We’ll be on the record with a transcript published after 10 days of editing.
Perfect. No problem. Can I get a copy of the recording?
Of course. Of course. Yeah, right after our talk.
Cool. So, Hi! [laughs]
How are you?
I’m good. I’m Antonios and I’m from Greece. I’m involved as a political activist/social innovator/educator now. I just wanted to get some inspiration. My question in the email was, how do we make democracy more inclusive?
What brings you to Taiwan?
I’m here for a conference – the general assembly of one of the largest student organizations. It’s the largest medical students’ organization. I worked as a soft skills trainer.
That’s great. I read on your CV that you’re location-independent. Does that mean that you fly over the world?
I try to keep it more sustainable, so I try to prefer buses, trains, or whatever, but in some caces flights are inevitable, so I fly a lot, yeah…
I usually use telepresence or hologram, things like…which is even more environmentally [laughs] sustainable.
That would be… Yeah, I’m looking to the future as well. [laughs]
So, democracies. What kind of democracy are you referring to? What kind of democracy would you like to discuss?
That’s a good question to begin with.
Athenian, or…?
Definitions. [laughs]
I do come from Greece. [laughs]
That’s right! [laughs]
For me, democracy is basically the way that the citizens make the decisions.
Yeah, cause you are an expert, right? [laughs]
Just linguistically. [laughs]
I should be.
That’s right. So, the work that I’m doing, I refer to it as continuous democracy, meaning that it is more a shorter interval between conversations. So, actually, a little bit like in Greece, but not in Rome [laughs] – ancient – it’s about just random people interested in a public affair, and having a public sphere to have a conversation.
And have the conversation be binding in terms of setting the agenda of the people in the administration here, and then have the administration respond in the here-and-now rather than having to wait for the parliamentary session or for the next voting or for the next referendum, which all takes place in two-year or four-year intervals.
In Taiwan, we have every year a major election followed by a referendum, followed by a major election, followed by a referendum, and so on. This it’s even/odd, even/odd years. My work is primarily in the gap between one vote and one referendum.
Within this time frame, which is usually 10 months every year we do our work by enabling continuous democracy.
And how does technology help in that, especially when it comes to enabling a large number of people to have a say?
Democracy is a kind of technology, actually. It’s a social technology, right? In ancient Greece, people used very interesting machines to [laughs] do tallying and voting and…
Clay. [laughs]
Right, exactly. Clay. Clay-powered technology. Social technology. I read on Wikipedia somebody modeled the ancient Greece operating system of the entire democracy as a kind of connected systems. And it’s very interestingly designed. Modern technology expands on that.
As long as you were in the elite, you could have a say.
Nowadays, it’s still that animals and rivers don’t have a say. So today it’s still for the elites – that is to say, the human beings who are of 20 years or older if you’re in Taiwan, which are very unfortunate, because in our continuous democracy, the most active participants are around 15 years old and 16 years old. They had to wait like four years before they even get the right of voting their representative.
My work is using technology to enable people who are 15 or 16 years old to have a say, not only individually but also to organize. And to organize online, you need a technology that is good for listening, not just good for speaking. Speaking is very easy. If you have megaphones, you can speak very loudly. Now radio, television, and so on.
Now, with the Internet, the person who raised an e-petition, for example. Two years ago, we had a person raising the e-petition of gradually banning all one-time use plastic utensils. That’s a very imaginative proposal with a lot of photos like sea turtles chocked by plastics and things like that.
The important thing is when they propose this petition, they get 5,000 signatures from all walks of life, and each of them have a different reason to sign this e-petition, which is part of our e-participation website, called Join, now with 10.6 million unique visitors since 2015. For each petition, we also have a pro and contra columns for people to post their different opinions and upvote and downvote, but they cannot reply to each other.
Because if you have the reply button, people with the most time dominate the discussion, but if you don’t have the reply button, and this we learned from Reykjavik from Iceland, if you can only upvote and downvote, then the best ideas surface to the top, but you don’t have personal attacks.
So this is the kind of design that makes the petitioner not only write their petition, not only see the 5,000 people, but also have a column of pro and a column of contra. Each statement can be upvoted or downvoted, but they cannot reply to each other. There’s no personal attack because you cannot quote anyone.
So, this way, we look at the most, in absolute numbers, topmost ideas from both sides and have the ministries in charge, like Environmental Protection Agency and so on, to similarly design a handbook for the people who participate in the petition, and invite them into a face-to-face meeting that we hold every other week.
