Nice to see you at least [laughs] through a computer, but it’s like live. I wanted to go a bit further because you brought me a lot of interesting datas.

I would like now to have some quotes I could use and to know you better. I read you are working a lot on VR, virtual reality. Could you tell me a bit more about that?

Virtual reality thing for me is part of daily life and I use it mostly as a time-saver so that I can have interviews with journalists who don’t have a bandwidth connection, because using virtual reality it doesn’t put that much demand on bandwidth.

Most people with very bad hotel connections, we can still get a interview going. That’s one of the very practical uses.

Oh, yeah. I read that you went on a few interviews. You said something I found quite particular. You went to sleep with your VR headset, and you were watching the sunset from a moon of Pluto . That was kind of cool. [laughs] I can’t wait to get one of those. Do you use VR in your experiments about democracy ?

Yes. I have given a talk on other previous attempts at VR. The link is pasted in Skype for you. The entire idea is it prepares people to see the entire social object, like us. Things that are much larger scale than we previously experience, but as one tangible object that people can gather around and have meaningful discussion. That’s the main idea, and we do it in the sense of all that we can.

For example, see the entire climate model and experiment with these models without feeling they are abstract things. We can feel like they are things that are tangible, that are just before us, discuss around it, and so on.

It’s a bit like the picture the Blue Marble, that sparked environmental activism...

Or the Pale Blue Dot, yes. But it needs to be a little larger than that to have meaningful discussion on it. We can’t really see the difference on that scale.

So somewhere between the blue dot and the sky blocking the view of the stars. Sometimes, just between those scales is the most useful scale.

Is that something we could draw? Do you want to bring a global sense of citizenship, or to make humans feel that they are now connected ?

Sure. Humans are connected, and we do feel it. It’s just, we feel a lot of other things also. So virtual reality is a way to temporarily block the distractions. If we are interviewing VR, neither of us will be distracted by people walking around us, or a telephone chiming or something like that. We will have each other’s complete attention, as if we’re standing face to face.

Through civic technologies, we could maybe unite our people better, for large-scale things like climate change, would you say?

Yeah, sure, but not just climate change. Climate change is a good example because it affects everyone, but we can also see a lot of environmental issues that are not as long-term as climate change. It could be just air pollution, just very simple, tangible things.

Your official title is minister of cyberspace?

Digital Minister.

You told me that your proposal is more like to implement a method about discussion than to go towards some goals. Could you elaborate a bit about that?

I said that I’m interested much more in the process and the tools, not the policies. The idea is to still make policies, but make it in an open space that invites not just the ministry in charge of that policy, but other related ministry, and not just ministries, but also other non-governmental actions -- the stakeholders, people who filed petitions before, people who went to the street before, and also the private-sector stakeholders.

The whole idea is that instead of just doing full, deliberative democracy on the largest public-building cases, we are now in the age where this kind of discussion is low-cost enough, inexpensive enough that we can do it to pretty much everything.

How do we get people to spend their time participating in the civic life, instead of the current way, which involves voting only every few years?

When we...

...we make it just like a game, going to a movie, or going to a theater. The whole idea of a game is that you can spend however many seconds you have, if you have just 5 seconds, or 10 seconds, or a minute, or one day, or many days, at the different level of participation, offer you different rewards. You can just participate however long you want...

As of now, how much does Taiwanese people use these tools?

Pretty much everybody have heard of these, but they only participate when the policy in question are related to them somehow. For each case, of course for the Uber case, the stakeholders is not the same as the case where we talk about the national open data, which is not the same about online liquor sales of alcohol beverages.

Every single policy has a different stakeholder composition, so it doesn’t really make sense to ask how many people. Pretty much everyone in Taiwan have heard it’s possible, their participation or a discussion, but only about the parts that they’re interested in.

Is vTaiwan inspired by the concept of liquid democracy?

No, not at all. vTaiwan is inspired by the Cornell Regulation-Room project. It starts as a multi-stakeholder deliberation platform. We only invite people who make constructive contributions online to the face-to-face meetings. People who contribute online are stakeholders, one way or another.

It is, actually, a very different model, theoretically speaking than liquid democracy. We don’t do delegation and we don’t try to include everybody.

