 I'm recording it on your site. Okay, that's great. So just send me whatever you've recorded afterwards. Yes, no problem. Okay, well, I'm just gonna stick to the script I sent you a couple of weeks ago. Yeah. Be pretty straightforward. Let me just pull that up. And I might want to use the whiteboard. So let me figure out how to share a particular window. Yeah, there is a button for that. And it's that like screen sharing. Yeah, it's the top top left of that window. The play button. I think that shows, shares the screen. Okay. The top level. Have you got, you've got that control panel. Have you? Yeah, but, but you're the presenter. So I'm not sure how to share mine particular. Let's see. You make me presenter. Right, it's your screen. Okay, all we want is it, let's have a look. Oh, okay. I can, I can make you presenter here. Yay. Yep. Okay, now you should have. Oh, here we go. Here we go. Yes, so let's see. Just a window, quick time player. And there we go. This should work. Just a second, just let me make sure that can I both show my screen and my face. All right, this is the webcam. There you go. I can see it all. Okay. Cool. That's great. Yay. Let's get started then. Okay, great. Okay, so, well, just to recap then. Sorry, a bit of chest infection. The premise of the fourth industrial revolution in general. And so this whole series is just that, we're going to live through an era of revolutionary change as a result of various technologies. This, this episode is just specifically focused on democracy and how the infrastructure of democracy and our norms are likely to be changed by new technologies. So I guess the first question is just, you know, I assume that you would agree with the premise that that will happen. Well, it's already happening and it's already happened. So it's difficult to disagree with something that's already happening. Could you just elaborate on, I guess, how you see that trend developing? Right, I don't think it's a single trend to be very precise. I hope the screen sharing is still working. Right, okay, great. Right, so I think like for example, currently in Taiwan, citizens expectation is already at the time where if they get 5,000 people to go to this e-petition site, now many of the other countries e-petition site, like they above a certain threshold, they get a guarantee response from a certain minister or a director of the office, right? That's the end of the expectation. Or if they want to build a desk or something they get a very humorous response, but still just a single written response from a office, right? But in Taiwan, people's expectation is that this e-petition will be put to vote by all ministries representatives. And this vote is actually after a very thorough discussion process of the marriage of the petition. And this discussion and vote itself is radically transparent. People can read the whole thing on a public website. And after voting, if the petition is nominated for collaboration, if it's a regional petition, for example, in one of the rural areas in Taiwan, the Southmost part of Taiwan or one of the offshore islands and so on, they made petition for, they already did petition for a station of the helicopters as ambulance because their closest large half hospital is finding minutes away, for example. And for cases like that, we fly while we take high speed rails. Everybody here, all the relevant ministries and the local county people and everything to their region and have a regional forum in which we use a lot of AI or machine learning or automated technology to gather the 8,000 people's sentiments into a rough consensus. And so this is a collective backfinding process where we try to get the descent as data going so that people can see on a shared whiteboard what all the different ministries and all the different city level counties have this particular case and collectively find a decision. And now all this is not only a publish as a transcript but it's also live streamed and there's also an online whiteboard of the mine and so on. And after this is done, this is for example, a Friday the next Monday, I'll just bring this to the prime minister and then for the prime minister to ratify one of the accepted solutions that we achieve rough consensus and declare it to national policy. So this whole process just takes a few weeks to complete and people kind of take it as granted now after a year of doing this and now we're ratifying this whole process. Well, so what I'm saying is that future is not evenly distributed but in a sense it's already there is what I'm saying. Yeah, I mean that is amazing. So is that so 5,000 is all it takes for and that is, I mean that debate is taking place at the national level. That's not a local level. Although it's a regional case, yeah, the debate is taking in a national level. We also have national cases like people complaining that there are AI based chatbots on Facebook scamming the most schoolable people into buying things at a discount but actually not delivering the goods and it's impossible to return it. Now, this is a very simple problem statement but it actually spans like seven different ministries and so the debate always has to happen on a national cross ministry level. And what is the involvement of the responsible ministers in this process? I mean, are they just sort of kind of? Right, so basically the ministers work on the policy and I work on the process, it's very different. I ensure that instead of each minister replying to the petitioner or sort of the protesters saying, I can only handle 5% of what you want, the other 95% is outside my purview, we get all