It’s a little bit too formal a setting, but currently we don’t have other meeting rooms.
(laughter)
We will have to meet here.
Do you want water, coffee, or coke?
Yeah, water.
Sure, yeah. Take a seat.
I’ve lost my voice.
(background sounds only)
There’s this big strike in France, so to take the plane I had to ride my bike with my suitcases under the rain to the station where the airport shuttle is and I was completely drenched on the plane. It made me sick but I’m supportive of the strike.
That’s the solidarity.
Exactly. It’s just that taking the plane after this is not so comfortable when you are soaking wet. I have tons of questions to ask because I haven’t met you for so long.
I know.
You’re recording everything?
We will make a transcript. Because you are not bringing a video camera, so we will just send you a textual transcript.
You will. I don’t need to do it?
That’s right. That’s right. You can edit any part of it if we mention any state secret, although I doubt that we will.
(laughter)
You can edit any part of it, and then we publish after 10 days.
I’m not sure you will…
[laughs]
…tell me any of that. I’m not even sure…
(laughter)
…I’m interested.
OK. The first question I want to ask is, well, you don’t need to expand on this, but of your role, can you describe what your mission’s been here?
You mean as the digital minister?
Yes. Compared to what you thought you were going to do, have there been surprises in the missions, or disappointments?
The public sector is surprisingly innovative. Previously, we thought that most innovations comes from the society, like the social sector, or the industry – economic innovators.
It turns out that there’s tons of public-sector innovation, but because of anonymity in the public service task force, often, you don’t know about it. You will just see it as a credit to the minister, but not the internal innovators.
A lot of our work, surprisingly, is just to make sure that the civil society understand that there’s equally innovative people within the public sector, and that they can form partnerships without going through representatives or ministers. That’s been the largest surprise. There’s been no disappointments.
Good. That’s very good. Here, we’re in the Social Innovation Lab. But in your message, you said, “Let’s meet at the PDIS.” What are these two?
The PDIS, Pubic Digital Innovation Space, is literally just some spaces. We have a meeting room here. We have the office full of pizza right now in the ground floor. We have a room also in the basement. Those three are three physical spaces of the PDIS. Similarly, in the administration building, we also have two office spaces at the ground floor and one at the third floor.
These six physical spaces together form the physical compartment of the PDIS. Of course, we also have interns. They can work anywhere.
Whatever places that we’re working with – for example, we have two colleagues in PDIS based in UK now. The place in London, the place in Bristol, are also extension of the PDIS. Basically, whenever there is a space that allows for this kind of public-sector, civil-society, and private-sector co-creation, we work them into the idea of PDIS, but PDIS is literally just spaces.
Are there online spaces as well?
Yes. PDIS, of course, we have our website. We have deployed a system called Sandstorm that allows everybody, citizens, to contribute their open-source tools, such as HackMD, which by and large replaced Hackpad in our civic tech now.
Public service can also write something like ordering lunchbox together. Because it’s cybersecurity-audited, anything from the civic tech can instantly become gov tech and be used by the public service without worrying about cybersecurity and single sign-on and such.
That’s one of the primary online spaces. Of course, we also do our own development on Polis and on other civic tech, but we always contribute back. Our gov tech is based on civic tech.
I understand you’re putting everyone together.
You’re really giving the space for innovation to happen, bringing different actors together.
That’s right.
What is your objective? Is it to train everyone to work together? Or do you have different steps, and maybe your first objective is to train, maybe, civil service first and civil servants? Then, obviously, the civil society, which is already vibrant, and then more people to get involved?
Yeah, I think, by and large, what you said is right, is to get the career public servants into the habit of participating early stage agenda setting with the civil society.
Because we know after the agenda is set, there’s limited room for a civil society participation. Any consultation design at that time will be challenged for its legitimacy and broadened into a great debate and things like that. Right? It’s easier if you start up front saying, we don’t know what to do, and how about people who care about this co-create.
I wouldn’t say it’s training. It’s more of an unlearning, like whatever they have assumed of the civil society when there’s 5,000 people fear, as there can be doubt, and so on to unlearn those habits and to empower them then to have an early stage conversation. That is the first step.
After people can meet in a more collaborative fashion, of course, the usual Internet governance ideas at play, right, rough consensus, common values, set of different positions. That you already know very well.
Then, after that, just some innovations that we can take to the president or to the premier and say, hey, they won the Presidential Hackathon.
How about let’s accelerate them so that whatever they prototyped in Orchid Island or in Keelung, we give them a presidential award by the president, that is a micro projector, when turned on, it projects the president giving the award to the team.
