 Unlike many people today, I'm an optimist. This strange condition began when I was 15 years old. That was 1996. I discovered that the future of human knowledge is on the web and my textbooks are all out of date. So I told my teachers I want to quit school and start my education on the web. Surprisingly, the teachers all agreed with it. Then I founded a startup working on web technologies and I get to join this fabulous internet community that runs with this crazy idea an anarchistic no one was in control political system that powers the internet till to die. Today, I'm Taiwan's first digital minister. I'm putting into practice the ideas that I learned when I was 15 years old. Rough consensus, civic participation and radical transparency. Surprisingly, it's working and it's transforming our society. In the spirit of participation I would like to ask you to enter this website on your phone on the browser. Slido.com That's S-L-I-D-O.com This website will ask you to enter an event code and it's the number you see here on the screen. That's today's date. Once you're in, you can ask me anything and if you see a question from someone else that you also like me to answer you can like that question. I will answer the questions right after this 10 minutes talk starting with the questions with the highest number of likes. In 2014, there was a live demo of mass participation. We occupied the parliament for 22 days. At the time, the MPs in Taiwan were refusing to deliberate a trade service agreement with Beijing and so the occupiers got into the parliament at night and stayed there. For 22 days, we demonstrated how to deliberate a trade service agreement with the whole society. There were over 20 NGOs participating, the Greens, the Labour, the Independence, everybody. We supported this whole deliberation effort with a radically transparent broadcasting, live streaming logistics system and it was powered by this community called GovZero. GovZero is a civic tech community with a call to fork the government. We also pay the government websites which are NZGOV.TW and make better open alternative that NZG0V.TW. For example, the annual national budget is 100 pages long in the PDF file and it's very hard to read. The GovZero community's very first project was budget.govzero.TW which shows the national budget in a way that everybody understands and you can drill down to each and every budget details. Today, the system is adopted by 7 city governments and it powers the participatory budget platform for the Taipei City at Budget.Taipei. Anyone can just look at this map, find a part of city budget that they care and type in any question that they want to ask and a career public servant actually comes forward and answer for that part of the question. So it becomes a direct dialogue platform not through the city council but through the career public servants to communicate with citizens. So why are there so many civic hackers in Taiwan like me who spoke to my clients during the Occupy movement saying, OK, I have to take a three week leave because democracy needs me. I think it's because, well, I'm 36 now we're the first generation that enjoyed freedom of speech after three decades of martial law and dictatorship. That freedom arrived in 1989. The year of personal computers. So for us, the personal computer revolution and freedom of speech is the same thing. Our first presidential election by a popular vote in 1996 is also the year that the World Wide Web got popular. So internet and democracy, they're not two things. There's one and the same thing in Taiwan. And so for the past 30 years when we see free software we always think of freedom of assembly, freedom of speech and never free of cost. We know that freedom is never free of cost. Our parents' generation, our grandparents' generation paid dearly for it and we need to use the software freedoms to keep it free as we did during the Occupy movement in 2014. And the movement caused a revolution, although a peaceful revolution. There was a radical transformation of social expectations at the end of 2014 and many occupiers just found themselves elected mayors when they did not expect it. And because of this, the prime minister resigned and the new prime minister and engineer said okay, from now on crowdsourcing and open data are just going to be the national direction. So the occupiers and the civic tech people who supported them were then invited as mentors as advisors to the public service to solve issues like Uber. Now Uber is very interesting because it is a meme, a virus of the mind. The meme was called Sharing Economy and it says that algorithms dispatch cars better than laws and so we don't have to obey laws. The meme spreads through apps from drivers to passengers to drivers and you can't really argue with a meme just like you can't argue with a flu. It's not in the same category. And so there's protests. The taxi drivers surrounded the ministry of transport and demanding negotiation by how do we negotiate with the virus of the mind? For us, the solution is through a deliberation that involves thousands of stakeholders. It's a scaling down of the deliberation we just did with half a million people during the Occupy and so we think we can do it. Deliberation, thinking deeply about something together is an effective vaccine against the virus of the mind and when everyone listen to each other and form a consensus, we become immune to divisive PR campaigns in the future. A proper deliberation with the focus conversation method involves four stages. The first stage is facts where we collect evidences, firsthand experiences and objective data. And then after that is confirmed, we move to collect everybody's feelings about those same facts. You may feel angry, I may feel happy, it's all okay. And after people converge on their feelings with everybody, we then talk about ideas. The best ideas are the ones that address the most people's feelings. And then we translate those ideas into legal ease and sign them into decisions. However, if