 Welcome everyone, and thank you all for joining the Institute for Public Knowledge and the GovLab at NYU tonight for this inaugural event in a series that is part of the new Future of Democracy working group here at IPK. For those of you who are new to IPK, we are a Social Science Institute at NYU that supports communication between researchers and broader publics around major public issues. Our working groups consist of graduate students and professors from within NYU as well as members of business, non-profit, and academic arenas beyond the university. Members collaborate to write papers, host conferences, and meet regularly to discuss their individual projects. If anyone here tonight is interested in joining or learning more about our Future of Democracy event, please come see me, Jessica Coffey, the Associate Director of IPK after the event at the reception. The next event in this Future of Democracy series will take place on Wednesday, September 6, this coming Wednesday at 12 p.m. in this very room. We will have a conversation with Jeff Mulgan, Chief Executive of Nesta, on Collective Intelligence and Democracy. Please visit IPK's website for additional details and to RSVP. Now I'd like to introduce the leader of the Future of Democracy working group, Beth Simone Nobeck, our humble leader. Beth is Director of the GovLab at NYU and its MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance. She is a professor in technology, culture, and society at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering and a senior fellow here at IPK. Beth was recently appointed as New Jersey's first Chief Innovation Officer and previously served in the White House as the first United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer and Director of the Open Government Initiative under President Obama. UK Prime Minister David Cameron appointed her Senior Advisor for Open Government. In conversation with Beth tonight will be our guest, Audrey Tang. Audrey is known for revitalizing the computer languages Pearl and Haskell as well as building the online spreadsheet system, EtherCalc, in collaboration with Dan Bricklin. In the public sector, Audrey served on Taiwan's National Development Council's Open Data Committee and K-12 Curriculum Committee and led the country's first e-rulemaking project. In the private sector, Audrey worked as a consultant with Apple, Oxford University Press, and Social Text. And in the social sector, Audrey has actively contributed to Gov Zero, which we'll talk about tonight, a viber community focusing on creating tools for the civil society and a call to fork the government. I now pass the mic to Audrey and to Beth to get us started. Thank you and enjoy. Thank you very much, Jessica, and thank you to IPK for hosting us. For those of you in the back, we have seats up here in the front, and we promise, A, we won't call on you often, and if you have to leave early, please don't worry, neither Audrey nor I will be insulted, so please feel free to come up and take a seat. We'd love to fill in the room and have you join us. So I'm really thrilled and grateful to Audrey for being here for our first inaugural future of democracy lecture, conversation, as we're going to have it. I don't know that I'm hopefully not the fearless leader. I am just the modest hostess of a conversation that I think we're all eager to have and eager to talk about. It's very hard to live in the United States right now and not to be in the world right now, I think, and not to be deeply fearful and worried about the state of democracy. So we started. Let me just give a quick word of why this is why we started this conversation. Because we're living right now in a time in a country in which every day is election day, in which party politics are coming ever before problem solving and public interest. And I think we're very deeply concerned that this is not simply another cycle in the swing back between one party and another, but potentially something deeper and more dangerous that's going on. There are no tanks in the streets. If you've read Zeblat and Levitsky's, the two Harvard professors who wrote one of the many books on the death of democracy that have come out this year, it's a particularly good one. They very chillingly paint the picture of how the dangers that we face today are not tanks in the streets. It's not people with guns. It's not people being thrown in prison. But it is, in fact, what we're seeing, which is Putin who is permanently in office by swapping the role of president and prime minister. Erdogan in Turkey. It's Orban in Hungary. It's Maduro in Venezuela. It's Modi in India. And of course, it's Trump here in the United States. People who derive their opponents as criminals, who maintain a constant sense of threat and support and endorse violence in our political culture, who show contempt for their critics and for the media, and who frankly stoke conspiracy theories galore, again, to reinforce their power and in ways that actually make us, I think, deeply fearful about our democracy. Add on top of that the fact that for a long time now, trust in government, even before these current spate of authoritarian and populist leaders, that trust in government has been declining over many, many years. In 1958, 73% of people said that they could trust the federal government in the United States to do the right thing just about always. In 2013, that number was 28%. And right now, in most recent surveys, the number of people who say government can do, the federal government at least does an excellent job is now at 2%. We're going to hear tonight, though, not about the United States, but about Taiwan. And hopefully not only about the challenges that are faced, but hopefully some very hopeful developments that Audrey and her colleagues have been able to bring about. We would like to find out the ways in which you are helping to make government and democracy stronger, to do a better job at delivering services, and what the vision is and for creating more effective and legitimate policies. And really to understand what it is, what this revolution is that's happening in Taiwan that may hopefully give us all some hope for what's happening here. So welcome very much. And let me start. We're going to make this as much of a conversation. Knowing Audrey, she will hack whatever it is that I ask her and talk about. I hope what she wants to. But I will start things off by really just asking you, how did you get started? What was the problem? Was it this problem that we're talking about now? What was it that motivated you? What was the challenge, really, that you were setting out to solve? And was it a problem of democracy or of governance or of both? So, hello, this towards the voice, like any other. Is it anyway? Maybe not. So, still not much better. Actually, can people hear me? Without you, so maybe just at this distance? Is that OK with you guys? So, yeah, very glad to be here. And actually, the last week I was in London and had an hour and a half conversation with the Nesta folks and Joff Morgan as well. So, we're very much in line, in value, and as well as in the various innovations democracy that we're working on. So, this is my office in Taipei City. It's called the Social Innovation Lab. And it's very playful and peaceful. And it kind of resembles my post as the digital minister. As an anarchist, I don't have a contract with the Taiwan government. I had a compact or a covenant, which is three basic points that would elaborate further. But the three points are in direct answer to the problem of legitimacy that we're trying to innovate and to solve. And the three pillars of the compact are, first, a voluntary association. I work with the government, for the government. I don't give nor take command. All I do is facilitate, make suggestions, receive fear, uncertainty, and doubts, and do some facilitative work. And the second thing is radical transparency. So, literally everything that I'm a chair of in the meeting, in the cabinet, we publish the entire transcript, 10 working days after each convention. And it's the same for lobbying and for journalists and for anyone who come to me. During my office hour, every Wednesday here, I'm in that place from 10 am to 10 p.m. Anyone can come to talk with me as long as they agree for the radical transparency. And the third thing is location independence. So anywhere on us, I'm still doing my job. And this enables, of course, to have creative offices like this, but also enables a lot of regional innovation where I just go to a place and do some ethnographic thing, like investigative reporter kind of thing in a population and in very rural or indigenous places. But meanwhile, having the 12 or so ministries in the social innovation lab to see through my eyes how is it like in the field out there and for the people in the field to have a real-time conversation with the 12 ministries involved in the national social innovation plan. So those three taken together, I think, form a legitimacy system that was initially prototyped during the Occupy. The Occupy for people who don't know about it was four years ago now in 2014, where people occupied the parliament in Taiwan because the MPs were kind of on strike. They did not wish to deliberate substantially a Cross-Strait Service and Trade Act, or a CSSTA, and because the MPs were sort of on strike, people just went to the parliament and did the MPs job for them, namely, deliberating the trade service agreement. And what they do is the demo, but in the demo in the sense of a, you know, demo saying not a demonstration, a purely protest. So for 22 days or so, people were just there, and also around the different street corners, there's about 20 NGOs deliberating each and every aspect of the CSSTA. And I was part of the people in the sunflower revolution, but not as taking any of those 20 or so sides, but rather as part of the movement called Camp Zero, which as the moderator already introduced, is the community that calls to fork the government, which was started in 2012, two years before the Occupy. And this is a very simple hack. You can do it yourself here. Any government website in Taiwan ends in GOV.TW. And