the participation officers who directly respond to the CIO of each ministry to the same place and basically make sure that everybody knows what their responsibilities are and in the process contribute what they know about this particular process. So the minister is for both discovering the initial facts for appointing the participation officers and for of course implementing the policies once it's declared feasible by the other stakeholders involved. So they have many roles in this and my primary role is just to make sure everybody is in the same place, on the same page, so to speak. I mean, you've seemed to have been able to achieve a lot in a short space of time. I mean, I would expect something like that here to encounter a lot of resistance at the ministerial level. I mean, you can obviously interpret it from that point of view as a diminution of their power, can't you? No, not at all, not at all. It's a diminution of their risk, right? Because the risk is spread on all the responsible ministries in this regard and the time they could have taken to explain that it's mostly not their job instead taken to actually solve the issue. And for example, on the Facebook, like automated combat case, we actually, so this is the real-time board, can you see it? It's mostly Chinese, but okay, great. So from the left, so we have the Consumer Protection Agency, the Ministry of Transport, because it involves the delivery of trucks and whether they require the sender to fully have authentic contact details and the taxation, there's Minister of Finance. And of course, there's also Minister of Economy because it's about e-commerce, about fair competition, about Minister of Interior, in charge of police, and the Central Bank. And so instead of all seven of them just taking a little part, we actually get it into many different subtopics which every minister can act as like fully responsible because we just now let everybody know that it takes all the parts, but for every part, they are actually really responsible. And for the career public servants, it actually reduces their work because otherwise they have to respond to individual MPs repetitively. They have to respond to individual protesters in repetitively. But now because there's 5,000 people e-petitioning, it's essentially 5,000 people subscribing to our newsletter. And once we publish this picture, like at least 5,000 people get the same picture. And if we charge, for example, that Facebook should be more diligent in joining the local business association of e-commerce and making sure that the authorized or the verified merchants actually gets a better like advertisement placement or at least less chance of being flagged as inappropriate advertisement. They actually now have the mandate from the people that says, okay, now this is internet governance stuff. The minister can talk to Facebook demanding this, knowing that it's what people want on this particular regard. And actually last week Facebook did join our local business council on this particular reason. And they joined saying, okay, we'll look into this. So this is a like semi-diplomatic way of dealing with semi-sovereign entities like Facebook, also for cases like this. I mean, as far as you know, is this, I've spent quite a long time looking at this now. And I mean, your approach seems like the most advanced one in the world and is that fair to say? Yeah, yes, absolutely. Do you have you had a lot of interest from other governments in what you're doing? Right, well to be completely fair, a lot of the tools and thinking we use actually originates from the UK, right? The idea of development we took from the policy lab. There's a lot of insights we took from the repetitions in UK and also on GDS and so on. So it's not that we are particularly innovative on any component, we mostly use the component that's well-developed and even proven by people in Iceland, people in Madrid, people in the USDS and so on. But I think our contribution, our two-vote, the first is we make it regular. It's not something that the prime minister won, not something the cabinet office won, but something genuinely, the career public servants see as reducing their risk and saving their time. So this is an approach that involves more simplification of administrative work instead of the highlighting of a certain prime minister. So our first contribution is we posit all this AI stuff, all this augmented reality stuff, all this collaborative ideation stuff as time savers. And it's actually welcome. So that's our first contribution. The second is that we see ourselves as fact-finding, essentially consultancy, not just for the administration, but for everybody, including the MPs and local city councillors and local city governments. And that solves a issue where always in cases like this, the resistance is actually not necessarily from the national government level, but from the MPs and the local governments who are even more likely to think about this as taking their power away, right? But because we focus on the fact-finding and the reflection phase, and does not at all move into the decisional power, there's no e-voting, there's no showing the funds or whatever, right? So this is as seen as a welcome addition to the normal process that they do their job. So during the WCIT, during the civic tech quest, I think those two process improvements are the thing that the other like et alab and other organizations see as most compelling. It's not that they have to learn or do something new, it's just their position could be different. So, I mean, just to be clear, then you're not saying, well, is