Hello.
Is this the right Audrey Tang?
It is the correct Audrey Tang. That’s my Skype ID, by the way.
There are thousands of Audrey Tangs, so you know. One is in mandarin characters that I don’t read. I had no idea it was you. Good morning.
There’s three Joes, as well. Good morning.
You’re very popular, apparently. Good morning.
Hi. This is my 9:30 PM the local time. [laughs]
Where are you, by the way? Where are you?
I’m in Taipei, so we’re 12 hours apart.
Good evening.
No, it’s fine. That’s actually the same situation as the MozFest, because I’ll be tele-participating, also, through Skype.
You’re not presenting in-person?
No, I’m not.
How come?
How come? First of all, as a cabinet minister it requires months of preparation and convincing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The Mozilla people thought tele-presenting is OK, because I did the same thing in Barcelona a while ago and it seems to work pretty well. In Florence, but soon in Barcelona, too.
Hold on one second. I want to grab the answers to the questions. Why don’t you walk me through them, actually? Tell me...
I assume that you mean the presentation training inventory thing. My first sentence that’s my presentation, I actually have a script that I used in New York. This is going to be abridged version of it.
The first sentence during that talk is "Greetings from the future. I’m literally in the future. Eight hours, to be exact," which is the case for London. Otherwise it’s 12.
The format is a prerecorded 10-minutes video. It’s not in-person, actually. I need to record a 10-minute video, they play it, and follow by 10 minutes Q&A through a crowdsourced question format.
Why do you want to start your presentation about time, the future?
Because the title of my talk is The Future of Democracy. The story that I’m going to tell is about some very experimental way that in Taiwan we’re doing democratic deliberations. That’s the reason.
Question two, "What props or visuals do you use to convey your message?"
For the presentation, I plan on only appearing in the first few seconds, then followed by the presentation itself, which is mostly in emoji. Have you seen the presentation?
I’ll very quickly show it to you. It’s like this. Can you see my share screen now?
OK, great. The idea is that I will just speak for a few sentences, and saying for people who want to ask me questions, they can do so on this Slido forum. They can use their phones to go to slido.com, and enter today’s date, which is 10/29, and then after 10 minutes of talk, I will start answering questions.
The format usually looks like this, where we have a lot of people asking questions and liking each other’s questions. I will, in the second half of the talk, highlight one of the questions, very quickly answer it, and then archive it away and highlight another. That’s the basic format.
Back to the presentation. The beginning, I’ll talk about three stories. The first story is about how we occupied the Parliament for 22 days, and how civic technology helped facilitating half a million protesters to peaceful consensus.
The second story is going to be about the same technology to solve the Uber regulation issue in 2015 through co-creating regulations. It’s going to go into some details of the focused conversation method, about how we get people’s facts, and then people’s feelings about those facts, their ideas about those feelings. The best idea is the best one that reflects people’s feelings and sign them into law.
We use artificial intelligence, machine learning, and so on, to get thousands of people’s opinions on Uber, and translated that into a set of regulations that everybody can live with. That’s how we solved the Uber problem and how I became the digital minister.
The third story is about how I practice radical transparency as an anarchist digital minister since 2016, by transparently answering all journalists’ questions -- everything’s on the record, even VR 360 record -- and how we use free software exclusively in our team to boost our creativity and have one person from every ministry to participate in this cross-ministerial way, and to have e-petitions.
This is this letter of participation, starting from voting, clicktivism, to sharing of open data, of real-time feedback forms and discussions, all the way to deliberations. That’s the basic three stories that I’m going to tell.
Back to the inventory. "How do you prepare for presentations? Do you script, draft, notes-notes." I’m not sure what’s a notes-notes, but yeah. Then, "What’s the winging it?"
For pre-recorded videos such as this one, I rehearse several times, convert recording to transcripts, edit the transcripts into speaker’s notes, rehearse again, and rinse and repeat, so quite a few times, like five times, at least.
"What consistent feedback have you received on my presentations?" I actually learned a lot from the materials you sent me, especially about how I can slow down to emphasize some points. I do have a habit of talking actually faster than my current speed during talks. I think I would need to slow down a little bit and condense the material.
But consistent feedback have so far been just inspiring, enlightening, and/or mind-blowing.
What more, what could you ask for, right? Today, maybe you want to work on a little vocal modulation.
Yeah, that would be awesome.
The difficulty conveying the passion. I find public presentation very natural, as well as the idea that bring forward the feelings. I always convey the feelings first, and then the ideas following the feelings, especially on very well-rehearsed transcripts like this.
I do sometimes mentally leave the room when facing a group of people, not when public speaking, but oftentimes during parties. I hope that’s OK. [laughs]
"What statistics do you employ?" I check the transcript. There’s no statistics used in my script.
That’s even better.
"What are the questions you’re dreading asked?" This is actually a very good question, and I thought about it a lot, but I can’t really think of anything. Maybe you can also help me there.
With radical transparency, there’s very little you dread of being asked. Maybe your age? I don’t know.
I’m 36.
Whatever. We don’t even care about that. I don’t think you have a whole lot of things to worry about there, but go on.
The last question, "What skills am I interested in acquiring or behavior I would like to change?" we’re working with telepresence, a very restricted medium, because it’s literally just a video that I have for 10 minutes to deliver.
On the other hand, of course it enables a lot of visual gimmicks that we may or may not use, because it’s not in person. I can levitate or whatever... I tried that once.
I think the easiest thing is just to keep to the visual slides and have the voice carry all the tonality and passion, and only have my face appear during the very beginning and during the transition between the video and the Q&A. That’s my idea.
When does Audrey tell her story? Where do I get to know how this all began for you, why this matters to you, where you came from, and how you got into this? I think that’s quite important.
You want me to tell a three-minute version now or paste you a link or something?
No, I want to know what you’re going to do...It doesn’t look like your presentation had much about you in it. I think we need to have a little about you. When do you intend to...Am I correct, first of all, in the video, or is there a whole part that’s about you?
I’m the first person to offer technology help to the Occupy, the day before the Occupy. It is intrinsically a very personal story. The Uber case, I’m the facilitator and the co-chair for the whole thing. Again, it’s my story. Of course, the third story is about my work as digital minister. I just don’t want to be seen as taking all the credit from the Occupiers, but it is very personal.
No, I’m not interested in having you take all the credit, but I would like to know how you, Audrey, at 36, has gotten to this place. What’s your story, basically? Who are you? Let’s get everybody to know that. Maybe you’re very famous to this crowd, but I don’t think people know each other much in this...
No, I don’t think so, either. Very quickly...
No, take your time. I want to hear it. [laughs]
I’m 36. I drop out of junior high school after going through 10 different schools, counting from kindergarten. After I dropped out, I founded an Internet search engine company with a few friends, got invested by...
Where are you from?
I’m from Taiwan. I’m always in Taiwan. I went to Germany for a year, but otherwise haven’t stayed for more than six months anywhere else. I’m in Taiwan, and part of the initial dot com rush back in 1996, which is when I quit junior high school.
Also, I think that’s because there’s this Tim Berners-Lee, who invented this World Wide Web thing. I found out everything that I can find online is 10 years of what a textbooks have to teach me, so I just told my principals, "I’m going to learn from the Internet, instead."
You quit junior high school?
That’s right. That’s when I was 15.
15? OK.
Mm-hmm.
What did you do after that, after you quit school?
I co-founded a pretty large Internet company, sold off the stocks when I was 18 or something, and led the Perl community for a while. Perl is a computer language, one of the earlier scripting languages. It was in a state of stagnation, and its creator, Larry Wall, decided to make a new version of Perl called Perl 6.
It was widely considered impossible to implement, to do. I just came out of nowhere and implemented it. That was in 2005. Between 2000 and 2005, I’m mostly doing free software advocacy and free speech, and all sort of other activism things, while running a social enterprise called Our Internet. That was all in Taiwan.
Can I interrupt you for a second? You haven’t told me the motivation. Why is free software and free speech important to you? Where did this come from?
I was able to quit school because of things like the Guttenberg Project. It’s like before Wikipedia. There’s people who digitized all those books. I basically got all my education from projects like Project Guttenberg, so I would like to give back. That’s my motivation, because otherwise it wouldn’t be possible.
Also, I think my outlook on history or human nature is very much biased toward optimism. Project Guttenberg only contains at that time works before the First World War, because everything afterwards is still in copyright. I read the classics before the world wars. I think that really biased my education.
Why does that lead you to optimism?
Before the First World War, most of the thinkers, in Europe at least, did not anticipate civilization would even go into a downward spiral.
Keep going.
I think the idea is, when the Internet was first beginning, nobody really thought, at least at that time, that it will be as centralized, as domesticated, as today’s Internet. Back at that day, I learned from, for example, the first Blue Ribbon Campaign of Electronic Frontier Foundation and a very early consensus-making day.