the idea, very simply put, is that if you don't like, for example, the legislative website, you can just do an alternative by changing the O to a zero on the browser bar. And so that solves the discoverability problem. So any public service, by changing O to a zero, you get into the shadow government, which does the same thing, example is more interactive, more open data, and people participate in this movement, relinquish their copyright, so that by the next procurement cycle, we see a lot of GOV.TW. innovations, like the first one was the budget visualization, and having each budget item a conversation board, that actually gets merged this year. So all the 1,300 ministerial projects become a social object upon which you can have a real dialogue with the public service and things like that. So all this is forking the government, but it's also systematically merging it back. So GOV.TW. is supporting the communication for the sunflower occupies throughout the 22 days, and we see something very interesting happening. We see that with this kind of radical transparency, with the location independence, wherever you are, you can be part of the conversation, and with this kind of voluntary association, people just cross-pollinate the different points around CSSTA, so that over three weeks, people converge rather than diverge as some other occupies do. So we converged eventually on a set of very accurate demands and which the head of parliament then accepts, and so the occupier was successful. And so that was kind of our first demo, but after that we've just been scaling these conversations that it doesn't take an occupier to start a conversation like this, but actually something the public service is comfortable of doing it themselves. So that's the kind of the legitimacy crisis and the innovation that was brought up to solve the legitimacy crisis. Yes. I'll grab the bad mic. Let's see, let's see if I can make that work. Obviously, Zuccotti Park, the Occupy Movement here, the Occupy Movement in the related social movements were not as successful. There's clearly some vision that you had or that others had or that coalesced that caused you to develop some really concrete proposals to move forward. Would you say it was a particular vision for democracy that sort of was the cause or what was really, why did this work and those didn't, would you say? I think we kind of benefited from seeing the other occupies around and also from the two years between the GOV-0 has founded to the Occupy, so there's two years of civic tech people basically trying to turn collectivism into something that is more agenda setting which we call hacktivism. And we do it obviously through sharing of open data, turning data into social objects, through having a good social sphere where people can ask questions without getting burdened by trolls and things like that. So there's a strong kind of deliberative quality to the spaces that GOV-0 has been building since 2012 to 2014. And then after that, of course, we try to have a real conversation with Korea Public Service and try to get a Korea Public Service into the design of such things and basically by relinquish the copyright, have the public service take over the maintenance after the initial prototype. And all these, I think, fosters a culture that focus on what we call scalable listening or listening at scale, meaning that we get people into the mood of listening but do it at scale. And so we did not certainly anticipate the Occupy which is like the real agenda setting power, but we were just almost there. And so I think when the Occupy actually happened there's a lot of ready-made systems for crowds transcript, for crowd live streaming, for a lot of different collection of opinions, for visualizing them in clusters, for getting each line in the CSS TA. You just have to enter your company number or your company zero number and then it shows exactly which paragraph of CSS TA affects you in a kind of comic kind of way that everybody understand and things like that. And all of these are ready when the Occupy happened. And so we kind of just plug it in into the Occupy's movements so to have half a million people on the street using the system that previously only maybe 5,000 people was using. And I just wanna push one more a little bit further on this because so many of the other public engagement platforms that have been developed by growing out of different social movements and here I'm thinking about our friends in Spain who have chosen to go a different path which is what we might think of as radical direct democracy. So their view is they wanna be Switzerland. You don't wanna be Switzerland. And I'm curious, why not? Well, we're not Switzerland. Neither is Spain, but... Right, I don't know too much about direct democracy because Taiwan just at the end of this year is going to have the first substantial referendum. I think there's nine or 10 topics waiting for a referendum but even in our new revised referendum act there's a strong emphasis on the deliberative quality before the referendum is actually cast. I think part of it is culture because in Taiwan we can talk about, for example, consensus and people visualize things with consensus statements and divisive statements and we can say with a straight face that online discussion after a while in a safe enough space always produces consensus but that's because the social norm already values consensus and it may be just in a rough consensus kind of way but we are reasonably sure that it always ends up with something like that with the right space design and you probably cannot say that in many other places on earth. So this is, I think, a defining characteristic that we always want to converge on something and it's seen as a positive social value even among people who disagree bitterly. So you've created this whole ecosystem now of tools and culture for digital listening and deliberation and I'm wondering, I know that everybody is super eager at least I think you should all be super eager to get to the demo and to see the details here but I'm wondering if you can, before we dive too deeply into the mechanics of any one platform give us the overview about the different pieces in this vision and how they're connected and whether they came one at a time or sprung whole cloth from your head and that of your colleagues. What are the components in this kind of ecosystem that have begun to create this new culture? That's right, so if we consider the occupy as people really going in and thinking really deeply about one singular social issue the difficulty usually lies in asking the right question like how may we move forward to find some common value? And so using standard design thinking terminology we can separate these into kind of four different phases where the first is the crowd fact finding the checking of feelings the kind of getting to a point where people think these are the objective facts that we can all agree on and then just by listening in to people's feelings we have a month or so dedicated in each topic just for people to check in on each other's feelings and visualization technology certainly helps a lot here because if you can see your Facebook or Twitter friends relative position in a crowdsourced map then people can actually relate much more because it's all your friends and families who just didn't talk about this a particular issue over at dinner and so they're not nameless enemies they're people who you can have a real conversation with and discover and all this is not done by a preset questionnaire but rather by people sharing their authentic feelings and for other people to rate whether they resonate or not with the feelings and so this feeling stage I think is very important the reflective stage and of course after we get a set of reflective rough consensus the ideation begins but now we have a clear goal because the best idea are the one that takes care of most people's feelings and finally the parliament's terrorist system or the administrative system steps in and make decisions by essentially ratifying the ideas into a coherent decision and so this objective reflective interpretive and decisional stages came out of the Canada research called focus conversation method and it's broadly speaking the stages that we use for public consultations and public multi-stakeholder discussions like this. And so now tell us about the tech and how all of this gets so soon should I I can't I can't wait I have too many I'm gonna come back to all my other democratic theory questions in a moment and let me just interrupt again to say if folks in the back want to there are seats over here on the side please feel free to come up and and join us but they look they look comfy back there. I can talk about the tech. All right so that or you can or you can override me I the no that's just fine. No I think the tech is is is worth looking about because it really the reflective part was was the hardest part. How do we get people with no face to face experience together to resonate with each other on feelings instead of you know just polarizing and trolling each other's cat pictures or whatever. And so that was kind of the missing piece that we were looking for and fortunately there's some startups in Seattle solving exactly that and that's the police system which is the first crowd feeling checking system that we tried we tried dozens of them that is the first one that actually worked. And so back in 2015 the topic at its time was UberX and UberX as you know is this meme called sharing economy but the payload actually means that you know code dispatch cars better than loss so we need to obey code not loss. That's more or less its payload back in 2015 and and so just like any virus of the mind is spread through the interactions from drivers to passengers to driver to passengers and it actually is a meme in the pure sense that if a driver after driving for a couple of weeks found it's not a very good deal after all they will have already infected people and that's basically the least of polarization of people. And so using this kind of consultation what we think is a kind of explanation of the mind so that after people