 by why we're here. And so society and technology have undergone significant change since the industrial age. And yet our systems of governance seem to be stuck in that era long past. And sadly, they're sadly out of touch with how times have changed and even sadder have ossified into systems of oligarchic power. And things don't need to be that way. New technology has opened up opportunities for large-scale participation in governance, and we need to grab those opportunities. And we need to experiment. And this is what Taiwan has been doing, experimenting and collaboratively governing citizens and government officials together, working to solve tough problems, building trust, building a better future. And we're incredibly lucky to have a team of people from Taiwan. They've joined us for a two-day workshop. They just finished another here to chat with us about their work, their ethos, what's been going on in Taiwan, and welcome all of your questions. I'm just gonna introduce everyone who's here. We have Audrey Tang, who's Taiwan's digital minister, and she co-founded the Public Digital Innovation and Service Unit, PEDIS, within Taiwan's central government. We have Shu Yang Lin, who is an interaction designer and co-founder of PEDIS. We have Zach Huang, who's also a co-founder of the PEDIS unit, Averro Xiao, where's Averro's? She's a senior legal consultant at PEDIS and a legal researcher at the Science and Technology Law Institute of the Institute of Information Industry. We have Fang Rui Chang, she's a service designer and consultant at PEDIS, back there. Tiffany Chang, participation officer from the National Development Council of Taiwan. Patricia Huang, participation officer from the Agriculture Council. And we also have Chi Hao You, who's an activist and an artist who works for the new media group, Watch Out, and he's a member of the civic tech community, GOVZero. He very much keeps the government on their toes. So without occupying more of your time, I will hand it over to Audrey. So, yeah, very happy to be here. And after a test. Okay, well, right. So, yeah, after a two-day workshop, I think this is the first time that, although we have held like hundreds, literally hundreds of curriculum for participation officer training and open government training in Taiwan, this is our first time doing it in all English and we're very happy that during the past couple of days there's a lot of feedback of the methodologies that we're doing. But tonight's reception is considerably lighter weight. You will not be asked to fill in those idea development post-it notes, although you're feel free to look at it after the talk. But there is one crowdsourcing element though. So if you have a laptop or a phone that can connect to the entire web, the internet, please go to slido.com, there's a website there, and enter today's date preceded by two zeros, so that's zero zero six one two. And once you go to slido.com and enter zero zero six one two and press join, you'll be dropped into this anonymous or pseudonymous or even real name if you prefer, chat room where you can ask the Taiwan delegate any questions. And so the time structure will be like, I'll start with this roughly 15 minutes talk about this is like a hyper condensed version of the two day workshop of the political context that leads us to here. But at any time feel free to just raise your hand or don't raise your hand and interrupt me and engage a conversation right here. Or if you prefer not to be that vocal, you can just enter your questions on Slido and even like each other's questions so that the question that's liked by the most number of people at the end of this talk will dedicate more time to answer those questions and we promise to answer any and all questions that's posted on Slido whether pseudonymously or anonymously. So that's the time structure. If you don't know how to link to Slido or if you have some questions about how to use the system, please feel free to ask people around you. So without further ado, let's begin. Right, so unlike many people today working on democracy, I'm a optimist through and through and this strange condition began when I was 15 years out. That was 1996. I discovered that the future of human knowledge is on this new thing called the Wario Web and that my textbooks were out of date. So I told my teachers that I want to quit school and start my education on the Wario Web and surprisingly the teachers all agree with it so I dropped out of junior high. A year later, I founded a startup working on web technologies and I discovered this fabulous internet society that runs with this crazy idea. It's an open multi-stakeholder political system that powers the internet till this day. And so today as Taiwan's first digital minister I'm putting into practice the ideas that I learned when I was 15 years old. That's rough consensus and civic participation and radical transparency. And surprisingly it's working and it's transforming our society. Now two years ago our president, Dr. Tsai Ing-wen said a inspiring statement in her inauguration speech. She said before in Taiwan democracy was a clash between two opposing values but from now on democracy must become a conversation between many different values. Indeed in conventional thinking there's the government as a rope between various different interest groups. It may be about business profits and environmental protection. It may be between the left and the right. It may be between the oriental and the blue and the green. There are many opposite forces that often contract each other and forcing the government to make trade-offs. But I think in 21st century internet technologies allow us to not just speak to millions of people but actually listen to millions of people and have millions of people listen to one another. And so we're trying a different set of questions that the government asks. Instead of asking what is fair or what is the minimum compromise we ask instead what are our common values despite our different positions and we ask given the common values even that people have different positions can we find solutions that works for everyone? And so this is the spirit of co-creation and this is where the government becomes a space which is why Peter's called ourselves the public digital innovation space. It becomes a space rather than a arbiter of things. It's a space for co-creation. And indeed in the past couple years Taiwan has been consistently ranked the top country internationally on open data, internet participation rates, women's digital access, digital inclusivity and so on. And all this was because we adopted as our national agenda in 2014 open data and crowdsourced as the national direction and it was catalyzed and epitomized by an occupied movement that many people from Taiwan here participated back in March 2014. That was a life demo of mass participation and we occupied the parliament for 22 days. At the time the MPs in Taiwan were refusing to deliberate one particular trade service agreement with Beijing and so the since the MPs you know were on strike of sorts the occupiers just got into the parliament and did their work for them and stayed there for 22 days. And so for 22 days we demonstrated how we can deliberate such a trade service agreement with the whole society is empowered by around 20 NGOs participating, the Greens, the Laborers and so on. They were all around the occupied parliamentary side and each taking care of one particular aspect of the trade service agreement. And one of the features of that occupy as compared to many other occupies is that it is a converging occupy. Every day we start with a recap of the previous disconsensus of the remaining items and then we use internet and communication technologies and logistics to make sure that each day that we move inch toward a consensus a little bit more until the 22nd day where it is a very firm set of six consensus items that was agreed by the head of the parliament. So the occupier was a victory. And so this whole deliberation which you can see more about this movement in GovZero.Asia and now the New York chapter GovZero.Network whenever we take this talk to New Zealand, there's GovZero.NZ, to Italy, there's GovZero.IT. And so it is, the innovation is mostly in this domain name. This domain name is basically that all the government websites in Taiwan ends in Gov.TW and so some hackers back in 2012 registered this domain name called G0V.TW. That basically says don't ask why nobody is providing this public service but admit first that you're that nobody and you can set up a corresponding GovZero website for each and every government service that the citizen feel the government should provide but does not provide. And it's very easy to discover. You can just take any government website, change O to a zero and get to the shadow government. And so that's the initial idea and the GovZero movement supported the logistics and the ICD systems of the sunflower occupy. The very first project, the GovZero movement was budget.govzero.TW and it was born because at the time there was this national economic boosting up plan and there was this YouTube video filmed by the National Development Council at the time that basically shows a bunch of citizens looking like very confused by a lot of budget numbers and there's a voice over that says the economic plan is very complicated, the budget is impossible to explain, but it's okay, just trust the government and the government will make it right and just do the thing. And so it was very quickly flagged as spam on YouTube. I think that's the worst first for a government sponsor to advertisement to be flagged as spam. But also the people were really angry because people felt that if the government feel that the national annual budget is incomprehensible by citizens, maybe it's not a citizen's fault, maybe it's just the visualization is bad and there is no direct communication with public servants. And so they forked the government budget website and build a beautiful tree map, bubble map and for each and every tracked item of the budget