the long-term vision in your mind, could you imagine just doing away with the parliamentary body? Well, I still think we need to have full-time people working on making sure that the legislation doesn't contradict with each other. But I think, of course, on the long-term, it will be a co-creation model. Like even on Wikipedia, there is a cabal. In all the anarchistic society, there are, you know, alarming networks. They may not call themselves, you know, the powers that they or the parliamentary or representatives, but there are real needs of full-time people to ensure the consistency of the system in general. It's just instead of them deciding everything, it's that we can crowdsource the materials that they need to make sense of all this. So, it's like in a large system, maybe we can say now that the designs evolve or collaborated, but in the end, someone need to hold the design vision and I think there's still a room for the MPs to do that. I mean, are they the right people to do that? I mean, in a system such as your building? Why not? I mean, we can save a lot of their time by gathering the consensus and the public's backfinding, but because they already have a place to debate in the public and also a well-accountable system of doing the proceeding, I don't see anything should really change in the way that they do things. Maybe there will be people who say, but I want to vote for this person on this regard and so on and argue for the liquid democracy. And maybe people will argue that for certain cases makes more sense to have a random sample of people instead of elected officials who are not that representative on the variety and so on. And these are valid arguments, but I think a empowered place for doing debates like this, whether we call them MPs or not, I think it's still very valuable. So the chief distinguishing feature for them being that, they're voted, they have a mandate that stems from the ballot box. Right, but I mean, the ballot box could be in any shape, right? In a liquid or delegative democracy, you essentially have 10 different ballot boxes, one for each area of interest and in participatory budgeting, you essentially have the ballot box in the sense of dollar programs and so on. So the ballot box itself is just information gathering device. Of course, you can argue that by having a winner pass the post, whatever, when it takes all design, there's not efficient bits, right? It's not sufficient bits to do decisions. And I would agree with that, but I mean, all the other ways are essentially just variations on the same thing. Looking outside Taiwan, I mean, you might feel that you don't want to comment on outside Taiwan, but I'm just interested in, what you see as the chief, the most immediate flaws in other Western democracies systems. Well, I would include Taiwan in that. Well, as the WEF report itself said, it's the disempowerment. And disempowerment is like mistrust, right? Let's just take a variation on that. So the same idea, right? There is now social media. There is a very good way to find like-minded people, even if you feel alone, you're a neighborhood caring only about things, okay? There's chances are you will find a community no matter what online. So that leads to what we call swift trust, meaning a quick trusting of strangers just because you share the same keywords or the same meme or words and badge, whatever. And that leads to a sense of empowerment. The reality is, of course, that to actually effect change in social production takes much more than the superficial connections. So, and the lobbying and whatever, if it doesn't connect to the decision-making process, then the empowerment turns into a sense of helplessness and that's the disempowerment. And that engenders this feeling that the government is so far away from the actual means of people. Although the distance haven't really changed, but the distance between people have reduced so much that the subconscious are overlapping, it's like negative distance. So in this sense, the feeling between the citizens and the government have failed to be so large that the mistrust is now very easy to happen. And so this is just a side-dice. I don't think Taiwan is exempt from this. I mean, of the various things you've implemented, what do you consider to be the most successful remedy for that? I think the most successful remedy is that we systematically reduce the fear, uncertainty, and doubt of the very, the words, civic participation because for many career public servants, even in the administrations that even have a civic participation in social innovation office, the career public service not necessarily see this and think, hey, this can save me time and this can reduce my political risk. Mostly the career public servants see it very differently from the elected officials. They see it as something that's kind of consuming, that's potentially risky, and that engenders fear, meaning that my power could be taken away. And suddenly, meaning that this technology could really work, doubt, meaning that culturally, this is just not the way we do things. And I think over the past few years of our work here in Taiwan, now the national level and city level career public servants see civic participation and think, okay, this is just something that happens every Friday. Or they think that, okay, this is just, you know, part of the administrative process. So instead of achieving any specific achievement, I think the general culture of the public servants on civic participation, there's virtually a very low level of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. And I think