To sum up quickly about the process of vTaiwan, first was it Polis, and then you go...

It’s a shape of two diamonds. At first, you have the initial divergence, where we try to reach as many stakeholders as possible using this social media game called Polis, or other rolling survey open survey methods, and get everybody’s agenda, asking what do you think are important in this issue.

Then we have the first convergence, where we use online discussion forums and synthesize documents to try to work out what exactly are the issues at dispute here.

Then we have a second round of divergence, where we invite people who have made useful contributions online into these face-to-face meetings that are live-streamed online so that people can still bring different ideas, but we’re now past the feelings and facts stage. Now people are trying to come up with ideas that address people’s feelings.

We always start with the facts, and then we initially diverge with people’s feelings, and try to converge into some shared mutual feelings. Then we diverge again from the feelings into useful ideas, and then we converge into the synthesis of feasible ideas that addressed people’s feelings. From there, we carry the general consensus into decision making.

So far, what would be the greatest success of this method?

The greatest success is that we passed a new company law in the parliament with support from all parties while they were filibustering each other. Because this was the due process, nobody can actually block this idea of what we call closely held corporations. It’s a more US-like or UK-like small corporation Act that is not the same as previous companies, which are designed for large shareholder companies.

That’s one of the first cases that vTaiwan tackled. We also did a lot of telecommunication work, medicine, cyber bullying, remote education, taxation for oversea trade, national open data plan, Uber, of course, and things like that.

There’s a lot of cases. I wouldn’t say one is more successful than the other because their stakeholder communities don’t overlap. I’m sure that each community thinks their case is the most important one.

It’s kind of a consensus at the end.

Yes. Our recent consensus was around whether we should give what you call social enterprises -- coop-like corporations -- its legal status. We also got some consensus there.

OK, looks pretty clear. You don’t use tools like Loomio?

We used to use Loomio. That was back in 2014. Then we discovered Discourse, which works a little bit better for our purpose than Loomio.

Is that Polis or no?

It’s Polis on the first diamond, but for the second diamond, we will use Discourse, which is another system.

Oh, yeah, Discourse. Next, what else do we have for you?

It’s fine. Take your time.

I’m reading off my notes. Inside the government, you have applied this way of working. So far, what’s the reception of these methods among other ministers?

They think it’s pretty nice. A lot of the work that we’re doing is simplifying the paperwork. That’s the main goal, while keeping as much as we can the same ease of access. Paper is very easy to work on. I assume you’re working on pen and paper right now. It’s very flexible.

I use stylus all the time myself. This only becomes possible in the past year or so, to replicate the experience of writing. That’s still not paper. If you use this to write on iPad, the writing part feels very natural, but you can’t really fold or make small notes on that piece of glass.

Usability-wise, paper still has better usability. We’re working on tools, process, and things like that, to keep the usability of paper, but eventually lead to a way where everything is digital first. It will take a few years to get there.

It also applies to, for example, us talking like this. It’s not the most natural way. We would still prefer to meet face-to-face. In a couple of years, technology will progress to a point where it’s indistinguishable whether we are meeting in VR or whether we’re meeting face-to-face.

It’s getting there, is what I’m saying.

Did you get inspired by other countries first to go towards digital democracy?

Yeah. You mean do we have connections or did I visit other countries?

Yeah.

Yeah, of course.

Other examples that got you into thinking, "OK, it’s possible to do that," like maybe Iceland or Podemos.

Yeah, sure. These are the two examples everybody comes up with. We also learned a lot from Helsinki, other parts. Also from the GDS. I think the Etalab is pretty well run. Singapore also has a GDS.

Of course everybody says 18F and USDS. We also learn from there a lot. I would say it’s not particular to a country. It’s always a bunch of people who just decide to do digital transformation one way or another. It’s not very specific to the political system they are in.

It is dependent on the people’s will to access things in a way that is non-hierarchical information, non-hierarchical collaboration.

Would it be right to say : yourself, you’re part of a new generation, a bit like the folks of the Pirate Party in Germany and so on. Are we facing the rise of Internet activists now in the political sphere?

Maybe. I wouldn’t say that I’m like the Pirate Party. First of all, I belong to no parties. I don’t really see the point of party politics to be honest. There is a lot of Internet-enabled activists.