there's a like you can ask for more, you can ask for less, you can say that you don't understand that and you can ask questions among the people. And the beauty of the GovZero movement is that most of our project like this are we relinquish our copyright and the creative come on zero. And so on the next procurement cycle when the government thing is a good idea then it just becomes a government website. And so now this system powers not just the participatory budget program of Taipei City and five other cities, but just last month becomes a part of the national e-participation platform that you can track thousands of government projects and the KPIs and the procurements and spendings they made, but most critically each budget item becomes a social object that you can just type in whatever you want to ask and the career public servant would answer to you without going through indirections such as MPs, right? So that's the basic idea. It's making the budget not a complex incomprehensible whole but as a specific social object that people can have real discussions on. And so why are there so many civic hackers looking at each government website and trying to make it better? And during the Occupy we all talk to our respective companies like I was working with Apple on Siri at the time and say I have to take a three week leave because democracy needs me. I think that's because our generation M37 now we're the first generation that enjoyed freedom speech in Taiwan after three decades of martial law and of dictatorship. And so the freedom arrived in 1989 the year of personal computers. So for us, personal computer revolution and freedom of speech is the same thing. And the first presidential election by popular vote in 1996 was also the year that WorldWeb got popular. So internet and democracy, they're not two things. They're one of the same thing in Taiwan with the same generation. It's not two kinds of people. It's the same generation of people who get to work on democracy. And so for the past 30 years in Taiwan when we see free software we always think freedom of assembly, freedom of speech and never free of cost because we know that freedom is never free of cost. Our parents generation paid dearly for it. And so we need to use the software freedoms today to keep it free as we did during the Occupy movement. Now the movement back in 2014 caused a revolution although it's a kind of peaceful revolution. There was a radical transformation of social expectations at the end of 2014. And many occupiers just accidentally found themselves elected mayors when they did not expect it as something that happened in Spain during the 15M movement and that wave of occupies. And because of that the prime minister at the time Jiang Yihua resigned and a new prime minister and engineer said okay from now on crowdsourcing and open data are just going to be the national direction. And the occupiers and the civic tech people like us who supported them were then invited as mentors and advisors to the public service to solve issues like global issues, wicked problem that nobody knows how to solve like Uber at the time. And Uber is very interesting because it is a meme. It is a virus of the mind. The meme at the time in 2015 was called quote unquote sharing economy but the payload of that meme is essentially that code knows better how to dispatch cars than loss. So why don't we just ignore loss and just believe in code? So that was the payload of this particular virus of the mind. And this meme spread through apps from drivers to passenger to drivers. And you can't really argue with a meme just like you can't argue with the flu. It's not in the same category. It may be that a private driver after trying UberX for a while decides it's not a good idea. So it's like the flu gets better but it's already spread because of that. So there's protests just like protests elsewhere in the world. The taxi drivers surrounded ministers transport demanding negotiation and so on. And so for us the solution was then to discover a way to solve this from an epidemic perspective. How can we involve thousands of stakeholders and inoculate them against very divisive PR agenda that people on all different sides are putting forward on public media. And so we thought that since we just did a demonstration, a demo of deliberation with half a million people we can scale it down to thousands of people and do a deliberation, which we mean deliberation by thinking deeply with something that everybody has a stake in thinking deeply together. And we think it's an effective vaccine against such virus of mind. So when everyone like passengers and drivers, academics, public servants listen to one another and form a consensus they become naturally immune to divisive PR campaigns in the future. So very quick recap of the first day of our workshop which is that deliberation method that we use is called a focus conversation method that's invented in Canada. So the FCM or the ORID method involves four stages. The first stage is the facts where we collect evidence and objective data. But based on the objective data after data is confirmed we move to collect everybody's feelings. And it's very important to set aside some time for everybody to confirm everybody else's feelings because for the same fact I may feel angry you may feel happy and it's all okay. And it is only after confirming everybody's feelings that we move on to the ideas or the brainstorming stage where the best ideas are the ideas that take care of most people's feelings. And finally we translate them into legalese and sign them into decisions. So that's the facts, the feelings, ideas and finally decisions. However if the decision making process is not transparent then people in the street and people in the establishment usually when they see the same word they mean very different things. So they're not even agreeing on basic facts let alone each other's feelings. And in that situation ideas become ideologies, a virus of the mind that's even more potent that they can blind people from new facts and to each other's feelings. So to address this situation the first step is open data and it's not just open government data it is asking all the stakeholders from the private sector and the civil society to contribute objective data that they can bring to the table and that we can look at and then ask what people feel about those objective data. And so we use a AI moderated conversation called POLIS is an open source system to ask about how people feel. And four groups of people soon emerge there are taxi driver, Uber driver, Uber passenger and other passengers and it shows how their sentiments are received by other groups. The important thing here is that it's your Twitter and Facebook friends over the place so they're not like nameless enemies or anything. It shows that it's people, reasonable people can stand on different sides and feel very differently and become again a social object. And people can just write in their feelings in the system and rate on each other's feelings whether they agree or not. And as you click agree or disagree your avatar will move toward the people that feel similarly as you do. And so the entire group may also just coalesce to the middle as people propose more and more eclectic and more and more resonating ideas. And so this way of doing discussion is very different from the usual social media where there is a reply button. There is no reply button here. And so one can only add to the discussion and one cannot distract from the discussion. And so we deployed many different systems throughout our experiments but there's one common thing in it is that there's no reply button and people can only add to it, they cannot subtract from it. And so instead of distracting, we say that anyone who proposes any feeling that resonate with a super majority of people we agree to be bound by that as the agenda to negotiate with Uber and other taxi unions and companies. And so in a typical Polish conversation this become the face of the crowd. People can see how many groups there are, how much they agree or disagree on different things. And very interestingly, the trolls don't get to waste people's time. The most divisive statements, they are identified as divisive but they're just that. And because we encourage people to dive even more deeply into more and more resonating statements that attract more consensus, people spend most of their time on the consensus statements and try to refine them into more and more acceptance. And so in other social media venues, this chart may be flipped, right? But on Polish and other more additive spaces we often see shapes like this where we end up being able to harvest without spending much time on moderation instead of consensus item that we can check in a live stream fashion with all the stakeholders saying this is the people's will and do have any problem accepting it. And if not, how about we just ratify it this and that way. And so the stakeholder agreed and because it's live streamed, everybody know that it's coming, that everybody agreed on this set of consensus. So when we ratified in August 2016, everybody anticipated it and now Uber operates legally but only with professional drivers and rental cars and pay taxes and insurance and things like that and the co-ops and the unions they get to enjoy the same search pricing and other innovations that Uber has brought illegally. So it's literally the best of both worlds. You can call some rental cars using the unions or co-ops apps and you can call taxis using the Uber app and everything is kind of anticipated because of this deliberation that involves thousands of stakeholders. So this method really works and so the next question is can we scale this process of listening? We call it scalable listening. So right after this ratification, I joined the cabinet as the digital ministry to explore the possibility through PEDIS, the public digital innovation space. So we're a little bit like policy lab in the UK. It's a digital service at the national levels and we have designers, programmers