 There we go Hello Good morning. Hi there. They're having breakfast or lunch You're in the lab Ambient noise I hear I hear some voices in the background, but it's not too bad Yeah, it shouldn't be understanding. Yeah, and I don't know Japanese. I don't know Japanese. So it doesn't really distract me All right, so hi, I'm Audrey and so how do we proceed? Exactly, so I'm I'm sherry. I don't know when you want to start recording and also I don't know I Assume you're gonna post the recording publicly, but I don't know in what form so I was thinking of recording on my end as well That's great. Um, probably it's a good idea anyway to just double down, right? So actually sure and at the end of it we can collectively decide whether it's Published in the video form or edited slightly and published in the video form or skip that video for all together and make a texture transcript and publish that instead And usually after collaborative editing or we can do both we can publish the video and the text The modern world is far too complicated. It is So I will just turn on my recorder and then we can Figure out that later on and the thing that's bringing us together is I stayed with Andrew Rochet in In New York recently and we got to talking about a whole bunch of different things some of which will show up in this conversation And He mentioned you and your talk at PDF And I went and listened to the talk and I went and did some more doodling and looking and I thought oh wow, okay You're you're basically helping reinvent Civic participation and how government works and so forth in some really interesting ways So I wanted to just have a getting to know you conversation I'm happy to tell you part about my journey and I've been doing a lot of work on trust That comes from our that comes from my realization in the mid 90s that I didn't like the word consumer Hmm. So that's kind of what took me down this this particular journey And so we can kind of start most anywhere. I had one question I I sort of wanted to ask but maybe we should do intros first. I was interested in what do you mean by optimizing for fun? Right. Um, so it's a verbiage That I coined during 2005 When I was building this new language called pro six Pro is a computer language with a very long history. It's one of the first Well, actually the first scripting language used for the web But it's been stagnating for a while and people generally did not find Find the learning the language much fun anymore. And so they went to learn python and php and ruby and whatever Now, there's nothing wrong with that, of course, but the pro community itself Thought to reinvent itself. And so it did a public consultation He asked all the pro programmers everywhere to write proposals. They call them requests for comments as all the internet proposals are and There's hundreds of those proposals Arriving from the entire pro community for the designer Larry wall to look at now. They're contradictory They they don't make much sense together for any Like most of them are suggestions, but they They don't elaborate very well on the underlying problems. Um, so there's no Coherency in the design so to speak. And so Larry as the designer put up a design that solves all their problems And ends up designing the impossible to implement language Generally considered by the programming language circle. So it went unimplemented. There were many failed attempts For like four years And and then I came along and said, you know, we can't do this on heroics We can't rely on a, you know, super intelligent person Donating their time and implement just five percent of it and then quitting because it's just too odd Right. So instead of in a in a compiler in a language implementation What we say we optimize we means we try to make something Maximized right if we optimize for speed we make a very quick language that we optimize for memory We have a language that doesn't take much memory and things like that And I said, you know, we have to optimize for fun meaning that we need to increase participation as our Go and the language instead of being a secret thing Let's just be this excuse for us to getting to know each other And that's the only way we can even start to get this thing done So I I decided to try several things really radical by that time because it was before git and github For example, anyone who mentions the the language pro six or my implementation plugs Anywhere on the use net anywhere on the internet And usually just just flaming right just just saying, you know, it's been taking a few years It doesn't go anywhere. Right anyone who offers anything much as a complaint I offered them a commit bit meaning that I hand hand them the right access to the repository They can do whatever to the language now And so this this makes the irc chatroom channel the whole community extremely vibrant because they're essentially people who have something Provocative to say about the language at first, but they've been Hucked to into this community. This is probably Were you Yeah, that's right. It's it's my default. Anyway, so so then Then it arrives these memes right hugging a troll optimizing for fun and things like that. And so Larry Ward the designer joined the community and says, you know, the only criteria for joining the community is you want to Want to be nice Right. So so if you you don't want to be nice yet, we can teach you how to be nice also And then we would be one of the nicest community and the language eventually got interrupted. That's the story I love that. Thank you It's interesting because I tell the story of wikipedia's birth now and then And back to when it was new pedia and there was a seven-layer editorial process And jimmy wales and larry sanger were trying to get, you know Articles published and they got no place and then they discovered wikis and wikis have the process you're describing sort of innately because they depend on people participating and Clearly the conversation can go haywire, but It's just really interesting that there's a lot of what's happening depends on trust You're handing the keys to the car to people who are yelling about the car And you're trusting that that's going to motivate them to come in and be helpful Right, right. And we also have a observer during the pro six community building called clay sharky You probably have heard of him Right, and then and then he he gave a public speech called love internet style There are centers around this community called pro as a shinto temple And something like that that attracts people and shares their lives and so on. So that's that's his observation our community And that was the shinto temple that was designed to be rebuilt every 400 years something no, it's it's basically just taking the the communal space in the metaphor of a shrine Right, but but not as a sacrifice But as an act of love and it also means that there's millions of people wake up this morning loving pearl And they love one another according to play in the context of pearl And they love one another enough to stop what they're doing and listen to each other To have a conversation to answer questions to diagnose things for each other Sometimes even write code for each other. And so so I think he was saying this as a kind of metaphoric Ideational structure that people once identify with suddenly become better person And well, but he put it better than me, but that's the basic And So it sounds like this is a piece of your recipe for how to fix what's wrong with the world And I mean, I don't I don't think I'm going too far in saying that right Well, yeah, well, that's my that's my one of the many Ideas in the toolkit, but yes, that's one Yeah, what are the other ones? Well, there's well sure I'm smiling there Well, she's you know too much Yeah, she's