Where we meet the petitioner, the EPA thought that it must be a very senior environmental activist because they get 5,000 signatures in no time, but turns out she’s just 16 years old, and it’s her civics class assignment to find something that can resonate with people. [laughs] Unlike in Europe where she probably have to strike on Fridays and go to the street… [laughs]
We have the Internet playing the same role as the Friday strike, but gathering people’s opinion in a way that actually enable the EPA to see this as signal and not a lot of noise, not very loud, but only the top, very reasonable suggestions. They committed to it, and so this July, you see plastic straws being gradually banned in Taiwan.
This is a concrete example of having Internet and having people’s different positions be gathered in a face-to-face meeting that is then broadcasted for people to see that we have some same values after all, and then move the democracy forward in intervals that’s a week, or a month, or at most, two months instead of a few years.
I see several challenges there. The first one I want to ask is, who can ask a question?
Cause we’re talking about a petition system here, so the person who is more tech-savvy or the person who can physically use a device. People that are disabled according to what device they can use have less access, or people that are less educated, or people that may be using a different language are kind of limited. So how can you enable people that…?
How to be more inclusive.
…don’t have the same access to…Yeah.
First, let’s compare it to the baseline. It’s not like representative democracy does better here. If you’re illiterate, if you’re someone who don’t have physical access to computers, it’s almost impossible for you to participate in representative politics either.
For sure.
This is on the baseline. In Taiwan, we have what we call broadband as human right. No matter where you are in Taiwan, even the most remote, indigenous places, you’re guaranteed to have 10 megabits per second, which enables live-streaming, not just textual representation.
We have witnessed that if you don’t have broadband, if you have to rely on text, then there’s a lot of psychological projection to the text that doesn’t work.
If you have video access, but only in 240p or worse resolution, again, you see people in a very abstract painting kind of way. You can still project the micro-expression that they don’t have into it, and that actually widens the divide instead of bringing people together.
It’s only with 1080p or better can you actually feel what it feels like to be that person, and so we always insist on high-definition live-streaming. We actually bring those conversations to the people. We don’t ask people to come to the social technology.
So for example, just one quick example, I bring this conversation to wherever the petitioners are. Like people in Hongxiu, I go to Hongxiu, people in Pescadores, I go to Pescadores. People who petition about fishing rights of amateur versus professional fishing in harbors, then we actually go to a harbor and have this conversation.
While I go to there personally, it’s not just me, all the relevant ministries, 12 ministries that are here in the Social Innovation Lab and seeing through the two-way video conferencing to the local people.
This works so well so that like six cities and municipalities are now all joining this network, which we tour around Taiwan every other week or so and talk with the local people on the local issues.
For them, it’s just a town hall. They go to where they usually gather, they talk the usual way, but the difference is that they get real-time response, not just a written response. The benefit for the ministries is that they can see the whole context.
They don’t have to guess and they don’t have to copy the other ministry with just a A4 paper, but everybody is in the same room and they can brainstorm.
This kind of design is for maximal inclusiveness, meaning that even if you don’t have Internet access, as long as one of your friends have Internet access, you can just participate in the town halls.
That’s nice. The other challenge I see is that, people who are already famous and have a big reach can easily rise to the top regardless of whether the idea is good, but just because they have a large fan base or whatever you want to call it.
That’s right.
How can you prevent that?
We’re not preventing that because, for example, this anonymous person that raised the plastic straws issue, she’s not famous at all. She basically just proposed an idea that really resonates with everybody, but we allow pseudonyms so that nobody knows she’s actually 16 years old.
There’s many cases where we don’t really know who is the proposer, perhaps because it concerns a asymmetric power relationship. Like there was someone who proposed that public servants should be able to take absence by hour instead of by half day.
It’s clear that all the 5,000 people who petitioned are probably public service, but without pseudonymous protection, they would probably not dare to propose it. What happened is that, only after this was ratified, signed into the regulation do the proposer came out and say, “Oh, it was me who proposed this.”
We allow a kind of pseudonymous effect. So even if somebody purports to be a very famous person, you don’t really know whether that’s just a pseudonym chose by a anonymous person, or is that really them.
Of course, they can post videos or so on saying that, “I initiate this petition,” but all they get is a chance to have a conversation. It’s not always to their favor because sometime you see a bad idea, and the contra side actually dominates the discussion. This is a design where it’s only setting agenda, but it doesn’t control where the conversation goes.
