Oh, the citizens have no obligation to listen to our explanation either. Either…
If you can convince a young reverse mentor to convene the meeting, or if you can convince one of the 12 ministries to convene the meeting, or whether you can invite 5,000 people to sign a petition, any of these three ways results in we having a meeting in your ...
We had a meeting in a clam farm. Like when there was an issue about sustainability of clam farming. We actually had a meeting there. Just bringing democracy to where people are instead of asking people to come to the voting booth. That is the main space difference.
Each of the 12 social-innovation-related ministries have around two social innovators as reverse mentors. They are young, but they lead the direction of that ministry. If you invite one of them to convene the meeting in your local town hall, in your…
The second is about space. Instead of saying only the voting booth is the space for democracy, we are more like anyone can set up a co-creation space if you want, and gain binding power of political decisions by inviting, for example, one of our reverse mentors in our use ...
Democracy is a living social technology that’s still evolving, and everybody can improve on that. The first is about everyday democracy. Continuous democracy as they call it. That’s the first thing.
If democracy is something that you can literally do every Wednesday or every Saturday, or meaningfully through participation and petitions like every day if you want, then it stays close to people’s minds.
I think it improves democracy on two dimensions. First is the time dimension. If people think democracy is only something that you do every two year or four year, and only three bit or four bits of information, then it’s a lot distance from every day people’s mind.
Yeah.
It’s always the case that petitions are mobilizing more people than vTaiwan.
As soon as JOIN launch, there was a petition about immunology therapy for cancer treatment, and the petitioner was a cancer patient already quite advanced. That’s like his wish. His will. To bequeath a better treatment for other people, and that petition alone maybe mobilized more people than all of ...
That has always been the case because when I was a part of the vTaiwan community in 2015 before I joined the cabinet, the JOIN platform started at that. Yes. vTaiwan maybe starts late ‘14, so maybe five months before JOIN launch.
It’s not really low. The meet-ups stay more or less the same amount of people since 2014. The community is larger, but if you are saying that the kind of cases that vTaiwan processes is not as politically visible as the petitions, that is the case.
I wouldn’t say there’s no national will. There’s certainly public will. It’s just each mayor has different political priorities, and in our relationship, the cabinet and the mayors are not one of a commanding relationship. We can build best practices, and share them with the municipality, but they are equal ...
Tainan and Taipei have institutions designed for that.
The Taipei City is one of the prototypes that we learned from, but aside from Taipei and Tainan, both mayors in 2014 promised open government as their core platform. We don’t currently have institutionalized designs in other municipalities. There are some around say youth engagement and so on, but it’s ...
The Tainan municipality. We have indicated that if other municipalities would like to use this system, we would help, but we have not actually received like calls for help from other non-Tainan municipalities. On the other end, we also learned a lot in our design from the 2015 design of ...
Yeah. It’s a directive. It’s not a law, but to be very honest, the directive is currently only used in the Tainan municipality.
The president has indicated that she would like to have a council or ministry, or responsible agency for digital affairs. That’s her kind of platform for the reelection.
I don’t have a ministry. In my office, there’s five full-time people from the Institute of Information Industry working on the various sites of civic technologies. Five, four time.
No. Not at all. It’s open source, so it doesn’t cost anything to start using it. To improve, of course, you need dedicated technology personnel.
Just internationalization or localization is one improvement we made on Polis. The other one is to make sure that it can run in our service security audited data sensor instead of a public cloud.
A lot. Like for the additional dialogue for example, we deployed for the first time bilingual because it’s between the Taiwan and US communities. Everyone needs to be able to comment in Mandarin, or in English, and have the other side, CA accurate translation of their statements in order for ...
To make every ministry aware of these tools. Their advantage and limitations, and use them whenever they feel they could, and also improve upon these tools, too.
Not necessarily. Sometimes, it’s like the Uber apps. The initial statements came actually from three different ministries which all have very different views.
Usually, the shape is one from the government, and two from opposing sides of advocates.
Yeah. Because if it’s entirely bilateral, then it could be framed as a zero sum game. Like a tag of war, but if there’s at least three stakeholder groups, then some sort of common value is usually easier to form.