Before I got my voting right when I was 20, which is the age of consent in Taiwan, I already experienced, for five years, a very different political model, which is what we call the rough consensus model, which is the model, mostly up to this day, but still most of the early Internet runs from, which is this anarchistic model of rough consensus and running code.
I think that’s my tribal culture. That’s how I get accultured.
I think that’s all really fascinating. You’re a very interesting person, obviously, but that needs to be coherent. Let’s do it simply, like from a beginning-middle-end point of view. Here you are today, "I’m Audrey Tang, and I’m doing this."
We can come up with a much more interesting way of doing it, but can you please tell me how you got to where you are today? Obviously, the story is going to start at about age 15, maybe before.
Yeah, sure. I’m Audrey Tang. I’m Digital Minister...
Can I ask you another little favor? Do you have your phone near you?
You mean like an iPhone, like this one?
I’m sorry. Why don’t you put on the voice recorder, so we capture what you say, if this is useful. If not, don’t worry about this.
I’m recording this entire Skype call.
OK, terrific, fantastic.
But I wouldn’t mind another recording. [laughs]
You’ll know what’s good. What’s good will stick. You know that, right? Just keep it in mind.
How long do you think the intro paragraph needs to be?
I think this should go just for a minute or two. I don’t want to take away from what you’re doing, obviously. We have to figure out the right place for all of this, as well. Maybe it’s just in the beginning, when you are talking to the crowd really.
OK, sure.
You certainly don’t need to introduce your name. Everybody knows who you are, in terms of that. Everything’s there. Just start somewhere, interestingly.
Mm-hmm, sure.
Do you want me to give you a place to start?
"When I was 15."
When I was 15, I dropped out of junior high school to pursue an education exclusively on this newly invented thing called the World Wide Web. I told my principal at the time that everything that I can learn online is 10 years in the future compared to the textbook, so she let me do that.
I found that, online, everything is voluntarily given. There’s a lot of free resources, and the best thing is that this whole online system, this thing we call Internet, there’s a political system behind it. It’s called the rough consensus model, where people follow these anarchistic principles of coming to consensus and implementing things, without a central director, presidents, or voting.
That’s the first political system that I know, and it’s the political system that I’m introducing now to Taiwan’s national government.
Whoa, we went from 15 to your introducing something to the national government. Give me a little more story there, will you please? By the way, your teacher just let you go?
Oh, yeah. They actually faked my records to the Ministry of Education, so I won’t get fined by skipping compulsory education.
What’d you parents think about this?
They were initially very skeptical, because nobody really knew what the World Wide Web is, but I managed to reason it out and convince them after a couple months.
What year was it when you were 15?
Maybe that’s a better place to start, "In 1996, I was 15, and I decided I was leaving school. So I told the principal..." I think you need to give me a little more detail here. It’s very interesting that the principal was actually on your side, don’t you think?
Certainly.
Audrey, that’s very unusual. Was it public school or private school?
It’s a public school.
That’s a very unusual thing. Let’s not forget the fact of drama. Drama’s very compelling to an audience who’s listening to a million speakers a day. Give me the drama of your story. Come on, there you are, you’re dropping out of school at 15. They’re letting you go, "Bye-bye."
There you go. You get introduced to this thing called rough consensus. What happens next? You’re 16. I don’t want every year, but let’s get to some of the high points that you told me about. You co-founded a company.
In 1996, when I come to think about it, is also the year that we, in Taiwan, after 30 years after military dictatorship, finally have our first presidential election.
That’s good. Keep going.
It’s like Internet and democracy is not two things. It’s the same thing. In Taiwan, they happened literally the same year. The year we have World Wide Web, we also have our first presidential election. I think that’s why there’s a very strong free software community in Taiwan.
We know that free software, the "free" doesn’t stand for free of cost. We know that freedom is never free of cost -- freedom of assembly, of speech. Our parents’ and grandparents’ generation fought dearly for it. That’s another arc that we can use.
That’s a great observation.
Now, where am I? I don’t really know how much detail I need to tell. I can tell that, when I was 20, I started devoting full time to the open source movement, to the free software movement, because I want to give back to the community that taught me.
I helped this very new project called Wikipedia, on Freenet, Slashdot, all those early community websites. I think the main idea is to create a safe space in which we can all learn from each other. Even if the experiments fail, we can always go back here, so it’s like solidarity.
The other interesting part is in 2001, when I first got the right to vote, I went back to the district for a head-of-district level voting. I wasn’t living in my district at the time and I had to travel for a couple hours to go back to vote. The candidate I voted for ended up winning by one vote, and they did a recount, and he still won by one vote.
That really indoctrinated me, in the sense that participation and every vote counts, literally, and that the public sphere is there for everybody to participate. By the way, my dad was also the spokesperson of one of the presidential candidates back in 1996, so he also did a lot of Internet campaigning. I don’t know if that counts.
There’s all this idea of Internet participation, democracy thing that’s co-evolving, in a sense, in my life.
You said you’re an optimist, right?
I think that’s also a very nice place to begin, because not many people are today, especially in the West, as you know. That might be the most interesting place to begin, because all of this is making me feel very optimistic. I think there’s too much detail in what you’re saying -- no problem, easy to cut out.
You’re a rare bird in that way, in that you actually think that this is an optimistic future, "Greetings from the future. Not only hours ahead, but I’m an optimist about where we’re heading. Let me tell you why."
That’s a great opening.
That’s the framework, I think.
I think you’re getting a little caught in the details as you go through this, which is fine. You have to unearth it. I think it’s important to tell me...and you tell me that you started this very large Internet company. Is it important?
No. It was important back in the late ’90s.
Just bring me back. Today, you do three things. What are they? Break it down for me and explain it to me slowly, please.
What do I do?
There’s three things you said you did, and all of them have left my mind. I didn’t write them down, so I can’t...
There’s three stories in my presentation. I think it helps if I actually show my presentation. Just a second. It’s somewhere. It’s here. The first story is about how we occupied the Taiwan Parliament for 22 days.
Who is "we"?
The occupiers. A bunch of students.
This is back to Occupy time? OK, very good.
This is 2014.
I had no idea there was an Occupy movement in Taiwan. I live in New York. Obviously, I’m New York-centric. I’m not sure if anybody in the audience knows this, either. The mainstream media does not cover Asia very effectively, as you well know.
You may have to walk me through a little bit, but continue, please.
Back in...
Were you a beginner? Were you a starter of the Occupy Movement in Taiwan, for example?
I’m the first person to offer the students, who run to this Parliament, Internet support. I think I’m one of the first civic tech supporters. We’re seen as neutrals in that scheme. We provide equal Internet access to the medics, to the lawyers, to the protesters on both sides.
I think we can take some credit for having this to the Occupy that’s completely peaceful. Nobody went dead or missing. And, the occupiers actually got a consensus from half a million street, and the head of Parliament consented to that consensus, and so it was a victorious Occupy.
Tell me what you did. You occupied the Parliament for how long?
For 22 days.
Where? You sat in the lobby? You sat in the chambers?
Everywhere.
Tell me the story, please.
Back in the time, it was called the Sunflower Movement. The MPs at the time refused to deliberate a trade service agreement with Beijing, because they think, constitutionally, Beijing is part of Taiwan. It’s a domestic agreement, so it doesn’t need parliamentary debate, or something like that. In any case, it’s as if the MPs went on strike.
The occupiers, far from just protesting, did a demonstration in the demo scene sense, meaning that we took the Parliament. Instead of protesting, we deliberated the trade service agreement with half a million people on the street, and showed how is it possible to do efficient deliberations, even with this much people.
This is facilitated by professional facilitators and co-organized by 20 NGOs, the greens, the labors, the separatists, all the peoples, and were supported by the g0v civic tech community, which I belong to.
This community is very interesting, because our call to action is to fork the government. By forking the government, it means that we look at all the government websites that we don’t like, which all end in gov.tw, and build shadow websites that end in g0v.tw.
We solved the discoverability problem. You just look at the government website, change the O to a zero, and get to the shadow government, with open data and everything.
This is all presumably a part of your presentation, right?
Oh, yeah.
I don’t want to hear the presentation, because I’m sure it’s great, but I’m still trying to finish who you are. There are three things you currently do in your life, in your job, or in your work. One is this Occupy Movement. What else do you currently do?
That’s not how I phrased it. I said there’s three stories that I have in this presentation. Occupy is something that already happened. My full-time job is just Taiwan’s digital minister, member of the cabinet, and all that.
My main work is to lower the fear, uncertainty, and doubt of the public servants on concepts such as civic participation, open government, radical transparency, and all that. The idea is mainstreaming participation.
