There was no digital minister in Taiwan before, so I get to write my own job description. I wrote a prayer—a poem, really. It’s very short. I’ll just recite it here. It goes like this: When we see the Internet of Things, let’s make it the Internet of Beings. When we see virtual reality, let’s make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let’s make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let’s make it about human experience. And whenever we hear that the singularity is near, let us always remember the Plurality is here.

Welcome to How to Save Democracy, the podcast where we look at the relationship between humanity and democracy and try to figure out how to rebuild it. I’m Jon.

And I’m Omezzine. For this episode, we’re going to look to a place where the relationship between humanity and democracy has actually improved over the last 10 years, which isn’t the picture in most of the world. A place that has grown stronger and stronger, where trust in government has gone from 9%—wait for it—to above 70%.

In summer 2024, I arranged for Audrey Tang, former digital minister of Taiwan, to come to the UK, and I hosted her at the Conduit. We’re going to listen in to that conversation and draw out some of the key lessons, contrasting what happened in Taiwan with what’s happened in other places, and use that to see what could be done differently.

That moment of the Sunflower Revolution, the protest moment. Maybe just tell us a bit more about the URL that popped up on the screen—budget.g0v.tw—as a real thing. Please.

Yeah, so we like to say that we’re not protesters, we’re demonstrators. Protesters manufacture counter-power, and demonstrators manufacture alternate power. So g0v, starting in 2012, is this systemic movement that looks at all the government websites (which end in .gov.tw) and makes better shadow government websites (at .g0v.tw). Just by changing the ‘o’ to a zero, you get into the shadow government that is built by open-source civic technologists. It always works in a way that is free of copyright, so the government is basically shamed into merging it back.

The best thing about such g0v experiments is that a lot of it actually came from the career public service. It is the actual section chiefs and so on participating in our hackathons pseudonymously. Only when they really saw that this is a better way for the public to see the budget, co-create a dictionary together, make better contact tracing systems during the pandemic, make better distribution systems of masks during the pandemic, and many other things—better ways to collaboratively fact-check and so on—did the government then say, “Okay, because it’s free of copyright, let’s just make it digital public infrastructure.”

So for the past 10 years, what we call the social sector in Taiwan has been able to very actively set the agenda for digital infrastructure. That Occupy movement was the peak experience for all of us. As many of you knew, there were many occupied movements before 2014 in Taiwan, but very rarely did it reach a place where the head of the parliament actually said, “Okay, it sounds very reasonable.” After three weeks of non-violent occupation, those half a million people on the street and many more online managed to agree on a very coherent set of policy demands. So, okay, I’ll accept, and that’s it. Right? So it’s one of the very rare successful occupies that then institutionalized the kind of facilitation and the kind of crowdsourced agenda setting that we demonstrated during those three weeks.

Yeah, I see two main powerful things in what she said right now. One is the demonstrator part of the Occupy movement in Taiwan, and second is the political leadership. I want to start with the first one because it’s really this fundamental difference between protester and demonstrator that she’s pointing at. I think most protest movements, occupy movements, and the Tunisian Revolution were unified against a system that was dysfunctioning and oppressive, so it’s easy to unite people against one single enemy. But I think it’s revolutionary and visionary to bring a solution and an alternative to the current system. I think this is why it was successful. They created the space for the politics to move into.

Yes, and then comes the second point, where the political leadership was not violently repressing the movement as they did everywhere else. In Tunisia, people were shot by the police and killed. In the Occupy movement, people were taken off the street and arrested. Right. But here, the political leadership was open to seeing that there is an alternative, that these people are coming with a solution, and that they need to listen to them.

So two really fundamental differences. The action from outside was to create the space for politics to move into rather than to attack the politics. And from inside, the leadership was to step into that space rather than reject that space.

Absolutely. There is a very delicate place where there is this maximum tension between the protester/demonstrator movement that is gaining attention and really pushing the political leadership to its limit, and the political leadership seeing that they lost power and the trust of the public. So what do they do? In most situations, violence happened to repress this new power that was coming up from the people, right? But in this case, they didn’t try to co-opt the movement either.

It makes me think of what happened in the Tunisian revolution, where the social movement was, at the end of the day, co-opted by political parties because they didn’t have this vision. They didn’t have this new proposal, this alternative system. Slowly but surely, political parties who were more structured—even though not really structured to govern after the dictatorship was taken down—had more power, more connections to the regime. A conversation started with the regime but excluded the people because they didn’t have any leader to represent them and no real new idea how to handle this period.

