ways to just show on open street map, Google map and things like that visualization of nearby pharmacies and in real time because when you swipe your national health card queuing in line then the person queuing after you can refresh their phone and very quickly see that it de-pleased by 2 or nowadays by 10 by 10 with each purchase so it's like a literally accountable distributed ledger with more than 100 different systems tracking it but when this happened the pharmacies also independently invented this idea of take a number system where they collect the IC card for healthcare but didn't hand out the mask immediately they tell you take this number go back in the evening and they processed the car swiping during the lunch break but on the map this broke the map because then you see it sells nothing at the lunch break it sells everything so that map becomes not useful to the point where the pharmacies near my household actually put on the shelf window saying don't trust the app, exclamation mark and so I mean in an authoritarian top-down regime what we would do is punish one side or the other and just encourage one social innovation while destroying the other but because we're a thoroughly open radically open policy I just literally step into the pharmacy took a deep breath of course and ask you know what would you do if you are the digital minister my favorite question and the pharmacist consulted with your online group and discovered that they can actually hack the system by inputting if you receive a certain set of mask as a pharmacist you can actually input negative 500 or negative 1000 in which case the stock availability become negative and then you disappear from the map because we didn't handle the negative values and so they invented this kind of cloaking device by essentially hacking the system and so we immediately institutionalized that and put the button in so the time they spent handing out the numbers after that time they just push a button and they disappear from the map so the map auto-calibrates itself and so on and so when the legislature later on in this case and real-time API to interpolate Mr. Chen Shi Zhong saying look I know that you think it's fair because population center overlap with the distribution of pharmacies is actually unfair because the urban people don't have to spend as much time as rural people on public transportation to reach the nearby pharmacies so there's this type A city based bias baked in and by pointing this out and suggestion the better distribution method 24-hour pre-ordering and collecting convenience was the minister didn't have to defend our policy he just said, you know, legislator teaches and then we worked with the MP who was VP of data analytics at Foxconn Group so she really knows something about data and the community on a new distribution mechanism just 24 hours after her interpolation so I hope these two anecdotes showed a swift apology and a competent response saying okay your idea will become policy next week shows how people really would then re-engage with the system of government because there's instant gratification Thank you so much, yeah Danny, your questions next Hey, can you hear me? Yes, excellent so my question was originally well it's about making a trade-off between radical transparency and individual privacy and you already gave one example with the radical privacy of Microsoft but I think I can broaden this out a little bit and ask about when you're using public data public sector data which of course is about the citizens and then you are into this problem of like you end up exposing data about citizens so if you show the patterns of behaviour or whatever you're actually revealing something about individuals and where do you think that trade-off will imply what heuristics are you using to make those decisions? Well first of all we make a very strong delineation between open data and real-time open data, open API with private data and what we are looking at is for example the civil IOT system in Taiwan, SCI.Taiwan.gov.tw collects real-time sensor data, crowdsourced by say primary schoolers using air boxes to measure in their classroom the PM2.5 air quality value, the water quality values and things like that in a distributed ledger and so that teaches people the importance of data stewardship and what we call data competence literacy, literacy is when you're a consumer competence is when you're making your own narratives and of course the rivers and mountains doesn't have privacy concerns I guess so it's okay for the primary schoolers to do measurements there but by participating in such data coalitions, data collaboratives, the young people also learned that there could be bias right, there could be like the things that's used to analyze outside of its original collected purpose, there could be a data pipeline problems, there could be issues in the like different resolutions of collection materials and so on so they become more sensitive, more aware of the issues that could happen to them if the private data is measured, analyzed this way and bias introduced but they then have the vocabulary to correct these things when pointed out as well so this is a little bit like I don't know teaching the safe use of fire, responsible use of fire at a tender age of 6, 5 I don't know offering cooking classes, sharing recipes and things like that so this is the baseline and then on top of that a EU compatible basically pre-GDPR European privacy law in Taiwan we are seeking GDPR adequacy, the independent data protection authority is the last missing piece and we're working on it this legislative session and so with this idea then we need to focus for the private data ways to enhance privacy by default, by for example using federated and split learning to share the insights about particular data inflation points with our revealing the raw data or about for example for cyber security homomorphic encryption to make sure that our national center for high-speak computation can do the calculation computation for you without peeking into the data, mathematically speaking cannot peek into the data and people are more versed because they learn as part of data competence classes that there could be for example zero knowledge range proofs that allows marathon hosts to define a range of health conditions for the eligible marathon players and for the national health