It’s only natural that when the civil society and the private sector already embraced the digital transformation and become much more agile, much more adaptive. It’s only the public sector that is lagging behind for quite some years now, for at least 10 years now.

I would say it’s just catching up, whether it’s activists driving, or whether it’s private sector people driving modern administration folks, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that a new kind of tool -- with the tool, a new kind of organization structure -- is entering the public sectors throughout the world.

You described yourself as a conservative anarchist, so if I get it right...

Yes.

It’s because you want to keep and protect the original anarchy of...

Civilization.

...the Internet. Myself, I’ve been using the Internet since the year 2000. I see what you mean, eventually something is missing. You don’t really meet people you don’t know on Internet anymore.

With your work, that’s something -- I don’t know how to say it -- nostalgia of the first bulletin boards and so on, something where we can find ideas for the future.

At the core, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the ICANN, and all the organizations that keeps the Internet running is still using the old, anarchistic model to run. That has not changed. It’s just around this core, we have built a lot of intensely social -- as you said -- spheres around the core of the Internet.

I would just say that there are attempts like Wikipedia that tries to take some of the same spirits at the core, and try to let people see it and participate, even, on the surface. I would say that the public sector is doing more or less the same.

It’s not just for nostalgia’s sake. It takes time to trust strangers. It takes time to really work with random people and feel that you’re at ease with people who you barely know and so on.

I’m pretty optimistic. I think the intensely social generation, after a few years, will then make useful contributions in a much more deeper scale, and we can also accelerate the process if we want to.

What do you think about using new technologies that can enable the contribution of people like, I read about it, what’s its name... it’s a program that can subvert a traditional organization by ... it’s with Primavera De Filippi.

I’m sorry, I forget the name. it’s based on the blockchain, and it’s for organizations to distribute work for doing tasks. Backfeed. Do you know about Backfeed?

Not offhand, no.

Backfeed.cc. Spreading consensus -- a social operating system for decentralized organizations.

I had no idea, but I’m reading it now. I see the idea.

I was wondering, was that the kind of thing you would explore, ways of decentralizing everything.

Sure. There is a lot of work in this area. Us, it is that we share one. There’s many. There’s one from the New Zealand occupy people, from Enspiral. There’s of course the original Diaspora*. There’s also the sovereign.software application from Democracy.Earth folks.

This space has seen explosive growth ever since Ethereum appears. I’m acutely aware of these efforts. I think it’s great. It’s great that people are exploring the new protocol based on proof-of-work and things like that.

I also think decentralization has some very obvious use cases, like when you are part of a occupy, and your Internet connection just went down, but you still really want to communicate with seven million people around you.

Of course at that time, you will want a mesh network, which is why things like FireChat got very popular, both during the Sunflower occupy and the Hong Kong occupy afterwards.

But in normal, civilian life, a really decentralized architecture has to establish its worth somehow, like by offering better anonymity, which is very different for decentralization, or by offering trustless trust, which only makes sense if you’re doing things like shipping crates across the Atlantic. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter. Or that you’re really into cryptography for its own sake, for research.

Every network has to establish its core value to the early adopters. The more values it can satisfy with the same protocol, the more chance it has to succeed in the end, which is why we see Ethereum rising in its trade value versus Bitcoin in the past week or so.

It’s a great space, is what I’m saying.

You think cryptocurrencies could help this trend of decentralizing?

Blockchain, in general, is one of the many useful technologies. You can take the consensus protocol out and just build things around that without having a blockchain. The whole thing doesn’t have to be tied to a cryptocurrency. These are all independent technical aspects.

I think cryptocurrency motivates people to look into these technologies. It’s very good PR for the underlying technology.

You mentioned the uniform resource identifier. What is that about ?

It’s just ://.

It enables us to talk about things that are thousands of miles from us, like Medium.com, as if we shared the same object between us. It’s actually magical if you think about it.

Maybe we can go a bit on the topics of philosophy and code. From what I read about you, it’s something that’s really mixed together, joining philosophical concepts, putting them through...

What were your main influences, maybe as thinkers you read?

The thinkers that I read about?

Yeah. What was influential in your way of thinking about the world, this way that you can transpose that surreal and cut through...?