Very good. Really, you identify for this crowd Taiwan’s digital minister and what that entails. Is that correct?
That’s correct.
Perfect. That’s what I wanted to know. The presentation will go into the details of all this. I’m trying to just get you to, "Here I am. I dropped out of school at 15. I did this, I did that, I did this. Today I’m Taiwan’s digital minister." Are you the first digital minister of Taiwan, presumably?
That’s right.
And that job is responsible for this, this, and this.
Right. I’m responsible for pushing Taiwan’s open government agenda, for social enterprise, and for youth affairs, although the last two probably doesn’t enter the presentation.
Is this a radical position in Taiwan? Give me a little context here. You’re saying all this very matter-of-factly, as if I know a lot of this stuff, as if the audience knows a lot of this stuff. I think you need to provide a little bit of context, or else it’s going to sound quite factual.
Yes and no. Taiwan didn’t have a digital minister, but there is a tradition of having people who worked in international companies to work in the cabinet. My predecessor was from IBM Asia. Her predecessor was from Google, and I worked with Apple for six years. It’s kind of a tradition. It’s not very out of ordinary here.
What else? As Taiwan’s digital minister, I can say I’m the first one that introduced this idea of radical transparency, rough consensus, or all these things that the crowd identifies with. The previous ministers, they come from a very what we say establishment class, and doesn’t actually put radical transparency as their top agenda, while I am.
For example, I publish, publicly, all the meetings that I hold -- even internal meetings -- all the meetings with journalists and everything. This is actually very radical, because nobody, to my knowledge, in any national movement, ever did that.
Everyone knows that after a meeting with Audrey, the digital minister will send a Etherpad link to all the participants, and they can all edit for 10 days to take out where it may sound too bad when it comes to press, or whatever.
After the 10 days, or 10 working days editing, it’s all published verbatim online. There’s millions of words of hundreds of meetings that I’ve convened after entering the cabinet a year ago.
What’s the effect of that?
The effect is twofold. First, it made -- somewhat surprisingly -- the public servants very much willing to innovate. The career public servants have this dilemma. If they do something right, it’s always the ministry’s credit. If they do something wrong, the press has a way to find who actually did the wrong thing, and put the blame on the career public servants.
Publishing this transcript reversed, flipped this situation.
Interesting.
Yeah, because this digital ministry is blame-seeking and credit-avoiding. If everything goes right, people just check the original transcript, and discover who is the previously anonymous career public servant who came out with this great idea. They get the credit.
If this innovative problem goes wrong, because nobody did policy making this way anyway, Audrey gets all the blame. Under this situation, people are much more innovative than they previously was, because I am not claiming the credit, and I don’t issue commands. Instead, they just brainstorm.
This is another reason you are an optimist, obviously. Seems like you’re actually getting career bureaucrats on your side at the same time.
That’s right, yes.
They are not afraid of this, which is really interesting.
You would think most of them would be very afraid. Is this a part of the thing you’re going to be showing?
Yes. This is the slide, actually, where I’m showing this thing.
I want to be sure that you talk...not only did you do it, but what was the result of it. The result is what’s really interesting. The doing is fairly interesting. You’re obviously very smart and interesting.
You’re rocking, by the way. You’re rocking back and forth. I don’t want you rocking when you’re doing your presentation, OK?
Sure, of course.
Let’s just say I’m just mentioning that. Are you on a swivel chair, or on a rocking chair, or on a straight chair?
To be perfectly transparent, I’m sitting on my bed... The rocking was just me adjusting the position of the pillows and everything.
Oh. I didn’t realize you were on your bed. That explains the rocking. No problem.
What’s really important here is the result of this action. Equally, the results of the Occupy action, because you actually went out and got involved.
Yeah, and got the demands met.
Yeah. That you actually brought democracy to the street. I don’t know if the people understood what was going on or not, but you actually enabled them to understand it and bring it to them. Give me the upshot of this stuff, OK?
Mm-hmm.
Tell me some more, please.
All right. For example, the Occupy, the idea was that the parliament needs to really treat Beijing as just another diplomatic entity, and pass treaties the same way as we pass treaty to, for example, New Zealand. That demand got met, so the students retreated peacefully.
This radical transparency, designed to promote innovation in the bureaucracy, actually worked. It also kept lobbying to a minimum. It’s not that I don’t meet with lobbyists -- for example, this is David Plouffe, from Uber -- it’s that all the lobbyists is actually adding to something, because they know that everything is under 360 record, and they behave much more civilized.
It was able to bring several different disagreeing sides, such as Uber and taxis, to a rough consensus, to agreement, because of the style of working.
This slide is where I appeal to the free software folks in the audience, saying that the first thing that I did as digital minister is to recompile the Linux kernel, which is operating system, to run all those softwares that people love in the free software world.
The end result is that, because it runs on what we call the Sandstorm platform, which is now certified by our department of cyber security, people can very easily add their free software contributions to be part of the Taiwan public service, or where anywhere is public service, and not worry about security implications, because the security is handled by the Sandstorm security-hardened platform. This is the software slide that I’m going to talk about.
This slide is about how we enlisted all the different ministries -- all 32 of them -- to send us one career public servant as participation officer. The end result is that, for all the e-petitions, for all people’s petitions above, say, 5,000 countersignatures...It’s like in the US, you have "We the People".
After meeting the petition threshold, instead of just a written response from a random minister, the petitioners and countersignature people, like six of them, is actually invited to the national government to have a face-to-face deliberation with people from all the relevant ministries.
The end result is that...
Can you talk about this again for me, please? Do it this way. Before, there was this program, this is how it worked. I need the before and after, so I can understand it better. Again, the intricacies of the Taiwanese government are not well known, or not necessarily that interesting. What’s interesting is how your changing it.
Give me the before and the after, OK? Let me hear.
Before I entered the cabinet, we had a e-petition platform, just like "We the People" in the US, but it was not very popular. It was, again, also like "We the People," have been described like a ghost town.
The reason is that people often get a very formal, very bureaucratic written response from one of the ministries, while what they’re actually petitioning is very reasonable. It’s just because it touches multiple different ministries, so they don’t get a satisfactory response from the one ministry that was designated to handle it.
To solve this issue, when I become the digital minister, I invited at least one senior bureaucrat from every ministry in Taiwan, to form a virtual team called the participation officers. We are on the same Slack channel, we use all the same Internet tools.
We basically acculturate them into the Internet culture of rapid responses, and not afraid of facing people. Now, after a petition is signed, the POs -- the participation officers -- actually vote on things that they want to collaborate on, and then invite the petitioners on a face-to-face deliberation.
We are able to work on some very difficult issues, such as how many holidays to have in Taiwan, between the labor unions and the capitalists.
(laughter)
For example, how to balance environmental issues of overfishing, versus the livelihood of local fishers, and things like that, and the lemon cars, and everything you can think of, you think this way of collaboration to everybody’s satisfaction.
Say a little less. Try that again, and give it to me in about...That was probably about three minutes. I wasn’t timing it. Let me see if you can condense quickly as you’re walking through this. Let me see if I can guide you a little bit, OK?
Mm-hmm.
This is how it worked before. When I came in, I saw this problem, and I did this. Here is how it’s working today. It’s not perfect, but it’s done this, this, and this. You don’t have to overexplain it. Let me hear you.
Before I entered the cabinet, there was this e-petition platform in Taiwan. It’s called a ghost town, and for a very good reason, because people went, finally get 5,000 people countersigning it, but get a very bureaucratic response of very little actual substantial content.
Now, after I become digital minister, it’s much better. It’s not perfect, but because we one person from each ministry forming a virtual team of rapid response participation officers, we actually invite the people who entered the petition to meet with all the national ministries people face-to-face, and resolve some very difficult problems, such as environmental issues, such as how many holidays to have in a year, and so on, to everybody’s satisfaction.
Did that feel better to you?
Slightly. Lukewarm.
Why? What was the matter?
If I use the same formula for one, two, three, four, for all the four things that I do as a digital minister, it might a little bit repetitive.
Possibly. I don’t want you to use the same format. I wanted to give you the sense of the storytelling arc of before, here is what we did, here is the result.
I do think if you use it four times, it’s going to get repetitive.
OK, but for this one, yes, I’m feeling better.
Good. Give me another one.
That’s the end of my four slides. As a digital minister, I only have four slides talking about my work as digital minister.
Let’s see the first one. This is who I am.
This is who I am.
This is the...
This is the radical transparency thing.
The third one is participation.
The third one is participation.
This is the free software. Then this is the participation officers.
Got it. I understand. That’s a very simple storytelling trope. The before, the action, the result. The result, by the way, it doesn’t always have to be positive. It’s quite interesting when it doesn’t work. Maybe there’s a rub, or maybe you should do a tweak, or maybe something else is happening. This is not perfect. This is whatever it is, OK?