confirm each other's feelings it would become much harder for people to be polarized by one-sided PR messages and so just checking in each other's feelings is done simply by people you know looking at one sentiment or another clicking I resonate with this or not and see their avatar move among the clusters formed by the similar minded people but there's two things that's worth mentioning first we're not looking at the numbers at all these numbers mean nothing. So this just basically measure the diversity of the sentiment at the moment and anyone can just override by proposing something that's more nuanced, more eclectic that resonates with more people and the second is that basically there's no replete but then so you cannot really throw someone here and so that's the two secret sauce so to speak and so we send that link to all the drivers and passengers and unions and whatever and after three weeks as I said they came out with this very strong consensus statement just like we did during the Occupy and the thing that happened afterward the tech was the live streaming of the meetings between the stakeholders and we bind ourselves to use only the consensus statements as the agenda for the meeting and checking in the consensus resonant feelings one by one with the stakeholders do you agree and if you don't why not and just by you know committing their words in a live stream way transcribe and so on people can refer to the transcription as the social object and so that leads to the much easier ratification because people cannot easily go back on the statements they have when they know that thousands of people are watching the live stream and the agenda was done by those same people who formed over the course of three weeks through live stream and so that is the UberX case but we did maybe 26 or so cases this way before I became the digital minister and that's the VITAMIN process in the show. So that's the VITAMIN process, a couple of questions tell us something about who's participating here and VITAMIN over the course of those 26 pieces of legislation that have been developed have engaged about 200,000 people is that number about correct? If you count people watch live stream or in polis because it's very low threshold all you have to do is just click a bunch of agree or disagree. So how do you sort of evaluate who from your own reflection on it 200,000 is a pretty big number but Taiwan has 23 million people so it's still a fairly low number. That's right. Who are those people who are participating? Are you satisfied with who has participated? Let's talk about who those individuals are how you got them a little bit and why you think it wasn't more. Right so VITAMIN as I said is mostly about like getting this thing, this how may way thing right. It doesn't even talk about the ideation and decision making which is like the follow up statement that each ministry has. So what we focus on in this point is very much what we call a diversity in stakeholders. So for UberX of course we have to talk to unions to various different taxi companies to Uber itself to the various horizontal groups that's formed around this particular issue. For Airbnb it's a very different population for anything that's related to digital economy for example for the privacy protection and so on is a bunch of very different people and so on. And so there is no constituency of VITAMIN. It is mostly just people sharing pizza and food and whatever every Wednesday in the social innovation lab and basically over dinner think about things that they would like the public to talk about and also invite the various ministries and agency people to join in on this pizza discussions and over the course I think the Uber one we got I think three months or so before we even agree on the name of the title of the consultation. We eventually settled on you know riding a car driven by someone with no professional license and charging over it. And that kind of absolutely neutral sentence was basically formed over many months of stakeholder gatherings which the stakeholders who participated in this eventually went back to their communities and spread this questionnaire and these online engagement forms. So it is very much a stakeholder conversation platform much like the internet society or other standard making association rather than trying to build ourself as something that has a power of a referendum. So we're very much not on this stage. We're very much just on the fact checking and the feeling checking stage and that was the VITAMIN position which is why it's seen as a complimentary to hierarchical power or to representative democracy but not reinforcing it just complimenting it. Just complimenting it but it was a very deliberate decision to start with that component of the problem as opposed to instituting a citizen jury or something that use sortition or random selection of a representative sample of people you may know Jim Fishkin's work out of Stanford he's the granddaddy of this field who said it's only legitimate we're gonna get a representative sample of the population 400 people together in a room and measure their opinion. Why start here? Well it is not very clear to me that once you get after the sortition that these people will actually carry out the deliberation back to their communities to share their sample statistic characteristics. That's the first one and the second is that even if it's statistically fair some people are just better orators than other people better at rhetorics, better at convincing other people given a limited amount of time. So it was not at all clear to us that we should start with a representative sampling. Of course if you want this decisional part to be informed by such sortition based sampling we do have some of that here going on in Taiwan but it is more of in the ideation of decisional processes and not at all in the first two phases. So these two are kind of disconnected. They can be connected by a shared how may we question but when we started we were not entirely sure that we should start with a random sortation mostly because first there's no culture for it there's no jury system in Taiwan. We're just starting to introduce one. So it's kind of experimental so people don't have any prior experience to sortation. And the second thing is that we want to make this really lightweight so that any city public servant can run it by themselves and sortation is kind of expensive compared to this mechanism. And how? How much does this cost by the way? Zero dollars. Who pays for the pizza? Yeah, who pays for the pizza. So we had a donation box after each meeting people just chiming with coins and whatever. So it is all very much crowdfunded of the people who shop for the pizza. But yeah, really the government what government does is essentially two things. First to agree to appear on the pre-meetings sending the people from the right agency and finally after the how may we question and the reflections are synthesized to reply point by point. And that's the two main commitments and they don't cost anything from the government agencies. So for an anarchist, a self-proclaimed anarchist you are remarkably concerned with government involvement and what government thinks. I'm concerned with public servants. So tell us a little bit more about how you have engaged public servants, how you've gotten them to participate. That getting them to the table maybe even harder than getting the pizza eaters into the room. So I'm really curious what has been how you've convinced public servants to participate and importantly how you really had the idea that that was as crucial that it is. I agree with you completely but it's surely not a universally held view. It's their key to the equation and you've clearly been bringing government in and look, you yourself went into government so it would be wonderful to kind of figure out why that happened. Did you take a wrong turn or how did you end up in government and then being so good at convincing government to become part of this process? So yeah, I think first of all during the occupied legitimacy or people's approval rating of the central administration was at 9%. So it's not exactly 2% but it's dangerously close. So that is a time when the entire public administration kind of lost legitimacy. And also at the end of that year of the Occupy every mayor who did not support Occupy lost the mayoral election and the mayors who did support the Occupy sometimes found themselves mayors without preparing the inauguration speech. And so this is also something that happened in Spain actually. So I think that that is the time, a kind of moment in democracy where the people in the public service very much did not want another Occupy. And so which is why the new premier at the time at the end of 2014 just invited the neutrals during the Occupy, the facilitators, the communicators, the people who work with all the different 20 different NGOs essentially as mentors or advisors to the public service. And I remember the first few lectures I gave was to, there was three lectures to 100 people each and they're rank 12, almost the highest rank in the career public service. There's exactly 300 such people in the Taiwan administration in all the different cities, different branches in the governments and all those 300 officials of rank 12 basically through the three hour lecture on how VTaiwan works and how the Occupy technologies work and how to communicate with people. And I found that most of them are actually very much pro this kind of conversation, mostly because in career public service the deal was pretty bad because if things go right the minister takes all the credit. And if things go wrong you take all the blame. And so of course people don't innovate in such circumstances, but they found that there's something in it for them for radical transparency because if there's good ideas even during a piece of heating stage people discover about how professional they are and also how truly concerned they are for the public welfare. And you don't usually see that because you see that only after the minister takes or rejects their proposals. And second it really reduce the risk because if