and we're automating away a lot of those chores that public servants are doing in order to make participation not just possible but also fun. So yeah, that's one of the emphasis that we did in the past two days workshop is just to make participation fun. So a lot of it is not technical. A lot of it is cultural. For example, I'm a radically transparent digital minister. By that, I mean that all the journalists, all the lobbyists, everybody get to ask me questions but only publicly. If I get a question from a private email, I will reply and ask if it's okay to give my answer publicly but if not, I'll just give them links to what my previous statements are. And it's not just to the lobbyists and journalists like the David Ploof here. We talk about Uber at the time. He was speaking for Uber but all this thing are not just on the record, it's on 360 record. So we can put on VR and revisit the conversation but it's also keeping the transcript form and it's not just for external lobbyists, it's also for internal meetings. So for all the hundreds of internal meetings that I held since I was the digital minister, everything was transcribed and published as structured data on the internet. So that was the record for everything everybody said during the meetings and we send them to participant to check for 10 days and then publish online. And the effect of this is actually very surprising. The career public servants actually become more innovative and more risk taking when they know that after editing for 10 working days, all the internal meetings are published to the internet. And that's because previously before we introduced radical transparency, if we come up with some innovation and things go really well, it's always the minister that gets the credit but if it goes really wrong, then the journalist has some way to find out what is the career public servants that's doing wrong since the minister has such a wonderful vision and they would get a blame when things go wrong. And so there was no incentive to innovate at all when you have a political appointee behaving to harvest all the credit and share the blame. But with this completely radically transparent accountable record, if things go right, they actually get a credit because their name is on the transcript. And I introduced people to the low level or mid level public servant that came up with the wonderful idea in the first place. And so because it's an experimental method, if things go wrong and they do go wrong, it's all the digital ministers fault because far as I know I'm the only minister in the world that's doing this. So under this condition, people become very innovative and open to a lot of very interesting ideas. And one of the ideas they adopted was this thoroughly free software platform called Sandstorm as our public service internal platform. So we get to use the same tools that people use for collaboration, Davros is like drawbacks, Intercalc is like Google spreadsheet, and Google docs and weekend is like Trello. Like we have Rocket Child, which is like Slack. And so how the free software community is organizing around ourselves these days, we are also using it in public service. And previously the roadblocks was the cyber security issue since the open source development method is essentially strangers writing arbitrary patches. The internal public service had a lot of difficulty convincing ourselves to deploy free software as our internal tool, but because the Sandstorm, the underlying cyber security solution is itself a free software tool that solves the cyber security problem through sandboxing. So it gets audited by our cyber security department and by a lot of whitehead hackers. So we convince ourselves that all the free software on top of it doesn't suffer from cyber security attacks. And because of that the public service can go wild and implement with just a few lines of JavaScript, whatever system that they need to use on a day-to-day basis, like we have one for ordering lunch boxes together that we use every week, and things like, and planning trips together, and things like that. And so I think this is really good to have this choice of internal innovation. And also we have this ePetition platform as a way for people to participate. It was like the We The People platform here in the US, but in the beginning, the joint platform has a reputation of if it's a single ministry issue, people will often get a real dialogue. But for any and all cross-ministry issue, people will just get the explanation rather than a solution. They will get this very blank, very bureaucratic answers. There doesn't really solve their problems, but just explains why this particular ministry cannot do much about it because it's a cross-ministrial issue. So after I become the digital minister, we asked each ministry to allocate a team, at least one person, but now like five people in the COA now, like many people in larger ministries to serve as participation officers. So this is a virtual network of around 60 people now, and we communicate online using the rocket chat and all those collaborative tools and just show each other how to do online offline engagement. So now in Taiwan, when people start a petition, they know that instead of just a duty for response, they will actually get to meet with all the relevant agencies and ministries, either in Taipei if it's a national issue or we will actually travel to those rural areas like Hangchun and even offshore islands like Penghu if they're petitioning for their local development or environmental issues. So it's a lot of very interesting issues like this one without exposing any public servants to risk and the goal is to relieve the fear, uncertainty and doubt around civic participation so people can put the fun into engaging people who are petitioners and invite people who are really experts. So for example, we have a petitioner last May who petitioned that for Mac and Linux and tablet users, the national income text filing software is explosively hostile to use. And so instead of just explaining the problem as the career public servants are often just doing year after year before last year, we actually brought it up to the PO network and the PO from the Ministry of Finance, Yang Jingheng here who brought it up. These are full credit because instead of waiting for it to reach 5,000 people that was a threshold to response, he brought it to the PO network when there's only like 50 people like complaining about it. And then so we invite anyone who complain into the kitchen so to speak to co-create the new text filing system of this year with a lot of critical claim. And so through this kind of co-creation people learn that they can contribute their expertise not just as complaints but as co-creation efforts. So by collaborating with the civic sector we're now building a robust environment suitable for social innovation to grow where the power of civil society can be brought into full place. And so it was like this last year and it's like this this year. But the point here is that the venue where we hold this collaboration meetings are itself, I think worthy of the name the Social Innovation Lab because it's shaped like this. And Social Innovation Lab in Taipei near the Jianguo flower market is itself a project co-created by hundreds of social entrepreneurs and social innovators. And so the like this soccer field is drawn by people with Down syndrome and they're like really artistically inclined and you see a lot of different people bringing different aspects of their creation to this space. And the space was formed through this responsive methods where when people is just like Slido vote on the thing that they really want and then we just make it happen. So the first thing that they ask is that it for it to open until 11 p.m. every day and we do that. And the second most asked thing is that there's a resident kitchen and a resident chef and so we have that. And then it's open to anyone, right? And so they asked the digital minister to be here one day every week. So every Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. that's my office hour in the Social Innovation Lab and anyone can come to talk to me as long as they agree to have the full transcript published online. After this personal office hours been running for a few weeks, I observed that mostly people visit me if they live in Taipei or they live to very close to one of those high speed rail stations. And that's not really good for the rural and indigenous area development. So I start touring around Taiwan every other Tuesday and so I will be in like Hualien or some other rural places and even more rural or indigenous places can connect to me through this kind of teleconference. But the point is that every time in the Social Innovation Lab all the relevant ministries often 12 of them or 13 of them are here in Taipei through teleconference seeing I'm kind of like a investigative journalist to bring them into the actual places where the social innovations happen and just they get to answer questions in real time responding to the need of the local social innovators. And so once the respective agencies here solve it in a kind of fashion, they publish it online. So other ministry can also understand so this problem is to be resolved in this kind of a way. And so just by touring around Taiwan we discover and then disseminate a lot of social innovations that makes it much more possible for them to collaborate and not working against the national government. So I'll just use one example. This is another GovZero project. It's called the GovZero Air Pollution Observation Network. And this is basically a theme in Taiwan that people, although our environmental protection agency are going to have like thousands of PM2.5 and other air quality sensors if it's not in people's balcony or in people's children's schools, if it's not close enough to them people don't put a lot of trust in those numbers. And so this is how people just crowdsourced their own PM2.5 and other air pollution monitoring network. And there's like thousands