As a young child, maybe when I was 13 or something, I read early Wittgenstein, which is pretty fundamental to all the computer science people. A few years later, I started digging into late Wittgenstein.

To understand late Wittgenstein -- people followed him like royalty and so on -- I actually have to go back and read all the continental philosophers who influenced Wittgenstein writing, and also his contemporaries.

A lot of them made lasting impressions. Still, I’m pretty Wittgenstein in my core thinking structure as a continuity between the early and the late. I think that’s the number one influence if we restrict it to the traditional philosopher sense.

That’s those books you read on Project Gutenberg, right?

Yeah, of course. That’s, I think, very interesting because it only contains public domain books, which means books printed before the World War I, which means when Europe was optimistic. I was raised on those optimistic work because they are really despairing work after World War I was not in the public domain, so I could not really read them.

[laughs] That’s great reads for a kid when you’re starting. Talking about your parents, they were OK with your choice of dropping school at 13?

Yeah, after I convinced them that I would just go to their university instead of attending high school. I think they were OK with that. The professors are still there. The professors who teach me are the professors who taught them, anyway.

That’s funny, because there’s always so many TED talks about people who are now dropping school and saying, "I can’t dedicate myself." You were pretty in advance.

Yeah, but I dropped school to go into graduate school, so it really doesn’t mean anything. It just means I don’t care about the diploma, that’s all.

Let’s see on the biography. You made your first startup at the age of 15?

That’s right.

It was a search engine in Chinese?

Yeah. It was a search engine, both on the desktop and on Internet by the same company. We also built a eBay-like online auction website, and also a social media community, like an instant messenger after I left the company. It’s pretty diversified.

This first startup, you left it at 17?

Mm-hmm.

Then you became a consultant for Silicon Valley companies.

That’s right.

You worked at Apple.

With Apple.

With Apple. Oh yes, sorry. I did the research.

Important difference.

Yes. It’s funny, because I knew you would not like this. Which other businesses?

I toured around the Silicon Valley companies when I was introducing the technology corporal sticks. That was around 2005, 2006. Microsoft, Intel, Amazon, the usual suspects were all very interested in technologies that I was advancing around that time.

Long-term relationship with companies is mostly just Socialtext, Apple, the Oxford University Press, and a few others, but these are the major ones.

There is just a question. In 2001, when there was the dot com bubble, were you affected by this? Because before that, the world was hoping a lot for the promises of digital technologies, and then there was a phase of doubt.

I was helped a lot, because suddenly, we have a lot more people contributing to open-source and to free software. I was into free software before that, but it’s hard to recruit a community, because everybody want to earn a lot of quick money.

For community building, it’s great because then we have people who are talented who temporarily doesn’t have a job, and who can contribute to the community. From that view of a free software activist, that dot com crush is a boon, the free software boon.

In 2005, you decided to change your name and gender.

Mm-hmm.

Now do you define yourself as a woman, or both.

Whatever. "Whatever" is officially my gender.

That’s very cool. As you became the first minister with both gender, what’s your feeling for the LGBTQ community, do the press...

It’s entirely normal. People are judging me in Taiwan by the contribution that I make, and regardless of whether I appear feminine or masculine any particular day. That’s really what mainstreaming means, it means it stops being a thing.

In that way, I think I’m also helping the community just by saying it’s mainstream.

I had another question totally unrelated. What would be your analyze of the difference between the Sunflower Movement and the Hong Kong Movement...

Umbrella.

Umbrellas, yeah.

The only similarity is that it runs on a similar technological software stack. Everything else is different.

I don’t even know how to begin. It’s hard to say how to begin because, otherwise, there’s almost no comparison point, really. In Sunflower, it’s just one building that’s occupied. Then people surrounded the building.

In Hong Kong, there’s anytime anywhere from five to nine different occupied sites, none of which are easy to defend, like the parliamentary building. Also, the Sunflower happened because the MPs, the legislators, was on strike.

They refused to deliberate a trade agreement, so the occupiers said, "OK, now we’re doing your job for you." There was a very concrete agenda. With the Umbrella Movement, it’s much harder to condemn this. We can say it’s about the February election, but you can also say it’s about self-determination, or you can also say it’s about social equality. You can cut it any which way.