you communicate with the people who would have been on the street but now is willing to go to the social innovation lab then there's much less risk for everybody else involved. So more credit, less risk, also less work. So why not? So that is why after which I trained another 1,000 or so public servants of lower ranks in the actual nuts and bolts of the winters. It's ecosystem. Talk to us a little bit about the impact from your perspective. So 26 pieces of legislation, 200,000 people participating. How would you describe the impact both in terms of individuals, in terms of the institutions, in terms of society? Are those laws better laws as a result of this? And how do you know? Yeah, this is a very fair question. I would, of course. Why don't you have an answer to everywhere? Yeah, that's exactly right. Yes, so I would, so this was the DTO interface. It's more colorful, but less legible. But I would say that the V-Taiwan is a kind of existential proof to everybody involved that this is possible. But at a time, the Uber case in particular, I think there's three notable omissions. First is that we, the Civic Hacker, did all of this ourselves. We did not actually involve, oops, where did, I think it went to sleep or something. So yeah, we just hit a key and it may wake up. Or it may not. No, it's fine. It will come back. So yeah, so here we go, yeah. So at a time, the Civic Hacker ran everything and did not involve the career public service in the preparation. And so I think that is why it did not actually scale into city level or municipal level. Because while everybody see that this is obvious working, that exactly how to make it work is not exactly common knowledge to the public service, especially on a municipal level. That's the first thing. And the second thing was that when we did this experiment, Uber was only operating in Northern Taiwan in Taipei and Kaohsiung and so on. And so we did not invite taxi drivers from the south, southern Taiwan that will go back to HONUS because the legitimacy was simply not there. And the third thing, finally, is that people keep in this conversation want to broaden the scope to talk about platform economy in general, but not UberX or ride sharing in particular. And we should have gone with that. And that also came back to HONUS because then we'll have to do case by case for each and every cases after that. And so we remedied some of that after I become the additional minister. But I think what prevented VTHA when from really going into other municipal places was it's very cutting edge. The people who do it did not actually do it with the Korea Public Service in tandem. It is kind of seen as kind of a plug-in or a Oracle in computer science speak where you can just plug in and it gives you a good resonating consensus. But it is very much a black box from the Korea Public Service point of view. So they may accept that there is no little risk in doing this and also that it also saves some time amortized. But otherwise, I don't think it became really, really popular because the public service at that time still did not know how to operate it independent of those civic hackers. Does that excuse me? Yeah. Is that because of the lack of public service? Not really, because there's only one case that people reach a consensus and that did not get turned into a law and that's the online liquor sales case. But in every other case, I think the consensus was respected. And sometimes it did not lead to action because the collective consensus was we don't need a law for it or we don't need new laws for it. There's cyber bullying one in particular. After various rounds of discussions, people generally think bullying has existing laws to work with it and what we should do is basically have a foundational law that treats online behaviors in the same way as offline behaviors and in cases where the metaphor doesn't hold, provide bridging clauses for it to hold but not to treat cyber bullying as a different thing as bullying. And so people generally agreed to not have a special cyber bullying law, which was the original ask. So in many cases, people deliberated and after a few months decided that maybe the best course of action is not governmental action but actually action from the social sector and the civil society and the private sector to build new norms. And that's cases, I think, count for most of the 20% where it did not lead to government action. And would you, in your wildest dreams, does every piece of government action go through this process? No. And mostly because getting people on the same page thing is really difficult. This checking of reflective feelings rests on the fact that people can look at a description and some crowdsource data about private drivers and charging people for it. Everybody who participates have an idea of what it is like. But if it is too far in the future, for example, if we're deliberating about, I don't know, zero knowledge proofs and data agency based on mutual distributed ledger governance systems, then it will require a lot more intuition building before we actually enter the checking of feelings. Or alternatively, if we're talking about transitional justice of indigenous nations, the past vary too wildly so that the same concept don't even hold its same currency in people's mind who are came from those 16 different indigenous nations in Taiwan. And so the transitional justice process we can't just say, you know, go use the veto and process because the basic empathy, the basic vocabulary have to be built before even the facts can be considered. So if it's too far in the future, too far in the past, or a mixture of between, I don't think this actually is the best practice. So tell us a little bit if we can do it without apologies for the visuals. Although we can try to troubleshoot them in parallel. I wanna ask you about the rest of the ecosystem. I mean, I'm sure there will be lots more questions that I haven't asked yet or we haven't had time to cover on the V-Taiwan mechanics, but I don't wanna run out of time to really talk about the broader, the sort of the role that the lab plays, the role that some of the other pieces, which I won't give away and let you tell us. Okay, sure. So all that was kind of up to mid 2016 before I got this post of digital minister. And so after I got this into this post that was this compact of three clauses, my main aim in the public digital innovation space that we set up was mostly just to get a career public service the confidence of running these processes by themselves. And the platform we chose was the join platform, which is at once a petition platform and regulatory pre-announcement platform, and the budget discussion platform that I just showed the people about, you can fill it in your head. So it is basically you look at one piece of the budget, you don't like how it's being used, you can petition for it after you collect 5,000 electronic signatures, the government is committed into answering it substantially, and then hopefully leading to new regulations which gets pre-announced on the same platform and then you can then have a discussion also online with public service. But the petition part when I became the digital minister, it's really pretty good for things that pertains to one single ministry or one single agency, but it's spectacularly bad if it is cross-ministerial. And that is because no ministry want to answer for the other ministries. So if it concerns three different ministries, each ministry just use a lot of words, beautiful reply to explain why this is, respectively, not their business, their business and their business. And so it's pretty bad. And so the first thing we did after I became the digital minister is to set up a team of what we call participation officers or POs in each and every ministry and have them form a virtual team. So that because it's just basic game theory, if you're going to interact with the same bunch of people for the next four years, then you better collaborate. But if previously it's different people every time. So that now when people do a petition in Taiwan, they know even if it's cross-ministerial, even when people petition for, for example, in South Taiwan, there's people petitioning for stationing helicopters to serve as ambulance cars because they are too far away from a major hospital. And it could be solved by depositing the helicopter, which would be the ministry of interior or by building faster roads, which would be transportation or building a large hospital there, which would be a health and welfare and or doing more, I don't know, relocation of population, making that actually there's national defense there as well because there's a defense base there, air base there. So it could be solved in like five different ways. And what prevented these idea from being fully explored was the previous leaders, no virtual network of such participation officers to fully all go to that town of Hengchun and make sure that everyone, yay, it's back. To make sure that everyone is on the same page and also make sure, yeah. Making sure that, yeah, it's almost there. You can, if you can just open QuickTime and start a recording, and then we may actually go back to showing the visuals. Yeah, I can help. Please don't do that. Yeah, it's okay if you start mirroring and then start QuickTime and new video. Obviously you should feel free to just raise your hand, but you can also send questions in via Twitter and we'll try to take them by both modalities. So if you're watching this live streaming, by all means send the hashtag IPK and then for people in the room, you can have your choice, have your cake and eat it too. Right, so let me just take a couple minutes. So these are the participation officers and every month we meet and vote and talk about a question that requires cross-ministerial support and here are the petitioners and just by petitioning, they automatically get invitation to such collaboration workshops which are if they want live streams so that people can also participate over the internet and it's not just one collaborative meeting. For example, the tax system case, it was like four subsequent meetings where people just collaboratively