 Hello. Hello. How are you? Pretty good. Can you hear me? Good. Good. So you're in the airport at the moment? That's right. I'm in the airport launch, so I'm going to speak a little bit softer. Assuming that you can still hear me, of course. Sure. I can hear you really well. That's great. So that's great. Where are you going? To New Zealand, actually. To Auckland. Oh, fantastic. And what are you doing there? There's this annual food camp there called the BEG camp, the BAE camp, or Kiwi food, and I'm attending it for the next time. Oh, fantastic. That sounds lovely. Excellent. Well, thank you for taking the time while you're at the airport to speak to me. I really appreciate. So just for the setting the timeframe, I have two and a half hours. I don't know whether that would be sufficient for you. Yeah, that's plenty of time. Don't worry. I think we'll be at half an hour, probably, if that's okay. Sure, because there's like a lot of questions. So if you want to go through them, I would estimate that like one hour of time would be. It could be. It could be. Depends how much you have to say, but if you have to say a lot, I'm happy with that because we just want to get as much information as we can. We're doing a big piece. It's 1,500 words, so we want a lot of detail, if possible. So yeah, should we begin? Yeah, I should. Yeah, go ahead. Great. I'm recording, but my record is only doing the audio at the moment. Are you recording as well? Yeah, I'm doing a screen recording of the video of both sides and also a regular recorder. So we'll have like three channels. So there will be high quality audio and video that I will send you right after the call. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you very much. Okay. Well, could you start with telling me a bit about your background? Have you always been into programming? What was it like growing up for you in Taiwan? Well, my background is pretty transparent. I started programming in 1989. That would be when I was eight years old. It was around the time when the martial law was lifted in Taiwan. We had freedom of press for the first time and my parents, I suppose, working in journalism, started to slowly migrate to typing instead of writing for their work. But at the time, things like the IBM PC and so on are still considered work and not personal items, but I was really interested. So I just started reading the Vux programming when it was around eight years old and started programming without a computer at home. And so I just, you know, draw the keyboards and write down the responses that the computer would supposedly give me and so on. And it went on for quite some time before my parents finally gave in and gave me, you know, a person computer. So how did you become interested in politics? Well, it's immersive, you know, because when I was eight, as I mentioned, we just got democracy and freedom of press. So like everybody was talking about politics, like we get to vote for this time, meaningfully. And it's like, I remember the around the dinner table in our home because my dad is a political commentator in the newspaper and my mom also covers for politics when I was young. So there's like this constant debate about the speed we're taking to our democracy about what's the best form, whether it's button up, whether it needs a constitutional amendments, whether it's things like that and how this multi-partisan actually work and things like that. So I grew up listening to this as is people in my generation. So tell me about the sunflower movements and how things entailed and kind of led you to where you are? Well, it's a like any large massive skill movement. Anyone's viewpoint would be radically different from anyone else who participated. There's literally half a million different viewpoints. So what kind of experiences would you like to hear about those 22 days? Where were you when it was happening? What were you doing personally? All right. So I remember I was working with social text in the Silicon Valley, as well as a consultant for Apple at the time. And I remember posting in a social text chat channel, we call it signals. That's our virtual workspace saying that I really need to take a leave because democracy needs me. And so it's like one of the statements that really stuck because I really have to explain to my coworkers what's happening, why a bunch of people occupy the parliament. And I remember going there at the night of the protest, bringing my laptop and my phone for the covering of the event, providing the necessary equipment for the civic media there. And we all thought that it will end that night. I thought we all thought that it's just one day of demonstration. But I remember this young person who lent me his laptop because we need this really stable connection between my Wi-Fi and through a Ethernet bridge to the person, the camera person who is taking in the footage of the protest outside of the parliament. And he was like, this is my administration, their password. I think he was running Windows seven and saying, you know, you can have that laptop all night if you want. I'm like, maybe you look like a 20 something. How does it say 20 something is okay with parting with this expensive looking laptop. And like just leaving it to a complete stranger for the entire night. And little did I know that he belongs to the Black Island youth, the group who decided to break into the parliament and climb over walls and things like that. So laptop is going to be a burden, which is why he's just safely depositing it in the media camp right outside the parliament. And so I think there's a really interesting meeting between the free software people at my camp and the people who are young activists and people who are civic media. We did not wipe this Leslie in any of those demonstrations before. There's plenty of demonstration like the anti nuclear force nuclear plan demonstration where we strictly speaking just provided broadband and things like that, but always in a very neutral way and kinds of, you know, we just support the media. We don't become the media, but the line becomes really blood between the media and the network people and the activists during the days that followed because we had to improvise practically everything because there was no internet connection to begin with and we had to boost trap ourselves. And so, yeah, I remembering those 350 meters internet cable to connect through the parliament building to the street outside. Remember talking in our hackathon about whether it's a crazy idea to apply for a fiber optic line to a random place in a street's cross section. I don't think any of the telecoms got this request before, but it is