That’s a mandate from the president whatever they did in the past three months, we will make it international policy within the next 12 months, and so that’s also the acceleration part.
We mostly talk about the middle one in our previous discussions. But the first enabling condition and the second the political will is now also part of the Social Innovation Lab’s agenda.
You really managed to work on the binding effect. Right?
OK, exceptional. When I first met you, you described yourself as a civic hacker.
That’s right.
But you also used the term anarchist.
Conservative anarchist, important prefix.
Yes. Conservative anarchist.
Not bomb-throwing anarchist.
Of course, of course. But then, how does it feel to be part of a government as an anarchist, whether conservative or not?
I’m working with, not for the government here. I’m also being board member of international NGOs, two at the moment, and we’re applying for the third.
I’m working in a very international way, making a facility to show that, instead of working for any particular agenda or for any particular government, I’m rather just working with people, in Taiwan. I guess the public sort of trust me most so that I can do most of the research here.
But a lot of our applications, through my participation as board members, in, for example, RadicalxChange with Vitalik Buterin. That’s in New York. Or in Digital Future Society, that’s in Spain, or the CONSUL Foundation, which started in Spain but they are moved to Amsterdam. I’m also actively participating in these work as well.
The experience has been, first up, it’s, I’m really grateful that the Ministry of Civil Service and so on, really relaxed and adjusted a lot of their working condition rules to make sure that I can be a international board member, that I can telework, that I can do a lot of these things.
But I made sure that they make those changes not for myself, but for everybody in the career public service. It also has a transformative function to the entire public service, as well for them to work in a more international and also more globalized fashion. That’s my first experience.
The second half, of course, the other way around, is that for international social innovators. They found that in Taiwan, whatever they first invent, like quadratic voting or whatever new methods of public decision, we just use them like within months, in Presidential Hackathon, and thereby, providing the vital proof of concept for these ideas to grow in other jurisdictions.
Mm-hmm. All right. So you are saying that you have worked with, not for the government.
Yeah, so giving no orders and taking no orders.
You would reject the term, for instance, cooptation.
I work with, right? Cooptation would mean I’m taking order but not giving order, but I’m neither taking order or giving order.
Is there a really good word in Chinese to describe this that we don’t have in English?
Well, there’s various words, but I still really like the initial translation of collaboration which is 協作, or just 協, is a common value, shared value, out of various different forces like the three forces, three meaning many.
It means to me that instead of 合作 which is like you have to first live under the same roof, and speak under the same roof for you to cooperate. But collaborate, even in English, it’s been used to describe a Vichy government, which is like a working with people who you oppose with.
That, I think, is a core way to describe that we may have opposing positions, but a common shared value like sustainability, and innovation, and inclusivity. That enables us to nevertheless do something that is good for all the stakeholders involved. So 協作, I will think it’s not a new word, but it is still very apt to describe this.
Would you say that your position allows you to represent some people or some values that were underrepresented before? Do you accept this term of representation?
I will follow Yves Sintomer and put a dash inbetween “re” and “present”. [laughs] The position allows me to re-present the positions by traveling around Taiwan, visiting the most rural, indigenous, and offshore places using broadband as human right.
To make sure that the 12 ministries here in the Social Innovation Lab every other week or so, see in their own eyes, fish bowl-like, across 12 ministries, what the local people are thinking about.
I’m always participating this locally as a facilitative role. I’m not speaking on behalf of them, I’m making sure that their original town hall format is kept, but it’s just incidentally being listened to by five municipalities and 12 ministries.
The agendas are still directly coming from the local people, but using digital means I make sure it is re-presented in a way that is a higher fidelity across ministries.
What you’re saying – as you know I really don’t know the Taiwan system very well – at the local level, before you were here, people already had possibility to locally talk about their needs.
Of course, it’s called community building, 社區營造.
You didn’t really need to…
Invent that, that’s right.
Not to invent, but to improve that or encourage it more, or make it more inclusive. What you’re doing is really making the connections, making sure that it has some impact.
Yes, because previously in community-building town halls, maybe they talk about education. Then the bureau of education of course will be part of it in their municipality or township, but then it will then talk only to the Ministry of Education.
When it requires, say, Interior support, Health support, or Economy support, it’s copied always as very abstract, bureaucratic wordings. That loses almost all of the original context of why this needs to be supported.
People in Taipei will feel that they have solved a problem, but actually may cause more problem, locally. I’m sure Paris doesn’t have this problem with the rest of France. [laughs]
Basically the idea is that instead of asking everybody to tour Taiwan with me, which would be prohibitively expensive, it’s just me who travels. I make sure that they’re being listened to in real time by 12 different ministries across Taiwan that can then ideate possible solutions with the right context.