of such sites and each one is maybe a little bit imprecise compared to the official ones but it's close to where people live and it's all automatically uploaded and aggregated on the free software platform called the LAS system. And then it's becoming very popular and apply a lot of IoT technology so people can participate by providing either real-time air data or newer analysis algorithms and things like that. And then exceptional advantage of Taiwan is that the national government when met with this kind of civil substitute of legitimacy we offer full support instead of rejection, right? So we can't beat them, so we just joined them. And so as part of the forward-looking infrastructure plan we launched this project called IoT for Public Good with a four-year budget of Taiwan, five billion Taiwan dollars so that's about 150 million US dollars and in the program an enormous amount of environmental data on the air quality but also meteorology, water resource, earthquake, disaster relief, et cetera. They're all integrated into this high-speed computing environment so we can collaboratively discover the correlations between social activities and environmental phenomena while using exactly the same time and the people, the data and the time series and so on are all kept and replicated even on the IOTA blockchain now. And so data from various different sources are aggregated and the models with various prediction abilities are for the first time able to compare on a orange by orange basis on the same shared data. And so we're also working with our industrial technology research institute to assist with manufacturing of domestic, affordable and high quality PM2.5 detectors. And so why does the Taiwan government encourage such social innovations? I think that's because we really want democracy to work and as I said in the ORID method, the first step is always the facts, the objective part. So if people can't even agree on the basic data that comprise of the current air quality, then it's impossible for people to have a real policy discussion. And so establishing effective dialogues are the source of democracy for us and which is why we sponsor this project and it's spreading very quickly throughout the world. And so to speak, we solve not just our domestic issues but through each and every such innovations we document all this and make it very easy to spread everywhere. And moreover, we have this idea of a sandbox act in Taiwan. And so now if you're experimenting, as I said on blockchain or very soon on self-driving flying or in the sea or on the road vehicles, you can apply for experimentation to break the law for 12 months up to three years if the experimentation is successful. And during that 12 months, any innovator can break laws but one need to explain why breaking those laws and regulations is good for the public, not just for one private sector. And during the experiment, we assemble that kind of a multi-state holder panel that collectively at the end of the 12 months experimentation period decide whether the society impacted by this experiment think it's a good idea moving forward or if it's a bad idea. If it's a good idea, then we change the regulation and the laws because of this innovation. But if it's not a good idea, well at least the risk is limited and we thank the investors for paying the tuition for everybody to learn something from it and then people can do something else the next time. So that's it this way. I think we're using this controlled risk experiment to basically contribute our experience not just on one or two of the sustainable development goals but we are mainly focused in PDIS on SDG 17 which is Cross-Sectoral International Cross-Discipline Collaboration. So as promised, yeah, it's exactly 8 p.m. now. So I'll switch to questions but in conclusion I would like to share a prayer with you about how we are approaching the technology so that the technology visits the human society instead of the other way around and so the prayer goes like this. When we see the internet of things, let's make it a internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let's make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let's make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let's make it about human experience and whenever we hear that the singularity is near, let us remember that the plurality is here. Thank you very much. All right, so let's take some questions and I may cue other people from the Taiwanese delegate to answer those questions. So what's the most complex and difficult project where you've incorporated the techniques that's shown here? I would say that it is the drafting of the harmonization between the new company act and the need of social entrepreneurs. There's many different sub-movements in Taiwan, the UNUS movement, the B Corp movement, the Benefit Corporation movement, the Platform Cooperative movement. There's many movements in Taiwan that advocates for various ways to structure themselves. And in the V-Taiwan method that I introduced, about Uber, about Airbnb, about every other like purely technical things, usually we get by just a few pre-meetings, a few stakeholder meetings and one large consultation livestream meeting and that's the end of it. But for the social enterprise harmonization into the company law system, we held no less than 15 regional meetings just going into every corner in Taiwan because the indigenous nations, the farm-oriented rural places, the places with a lot of immigrants and they all have very different social conditions and their organizations change accordingly because of that. So just the word social entrepreneurship means very different things to people around different corners in Taiwan and just to get a shared language just by building a lexicon that is generally agreed by all people who self-identify as social entrepreneurs, it took us 15 such meetings and each of them, as I said, livestreamed both ways with the Social Innovation Lab in Taipei and all the different ministries involved and that is actually how those ministries build a shared lexicon. Also because it turns out that every ministry treats social enterprise with very different definitions too. So it took us 15 meetings with a lot of like social disadvantage group. We have to go there and use maybe 360 streaming, maybe real-time captioning, maybe we haven't done machine translation to sign language yet or to indigenous languages yet but we're seriously prompted by that experience to develop such technologies. But at the end people achieve a broad understanding of what social entrepreneurship needs at this stage in Taiwan and achieve a broad set of consensus. So we expect the parliament to ratify it about two weeks from now and so it is a major achievement of the VTaiwan process adapting to something that is thoroughly not digital and using digital only in a assistive civic technology role and not as a platform where people have to come because otherwise we will exclude a lot of these people and lose a lot of the diversity and all these records are on the social innovation lab and also on the vtaiwan.tw website. Liz would like to know were any questions asked during the past two days that struck people from Taiwan as particularly revealing of differences in our democracies? That's a very good question. Anyone from Taiwan would like to take that question. May I ask Fang Rui, where's Fang Rui? Where's Fang? She's somewhere else. Well, then it would be Avros then. Avros was the main facilitator of the first day and so are there any questions asked that you still remember really? Oh, yeah, have the mic please. Yeah, use the mic. Yeah, or Nifeng would like to take a question, okay? All right, so just to, just there, bootstrapping their thought process. There's one question that ask about the role of the MPs and the parties and the Taiwan administration and there's a real difference because constitutionally, a lot of this process of policy drafting is because in Taiwan, the administration is the place where the draft bills are formed and they're sent to the parliament for adjustment but the skeleton, the main meat of the drafted bill is formed by career public servants and by the ministers instead of the MPs and while the president is directly elected, she appoints a premier and over the cabinet and so the cabinet are relatively shielded from party politics and in fact, in the past few years in the cabinet, there's more independent ministers than ministers of any party and this is a very different atmosphere because we get to work on this progress, on this process in a largely non-partisan, not bipartisan, non-partisan kind of way and just after we bring this draft bill to the parliament, do the parties really start to work on it and I think this is constitutionally somewhat different from the US model of lawmaking, yeah. So anyone want to, I do, no? Okay, oh well. That this from very wants to say something about where there are any question asked during the past two days that really strikes you as wow, there's a context difference that I really have to explain about Taiwan. Yeah, during the two-day workshop, yeah. It is, it is, it's an open-ended question, the best kind of question. Can you elaborate a little bit more on the question so I can understand it better? Yeah, so this is right there, so. Hi, sorry for asking such a difficult question. I just was imagining that people coming from one country to explain their process to a whole room full of people working in a different country that actually the, any gaps between what's happening one place and what's happening another might be revealed by the way that people ask you questions. And I just wonder if you got shocked by anything or if you thought Americans were cynical or anything like that. Not really, actually. I think it's more about sharing our infuestics. And like, what I spoke to Dino earlier and some of the folks earlier on, they were like building similar things, similar models, try to engage people more and how to facilitate people to build consensus on certain things. I