There is this delicate moment in time that the movement can totally lose in front of the existing power. In Tunisia, I think one of the failures of this transition was that people who went to the streets didn’t have the tools or the collective capacity to bring this new vision, which made them super weak in front of others who had another vision. In a protest movement, in a revolution, you need to come up with a vision; otherwise, others will take it from you and use their own vision to force it on you.

So we’re going to paint that timeline a little bit to start us off. The budget website came in 2012.

2012. That’s correct. And that was the g0v movement, as it was known, starting to organize outside of government. Basically, every two months we would hold a physical hackathon, about 200 people or so. We meet in the National Academy. The idea is that we need to find places that are credibly neutral, that are above any party politics or any ministers—a purely social sector place. It just so happens that Taiwan has this idea of a National Academy that only reports to the president, and the president doesn’t have control over its research direction. We were able to just keep meeting there every two months for more than 10 years now.

So 2012, these websites that have forked the government—I’ve heard you use that phrase. ‘Forked the government.’ Fork means steering it in a different direction, and always with the hope to merge it back.

So demonstrate, not protest, and fork the government. We start there in 2012. The momentum is building. 2014 comes, and what triggered that moment?

In 2014, the Parliament was trying to fast-track—in 30 seconds—a trade deal with Beijing. That would open up a lot of the service industry, including the then-very new 4G core infrastructure, to the likes of Huawei and ZTE. The conversations that people here had almost 10 years after that, we had in 2014. It’s not just the telecom industry, but also publishing and basically all the service in trade.

The g0v people helped to code up some tools that say, if you just enter your company’s registration number or the name of your company, it shows exactly how the CSSTA, the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement, affects you. Then you can join one of the 20 NGOs around the Occupy Parliament to talk about things from an environmental perspective, a labor perspective, a consumer protection perspective, a cybersecurity perspective—however you want.

Every day we take this group selfie, this snapshot, because everything is live-streamed—just like we’re being live-streamed now—and transcribed and translated. Instead of diverging over time, it actually converged day after day. We’d read what people were able to agree roughly with each other—we call it ‘rough consensus’—to live with such an agreement the previous day, and what remains to be deliberated. No matter how soon or how late you join, there are still some points to contribute to the deliberation.

I want to draw out how different this protest moment, the Sunflower Revolution, the Occupy movement in Taiwan, is in its operation from some others. One of my thought experiments to illustrate this would be about Extinction Rebellion (XR) in the UK. When XR started, it was incredibly popular, right? It’s hard to remember now, but my mom nearly went to Waterloo Bridge, right? And my mom is not a Waterloo Bridge woman.

In that moment, the demands of XR included a citizen’s assembly on climate policy. They wanted that assembly to be legally binding by 2035 for how Britain would reach net zero. I won’t go into the detail, but a citizens’ assembly was commissioned in the UK—not many people even know this, which illustrates my point. A citizens’ assembly was commissioned by six select committees of Parliament.

My thought experiment is, if you contrast that with g0v, what these guys were doing: while protesters were occupying the parliament, people were having the kinds of discussions outside that should and could have been happening in the parliament. They were doing the politics that they were wanting.

So what actually happened was, because the citizens’ assembly that was commissioned was not quite what XR had asked for, they basically decided to ignore it. Hm. Big mistake.

And my thought experiment is, what if they had chosen to follow that citizens’ assembly? What if, for each meeting of the assembly—there were three, I think—what if they’d set the dates for their rebellions, for the big protests, on those dates to draw attention to the citizens’ assembly? To say, “This isn’t perfect, but we need more of this. This is the direction we want to go.” I wonder if that might have conducted energy into that process that could have shown a new way forward, in the same way as the g0v gang, by equipping people to have these meetings outside the parliament, sort of validated the occupation of the parliament by doing that. Mmm.

So, if they had been more pragmatic? If they would have accepted the situation as it is and not tried to implement their vision from the beginning and impose it? Like, accept that maybe the political leadership was not ready yet for that, but see the citizens’ assembly, as imperfect as it is, as a first step instead of, “Okay, this is a no-go.”

Right, it’s almost like a ‘yes, and’ rather than a ‘no.’ Look, I’m hesitant with this a little bit because hindsight is always 20/20, but I think it’s useful to draw out the contrast between the way Extinction Rebellion happened and the way the Sunflower Revolution in Taiwan happened. There was this participation that showed and demonstrated and lived and said ‘yes, and we can do more of this,’ rather than a demand and then a failure.