Around the Sunflower, there’s just one very focused agenda. Pretty much nothing is the same. I don’t even know how to begin.

It’s a candid question. Was it new for Taiwan to have sit-ins like this occupation of buildings or not? Has there been other sit-ins or such kind of occupations there before?

Yeah, of course. The defining moment in Taiwan’s democratization is what we call the Wild Lily Movement. I’ll just give you the Wikipedia link, which makes it easy. It’s just for a week, no, 22 days. It’s defining because it was the year after the Berlin wall, and Tiananmen, of course. It was very symbolic demands, demands that are very much informed by the previous year’s sit-ins and occupies.

The people who participated in the Wild Lily would end up being the defining generation of politic movements, also, professors and teachers of the Sunflower occupiers. There’s a direct link between the two occupies. There’s of course quite a few, between those two major ones.

This one was defining because, had the Wild Lily ended the same way as Tiananmen the year before that, then Taiwan wouldn’t even have a democratic constitution, let alone a direct election of presidents.

I think that’s the major one.

How would you envision the future protests, i mean anywhere on earth in the next years? Do you think that something started with all the occupy movements, and Arab Spring? Is there some new way of doing things that’s emerging or not?

Of course, we see sit-ins all the time. Thanks to the fourth-generation mobile network, people can now actually run a self-organizing community, as we see in #NuitDebout, for example. It’s like a mobile community of sorts, of random ad hoc people. It becomes a way of living, really.

Before, you don’t have the same information and communication technology to have a million people show up. There’s no way for them to organize in a meaningful way. Now, we have more and more ways to organize, even on the street. I think it will co-evolve into ways of living, and spheres of living like mobile cities and mobile spaces.

We see that a lot actually around the world, even in non-protesting forms like digital nomads, digital communes, and communication experiments, retreats, and whatever.

That’s one more thing. The ethos of the Internet is getting into the real life now. People who got used to collaborative tools ... for the next revolution they will be used to organize like that.

Yeah, of course. With the real-time mobile Internet, the barrier of entering the Internet has massively reduced. Next occupy with wearable technology, contact lenses, or whatever, you don’t really have to do anything to get online anymore.

The cyberspace and the real space, this distinction wouldn’t even make sense.

It makes me think a lot about Neal Stephenson book. What’s the English name?

"Snow Crash”? "Diamond Age"?

Snow Crash, yes. Both of them. Do people sometime compare you to some kind of cyberpunk heroine?

Yeah. I got compared to Aaron Swartz a lot when I was first made Digital Minister. There are similarities. I think that the main difference is that I never do things by myself. [laughs]

There is a community, and I make sure that I’m not the critical link in any movement. I think that’s the primary difference.

Of course, I adore Aaron’s work and tremendous respect of what he has accomplished. I think my main work is not doing work, but building a space around which people do work.

The story of Aaron Swartz is particularly tragic.

Yeah.

I think we’re nearly done. Just to clarify, you said your parents were journalists.

Mm-hmm.

They were working on the topics of exile activists. That’s it, no?

You grew up in a family with people always talking about politics.

Mm-hmm.

That was shortly after the Tiananmen events.

Right. That’s my father’s PhD thesis. He had to interview his subjects. That’s the main idea. But even before the student movement in Beijing, because they were journalists before Taiwan’s press freedom. They were majors in politics and law respectively.

We do get a lot of discussions.

Your father was sitting the Tiananmen incident as a Taiwanese student at the time?

I think they participated in a lot of student movements also during their student days. I don’t remember that, because I didn’t exist.

They do have a lot of friends in that cycle.

Another question. Do you still work in g0v or not?

Sure. We run a hackathon every week. The next one, it’s always Wednesday, so it’s tomorrow.

Oh yes, about that, g0v. Another missing point in my notes, my 14-page .odt. I was wondering very concisely, g0v is about mainly organizing hackathons, like helping open-source projects about civic tech, right?

That’s right. The hackathon is the face-to-face gathering, but of course, g0v also has a lot of alignment in spaces. Yeah, as you just said, a movement with many different projects at the same time -- hundreds of projects.

It reminds me a bit of something called Techfugees. That’s about hackathon for technologies helping the refugees.