the place we needed to provide the Wi-Fi for the people hovering the protest on the street. And they actually consented and sent this fiber optic line a couple of days later. And I remember, you know, setting up those real-time spreadsheets using a spreadsheet that I co-wrote with Dan Brickling, the inventor of spreadsheets called EtherCalc. We were just beta testing that free software spreadsheet and then people started just warming that little host to paste in all the links they could find that is relevant to the protest, including the maps, the charging stations, the open street map people did a really comprehensive mapping of the resources and the police force and where to get supplies and things like that, as well as real-time social analytics of the sentiments across the island about all the major arguments of the protest, as well as, of course, like courtry, reporter styles, demographic recording of all the debates that's being held in the occupied parliament, as well as in the streets nearby. Yeah, there's a lot of memories. Toward the end of the occupy, there's a bunch of people who don't want to retreat and they appeal to us, saying that we want to use the system that you're using for decision-making, Lumio, to have a real consultation about whether to retreat or whether to continue occupying. I also remember how we started using Lumio because we had this coordination problem of just random volunteers showing up to help with the connectivity and we had no idea whether they're actual civic hackers or engineers or whether they're just here for the fun and because the engineers have a fast lane toward all the occupied stations and so yeah, maybe people are just getting from the ride and we had to somehow tell a network engineer from a non-network engineer and so we used Lumio to crowdsource the ideas. We started with some really bad ideas like depositing one's passport or an electronic ID or that nobody mentioned blockchain at that point wasn't that popular in 2014. But yeah, we settled out with something really, really simple which is asking anyone who show up who looks new what's two to the power of six, two to the power of nine and if they can answer it they're likely a civic or an internet engineer and things like that. So there's literally every day is a completely different topography, a completely different configuration that we're going to work with. I remember a day where the Supreme Court did this interpretation of the law saying that it is flesh mobs are constitutional. They don't have to get a approval beforehand. If there's no coordinator and there is no organized, pre-mediated will to and suddenly we have random people showing up and holding iPads or wearing GoPros and saying they want to be volunteer. Civic journalists because well, now flesh mobs are legal and so we had to coordinate those people and so we printed, we've made a website where you get to upload your photo and type your name and they print out this civic journalist badge for you and with a QR code and a 16 explanation of your rights after this Supreme Court judgment. So just so that any police would didn't get a note can just scan the QR code and understand the city journalists. It's now protected in the same way constitutionally as mainstream journalists. So yeah, it's like 22 very different worlds day after day, but it's fun. Fantastic. It just sounds like it's very highly organized as well, which might be one of the reasons it works so well. Do you agree with that? I wouldn't say it's organized. It's very tightly, I would say coordinated that there will be a better time. There's no there's no organization, let's say there's just protocols because it's co-organized by at least a dozen and by the end of it at least two dozen NGOs and some not even organizations like which is random bunch of people. And so each of them have to find the places where they provide some value to the other occupiers while you know agree on some way of achieving a rapid rough consensus so that we can go on to do our thing throughout the day and respond to the media and things like that. So there's this huge amount of using hackpad of using all sorts of collaborative documents to do synthetic documents guidelines and things like that. So it's very common for one side or one group or just one person to put up something that they think is a viable plan for the day and on a hackpad and then people would just swarm on it and the discussion itself would be recorded and actually live streamed and so more people discovered and joined the discussion but the magically people just agree on something by the end of the hour and things like that but it's literally hundreds of people. And so yeah I would say it is that the non-human agent things like hackpad and either calcard are really providing the facilitation role in a very agency-wielding way so but I wouldn't say that those collaborative documents are organisers of the protest. It would sound very funny. I would say it's coordinated. Tell me about how you met Chi-Lang and how you ended up working together because I've spoken to Nesta in the UK and they kind of described the situation where you met and you went back to the government. How did that work in real life? You mean CL Gao? Right. I think I met CL. I'm sure that we met virtually on some bulletin board systems but that doesn't count. So I think we met face-to-face when I recruited him for a random Silicon Valley startup. I think that was in early 2000 or yeah or 1999 something like that. And so the idea is 2000. The idea is I worked it in my first startup as a CTO of a small company called Inforion. And Inforion is kind of a prototype like we did the first online auction slide in Taiwan. A meta-search client. What we will now call the social media or the Myspace like or good like thing. And I got some investment from Intel around the time that I quit. And so it was one of the larger like internet companies back in 1986. And so after I quit, CL Gao became the CTO of that company and started doing the instant messenger CICQ which was really popular also. And so yeah we were like alums in the same startup company but our times did not overlap. But after the dot-com crash CL also left Inforion. And so we started planning what we're going to do next. And so we thought that we could build a federated not central social system built on bulletin board systems which is well part free net part. Now that we have words for it, it was really hard to explain in the 2000 and so we did a startup together. And that's how we met. Great, great. And how did your relationship develop? And how did you get involved together in the current Taiwan initiative? Well see