co-created the tax-exporting reporting system or in the Hongchun case I just talk about, it's literally all the different ministries and all the different local stakeholders and the reason why we can get all the different ministries was that in the participation officer regulation, all these are national regulations and the e-participation regulation we said that whenever there's more than one owning agencies and each considering each other owning it and they only want to support it, everybody owns it and they all have to go to where the people are and so we went there, took five hours, explored every single options using the policy lab methodology of mind mapping and so basically explored all the different options before setting on the insight that we should actually retain people's trust on their local hospitals and so we really should build a larger hospital after exploring all the different options and so that was like every other Friday and so next Monday after each collaboration meeting I bring this synthetic document into the premier meeting with the premier and other ministers and say whether the premier is okay with it and once the premier is okay with it then of course after a couple weeks the hospital just gets the budget and it gets built so it's a very quick turnaround system from people surfacing there is a local or national issue to the participation officers crowding in and to make all the different solutions palpable and understandable and then the people getting a consensus and the premier actually gives blessing to the cases so using this new e-petition driven method we handle another 40 cases this is in parallel with the V-Taiwan service and about half of which has led to a new budget or a new policy or so on and the other half again it's not because of inaction it's because after thoroughly discussing whether Taiwan should change its time zone to plus nine people decided maybe it's not the best idea after all so it did not actually get changed to plus nine I mean it's the career public service doing all this preparation we're just facilitating and providing the missing proficiencies and even at that the facilitative, the recording the translational proficiencies we make sure that it's all transferred back into the public service so of course they will insist on that because it's them running the show and that's the first thing and the second is that we also leave room for reflections like in the Hengchun case with helicopters we use two rooms, a smaller room about 20 people of just like this of people doing co-creation and discussion and so on but a larger room that can fit hundreds of people actually a town hall in the town hall is where we watch the live stream together and the additional ministry is in the town hall and with the people watching the live stream in a smaller room and serving as a kind of ESPN anchor to explain what this slide means what this move means and whatever and making sure that people who want to vent who want to protest and whatever they can just come to me because the media is on the town hall obviously while the professionally, neutrally facilitated high performance meeting is happening concurrently so people won't protest for very long because everybody want to watch the movie and also because it's not live stream back so all the protest, all the shouting doesn't actually affect the deliberation that's happening in a smaller room on the other hand, any new point they make that's in relation with the mind map is tagged and brought back through sliders, through other digital tools so that people there can also see the outside people's contributions but always within the context of the mind map that they are doing the mapping So what's the experiment you next want to try? What haven't you done yet? And is it scaling, is it scaling what you've done or trying something new or both? Yeah, so there's a mayoral election coming soon and we are already getting some interest and commitments from those existing mayors and mayoral candidates of basically taking this system which is national regulation and into city and municipal level so that they would want to try this not just for participatory budgeting of which there's many but also on well, crowd law, on a city level and we're also seeing a lot of interest because Taiwan is now doing a lot of experiment on what we call sandboxes which is this idea of people experimenting with breaking the law for a year or so and I think this is worth sharing because this is essentially us encouraging people who want to do platform economy or so that's our kind of final solution it's just for people who want to break the law to do platform economy or fintech or later this year UVs and the UVs could be hybrids to just break the law for a year and basically work with any willing municipalities they can break the law for a year basically running with a forked version of the law they would wish the government had set up in place and after running it for a year we use this kind of consensus gathering mechanism to make sure that the whole society thinks this is a fork it's a good idea and it's not a good idea where we thank the investor for paying the tuition for everyone but otherwise and reduce the risk for everybody else afterwards but otherwise it may be extended to a larger scale including a business model for another year and if it's a regulatory change it would just happen if people deem this a good idea and this requires a law change then it's up to four years when the MPs deliberate on that in which the people applying for a sandbox just essentially gets a monopoly in the municipality in this kind of business experiments so a lot of the steps that we're now taking is basically empowering the municipalities to be able to run this kind of process when they do with a sandbox application and evaluate its applicability to the local social good and social needs alright I'll do one more for me and then I'll save the rest of mine until we get a chance for everyone else to come in so I have to ask because everybody always asks me about the risks with the introduction of and the moving of so much of democratic life in your vision online how do we square that with the dangers of people always ask about surveillance of privacy the risk as we look at what China is doing with regard to social credit scoring and potentially rating people and using that score to determine whether you're allowed to have a political voice what do you perceive to be the greatest risks in this process or is it all upside we're all very wary about vendor lock-in when we first use Polis for the UberX discussion there's a lot of flak from the civics community because it was proprietary and even though that Colin and friends running Polis said that they will share all the data we have no way to know whether they're actually sharing all the data and they're really just a Seattle startup and so basically we don't know what is the data policy like and we kind of took the bet but we also peer pressure a lot for them to go you know, Afro-GPL which is one of the most you know, Libre version of open source licenses and also making sure that we can host it locally and basically have everybody to be part of the governance system that makes sure that this mechanism of democracy is itself democratic in a sense that this code is data its operation is community owned and after I become the digital minister of course I took this philosophy into my office so basically we built this Sandstorm installation which is again another startup but it's all open source and we get our cybersecurity people to audit it and what this does is basically a sandbox system in a computer science sense it boxes the apps that runs on top of it so that they don't have to worry about cybersecurity authentication authorization and whatnot and we can use all open source technologies for collaborative decision making or just note-taking or whatever on top of this platform and our career public service can even just learn some JavaScript and write a small application for ordering lunchboxes together or planning trips together that actually happened and running on this platform without worrying about cybersecurity, about infiltration, about surveillance and whatever because the code itself being audited and open source is a collective resource managed by the entire worldwide civic tech community of which Taiwan is just one installation of many. Okay, I won't man up. Thank you so much for your input. I gotta ask in the age of fake news what's the role of journalism in your project and moving forward or what has been the role of journalism and how do you envision the role of journalism moving forward? Right, so I don't use the F word myself. I prefer to call them disinformation when they're intentional and misinformation when they're not and as a kind of not in affront to journalists both my parents were journalists anyway, so I found that radical transparency is really empowering investigative journalism and just quality journalism in general because a lot of journalists work is just to get this group from the ministers but when a minister basically published everything I agreed to no exclusive interviews everybody is on the same ground and when a lobbyist come like Mr. Padoof here talking for Uber at that time we make sure that it's not just on transcript record but actually on 360 recording so any journalist can put on VR goggles and relive the moments of the negotiation and I think this is very powerful in a sense that once everybody gets some facts the journalist with perspective with time for investigation with their own life experience to bring to the table can produce much more powerful pieces but still within the time frame that still attracts popular attention but without these raw materials being made available their life is much harder because they have to compete with short term attention and also try to get some sort of information out there but it is much higher chance because they're racing essentially with the tabloidic journalism and to produce something and then it will contain more misinformation in it and which will reduce the quality of your reporting so