she's the actual digital minister. I'm just doing the talking No, I've been working with her for so long Yeah, she's she's now she's now working on the the other part which is integrating mixed reality virtual reality And in a way that much more effectively communicates affect than this Skype two-dimensionals work can And and and I think that's really important because it's Assistive it means that instead of bringing people and part of their attention to this unnatural glass thing We let people stay in their natural habitat and just you know talk deliberate the same way as they always do But have the ambient computer in a kind of calm way Generally guide their attention and overlay different spaces into the same space So people can have both a large-scale zoom out conversation as well as a really local Zoom in conversation, but all the while without learning anything new they just use their body their their emotions Their voices the same way as they do, but that's for sure to introduce and just Yeah, there's everything they say introducing Virtual space more like a mixed reality space what they're calling that right now or sure sure So like allowing Almost all participants in the globe to participate on the same Answering the same big questions like how do we go together as a society? What do we want for our society to have? um maybe in the recent Years or in the near future in the future, maybe um very far future that um probably we don't even exist anymore Just like having these big questions in mind and probably they will also break down into smaller questions more practical ones Some controversial social issues that still left unsolved right now at this moment um, so we're thinking to like create a space for people to to participate anytime they want and to contribute To whatever degree they want um more like having this very relaxing place to hang out and just They can um try to think about maybe start to think about What will be a possible promising future? We all want to have And I hope this will be a space not only for having conversation and but also for um Creating some prototypes all together so having like a prototype in the virtual space and probably that can be brought into a physical one A real one in life that we can all try things out and having this like virtual ideation room We have over there in the cloud So that's like a big um Yeah, not really big. I think that's a possible vision. We will have Right now and at this at this point in these two months I'm here sitting in tokyo's one of the labs in tokyo and just to try to figuring out If that makes sense and if that's possible Or what kind of technology actually we have now is possible to build a prototype and kind of having this space for everybody to to connect it together and if there's a any research Left on down about human compared interaction meaning that if a real person come into a virtual space Are they going to have real conversation or are we still going to just like? um Not really taking a conversation seriously because it's a virtual space. Um, there are things I think that aren't resourced yet probably, um There will be some interesting topics to be opened up in the two months, but I think for for me. I'm taking this very relaxing also sprint to to figuring out What are the possible? Visions we we would like to have and one of the possible questions we like to research on for the Yeah, next maybe after these two months That sounds great It's honey because just today I happened across in twitter I got a pointer back to facebook where mark zuckerberg is in porto rico And he was sitting with somebody else They were trying to do they were trying to coordinate sort of data for rescue and apply ai But they were using the new Facebook tool i'm forgetting what it's called Where they were both avatars and they were lip-syncing to what the people were saying But they were sitting in front of a scene in porto rico of a flooded street a flooded neighborhood And I found myself wishing that the avatars were gone. I didn't want the avatars there at all I just wanted to hear you know zuckerberg and uh and his colleague talking about this to see their faces and see their expression But it was an interesting glimpse of where some people think this is heading Um, I'm wondering uh, and also I'm remembering I've been in the tech field for quite a while So I attended one or two of the chi conferences the computer human interface group of the acm Uh, a really long time ago back when this was called things like computer supported collaborative work csc w It's gone through a lot of iterations before becoming social media virtual reality augmented mixed reality and so forth I'm in in the in the mixed reality. Are you envisioning feedback given to each participant during the event? Are you envisioning things done later? Are you envisioning things that let people see the setting as a group? I mean there's many things you could do in aesthetic. Yeah. Yeah, I think there are many possible ways One of the things I'm thinking right now is people um, because we do know people are busy right in their in their everyday life And they probably only want to participate then when whenever they want and they probably want to get a hint when When things happen, they would like to know that's a space that can go and log into to have conversation with other people in a virtual space. So things like um, not really seeing this space is um, um synchronized conversation but more like having you know Asynchronized conversation always going on people can join anytime in any place So it's like transition time and space Also, so I do think there's um, um, It's actually a spectrum we can try to find whether we're sitting Having a very delicate conversation getting everybody's attention and probably the space is not like only one setting also like it could be a different Settings where you can probably experience is you can probably experience with going to one booth and get more More overall background knowledge about the same topic and then you can probably go to another virtual room Just like sit and wait there for other avatars to join in and have conversation over there So it could be both and could be many kinds of settings and I also think the process of making um Could be interesting as well like instead of having Um, so I did reflect a lot on Being a designer to design a space for everybody to talk to to have conversation in science like I'm not playing god for for this project, but I do like everybody um to be able to to create their own spaces right because we all have our own um Ways to communicate and we find things or ways more comfortable. We can communicate with other people, right? So it'll be really cool to to like have um For example architects or designers or space special special designers on the team and really create space for all the people as well and having them in the virtual space and requesting others Yeah, about their ideas and try to get help from all the people I love that Um, did I send links to you guys about my brain? Do you know about Jerry's brain and all that? It's it's it's very yeah very much like that Yeah It's very interesting because one of the conclusions I have from 20 years of using this piece of mind mapping software And filling I've only got one brain like I have one data file that has three three hundred and forty thousand things in it now Including you guys And one of the things I learned was that Not having a way to create a collective memory Has debilitated us as human beings and makes our discourse much poorer It makes it much harder to make good decisions It makes much harder to remember what we agreed on last month It makes it harder to express what we know and believe and and all that And I feel I feel