Would that be the contrast between an idealist and a pragmatic person or group? An idealist would have this idea and want to implement it exactly as it is in a utopia. The pragmatic person or group would say, “Okay, I have this beautiful vision, it’s still a utopia, but I have to deal with the reality. Any step towards making this idea concrete is relevant, and I take it, accept it, and move forward with it.”

Something like that. I hesitate because I consider myself to be an idealist more than a pragmatist, but maybe I’d describe Audrey as a radical pragmatist.

We’re starting to build this muscle of developing these things. 2014 comes, and there’s an attempt to rush through the trade bill. That triggers this protest moment—Demonstration. Demonstration. Sorry. And at this point, you are part of g0v.

Yeah. I joined g0v very early, in 2012. At the time, I was working with Apple on Siri technology and with Oxford University Press on empowering low-resource languages, such as isiZulu, to crowdsource dictionaries so Siri can speak those languages. Naturally, because in Taiwan, nowadays we have 20 national languages—16 indigenous nations, 42 language variations—not all of them have the same degree of support, like traditional mentoring, when it comes to dictionary building. A lot of the early g0v work was actually on forking the official dictionary to add in modern, contemporary words. That was my first project in 2013.

In 2014, what’s really interesting is that the crowdsourcing and facilitated conversation we practiced over two years really found its place, coupling with dynamic facilitation, open space technology, and non-violent communicators—the face-to-face facilitators. Unlike many other Occupies, where the face-to-face facilitators and the online communications people were really two different camps, during the 2014 Occupy, we fused together. We all learned the art of face-to-face dynamic facilitation, and the facilitators all learned the art of online organization. We became the same people.

After that, there was a mayoral election at the end of 2014. All the mayors that supported crowdsourced agenda setting, open government, and citizen participation did get elected—sometimes to their surprise, without preparing an inauguration speech. All the mayoral candidates that did not support it did not get elected. The wind really shifted.

Then it’s up to us to determine what to do. Now we have mayors that ran with open government as their platform, with participatory budgeting, citizens’ initiatives, and reverse mentorship, but they also have no idea how to properly work with people. They just have this pre-commitment. We, the reverse mentors, are people under 35 years old. Each cabinet member at the time was tasked with finding at least one person under 35 to mentor them in the art of this new communication style.

I was 33 at the time, so I got recruited into the cabinet as a reverse mentor to Minister Jaclyn Tsai, who was in charge of regulation for the cyberspace. We did a bunch of stuff together—UberX, Airbnb, crowdfunding, all the interesting things around 2015—using the vTaiwan process that builds these bridging sentiments across polarization. Long story short, after two years serving as the young reverse mentor, I turned 35. I’m too old to be a young adviser, so I got promoted to a full cabinet minister.

Obviously, right. Career trajectory in four years: hacker to mentor to minister. Let’s bring it up to 2020 and, for me, the pinnacle of the story.

No idea, right? It’s a very uneventful year. Well, we started building and institutionalizing such relationship muscles. Within each and every ministry, we have a team called the participatory team, with participation officers (POs). They were trained in the art of facilitation, citizen engagement, civic tech, and things like that. All that relationship muscle, all that 30 or so ministries’ horizontal network, really got into action in 2020 when we started setting up this daily system where people can call a hotline, 1922, and ask to their heart’s content what’s really going on with this pandemic.

In Taiwan, we discovered that we needed to ration out masks very quickly. I think it was February 2020 when we started having this open API that anybody can see with a civic tech tool—actually, there are hundreds of such tools—how to navigate to your nearby pharmacy, how to get rationed masks, and things like that.

There were some communication efforts. We crowdsourced very cute memes. There was a spokesperson, a Shiba Inu—very cute. She would just put her paw to her mouth and say, “Wear a mask to protect your face against your dirty unwashed hands,” or something like that, which completely circumvents the aerosol debate or whatever. It’s just a very viral meme that people would link mask-wearing to hand washing.

This broad listening—it’s not broadcasting—this broad listening network really paid dividends. For example, not long after we started rationing out masks, there was a young boy, 10 years old, calling 1922, the hotline, saying, “You’re rationing our masks in schools. That’s great, but I got pink ones, which is not great. All the other boys in my class have blue ones, like standard medical grade masks, but all I got was pink ones. I don’t want to wear pink to school. I’ll get bullied.”