it's I think it's 2001 or 2002 where we started those weekly meetups called the elixir meetups. And elixir stands for elixir projects. And the elixir project stands for mostly it's just a random bunch of people who are inspired by things like intermediate or by things like the next times and you know those communities and want to build a similar community in Taiwan. And so we did a lot of things we translated this very important software called movable type MP4 movable type slash and also published with orally Taiwan quite a few books and also translated the word blog and started this circle of bloggers who meet regularly to talk about how we can decentralize or re-decentralize journalism. And so it was CL and I were both active participants in that circle and we meet every week every Sunday at the Wisteria House which was like the mecca for the Taiwan activists working on democracy for the past 40 years or something. And so it's interesting. So yeah we quickly gathered just random sorts of people who I will now see as a prototype of the gap zero movement some 10 days 10 years later. And so that's how our relationship developed and he taught me this program which is called Lisp and I taught him this program language called Pearl and then together we did some software projects together. He did this decentralized version control system called SVK which is like a predecessor to Git and I did this language called pro six and things like that. So yeah we which is always check each other's projects and collaborate it and just fill in whatever things that he did. Perhaps when starting a project and sometimes meaning the supporting role and so it went on I think for years and he went to London I think to join Fortango and after I joined social tanks I managed to convince him to join social tanks. And so it was 2008 when I joined social tanks. And so he had this I'm sure that he told you this paragliding accident and which was really the foundation of the gap zero movement because he was paralyzed in bed and couldn't really do anything other than try to organize people. And so yeah and that was when this really ingenious domain name was invented and I think it was really the missing piece. We tried to boost that community like this for at least five times before but this domain name two zero three I think is really cool. Yeah fantastic great. So you've been digital minister since 2016. Are the youngest ever minister in in the government is that correct? Well not quite so and of course I was the youngest when I joined but there was a minister who was younger than me. When she joined the cabinet many years ago for the first time as the minister in charge of use affairs she was acting a few months younger than me when I joined the cabinet. I am the youngest minister with a portfolio but that isn't saying much. Okay so you're one of the youngest we could. Yeah well you can say that I was the youngest when I joined or the youngest minister with a portfolio or the first digital minister I don't really care. I'm sorry? What's a typical day like for you now? There's no typical day so I mean my work is very structured around the days of the week so there's a typical Monday there's a typical Tuesday and so on but there's no typical day passing so yeah which day of the week is your favorite? I have no idea Friday. Okay my typical Friday is having a multi-state order for our discussion with the participant officers in the ministries in every ministry and it is part of a national regulation instated is that every ministry must assign at least one person but more often than not like a team of people who work as PO's or participation officers and just like officers who talk with the parliament or officers who talk with the media these people are there to talk with everybody with stakeholders and so the PO network is one of our ways of trying to be into the government this coordination without control or leaderless framework that we've been talking about for the past 20 years or so outside of the government in a national setting and the way it works is of course we use this free software system Sandstorm that provides collaborative documents and spreadsheets and come back boards and name it chat rooms and get the people from every ministry who form this network on it and what we do is that we look at the e-petition cases whereas before we had this national petition system as a result of the sunflower movement by the end of 2014 it is a demand of the national form of citizens which was held because of the sunflower movement that the government must not repeat this mistake which was to open the cross-strait service trade agreement to public consultation very late in the process where people are left with only the right of I don't know like chatting so the idea is that for all the regulations that are the laws there must be a ongoing system for people to have meaningful conversations and when the agenda setting power is was monopolized by the government we really want a with the people like petition system where 5000 citizens together can demand a response from the administration but unlike we the people many people proposed cross-ministerial issues and it wasn't really clear whether which minister or which officer would be in charge of responding to those e-petitions so what we observed was that the single ministry issues get really meaningful two-way dialogue with ministries especially the already public facing ministries such as the health and welfare but all the pretty much all the cross-ministry issues just get an explanation rather than a real solution a real dialogue for that matter and the reason why is that the ministry people is very siloed they are not used to work with or across ministry recovery lines and so as a minister with a portfolio and therefore not partial to any ministry the idea is that I lead this PO network in a service space leadership kind of way in a sense that I don't command them to do anything but if they need a facilitator we provide facilitator if they need co-design worship we hold it co-design worship if they need ways to handhold them to talk with angry stakeholders so we do that too and so the idea is that we lower their fear uncertainty and doubt and so on a typical Friday we will meet in the social innovation lab in Taipei we meet roughly twice a month sometimes three times a month to do a mind map together with the stakeholders who did the petitions so as a concrete example for example people petitioned that there's now random scams on facebook that propose to sell some goods at really cheap price but when they order and pay pay on arrival and so when they pay for say a hard disk and when the