the decision making process is not transparent, people on the street would speak a different language than people in the government. We need mediators, we need facilitators because otherwise people are not even agreeing on basic facts, let alone each other's feelings. In that situation, ideas become ideologies, virus of the mind that blinds people to new facts and to each other's feelings. And so our first step is open data that is making all the facts available, not just numbers, but also meeting record study analysis and ask the private sector and the civil society to share what they have. Next, we created an interactive survey on Polis to ask how people feel about those facts, we sent all the stakeholders a Polis survey at the same time to ensure a diverse group of participants. Four groups of people soon emerged, taxi drivers, Uber drivers, Uber passengers and other passengers. And the Polis system shows each group how well their shared sentiments are received by other groups, encouraging participants to contribute other more inclusive statements that show up as majority opinions. And the interesting thing is that it lowers people's antagonism because all these people on different sites are actually your Facebook and Twitter friends, you just didn't talk about this over dinner. So over three weeks of time, people actually converge on the center. At the beginning, the people were on the all the different corners, but because we say we only give fighting power of anything that people can propose that can convince a super majority, that's 80% of people, people compete to bring better ideas that resonate not only with like-minded people, but across the aisle. One of the things that resonates with practically everybody is now much easier for the government to meet with all the stakeholders and check with them one by one. Here is the consensus of the people. Do you agree? And if you do agree, how do we translate into law? They're bound to the words that they said during the live stream consultation and so the stakeholders agreed. When we ratified their agreements in August 2016, everybody knew that it's coming and everyone anticipated it. So today, Uber operates legally under the new framework, but so do the taxi companies who are now adopting the same model that Uber is using for dispatching its cars. So this method works. Now the next question is, can we scale this process of listening? Right after the ratification, I joined the cabinet as the digital minister to explore this possibility through PEDIS, the public digital innovation space. We're like policy labs in the UK at a national level. We have designers, programmers and we're automating away a lot of this chores of the public service. We're bringing radical transparency to the cabinet. By that, I mean all the journalists and lobbies get to ask me questions, but I only answer publicly. And it's not just to them, but also for internal meetings, for all the hundreds of internal meetings that I had since I was the minister, everything was transcribed and published. The written record was for everyone to edit for 10 days to publish it. The effect is very surprising. The bureaucrats actually become very innovative and risk-taking, because previously the minister get credit if things go right. But now, with radical transparency, if things go right, they get credit because their name was on the transcript. And because this is experimental, if things go wrong, it's all my fault. So under this condition, they become innovative and open to a lot of very interesting ideas. One of those ideas is adopting the same technology the FreeSoftware community is using as our internal communication platform. So we use EtherPAT, we use EtherCalc, we use a KanbanBorco weekend, we use RocketChat. Previously, the roadblock was on cybersecurity, but we were able to find the Sandstorm.io, a community platform that solves the cybersecurity problems through sandboxing. Our cybersecurity department audits it, and now all the FreeSoftware that runs on top of it doesn't suffer from the cybersecurity issues. And we have a lot of interesting systems written by young public servants that can opt for ordering lunch together or to plan travels together, and it's really good to have this choice. Also, we had an EtherPAT platform for people to participate online. It's like we the people platform in the US. It did not receive much attention because for cross ministry issues, people would just get those very blank, very bureaucratic answers that doesn't really solve their problem but just explains why they can't do much about it. And after I become the additional minister, we ask each ministry to send a team, at least one person, to serve as participation officers. We assemble this virtual team of 50 people online, using RocketChat and other tools for online engagement. So now in Taiwan, when people start a petition, they know that instead of just a dutiful response, they will actually get to meet with all the relevant ministries, either in Taipei or we will travel to those rural areas and islands if they are petitioning for local development. Together, we solve a lot of very interesting problems like this, without exposing any public service to risk. And so we relieve their fear, uncertainty and doubt around civic participation. The idea is that voting and collectivism is very easy. Everybody can do it but there's not much bits. And through open data, through having interactive Q&A forums, by setting up binding processes and by bringing the technology to people instead of asking people to use technology, we're building a deliberation system that scales to all levels of the society. And through this, we're building a unified democracy, not hijacked by ideologies and efficient democracy that responds to the demands of the society and an empathetic democracy that lets people take care of each other's feelings. And we do this just by listening and building technologies that help us listen to each other. Thank you for listening.