If they say something that’s right, they get the credit, because you can see them across that screen. In Taiwan, we say meeting face to face build 30 percent of trust, and in high definition video conference, maybe 20 percent of trust. They trust the citizens more to initiate the ideas.
Then I absorb the risk because if people here in Taipei say something really insensitive, you can’t punch people over a projector. I’m the only one in the vicinity. [laughs] I absorb the risk, they get credit. That’s how we get the Social Innovation Tours working.
Your role is not a representative, but an observer.
Mm-hmm, and re-presents their work.
Re-presenting. Now you, to me, you’re obviously working here. You’re located in Taiwan, but there is so much global dimension in what you’re doing. Are you also thinking of what you’re representing in terms of global citizenship?
Very much so. There was, I think, ARD, a German video broadcaster that asked me the question of whether I think that Taiwan could be an example of Chinese people being fit for democracy. I said that – that’s posted on social media – I think Taiwan is a perfect example that Homo sapiens is fit for digital democracy. [laughs]
Designing with the global perspective I think really enabled me to find as natural allies people in Switzerland, and so on, without worrying too much about the cultural differences.
I start with a transcultural point of view, and if you start with a transcultural instead of a local culture point of view, then you can very easily take the best practices, such as Better Reykjavík, or whatever other places and absorb them then in also the public service here.
When I first met you, you were already using vTaiwan, and I guess it’s been used many more times.
It’s now handed over to the social sector.
What are the main evolutions of the process?
Two things. First we enable a very vTaiwan-like process within the public sector called the participation officer on their work. Unlike vTaiwan, every part of it is carried out by career public service.
Just like vTaiwan, people are building a learning circle in the sense that, for example, public collaboration meeting of which we run about two each month, are collaboratively decided. Literally voted in by all the participation officer, hundreds of them across all the 32 ministries, and now in a municipality as well.
This model enables a vTaiwan-like feature where people only talk about things that they think worthwhile to talk about. It enables, say, the participation officer of Finance or Public Construction to talk about things like animal welfare and so on, as a facilitator so they understand how the public administration works, but they have no stake in this.
They will be perceived as a better facilitator and mediator than anyone in the public service working on that particular purview. That, we also learned from vTaiwan. That’s a core vTaiwan part is having mediators that are relatively disinterested, but as knowledgeable as any stakeholder on the process part of it. That’s also part of vTaiwan.
That’s the vTaiwan assimilation into the public sector. But we didn’t assimilate people. We assimilated the process. We enacted the vTaiwan process within the national government.
It’s pretty successful, the joined platform, which the join network mostly operates, now have 10 million visitors. Considering Taiwan is 23 million people, that’s a lot of people, right? [laughs] That’s very successful.
VTaiwan becomes, then, something that is more research-level work. There’s many parts in vTaiwan that talks about how to improve democracy as a whole, like getting people who support different partisan ideologies to talk to each other systemically.
That went beyond participatory rule-making. It has become kind of a democracy culture-forming initiative. Of course, vTaiwan do this agenda-setting for regulation from time-to-time, like e-scooters and so on, but it’s a more generative fashion. Like vTaiwan debated and deliberated about the fintech sandbox or the self-driving sandbox, the platform economy, and so on.
Each one then creates a vTaiwan-like process for experimentation on that particular subfield, carving out sandboxes from our continental law system, as approved by the legislators. Once that happens, then a vTaiwan-like process gets its own life, like self-drive vehicles or fintech sandbox and so on.
It doesn’t need original vTaiwan crew, so they’re not swamped by operational obligations. They can then pivot and just try something else that improves the democratic disciplines.
You mentioned that there’s debate on how to improve democracy. How does it take place? Is it an ongoing conversation?
Every Wednesday from 7:00 PM, we’re just meet here, like right here.
That’s where I’m going, here. I’m going tonight.
No, you’re coming tonight, because it’s in this room. It’s literally here.
It’s really what we’re going to be talking about?
I don’t know, because it’s open space technology, right? Whomever comes is the right people. They can talk about anything.
What happens on Wednesdays is a lot about…
Improving democracy, in general.
…improving democracy and having people with different partisan convictions talk together.
That’s exactly right.
Very interesting. Regarding this idea of conversation, I think in the president’s inaugural speech, I found this quote. She said, “Democracy is a conversation among many different…”
“Between many diverse values,” yes.
“…values,” yes. Democracy is a conversation, but I remember you always talk about consensus, and trying to, for instance, choosing pol.is because it was designed to be a consensus.
We encourage, what, rough consensus. But, yes, still some sort of a consensus.