sometimes like I'm lonely with this belief because I feel it very deeply because of 20 years of feeding a mind map and knowing what things are and being able to share that out Sort of um But it feels to me like the work you're doing would be really helped If we had more of a collective memory more of a shared sense making space whatever that looked like if it looks like Excellent if it looks like I don't know what it looks like But I'm wondering If you agree with that premise and what you've been efficient and maybe what you're building that would feed that because to me Our lack of memory. I call it our amnesia makes us easy to spin and manipulate Yeah, I still haven't figured out what it would look like, but but I've seen your brain and Looks like a nice way to to visualize ideas and thoughts In a more structured way and there's another visualization we used called policies It's more from it's from the polish pol dot is And if you're searching that they are start up from Seattle and using pca to Figure out people's comments into opinion groups so That's another thing we are looking at Right now because I think the elements we have in the polish visualization Could be more In fragments In a way that people could contribute in a more light way They don't really have to write a full article Maybe a full for example, we keep in that page, right? and But like compared to your brand, it's very structured and all the notes inside all the elements inside are actually um, a very Holistic knowledge as well already and I think that might be difficult for Collaboration Among a large group of people If I'm making sense, but that policy is taking bits and parts and like using part of AI and try to Compute opinions into groups and try to find Yeah I think this is a deeper topic than we have the time to go into here But I really appreciate what you've done and what you're working with And and part of what I want with like something like the brain Is I wanted to preserve my own opinion and your opinion and Audrey's opinion so that we can see Where do we agree? Where do we disagree? And that means that we each have to be able to preserve our own perspective into the issues and the topics And you know say this is this is sort of how I believe and in my brain I have a section I call my beliefs and I think of it as my belief snapshot and it explicitly says Here are the things I think are true and it would be lovely if there were some AI that could come along And compare my beliefs to your beliefs So that we could say okay great out of these 10 major issues Seven of them we already agree on Kind of set them aside for a while and we should you know order a bottle of wine and focus on these couple issues as well And thank you. Thank you for sharing your screen. This is fun And and Audrey I was I noticed also in your talk you talked about sandstorm And a series of other kinds of tools there seems to be the need of a tool suite Underneath the discourse and underneath the kinds of stuff. We're talking about and you know, I think as you are I've been on the lookout for what are those? What are those tools? What is the tool suite that we need? What are the things that you fold into that right? Well, I think there's tools and there's process right um for Tools that we really want people to fork we usually encourage open source tools, of course But for things that are part of the process that are not necessarily forked We also use some proprietary software and so I think the distinction is made In the sense that if the tool itself makes some kind of value judgment It really needs to be open and transparent and open for modification because we're essentially outsourcing part of our work to it And I mean human work to it on the other hand if it is purely for presentation Like uh, sharing slides on slide here. I don't really care if it's proprietary or not because it's not going to change the message Although it does change a user experience, but it's a lesser concern uh, and yeah, um for the presentation side, uh, we use real-time board Which is this um online post-it Ish collaborative thing and it is a lot like a mind map. Actually, we do use it like a mind map And you are yes. Yeah, but but we say service design Bent right we we group things into facts and ideas and reflections and responses decisions, right? And then if you look at the very small gray areas next to each post it if they actually Designate the ministry where it comes from. So, so this is uh, basically the ministry of Economy saying this is my opinion My subtree Of this so so it is in a sense a a mix of many different mind trees into one And then but what we're doing is that instead of just We will um make it into a problem statement It's the standard idea development way to try to go deep on one of the Right, so so that's that's the basic way. We're using real-time board and finally delivering on a workable prototype That everybody can live with not necessarily happy with so that's one of the process tools that we use The other process tool that that we use extensively is slido and We use slido in a lot of different ways not just Collecting people's questions. Have you used tools like this before? I have not used slido Okay, right. So so what slido is is it is essentially At the beginning of a gathering or a talk The power imbalances in the room will by default mean that people in the room Doesn't really get equal seconds of speech The right contribution and of course using poset is one way, but it also greatly Privileges diversification and it doesn't really contribute to convergence Without a lot of facilitation Work the facilitation work is it's really messy Really expensive in in terms of fine, right? So um, we we are developing a lot of cheap and cheerful facilitation tool kits and one one of them is polis, which you already saw and then Would you like to mute your part of the conversation? Because the background is getting a pretty noisy end Yeah All right Right, that's that's great. Um, excellent. Thank you. Awesome technology. So anyway so, um, when when I get a slider, um It's basically something like this and then we just ask people to enter today's date And once they enter today's date they get into this Um space let me see if this University audience interaction technology. Yeah, but but it's not just um, yeah interesting. Yeah, very cool. Um Just a second. Let me see if this actually works Single sign on Oh, it does great. So you can so you can see we we run a lot of slider talks practically One every every other day or so or more. Um, and so yes, this is right So, um, it's part of the the talk people will just chime in with questions and Interjections and whatever and what I like about this design is that first it's anonymous by default people can Disclose their name if they want but they don't have to and second It allows for topical conversations So if a lot of people press like for any particular Question I can just see them on the top and then I'll just focus on it And then then the whole room is focused on this particular subject for a while and then and then I archive it And but if I hold the microphone for too long the latest question Segment which is at the very bottom We'll interject and Let me know the real-time feedback and all this is done without the audience having to disclose Where they are at because everybody's tapping at the phone anyway The other thing is that this takes attention away from their other From applications and it kind of just occupies their phones, which is one of the the most Difficult thing to deal with in a large-scale deliberation at this moment because people get constantly distracted by their phones And by instructing everybody to to go to this website We essentially just took back control of the phones and they