Do me a favor. Let’s work on a little vocal modulation as well. Then we’ll put this together. We’ll start putting some of this stuff together. Will you bring up that sheet on vocal modulation? You have it handy?
Yeah, of course. Just a second. I have here speaking training tips. Eliminating verbal mush.
I think it’s called vocal modulation.
I don’t think I have one called vocal modulation.
What do you have?
You have a zip with a lemon of verbal mash, essential questions, leading a panel, questions to ask yourself, slow it down, start strong, TED Talks worth watching, telling memorable stories, and 10 elements.
Interesting. I forgot to give you that one. I know why, because vocal modulation is very hard to do on your own. Let me find it. I made a decision to not do that one. Here we go. Can I share this on Skype?
Sure, or email, whatever.
I’ll email it to you, probably. Show me how to share it on Skype. Where do I go?
You can just drop it on my face.
Oh, I just drop it into your frame, right? Exactly. Onto your face?
If it doesn’t work, there is a conversation, a text balloon button on top of the overlay. If you click it, that’s where you can drop it also. All this is assuming you’re on Mac. I really don’t...Here you go.
You got it. You can have it. I’ll email it to you as well if it doesn’t...You can download it from there.
I want you to do it with me. Let me know when it’s over, OK?
It’s still on the wire. I don’t see any files from you, at the moment.
I got to email it to you, do it the old-fashioned way.
Get it?
It’s taking its time.
It’s a very simple document. It’s not a big file, believe me.
I know. I am checking the spam folder, just in case. Just a second.
How about the Skype. Did the Skype one open yet? Did it download?
The Skype, I see you typing, and then it doesn’t really go through this...
This thing didn’t go in?
No, not at all. Maybe you would like to try...Oh, here it is.
Just did it again.
Oh, yeah, technology. All right, here we go.
About time, huh?
Here is what I want you to do. This is very, very simple. There’s five or six sentences here. One word is boldface. Read each one, and emphasize either loudness or strength of voice, the word that is in boldface, OK?
Sure. Do I just start?
Yes, please.
*Mary* had a little lamb.
Do the next one, please.
Mary *had* a little lamb.
Do the third one, please.
Mary had *a* little lamb.
Do the fourth one.
Mary had a *little* lamb.
Now, do the last one.
Mary had a little *lamb*.
I’m going to do them as well, and then you are going to read the part back to me, on the right-hand side, OK?
*Mary* had a little lamb.
Mary, not Tom, had a lamb.
Do you hear that, by the way?
I need to clock with you. Mary *had* a little lamb.
She had it once, but she does not have it now.
What about past tense? Mary had *a* little lamb.
She had one, not two lambs.
Mary had a *little* lamb.
The lamb was little, not huge.
Mary had a little *lamb*.
A lamb, not a sheep.
Exactly. Were you able to hear the difference in the sentences when I did that?
Excellent. This is something you could use to your benefit. Your English is fantastic. You are a great English speaker, but you tend to use a monotone when you speak.
If you want to engage the audience a little more and draw them in, you do have the choice to emphasize different words. From now on, I don’t care what word you emphasize, but let’s use the next six sentences.
I want you to pick a word, you emphasize it. I also want you to add a little microsecond of a pause after that word, OK?
Try it.
*This* was their finest hour.
Exactly. By the way, I want you to try it again, but pick the least important word that you think cannot...We all tend to pick the word that we think is important. Now pick a word that you think is not important. Just go.
This *was* their finest hour.
Exactly. Every word is important, if you see what I’m saying, OK?
Mm-hmm.
Every word, depending on the meaning you want to be emphasized to a different effect. Let’s do the next one.
If we can stand up to him, all Europe *may* be free.
Was it may?
It was a little half-hearted may. Could you do it with a little more conviction, please?
OK. If we can stand up to him, all Europe *may or may not* be free.
Do the next one, please. The is a very American English sentence. It’s terrible, terrible.
I was just wondering, would you like to *maybe* come in today?
[laughs] That didn’t sound quite right.
(laughter)
No, it doesn’t.
I think you meant that as a question. If that’s the word you’re going to use, I was wondering if you’d like to maybe come in today? Sometimes, you know, it’s not only doing it loud. You could also do it soft. You can do other things with that incredible instrument that is your voice. That’s a terrible sentence. Let’s use the next one, OK?
OK. Let *us* not wallow in the valley of despair.
Exactly. That’s really a difference for you. When you emphasize words like that, does it sound very unnatural to you?
I’ve never spoken English like this. English is my fifth language. There is really a difference, yes.
Can you hear the difference?
Good. Also, I want to know if you can hear and feel the difference, by the way. When you’re talking on a screen, also, I can’t see myself. Can you see me full screen?
Yeah, I can see you full screen.
It’s a little lamb. You can use your hands really effectively, like it was a little lamb. Show me a little lamb. Show me little.
A little.
Show me little. Little.
Little. Like this little.
Show me less, even smaller. Very little.
Exactly.
Like nanometer.
Show me big. It’s hard to do big on a small frame. Yeah, big. When you do that, you become much more alive. You can’t see, but I’m doing it for you now.
It’s much more compelling than just here’s my face on a screen. Right? [laughs] This way I just look like one of those bureaucrats. You have this voice, and you have this body. You’re very limited by, you have this much space. OK?
Mm-hmm.
Use your body. Do it. Repeat the last sentence, the very last one.
OK. We must do this now.
Exactly. Now do it really different. Now I want you to try something else, a staccato.
We. must. do. this. now.
That’s staccato. Let me hear you.
*We* *must* *do* *this* *now*.
Exactly. I like the way you did it first much more by the way. It was much more you. The point of this is just to get natural. This is not going to happen in a minute. It’s not going to happen in a week. It may not happen by MazFest. It’s something you can think about when you’re presenting, all the time. OK?
Mm-hmm.
You can play with this. The content of your cake is there. This is the icing that really draws the listener in to pay attention. Because you’re on a screen, it’s more challenging. It’s just harder. Let’s play a little with tone in English. OK?
The next part, now we’re going to pick two words. I just picked cheese sandwich. OK?
You could have picked ham sandwich. You could make it a pork bun. I don’t care. You can do whatever you want with it. OK?
Only want you to use those two words. I’m going to call out an emotion, and I want you to convey that emotion. This is not what you do naturally in English. I’m going to ask you to really convey emotion through words, just through the tone of your voice.
OK, I’ll just you your words. That is fine.
Cheese sandwich.
Cheese sandwich. Is it...?
Anger.
Cheese sandwich.
Anger, more angry.
Cheese sandwich.
Thank you. Happy.
Cheese sandwich.
Happier.
Cheese sandwich!
Cute. Sad. Can you be sad with cheese sandwich?
[sniffles] Cheese sandwich.
[laughs] OK. You don’t have to cry. [laughs]
Cheese sandwich... The cheese sandwiched me.
How about important?
Important?
Cheese sandwich.
More emphatic please.
Cheese Sandwich.
There you go. One more time.
*Cheese* *Sandwich*.
Exactly. Before when ministers would lobby, they would just send back a pro forma response that was so boring no one could even read it. Now, that the participation officers, they see that their words actually have meaning, that it’s no longer a culture of blame, but a culture of I can’t remember what you said...
...a culture of collaboration.
Collaboration, right. It actually matters to them now, and they find that they’re engagement. They’re more popular. They’re more alive in their job.
They’re rock stars.
[laughs] For a bureaucrat, maybe getting somebody to read their fucking, boring transcript is like a rock star, right?
It’s true, yes.
Give me a quick, use some vocal modulation, convey some tone, and tell me a sentence or two what they did before, and what’s happening now. Let me hear.
Before when people send in those e-petitions, they get this very bland, like nothing really matters response from the bureaucrats. Now, with participation offices all collaborating across ministries, they become alive. All their responses are not just text. They’re personal.
They were invited to Taipei, or we fly to those river islands and meet with those 5,000 peoples face-to-face on live stream.
How unnatural did that feel to you?
Like maximally.
[laughs]
I’ve never spoken like this before.
(laughter)
I could tell. Did it feel convincing?
No, not at all.
You’re wrong.
OK. Did it?
Yes. It’s more pleasurable to listen to when you’re going up and, look watch my hand, when you’re going up and down, when you’re fluctuating in your voice. I feel like you were overdoing it, which is fine. That’s where I want you to begin. Overdoing is a very good place to start. It’s like when you write something, your draft is this long. It’s this long, right?
That’s what I want you to do. I want you to overemphasize as we continue. Just go crazy with it. I’ll tell you when it’s wrong, or when it’s really good. I have to tell you, I thought that was very good. Me being able to listen attentively. Here’s how I’m working. I have my finger on my pulse, OK?