Yes, and to avoid the trap of polarization and so on.
To recognize, but not waste time on polarization.
That’s a good answer. Maybe you partly answered my question already, because conflict is also part of democracy, right?
Of course. The idea of overarching consensus is we get to the low-hanging fruit. People with different ideologies, nevertheless, accept that something is a good idea after all, so we just do this first. That rebuilds a sense of polity.
With Pol.is and so on, people feel, even though there’s some demonstrativeness, that mostly they agree on most of their neighbors, on most of the things, most of the time. When people have this general sense of polity, the worst part of populism, which is excluding part of the polity that says they’re not homo sapiens, that vanishes.
That’s all we need. It’s not to avoid divisiveness. It’s to avoid systemic exclusion from democracy.
When there was a discussion about the same-sex marriage, there was a citizen initiative, right?
Uh-huh. There was many citizen’s initiatives.
Many citizen’s initiatives.
But two that went into accepted referenda.
Since you have this other process, could you…I mean, what happened? What happened on your side at the time?
We actually invited both sides, from the Family Guardian Coalition as well as the TAPCPR to a collaboration meeting. Using the theory of overarching consensus, we talk about a citizen’s petition that says whether we need to legally protect the process of single mothers getting a child.
At that time, the Marriage Equality law have not been passed. Additionally, it will also apply to lesbians by necessity. On that specific point, which is the main stakeholders have not been born yet. [laughs]
The two sides actually come to some sort of rough consensus, because we’re not debating about sancticity, or whatever other abstract ideas. [laughs] We’re talking about something very simple, like if a child is born under this condition, is a society ready to support them equally? That is something people can agree to have a rational conversation on.
When did you have this conversation?
That was a few months before the Marriage Equality work, and ST here has written about it.
[laughs]
She’s a fellow occupier, actually. We met at the Sunflower movement.
We tried to, and largely successfully, build conversations around the topics that’s not ideological and very specific. Of course, the two referenda is also a really swift process that very quickly arrived to a solution that we legalized a bylaw, but not the in law of a marriage equality.
How did it feel for the team and for people being involved in this innovation lab and the vTaiwan process, and so on…? Obviously, you could do something, but wasn’t it a bit frustrating to see this massive polarization of a society over these debates?
But then resolution really worked.
I’m asking this because I have met some Taiwanese friends. Some of them seem to say that it was sort of a watershed.
There’s a large part of people who think that marriage is between families, not between individuals.
They discovered that they could really be alienated from their family members over this issue.
Before 2007, Taiwan’s marriage act recognizes social ceremonies. The social ceremony itself marries people between their families, and then maybe they do registration.
It’s like getting a birth certificate is kind of meaningless about the birth itself. It’s something that already happened in a natural way in a social setting. Then the registration is just after the fact, giving a administrative record of it.
After 2008, it becomes by registration only, so the social ceremony between families no longer count. People have to register for the marriage to happen.
I wouldn’t say that the people who married before 2007 is somehow deluded, because that’s exactly how it all works. [laughs]
Of course, right. Another thing about this idea of watershed is I heard that also because of what happened then, there is this kind of new resolution among a lot of especially young people to talk more with their parents…
That’s exactly right. Many of them thought it’s mostly about a transcultural issue, but it turns out transculture is also intergenerational, right? [laughs] There’s literally different cultures happening across generational experiences.
I would say that it broadens, especially, young people’s thought of not only the indigenous languages in a manner of speaking, people need to be transcultural. Even within the same linguistic and culture group, the different generations may have a higher gap than across different cultural traditions. That is, I would say yes, a new realization.
It means that, in a way, if the democracy is conversation between people from…
Different values.
…different values, then democracy had to be brought back to the family context as well.
Yes, definitely.
That’s interesting. All right. You know I don’t code, and I don’t understand a lot of what this question probably means, but why do you still stick to Pol.is, whereas other tools have been designed? What do you think of Decidim , for instance?
I know in France there are many people who have switched back to Decidim , and for instance, the Democracy OS now that you…
They’re also building their own blockchain systems. Actually, they worked on quadratic voting too. We are also part of this RadicalxChange community. We’re not only using Pol.is, we’re dealing with lots of new tools.
It’s just Pol.is remains very useful in the early stage discovery role that is very hard to replace, especially because Pol.is also improves.
There’s a new reporting mechanism that gives out more detailed analysis. There’s the bilingual or multilingual support that allows, for example, our work with the AMT, the de facto US Embassy, that use a series of Polis conversation to set a diplomatic agenda of Taiwan and the USA.
In that, you need bilingual. You need to have almost zero administrative burden, because people in the foreign service are very busy, and so on. [laughs] You need absolute server security guarantee that everything is run from a secure data center instead of somewhere on the cloud.