that's our main contribution. And of the various things you've tried so far, what do you think, I mean, could you, if you were to write a playbook for people innovators out there who want to implement technology in their democracies, what would your headlines be? Well, my headline would be that before expecting the people trusting the government, the government need to unconditionally trust its people. That would be the headline because it's reciprocal and someone has to move first. And certainly the government is the one that has the worst track record compared to other civil society actors. And so I think the radical trust need to start from the government and the government need to start on career public servants. Can you just talk through the example I've read most about? Is the Uber, your approach to Uber? Yeah. Do you feel like, is there a reason why that's been so high-profile? Or, you know, do you feel... Well, yes, of course, because I think the Uber case is really interesting because it's not about the consensus that we eventually reached. Any academics that research this TNC stuff can write more or less the same recommendations. The main difference is that the Ministry of Transport acting on this consensus now knows that it has a better PR angle than Uber itself. And I think it's a remarkable success exactly because in many other jurisdictions Uber is decidedly on the upper hand when it comes to PR. But through this process we are able to show that we're more transparent, more accountable and respond faster than a Silicon Valley company, which is why it is made a flagship case. But if Uber only operates in Taiwan and not in other jurisdictions, there's no comparison, then I don't think there will be this much international interest. Can you just, you know, give a brief post-adversion of exactly what you did with Uber? Oh, suddenly. So, just a second. You can see this, right? So, all right. Right, so this starts at the end of 2014 after the city-level election that put the occupiers into mayors and the previous Prime Minister resigned and the new Prime Minister at the time, an engineer, says that from now on crowd-sourcing open data is going to be the national policy. And starting from the national policy the new Prime Minister enlisted the help of his deputy minister, an engineer at Google, director of engineering at Google, Simon, and also Geoffrey Tsai previously at IBM Asia. So, these people speak the language of civic tech people like we're the same kind of people, right? And so they were able to reach out to the civic tech community that was very active during not just the Occupy, but actually the mayor of elections afterwards and say, we have an issue here in Uber and we would like to crowdsource the solution. So, it really takes a political will at the national level that want to make this a prime example of effective crowdsourcing. In order for this to happen. And they also said in a hackathon said the minister at the time said, we have no idea how to run this so you're going to come up with the process and we agree to bring all the ministers on board if you can come up with a process that's the political will. So, and the special thing about Uber is that it's what I call semi-sovereign, meaning that there's actually very little that a national government can do about an app because it's an app and also it's a meme, right? It's about the belief that algorithm is better than law, can still receive law when it comes to dispatching costs. And once a driver believes this meme they become a spreader of the meme maybe they have driven just a week and decided it's not actually a good job at all and quit but during the course of the week it's been already. And so there's a lot of memes and PRs and whatever during the time and which makes the factual discussions very difficult but we believe that only a deliberation can inoculate people against such divisive like sharing economy is always good or whatever this kind of blanket believes. So we introduce the focus conversation method and the important thing about this is that this process is pre-agreed by all the stakeholders including the taxi companies, the associations of drivers, Uber itself as well as potential over competitors in the co-ops and whatever and the process is basically four stages. It's about the collection and publication of all the facts and data are relevant to this case. And then a way to automatically gather people's reflections and sentiments about the same data. And then a way for people to come up with ideation with possible solutions and the ones that are rank highest are the one that takes care of the most people's feelings. And finally the rectification of the suggested solution. And when we introduce this methodology what we are looking at is essentially a translation problem between the professional language that's used by professional lobbyists on the industry chain, on the academics or individual counselors as well as the administration itself. And because of the one government idea the government doesn't tend to say much when it's still deliberating. But it doesn't prevent people on the street from talking about this. So eventually people have come to different ideas about facts. And once people you know in this kind of environment when the same word doesn't even mean the same thing like sharing economy it sees to mean anything in Taiwan's public discourse. Then ideas become ideologies. And once you're infected with ideology you lose access to new facts right. You lose the ability to empathize with people's feelings. So on my deliberation the first one we did