arrival to to their doors they found that it's actually counterfeit goods or really it's a brick but they have already paid and delivery people have already gone and the sender is you know a anonymous or an non-existing entity and where they came to the ever so helpful instant message assistant of that facebook page they discovered it is actually a robot so there is it is actually a legitimate concern and there's widespread scams on facebook last year and so more than 5000 people petitioned so that the government can look into it and do something but you know just like the problem of email spam their solution doesn't really lie in any single ministry nor does it lie in any sector for that matter we we need to all do a little bit in every point possible and solve the issues collaboratively so to increase the cause of scam scammers essentially so what we did is meet in this social innovation lab with the not just the petitioners we invite up to five co-petitioners to type a face-to-face but we also live stream it if they want and also invite the stakeholders such as the e-commerce association the delivery companies and and so on and try to figure out where exactly in this problem map are we and so we come up together with this mind map of where exactly is the problem and how do we respond to it creatively now this is going to be all like chinese characters for you but i'm going to share my screens anyway because it's kind of difficult to to paint this picture without a picture just a second how do i share my screen i'm sure that here can you see my screen now yes okay it's coming through okay that's great right so um yeah so as we can see the primary responsible ministries are the consumer protection agency the ministry of transportation communication and the ministry of finance and then in assisting capacities the ministry of economy fair trade commission and our ministry of interior because they are the police people and also the central bank because well they're interested and the e-commerce associations the home delivery guys and the you know petitioners and co-counter sign people so what we did is that we used this design thinking method to ask people to write in post-it notes colored as problems or challenges and the blue ones are the facts right and then the red ones are the feelings negative mostly the restrictions and the ideas are colored in green and the responses from government are colored in orange and so we dissect the entire from the touchpoint the journey of people getting into a scam into and they're receiving and they're not able to get refund into very small steps and then get to assign responsible ministries for each very small part of it and afterwards we started this problem statement about how to educate the people and how to make those kind of scam more expensive and co-created the solutions so the idea is that people who complain the loudest are our co-creators and they they kind of earn the right by starting a useful petition and we can also assign some cards to external stakeholders such as how to educate users to identify those scams and how to associate this report scan mechanism with other validation mechanisms such as the gray tick on Facebook and those two post-it notes we assign to Facebook because that's something only they can do and so when I visit to Facebook I just you know bring out this context saying all the other stakeholders are already committed to be part of the solution so why don't you know you show some corporate responsibility to society and to their credit day after just a couple weeks joined locally the taiwan e-commerce association has started a face-to-face dialogue inform with the people impacted and try to co-create a solution together so so it's a I think this kind of structured conversation if it's just once every year or so it will be seen as a experiment but now because we do it literally like 20 or 30 times a year it becomes a part of the norm the ministries all think that okay it's just the way you do with petitioners but actually this methodology can also be scaled to deal with pretty much everything that needs to work across silos so we use the public pressure from the petitioners and a known weak point that is to say that I'm inability to handle cross ministry issues and organize or coordinate the ministries so that they can self-organize and read the state orders and turn those noises you know those statements that people post on the petition platform and group them into signals that is to say the aspects that are constructive on this mind map so they're now all pretty well-versed in this methodology we have run at 27 co-creation workshops can I ask you how do you ensure the participation of kind of a wide range of people because obviously it's quite appealing to young people do you have quite a wide range of age in terms of so I think participation is such a wide word so we deal with local issues as well there's one case where we deal with the Hengchun which is a southmost part of Taiwan and they the people there were petitioning for a helicopter to be stationed the police helicopter the blackhawks to be stationed in their local little use airport because they are too far away from the close by large hospital who is able to treat cardiac arrest and things like that and and it's a popular diving place and so they want helicopters to essentially serve as ambulance costs because the closest large hospital is like 90 minutes away and so they they employ many tactics and and it's definitely not just young people because the Hengchun doesn't have even the population for the petition but it's a very popular touristy attraction so they organize booths and there's a bed and breakfast that you know scares their customers saying you know what would happen if you get a heart attack here you better go online inside this petition before checking in and there's all sort of community organization methods that I did to to push the conversation on a national agenda and I'm very grateful that the Ministry of Health care and welfare as well as the interior and the transportation we explore literally all the possible solutions to this problem and we finally settled on assigning a huge sum to build a large medical center in their place and which is actually the really the solution that stops the root cause because otherwise the doctors will just leave this place even more because the real heart cases are at a cup turn away and anyway but the idea is that we went there as we all went there for all the different ministries and the participation officers the team and the PD's team and so on and we all went to the south most part of Taiwan to have a face-to-face town hall