Being on-premise server security audit, being bilingual, and being almost zero administrative burden is important for diplomatic discussions, enabled by AI-powered conversation. That’s why we still use it, for example, on digital dialogs, diplomatically.
But on the Join platform, we only very seldom use Polis. I think there’s only six Polis conversations on the Join platform. For any other platform, we use other tools.
What kind of tools?
For example, Slido. We’ve largely replaced the face-to-face conversation in the initial vTaiwan process which was relying on a human moderator moderating the live YouTube comments. We’ve moved that to Slido, because Slido first they have a crowd voting mechanism, and also they have a really good projection mode that let people see which questions now being, the topic being debated, and so on.
I’m personally in charge of Slido’s Chinese, Traditional Chinese translation, to make sure that the translated terms feel local whenever we use it. My public lectures are almost now always driven by Slido technology, that’s one.
Another is Miro, M-I-R-O, that enables a design-thinking process which we did use, but only in an offline setting to be broadcasted to everybody watching the live stream, so people can follow at their own pace. The post-it notes and how the issue mapping is being done in real time, and it’s also very useful.
We don’t use Polis with that, because the conversation may not be a simple yes or no resonating issue, but rather a conversation starts with common facts, and then the reflection part, and the ideas, and then decisions which are best represented using different color to persist news, and so on. Miro and Slido are two new tools that we use much more than Polis now, actually.
Where have they been developed, these tools? Where do they come from?
The Internet, the great Internet.
(laughter)
We contribute a lot of our additions to that. For example, Miro-based issue mapping. We also built our own issue mapper tool, and that works with standard state tool that we use for our transcript keeping. We extended our transcript tool to allow multimedia content. You can embed video and presentations in it.
There’s also a new development that allows the textual annotation to automatically build the debate tree from a public transcript, and so on. Basically, we take what civic tech is doing, and then we improve on it and give back.
That’s great. Let’s go back to this notion of conversation. You don’t use the term deliberation very often.
Yeah, we would say that deliberation, we only use the word if people come with a mental preparedness of informed rational discussion. A lot of conversation is essentially creating the precondition of deliberation, but we wouldn’t say that the initial meeting is necessarily a deliberation because that would be abusing that term.
So there’s not too much expectation on the quality of the conversation because then a quality deliberation can take place afterwards?
Exactly. Deliberation, in design-thinking terms, deliberation is mostly about the Define state where we find something that we commonly care about, and we have a clear vision of what to develop afterward. It’s right between the two diamonds, which means it’s crucially important.
But, like Polis, or whatever our online petitions and so on, all starts in the Discover stage where people are still finding out the various dimensions of stakes. We’re not even sure who are the stakeholders, we’re still discovering the stakes.
In that, it’s more about ideation in a constrained setting. It’s less about coming to a informed rough consensus on where to develop. In this process, the more we run, the more stakeholders we discover, the more ethnographic hanging out we do [laughs], the better we’re able to define the problem afterward. I would say it’s a precondition for deliberation.
Who participates in the conversation? I know you constantly trying to…
Travel around, yes.
…to travel and to also reach out to people who are not so much online, reach out to different generations.
To join their own community-building events, yes.
There is special striving, in terms of the bulk of who’s part of this conversations, is it this typical public that is already people who are quite informed?
Quite politicized?
Not at all.
Do you really manage to spontaneously…Do you ask the people spontaneously join conversations?
No, not at all. We have 10 million visitors. Kind of by definition not all of them are very politicized, it is half the population, almost.
Do you always have 10 million visitors?
No, of course everybody cares about the one thing they care about, of course. It’s not to say that we have a jury-like status to join on sortition, which is very popular now in Europe, but we’re not yet doing that.
Not at all?
The thing is that Taiwan doesn’t even have a jury system in the tradition much. We don’t even have a word, like we can’t sit citizens jury if there is no jury. The court system just now is experimenting on participatory jury process, and they’re still doing small-scale pilots. The enabling act is now here, but it’s nowhere near an everyday practice.
We probably need a real jury system before we can extend that into the legislation part, it’s just a cultural dissemination process. That’s the thing.
On the other hand, the citizens initiatives like petitions, referendums, and so on, that’s very advanced now. Everybody feels that they can set an agenda.
That’s also because when the Dr. Sun Yatsen enumerated the fundamental rights of citizens in a republic of citizens, [indecipherable 37:30] , he specifically took citizens initiative as an important part of it and say one day we’ll be better than Switzerland, literally. That was in 1916. [laughs]
People understand that the citizens initiative at least every generation have heard about this idea of citizen initiative, but Sun Yatsen didn’t say anything about citizen jury. [laughs] That’s I think the cultural difference of the different conditions.