was we do a collective backfinding. It eventually evolve into this real-time thing that you've just seen right. But we did a crude version of using share bookmarks and directories and whatever. But still it's very useful because people are able to see that there are collective facts. And then we run a three-week online sentiment gathering for the feeling part. So we present people with sensitive facts and ask them a few yes or no questions. Now we ask all the different ministries to provide with one question that they care most. Like the Minister of Finance want to ask about insurance. And the Ministry of like transportation want to ask about requiring a professional license and so on. And so people can answer yes or no on one of those questions. And once they answer two things happen first their avatar change on this two-dimensional principle component map. And the second thing is that they see another question in the same place and they would just keep pressing yes or no yes or no. And so their position move. But they also see their Facebook and Twitter friends on the same map. So it removes the antagonism because they see you know although people initially have just clustering the corner literally like four different different sides. Still in each corner there's friends of yours. They're not really faceless enemies. They're reasonable people just didn't talk about this over dinner. And the other thing is that the positions can change because after answering a few questions maybe you want to chime in and your sentiment become other people's voting methods. So the topics. And so as people deliberate on each other's opinions we see that they cluster to the center by proposing more and more resonating sentiments. I think one of the reasons is because we say if you convince a supermajority of people 80% or more we agree to use that collective sentiment as a way to negotiate with Uber on the ideation stage. So people compete for a higher score that resonates with more people across the stakeholder groups. And then we run a consultation. It's a live stream and transcribe in real time that have the stakeholder basically checking with people's consensus like a majority of people think professional driver's license is required. What do you think about it and so on. So of the seven or so rough consensus we also get the people who to commit our support and they know that by not showing up they will be seen as essentially villains in the story. So everybody shows up and so everybody looks like heroes because they all agree with what the sentiments have agreed over the course of three ways and they're very nuanced as well. And now after we get everybody's commitment we can now say okay now we ratify this commitment into legal lease as long as this accurately represents the things that people have committed to. They can't really take big back their words and so then it was ratified knowing that everybody will be on board and Uber is good with that. And I think a large part of this is that we are okay with lobbying but all this is radically transparent and even 360 recorded and so all the stakeholders get to see every other stakeholder's points even if they come to visit me personally. So this increases trust over time instead of decreases trust over time and by the end of it Uber agreed to play by the new rules. They only hire professional driver licenses and also the existing taxi company get to make their alternatives and they're now competing on the same legal framework and so on. So it's a happy ending I guess that's the story. I mean it's extraordinary. Is that ratification process how does that take place? Right so the point here is that for each of the commitments the ministry now knowing that it's their business because one of the core issues in the Uber case was that the ministry of transport of economy of finance actually have very different idea at the beginning on how to approach Uber. So there is actually internal descent as well but after this process they're like okay so this is what people want so now the you know the tax paying the insurance the professional driver license they all have something to do. So instead of working against each other after the deliberation they now work with each other to bring their relevant parts into the regulatory wording. And now the wording is of course sent to the parliament for ratification. It took some time to be perfectly honest it took because of the transition during after the consultation they finished the first graph I think by the end of that year but then the election happened so during the four months nothing could happen. So we only ratified it after the transition to the new cabinet which took another like three months or so. But it's essentially the same version it really did not change because whether it's the KMT or the DPP it's not a party making decision it's people's collective decision so it really passed and changed to the parliament it just took a few months like seven months or so. The obvious risk I suppose is people who are not very digitally engaged or literate being left behind so you must have thought about that. Yeah of course. So we actually checked the distribution of citizen population and the distribution of people who participate in this online process and we're happy to report they correspond almost exactly right. So there's no CD like urban difference. But the reason is this is unfair because Taiwan is a small island and I think on the WEF network readiness in terms of broadband accessibility we're like tied for the first or something so people who want broadband access get