still get the same attention fix They're still like to press they're right. There's still All the other usual interactions that they're they're addicted to but but now it's something that's contributing to the conversation and now once something is Made into a topic then we use good notes and good notes is I think the third piece of the proprietary technology that we use really heavily and then basically just try to use different colors for different People's or groups input and try to get a coherent whole Into this topic where everybody can see everybody else's mind map and finally agree on something and then we move on to the next topic so the combination of Like physical posted notes transcribed to real-time board from the real-time board Set as the general topic from a slide of curating the topic at the moment and from the topic at the moment going back to good notes To to facilitate this verbal or non-verbal interactions into a collective mind map and then going back to the posted notes for the next Ideation phase in double diamonds. I think that's our Current workflow using the the three process technologies So this is different from the teams day-to-day work, which is open stores using sandstorm and so on but The process tools. I think it's equally important Interesting and you don't use wikis anywhere in the process, right? Well, we use discourse and discourse is kind of like a wiki for example, shuyang just writes writes down whatever she feels Important for the team to know randomly on our internal wiki But everybody can see it and like it and and also edit it because we all you know do away with this concept of Ownership so so and the edit history just like a wiki. Let's everybody know whose words is it anyway, right? So so we just without having to sign the documents like wikipedia does automatically Have this, you know, you know the sentence is yours and the sentence was mine But it doesn't really matter at the end. It's all used together. So, you know, we do use wiki space as a part of a working form It's not a separate space Part of other things. Yeah, there was a product called mixed ink a while ago That led people collaboratively create documents where you could trace You could trace the origin of every phrase Back to who had sort of suggested it back to who had added it to the document. It was pretty interesting Let me rewind to a different place because I don't want us just to talk about software and platforms Even though I I could do that all day because I used to be a tech industry analyst I'm interested in in the gov initiative, you know g0v At what at what moment did you realize it was probably starting to work What what is there is there a thing someone said or a moment something happened where And maybe you can give a little bit of background about about what happened because I think you started You and and volunteers started building out parallel pages to government websites that weren't weren't doing the right thing and You started providing more credible information than they were, right? That's right. Uh, well, um, it's actually Got there at the very beginning and it's even before me joining the the gov zero collective I joined about two months after the movement started but they're very first Work, which is the national budget visualization Uh, it's already a hit and and I think that's that already cemented the communities because At the time the the alternative was a 500 page Budgets pdf anyway, right? So so there's really no comparison and they they design interaction right right there You can't just click on any part of the The the budget and see the Not just How it relates to other budget but also zooming in and there's a lot of heat maps and everything right and there's a lot of There's also a calculation of the national debt And like if you input your how much tax you have paid It shows you where it went and things like that right so but but all these things are designed to be interactive So um if you click on it you can plus it you can minus it you can have a conversation and so on so so it went really popular and And everybody saw the website The url budget that g0 v the tw and and saw the the domain name hack. So there's um I think it's like a shrine right in the clay shirky sense in the sense that once you've seen this url You become aware of a parallel government's possibility and I think It entered the the popular conscious consciousness of taiwan society When taipei city decided to to use the same technology to publish their annual budget that was uh in 2014 after The occupy there was an election at the end of the year and a lot of mayors who did not expect to be mayors Just became mayors because they were occupiers And so and so it didn't very next year Taipei started participatory budgeting and then used the same gov zero technology to Visualize the taipei city's budget and it went hugely popular the mainstream media loves it So I think that's when it entered the popular consciousness and also because remember the forums that Basically each and every single part of the budget becomes a forum But when the taipei citizens um star filling questions and so on they actually saw the public servants responding to them On the forum because it was mandated that way like within three weeks All the public service needs to respond to the questions there So it essentially bypassed the city council or complimented the city council and and really changed the Side guys of interactions possible between the career public servants and the citizens So it took maybe two and a half years, but uh, I think every step along the way There's much more legitimacy Than the previous attempts just because of the the url really it's super interesting because Instead of inert documents at the end of the process basically the budget the report the pd The massive pdf instead of that being the form of communication all of a sudden the data is live And the data is sort of fractal meaning that that each of the issues is is parsed out as a topic You can comment on and participate in It makes the entire thing kind of alive and when when people inside the government show up and begin to Engage and it's it's interesting that the people voted in after occupy Basically mandated that right? I mean that that was the the force that tilt that tipped everything Forward it. Yeah, that's right. Um And and because during the occupy what we've been working on is essentially social spaces and social objects Uh and social objects meaning that This fragments of a budget as you mentioned are just shrines right excuses for people to discover more people And once you discover more people, uh, you naturally find out the things that they care about So you also discover social objects through people and then you discover more people and so on so it builds a solidarity And as long as the space is safe and fun people will want to come back and see whether there's more things to To be discussed and so on so so that was the the kind of overarching theme during the occupy It's during that 22 days anytime we return you're bound to find a group of people talking about things who like to talk about uh, and I think um everything after that is kind of a um I would say uh trying to integrate a integration of it uh into the the general public sense Mm-hmm brilliant How does trust factor into all this what and I'm very interested that people can participate at least on the other part You were showing me anonymously at first and maybe forever um, and it's it it's typically difficult to have Um a decent discourse when you have a lot of anonymity going on So that and other forms how does trust factor into all all these different aspects? Well, I mean there's there's crowd moderation, right? Um Moderation is it's good in in