Yeah, I’m aware of what you’re talking about. We actually get people who participate in a hackathon for refugees visit Taiwan -- I think they were from Germany -- to share their experience.

G0v is pretty different in that coders, people who write programs are now a strict minority in our hackathons, maybe 25 percent or even less. We now have a lot of designers, a lot of legal people, a lot of activists, journalists. We have a lot of people, even in anthropology.

It’s a very diverse background. People generally embrace the open-source, open closure ideas, but working on things that maximize social impact. It was already like that during the Sunflower Movement, which is why we have these very diverse talents to work with, that’s the ad hoc media team for the movement.

Could you tell me one or two projects you found very interesting that you worked from g0v?

Sure. There is many classic ones which you can read all about in g0v.asia, which is our gallery. This is g0v.asia. If I must say one or two highlights, I would say the most recent one, which puts a civil society NGO against one of the largest petrochemical plants, is a very good story.

I wouldn’t do it justice by talking about it. I’m sending you the g0v News link. You can see all the recent highlights by following g0v News. We try to cover all the new projects on this news. It’s all Creative Commons licensed, anyway, so you can read all of it.

I’m going to check this out. I think we’re nearly done. You talked about this chat app that was used in Hong Kong, which is called FireChat, no?

Yeah, FireChat.

I read this one was made by a French guy, but it was not at all encrypted.

Yeah, it’s not. It’s a public dissemination tool. It’s just like handing out pamphlets. You can of course build encryption on top of it, but most people didn’t bother.

That would be a nice tool to have, encrypted mesh network.

Of course. But it must also be easy to set up. If Signal or Telegram built a decentralized server, it would be the best combination of course. But we’re still some maybe a couple of years till we have a robust technology like that.

One sneaky question. Do you think new information technologies about civic tech, could they be social engineered in a bad way like we’re seeing now with the rise of fake news?

Of course. Otherwise it’s not a freedom of speech anymore.

We’re not censoring them, but there are tools that automatically prompt a alternative view to you as you’re reading the news so you can consider both sides.

That’s actually one of the projects -- the LINE bot project -- also in the g0v site. You can look at it at your leisure. It’s the messaging app that has a robot where if you let a robot join your dialogue, and then paste a rumor, it will respond automatically saying the link you’ve pasted or the photo you’ve pasted is contested, and the actual clarification is here.

It doesn’t censor your messages. Your message is still there. But it invites you to consider a independently reviewed alternate point of view.

I think that’s all I needed. Is there anything else you would like to express?

No, I think it’s great.

Do you need my written transcripts?

I’ll try to get you a written transcript, although to be honest, with the sound at your end, I’m not sure if I got all your words correctly, but all my words will probably be accurately transcribed.

I should get it done in a couple of days or so and I’ll send it to you.

Is that a program will do it?

Yeah. There is a program. It’s called Trint. It’s very useful. But with the current sound quality, I will probably have to ask human beings [laughs] work on it. We’re still maybe three years before machines consistently hear better than humans in noisy environments.

Would you have maybe, some pictures we could use? I’m going to grab one. There’s one here. I’m going to show you what the magazine is like.

So, that’s the magazine. There’s a little VR. [laughs] It’s a bit hard to explain, but it’s a bit like Fast Coexist, I would say. It’s sometime extreme tech, and a lot of time about resilience, ecology, more down to earth, and a bit of imagination and crazy stuff. [laughs]

If you want, I would be glad to send you one copy when we get it printed.

That’s great. That’s it, then?

Also, if you have a few pictures, because Iconograph has been looking, but said it was...

You mean you need pictures free for you to use?

Yes.

Of course, I have a lot of pictures in the commons, like Creative Common Zero, where you don’t have to ask for a license.

Excellent.

That would work best. You don’t have to credit anybody. [laughs]

I’ve sent you two. You can check it in your mailbox, and then if it doesn’t work for you, we can try to get you something more.

That’s wonderful. I guess this is all. It was a pleasure to meet you. [laughs]

Sure.

I will come back to you. I think I’ve got everything. You’ve given me like 15 pages of reading. That’s really good, so thank you again and have a nice day.

You too, have a good localtime. Bye.

Bye-bye.