think that is something that struck me the most. I didn't expect that there are lots of people are working on similar things and we can share with each other. And also me and Dino were talking about that we should document all of our process. And so we can, and also why were you using those methodologies and processes because we have different problems and different situations but sometimes we are facing similar problems and we can all solve it together. And if we can build on everyone's approaches then we have a good resource of how we can do and what we can do when we face different challenges. So we feel like during this trip I feel like I have a stronger peer support about we can all work together in the future. This sounds too optimistic. I'm sorry about that. Yeah, that the peter is a bunch of extremely optimistic people. So yeah, so if nobody chimes in we'll move on to the next question. How do you ensure representative samples? It seems that many of those would have stakeholders that would not be technologically adept. For example, people who don't take taxis and therefore is not contacted with regard to the Uber case, this is a fair question. We worry about representativeness in two different scenarios. The first is if this is decisional in nature. If this is like a national referendum or if this is a something that is immediately binding then of course we need to be very wary of the at least statistical representativeness but also maybe elective representativeness of people involved. But this is nothing of that sort. This all the binding power of this process is finding out collectively the agenda that people feel as important thing to discuss with the Uber and taxi unions and things like that. So is this an agenda set? In design thinking methodology, the police process takes care of maybe this part and up to a little bit of automated convergence to this part. But it doesn't move, it moves only almost halfway but not even halfway to this decisional part. So all this does is that it clears up everybody's misconceptions. It allows people to discover each other's feelings but without agreeing necessarily on the problem statement and the solution statement going forward. This is the place where we do through face to face deliberation that's live streamed in the consultative meeting. And because of this the software that we choose for it is opinionated on this. You would notice that these numbers do not correspond to the area. This measures diversity not numbers. So if for example 1,000 people more came in and voted exactly the same as this person here although the number in group C will be 1,242 the shape will not change. So if trolls or people mobilized in some way go here and vote exactly the same they will not contribute to the diversity and therefore is meaningless on this map. This map measures only the diversity in people's feelings. And so this is a very different way of looking at representation. This is a representation of people's feelings where everybody just talk about their own feelings but the space itself encourage people to find more feelings that resonates more with one another over time. And because this is deployed at an early enough stage and it's neither binding in a decisional way nor agenda setting in a irrevocable way it's very early so it can precede any democratic process. We can use this process before a participatory budgeting. We can use this before I vote saying we can do this before referendum. We can do it before a poll. It's called a deliberative poll that way. And we can introduce this kind of systems before any other more binding processes where representation would be more important. That being said we of course can work and should work with more grassroots organization to spread this participation through proxies or through just internet empowerment like digital opportunity centers in Taiwan because after all in Taiwan because of our geography when we say, when Dr. Tsai Ing-wen say in her presidential promise that broadband is a human right we actually deliver it. We are more than 80% internet penetration use right now and we're looking to increase it to almost 100%. In the next couple decades I think our next decade actually is oriented toward providing free broadband to people who cannot afford it and free tablets for people who cannot afford it. So if at any point in Taiwan people cannot go on this online platform to read about things it's always the government's fault. And so the internet broadband as human right we really feel very strongly about it but we of course still should and we do work with social entrepreneurs in the areas less inclined to use this kind of technology and use it in a more assistive tech kind of way. What is my favorite science fiction story? Okay. Well a recent one is called Story of Your Life written by someone whose family has been in Taiwan called Jiang Feng Nan and it's been made into a film called Arrival I believe. It's about this giant octopoid aliens that came to the earth and speak only in emojis. Well maybe not exactly emojis but pictograms. Pictograms, yes, yes. Yeah ink, multi-dimensional emojis. Right and I think I like this story especially because it conveys this idea of a holistic understanding of things, of things as a network, of things that are what we try to uncover through a lot of those mind mapping and facilitative processes that let people kind of step outside their own shoes and into the timelines of other people so to speak and to form a more coherent whole so that is one of my favorite science fiction stories that just came to my mind. Sometimes the will of the majority harms the minority. How does the process ensure that this doesn't happen? Yeah the person who wrote Polish Colin McGill and his merry band of friends actually taught Habermas in high school and the civics and so he feels really strongly like if there is a group E here that has a very different sentiment from everybody else but it's just three people, those three people get their place on the map and they're considered as a group and to reach super majority of resignation. Your statement still needs to convince more than half of group E to be counted into our heuristic of a statement that resonates with majority of all the different people. So it's through this way that we uncover the will of the minority and also give them a chance to be evaluated and amplified and even merged into a resonating statement that people will still find common value with the so-called minority. So this process is designed with diversity in mind and it will amplify the smaller in number diversified thoughts into something that people can resonate just by virtue of asking people to add to the minority voices instead of drawing them out in troughs or in other more nonproductive uses of online engagement. What kind of offline engagement do you believe is needed to have a vibrant online democracy? This is such a great question. We can have like three day seminar on this but just to introduce some basic things. I really think the experience of listening as someone who's tuned to other people's like nonverbal ways of expressing where their focus are and whether they're interested or not and their body movement and so on, we can of course with very high bandwidth like gigabits of bandwidth and like 8K of resolution and holograms maybe duplicate one-tenth of that but that is still not commonly deployed yet. So as a result of that any teleconferencing any two-dimensional maybe even 10 ADP resolution still necessarily drops many micro expressions and it is a feature of the human brain to fill in the gaps when the micro expressions are missing but they're mostly psychologically speaking projections and so it's easy to across the teleconference to feel that people agree a lot but in fact there's a lot of subtleties that only gets reviewed through face-to-face deliberations in a very fine resolution. So before our technology gets there with 5G network and mixed reality and everything like that you know like three years in the future perhaps. Still I think it makes a lot of sense for all the stakeholders to converge on a face-to-face meeting which is why we have the social innovation lab which is why we have this listening culture where people can all just come and allocate space and practice listening to each other before we scale this kind of listening out and so I think this kind of face-to-face listening and facilitation in an open space that are still needed for a vibrant online democracy because then when people fill in through projections to the missing bits be it to a textual forum or to a lower resolution live stream it will not just be personal projections but reflections of the prior interactions that people have for people with similar life experience and that empathy building of people with very different life experience as one personally is I think it's very important for the online deliberation to happen in a truly deliberative manner. Do you think a leaderless society is really possible? Yes and as I said it's called the Internet Society is still around, right? So I think a leaderless doesn't mean structuralist, right? There is a lot of ad hoc-racy structure within any this kind of self-organization public but I think one of the key themes that throughout those two-day workshop is the idea of a recursive public. Recursive public is a public that is aware of its own limitations of self-awareness and is interested in making positive changes in increasing the awareness of this reflective awareness. So again it is like an organism that is tried to be more self-aware and you see this kind of recursive public in the free software community, in the Internet Society, in Wikipedia, in other not exactly structuralist but striving to be leaderless organizations or in self-organization that try to negotiate with the contextual environment and this is the spirit that we try to cultivate the recursive public once you get infected with that kind of thinking, you can see eight of zero in any GOV establishment and one can always fork that