style discussion and so the idea is that we still have this co-creation workshop of around 30 people in one room but also in the same building in the town hall we broadcast this entire conversation in real time and I personally serves as the anchor like the ESPN anchor to explain to the townspeople why this expert is saying this why is this PowerPoint slide important so so the people in the first room can still dialogue in a somewhat more efficient way using expert language and so on while people in the second room can always dial in using what we call Slido an online opinion collection system I go over every single Slido comments that's being liked in the order of likes and so to feedback the crowdsourced wisdom from the general population I think the average age is over 40 on the town hall and to feedback those into the real-time deliberation that's happening in the smaller room which is coordinated and facilitated by the neutral facilitator and so we we think the idea is not not about just one face of one part of the deliberation that's online I think online is just a gender setting it's a signal that says this is important if you look into it but afterwards is ethnographic research it is face-to-face it's more groups focus groups but the idea is that we do it in a transparent way so that any meeting can refer to the product of the early things that this of the meetings and whenever we have a binding consultation we always meet face-to-face but also try to get people who would not otherwise be able to participate through 360 real-time livestream or virtual reality event and things like that so it's a equalized it's not meant to replace face-to-face meeting which would of course result of more young people than other age groups but rather a town hall meeting that is people of all the age groups but also augmented with online participation and I think that kind of balances the local wisdom versus the technical scientific knowledge of their people so what are your aims for the future um your twitter profile you decide could you explain that to me and and tell me what your aims are sorry my twitter way on your twitter profile you describe yourself as an anarchist a conservative anarchist well um a well which part do you want to hear both parts right um right so um a anarchist um is uh well to me at least uh someone who does not give commands uh who who don't coerce other people into doing things right and also of course equally important someone who doesn't take commands uh and and all the transactions and relationships need to be voluntary uh from all parties that's what anarchists mean to me um and and because of this it means that bureaucratic organizations such as countries or implicit command structures such as nations um these are useful illusions um but they are not always useful and so we still use it as a abstraction when they fit but uh we don't use it when it's a leaky abstraction meaning that they they don't fit and so we try not to pay too much attention to any uh hierarchical organizational structure right but the uh conservative part kind of balances this out um conservative to me means that to respect the traditions respect the way people's lives are there's a lot of existing ways of cultures both the internet culture as well as the face-to-face culture that are worth keeping and as those two cultures or many cultures right up matter are kind of just mishmashing into each other i think what what is important to me about conservation or conservative is to keep what works and not to try to install too drastic a change in circumstances or simply declare that one culture is good and the other is absolutely ending to be obliterated and so on so i think the the two words linked together conservative and up here is to me personally means to to keep what always has worked in the internet culture as well as in the larger civilization and try to fuse them gradually uh with the society without sacrificing any one side of things or or what um people valuable okay that makes sense a lot of sense so what are your aims as digital minister what are you going to be doing going forward i'm always doing the same things um whether or not people comic digital minister or not so let's say it so i'm not really doing anything as the digital minister i remember the the first interview with the premier ding chen the previous premier who asked me whether i want to join the cabinet um and i just draw him this this might map of all the work that i've been doing on my projects uh and he looked at it and i'm like is there anything i can't do uh in this that because of you know my role in the cabinet and then he looked at it and and says no you just keep on doing whatever you're already doing uh right so the digital minister to me is a more of an honorary title uh that that really doesn't stop me and then because i don't take commands either right so so i don't get assignments as such so um yeah so so the work that i'm always doing regardless of whether digital minister or not um is just to um scale the the experience of listening and and be listened to um so to see when when two people are meeting face to face and they attune to each other's emotion and mental state and so on they they engage in this very um you know the individualities meld away and people get genuine creativity and so on they're listening like that is magic um but we we do face a lot of space and time constraints which is why we need a noise canceling headphone to talk to you that's why we need sky uh because we're in different time zones um and so on so i mean there's parts where technologies can help but it's not to make us super human it's just to to restore to a more a better human condition uh that that's that's the kind of where we started right um and the same goes to to the number of people um because of this uh wet way uh restrictions we can't really um have a conversation with more than 100 people or so uh and keeping track in our head uh everybody's mental and emotional state it's just not possible the best facilitators can do maybe 100 people but but not more than that um but the and of course people can separate into groups but then you get hierarchies hierarchies just kind of grow out of this um inherent limitation and and with um the group dynamics uh kind of just mandates that there will emerge um either a leader or a leading um thought ideology or or kind of a uh a dual um at play that people other people kind of just give up their um creativity uh as time goes goes on and this is a very well-studied um issue uh until internet came along and and then suddenly people who shared the same affinity to a keyword just started trusting each