the investigative journalists I think are really our friend and impetus there are also my colleagues who during the Occupy ran the eForum which is the neutral journalism outlet of during the Occupy so it's very much on our mind that what we're doing is basically investigative work for journalism but in a minister's post within the cabinet and this kind of reliable information is also when Taiwan is you know there's a lot of disinformation campaigns especially now we're this close to election and the administration is committing to basically replying to all the spreading of disinformation in a timely open structure fashion so that every ministry can reply within like three hours or four hours whenever there's a disinformation campaign there's a clarification from the ministry but we're not censoring speech at all right what we're doing is ensuring that people get this habit of waiting a couple hours and then see whether a clarification came out from the administration that's all we're doing basically defining a social norm around rapid response and reasonable disclosure from the ministries thank you so my question is about you mentioned empathy earlier and how this approach doesn't make a lot of sense for issues that are long-standing deeply held lack of information on different sides so my question is whether you have explored any other approaches for establishing that kind of empathy between different parties or if you think that it just the problems are so complex and long-lasting that they frankly just should fall outside of the remit of a digital ministry so there is the Holopolis project which is now taking place I think in Madrid they're setting up a lab there but it started in Taiwan and it was initially a my kind of research proposal I was just working on it when they told me that they want me to be the digital ministry but in any case the idea very simply put is to use augmented and mixed and virtual reality to make sure that people have some lived in the experience of one another before entering a discussion if it's too far in the past for things too far in the future for example when building a hypothetical I don't know, airport or whatever at least we can take those blueprints from the architects and situate people in future versions of that airport and actually feel how it is like to be maybe a non-human because for endangered species we can also look at their lived-in experience as well and I did a VR conversation with a bunch of school children who all very much appreciate that I scale down my avatar to be the same height as them like they could be at eye level and there's a lot of design that went into this very carefully to make sure that people can be literally in each other's shoes or avatars and also that there is meaningful use of chatbots that can go back and forth on this lived-in experience to simulate a kind of conversation you would have if for example the spirits lived here the spirit of the river the spirit of the endangered species the spirit of, is a little bit animist even but we've found that it is actually very effective in getting people into the mindset of listening to social objects that cannot speak for themselves future generations and things like that so yeah there is a lot of active research but mostly it is now done by my other colleagues who are actually interaction designers in Peters and not me personally so I'm just talking about their work but if you're interested to join the HoloPolis project Hi thanks I was wondering you know you're describing how in the case of Taiwan occupied movement right it's part of a network social movement there was network social movements all across the world in the last six years and some have gained been more ambitious or successful I would challenge how we read and understand success because I think these are new kinds of social movements but one question I have is like you didn't have the opportunity necessarily to embed these civic deliberation methodologies into a political campaign because it sounds like the ministries were scared and kind of opened up space that traditionally social movements would need to amass space and run for elections kind of like what they did the municipalities did in Spain three years ago so I'm just wondering have you given any thought to what how these processes might look within that context and I'm interested to hear any thoughts you have Yeah I think Taiwan's political system is kind of different though people elect directly the president who appoints the premier and appoints the cabinet and that is separate from the legislative function and so actually a majority of bills passed by the legislation starts as the draft from the administrative function and so because of this system the administration is remarkably party free there's more independent ministers at the moment in the cabinet than members of any party in the cabinet and we can't say that of the legislative function at all so what we're saying is that basically this system protects creates kind of a buffer zone for this kind of conversation directly with the population without threatening the legislative because if it requires a law change eventually the MPs will have a say party politics will play a role but just at the feeling finding and fact finding and consensus finding stage nobody objects for the career public service to do a little bit more to prepare the MPs better for what people feel right so I think this the administration doing some preparatory work for the eventual referendum or the eventual MPs this is something that everybody can get behind and because of that it is like already a very good idea we don't need to campaign especially hard for that and rather people who held some reservations as I said lost their mayoral elections anyway in 2014 and so we in our new political landscape we don't even need to deal with the people who refused this kind of thing because four years ago they were just all gone I'm going to ask you a question off of Twitter while people are thinking so from Tamash I in somewhere writes oh you're here ask your question yeah no no no please my phone just died so now you have to ask the question I had to I had to ask the question on Twitter because I Google joined Taiwan and it was very funny to get the first hits so if you want to see that go on Twitter I see that so it was about the question that Google has as the first hit is when does Taiwan join China something like that so I had to join that show that the question that I had was was about the risk of public servants I like how you reframe that as a public servant myself I see lots of colleagues who are very afraid to join any participative process so I was wondering can these people in your radical transparent world can public servants join anonymously in an online world yes of course they can be they can choose any nickname they want and basically kind of anonymize themselves because the transcript is published only after 10 working days of collaborative editing so people who don't want to somewhere to be taken out of the context people who want to add a more supplementary material people who after reading the transcript actually change their positions they can all reflect that in the final published version so the upshot of this is that the public service is something very professional after reading all these transcripts and my work in channeling back the reddit equivalents is also make the internet people participation sound very professional because I remove all the exclamation marks and pictures and actually only deliver the substance back to the meetings and so I think it really builds mutual trust after you experienced this for a time or two and it really aligns what career public service is like because I think it really reinforces the message of what the values that a career public service hold without exposing them to personal risk but if everything turns out very well we can always re-identify yourself and take the credit for it Hi my name is Nathan Story Audrey it's nice to see you again I just want to note that a few months ago we were in the same room for the Fearless Cities conference and it was this exact room where you were appearing remotely and my question is about the role that you see Taiwan playing in these emerging networks of cities from cities and local governments and movements that are forming networks with each other outside of the nation-state level and why you are doing that why you were on a panel in Fearless Cities with counterparts from Madrid and Wikipolitica and Mexico at an opposition party and why you are traveling to London and here what are you trying to accomplish with all of this travel Yeah well it used to be that it takes paragraphs to explain but now with the excellent technology that is sustainable development goals all it takes is a few numbers I am working on 1718 the 1717 and the 1716 of the sustainable development goals and we found this to be really effective because digital social innovation in the context of the sustainable goals is really the glue that helps people care about society, care about environment care about education, about equality about whatever together in a way that is to the benefit of everybody working on different directions and cancelling each other off and the methodology in the global goals is just to enhance availability of reliable data of getting people on the same page literally using distributed ledgers or whatever as needed to make sure that people trust the evidences that their action is having are impacting on the respective domains and encourage effective partnerships by basically building a common vocabulary of sacred law a catalog of systems that people can compare what they are doing within their very different narratives but with some metrics that people can amplify their work and compare their work against each other and finally to share innovations and technologies so that when we solve this for Taiwan we know the limitations but if you are operating it on a different municipality maybe that limitations don't apply to you and you can extend our vision and do better so this kind of open innovation I think is the key to getting