is to say take what the establishment has already established but taking it into a different direction and with luck if it succeeded to a degree then merge it back to the originating society that is always how the free software community has organized ourselves. In the US, the influence of money on political processes produced a structurally unequal system. How might a framework like a zero overcome the power of money? This is a great question. So it works on multiple levels. First is that creativity or a true co-created consensus is one of the things that money cannot buy even if you throw any amount of money into it you cannot magically get something that is shared value by people and that people can live with. Actually you often get the opposite. So I think it's very important to position ourselves as a methodology that works within an existing private sector, civil society, public sector relationship and we call sometimes this construction a plural sector in a sense that in exchange it allows the people with money but cannot buy goodwill or consensus to channel that amount of money or resources into construction projects like the social innovation space where the money really has no string attached and people do really co-create this listening space but that is actually for the greater good and the people with the money that put into it gets the first hand experience into how this kind of co-ops really happen and form and things like that. So it is I think possibly my personal experience to convince the really wealthy to put their money to positive social impact once you can demonstrate that there is a tangible way to convert that into positive social impact and this is of course an area of venture philanthropy and social impact investment that also is part of the social enterprise law framework that we took more than a year to deliberate on. I work with people who often fear retaliation for speaking such as undocumented immigrants how might we have them part of co-creation radical honesty. So this is why we insist on having anonymous input into all our co-creation meetings and workshops even among people who are in the room there may be power imbalances and people don't want to be identified and we always encourage people to post such ideas and even on Polis or on Slido, on Join, on other systems they are evaluated only by the merit of their input and not by the real name we never ask real name of those online participants but perhaps over time after being seen as taken care of and included in the conversation sometimes those people do show up under a pseudonym or eventually under a real name after like two years and become very valuable members in the collective recursive public maintaining the VTELN process not just visiting it but it take a very long time and it could be arbitrarily long for people to move from anonymous to pseudonymous to on a real name basis. And I think the tolerance of the system on Troves I think is a testimony of how much anonymity we can admit to this system and this is true because again the lack of reply button I don't know how to maintain both anonymous input and reply button it is a open challenge but by so far the way we mitigate this is just by taking away the reply button. So can you tell us more about this pdc unit and how it works as everyone and anarchist? I think I only myself like Bill myself as a conservative anarchist which is just a very fun way to say Taoist but the idea, thank you. So the conservation part meaning that I'm not using the you know some anarchist they use more disruptive and violent tools and try to make a world that is distinct from everything that was before but the conservative part meaning forking what's already there taking recognize and respecting what's already there but just taking into a more leaderless more anarchistic direction and also respecting the tradition of the internet society and the anarchistic way of doing things as they have already done in the past few decades and so that's just me. And so in PEDAS we pride ourselves as you know nobody really orders anyone to do anything but we do abide by these four pillars of open government and with trust as our common call. And so yeah we had some mind mapping ourselves. We did it in our anniversary about 25 full timers at a time and about 35 interns this year so we're a sizable unit and we established that our number one priority is to build trust between the government and the civil society. That's priority one, priority two being empowering the civil society so that's where as people think it takes the government to do something actually the social innovation culture lets people think we don't need the government we can do it ourselves. So this kind of empowerment culture is our priority two and priority three is to simplify the workflow of career public servants so that the public service when they hear about public participation they think more credit, less risk and less work and instead of more work and more risk and less credit. And so this is very important to make Pareto Pareto improvements to the public service workflow so that they can see the protesters really as inputs and valuable members in the co-creation kitchen rather than just mobs. So and there's some associate smaller goals like make public servants eager to innovate while absorbing all the risk of failure so we hold for example three months long presidential hackathons in collaboration with the president's office. The one for this year just concluded so hundreds of public servants send their ideas of how to improve the public service on particular presidential promises. Sometimes actually they do it pseudonymously they do it by sending it to their civil society or private sector friends have them proposed to the president and say we're just working with the team but actually it's been on their shelf for like four years. So I think the teams participating in the presidential hackathon they're not there for the money because there's no award no monetary award. There's a very beautiful trophy but that's it. But the reward of being in the top five team is the presidential promise to solve all the regulatory and silo issues and be integrated into the public service starting next fiscal year. And that is the presidential promise of the presidential hackathon of the three months thing. And in this area the public servant who proposed this gets all their risk absorbed by the president's office and basically gets all the credit when they get a trophy. And I think this is one of the areas where we can work more to get people to understand the value of digital service of the millability of it of the possibility to do a lot of pilot of it and to really co-create something of value to all constituents and encourage this kind of hackathon or civic hacker culture inside the public service. So I think many people in PDS would be very comfortable describing themselves as a civic hacker but maybe not all the way to an anarchist yet. We are in a room where buying to this technical system prowess level is high. How do you ensure this participation are reflective of all the peoples we don't? So when we go to indigenous nations when we go to the rural areas when people in the Taipei city use the joint platform to debate how to allocate social housing to socially disadvantaged people and using the stakeholder discovery methods and a lot of assistive civic tech to make sure that disadvantaged people become the agenda setters. Each different case use a very different configuration of technology sometimes assistive, sometimes facilitative and try just to get the diversity there. So it's not about technology. The technology is custom and tailor made to fit the need of the population and the diversity that's needed to have a reasonable comma value discovery process. How is your team structure? What do you look for when you hire new team members? That's two related questions. So our team is very interesting because ministers with our portfolio are literally just ministers with our portfolio. We don't have a digital ministry. The MWOP position in the Taiwan cabinet are essentially we have nine people who look after the issues that either no ministry want to take charge of like eSport or and allocate responsibility to the ministries involved or work with issues that all the ministries want to have something to say like sharing economy and figure out something or social enterprise and make sure that everybody knows what's going on and agree on common values. And so each minister with a portfolio is supposed only to have like one or two staff but as I said, we have more than 20 full timers and 35 interns. So where does those people come from? So it turns out that each ministry we accept up to one volunteer from each ministry to join the office but they still rate themself. They, I don't rate their performance. They rate their own performance. And so because Taiwan has 32 ministries I can have technically 32 people on the staff and we also ask one person to come from each division within the industry, the information industry institute. And so that sticks more people. And so that is how it's done. And in software development, this is called onsite customer. The idea is that all the innovation that we do we don't do it out of thin air. We do it because one of those onsite customers that is also a career public servant thinks such a innovation is good for their ministry or their council and they need to get buying from the peers in the peter's office. And so the feasibility is never a question because I don't come up with new ideas. Those people who station into my office come up with the ideas. And then if it's about public participation is additionally vetted by the 60 participation officers around all the different ministries. So this is like two levels of crowd wisdom within the administration to make sure that whatever we do is a net improvement in credit and net reduction in risk and in human resource cost. And what do I look for when I hire new members? I look for people who give at least as much as they