I think taking the citizens initiatives through petitions or referenda, or participatory budget item setting, this is now a very widely known thing, and people understand that they can do it at any time. Even though they may not have done it, they may have supported their friends’ ideas.
Everything else requires a more gradual culture change.
It seems that there’s consensus around the participation scholars in France, is that citizen initiative is great, especially if you can combine it with the prior sortition of a few citizens, and then have them fully get informed and deliberate…
We do that, we do that.
…and then have the mainstream and social media sort of mediatize it, so that it influences the people…
We do that, but not through sortition. The only difference is not through sortition.
We’re taking the Internet governance norm, which is like 5,000 people do a petition, then we invite anyone who can physically travel to Taipei to register and just appear. Everybody who can’t, maybe watch a live stream and give us feedback on our Slido. There’s no need, if you have infinite space, to draw lots, essentially.
If you can have asynchronous participation across different connected spaces, there’s less of a pressure because of the room, the town hall, capacity to do randomized anything. That’s I think the main points of departure with the sortition school of thought. We always think that deliberation can scale, but the sortition school says there’s a limit of which how it can scale.
There is still a big difference between asking stakeholders or people who are really interested to come…
Participate.
…or ask people who actually will be in the right conditions to be fully informed…
We do that, but we do that only if they volunteer for it. Again, it’s a philosophical difference. We have people who are pro it, and we learn from Better Reykjavík that on the petition platform you can oppose it without adding to its signature count, so we have two columns.
You cannot reply to each other, but you have two columns of pro and con arguments. These people are interested in coming, and then in a more debate rather than a deliberate fashion. All the ministries and agencies are welcome to invite like scholars, academics, and so on, in a more traditional informed capacity.
What it lacks, really, is people who are not in a vicinity. We move to a vicinity to run collaboration meetings. The neighborhood naturally becomes aware of it, so you must be outside of the vicinity, outside of the main stakeholder groups, not part of the academic or social sector community, and not known by any of the ministerial agencies and the NGOs involved.
Then you have no natural way of knowing this conversation is taking place. Philosophically, because most of our conversation is about regulation change, you probably won’t be affected by the regulation either. We need less of a democratic legitimacy for these people to participate.
How do you process the fact that there are always people who are active, even on these platforms? They will express themselves. They will assess what others have said if they’re given the possibility to. What do you do with the onlookers, people who are interested enough to read, but might not actually vote or say something?
Just with the idea of Polis, or with the petition platform, it’s as simple as saying, “I think this idea is good up, upvoting, or I think this idea really creates a distance, downvoting.” It’s literally just one click.
Do you have the data of how many people actually read the sentence and still do not click?
Of course.
Are there many people who do that?
Or maybe they keep pressing “pass, unsure.”
What’s the percentage?
For each, it’s different. For like diplomatic conversations – because we just had them, it’s fresh on my mind – the more professional it is. For example, whether we reform or reinstitute the conscription system, there’s, I think, a large percentage, 20 or 30 percent that simply said, “I don’t know enough to say yes or no to this question.”
But for things like how to make Taiwan be seen more unique in the world, everybody feel they have something to say. [laughs] I think it largely depends on the kind of…It’s not just informed, it’s on the required background to have a informed consensus or even informed knowledge on this.
Again, to quote Sintomer . The ladder of expertise, sometimes, at some stage it feels that you have to have spent days, if not a month, to climb to the next stage. For all the topics above that stage, we have a lot of people saying I’m not sure. But for everything below the stage, we can still have a lot of meaningful resonance.
Did you really have the conversation how to make Taiwan more unique?
Yes, literally.
That’s very interesting. Is it easy to find?
Yeah. All the digital conversation report, if you google just for “AIT” and “Digital Dialogues,” actually, it’s right there. There’s only one divisive statement that neatly divides everybody apart into two opposing groups, [laughs] but there’s only one such thing.
What is it? Related to China?
Yes. How would you have guessed it? [laughs] It says, “Every time PRC closes a international door for Taiwan, the US should try open one for Taiwan someplace else.” Exactly. [laughs]
Right.
There’s only one statement with this effect though. Largely, people agree on these things. We took the top 10 and made sure that the US, AIT, and TECRO, our foreign service, answer to each one of them.
I could easily find this…?
Yeah, if you search this for AIT, digital dialog.
The more I get to know about Taiwan, the more I feel that everybody is under a lot of pressure to become a perfect or a model political system, that more people than anywhere else are involved in really striving to improve the democracy.