some sort of solidarity across the different municipalities who are all working on this very same legitimacy problem but with very different cultural norms so I think Taiwan's role as one of the places where really there is no other choice but innovate without leaving anyone behind because otherwise the people who get sacrificed just occupy it is essential for us to document and to share our findings but also work as one of the reliable partners to hold such evidence and such data and such studies and participate in the global network so you came out in the room and talked that you're an anarchist and when I think of anarchy I think of a lot of passion and protest and we see people here protesting on the streets and at the end of the day nothing really gets done and what you're doing in Taiwan is I see a lot of organization there and it takes a long time how do you maintain that momentum of passion that you obviously have for what you're doing and with everyone else who's involved how do you maintain that through this process yeah thank you I've wrote entire treaties about this back when I was working in the free software community and it's called optimizing for fun and there's a whole bunch of methodologies to basically just celebrate small successes and make things fun and make the fun contagious and I think that is the origin of the anarchist thinking for me because I learned anarchism of course from the classic text but also from the fables and stories of Zhuangzi and Laozi in the old Taoist tradition and they were very much against hierarchical power as well but they explain their philosophy and that is fun that appeals to even a you know I think five-year-old when I first read Taoist texts and so it's basically very intuitively appealing and when you maintain this intuitive appeal without actually you know throwing bombs and things like that and destroy people who don't agree with the anarchist agenda you get a well I call conservative anarchism meaning that anarchist tradition that respect the traditions but don't reinforce them who work alongside hierarchical power and shifting them into never making power but without you know asserting it within the old power logic I think Buckminster Filler captured it best like when you don't fix a broken system you make one a new one that makes the old one obsolete and that's exactly what we're doing which is a lot of fun Hi I'm Rufei and I currently study the urban informatics so the like public health and all the health care is one of my interesting directions for example I think if people go to the hospital it's always expensive and time consuming and I think that is a problem that people like most concerns to so I wonder in your opinion how can you how your ecosystem could address it or help to improve it and or does your ecosystem or e-participation already accumulate some solutions about it? Yeah there's a lot of people petitioning and working to digital health and Taiwan wasn't that big on telehealth before but because of the V-Taiwan methodology we found out a lot of people who want to do e-health not because they're too far away from a clinic but rather they want a continuous ongoing relationship with their clinicians and so on so it really surfaced some real needs and coupled that with the aging issue in Taiwan there's a rapidly declining but okay both rate and that we're basically having to work with elders who is much more difficult to actually go to a clinician all that resulted in the digital health initiative and telemedicine bill and whatever of this year and so this is one of the most popular actually topics in both V-Taiwan and also the joint platform and the joint platform really gets a lot of people really passionate about having the clinicians the large hospitals doctors as well as if they're in offshore islands then the helicopters the people who actually does the shuffling on the same page using open standards using the cutting edge technology such as voice assistance to make sure that the elders receive the medical care in the accent in the culture that they understand in the words that they understand using metaphors that they understand and can also capture the non-verbal response to such cues and such dialogues in a way that feels comfortable to them is instead of asking them to speak perfect Mandarin or whatever to get into the system so yeah that is one very active research agenda I am very happy that V-Taiwan played a very small role in opening up the public imagination into the inevitableness but also that really the urgency of working with the public. Hello my name is Marco I'm from Brazil and I read the Chris Hortons article on MIT technology review I don't know if you have the opportunity to read it and in general the article says that you have a very ingenious system for crowd sourcing and then there is a statement that the platform has its limits it needs real power and I would like to know what we are doing to get the real power it means what the deep institutional reforms you are thinking or trying to propose to especially keep these changes continuing and during next administrations in Taiwan. I think the consensus of the V-Taiwan community which I certainly cannot represent but I can re-present them which is to scale out to scale up and also to scale deep and that's the three different directions that the various V-Taiwan community actors are taking. Scaling out I already mentioned meaning that municipalities and city and even smaller communities need to be made comfortable in running this process and the national government to do it for them which is why the sandbox experiments and so on is so important because it gives something that's pertinent to that particular place to deliberate on without waiting for the central administration to do it for them so that's scaling out. There's many people who think that V-Taiwan should be coupled with the referendum process or some other process that gives final biting power a lot more than what we already have which is just really consultative power. At the end of this year there's a national digital communication act that says for all the things pertaining to digital communication to internet governance to multi-stakeholder governance around transnational issues something like the V-Taiwan method must be used and that's the first time that this method what we call open multi-stakeholder consultation process is written into the law itself and that would give the scaling up the biting power that it needs in the area but we're still waiting for the legislator's screen light it will probably happen in a couple of months we'll see finally it's scaling deeply it's getting this idea into the K-12 curriculum system is for the students to co-create curriculum with the teachers which is just happening now and the new curriculum goes online next year where we will redesign the capstone classes to make sure that there's a lot of junior high, senior high and a college level solve social and environmental problems collectively as part of their learning instead of just waiting until their adults and then participate in this process because personally I'm a junior high school dropout and my first foray into democracy is in the internet society and that was when I was 14 and I've just imbued myself into this rough consensus process for six years before I even get my first voting right and represent democracy so I think that kind of formative experience is really important and we really need to scale deeply into the minds of the junior high school students who will lead the future of the direction of the earth anyway so I've been focused a little more practically I guess my name is Kai Feuder I work with Beth in her New Jersey capacity as of two and a half weeks ago so when you're looking at with civil servants in particular that are used to very rigid structures and you're engaging them in this very different approach to governance innovation etc are there specific types of characteristics and skills that you think really lead to more successful outcomes that either attract the civil specific civil servant to get involved into something like this and also help projects succeed internally and be able to navigate within their respective agency or role? Yeah sure, maybe let's take two questions Great that question fits well with mine which is what do you think of if a governor of the state said I love this process I think we should implement it and told his CIO make this happen A is kind of top down implementation of like this type of has the GovZero community thought about how to support such an implementation? Is there something kind of antithetical about applying it from kind of an executive level on down without the community kind of self organizing this and also and more concretely how many app that you're using Sandstorm you're using all of these softwares like what is kind of the minimum viable resource investment necessary to just put the infrastructure together to be able to implement this at any type of way that would be respected in kind of like the public arena Yeah So like how to bootstrap Well I think the minimum bootloader is very simply a physical place because really the architecture of the physical place of the digital public digital innovation space I think determines the kind of people who want to go to it and who want to stay and who want to basically make collective decisions and take risks together and I say this because this place was literally co-created by hundreds of social innovators they ask for a kitchen and they got a kitchen, a chef it opens until 11pm every night and so on so basically I feel that this place is where they are, where they kind of belong and where they is willing to come back even after spectacular failures in experimentation and this whole notion of just going into space and see some self-driving tricycles roaming around as seen as kind of a social norm every time you go into social innovation lab you will find new ideas and new experiments running around and so for me if there's one single thing it's this recurring recursive space that allows for a culture of people just authentically sharing their experiments and failures