take and I look for people who can master new skill sets that are currently not covered by any existing members in peter's. So they're complementary to the existing team. And with these two attributes, I don't need to do any management. People just go wild and help each other. So Noelle would like to know how do you incentivize CIOs that's deputy ministers in Taiwan to integrate your POs into their workflow? Sometimes the deputy ministers, they are politically appointed. Like in the agriculture council's case, the deputy minister was himself a sunflower occupier and an activist in the rural front of Taiwan. So I don't think Ji Zhong is convincing of the power of democracy because he advocates for it during the occupy and with his prowess and economic analysis. But in other deputy ministers who are more of a career public servant background, as I said, that's three main things. It's a net reduction in cost. It's a net reduction in risk and it is a net increase in credit. We don't have to establish all three at once, but those three are not fungible. You cannot make one of the sufferer to exchange the other two. So at least like do no harm and improve on one of those three areas. And because I make this really explicit and said, you know, I only accept voluntary proposals, the ministers and deputy ministers soon learn that I'm not ordering them and commanding them to do anything. Basically they come to me only if they think there's something that could be solved by wide engagement, public engagement practices. And so yeah, I think this kind of voluntary association is why the CIOs are more inclined now to integrate POs into their work, especially now that we have some highlight cases like the income tax filing system and so on, that the entire country see as like really a good example of the open government and co-creation process. So because of time, the next few questions I'll answer briefly. So how do you ensure law enacted are good as separate from popular? We can't ensure that, but what we can do in the idea of sandbox laws and in an idea of co-creation workshops is to provide room enough in the legislative system to have a rolling, auto-correcting really, system of a new implementation. The idea is that it takes just 60 days of a public consultation for a regulation or policy change to take effect. And the sandbox laws are essentially the parliament saying, we let the multi-stakeholder mechanism take us wherever the innovation goes without ruling over it by specific laws. And so even if we're a continental law system, that still allows for sufficient rooms for innovations to try itself on a two-month by two-month basis. And so just by allowing such improving the rules and norms on the fly. And sometimes in cases like AI's integration with society like autonomous vehicles, really that is the only way that I think and can think of that allows people to co-domesticate with those new creatures and establish a safe norm that is generally accepted by the society. We can't just start from some abstract laws of robotics and accept, by Peter, accept it on a top-down fashion. And so this kind of co-creation culture, I think really is complementary to this like vote every four years or two years, two bits of upload per four years. Idea by having more symmetric bandwidth between people who are impacted by policy and people who can change the policy incrementally. So it could be just popular at the beginning, but after a year of actually trying out in a sandbox, maybe it turned out to not be not good after all and people still have the political will and the mechanism to correct it. What do you think of democratic practices in America? Well, so, well, I think, well, I mean, you guys are pioneers. We learned most of the, really most of the Taiwan's democratic institutions, we copied verbatim like the joint platform, the e-petition platform was copied verbatim in the very first version from the We The People platform. And so is the national open data platform. And so for example, our referendum act explicitly referred to the Oracle model and things like that. So I see that you're one of the main upstreams, the sources of the democratic innovations, but Taiwan I think is special in that we don't have 200 years of representative democracy. We only have like 30 years or less of truly representative democracy, which is also less than 30 years of direct internet-based democracy. So for us, it's much more natural to fuse those two together and find something that's innovative that could complement the shortcomings of both models instead of saying, you know, there's a lot of legacy here and some newcomers here is just the same generation of people. So I think we are in a culture where it's much more easy to iterate quickly. So there's this chairperson of the Audrey Fink Club. I want to know what advice may I offer to friend and family who helped join the fight against systemic oppression in their everyday lives? What about die-hard activists? So yeah, I mean, previously before I made conservative anarchists, I was a crypto anarchist. And one of the ideas that we had is that instead of fixing a system that's broken, we need to invent something that's manifestly better and that renders the original system obsolete. It's a Buckminster Fuller saying. I wouldn't say that Bitcoin or Ethereum is the holy grail that we were looking for in the early 2000s or the late 1990s, but it's going that way. It is spreading the idea of a leaderless consensus while burning a lot of electricity. We really need to fix that. But otherwise, I think it is really a good idea of just showing alternatives and just living in the alternative and having a lot of fun doing it. And people will just discover the fun of living in an alternative world and maybe start seeing it as feasible and lo and behold, the old way we're seen as outdated. And that may happen in our lifetime. So is there a risk? Yes. So yes, there is. So it's important that our national participation platform currently about five million active users out of 23 million population and that's just with what, three years of history. And so we're looking to increase it even further so that people are generally aware that such a platform exists. I think that is our responsibility to really spread it through everywhere. Well, would I do if I'm the Prime Minister of China or such a diplomatically loaded question? I have no idea. I really have no idea. I mean, I don't know. And from what I've learned, working with people still in the civic tech community, although they may just call themselves social entrepreneurs or social innovators, I think there's a lot of consensus making method and the facilitative method that is compatible not just with representative democracy, but with Leninist centralized democracy. And so with the air quotes. And so I think even in places such as the PRC, government territory, there is a lot of willingness and interest in learning this kind of techniques. And so we as any other free software community, we embrace people from any part of the world and teach them this method to what end, I don't know. So when you analyze data of participants, yes. So we find of course young people participate more, but also retired people participate more. I think because they have more time, that is entirely the function of the available time that they have. And so we try always to come up with things that you can do like pressing yes or no, likes or not that you can do in one minute's time. And some more thing you can do in 10 minutes time like sharing a open data or a factoid or something you can do on one hour time or one day time. So it's a ladder of participation that we try to include people of all walks of life and all the different demographics and groups. So how long do your engagement process remain open for? How quickly from start to finish? It depends. But usually for the e-petition originated proposals, we give a reply within 60 days. Sometime extending to four months, but no more than four months. And so all our participation in meetings, collaboration workshops need to happen within this two months to four months time window. So we learn to be really efficient and there's a lot of structures as you can see that we try to introduce to move this process along. And we can reasonably get to a consensus now after just three weeks of preparation, but of course we can still improve on that. What about leaderful? Well, leaderful is also great, I guess. So the thing is that the leader need to empower others so that they can too be leaders, right? So a full of leaders. So which is the same thing to say leaderless, right? So to have multi-centralism is the same as decentralism. So basically we are approaching it on two different sites. The V-Taiwan process is about civil society trying to engage the administration and the PO network about the administration trying to engage the civil society. So once I've been leaderless and once I've been leaderful, but I think we do meet somewhere in the middle and that is the ground where the real creativity and co-creation happens. So what doesn't work? So far that we think there's a lot of petition issues that are just refused flat out by the CIOs or deputy ministers to bring to the PO network. Sometimes they are highly politically motivated so that it's really the president's preview of doing these things. One case in point is that there's a petition about banning the flag of PRC in Taiwan and that would be a presidential political decision. People are now trying to take it to the referendum platform now, but that is actually beyond what the process can do in a three-week or two-month timeframe because it's so politically charged and it is actually not within the administration or the cross-ministries purview. So we do have to say no to a few petitions like this when it's being deliberated by the PO network. Can housing be addressed adequately with respect with limited resources? There is a related process. I didn't do any of this, but it's called e-participation of socially disadvantaged people and it's