broadband access and our new president current president campaign with internet is right. So there's less excuse of you know we don't have internet access but now of course it's possible that they have internet access but they don't prefer the textual way of engagement. Now that's actually a cognitive mode diversity argument instead of a network access argument. Right so for this which is why we adopted AR, VR, we adopted a real-time board that posted notes which is why we adopted this ambient computing idea where we take all this recording environment into a town hall but for a citizen it's just walking into the same town hall and having a real discussion. So we do a lot of assistive civic technology to try to make it much more inclusive for people with different cognitive modes than purely textual and PowerPoint. Okay can you just explain rough consensus and working code? Sure well I mean this is one of the tenants of internet policymaking right it's written in ARFC the Dao of the IETF the internet engineering task force so in a sense that's the political system that was raised in so I'm kind of like bringing this tribal innovation into the larger scheme of things so the idea of rough consensus is that because most of the discussion happens with people with very diverse backgrounds and especially when it's online if you seek fine consensus what will happen is that first it draws out the process very long and also people with the most free time leisure time actually always win the argument but the argument is not worth winning anymore because people have already left because they run out of patience so the idea of rough consensus is that it's better to be roughly right than be precisely wrong right so as long as people roughly agrees that okay this is more or less the case then it's okay for people to start implementing to start working on technologies that embodies this collective rough vision and then so I think central to this idea is the idea of iteration or iterative development the idea is that instead of like in Wikipedia right you publish and then you edit it was the other way around and in many crowdfunding sites you first get paid and then you do the work it was the other way around and so all this idea is about release early release often so it's okay to have some rough policy out and we co-create or we have a sandbox and then we experiment together for six months and then after six months we promise to go back and look at the data of the evidence and saying okay we need to adjust the policy whichever way and I think this iterative process itself rebuilds trust rather than any particular wise decision at any given point that's the main idea of rough consensus is just try something out and then go back and then iteratively refine it so if I what I'm hearing is I guess if you were trying to define okay 20 years from now there's been a revolution in how our democracies look you know what is it sounds like it's you're saying it's really the values revolution is around trust and the process revolution is around a much more iterative approach to making making law yeah that's a very good summer okay good oh yeah it's fascinating let me just see if there was anything specific else that I should oh maybe I should just ask you to just give a brief explanation of you know what is your actual role in government and how you came by that role and what you see as your responsibilities sure well my role in the government is called digital minister meaning that I don't oversee any particular ministry but I work cross ministry communication mostly my role is pretty varied there is an eight year plan called digital plus and there was a cover of that plan which I'm trying to bring up yeah right so the idea is this obviously the government would take care of all the different parts of the plan but we now explicitly say you know we take care of the stable infrastructure 5G and whatever right but otherwise we're just going to improve our own governance model to co-creation and stuff like that but now for the innovation we are asking the private sector to show us what regulations to change through sandboxes through co-creation and just this week the parliament is working on a fintech sandbox act and we're at the end of year doing a driverless car sandbox act so there will be many sandbox acts like that basically saying for a limited time a limited place let's co-create a regulation and for the private sector to drive the digital economy and for the government to work alongside it instead of on top or on the bottom I think bottom up or top down really only makes sense when you're in a luxury or a highly bureaucratic organization when it comes to cross-sectoral collaboration there's no bottom up or top down this words doesn't even make sense and then the other part of my work is I'm also the minister in charge for social innovation social enterprise so the idea is therefore the last mile delivery of the inclusion we also say actually the local civil society the co-op the NGOs the social enterprise is no better to do inclusion to for example instead of just providing accessibility services to the disabled people there are social enterprises in Taiwan that trains the disabled people empower them into urban designers and who sell their service to the places that actually needs you know accessibility design and through you know preferential like hotels.com but for accessibility needed people to encourage the whole society to co-create stuff and I think this is much better than the model where the government simply contracts a few inspectionists because they may not have the