Yeah. Usually, we have what we call seed comments in the sense that we first try to collect like from at least three different stakeholder group, three statements each, but it’s a heuristic. It’s not a hard requirement. It’s useful because then it’s not seen as something polarizing from the ...
This is about Taiwan’s role, and second one was about trade relationships, and the third, security cooperation, and the current one is around talent circulation.
There’s a lot of people participating. Again, there’s a divisive statement, but there’s also rough consensus, and just like vTaiwan, we get the stakeholders to sit down, and consider only the rough consensus, the top 10 for each topic.
No. We also use it for diplomacy. We have four digital dialogues. One is ongoing around talent circulation was the AIT which is the de facto US Embassy. The first one talks about how to promote Taiwan’s role in the global community.
Nowadays, you can still use Uber to call cars in Taiwan anywhere, but all the cars that arrive, you will see a red plate. These are multi-purpose taxis which are designed by the people’s rough consensus, and the existing taxi fleets are also rolling out apps that are more or ...
Media tends to capture these anecdotal statements, and make it seem like a polarizing dialogue. Actually regardless of whether they’re Uber drivers, or Uber passengers or taxi drivers, or other passengers, everybody agreed that insurance is important. That registration is important. That some sort of mutual feedback mechanism is important.
There are quite a few divisive issues. For example, there is one that says Uber’s service is so good that even when taxis are wishing past me, I will still use my phone to call a Uber. That’s very divisive.
Sure. For example, in 2015 when we first used the term rough consensus, and Polis as a civic technology, at that time, the topic was around UberX or people who don’t have a professional driver’s license driving to work, picking up a stranger that they meet from the app. Taking ...
It could be fintech. It could be self-driving vehicles. It could be 5G. It could be platform economy.
Because of that, we can take those low hanging fruits which is a rough consensus of the public will around a specific topic, and then make working regulations based on this while bracketing these from these sandbox experiments or from this temporary regulation, or just from something that people can ...
We use quite a few technologies. For example, Polis which can easily show that actually aside from the few divisive issues that the media tend to amplify, people actually agree on most of the things most of the time with most of their neighbors.
Yes. A lot of what we call here consensus is just common understanding. Like things people can live with. Not necessarily totally agree on. In Internet governance, it’s called rough consensus, but I usually just call it common understand.
Of course. This one is online, too. Yeah. I can send you the link.
No. We are just making jokes quickly after each rumor rolls out. Within two hours, average one hour now, whenever there’s a rumor, we just made a joke about it.
When people are laughing about a matter, then afterward, they will be much more calm, and able to co-create a common polity without being attracted to outrage because these two pathways in the mind is mutually exclusive. If you see something, and find it’s humorous, then you cannot feel outrage ...
This information is mostly predicated. The personal anger being amplified into a group outrage on social media, but if we can turn anger into fun, into humor, and humor that makes fun not of others, but of one self, then that kind of messages tends to spread virally.
Basically by mimetic engineering. That is to say make our clarifications, our messages fun, and fun is a great way to make sure that people who see the message enjoy the message.
Like instead of people speculating the worst, and protesting against that, people have now the evidences of what the actual situation is, and they may still protest around that, but that makes the protest much more constructive.
Oh, definitely because if people do go to the street and protest, at least they protest about the actual current situation instead of a speculation five years back or three years back. It makes conversation much more focused.
However, as for politicians, I think it enabled a more accurate view instead of a caricature on politicians. It enabled a more evidence based view. Whether it’s a positive or a negative feeling or effect, that’s up for every citizen to decide. We’re not painting a positive rosy picture.
Participation offices as well as any public servant that take place into this direction conversation with people, people see that it’s really the public service serve the public. Not just the minister. This really improves the trust between the career public servant, the civil service, and the civil society.
I don’t know about that. Improve the image of career public service because it used to be career public servants are anonymous. Their ministries get the credit, and they take the blame usually, and it’s not only a Taiwan problem.
Yes. I would say nowadays open government is considered as a norm in the sense that there’s no national level political candidate who will discard open government from their platform, or to somehow backtrack from the open government commitments. It’s now a nonpartisan norm.