The Web has a bright future in Taiwan. First, everybody’s on the Web, and everybody recognized the ideas of the early Web — the hyperlinks and distributed publishing — things like that which makes the Web unique. There’s a lot of very interesting experiments, such as twreporter.org, an entirely crowd-funded media for investigative journalism, in the form of not-for-profit Web publication.

It’s for quality reporting and also for dialogue with the civil societies. The writers and photographers have all volunteered on this open-source website, freeing their content under Creative Commons.

The combination of crowdfunding and crowdsourcing which was boasting enormous improvement in adoption of civil-society projects for the past two years, and will certainly continue to change how people assemble themselves, how people gather around, how people delegate, how people decide their lives together and improving others’ trust as well.

At this moment, just this morning, I was talking with my colleagues about setting up a virtual reality deliberative democracy meeting, so that we can look at the issues and problems as a social object, but without the constraints of everybody necessarily fitting the same room.

Imagine that people can just putting on glasses, and then, see the options, numbers, charts, and playback all the relevant information — which is much easier, now we have people’s full attention in a virtual reality space — it is not distracted like in this coffee shop.

It would also enable more empathy and more communication between people and the islands, and with the earth — a place where we all live in and we all share. This will further erode the physical distances between cities, between different places of living. Any ways of organization or ways of deliberation that we experiment in this lab, are then instantly reusable everywhere in the world, in Europe, or anywhere on earth’s surface. I think that would be our contribution.

Keyboard shortcuts

j previous speech k next speech