theory Theory is good in moderation Exactly Oh, I like that, right So so because of the the crowd moderation so in really large Uh conversations, um, the really bad anonymous trolls doesn't really even enter the the conversation I think that's the the thing that kept uh things from exploding when we allow message, um, anonymous conversations Uh, for example, are there even good examples? Um, just a second Yeah, um, oh, yeah, yeah there's Creating communication spaces. This is I think thousands of people or something, but um, so There's even people who who ask are there bad questions But I think the the the fun thing is that because of the crowd moderation, um, it's you can see that the The top ones are all having like 60 something likes And they ask about um, how is the government? Using digital technologies to communicate What do we do when the person who communicates with doesn't even want to listen? Um, and how the question how how should civil Citizens do when civil servants become barbaric that is to say not willing to speak on the same language or or not And the latest question here is that uh, what is the worst question you have ever heard? From the audience and so on right, so so it's a very extremely high quality Conversation, but there's actually 230 of them So so if you throw to the very bottom, they actually don't are not worth much time to to to work on So so in situations like this, I think the anonymous forces serve as a self regulating force You don't even need to do anything is you just handle the ones that are on the top And if I do have time I sometimes answer make a point of answering all the questions anyway by spending A couple of seconds for every question that's down the line and spending minutes for the things that are on the top of it And so it also shows for people that there's a symmetry Of attention, which I think is the basis of trust because um If there's no symmetry of attention if one part is just faking attention or or synthesizing attention, uh, so to speak There really is no more authenticity. It gets like marginally Less interesting if you don't get authentic responses, uh after a while, right? So so I think I think crowd moderation is really one way to solve the the issue and And we also make a point of allowing anonymous participation to evolve into a pseudonymous like stable ID participation and then eventually revealing their real name and we have Pretty good stories to tell about one particular person who participate in our crowd regulation Processed from the beginning and he was using a comic character's name and a comic character's avatar and and um and it's obviously japanese name and everybody was just fine with that but after being Welcome into the community. He eventually decided to show up to our face-to-face deliberations And at which point because his administration building they have to uh, tell his name to the To the police guarding the the front door, but but it's the pseudonym for everybody else We we still didn't know and once he felt welcome on the face-to-face basis Then the next deliberation he actually showed up using his his real name Meaning that okay there he's fine of being identified But a magical thing is it's not just he showed up with his real name But he also went back to facebook and and to all this social media and changed back to his real name Instead of his avatar name. So so that that means that it has a back propagating effect It's not just he trusts this bunch of people, but he trusts humanity more because of this bunch of people That's the story Should we understand person? Yeah, it's Cindy is it's like always part of our conversation. Yeah I love stories like that. They really help So our It sounds like citizens are getting a sense of agency like they're beginning to get back I mean what my whole my journey for the last 20 years starts when I realized I don't like the word consumer back in the mid 90s And one of the things I blame consumerism and consumerization Of is that it removes our sense of agency our only job as a good consumer Is to buy stuff that's on offer and it's being advertised to us That's how we know what's on offer including political candidates, right? Because that's that's how our electoral cycle works right now The candidates want a lot of money from us because they're going to spend it on tv ads and other sorts of and now On facebook and who knows we're doing whatever But they're basically They're treating us as mere consumers, which is this very It's not just impersonal It's sort of an abusive relationship as opposed to what you just said about the symmetry of attention And I think I think you also mean the symmetry of intention That's right where it's not just that people are paying attention But that they have the intent of listening And maybe acting on the idea if it's a good idea And when the conversation generates good ideas and those bubble up then you get more confidence in the conversation So there's all these different kind of virtual virtuous cycles working That may make the thing better over time, which is which is super fascinating to me So do you have Does the notion of people getting more agency or feeling more of a sense of agency resonate with what's happened here? Well, yeah, um, I think one of the the thing that we try to do in the e petition case Is also worth studying The shuyang is the shuyang side still very noisy shuyang No, we don't know we've been muted. Yeah, so I'm asking shuyang that Yeah, well, it's better now. It's okay now, right? Yeah, it's much better. Yeah We were like we were like a little bit of ambient awareness Yeah All right Yeah, so so we have this e petition platform It's just like we the people in the u.s. And before it was like a ghost town people would Get 5,000 people to counter sign but all they get is a very bureaucratic almost, um, you know Inauthentic response from one of the ministries Saying okay, we maybe have planned this but the other things are not our purview and things like that It's explaining the problem. It's not solving the problem and and it's been like that So people gradually did not really find it a really interesting place to to to do e petition But once we uh entered the cabinet, uh, we started designing this forum called participation offices Where we asked all the ministries to send at least one but sometimes three People to join this virtual team. We're on slack. We're we're on real-time board We're a slido where all these things and so it's a cross ministry virtual team of about 50 people now who are Trained into this kind of conversation and because they directly report to their cio's their deputy minister and their themselves pretty senior public officials anyway They they suddenly find that it is much easier now that you have social connections to all the different ministries And we handle the e petitions now in a way that every month We vote on the things that the participation offices would like to collaborate with the civil society And once they are voted in there are some really difficult Issues, uh, like for example, should i may may be able to talk about a particular case where the cells of taiwan petitions for helicopters to serve as ambulances because their nearest large hospital is too far away It's 90 minutes and and people die because of it And so so and this is a really difficult case to solve and we fly the entire crew to hengshun to south taiwan For a face-to-face deliberation to solve that and we also face many other issues It's about 20 something issues now, but the the point here is that the petitioner now Sees the government as a whole instead of just, you know, code text. They see All the ministries treating them as peers as equals and up to five Country signature people can also come to those face-to-face