insurance agency to attest to that using zero knowledge proofs without revealing any of their diagnostics, materials and so on so again viable alternatives that renders the old bad zero-sum trade-offs obsolete a very but Mr. Filarian thought right a new system to render an old obsolete instead of try to fight that old battle thank you thank you so much lovely lovely thank you so much we have next one Esteban cool yeah so I was wondering if we're if you ever looked at some sort of liquid democracy at any scale the idea that even though I don't know anything about health the minister of health of a country may be both elected by the collection of votes of people to whom other people have delegated their votes for example I will delegate it to my mv or whatever or what would be the challenges that you may see some sort of system like that to me liquid democracy delegating to specific people requires you to maintain constant contact with the said people and that makes scaling quite challenging and so the experiments we did is mostly voting for topics instead of voting for people which to me requires less cognitive burden to maintain a weak link to like 10 topics right so I may join like 10 different e-petitions and each one collecting support from 5,000 signatures and they receive constant feedback when the ministers held collaboration meetings with the petitioner but it doesn't require me to delegate to the petitioner anything else than that particular topic and because of that I don't need to do you know constant interpolation to the petitioner to assess their expertise in other things as well so to me a faster iteration a faster feedback is the main thing I'm looking for so because of that the liquidity as measured by the effective bit rate and sometimes the liquid democracy delegate serve as bottlenecks of such principal agent problem configurations so choose to be told I use more quadratic voting quadratic funding participatory budgeting things like that that builds a many to many system where people choose the topic they care about and everybody feels they have won because there's synergy and if you support seven project with synergies chances are one or two of them are bound to happen anyway and instead of liquid democracy pure delegates because that still has this issue like 49% of people feeling they have lost when their favorite candidate didn't win the argument you're already using quadratic funding and what kinds of things work well and what doesn't it work well so I'm digital minister dot tw slash board member radical exchange radical exchange board vote we use quadratic voting already and after trying it out for a couple of times we then transfer it I think a couple years ago we're on the third year now using quadratic voting for presidential hackathon and for the hackathon which the trophy is a projector that projects the president handing you the trophies it's metatrophy subscribing there's no prize money but the five winners each year get a presidential promise that their idea their small scale minimal viable process will become public policy within the next year as if it's a executive order from the president so it's binding power from the presidential office as a hackathon prize so how to qualify the projects that receive the coaching needed to achieve this presidential hackathon championship where we use the weight of SDGs the global goals 169 targets and each idea each collaboration need to correspond to one or more of the SDG targets and then we display this pellet of SDG like all 17 colors to the voters and anyone on the joint platform which constantly have around 10 million visitors out of country of 23 million a lot of people and each person has 99 points to vote now in normal internet voting people get mobilized to vote everything to the same candidate without looking at other candidate and they close the window that's the usual pattern of behavior by using quadratic voting we enable people to well still get mobilized but when they vote they discover with 99 points they cannot vote 10 votes because it's quadratic 1 vote 1.2 votes 4.3 votes 9.4 votes 16 points so with 99 points one can only vote 81 points into 9 votes to your favorite subject and you still have 18 left so people are motivated to look at something else and maybe they vote 4 and they still have 2 points left so they're motivated to look at least at 4 projects and sometimes people discover synergy so they take some back and do a 7 and 7 and things like that so on average people vote for 5 to like 8 different projects and they discover those synergies by themselves learning more about global goals on the process and so when the top 20 or 24 are selected it's much easier for us to find which teams that didn't make the cut can actually join the teams that did make the cut and the voters feel that they win nevertheless because one of the teams that they support now absorbing some of the other teams now makes the cut and become the president approved trophy winners and so on so we can look into for example the midpoint between pure grant making and pure crowdfunding and quadratic funding is somewhere in the middle and we're now working with the social investment committees in an upcoming social innovation summit to design that for the impact based investments so that's still in the future but quadratic voting is in the past it's worked really well in the past couple of years and this year is no exception wow okay and is there also a way for folks to potentially propose things they can get voted on or is it just SDG also have you heard you can propose anything but you have to find a SDG target that it fulfills because then it measures the common good part of it okay interesting and have you heard at all about adult democracy and proposed by Ralph Carter who was I guess thinking Robin Hansen's future key a little bit further and are there any other types of governance mechanisms that you'd be excited about or what do you think about that particular one well community democracy is a form of technology so as a technologist I'm equally excited about each and every new governance proposes a mechanism and I think blockchain governance the Ethereum and other communities provides a really good testing grounds to make some of the governance principles shine forth or not shine in the case of Bitcoin experiments we have seen many issues and