one of the open government partnership presentations by Lu Jiahua and she orchestrated Taipei Social Housing deliberation process by having those of disadvantaged people as the main agenda setters. So I would encourage you to read through the slides and the OGP write-up. I don't have the time to go into that now, but I believe that there are certain composite collectives trying to bring some of these ideas into NYC housing, so please contact your friendly organizers locally to work on this question. It really does take local organizers. So quality control, yes. So basically we just aggregate everything and then we deploy machine learning and other heuristics that try to weed out data that just doesn't agree with any patterns and we actually crowdsource those algorithm also. So there's a new paradigm called open algorithm where you can just crowdsource our algorithm and make sure that it doesn't invade privacy if it's handling personal data but publishing the data in an aggregated form in a statistics form that's nevertheless very usable and comparable. So if you're interested, you can look into the open algorithm project that is the direction we're going. Can I share examples from sandbox? So yeah, so one thing that we see from the public service after the introduction of sandbox is that when there's a new request from the civil society or from a social innovator, it used to be that the public service, it takes them nothing to say no and if they say yes, they have to interpret the existing regulations and policies, it may take them seven days of work. But now with the FinTech sandbox, if they say yes, it's just seven days of paperwork. If they say no, it enters the sandbox and they have to spend six to 12 months with that idea. And so just by a pure cost reduction calculus, people tend to say yes to new innovations. So we were able to get the, for example, telemedicine and psychotherapy over the internet and a lot of healthcare related innovations just by the virtue of people saying otherwise we're going to the sandbox. So that is one of the consequences of having a sandbox law. What features do I think Slido can improve on? I think it's pretty good. I wish it's open source, but it's pretty good. So yeah, I think bootstrapping always starting with small alternative that enjoy itself. So we can start in any level. It could be just one collective, one house or one apartment, one region, one block. You can always start at any level to bootstrap. The 35 interns, some of them are right here in New York. So I'm the first teleworking minister. So I only work in the administration building every Monday and Thursday. And so otherwise I'm just everywhere, right? Wednesday I'm in the social innovation lab, Tuesday I'm touring around Taiwan, Friday I'm going to Penghu or whatever for collaboration meetings. And so all our work is telework. And because of that, and because of the cybersecurity system that I brought in, everybody in PDIS can work anywhere. So every year we recruit 25 people last year, 35 this year to work as people who look at all the government websites, like all 500s of them. And last year they check with tablets and notebooks. And this year they check with iOS and Android phones and make sure that the user experience is consistent and fun for all the government services. And it's not usually the case. And so people, the college people, the interns just look through all the different government websites and identify the part that's are broken or that are difficult to use. And then one third of them are who knows the assistant JavaScript actually go into the reports and fix it and bringing gifts to the ministries. So the ministries love the PDIS interns because instead of spending more money on procurement, they just bring gifts like five line changes and it really changes the experience of the website. So that is how our crowdsourced interns work. They fix the government services. And now we also have digital design interns that try to come up with all these structures for our facilitation. This is my first time in the US, no actually. If not, what did I accomplish or didn't accomplish last time? My last visit was also in New York City, it was PDF last year. And I gave a talk and that led to today's collaboration. So the achievement I think is just bringing all the people from PDIS so that they're not just random people that appear in my slides, but actually in the flesh people who can have a real interaction with you in the facilitation. And I look forward to more concrete collaborations in the future. How do I self-regulate? Yes, it is a fair question actually. So I was born with this congenial like heart defect that basically the doctors tell me that I have like 50% chance of living to 12 years old where I get my heart surgery. So everything is fine now, but I always live with this idea that when I fall into sleep I may not wake up the next day. And so this become a part of my core personality so that when I found this idea of the free software or open innovation society I always make sure that by the end of the day I push all my Git commits or Subversion commits or CVS commits and that I answer each and every of my email that I finish my inbox on my OmniFocus and all the other things so that I can rest in peace. But the other... The other unexpected side fact is that this is actually great for innovation because I literally wake up a different person. I don't have any legacy system to maintain, right? It's all handled at last night. And so I'm free to roam the internet and innovate in a very different fashion and just live every day in a very fresh way. So maybe you can consider this kind of self-regulation as well. So yeah, thank you for that awesome Q&A session. We made it. Thank you so much, Audrey. So I just wanted to close and let folks know a little bit about the GovZero Network or VNetwork that's been formed. And there's a bunch of us here in this room and other folks in other cities. And really, we're a collective of people that have really been inspired by the practices in Taiwan. And we are coming together to learn and to figure out how we can bring these practices to our own localities. And it's not so much about lifting them but really thinking about how do we shift these structures and the systems of power that underlie them. So I want to also give some thanks to all the people and the organizations and collectives and really bodies that made this possible. So for today's open government reception and Audrey's chat and all this food, we have the American Assembly at Columbia University, Taipei Economic and Cultural Office ThoughtWorks that has lent us some VR equipment over there where you can try out some of the really neat work that Taiwan is doing in mixed reality and VR. Civic Hall Personally Democracy Forum, beta NYC and Delicious Food by Weekday Urbavor. So this closing reception is part of a larger two-day event where we got to actually learn about the practices that are happening in Taiwan, the V-Taiwan consultation and the participation officers training. And the sponsors for that were Composites Collective, The Awesome Foundation and Surapis. Space is really important. We need a place to come together and to share ideas and I think that's also very clear in the talk that Audrey gave. And so I want to give a huge thanks to Prime Produce that has allowed us to be here for the last two days. And I also think that it's really important to have spaces that are also aligned and sharing values. So it's such a gift to be in a space that is, as Prime Produce says, a guild for social good where we practice the craft of intentionally serving others through our work. And there's another space in New York City that's been incredibly instrumental. Ah, sorry, it's a little bit out of order. So I'm gonna skip it to getting us here. And that's Orbital and Gary is here upfront which makes me super, super happy. And V Network hangs out there. We've been meeting on Fridays for the last few months to organize this. And now that this is done, we'll continue meeting to organize something else. And in the spirit of learning from Taiwan and their radical transparency, we've been recording and live streaming and our plan is to actually put together a video of the training for the last few days. And that would not be possible if it wasn't for the internet society and the work of Jolly over there. And it also takes a lot of people to put this together. So I would just like to thank the volunteers that have come together for the last few days. If you're here, please stand up. Cordelia, Christina, Evan, David, Dan, Nathan, Patrick and Kate. Thank you so much for all of your help. And last but not least, the folks that I've gotten to work with so closely over the last year. And I hope we get to continue working together. So if you could please come up here. Darshana, Liz, Devin and Tina. Tina, are you still here? Yes, please. And so we want you to join our VNetwork and to, if you're interested in what you've heard, if you've been inspired, you can go to govzero.network and join us. Or also we spend a lot of time in Slack. And if you go to join the govzero.today, you can join the govzero Slack. When you join, you'll get dumped into the general channel, which is mostly in Mandarin. So search for the VNetwork channel and you might feel a little bit more at home. And the other way, which I kind of forgot to mention at the beginning is, you know, that's one of our main hashtags. But a lot of this came together just by people sharing on the internet. And actually Twitter really brought us all together, sharing our ideas and sharing our plans. So I think that also leads back to this idea of radical transparency and just share. And you'll find your networks out there. So thank you everyone for coming and a huge thanks to Audrey and her team. Music, there will be some type of music playing very shortly as well as a bar that will help us operate in the black. So please come and join us. We have the space for more than an hour. So yes, let the party continue. Also please eat. DJ.