first experience of the distributed stakeholders so we try to use such social innovation methods and social enterprise on the civil society to deliver government services and government focuses on improving the governance model and so my role is both to oversee that this whole paradigm shift and also share of this very specific small part of how exactly the government internally conducts this business with the help of digital tools so I'm not directly involved in the innovation or inclusion part per se but I'm also just working on the process to ensure that the multi stakeholder model happened so this is a digital enablement part and then of course there was also all those repetition and open government participation stuff that I'm working on and that's the main role that I'm having. What does anarchism mean to you in the context of this conversation? Right so anarchism just means doing away with any top down button up you know any hierarchical things and it also means doing away with the idea of representation right anarchism is the idea that people should represent themselves directly to each other instead of representationally having somebody speak for anyone else right so my work as an anarchist is just to dispel the myth that all this process require a governmental apparatus to happen because the process itself is all free software it's open sources and commas anyone in any level can just take our toolkit and run it and which means that eventually people will see that it really doesn't take a government to run this process and that's the long-term goal okay that's probably the end of my question I mean just to be clear you when you say there's no government I mean that would terrify a lot of people maybe you could elaborate because you don't actually mean that there's no there's no government right I mean the government maybe is then distributed right like for example if you like if you're one of those cryptocurrency believers it doesn't mean the end of currency it means the end of hierarchical top-down central banks right so it's not cancelling the so which is why we wrote governance right instead of government it is the idea that people can participate in governance whatever their sector is now the government the state still runs a lot of governance stuff but we're not saying you know we're the one with exclusive right running governance stuff right so this is more like a I wouldn't say the central at the point a multi-central thinking of governance model so it's not the abolition of state but it's you know having people who are much more much better to run multi-stateholder process to design run the process then just as they get self-dealing okay and final question you've been able to run a lot of I guess experiments over the last few years and also it's been an experiment for you personally you know moving into a government role so what has most surprised you hmm right so I run this process explicitly to reduce fear uncertainty and doubt right and I run the idea of radical transparency which basically means all the meetings that I convene even internal meetings we make a full transcript and have all the participants from all the ministries or whatever edit for Ken working days and then we publish everything on the internet and so twice I know other national ministry level people doing this and the results really surprised me I mean I did it to show accountability and also to show that it really isn't that there's nothing to fear there's no uncertainty or doubt around publishing the work that we do right but once we I do that there is a side effect that I did not anticipate it makes me a very rare kind of politician that is blame-seeking and credit avoiding so in traditional public administration theory a non-career public servant a appointed politician is supposed to be credit seeking and blame avoiding meaning that if things go right is the minister's credit and if things go wrong the media or the people has a way to pinpoint the contractor or the career public servant that actually carried a new step but in a radically transparent environment it's the other way around this is an entirely new idea of policymaking open policymaking so if anything goes wrong it's of course Audrey's fault because you know this is a whole new system of making things but when things go right and they did go right people and the journalists and so on they go back to the transcripts and see that this is actually the director general's idea or this is the very low level career public servant's idea and they get the credit right so the idea is that what we are seeing now is that people become very innovative they raise points and propose plans that maybe only has 20% of working instead of 99% because they know that the blame gets absorbed by Peters and especially that Audrey but if it actually works then they get the credit so what we are seeing is a lot of the same dynamics as when a similar program was adopted by private enterprises or large NGOs is that people become much more innovative and much more willing to propose to engage in risk taking behavior now that we absorb the risk and this is very surprising and it's not in any of the public administration textbooks so that's why I'm also learning the same brilliant thank you alright unless there's anything else you wanted to say well no that's pretty much it and again we can either publish this whole video recording if you're okay with it or we can make a transcript and if you want to edit for 10 days sure no no we can just publish what you like okay so just send the video to me you'll be on youtube soon thanks bye