deliberations and sometime live stream but always text transcribed So every time we do a collaboration workshop like this, which is every friday Those five thousand or more people gets more agency together because they have now a shared mind map to talk about And they consider public civil servants part of them Instead of they part of the government and I think that's a very Very different route. It means the government trusting the civil society before expecting trust from the civil society And that's really really interesting What can you can you remember any stories about the discussions within the government to get to get to this point Because what you just said is is is gigantic and runs counter To where I think most, you know governments are around the world today. They're they're very mistrustful They they think that the people outside the gates are mostly a mad crowd. They're a mob They're not citizens The consumerization of our world has caused us to treat them as mere consumers not as whole citizens And in fact Barry Lynn the guy who just got a lot of publicity for being booted out of the new america foundation Barry Lynn has a whole history. He can tell you of how we shifted from treating those people as citizens to treating them as mere consumers It's super interesting But but what what moments do you remember that that where It became clear that there was you were going to start from a gesture of trust Um, I think when we did the first p.r. Ware shops We did what hopes and fears cards. Should we only remember the first two workshops? Yeah, it was a two days um kind of like ideation can just inviting all the volunteers who want to become PO's and Really like having them all together and thinking about what would they like to do and what would they like to think about and the first workshop was about um The national travel card National travel card. Um, there was this controversial issue at that moment So we decided to use that as an example topic and for everybody to really try out the process of having Design thinking process in the in the government and as a way to figure things out and have like overall ideation um workshop where where people actually use the Oh, I was talking about hopes and hopes and fear cards meaning we kind of lay out some Maybe 20 to 30 different pictures about some Yeah Yes, so there's some hint you can you can try to relate to Hopes and fears you could have in the government or Towards to this controversial issue. And so like they put things on um, so they put postage on the cards On the certain kind on a specific picture Maybe that make them think of some different hopes and fear And then after that we try to gather some more stories um around their day to day work and and then another round the next phase will be to Have them ideate Some possible solutions in an idea development canvas Right, and I think one of the the defining moment is that well National travel card is this card. It's only handed to public servants And it's a way to compensate for their inability to Basically the idea is that to encourage everyone to have at least 14 days of vacation time But it's it's mandatory. You can't not take those vacation time and there's no extra payment so, uh, basically is a way to Hand out certain cash benefits to encourage people to take vacations But it's not just Hand out of cash That would be great But no is in the form of credit card that can only be reimbursed if you spend it on national traveling So it's a restrictive form of of public servants vacation Encouragement and so that year there was a protest about the group Buses being out of the job because the uh tourists from china decline in numbers So it was decided at that time that the the card would be repurposed and half of it has to be spent on group travel And it's basically restricting the freedom of civil servants taking vacations a lot and it's really unpopular among civil servants So when we got the participation officers together in ideate on it They all proposed some very creative ways to to to solve their problem in other ways that doesn't alienate The civil service that much but two groups out of six I think came up with this idea of generalizing the problem of setting up a internal petition platform That's restricted to civil servants and let them pseudonymously point out issues like this and run consultations Within the public service to simplify their work and also to build solidarity within the civil service And they saw it was just a homework It was just a what practice and exercise that we're doing to try out these cards but but Not just like three weeks after that they become national policy because we just took it to the prime minister saying, you know, this is a good idea Let's ratify it. Yeah, right. So so I think then then because the civil servants themselves Were being seen as consumers in that particular policy They they they experience the same alienation the same Thing that you just described and so it's not mobsters. It's us, right? So I think they have every right to Expect the same fear uncertainty and doubt when they propose something innovative But when it was welcomed and even made a national policy Then they they feel the the idea of, you know, collaborative ideation actually working with them in the petitioner's Perspective. So I think after was they built much more empathy to people who petition and building their agents because they've been there There's nothing like seeing results that gets people to start waking up and paying attention I mean, that's maybe that's an old lesson, but but that really does help have any Have any other countries looked at what you're doing and said we'd like some of what they're having and come over and Listened and taken ideas other places I've just been in Estonia and Estonia is quite famous for their e-government And they have a whole e-government academy that's working with I think 65 governments around the world But they're but their infrastructure seems really different from what you're doing Maybe even Or orthogonal in some ways because they're talking about sort of open data and they have a platform called x-road That commute the connect. It's all different. You know and so forth I'm wondering what that what the international collaborations are that you're seeing Oh, we still we talked to Estonia. We are actually In close contact with with our counterparts over the world Should we have to be building a lot of connections to To et alab, right in in France in France Yeah, and then France and we also talked to m2 m city office in the netherlands and also I went to the hake last month Some people from new york can To have the overall interview kind of like fuel work session around as an interview a lot of counterparts also in Taipei where we had this Conference called civic tech fast It's within part of wc it So so it was nice to to especially seeing some Journalists actually at at at the conference and they're like really interviewing people and kind of build help us building More holistic stories and understanding where we're standing With other international partners right now That's really cool Right. So I think it's not just gov tech. We don't see our service strictly working with the gov tech space Although there are Like this the singapore gds the uk gds the french et alab 18f and usds are Are probably speaking our counterparts and we do talk to them But I think the the more interesting thing is is local NGOs and local Hectivist and so on who actually because of the smaller scope and the Relative lack of public accountability requirements are actually much easier to to introduce this kind of systems than people in the civil service Yeah, it was interesting because uh in your talk you started talking about sandstorm and some