other in a very quick way uh and then it become it's scaled out but but it's not scaled deeply nor has it really scaled up the number of people all it did is scale out this kind of shallow not quite listening listening and and so um my work has always been to to go into all the three dimensions um to scale out to scale up and to scale deeply uh and try to get the same listening experience but instead of you know like radio and television where one person get to speak to one million people but have no idea what this million people said um try to listen to those millions of people as signal but not as noise uh but equally importantly too to have millions of people listen to each other uh and to partake in this kind of uh listening experience so yeah it's been always the project that I don't think uh it's my project I think it is just um how the technologies uh evolved in a asymmetrical way at the beginning and with the internet it was this huge dream the clue train manifesto and declaration of zebrasmiths independence and all that uh and to to kind of democratize this but it didn't quite play out that way right so we talk about um really centralization we talk about really really centralization uh and and somehow I think um artificial intelligence um will um either just make the facilitation so so easy so that uh we we don't feel that it's uh 100 people will be able to listen to 100 people as if it's one person or it will uh it will fake that right so so basically just echo chambering and and listen to the part in the 100 people where we already identified with which doesn't really mean anything right so so there's there's potentials in many different ways and I'm just trying to um to to build some authenticity uh in in this uh process and to be with the public service because they of all people are tasked with listening right to the general public and um if if anything um I think the real innovations will will happen with people who are who have the career of listening to um just random stakeholders just because there is assist great so you mentioned AI is one of the technologies that you think is going to be helpful and kind of collating these large amounts of information opinions is there any other technology and are you talking about the policy platform is that that's an AI enabled platform isn't it yeah well well it's I mean AI means anything now right it just mostly means automation now so in that sense in that sense is AI powered by the conversation for sure um it uses um you know um I think it's it's like the the Eliza of uh of of scalable um conversation it's it's very easy to explain um just like Eliza if you have seen the script of Eliza you know immediately how it's like you match some keyword and it's just a chat bot um but um just like polis um if you uh see how and it used that k means clustering to cluster the votes and the principle component analysis to determine the most controversial dimensions that's pretty much it um there's no deep learning or anything AI um traditional AI machine learning uh involved but but that's the there's the beauty of it um just like um the the recent um there was this this bot a chat bot with a face that was um named a a citizen of a uh a Saudi Arabian country or something uh France and robotics um yeah the beauty of that is that a chat bot with a face is actually in many cases working better than than real artificial intelligence uh robotic assistance um because people people want to hear other people they the chat bot is just a a conduit uh to for like a better chance um and so yeah you can think polis as AI but it's really just a chat bot with a face um that that shows you the face of the crowd in the most um cognitively policing way uh and and so yeah I would like brahly speaking I think it's AI um but but I think it's um as things go by we I think of AI as as just outsourcing um the cognitive functions um the predictable parts of cognitive functions that a facilitator go through as she is facilitating a rim for example she would need to hear the the sounds and uh identified which part in the mind that that I just showed you is this person talking about and that requires um semantic analysis or and well and very simple things just you know speech recognition and gaze recognition right and when many people are talking together they need to figure out the the attention uh like the gaze of um the various participants around and then to handle the group dynamic and and of course just like most of the cognitive functions those are automatic and uh part of facilitator training just like driving a car is to spot those cues and and respond um accordingly and and just like self-driving cars these are people what people do subconsciously and so these are actually what mission learning can help and they can help in a way that doesn't make value judgments but rather just take the mind let the facilitator take the mind off because it's augmenting the human capacity and so that the facilitator can concentrate on understanding and and getting to a consensus that people can live with and so I see AI anymore um there's a term for this called calm technology um in in a way that that that's the that's the the inverse that's the reverse of distracted distracted technologies like it it gives you more attention um it doesn't take your attention away uh and so most of the research and experiment that we're doing now such as the 360 um um camera that's linked with system that automatically transcribe whatever he says and who is speaking and who is paying attention to where and so on are the are the things that uh there so that people are just vaguely aware of it it's the environment as a computer and and it makes people suddenly feel that they could focus on each other and this is the kind of AI that I'm referring to impetus or slido and and so on the real-time are of course part of it okay so are there any other plans uh in terms of what you're doing in v tyron for the future are you going to be expanding out to beyond uh digital policy making well you see the the the e-petition platform uh the join platform um j o i and um is is is it's not particularly digital right we we we talk about the deployment of helicopters or not in henchmen we talk about um uh whether we need to ban fishing in our first uh open to the public national marine park uh we talk about whether single women should be able to get a child by her volition uh and so there's nothing digital in those topics and and so the the production system I think of join uh platform as our production system um on top of it is all of the laws of the regulations announced 60 days before taking effect or sending to the parliament on