Yes, as a social technology.
There’s really so much pressure to prove that. It’s sort of a survival, there’s a surviving dimension to that in the Taiwanese case.
Yes, definitely.
To me, that seems to be what makes Taiwan unique.
I was wondering if that’s what made possible what is happening here, the fact that you’re here, the possibility of having this Social Innovation Lab. Also, it seems to be more and more mainstream, at least among young people, hacker’s culture and hackathon culture.
Oh, yeah, open innovation. I would say it’s no longer a subculture. It’s just culture now.
Yeah, it seems to be really widespread. Everybody has been part of it at some point, it seems.
Definitely.
Is it related to Taiwan’s status?
Definitely. I think according to “CIVICUS Monitor,” we’re the only jurisdiction in the entirety of Asia, actually in the Pacific, actually all the way to Africa, that has as much civic space so that any civic hacker or journalist have the same room of action compared to a minister.
Everywhere else, especially our nearby jurisdictions, there’s a declining civic space that the minister’s words is getting more and more powerful, as compared to a journalist’s or a civic hacker’s words. But I think the entire Pacific region, only New Zealand is comparable to Taiwan in terms of civic space and…
Is there a place in Europe that is comparable?
Sure, sure. Of course, in Europe, there’s plenty.
Really? Not France. [laughs]
Like the Scandinavians. Scandinavians and Germany, I think, are full open, and Iceland.
It’s fair, right? [laughs] France is said to be a little bit narrower now.
What I’m trying to get to is that for many people, this is kind of defining characteristics of Taiwan. It’s not a language. We have more than 20 national languages now. It is not any particular culture.
Lots of new immigrants now in Taiwan. Like there’s a Taiwanese citizen that’s going to vote for the first time. She’s Urkrainian and is becoming very visible ambassador of saying that Taiwan is about a democratic process and not about your skin color, and things like that.
My point being that if this is the single thing that young people, and now increasingly older people of all different cultural lineages can agree on, this transculture point becomes not only a survival thing, but it becomes an identity, a kind of new identity.
What happens when there’s political change? Do you think that it’s really…?
Taken root?
Yeah, that it has taken enough root, and that it will remain?
Oh, yeah, very much so, very much so. If you see the DPP primary, William Lai, now, of course, running as vice president, but at that point, running against Dr. Tsai in the primary. Dr. Tsai has done quite well on open government, but he will be even more open.
Just yesterday, Mayor Han said that the Join petition is really good, but that he will lower the threshold from 5,000 people to 3,000 to allow more citizen participation to power. They’re competing, but like…
Not against it, but for it.
…not against it, just trying to be even more progressive.
Another thing, it’s happened here, but everywhere in the world, it seems that we’ve gone deeper into the fake news, disinformation era. Obviously, you’re part of the hope that we have that it’s through creating new tools, people will have different kinds of conversations…
And for creating humor and making fun. It’s working really well.
I think that’s also what I meant with this sort of watershed with the same sex marriage debate. You’re still very hopeful?
Very hopeful.
You don’t think that it’s still very much of a challenge to change things?
Not at all.
You see improvements?
Yeah, if you look at this election and how people have been coming swiftly with humor and fun to communicate effectively across the disinformation crisis, compared with the last election, you will see that the civil society is much more tolerant and making much more fun about it now. That enables a more resonating discussion.
There’s even a new party formed around this very idea, the 歡樂無法黨, an unstoppable happy party; their English name is “Can’t Stop This Party”. I gave them a basket of catnips on the day of their formation.
(laughter)
There’s a new political culture now, that’s centered around this idea of humor, comedy even, as effective tools for communicating across outreach and getting people into the mindfulness that’s required for conversation that eventually leads to deliberation.
Does it mean that Taiwan might have found something that other countries can use?
Yes, and we’ll be exporting it.
Where have you been exporting the tools, and where has it been as effective as here?
The individual tools like the Cofacts system that makes people on the LINE into an encrypted system being able to forward any piece of disinformation to a robot that then do a collaborative fact-checking and get it back to exactly where it’s spreading.
We work – in Taiwan, I mean, the LINE Taiwan – its CSR department work very closely with Cofacts, which is a g0v project. Taiwan FactCheck center, and the administration too, as clarification partners to build this dashboard for LINE.
The Cofacts part, if you remove the S and get into Cofact.org, you’ll see a Thailand version of it, because it’s open-source. The civil society in Bangkok just did a carbon copy and started running its own copy of it.
I would say we’re having some effect in the nearby jurisdictions to look at Taiwan and see that it’s not always about takedowns. It’s not always about suing journalists. It’s also about making a funny picture 60 minutes after a trending disinformation. That’s more nearby jurisdictions.
