 testing. We have been in this field for quite some time too. We are doing this for 10 years also developing tools to do participatory projects. And just from studying the online issues and publications, I think I experienced many of the issues you already solved or also in the process of solving. One issue that if I may ask questions. One issue that is interesting is, is there now a mode how you integrate these participatory processes into decision making in the political system? Is this the standardized way or is it a case-by-case approach? Well, there is of course the national referendum which holds exactly the same level as a law and it binds the parliament for at least two years and we hold such a referendum every two years. So each successive referendum may overturn the decisions made by the previous referendum because it happens every couple years. So that's the highest binding power. There's various other systems of direct participation that are less binding. But for a referendum, anything that's not unconstitutional that doesn't systemically take away, for example, indigenous rights. There are certain things that are forbidden for referendum topics but otherwise it's as good as a law. Okay. So is that something every ministry does or is the parliament doing it or is that formalized for each and every law you are coming up with? Yes, so there is the referendum act and the referendum act is ratified by the parliament and is enforced by the central election committee. The same council that runs the same commission that runs the national elections and so it's overseen by independent body including the debate and deliberations before each referendum and it takes alternating years. So one year we choose president and one year we do a national referendum and the other year next we do a mayoral election and then the next year a national referendum. So the representative and the direct or deliberative take on alternating years. That's the Taiwanese system. Okay, cool. And I had a look at the tools you are using in your participatory processes. Is there from your point of view anything that is particularly important that is the key tool to start the process or to run the process like this? Well, I think the single most important tool is to face-to-face communication. It's just people meeting and listening to what each other have to say. Everything else builds upon this deliberative space and so our tools are roughly speaking in two parts. One is about amplifying the audience of a face-to-face meeting that includes live streaming including co-presencing including immersive video including virtual reality that's synchronous mode and the other tool is about making two successive face-to-face meetings make sense to connect them so that one meeting can work to crowdsourced ideation for the next face-to-face meeting to take as agenda. And so this discover and define process may be done by asynchronous tools and that includes of course polis and the petition system, the presidential hackathon. There's a lot of systems that enable this kind of crowdsourced agenda setting for the next face-to-face meeting to take place. So it's a process that interweaves online and offline issues to arrive at whatever the outcome is supposed to be? Yeah, because the idea is to we bring technology to the people. So for people it's just they amplify town hall meeting and they're already you know having town hall meetings. It's just their town hall meetings are becoming much more binding, right? But we're not saying that you should take away those town hall meetings and move them online. We're not saying that. And is there a discussion about how representative these processes are in the sense that only the educated or whoever participates in other excluded is that being discussed? Yes, so in Taiwan we have more than 20 national languages and the National Language Act is designed so that people for example just simple example who have a heart of hearing, who have deafness. There are interpreters that translates the important announcements and informative material in real time. For example during our epidemic center command live stream press conferences there's always a live interpreter that translates these into the Taiwanese sign language which was one of the national languages. And so the idea of inclusion is not only about a diversity of representatives but rather making sure that everybody can re-present their ideas in whatever modality that they prefer and we rely on a combination of machine translation and human translators to make sure that it makes sense to everybody involved. Okay, here we have a discussion particularly relating to online deliberations that only about one third of the population is able to participate here. Do you compensate this by offline formats like town hall meetings? Is there a broad participation of people in Taiwan? As I said what we are doing online is just the amplification of a face-to-face meeting including live streaming and archival. Because of that the protagonist, the main character is always the face-to-face meeting. Now of course because of coronavirus the face-to-face may be through video conferencing but still it's synchronous and that's what counts and we're not saying that we're taking anything away from those town hall meetings. Okay, I see. So this I mean this is something you invented or is this a Taiwanese tradition to do it that way? I think in Taiwan even before we have election for president there is already a long tradition of community building and the social sector and the civic sector always meet over food actually and music and come on community deliberation and there's a very long tradition of taking things to the community hunts instead of relying on the government to do it. So I would say that the civic sector or the social sector there's many different ways to say this has a higher legitimacy than the public or the private sector from the 80s. So I didn't invent it because I was born in the 80s right that