the necessity or is still debated of negative votes and things like that but when it converges a little bit and ready for mass deployment then Taiwan is here to help because we then transfer the idea that are more mature into our everyday governance thank you this is just a brief reminder for everyone that I posted the link I'm going to be uploading and downloading questions into the chat so if you can't find it in the email then it's in the chat and you still have time to bump some questions up and find the 20 minutes and oh someone just did okay great so we have a next new question a new next question which is your Wikipedia page mentions that you have been working on sharing economy software can you speak more about your work on this yeah I wonder who wrote that part though because we're not allowed to read on Wikipedia page I really don't know what that refers to I actually my guess is that the software called Polis an AI assisted conversation tool that did get the regulation done by the people, crowdsourced by the people in 2015 about Uber X and later on about Airbnb and later on about platform economy in general maybe what the Wikipedia writer is referring to and so this system very simply put is an AI system that makes it very easy for people to discover their commonalities despite their ideological differences because when Uber X came to Taiwan in 2015 a lot of people get caught into the ideological debate of whether it's a sharing economy, whether it's just gig economy, whether this is platform economy or whatever right but what people care about really is the fairness and the idea that this must not for example harm the insurance for the people sitting in the back seat and things like that but these do not get as much coverage so we built our own pro-social-social media not anti-social ones and nowadays digital public infrastructure Polis.gov.tw thoroughly free software AfroGPL and in 2015 this is the actual map of the clusters of my friends and family who are all over the place about what they feel about Uber X and so basically we cross the fox, we share the fox for three weeks we ask about people's feelings and then the best idea that take care of people's feelings become the regulation so one feeling maybe passenger liability insurance is very important and if you agree with me then your avatar move a little bit toward me but if you do not agree with me then your avatar moves away from me this is K-Means clustering and the two axes are dynamically calculated using principal component analysis and then people are motivated to propose their own feelings for other people to vote on and surprisingly these ideological differences are just a very few percent and most people agree with most of each other most of the things, most of the time this is a true shape of democracy but in the more anti-social corner of social media something flipping as shown to people because I don't know because the private anti-social social media is sometime like a nightclub where people have to shout to be heard and there are addictive drinks private bouncers and all that there's room for a nightlife district but we do public deliberation on public squares so this is a public square and we get the consensus around registration about not undercutting existing meters and so on and then we have a very fair and balanced platform economy law for multi-purpose taxi drivers that includes existing co-ops and companies and individual taxi drivers in a way that ensures fairness like search pricing and so on to be introduced to the market that may be what the Wikipedia is referring to but it's not a sharing economy software AI software for public deliberation about sharing economy very nice, okay, thanks and I guess this one's also a good piggyback what technologies that may be under people's radar especially on this car would you like to see developed or used more if they aren't then what's stopping from being used at well? Well, I think just this very idea of democracy as a type of technology that you can increase the bitrate of democracy by introducing not necessarily new representative democratic voting system which may be difficult but rather the basic idea of say presidential hackathon which is compatible with any form of representational democracy, sandbox applications, the as I mentioned, participatory budgeting and things like that, so the idea of democracy as a technology and you can develop it without destroying the old generation of democracy you can even build some API for backward or bug word compatibility, I think that thought itself is quite under people's radar and I would wish more people could work on it and I think what's stopping this vision be developed is that people sometime has this idea that career public service is resistant to change, it's not true the career public servants that I interacted across the world are all for change if the change could save their time and reduce their risk, so if you frame your innovations as a time saving risk reducing tool then you may find surprising allies in the public sector. And perhaps if you refrain your work relationship with the government That's right, that's right as opposed to working for the government that's exactly right Okay great, next one as global institutions continue to lose trust which emerging attractors for non-corrosive coordination do you find most promising? Well I think this idea about data coalitions about people now more and more see that if I take a selfie to an extractive surveillance capitalist then I'm essentially giving up the negotiation power of my friends selling them out so to speak I think this is capturing people's attention and people are forming variously called data trust, data intermediary data coalitions or data collaboratives to address this very issue so I think this is something that I find very exciting because when people get into the mood of a cooperative movement they may not call it a co-op or credit union but that means that people spend more time thinking about governance instead of just passively succumbing to the state or capitalist surveillance so more active participation in data coalitions I think this is the most promising in the near future for me And what are specific data coalitions that are forming in Taiwan? Yeah in Taiwan for example more than five I think six million people now have downloaded an app that