The final challenge that I see there is democracy as the will of the majority. So the main issue that I have here is, somebody who is in the minority and has an unpopular opinion but has to do, for example, with human rights. How do you protect that?
This quote that is attributed to Benjamin Franklin, although I think he never said it, but democracy as having two wolves and one sheep deciding what’s for dinner. [laughs] How can you prevent that?
I think instead of preventing that, we’re showing people it’s not about majority or minority. Usually, we use a tool when there’s really a lot of comment that we cannot physically go through. We ask people to crowd moderate each other’s comments, and so this is called pol.is.
This visualization is very interesting because as you can see, even though this is less than 200 people, this is 242, but the area is not dependent on the number of people holding that opinion.
So if you have 5,000 people going in, vote exactly the same, it’s not going to expand the area because the are is calculated by asking each person, for each comment, whether you agree or disagree.
As you press agree or disagree, your avatar moves among the people who share your ideas, and so first you can see that these are not anonymous enemies. These are your friends and family. You just disagree on this particular public issue.
Second, it shows that people’s positions can change. If a minority actually have more diverse ideas in a idea landscape, then that minority actually has a larger area. This is not proportional to the people, but actually to the diversity of their opinions.
After each discussion, we share a picture like this, and this is very surprising because most people would think that if they are in a minority, it’s in one of those divisive statements that polarize the society. The fact is, minority or not, most people agree on most of the things, most of the time, with most of their neighbors, so the majority/minority is a false dichotomy.
Around each public issue, most people actually agree on most of those things. It’s just the media and the social media amplify the 5 percent into 95 percent of conversation, but in actual fact, we can regulate and just promulgate this rough consensus while continuing discussion on those divisive issues.
This shape, this reflective shape is what we always get after three or four weeks of one conversation. Once we show this to the people, people forget about them being in the minority or majority. This is not a referendum, after all, people, is about, “Oh, we do have same values despite a few superficial differences.”
They’re very happy that we can just implement the good idea that widely considered good by everybody.
I know that this is a little bit abstract, so, let’s look at one simple example. For example, the de facto US Embassy collaborated with us on a question called, how to promote Taiwan’s role in global community.
We identified the groups as dividing over this statement, namely, how do we treat the PRC relationship? Is it part of a triangle, or is should it be decoupled from the Taiwan-US relationship?
If you’re a popular media, it’s likely that you would just dive into this wedge and then start asking polarizing questions, but with our system, we actually showed that there’s only one such statement that are divisive. Actually, most of the things, we will do agree.
Then, we just go through each of them because they have what we call group informed consensus. Which side you’re on, whether you’re in the relative minority or the relative majority, these are things everybody agrees on, and so that’s the thing that we should first pursue if it’s not yet pursued in US-Taiwan relationship. That’s my answer.
Well, that’s a good answer. [laughs]
Please go on.
I’m still thinking of where this could face even more challenges.
Of course.
I’m still focusing on this majority/minority issue. I’m thinking, for example, a very provocative question. You have a very conservative area, and you have a small minority. Somebody asks in a petition to drive them out, and most agree because they’re in the majority, so you have a minority that is being suppressed.
How do you prevent such an example from happening, even if everything else is like content?
The petition is just saying that we should talk about it. The petition is not a referendum. In design thinking terms, the petition is just for us to get people’s wide, diverging opinions of what the feelings and issues are.
A face-to-face meeting is just to converge, but to converge is not to a policy implementation, which is what you were referring to. The convergence is just to a “How might we” question. Meaning that this is something that people across the isles identify as important.
Once we have this, of course we can have more substantial conversations, but that would not be crowdsourced as well. It would be between the partnerships that was forged between this conversation.
Just a very simple example, for things like this, the implementation of people’s suggestions is up for the ministries and so on, in collaboration with people, but this is not about deciding something. The grouping for consensus means that even a group is very much in the minority. Still, there has to be a supermajority within those minority groups that supports this.
In your example, the excluded minority, unless they have like 80 percent supporting the feeling that they would love to be driven out, as long as some condition is met perhaps, then it will not even enter the agenda because it need to convince all the groups, no matter where it’s two, or three, or four groups.
Ok, that helps.
[laughs]
Then my next question will be, how do you motivate more people to participate, in the end?
By making it easy and fun.