of the you know local open web accessible Distributed platforms for collaboration and document creation. I mean i'm a heavy google docs user, right? And slack and all those kinds of things and it's very interesting when you start thinking about how the platforms for civic engagement and participation might in fact Be the platforms that we use for work and for everything else that would be it might actually be a very useful thing to be on On similar platforms as we do this work Then we're used to the tools. We understand how the the dynamics of that conversation works There's a lot of benefits from doing that Right it's in in our natural habitat And I think that's really what inclusion means if it requires people to to adapt to a completely different user experience You lose maybe 90 of the people Yeah, exactly What what's next? What do you want? What are your current frontiers? What are you trying to solve or fix or make better or? Or you headed with all this what? Well impetus everybody has a different research agenda right where this anarchistic organization where I don't give commands so so There's people there's people making films. There's people doing Summer interns with autumn interns anyway In an idea of crowdsourcing young students to just look at websites and pointing out what's wrong and fixing it in a Kind of crowdsourced way. So there's a lot of crowdsource engagement being being done right now I'm also the minister in charge of social enterprise. So we're trying to Using this umbrella term social innovation to kind of unite the traditional NGOs to co-ops movement the socially conscious corporations and the civic tech movement Under the same umbrella So one of the experiments that we're doing is that We have designated a space in central Taipei dedicated to social innovation and every wednesday I'm there as my office hours. So all day that the ministers is there and as long as you have some idea about social innovation you can come to talk to me and Because it's a structure as an office area and open office hour There's many different people from all walks of life Having very different imaginations of what social innovation social enterprise is But the point is that I'm kind of the shrine that gets people into the same space and develop social connections among themselves Not with me and I think that's that's the the magnet We're now taking every two weeks. I'm touring around Taiwan in all those different regional Spaces also try to to cultivate social connection between social enterprise practitioners Out there. So that's that's me personally. Um, there's 20 something people in PDs. Everybody's doing something very different Yeah, we get all the trust from That's funny, um, is what what can I answer for you? Is there anything you're curious about that I could that I could answer for you Well, I was just looking at your brain I love that you can say that Yeah, and then it actually and then it actually means something right? right, um Yeah, so, um So you spend a lot of time, um, thinking about animal intelligence and Yeah, and It's great because, um there's a lot of I think overlap because I'm I don't really see human as as a privileged species Our earth anyway, um, and a lot of the the work That I've seen is is one directional meaning that we upload Animals and make them more like human beings or like super enhanced human beings or whatever But it's not necessarily a good metaphor because it's also intrinsically Says that there's a linear development and the human species itself Is also on a same race track so to speak But I I firmly believe that we're all our own dimensions We which may project on each other, but we're all our own dimensions and there really is no, um, you know Winner or loser if everybody's on their own Dimensional track anyway, so yeah, I would like to to hear a little bit about Um, what what's the the animal intelligence? Link or artificial intelligence and animal intelligence linked uh in in your mind Sure, uh, there's also you'll find a lot of stuff about animal rights in there as well Yes, um On the intelligence thing the thought you're looking at is animals are more intelligent than we think Uh, is the name of that thought in my brain? So if anybody's looking for it, um, and I collect stories about of animal intelligence everything from how incredibly smart octopi and pair and African great parrots and etc etc are Where I think I'm I think I'm fighting a general assumption that humans are the superior life form on earth And that humans a long long time ago We're really really stupid and brutal and tribal and look at how much smarter we're getting all the time And soon we're going to hit the singularity or something like that And I actually think that humans were really really smart a long long time ago And we were hominins and just kind of Just out of whatever that boundary was between being great apes and becoming humans And the worst we could have been Is how a group of chimpanzees or or or gorillas or whatever is today, which means we would have had society We would have had caring. We would have had funerals. We would have had morning humor A whole series of of things and if you look at you know elephants They have a really rich society if you start looking It's funny. There's a very nice bridge here to another topic I wanted to cover if we had the time which is anarchism Years ago, I decided I was going to go read one of these crazy anarchist texts So I found a book by Peter Kropotkin And started reading and the first half of the book Is him describing how in nature groups of animals are cooperative and look nature is not, you know, uh Red in tooth and claw as we were led to think it's actually incredibly collaborative And there's there's there's symbiosis and there's a whole series of things going on that we're completely unaware of because the The principal texts that we get are so different So part of the reason for collecting animal intelligence. I think is a bit parallel to what you're saying Is that is that there are many different forms of intelligence, which is itself even a bit of a controversial word And if we can all figure out how to collaborate and use those intelligences For our common well-being I think we'll all be better off Here also, uh, there's a bunch of science fiction writers who are really good At positing what different kinds of intelligences might look like And how those things might work and then if we bring in artificial intelligence, there's an entire Tub of thinking going on right now About when will you know, ai gets smarter than us, etc, etc A lot of which seems to be pre predicated on this notion that The best ai is one that looks an android that looks and feels like me that thinks like me And I'm like, wow, that's a limiting kind of thing and we're we're we're actually a really long ways away from having that But instead what if we appreciated what each of these kinds of process was good at and blended them in useful ways With some kind of ethical Oversight some kind of ethical intention and and a big piece of the a big missing piece of the puzzle Is this ethical intent or this understanding of the implications of what we're doing? There's this really long lag period between when we implement the technology And when it has its effects on society and changes everything Jerry mandor had a long passage about the car in his book in the absence of the sacred And in in in that passage he talks about would we have let the car go forward If we had known that we were going to pave over all our cities Pollute the air fight wars over the raw materials for the car, etc, etc, etc like we don't We're like an overgrown child who goes and does everything and changes the world And then doesn't know what it did and is like well, I didn't do