will let you authorize your national health insurance records through say zero knowledge proofs and other ways to integrate with SDKs to better understand the cohort of people who for example suffer from diabetes and form a theory of change or to find out heat damage, heat strokes and so on as a result of climate change without, you know, divulging your private details or actually well let's not get anyone the most active participated data coalition is none of these but rather about dedicating medical mask quota to international heat military aid that particular program had more than seventy seven hundred sixty I think seven hundred sixty thousand citizens participating which collectively dedicate more than eight million medical mask for international humanitarian aid by people refraining to collect their quota from the pharmacy go to this app and say I want to dedicate a quota I didn't collect in the past couple weeks to international humanitarian aid in exchange for a non-fungible token of their name being displayed on this this wall of like people who care about international humanitarian assistance and you can check the wall for yourself and my name is even on it and my name anyway and this has turned into a real social media game and people including popular YouTubers and things like that it really raised the awareness about the shortage of PPE needs for self manufactured masks around the world and things like that and it really also reminded people that masks are there for protecting our own face against our own washed hands and so on so it serves many many purposes and the engagement rate is really high thank you lovely what's the best existing application of distributed ledger and what's the worst I don't know I've never met an application I didn't like so I don't know if there's a bad application of distributed ledgers I think just like I don't know just like asking you know your favorite relational database application I can think of quite a few and I don't think they are in a competitive relationship to one another I think each application fosters newer exciting applications with new innovations so I don't really have a favorite so to speak lovely and what's the who asked the next question on anarchist thinkers who is it anyone here in the audience that want to ask it themselves okay then I'll ask it which anarchist do you recommend okay I usually begin my day reading a little bit from the Dao De Jing the Lao Zi and if you speak English which you probably do I recommend Ursula K. Le Guin anarchist herself translation of the ancient Daoist classical scripture in a contemporary poetic form and of the contemporary thinkers I'm quite influenced by Kojin Karatani Japanese anarchist and associationist thinker so also check out his books I think it's been translated to English awesome thank you okay again a reminder people that there's still a few questions moving up and down so if you want to get the last 10 minutes your questions upvoted then go on the chat open up the voting tool and start upvoting questions there's still some movement so there's still time when will we have an automated future and what can we do to keep humans in the loop we already have an automated presence I mean a lot of the work that we do even in this very chat are automated I don't remember hand telling your votes on slide that's entirely automated I think the trick is to automate away things that we don't want to do to focus on things that require people to people connections because we collaborate much better if we don't want don't spend time on the you know chores to enable the collaboration to happen at the first place if we have to manually you know count the votes and of course we can do humming IETF style but assuming that we just are very vocal and just take turns speaking out yay or nay on each question ask not only this is very time consuming but it will not scale very well beyond say five people right so scaling better the communication and automating away the chores that you know when anyone counts the votes it's probably going to be the same thing so the vote counting part could probably be automated but the deliberation to get this agenda on the table in the first place to find the facilitated space where people can converge on the common ideas and values despite their initially different positions that's an art and what's an art probably requires human in the loop and could not be that easily automated or at least it could be automated to much detriment so we don't do that oh interesting and what do you think of reason GP3 advances anything that you thought was well it's an inspiring art form right is this complete this sentence art form and as a poet I think it inspires poetry but if you expect a poet to be your I don't know local clinic doctor or something that's asking too much from poets all right thanks Chris do you want to ask you a question Chris you got uploaded on the democracy but do you want to ask it yourself in case you're here in the conversation sure sure so I think you mentioned a few times something about bit rate of democracy I'd be interested in you giving a slightly longer explanation of what you had in mind there sure so I refer to voting as around three bits per person every four years uploaded right so that's a very concrete bit rate anyone can calculate the bit rate of democracy by thinking about the choices the public choices that we make and the frequency that we make it and these two together I guess also a lot of ineffective voting and noise in public choices and so on but you can of course calculate rather easily the bit rate as we can compare that with a slider which determines literally the agenda setting it determines the agenda of this particular conversation but while I'm speaking you don't have to wait for me to stop speaking you can with your own phone or other computing devices to do upvoting and you're not limited by the number of the questions that you could upvote so if you have upvoted like five different agenda in this conversation your bit rate is already much higher when measured in the kind of time from you doing this upvote and me actually talking about this agenda as a result of your upvote this is a much shorter iteration cycle and therefore a higher bit rate so it's kind of a measure of the level of agency in the aggregate for the population democracy yes definitely and