Yeah, I guess that helps as well. What I’m thinking now is that, in Europe, in Switzerland for example, you have very frequent occasions where citizens decide, especially on their local issues, in their municipal issues, and still the participation is low, except when it’s a very pressing issue.
Because it takes time to understand the issue, to have meaningful conversation, but this is essentially saying, “Go online and see if you agree or not with the concern that your fellow citizen have.” You’ll spend maybe 15 seconds, and so everybody has 15 seconds of goodwill and of kindness, but if it’s 15 hours, then of course there will be a lot of reservation.
How does it work in practice, in the sense of, if you get a lot of opinions from the citizens, do they end up being implemented here in the end?
Of course, and with partnership. In our collaborative meetings, about half of the ideas after a face-to-face conversation, people collectively decide that it’s good to implement, and so these are implemented. Another half, people thought of another, better way of implementing, and so it did not get implemented by its original petition.
For example, there was a petition that say we should change the time zone of Taiwan to +9, the same as Japan. That did not get implemented. [laughs]
Good, I guess. [laughs]
The conversation is very fruitful because there’s another counter-petition at the time, also 8,000 people, that says Taiwan should remain in the GMT+8, and we invite both sides into a face-to-face dialogue.
That must be fun. [laughs]
Lots of fun, and the +9 said that, like daylight saving, it will save energy, it will improve trade, it would improve tourism, it will improve a lot of the things, traffic. And then we get the ministries of interior, of economy, and finance, and all sort of different ways to respond – and transportation – to respond with numeric models. [laughs]
We actually calculated how much it will affect energy use, and the change is negligible. The ministry of economy said it will not increase tourism unless everybody breaks labor law, which is not going to happen, and so on. [laughs] We have numeric models.
The petitioner was like, “OK, so these are the facts,” but they want to share their feelings, their feelings that they want people coming from Beijing or Shanghai who landed in Taiwan to have to change their watch to show Taiwan’s uniqueness around the world. [laughs]
There must be better ways. [laughs]
As you can see, if it’s a referendum and so on, like half the people would feel hurt because their side did not win, right?
This is not a referendum, so people actually converge on the idea. As you put it, there must be better ways. If we are going to pay a one-time large cost to change a system – we calculated how large – and a smaller, but still significant, annual cost. Then, with the same budget, can we do better?
People start brainstorming, and people said, “Oh, actually, if we let everybody know we are the first Asian country, actually the only, with marriage equality, that actually makes Taiwan more unique.”
People have a lot of brainstorm ideas. [laughs] People also pointed out, nowadays, the watch – they are all smartwatches.
So they adapt automatically.
They auto-adjust. You don’t even feel about it. [laughs]
Beijing can just say, “You know, Hong Kong has its own currency,” right?
It doesn’t really help. People probably agree, and so all 18,000 people said, “Oh, this new way of using budget to promote Taiwan, that may actually be a better idea than changing time zone while achieving the value that we petitioned about.”
This room of conversation provides this far more creative potential than a simple referendum where everybody can only contribute one bit. That’s a actual case.
The actual case that did get adopted is someone who proposed that the tax filing software is very hostile to use two years ago. Because in every ministry we have a team of participation officers who engage with people in real-time, so once they post that and we see 80 percent of people was flaming, meaning attacking the ministry of finance.
This person from Ministry of Finance, the PO at the time, just said, “Everybody who complains is now cordially invited to a co-creation workshops,” two weeks later in the Ministry of Finance, so that we can create the next year’s tax filing together.
I obviously reply saying, “Oh, I’m Audrey Tang, and what he said is true,” and so basically everybody, 80% started offering constructive criticism instead of just flaming because they now see they’re invited to the kitchen, so to speak.
Turns out the petitioner, while the initial wording is very toxic, he’s actually a interaction designer, so he feels the pain the most because he’s the professional. [laughs]
He cares the most, so he suffers the most, and then we live-stream the co-creation workshop. We have people going online, and we use user journey to map the before, during, and after of tax filing. People’s actions, needs, feelings and how we can adjust those feelings and the burdens they have to carry going through the process.
Even though there’s thousands of comments, if you lay it out in a matrix, then all the duplicates are just consolidated into one single Post-it note and so this mess is the entirety of the problem.
We run four following workshops inviting the most toxic people online to join, because they must care the most, and then the people who they attacked are here. [laughs]
There is live feedback.