As long as you get my blood going, I’m with you.
Ah, OK.
That’s great.
That’s what I like you to do is engage me all the time. OK?
OK, awesome.
By the way, I think when you begin your presentation, it would be a good idea to introduce, I don’t know if you do this in the beginning, the comments. I think you should invite the participation very early. Do you do that?
Yes. That’s my first slide actually.
Perfect. OK. Very good. Let’s just use the tone, and the emotion, and the word emphasis going forward, OK?
Very good. Do you want to walk me through the presentation now, the deck you’re going to use? You want to do that?
OK, sure. It’s a 10-minute presentation anyway so we can do it in 10 minutes.
I’d like to do it a couple of times. I’d like to start it off with in 1995 or when I was 16, just start right there, or I’m an optimist. Whatever it is that you want to start with, let’s just, pick a place. OK?
All right.
I sort of think the optimist is your theme. That’s a good them by the way. It’s something you can come back to 100 times, but it’s certainly a way to rap, also gives you a good conclusion. I believe from what I’ve seen and heard from you in one hour only, that it really is the underlying story here. Am I correct?
That’s correct.
Am I correct or not?
No, that’s correct.
Good. Let’s start there. Let’s see how that works if it works. I never told you anything about me, but I’m going to give you a bunch of tools as I already have. You’re going to take the ones that work for you.
They’re super helpful by the way. The ones that I did receive.
I’m so happy to know that you read them. I had no idea if anybody was going to read them or not. They really work best when it’s one-to-one. It’s hard to read something and get good at it, right?
Is there anything else before we kick into this? Was there anything else that stood out? Was it speaking more slowly? Was there anything else that you thought, OK, I’d like to work on with this guy.
The verbal mush thing. I actually look at my transcript and saw a lot of "actually" because that’s a verbatim transcript from my recording. The stenographers type what they heard. I took them all out. I think it’s really helpful. I had maybe seven "actuallys" so that’s the thing. I think the slow speaking also really helps.
In Taiwan, if you’re a political minister in the cabinet, we’re trained to do the opposite with all the verbal acting thing is what the MPs do. There’s a very clear, if you see a parliamentary inquiry, you see one side using all their vocal modulation and the other side being completely plain. I’m on the completely plain side.
Let’s fuck with that to start.
Let’s just fuck with that with radical transparency. OK?
Listen, don’t worry about the filler words. I’m very sensitive to filler words. You, actually, you don’t use actually that much actually.
OK. That’s great actually.
You do a little bit actually, but not so much. All right?
If you’re going to slow, here’s what I want you to do. Slowing down is very hard to do. We all revert to our natural pace. That’s just us.
The way to do it I think is a little more efficient is at the end of a powerful sentence or at the end of a paragraph of thinking, pause for a second, just pause. Give it some silence. It gives the audience some time to catch up. It breaks your flow a little bit. It makes people think you’re really thinking about something smart. OK?
You can use pausing as a way of slowing down, and I think you actually will slow down, actually, a little more just by adding that actual pause. OK?
Mm-hmm.
Can you try with me now? Just read something in front of you. I don’t care what it is. Put a pause in after a sentence or two. Let me see if I can hear it.
Just read anything. I don’t care what it is.
Take an emotional state, and build a whole conversation around the phrase "cheese sandwich." Imagine you’ve just seen the most exciting thing. You want to share that experience with a friend, but you can only use the words cheese sandwich to convey your feelings and no others.
Try consoling using this cheese sandwich, or congratulating. Experiment with as many different ways as you can.
Does that work?
[laughs] You’re pretty good. I mean that’s...
(laughter)
Again, you’re probably 30 percent too much. OK?
But that’s really good. You’re really doing it. Thank you. I love your participation. You’re really going for it. We will hone this in the next hour. OK?
You will absolutely get it to a place where it still may feel unnatural, but it will sound...I think you’ll understand the effect of it. OK?
OK. That’s great.
Start please with the optimist. Give me maybe a two-minute introduction. I’m going to clock it, and if it’s going too long or if you feel like it’s going too long, just stop and we’ll start again. We’ll get it. We want it to go fast. Maybe a minute and a half at the most. How does that sound?
It sounds great.
All right Audrey, give it a go. Let’s see what...Can I look at you full time please...
Yeah, sure. Of course.
I want to watch you here. OK?
Because this is the moment when people get to see you, right?
Mm-hmm.
You’re actually live with them at this moment. Correct?
I want you full screen, please.
OK. I’m placing...
I got you, I got you. Begin.
Greetings from the future. I am literally from the future. I’m now eight hours in the future. In Taiwan...No, that’s not a very good start. Let’s start again.
You know what? Don’t start there.
Start with this idea of optimism, OK?
OK. Let’s do this.
Or try it. We’ll see if it works. We’ll know if it works right away. You knew that before. Let’s do it now.
Let’s combine those. Hi, everyone, I’m from the future. In Taiwan, we’re literally eight hours in the future, but we’re also experimenting with the future form of Democracy, and let me tell you I’m pretty optimistic about it. It’s working pretty well.
How about this, or do I just...if I do something myself.
I think if I were you...I think the future’s fine. "Greetings from the future. I’m eight hours ahead, it’s already tomorrow, and in Taiwan we’re doing the future of democracy." And, "Unlike most people in the world that I know right now, I’m incredibly optimistic."
That sounds great.
Go for it. It’s yours.
Hi, I’m Audrey. I’m in Taiwan now. We’re eight hours literally in the future, and we’re...
Let me do something else. Stop the future. Forget the future.
Let’s skip it.
I’m erasing it now.
Let me hear a start with optimism, OK?
I just want to hear how it sounds. OK?
Keep going. Start again. Go on.
I’m an optimist. I’ve always been an optimist ever since I dropped out of junior high school, when I was 15. That was 1996. We just had our first presidential election.
In Taiwan, we suffered for 30 years of martial rule, of martial law, of dictatorship, but democracy was at hunt, and with democracy also this fine thing called the World Wide Web. I was able to finish my education pretty much on my own.
Not really on my own, but with a loving community of free software hackers, and that shaped my education, and that’s how I become an optimist. Because, you see, in the early Internet, people had this crazy idea of running the Internet as anarchistic political system, where nobody get to command anyone to do anything.
All the Internet protocols, everything that you can see today was invented by those free-willing people who doesn’t get to wield or command on each other. Does that work?
What do you think?
I think it’s pretty convincing to me, but maybe not to half of the audience.
I thought it was a much better start, first of all. It felt much more honest and much more real and, actually, much more serious. I don’t think talking about time or the weather is a terribly interesting way to start.
That’s great.
Joe. That’s my opinion. It’s not necessarily what you should do...
No, it’s good, it’s good. What else could I improve?
I think it’s, "Unlike many people in the world, I’m an optimist. And this is a strange thing to be right now, but with me it started in 1995. That year I dropped out of school. I was 15 at the time.
My teacher even agreed that it was a good idea that I drop out of school, because I said that I wanted to learn on the web. I wanted to use this new thing called the World Wide Web because a lot about it appealed to me. It was anarchistic, it was rebellious, no one was in control."
For some reason -- whatever it was -- you wanted to do this, you have to tell me why. OK?
Mm-hmm.
"Today, I’m the Digital Minister of Taiwan, the first digital minister, and I’m still trying to bring some of these radical ideas that I learned in 1995 to my work. They include radical transparency, blah-blah-blah-blah, and blah-blah-blah-blah." OK.
Mm-hmm.
"I’m an optimist because right now it seems to be working." How does that sound? Something like that. Listen, I just made that up based on what you told me. How did that sound to you?
It’s fine up to the last sentence. "Right now, it seems to be working," seems to be lukewarm. I would either be more cautious or even more energetic, but not in the middle.
What would you say? Tell me.
Today, I’m Taiwan’s first Digital Minister. I am putting into practice the same ideas that I was taught in 1996 by the internet community, and so far, it’s transforming our society.
Fantastic. You have to tell me what’s true. I love that because you’ve not taken the credit for it. I always say that the speaker should be as humble as possible, right?
Instead of saying, "It’s working great and all of my ideas are fantastic," you said, instead, "It’s transforming the society." That’s perfect. Doesn’t that give you a good bridge? "Am I now engaged? I want to hear, my god, how’s that happening?"
That creates an additional problem, because now do I just go into the story, or do I say, "But, by the way, if you want to ask me questions, you go to this website."?
Yeah. "Before I get into the story, I want to invite your participation." OK?
Mm-hmm.
"In the idea of radical transparency, or going with the idea of radical transparency, I want you to ask me anything you want as we go through. On this site, here’s the format, you just plug it in, and come back to it when I’m done. If it’s really important..." Are you going to be able to see the questions as they roll in or...?