for example polis which enable people to resonate or not with one another it has a much higher bit rate than say a pre-defined survey or a poll because in a poll people are only doing selections so each selection like one out of four selections that's just two bits but during a polis conversation each person can actually write in 140 letters for other people to resonate or not and so those 140 letters there is already much higher than any polls or surveys that we have entered because it's qualitatively different okay thank you how is technology changing currently the global offense defense balance well that's I really don't know about that because I only work with the people who voluntarily associate with me and they know that I'm working in the radical transparency way so while my office do have segments or dispatches from around 12 ministries related to I don't know culture public communication, public diplomacy education you name it we do not have any defense ministry people in my office I maybe they're not that cool with radical transparency so I know nothing about military and I don't really have any context to answer this beyond what everybody read in the news thank you okay so what do you think is the number one global development or technology that you're super excited or super worried about I'm excited about as I mentioned the idea of data collisions, data collaboratives, international endeavors that already helped us to counter the pandemic via joint research and now are increasingly turning the attention on say solving climate change solving the infodamic and things like that which is all great I'm worried about this tendency to attribute to a failure of democracy whenever something bad happens that couldn't get addressed quick enough by democratic polities and people sometimes praise authoritarian models and say that they made the necessary sacrifice of freedom and liberty so that they can recover economy wise or recover public health wise and so it's a quite popular rhetoric in the past year or so now of course Taiwan is the living proof that you can have both liberty freedom the human right democracy and economic growth public health and so on so I think that need to be more widely known and also I think we are able to do that precisely because we're a democratic polity and people learn from the very traumatic experience in SARS in 2003 which is why we institutionalize while the memory was still fresh all the SARS playbook that we played this time too much success so one of the thing about democracy is that it's resilient and whatever it learns is in the memory of the people not just a few elites that does their decisions so more democracy it would be my prescription not less democracy just because democracy didn't perform that well on one particular pandemic or the other and perhaps friction also is back not as future okay well someone who has the next question on the experimenting with democracy tech do you want to ask yourself if it's yours no okay okay yeah I was just saying so let's say I'm working I'm in blockchain or I'm working on novel dows or democracy and I can sit and I think my thing is mature and cool I'm sitting with Taiwan around how do I do that come and visit become a resident we have an open permit that allows you to work for your own company it doesn't have to do with Taiwanese one or for yourself digital nomads just fine and stay for three years with tax benefits high salaries bring your family your parents and grandparents can visit too and you enjoy universal healthcare even amid COVID and you can like apply now right so physically come to Taiwan and get to know the people who are on the civic tech scene and propose your ideas in a presidential hackathon say or in any of our like fintech sandbox and things like that and then you get to essentially break the law for six months or a year and try out new ways of governance within the sandbox the caveat is that you can't experiment on money laundering or funding terrorism but everything else is fair game and if it's a good idea as measured by policy or other consultation mechanisms then we just adopt that and you may be one of the five champions each year on the presidential hackathon and have your idea turn into a presidential order well that's a nice recipe there okay so we're now at time I have one more question so you know I mean now that you know the group at least a little bit the kinds of questions that we're asking what is the kind of question where you like this is the total blind spot of this group why aren't they asking this question like what do you want to draw our attention to that where you're just like oh my god they're totally drifting in the wrong direction here and what's something that we definitely don't know that you think we should be just paying more attention to well I think the question that I get asked in this hour I think it's very well balanced and I think this is a bunch of people who are cautious optimist about the potential of social technology which is really really my tribe so I don't think there's any glaring blind spots or any glaring mis-assumptions or bias that I could detect so I would just do my usual thing and wish all of you live long and prosper thank you so much we can't thank you enough for joining us here for this very very quick round I think that was super super refreshing I am posting in the chat here right now a link to our gather room with a password in case it prompts you still who would like to hang on and just socialize at our normal gather tables and get to know each other and the group and perhaps have some after debrief then let's meet there I cannot thank you enough from everyone here this was really fantastic and yeah we're hoping that we get to potentially welcome you again soon that was definitely the fastest question session I've done so far I didn't even get to all of them that's right thank you thank you all and I saw the peace and long life from Danny in the chat you're the third person Danny to get this right okay cheers well thank you a lot of us in Taiwan in the future see many of you together for those of you who would like to join don't forget to quit your ditsy as you're joining together and yeah I'll see you there and for the rest of you I'll see you in the next few weeks for our next keynote meeting it was really lovely to have you all on bye bye everyone