I was just in Berlin and talked with a lot of different parties, and a lot of them see the necessity of it. It’s also being taken hold in Germany, because initially they designed a NetzDG for this particular issue – hate speech and so on.
They found that what they’ve created is essentially that people just adjust their way to spread hate speech to a point where it’s not captured by the NetzDG. It’s a moving-goalpost thing. The more you define what you censor, the more creative the people you want to censor becomes.
It’s kind of a difficult-to-catch-up game. At some point, you will have to say, “Oh, forget about it. We’ll just build a great firewall,” which is what some jurisdictions have done. Germany certainly doesn’t want to go there.
It has a very active civil society. They’re increasingly looking at Taiwan and see, “Oh, maybe that’s a viable model.”
Excuse me. Time’s up…
…we have maybe 10 minutes, at the most.
OK. I wonder what you think about this concept of echo chamber…
Obviously, there are tools now to counteract, but…
Yes. I use, personally, those tools on my laptop here.
The thing is who are they effective with? Aren’t they useful among the people who already are willing to see that might be disinformation? Obviously, the humor, I understand that it’s great to counteract the…
To inoculate.
…the fake news with humor. My understanding of the way rumors and fake news are spread is also related to humor. That is, people find it fun. They don’t even want to check that it’s right or not. They find it fun, and they know that people who share…
The clarification need to be even more fun. [laughs]
Is the humor the same one? Did you manage to actually…?
Humor as opposed to satire or even a even more attack package as something fun is that humor makes fun at expense of the person making the humor. The more aggressive alternatives makes fun of people who are not like us. It’s a very clear philosophical difference.
What we found is that humor that doesn’t exclude people spreads easier because people don’t feel a moral difficulty spreading it. This, I would also say, may be a East Asia thing, that we collectively already have an idea that says making fun of people who are not like you with the intention of excluding them, although it may seem funny, it’s fundamentally a bad thing to share.
In a more individualistic culture, maybe that raises debate, and that’s the perfect thing to share. I would say there’s a cultural difference.
That’s interesting. I never thought of it that way. That’s very interesting. In terms of spreading what you’ve been doing, what about the vTaiwan process? Has it inspired other people in the world?
Yeah, it’s been written up in the social archive open-access website. There’s at least one citation from the Canadian Energy Board, and so on. I’ve written also about it in “New York Times,” in “Economist,” in all those interesting places.
We’ve seen political platforms set up specifically using one part of it – usually Polis – that says, “We want to build a new movement out of this massive online listening practices.” I think Jeremy Corbyn at one point said that as well.
It’s definitely spreading as an idea, not as definite technologies.
What about Italy?
Yeah, Italy, actually, I’ve read a blog post that suggests their minister of direct democracy to specifically look at vTaiwan in Taiwan government, the participation officers and said that we need to install something like that in the Italian cabinet. That’s something I’ve read.
There’s also g0v.it. If you go to g0v.it, you’ll see the budget visualization just like the original one for the Italian budget. Yeah, so it’s been spreading on both sides – the public and the citizen side.
These are things that you’ve heard or observed, but they haven’t reached out to you?
At some point, they said, “Oh, we’re going to have a press conference. We’ve invited Jeffrey Sachs. Would you like to have a video conference and say something?” Of course, I don’t have direct participation in the using of the technology, but of course, I help to connect them with people who have actually worked on that project.
One last thing. I remember that when you talked about your role and the role of g0v in the Sunflower Movement, you said there were many people in Hong Kong that had…
That learned from it.
Yeah, they learned from it. Obviously, the situation is very different in Taiwan and Hong Kong, especially right now.
Now they perfected the art of leaderlessness, far beyond what we have thought in Sunflower.
I’m sure both sides are observing what’s happening on the other side. Are there other…
This is something you may want to talk with ST about, because she’s in touch with more Hong Kong people than I do. [laughs]
The very limited touch I had was there’s a bunch of people who just won the original seats.
They’ve never won that much seats before, and they now want to talk about community-building, participatory budget, those smaller-scale civic technologies that can enable a culture of caring about the constructive part of democracy.
Of course, they’re already world-class now in the protest part. [laughs] The constructive part, they now also want to learn.
There’s something very practical in that Taiwan, just after lifting the martial law, but before the presidential election, there was a decade of community-building exercises and approaches. Most of the materials are in traditional Chinese, which they can readily use.
There’s a lot of exchange in thoughts and common practices that they now can use in a local jurisdiction vision. Beyond that, I don’t really know, but ST may know more.
Sorry, I have to run.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
That was great.