streams and whatever and then still willing to come back to the place and this is also the place we hold all the you know my touring Taiwan and using video conferencing and so on so the 12 different ministries people when they go to this place it feels like play right even if it's actually a whack but it feels like play because they get to see new experiments, new social innovations along the way and they understand that they are not under any sort of risk of attack of protest or whatever people cannot attack them over the monitor anyway so everybody acts very civilized and so on so it gradually it lowers the fears, uncertainty and doubt of public service when it comes to public engagement and that is really the only thing that's missing because the career public service perfectly capable journalists and specialists to deal with this kind of issues it was just the silos that prevents their empathy from showing forward and things like that so just creating this recursive space and culture I think is the bootloader that you just talk about and also what I would recommend when bootstrapping from a new municipality and whatever and we hold training classes actually in this tuning in NYC and also very soon I think November in Canada and in many other places so we're building an English curriculum of the curriculum that we're offering to the municipalities in Taiwan general personality or technical skills as well though that really make civil servants that are engaging on these projects successful especially given the fact that you're introducing them to a very new novel environment so yeah I think I didn't get much time to talk about PEDIS the public digital innovation space which is kind of a reincarnation of the Gulf Zero culture within the central administration PEDIS is at the moment I think 22 full timers about 40 or so interns so it's like a small internal startup within the central government it's like policy lab or whatever and everywhere but what what is PEDIS a part though is that I talk as part of my compact when I join the cabinet that I can poach at most one person from each ministry to work full time in the public digital innovation space so they're not like the PO's the PO's they grow they get new PO's in the third level, fourth level agencies the PO network just grows it's now more than 60 people now but PEDIS remains small and it's a big part of the ministry which means the maximum capacity of 32 people because there's 32 ministries in Taiwan you see so because of that it is by definition cross functional it is by definition people who care about various many different things but what's not what's a constant here is that everything joins by voluntary association and I don't even give them command I don't even rate them write their own score card if they want to do something they have to pitch to the rest of the team who all came from different ministries anyway so you better find some common values and so it means that first all the mechanism that came out of PEDIS doesn't sacrifice any other ministry it is not a place to do ministry or politics because every other people are there too and we work out loud using the traditional open source free software mechanism and the second thing is to do the recruiting we find that people who are willing to join naturally are more of a giver they wish to contribute more than what they think they can take to the public good and this is not some HR criteria it's just in an anarchist work space you have to be this kind of people in order to have fun otherwise it's just not fun at all because if you are after petty politics or whatever you don't get much satisfaction and so that's the second thing is the fulfillment of giving and contributing and the third thing I think really is just the PEDIS being a kind of risk free space for you to do the experiments because if anything goes wrong it's always Audrey's fault I think that's what empowers the career public service so we have our PEDIS member from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and there's many other ministries people currently in Taiwan do we have any final questions? okay you've earned it cameraman thank you so I have a small two part question the first is sort of related to the minimum viable resource question which is is technology crucial to decentralized consensus making to what you do and the second part is if it is have there been attempts to game the system because anything that's online whether it's Facebook or Twitter or WhatsApp there's always people who find a way to game the system and have there been instances of people trying to game with Taiwan and how did you overcome that? so I think we usually say civic tech but I mostly think in a framework of calm technology in the sense that technologies that allows people to focus more on each other rather than distract people's attention from each other and calm or assistive or ambient however you want to call it technology of course doesn't have to be digital it could be post-it notes, it could be you know Y board or whatever so it could be you know sign language used during the Occupy right it could be people's microphones so there's all sort of technologies that you can deploy without it being a digital technology and we use the digital technology mostly because it allows this experience to scale you know horizontally and to for the ideas and thoughts and reflections reached in a face-to-face setting to kind of ripple out without kind of dying down because there's just not too many people joining the protest on the street so it is more in the conservation part of it of the consensus making process than the amplification part of it we're not too big on the amplification part of it but even though the joint platform is now 5 million users out of 23 million population which is not too bad so the gaming part back when we did Airbnb case which is right after UberX Airbnb send an email to all its Taiwan members and asking them to come to Polis and support the Airbnb position and what they found out was that instead had this be a simple yes no question or a simple questionnaire maybe people would have behaved as the email told them to do but because this is an open ended reflective space only one-third of people they recruited this way actually agree with the Airbnb position and many other people have much more nuanced much more eclectic much more resonating feelings because they're just motivated to press one like but what it gets from you know opening the link is actually a larger crowd a larger system a more holistic approach an overview effect if you will on the problem space and in that reflective space people behave very differently than people mobilize just to press one like on things and of course we see people trying to use bots and things like that but it's not really a big problem if you write a bot that goes exactly the same for 5000 different entries it's just one dot what we're looking at is the diversity it's whether you can propose something that resonated with more people and if you can write a bot that generates a sentiment that resonates with more people I for one will come but so far that has not happened the hour is getting late so let me close us out in the following way this past Saturday was international day of democracy international day of democracy is a UN created holiday for those of you who don't know who really which really tries to zero in and focus on one specific aspect of the universal declaration of human rights that is celebrates its 70th anniversary this year and that is namely the idea that democracy in that 70 year old version is the conduct of periodic and genuine elections so for those of us on this side of the table who think and feel that democrat that the voting once a year is not enough and that we can do better that we can do better in the way that you are trying to do in Taiwan and I think have shown us maybe possible I wanted to ask and point to all of you that on your chair you will find a manifesto on what Audrey referred to a number of times in passing the idea of crowd law so the idea of crowd addressing plus law making the idea of all of us can play a bigger and better role in engaging in how our governments make law and policy so if you like this idea of doing more things like V-Di-Wan and PDIS and the participation officers and the digital lab thing which is digital social innovation lab and this whole ecosystem of initiatives that really is a thicker more active vision of democracy so I would just invite you please to sign the manifesto and leave it behind on your chair and we will collect it you can also go online to manifesto. crowd.law Audrey has signed it and so I would just and it's really a call to all of us to our city councils and parliaments and legislatures to our technologists and to each of us to play more of a role in the way that you have shown us I want to just ask you as a final question then to give us the big vision we started with the worried fear about democracy the future of democracy for you are you optimistic are you pessimistic and how do we realize this big vision close us out and then we will drink wine and cheese and pepper you with more questions so yeah so back when I took the post of digital ministry I said I had a compact a covenant not a contract but they still want a job description and so instead of a job description I just wrote an administration a poem or a prayer which would serve as the job description as the digital ministry and I think that answers the question so which is why I want to read the poem to you now and it goes like this when we see 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 always remember the plurality is here thank you so much thank you to all of you for coming Jeff Mulgan just as smart as Audrey and who is also a Buddhist monk by the way in case you didn't know that and advised three prime ministers in the UK is coming to talk about his book Big Mind and Collective Intelligence and Democracy 26 next Wednesday over lunch a little bit shorter but we I think we feed you a little bit more and with that said please come mingle talk cheese cubes await thank you and thank you Audrey so much