top of it is every ministry's budget and all the kbis and and how each government procurement or spending is going toward those government projects there's this nifty visual budget visualization of the national budget and of course there's the e-petition part and so the production platform has long since moved beyond the the digital issues uh and in fact we we meet every week or every other week to to tackle those those issues the v taiwan platform remains experimental and the government isn't even at arm's length we are we're we're totally giving up control um on v taiwan just as minister jack lintzai totally gave up control when she went to the gap zero hackathon and then say the government doesn't know how to do this you guys figure it out um and so in in her tradition uh now that i'm the digital minister i'm explicitly not telling the v taiwan folks uh how to deliberate any particular topic uh all I promise is that any topics that's chosen collaboratively by the national development council and the v taiwan community I will give it binding power by personally attending the consultation meetings by bringing synthetic documents to the premiere by you know making part of our digital agenda and things like that but other than providing binding power and a the very nice social innovation to have weekly meetups I'm not really directing anyone to do anything on any topic but but this is a luxury you see for for things like whether we build a a building or not whether we ban fishing or not it's not very clear that we cannot find win-win solutions there's there's going to be trade-offs there's going to be parts of it that are zero sum we we try very hard with co-creation to find win-win solutions but sometimes we find just solutions that people can barely live with and that's that's politics but but with with with digital issues nobody really nailed how it's going to be and there's there's no zero sum generally speaking there's no zero sum because there was not a status quo there was no no uber before uber was introduced right so so it is almost always possible with digital to to find a way that is based on the abundant mindset rather than the scarcity mindset and so we we handpick curate those topics and and and give the v taiwan people the community for rain because you know the worst they can do is to to come with the zero solution meaning that we don't do anything which is okay with digital matters but the more often than not they come with this really creative solutions and reach a lot of stakeholders and also with digital issues we can engage the international network community because as we're deliberating over our airbnb or platform economy everybody else is doing the same thing and so we get to think outside of a national city boundary and then to really do it in a way that's sustainable to all the stakeholders involved which is why internet participation is very important but it is very difficult to imagine for a local whether we build a hospital or not discussion that we would get a fraction of the international interest on these kind of matters and and so skilling out is kind of you know down to a political deliberation of either one just doesn't really make any sense and it will necessarily make this you know anarchistic leaderless community split because there will be people who are more familiar with the local issue or there will be people who think of it as a zero something but the digital issues that we put on v taiwan don't suffer from these issues so so i think v taiwan for the foreseeable future i think we remain to tackle issues related to to the digital world just because it's not zero some but if we somehow you know you know with i don't know cofusion or things like that matter duplicator or things like that to to make real world stuff also no zero some and then of course we can open up more room for experimentation but before that we defer to the internal v taiwan like network we should appeal network and they're all career public servants trained to tackle this kind of issue i still also give them free reign but at least their peers are all participation offices and career public servants and authorized by their deputy minister or cio to make our decisions if needed be and so there's two communities and for the join platform we use the internal community and for digital issues we engage the beat howling of zero your approach is quite unique across the world if you look at other you see it working where else or is it very unique to you well we actually learned a lot i mean from other places the joint platform in particular the e-petition platform while inspired by we the people is actually modeled largely after the um the the iceland i can't pronounce their capital history the better radiopic whatever uh platform um the the idea is that the the as city level we learned from the madrid city the council platform the pasalona city there's there's actually many cities the paris city for their participatory budgeting platform and of course many nearby city states as well the singapore government digital service and things like that so you see a lot of this kind of co-creation in community level like in the uk or in city level in some younger democracies well so i don't think we're that unique what's perhaps unique is that we're scaling into 23 million people so so it's the population i think that is the main unique point otherwise if you just look at half a million people's cities there's plenty of them doing similar innovations um but i think the geography of taiwan is is particular in this regard because um with the taiwan high speed rails going from the northmost to the southmost uh station um is just two hours a little bit more than two hours so so it is a a city right by by many measurements and of course it's mostly a single island uh and so we're very easy to get the forgery coverage or the internet um penetration to to one of the world's highest and and even when moving like hundreds of miles per hour um the taiwan high speed rail we were able to um give free wifi access uh even in the tunnels and so in many ways the geography is in our favor because it's it's we don't have that much of a digital gap uh and of the the remaining like three percent of uh areas uh the population who don't uh can't afford usually if they're in uh indigenous or are really rural like uh remote island um places we because the president's high believes in in brabant as human right uh we use special budget uh to to you know fill all those remaining two or three percent so so there's no excuse of saying we can't get a can make a bit public uh then and when you get there then then a lot of things just became a lot