Yeah, in real time.
I mean are you able to really...You want to stop when these are coming in, or do you want to pick them up at the end? What’s more comfortable for you?
I’m still far, because people take time to typing these questions, so I found that it’s easiest if I just record the whole 10-minute thing and answer on the second part. But if there’s a really good question, I can of course interrupt anytime myself.
[laughs] You can either say, "Look. I’ll answer them at the end, or if something catches my eye, I’ll interrupt myself and go forward."
That sounds good. Or, I can just not say how it will be handled, but just say, "Just before getting into the story, I’d like to invite you to ask me anything. This is called ’Ask Audrey Anything’."
"Just go to slido.com on your phone or any Internet connecting device, and enter today’s date, which is 1029, and enter your question anonymously or like others people’s questions. And now, back to the story." Is that...?
Something like that.
Something like that. That’s the OK bridge.
I think it’s a good bridge. I really do. By the way, what’s the title of your presentation?
Stories From the Future of Democracy.
I love it. The MozFest folks, they like to know what the titles are ahead of...Good. Let’s keep going.
Now, again, you’re going to speak a little more slowly, or add a pause. You’re going to use voice for vocal inflection, convey emotion where possible. You can overdo it, it’s absolutely fine. Let’s go.
Could I use the bathroom for one minute?
Yeah, sure. Go ahead.
Thank you.
(pause)
What five languages do you speak, by the way?
Taiwanese Holo, and then Taiwanese Mandarin, and then German, and then a little bit of French, which I have completely forgotten now, and English. That’s the sequence. I think I forgot French completely when I learned English.
Anyway. Do I just start saying, "Unlike many people..."?
Let’s start with your...You want to pop your deck up? Because I want to watch you speak... You want to start from the top? Let’s do it.
Yeah, sure.
Let’s start.
Unlike many people, I am an optimist today. And I’ve always been an optimist, but especially, when I dropped out of junior high school back in 1996, when I was 15 years old, I discovered this infinite World Wide Web on which there’s...No, it’s run on sentences. Again.
Unlike many people today...
Let me give you something.
When you introduce, "I’m an optimist," you just say, "This strange condition began when I was 15 years old."
Thank you. That’s great. Strange condition.
"This strange condition..."
That’s great. I say it like "I’m an autist, this strange condition..." I can say that, OK.
Unlike many people today, I’m an optimist. This strange condition began when I was 15 years old. That was 1996, when the World Wide Web was first invented.
I discovered this shiny new thing, and thought that the future of human knowledge is on it, compared to the pale textbooks, and I told my teachers that I want to quit school and start my education on the Wide Web. Surprisingly, the teachers all agreed with it.
I started founding a startup, working on web technologies, and I get to learn this fabulous community who all run with this crazy idea of this anarchistic no-one-was-in-control political system that powers the Internet until today.
Today, I’m Taiwan’s first Digital Minister. I’m putting into practice the same rough consensus, civic participation, radical transparency ideas that I learned when I was 15 years old, and surprisingly, it’s working and it’s transforming our society.
In the spirit of participation, I would like to ask you to put your phone and enter slido.com and ask me questions. Ask me anything by entering 1029, that’s today’s date, on the browser, and I will answer them after this 10-minute talk.
In 2014, there was the first demo thing of the radical participation idea. We occupied the Parliament for 22 days. At the time, the MPs in Taiwan were refusing to deliberate a Trade Service Agreement with Beijing, and because the MPs were on strike, we got into the Parliament at night and demonstrated how to deliberate a Trade Service Agreement with everybody...
How long did that go for? 24 days or 21...?
22 days.
"For 22 days, we demonstrated how you negotiate a Trade Agreement."
Very good.
22 days we demonstrated how to deliberate a Trade Service Agreement with the whole society. There was over 20 NGOs participating. The Greens, the Labors, the Separatists, everybody.
The key point here is that we supported this whole deliberation with a radically transparent broadcasting live streaming logistics system, which we exported to Hong Kong for the Umbrella Revolution, by the way, and was powered by this community called g0v.
G0v is a community with a goal to fork the government. We take the government websites, which all ends in gov.tw, and make better open alternatives, and ends in g0v.tw.
If there’s any website that anyone in Taiwan doesn’t like, they can just create a fork of the version and abandon the copyright so that the country, in the next procurement cycle, can just include and merge back these ideas. When the Parliament doesn’t deliberate this kind of thing, instead of protesting against it, we thought maybe we can do it better.
There were thousands of civic hackers at the time working on the street just to make facilitation possible and make everyone who care about their service agreement put their input over the phone, over the Web, over anywhere, or just walk into one of the booths we set up.
This is not a coincidence that we have so many free software civic hackers. Because, as I said, back in 1996, when World Wide Web was first invented, it’s also our first presidential election. There was 30 years of martial law, and we are the first generation that has both democracy and the Internet.
Free software to us never means free of cost, because our parents’ generation paid dearly for the freedom of assembly or the freedom of speech. This is why we were able to run this Occupy completely peacefully and agree on a set of consensus that the Head of the Parliament eventually agreed to.
It was ended peacefully, and the whole society learned that there is a way for people to deliberate at scale.
After the Occupy, there’s many cities adopting the same methods and the national government has a changed leadership. The new Prime Minister said, "You know, crowdsourcing, civic hacking, everything, it’s just going to be the national agenda."
We, civic hackers, were recruited to solve one of the most interesting policy problems at that year, which is the Uber problem, and this is not...
Wait. Are you telling me that the Occupy movement caused the government to rethink what it was doing?
Yes, and a change of leadership in all of the major cities’ mayorships.
That was actually very major, right?
It’s a revolution, but peaceful.
You need to say that in your transition, OK?
"This caused a revolution, although a peaceful revolution. This was a radical transformation. That and the election of 2015," whenever it was.
End of 2014.
Yeah, "Here’s what happened. They did that, they this." Now we’re going into Uber, OK?
OK. Let me just fill it up. At the election at the end of 2014, many Occupiers just find themselves mayors when they didn’t expect it. It turns out there’s a radical shift in the society. People start demanding for open government, and everyone who campaigned for open government magically became mayors, much to their surprise.
Because of this, the Prime Minister resigned, and a new Prime Minister, an engineer, said, "OK. From now on, crowdsourcing, open data is just going to be the national direction." Does that work better? Or something like that?
Yeah, I don’t think it’s magical, though. You used the word "magical," I don’t think it’s magical.
OK. Let’s go to the Uber part. At the time, there’s this very interesting...
Hold on. Before we do Uber. That was how this changed the government, OK?
What is the story of Uber? What are you telling me? How this opened the doors to what? Negotiation? You tell me. What are we talking about with Uber?
Instead of going to the presentation, I’m explaining it now.
At the time, Uber was operating illegally in many different jurisdictions, and causing a lot of protest, and taxi drivers surrounding ministries everywhere, and so on. There is very little a sovereign state can do about it.
For example, the Paris city, they seized the Uber’s office and confiscated all their equipment, but it’s just an app. It kept running. It is actually a very challenging problem for any national government to solve.
That’s the lead. It can also go into the presentation itself.
Keep going. Let me hear it. Keep going.
As I mentioned, there’s very little, actually, what the sovereign state can do about Uber, because it’s an app. To me, it’s a meme. A meme is called sharing economy, by the way. At the time, the meme essentially means that algorithms dispatch cars better than laws, so we don’t have to obey laws.
This meme is very powerful. It’s like a flu of the mind, a virus of the mind. If you catch an Uber, and you catch this meme, chances are that you will spread it to other drivers and other passengers.
If a driver suddenly discovers after a couple of weeks this is actually not working, they’ve already passed it on. Just like any other epidemic, it really made a pandemonium -- is not a very good word -- of the taxi drivers industry in Taiwan, and everywhere in the world. The taxi drivers surrounded the Ministry of Transport, demanding negotiation.
The thing is this, you can’t negotiate with a virus of the mind. It’s in a different category. You can’t negotiate with flu, either. The idea is that if this idea, like a meme, spreads to sufficient people, it will just keep Uber running.
To solve this problem, we thought about the way we did during the Occupy. It’s through deliberation. We think deliberation is inoculation of the mind. It inoculates after sitting down and listening to everybody’s side about everyone’s ideas, and coming to terms with a consensus.
It inoculates people against future PRs. It inoculates people against future incitements, from Uber or from any other agency. We think it’s essential that we get all the stakeholders, and get them to sit down and agree on a set of consensus.
We do this through the focus conversation method. The focus conversation method means that we first collect everybody’s facts, and then we collect everybody’s feelings about the same set of facts. The same set of facts, I may feel happy. You may feel angry. It’s all OK.