I was just taking what the community builders with them and then amplifying it through digital channels. Okay yeah because this offline dimension of your system is not always that well seen abroad yeah I heard first about the online issues well this was working in Taiwan. But surely you have seen the live streams right so these live streams are what captures this multi-stakeholder face-to-face meetings. Okay good and I've seen you have a lot of open source software is that us? We strongly prefer open source software. And you only use other software if there is no alternative? I mean you prefer Skype so I use Skype too. I'm insisting that we meet over Jitsi but if I had a choice I would say oh let's meet over Jitsi. But so I'm not religious about open source I'm just saying that if it's open source it's easier if we find that there's shortcoming in the software it's easier for me to just go in and fix the problem instead of waiting for a vendor to do so. But if we see an existing proprietary software we still work with it for example Polis used to be proprietary software and we use it so much that the Polis now a foundation mass and democracy see that it actually is more lucrative to earn money through consultancy and through maintenance and through things like that instead of through selling software licenses. So we gradually work with the vendor also to shift their revenue model so that they could agree to the FRO GPL license or the GPL license at the end. Okay yeah that's an issue I'm contemplating at the moment too. I haven't taken a final decision but it is an issue to maybe change business models in our case too. Is it possible that I show you? Of course you're free to start a screen share yeah. Okay I would share my screen. That's okay. Of course of course go ahead. Okay I just did it. Basically we started from a slightly different process yeah we started a process the first process was to to elaborate the strategy yeah so a text document and that is something the process here you see that we did for the city of Vienna and that is basically the background of what we are doing yeah it's a kind of innovation process where you start with collecting ideas they are evaluated online that's like the Polis system less advanced because the the graphics are not there yet. Taking these ideas we use experts we use the community we use the public sector to come up with a strategy that's very complex issues and that is then again uploaded and discussed online yeah there we use this this system this is this kuto this is what you see here is basically the document uploaded and we discuss the arguments yeah we think that they are contained in the paragraph so people vote and comment on this and then we try to find consensus and we have developed this this part here this is the consensus meter that is most of the time in line with the direct voting yeah so if this is highly negative then this is also on the change inside but it can be different yeah while this is negative this is still green or indecided and this more or less takes into account how people vote across the document so that you don't give in to those that are against almost everything in your document or they get a low weight in this and basically the idea is then to if you see that there are new comments you change the paragraph you update it you come up with a new proposal and you start the process again iterative until you have a solution and the recent things we are doing is we are just clustering users I mean that you do on polis as well from the documents cluster users see if there are clusters how they behave what is important for them so I don't have to explain this I think because you are actually exactly the same as the k-means clustering that polis uses yeah so so it's basically we use ideation then document discussion tool and if there is something indecided or where we need to see where people are we add survey questions or do a separate survey to see where the community is and what we favor right you can drill it down to another focus group or things like that yes and this obviously this is if you combine this with with offline events this ideal yeah that you take things online discussed online sessions then upload again whatever yeah so this is I think very much in line with what you are doing already very much so very much so yeah you can just invite the people who proposed ideas that most people resonate with or most controversial depending to your physical meetings and then we will have the same process yes yeah okay so I mean the main difference is here in Austria and I think in Europe I can say most of the time is that the communities that take part are far smaller than what I hear from Taiwan yeah impressive that you have so many people there okay that but that it's it's that it is that's it from my side okay yeah and thank you for making the introduction and I mean we're not opposed to proprietary software so if people inquire for similar tools or things like that I may point them to to your way but of course for us to run it on the national level for example the police consultations the live streaming platform and so on we always run it on the on premise because of data retainment issues I'm sure that you're part of the GDPR you know the requirements needed so but I'm happy to encourage other people to try out the tool just to get a different feeling of how does the different upload and download feels like yeah that would be really nice I would like to do a little blog post on our conversation and what is going on in Taiwan if that's fine for you of course and if you're okay we can just post this recording on youtube so you can just embed this conversation in and youtube will take care of doing the transcription yeah okay that's cool yeah that's fine for me and if you don't mind I keep you posted on on the the things in the next steps and the maybe breakthroughs we are having here yeah okay very much so okay okay and have a good local time okay thank you bye bye