more possible um and um also because taiwan is constitutionally protecting the education budget and the education reform now also emphasizes autonomy learning co-learning with the teacher from the internet and things like that as part of the new curriculum um the the entire generation of kids are are are raised uh to have the skill of critical thinking and uh debating both uh physicals and online and actually to them there's a real difference uh between those two worlds and more and so with this kind of population um we can then treat 23 million more of like a 23 000 uh people's city geographically speaking and so focus on getting the best ideas but not focusing so much on uh you know just getting the last mile fibers um or other things like that so the education level the young democracy engagement level and the geography i think all work in our favor thank you that's really interesting and thank you for explaining everything so clearly and precisely i appreciate that um was there anything else to add as well i think there's a couple of questions i don't know if you thought there was anything that might be missing that might be interesting for our readers well um let's see um well i kind of elided a question that that's how did the v taiwan story play out of that right we didn't really go over that one um but but you're you're interviewing everybody else in the v taiwan community right they're actually starting a a hackpad to collectively answer that so so i'll just give my side of the story then um the the v taiwan story from from my point of view um it's a story of the central government having lost all legitimacy uh and the occupiers and occupiers sympathize us want the local election um threatening to make the central government irrelevant that i think that's the the the background the back story of the story if you will um it's also the story of a existing civic tech community the kavzero community um with the slogan fork the government um kind of what we really didn't want to for the entire government um people kind of just picked the the part of government where we had the most right with and forked that particular part of it but but when the central government having lost all legitimacy and they came asking how about forking the inside central government um it's it's yeah without that domain name g0v.tw i don't think we will rise up to the task um it's subconscious i would think that um people after living with this domain name g0v.tw for three years now uh at the time of uh when jekyll inside came to the kavzero hackathon um people were like we thought maybe one thousandth of the government and you're like you're handing the entire national governments um working staff to us what are we going to do with that um and and so um i think it's subliminally in all of our heads that went jeblin as something and we did our research uh we checked uh similar efforts across the world and none of them really went anywhere if it's national scale um the closest we could find is the cornell university's regulation room and again they picked things that they they think are very fit for this kind of online format and even though they had a lot of problems with getting the message uh scaling out they were able to to scale up and people but not really scaling out a lot so um to to our knowledge at that time at the end of 2014 there's no project that addressed all the three dimensions simultaneously and succeeded in any way and and so um we kind of very clearly told jeblin that what she's asking is impossible uh but we're we're going to try it anyway um and so um and i think it is to the gupzero community's credit that um nobody feel that we need to do it right people just started to to do it every single which way uh and and because we think forks are good so we we forked ourselves even the community at that point forked into many different approaches to try to tackle this this impossible problem uh and only very recently do we see a little bit merging back and it would be a problem if it started as our organization we would say the organization has fragmented to seven different factions uh but but because it's leaderless to begin with so for us it's just you know seven projects that all work in the open on github and and on trello and on slack and and people some people don't has a philosophical sense of slack so some faction uh worked exclusively on irc and someone telegram uh and so we had to build those robot bridges to bring those channels together so people can use the the vehicles that and channels they identify with and so on so we did a lot of those cultural hacks um and and in the in the meantime reached people who had something to contribute to to this network but did not at all speak the language of technology and i think without those people um we wouldn't go anywhere really and so i think after being asked of doing the impossible the guzzier community just dispersed uh into all the different corners and and because of the occupy there's this implicit trust between the the 20 or so ngos and the guzzier people who supported their getting their message across so so we were not seen as random strangers we were commerce in in some sense who worked just a couple months ago right so um then we started building connections and bringing those uh people in and so so yeah it is a scaling out and then in and then deeply up to god zero community itself um and i i'm just one very small fragment of it um and uh just like with all the large open source of free software projects um you know um linus told us one uh is like to to joke that he just you know focus on being lazy and taking all the credit uh and and i'm more or less in the same boat which is why i i try to get um shuyang or avros or one or other people uh to go now to international conferences and speak and so on because this is as much their work as as anybody's and i don't really want us uh the first generationals in a vetoing project to dominate the discourse it wasn't fair and also the digital issues we're facing now in 2018 is radically different from digital issues we were facing in 2014 it's just very different and so um it needs new approaches and new ways of thinking and uh the least i can do is try not to be in the way uh and so that's that's my my part of the story great well thank you so much talking to me today it was really good to meet you really appreciate it and we did end up taking more than that so we did so one hour and seven minutes so that was good so i'll send you the the high quality recording then oh thank you so much really appreciate it have a good flight and a good time in new zealand all right we'll see you guys take care bye bye