After we get everybody’s feelings represented, then we ask for people’s ideas. We brainstorm. The best ideas are the best ideas that address most people’s feelings. Then we ratify the ideas. We translate them into legalese, and sign them into law.
What prevented, before...I will say before. Before the focus conversation method, usually, the government, the private sector, and individual academics use an expert language to talk about policy, while not letting the people on the street know what they are talking about.
That doesn’t prevent people on the street from talking about it. It’s just they develop a different set of language, and actually disagree on the same set of basic facts. Without the same set of basic facts, people become unable to empathize with each other’s feelings, and ideas in this environment grows into something very dangerous. They grow into ideologies.
Once people are infected with ideologies, they become blind to new facts. They become blind to each other’s feelings. This is what we set out to solve.
When planning the Uber deliberation, not only did government published all the relevant transport data as open data, we also asked the private sector and the civil society to contribute to this pool of facts. Then we used machine learning, that’s artificial intelligence, the fear.
We used AI to help facilitating people’s feelings. What you’re seeing here is my avatar sitting among my Twitter friends and Facebook friends, and we all have something to say about Uber.
The thing is, when you enter this Polis website, it shows one sentiment -- I’ll translate it to English, by the way -- which you can agree or disagree. As you agree or disagree, your position moves on this two-dimensional map that represents all the possible different sides that people are taking toward Uber.
The interesting thing is, it lowers people’s antagonism. Is that an English word?
Antagonist against each other, because you see all these people on different sides are your Facebook and Twitter friends, you just didn’t talk about this over dinner.
Second, it shows that over three weeks of time, people can actually converge to the center. At the beginning, the people were all on the side, but because we say we only give binding power of anything that people can propose that convince a supermajority -- that’s 80 percent of people -- people compete to bring better ideas that resonate not only with like-minded people, but across the aisle.
By the end of three weeks, we have seven that very strongly resonated with everybody, such as insurance, such as tax paying registration, and so on. We just translated that into law.
A few questions.
Can you go back two slides, please? That slide. No, no, no. Go forward, one. Now, go forward, the other one.
This one?
Yes. You said that this, after three weeks, it actually moved people’s positions, right?
Is there a slide that shows how the aggregate looked before and after?
Yeah, I can produce them.
I’d really like to see that. It would be very helpful.
Visually aggregating to the center.
Yeah. I’m assuming I don’t know what I’m looking at here. Maybe I need two more slides. Here is where we were when we began. This is where we were after the deliberation. It’s very interesting. I think that would help really articulate it in the mind of the viewer.
OK, that’s right. After a few weeks.
This is a great example, by the way. I like this example so much than the .g0v example. This is very clear. We’ll talk about it. Keep going, please. Keep going. It’s very good.
I can take the g0v part out.
No, I don’t want you to take it out, but keep going.
After we get everybody’s feelings in a set of seven feelings that resonate with practically everybody -- they may be taxi drivers, they may be Uber drivers, everybody agrees on those things -- it’s now much easier for the government to meet with all the stakeholders, and check with them, one by one.
Here is the consensus of the people. Do you agree? If you do agree, how do we translate that into law? After the live consultation, which was livestreamed, and people had input, just as you are doing now, through their mobile phones, we ratified a set of regulations.
Uber cannot helped...cannot help. It’s actually not...
Was Uber a part of the ratification? They agreed?
They could not help but agree.
Yeah. They couldn’t help but agree.
They couldn’t help but agree.
They could not help but agree.
They have to agree, basically. There was... [laughs]
They are bound to the words they said during the live consultation, and they agreed. When we ratified this in August, 2016, everybody knew that it’s coming. Everybody anticipated it. Uber now operates legally in Taipei, but so did the taxi companies, who are now adopting the same model that Uber is using for dispatching its cars.
That’s the second story. I’ll pause a little bit here. I remember you saying but there is a rub. Do I literally say but there is a rub?
"A rub" is there’s a downside, basically. That’s when you say that. Go on.
Ratification. Everybody were... However...
Try it. There is a rub. See how it works.
There is a rub. This process is very expensive. We put maybe a dozen full-timers, and a lot of mediators, volunteers also, who run this process over the preparation with three months or so. It was experimental.
Of course, people all wanted to see whether the techniques we had in Occupy can work for a national deliberation. It did work, but it was very expensive. As a consequence, the public servants, the bureaucrats, are somewhat turned...Do I say turned off? Do I say shied away? Do I say afraid? Become kind of afraid.
If all the policy making needs to be...How expensive was it? It’s maybe 20 fulltime staff on the government side for three months, 20 volunteers on the civil society side for three months. It’s very involved.
I want to say it’s expensive. I guess I want to say it’s expensive, but what’s the cost of not doing it? How expensive is it to not come to agreement, if you’re hiring lawyers? Is it really expensive compared to lawyers, and lawsuits, and endless...? I don’t know, I’m just asking.
Maybe I shouldn’t say expensive. I would say it demanded a lot of commitment, or something like that.
Were they complaining about money, or were they complaining about time...
They are complaining about time. They had to put down other things that they are doing.
It is time consuming, definitely, right?
Yeah, it’s super time consuming.
Super time consuming. Go for it.
It’s super time consuming.
Right, go on.
We thought, but there is a lot of different ways that we can improve on this to scale this process of listening, and automate a lot of this stuff that we had real human beings doing, like collecting people’s ideas, and responding to them, and so on. All these could presumably be automated by machine intelligence.
This is why I was hired, right after the ratification, as the digital minister of Taiwan. We started this public digital innovation space, PDIS. It’s like the GDS, or USDS in the US.
Maybe it’s not so good to make comparison like this? Anyway, we started PDIS...
It’s not a bad thing to do, by the way. Wherever you can help me understand what it is, is useful.
It’s like the Government Digital Service in the UK, or the US Digital Service in the US. It’s a digital service of the national level. We have designers. We have programmers. We have a lot of young people working to automate away a lot of those chores that the public servants are doing, in order to make participation possible.
Even more interesting than the technological contributions we are doing, is the culture that we are bringing. I’m a radically transparent digital minister. By that, I mean that all the journalists, all the lobbyists, everybody gets to ask me questions, but only publicly.
I get questions from a private email, I will reply and say if it’s OK to give my answers publicly. If not, I just give them links to what my previous statements are. Because of this culture of radical transparency, to my knowledge, I’m the only one in the world in a national government doing this.
It’s not just to the lobbyists and journalists, but also for internal meetings. For all the hundreds of internal meetings that I have since I was the digital minister, everything was transcribed. There was the written record for everything everybody said during meetings, and we sent them to participants afterwards to check for 10 days, and publish.
The effect of this is very surprising. The bureaucrats actually become very innovative and risk-taking. They propose some very good ideas under this condition. That’s because previously, before I introduced this kind of radical transparency, they would get the blame if things go wrong, and the minister would get the credit if things go right.
Now, with this completely accountable record, if things go right, they get the credit, because their name is on the transcript. Because it’s an experimental method, if things go wrong, it’s all the digital minister’s fault. Under this condition, they become very innovative and open to a lot of interesting ideas.
One of the ideas is adopting this thoroughly free software platform called Sandstorm, as our public service internal platform. We use the same tools, like Etherpad, like Trello, like Slack, how the free software community is organizing ourselves these days, we also use it in the public service.
Previously, the roadblock was the cyber security issue, but we were able to find this community platform called Sandstorm, that solves the cyber security problem. It gets audited by our cyber security department, so that all the free software than runs on top of it doesn’t suffer from cyber security attacks and issues.
We were able to adopt a lot of free software working methods, just by adopting this Sandstorm free software platform.
Can I ask you, interrupt you a bit, pardon my ignorance?
Yeah, sure.
What’s the virtue of using free software? Is it simply to save money, or is there a larger philosophical issue that you are concerned with?
There is, of course, saving money, because for the 60,000 public servants, to pay for per-seat license is impossible.
Impossible...?
Yeah. There is also, because it’s free software, we are not dependent on any vendors. If any public servant doesn’t like the system we are using, and they can code, they just contribute and make the system a little bit better.
I think you need to explain that, OK?
First of all, that there are 60,000, and 60,000 licenses. No one was going to pay for that. That was a roadblock that we overcame with this. Second is, if you don’t like the software, and you can code, change it, or find some 12-year-old who can change it for you, right? Something like that?
That’s exactly right.
I think it’s important to say that.
Yes. We have a lot of interesting systems proposed by young public servants, like an app for ordering lunch together, or to plan travels together, or whatever. It’s really good to have this choice.
That’s a great detail that actually brings people together.
Now we have a free software community inside the national government... How do I bridge into this?
Also, we had a e-petition platform as a way for people to participate. It was like the "We the People" platform in the US. It really didn’t receive much attention before I was the digital minister, because people would get those very blank, very bureaucratic answers that doesn’t really solve their problems, but just explains the problems.