Once we meet face-to-face, and share food, and start drawing together, the toxicity is gone, and so, together, they made the new tax filing system that is widely approved.
And so by voicing your concern, you get invitation up to the time you are willing to spend into the co-creation and design process. At the end of publishing this, we have thousands of people feeling they had a part of creating this, and so they will actually be volunteer advocates for the new system.
We can always get this design if we spend a lot of money, but we cannot engage people with the goodwill, the kind we do here.
That was the most impressive, so far. [laughs] That is amazing. I see challenges in that, mostly in the sense that if the state wants to implement that, then that also takes money, effort, people. Well worth it…
This actually takes negative budget.
The co-creation workshops.
Yeah, because during the workshop, a IT engineer, after talking with the civil service in charge of tax filing, noticed that the ministry was paying the rental of the bandwidth and the machine the entire May for the tax filing, and anticipating the influx of people filing the tax online.
They said there is this idea called elastic computing, that you can rent the computer as you want it.
They observed that only the first two days and the last two days have high usage because people were in a rush to file a tax and they’re in a rush to catch-up on filing their tax, but the middle three weeks, there’s almost no activity compared to the first and last few days.
They’re like, “Why don’t you just reject the telecom’s proposal that you rent for the month and, anticipating this flow, you can just rent this in a elastic way?”
The IT department implement it this year, and they save a lot of money, of which running the workshop is just a fraction of cost, and so the net budget is negative.
Wow. That is still the most impressive part for me. That is what I take the most of. If we were to implement that in X country, what will be the main challenges in implementing it?
I’m at a advisory council of a effort called CrowdLaw. If you type crowd.law [types it on a tablet and shows the result], I think it’s this one, it shows not just our methodology and case study, but actually what everybody else is doing as well.
There is what they call a CrowdLaw Catalog. This is a what we call a digital compendium of everything in the different stage – the level of government, the stage of the government, the task that you want to achieve. It’s not about the technology. The technologies only comes in when you have the design brief of the expected outcome of your agenda-setting.
Based on where you are, and what kind of level of engagement you want to be, and the political power, whether they’re aligned with this process, and so on, this allows you to find natural allies across your region to implement it because a lot of it is cultural.
We can’t just transfer a process. It’s just like democracy itself, and so I cannot give a shortened answer that works for the whole world. [laughs]
Of course.
There is the catalog and a checklist that if you do these things, at least people will not feel cheated. They will allow the second chance if the first one doesn’t work. There are also things that it doesn’t work. If you do this once, then people feel that they get a false run, then it will not work.
You can see the basic check points in the CrowdLaw manifesto. This is all in the CrowdLaw website.
Yeah, I’ll definitely look it up. I wasn’t aware of that one. That’s super cool. Because I work, basically I facilitate discussions and do things like that as my job. I would be interested in what is the model of discussion that you are using in the final part that you mentioned, the co-creation.
We use what we call “dynamic facilitation.” I’m sure that you are already quite [laughs] fluent in that. Tom Attlee, the person who showed me dynamic facilitation, actually wrote a few blogs about how the practice works in Taiwan. I would also recommend you to checkout…
…Atlee’s blog. We are also informed by open space technology. Pol.is is a kind of online open space technology, where people just go to the people who feel like them, right?
Also, we are indebted to the focused conversation method, which actually is where the polarized conversation is situated in. The focused conversation method says that we should first lay out the facts. Changing time zone doesn’t save energy.
[laughs]
We should also reserve time for people’s feelings, to check in their feelings. That’s where pol.is and the whole Open Space thing comes in. The best ideas are the ones that take care of most people’s feelings. This is, again, a non-violent communication thing, right? We have universal needs that are just surfaced by a polarized conversation.
Finally, the ideas after this recognition, then we can co-develop them into implementations, knowing that everybody will be at least not against it. This is what we call a rough consensus at the decisional stage. The framework is focused conversation.
That’s so nice. I have a lot of inspiration now to start doing more stuff like that.
That’s right. That’s right. For how long are you staying in Taiwan?
I’m still planning it around. I have some free time, so I can stay a few more days.
The social innovation lab, including the basement which was freshly decorated and opened today, [laughs] there’s a basement. Yeah, you can take a quick tour. The whole cultural lab is very interesting, as well.
Yeah, yeah. I’ll definitely go in.
All right, so I’ll send a transcript to you.
Yeah. Thank you very much.
Thank you.