that. Did I so if we were smarter about Appreciating the intelligence that's present in everything including the wood wide web Which is how trees and mycelia and everything else cooperate to send signals across forests If we could appreciate and blend all the different kinds of intelligence We'd probably be much better off as humans living on on on earth And and I'll throw in one last thing there, which is I think also a long long time ago when we were Just becoming human. We understood how to live in community On the commons We understood what it meant To live together to take care of the place where we lived Right and we've lost that we turned the commons into natural resources We turned everything into money everything has a price now, which is a new phenomenon, you know before 1700 everything didn't have a price Um, so all of this blew us apart and the kinds of things that you're doing With your citizens and peers are in really nice ways not only bringing Bringing us together but creating some shared sense of agency responsibility An understanding of common intent all those different kinds of things that I really admire so That's a bit of a riff on on your question, but uh I'm happy to compare notes on all this stuff Oh, that's great. Um Yeah, it's it's a um My my thought around this is actually very much influenced by Uh by one particular philosopher, which I don't uh completely subscribe to but it's a very good starting point Um, the name is cojin Kara Tani um And uh, he has um this interesting Manifesto which I'm going to paste to the sky here, uh and Right his four modes of exchange. He's in my brain if you search for him. Yeah, okay. So cojin is in your brain Yeah, if you if you look for him, you'll find cojin karatani in there unless I didn't unless I put him in more than a year ago Okay, that's great. Um, so so yeah, then we have some well This is a the pdf is a kind of a abridged version of the the very Kind of long-winded argument that he developed. Um, so how do I search your brain? Uh, there's a search box. There's a little text box. Just type in. Yeah, don't use don't use carriage return Just type in whatever phrase like car type in karatani And he should show up The brain you're looking at is a year out of date Because the server is the brain eight and i'm using the brain nine client But that's our only possible fail here I don't think I don't think he's Not showing up. Oh, then I must have seen him recently But I will go back and look at him some more Can you just say some more about karatani's point of view here? Sure. Um, I think it's um It's not just the the modes of exchange, which is already a very useful schema anyway, right? Uh, but um, but the idea Which is exactly as you said is that um back in the nomadic, um Ages there there was Already part of the human evolution that we can still see it in many animals now. Um, this natural anarchistic Symmetric way of of living together and and he calls it the exchange mode you which is already gone Right, but he sees the exchange mode d, uh, which is the the anarchistic thing that we're we're developing. Um, which is, um characterized by If I still remember the schema, um, the idea the idea is that um, there's there's the state, right, which is Both restricted and unequal. Uh, there is the market Which is unrestricted, but unequal There is the the clan or the nation, uh, which is a larger clan anyway, uh, which is You know, uh, restricted but equal and and he says that we're we're somewhere here That that says, you know, it's unrestricted and is also equal and uh, the the main idea here is that it's actually a A regression to the repressed because human beings were animals and when we were animals, um We we are actually in that natural habitat because it's the the usual way to do things to to share with strangers Uh, so to speak and it's because of the the idea beliefs ideologies of the three different, uh, exchange modes, which are of course, uh, respectively submission and protection, a commodity exchange And a force reciprocity, uh, that kind of took over from the unlimited sharing, uh part So, uh, I think that the main point is that instead of doing something, um, or learning something the way to toward, uh, this kind of, um An artistic society is unlearning something and undoing something if we keep, uh, making moves Based on the assumptions of the exchange mode, a brc We are actually farther away from this and this is of course a very Taoist very Zen buddhism, uh, kind of view but but I think it's easy to to ignore it as a A, um, cannot even if you're a practitioner of Zen or Taoism because it's so ingrained in our language even That's there is a exchange mode going on without this unlimited free exchange thing. So yeah, that that was just to echo yourself Fascinating there's a there's an essay I want to write Which is I can't figure out a snappy title for it But basically we're living in the in the era of co and on Mm-hmm. We have co housing co living uh unconferencing, you know, uh Basically lots of things are collaborative and lots of things are about undoing the thing we had before trying to Uh, you know, I'm a big fan of open space, which is on you know If it comes before unconferencing is really about trusting the people you've invited For the people who've shown up, uh to actually Uh be smart and to contribute what they want to define their way to the conversations where they matter So I think that's partly what you're designing here is you're you're designing a bit of a Technological open space that lets people move toward where they have passion and interest in some skill Yeah, yeah, and and I, uh Found that nobody actually said in interest we design interesting So I so in in a separate conversation we can talk further if you want I'm trying to put together Something more or less like a methodology I call design from trust And I'll I'll send you a link to a talk I did for the AI GA a couple years ago Where I explain as much as I knew then about it and I've you know, I've moved the thinking forward a bit But uh, it might have some interesting things for you. So I'll I'll make sure you see that talk Sure. Is that the the gain talk? Oh, yes, it is the game talk Yeah, yeah, actually it's part of the link Yeah, cool. So yeah, and I liked your your point of the I think it was we're designing from this trust And there's no methodology we can apply to correct this if we don't change the the beginning point I think that's the exact insight Yeah, exact and we've been going for a really long time and I really appreciate your time, but uh I'm so is there anything you'd like to to sort of throw into the conversation by way of Uh wrapping us up a bit and uh Sending us back out Well anything from shuyang. I mean I can do this for hours, but yeah, I know same here same here shuyang Yeah, I learned a lot actually just by listening you two talking and yeah I have some some things on my reading list to to really look through and But I I probably need to go for another Meeting with a lot of people and really like show them my projects around here But I would like to send your link also to Jerry um about The project we're doing right now and of course because everything is public already you can already check it But I will send you some things too. Please. I would love that. Thank you very much And really thank you for your time and for for sharing what you've been doing. I I appreciate it a lot Yeah, thanks a lot. All right. So we'll do anything else. Yeah, we'll just follow our line That sounds great. All right. Cheers then Thank you very much. Cheers Oh, and uh, we have a collective decision to make our uh, are you okay of, uh, publishing this video? I'm totally fine. Okay. Sounds great. Okay. Cheers. Bye. I'd love it. Thanks, Audrey