The reason why is that often, when people propose something, it touches many different ministries. The one ministry designated to answer for it can only answer for the little part that it has in this policy suggestion.
After I become the digital minister, we asked each ministry to send a team, at least one person, to serve as participation officer. We assembled this virtual team of 50 people online, using Slack, using all those online tools, and trained them to face the people directly.
Now, in Taiwan, when people start to get a petition, they know instead of a written, nonsensical response from any minister, they will actually get to meet with all the relevant ministries, either in Taipei, where the capital is, or we will fly to those rural areas and islands, if they are petitioning for a local development.
We were able to solve a lot of very interesting problems like this, without any ministry committing too much people to it. That relieved their fear, uncertainty, and doubt, since the time when we did the Uber deliberation.
This time, everything was automated, they only put one or two people forward, and they still get a pretty good result.
That’s kind of a little long to the end.
Indeed.
I think this section should be a little shorter. I think the answer is what you are doing is...You said it was a nonsensical response. I don’t that’s the right word. I think it’s a bland and bureaucratic response that no one believes anymore. It just feels dutiful, if you know that word.
Yeah, "dutiful" is great.
Dutiful is a great word. No passion. No conviction. A dutiful, boring response. This actually got people to engage. I think that’s the point. You’re talking about engagement. Is that what you were talking about?
That’s right.
Get to that. This should be a little shorter. Keep going, please.
I just go to the other slide?
I don’t know. I interrupted you. I’m sorry...
...it’s fine.
Where are we next? What’s the next slide?
It’s the ending, actually. It’s just another minute after this. The idea is that voting and clicktivism is very easy. Everybody can do it, like four bits every four years, but it’s not much bits. Or we can do hacktivism, and occupy the parliament to exercise agenda-setting power and transform the society, but we cannot do that for every policy issue.
We need to build a ladder between the two polar opposites. We need to build a sharing of open data. We need to build interactive public Q&A forums. That’s where we are at, at the moment.
We bring the technology to people, instead of asking disadvantaged people to use technology. We can build a deliberation system that scales to all the local communities, the regional community, and the national policy-making community, for everything.
The best thing is that this process itself is in the commons. You don’t have to go through the Taiwanese...
The commons?
The process itself is free. The process itself is a free software project, so you don’t have to go through the Taiwanese government if you want to run it for your local government. You can just take our code and process, and fork it.
Anyone anywhere on Earth can run this idea of taking something like a non-resolvable singularity, and turn it over into what we call a plurality that will listen to one side and then the other side across a time dimension, resolving our differences. Then eventually know what we ask of any specific technology, instead of having the technology dictating what we do.
I think we need to build a unified democracy, not hijacked by ideologies. We need to build an efficient democracy that respond to the demands of the environment, and a pragmatic democracy that will let people take care of each other’s feelings. We do this just by listening and building technologies to help us listen to each other. Thank you for listening.
Beautiful. You call it a pragmatic. I call it "empathetic."
"Empathetic," that’s much better.
Because pragmatic is practical, but with the hearts you’re thinking empathetic, which is that I can hear you. I actually hear you.
That’s a radical idea these days, as you know. Nobody’s listening anymore, right?
It’s very inspiring. I want to go back to the g0v part. The very first section, please.
Yes, this part.
This is great. You’re really great.
Thank you.
You’re welcome.
This is the occupy.
We occupy parliament. We get that. Move to the next one, please.
This talks about how many sides there is.
Sunflower.
The Sunflower Movement, and we’re able to scale the deliberation by deploying civic technology from the g0v movement.
This is fork. Look at me and tell me. I got lost where...it got very technical. This is going to...
No, it’s OK.
Tell me in English. Tell me simply, to me, what this means. What’s the impact of this? What’s the power of this?
The g0v movement is this idea that instead of blaming the government for not doing something right, the civil society can do a prototype, and do that thing well, to show the government how to do it.
I see.
We did that for many different government websites.
Can you give me an example?
One example.
One example? The canonical example is that the annual national budget is 500 pages long, is a PDF nobody actually read it. The g0v people, the very first project was this budget that g0v.tw, which shows the national budget in a way that everybody understands. I can actually open it, yeah.
It’s in Chinese. I hope it works. Yeah, it works. Right, it doesn’t matter.
What this does is that it shows the national budget according to every different ministries, and it’s showing the ones that’s raising year after year in green and decreasing year after year in red.
Bubbles correspond to the size of the budget. If you click on each one, you see it shows the nitty-gritty details. You can also switch to the bird’s eye view that lets you, well, it’s taking its time. Yes, so you can drill down to each and every budget details.
After the g0v did this and after the occupying after the election, the Taipei City Government, the newly elected mayor, an Occupier himself, just copy and paste it, this whole thing to Taipei’s budget program as the participatory budget platform for the Taipei City.
Anyone can just look at any one part of the Taipei City budget on this map and type in any question they want to ask and a career public servant actually comes to the phone and answer for that part of the question. It becomes a direct dial up platform, not through the city council, but for the career public servant with the people.
This is so much clearer to me than what you said before.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, please use the example, OK?
Please, use that visual. It’s fantastic, it’s clear, it’s almost fun.
To turn a budget of that size into something that’s engaging and fun, that’s quite...That was done by a bunch of hackers?
Yeah, that’s the beginning of the g0v movement. Then we start doing that for every other website as well.
Really great. That’s a much more powerful example. I think in one of the sheets I send you, it says that the specific is always more memorable than the the abstract, OK? You don’t have too much abstraction. That was the only abstraction that I got really lost on.
I don’t think you need to exemplify everything. But I think that is a perfect way of going from words to pictures to clarity.
That’s right. Anything else I need to improve on?
I think you’re brilliant. What is it that you want to improve on? You just walked me through it. What felt like you want to strengthen it? What did you want to strengthen? What did you feel that you want to change, basically? When you were talking, was there any place where you thought, "Eh, not so strong"?
As you mentioned, the participation officer part, I can cut it by half, and I’ll work on it.
The bridge from the, "...and now it’s transforming our society, but before I tell you about it, I’d like to invite your participation." Though this part didn’t feel that natural, but I just...
That’s what I would do. Maybe there are more elegant ways of doing it, but I don’t know. I just think people will fight to be invited to do things.
Maybe I just didn’t...
By the way, wait, I have one more question for you. This is a pretty clicked-on audience, pretty smart audience. What do you want from them in the end? Do you want to know people? Do you want to know ideas? Do you want to bring this to other places? Is your goal simply to convey information about what’s going on?
See, I’m not attending there in person. I would like to make connections to people working in the civil society, especially in the local-level government, local organizers, who can much easier deploy this kind of methodology than the national government, which is very difficult.
Why don’t you end with your request or your call to action, OK?
Look, you started out as an optimist. Maybe you want to spread optimism around the world. Do that, maybe it’s helpful to be in touch with people who are doing a similar thing.
Yeah, but I can do that in the Q&A. I don’t have to do it in the first 10 minutes.
No, not at all. I’m talking about a wrap, an end to this presentation, OK?
Just something. This is a pretty smart audience from around the world. You have a good idea to...It could be useful if you want to ask them who it is you’re looking to connect with. That’s it. It’s a thought.
OK, I’ll keep it in mind.
Keep it in mind. I hope this has been useful to you. Has it been useful to you?
Yes, super-useful.
You have the recording also, right?
Yes, and I was just about to ask you whether you feel comfortable publishing the transcript, the text of what we just talked about?
A hundred percent.
What about the video?
Did you video me?
I recorded the whole two hours. You’re OK with me just publishing the whole thing?
Of course, I am. This is about process. What I do is what I do with everyone. This is what I enjoy doing. You were good enough to share your content with me and be open to change your content. I gave you my honest feedback, of course.
That’s great. The whole thing will be on YouTube then. I’ll send you a link.
You just linked me. Yes, my name, tag me properly. Yes, of course, absolutely. I’ve never had that done before. It’s fantastic.
I’ll have to work on the vocal modulation a lot more to just get it just right, like not 30 percent more, but because this is pre-recording, anyway, I’ve got plenty of chance of retakes.
Don’t be inauthentic. Don’t not be you, OK?
I just want to encourage you that you have an instrument that you can use to your own effect. You can use it more mindfully to get what you want to bring power to your language.
I’ll definitely do that.
You’re a very powerful woman. You have powerful ideas. I want you to express them in English, it’s not your first language, as powerfully as possible.
I hope someday, somewhere in the world, I meet you.
Same here. It’s been a great two hours. Thank you so much.
It’s a pleasure. Thank you for sharing with me, OK?
Cheers.
Cheers.
Bye-bye.