We needed to handle that fast. If we do not do that, if this goes viral and the Minister of Education goes out and says bullying is bad, it actually makes it worse. We needed to handle this in 24 hours. All the participation officers huddled together. There was a great idea from the Ministry of Health and Welfare participation officer, which we turned into action. The very next 2 p.m. press conference, everybody wore pink. The health minister wore the pink mask, looking very hip. Regardless of gender, everybody wore pink. The Instagram, Facebook, whatever avatars of all the trending brands all turned pink. The very next day when the boy comes to class, he has the most hip color, the most sought-after color.

That’s the idea of ‘humor over rumor.’ The idea that it’s not debunking that fixes this polarization. It is pre-bunking. It is anticipating the energy that will go into polarization and shifting that energy, in a kind of aikido sort of way, into something humorous that gets viral.

Just to underline one more thing: the three design principles that were publicly announced. It’s called Fast, Fair, and Fun. The triple F. That was our counter-pandemic response, and it applies to everything—not just masks, but contact tracing, vaccination. We have a national vaccination scoreboard that, just like soccer games, displays the score of each age bracket’s preferences.

For example, people in their 70s and 60s, because they read some reports from Europe around AstraZeneca, they don’t prefer AstraZeneca. They would say, “We prefer Moderna.” There are people in certain age brackets, like 30 years old, who really root for the local team, the home-brew, the Medigen. But there are people who swear Medigen is toxic and they will only get BNT. I got all four brands just to make a point, but anyway, the point is that we knew there was going to be an anti-vax polarization attack down the road. Instead of debunking that, we turned that energy into civic participation. Basically, a ‘my vaccine better than your vaccine’ kind of friendly competition. Because of that, Taiwan does not have an anti-vax political faction. Everybody got vaccinated, but still to this day, people would believe that only the one that they got works, and the other ones are fake.

There’s so much in Taiwan’s COVID response that is just—I mean, we laugh, right, but it works. I still can’t believe that I’m one of the only people who seems to tell this story that Fast, Fun, and Fair, that pre-bunking not debunking, that humor over rumor—that these kinds of approaches really worked. Taiwan had the second lowest death rate anywhere in the world. The country as a whole never went into lockdown. And trust in government built through that process. The economy was doing better, the trust was doing better.

At the core of it, I think, is this idea that the government trusted its citizens. The government sought to tap into the ideas, energy, and resources of everyone in the country to be part of a national team response, rather than trying to do it for them or to them. Rather than seeing citizens as something to be managed, they saw their citizens as a resource to be tapped.

I think this is unique. I would love to see that in more places in the world, but again, I want to acknowledge the political leadership there. Seeing citizens as resources, trusting collective intelligence, understanding that it’s a crisis—a humanity crisis—and that they don’t have the solution and need everyone to come up with the answer is pretty unique. I’m wondering how we can get politicians to embrace that vision, that trust in their citizens.

This is exactly the question, I think, and that’s where I took the conversation next. It can be easy to think of Taiwan as just another planet and to say, “Well, this could never happen anywhere else.” So I put that question to Audrey: could it happen anywhere else?

Yeah, I mean, in terms of pandemic response, we’re second to New Zealand, so obviously it’s not just Taiwan. But more generally speaking, it does require, as I mentioned, the relationship muscles. It does require the public service trusting the citizens because ‘to give no trust is to get no trust.’ It does take somebody to trust the citizen first before some of the citizens trust back.

The trust level was really low in 2014. The approval rate of the administration back then was 9%. Anything the administration said at the time, automatically people would just say, “We’ll have none of this.” If you asked a random person on the street whether you will get democratic agency—‘nothing about you without you’—they’d say, “Of course not.”

It did take a lot of time, institutionalization, and hard work for the public service to start trusting, bit by bit, the citizens. And it does take technology—technology that highlights the bridges instead of the polarization—to show the public service that it does actually surface the signal, not just the noise. It actually saves you time instead of wastes your time when you engage the public in this particular way.

In Taiwan, what we have demonstrated is that it does take time. In 2018, it was still just 20% trust level. It took us almost eight years to reach 60%. My president, Dr. Tsai, graduated with almost 70% trust level, all pan-partisan, which is very good. Every year we just dialed the trust from the government to the citizen way up, and then maybe 10% of citizens trust back a little bit.

I want to go back to this powerful sentence: ‘To give no trust is to get no trust.’ I’m wondering where it starts. Someone needs to be the first to give this trust in this atmosphere of suspicion. Again, we can think of it as this unique place, but at the same time, if the most powerful give that trust, right?

I think that’s right. The danger in this moment, and what’s so powerful about that articulation—‘to give no trust is to get no trust’ (it’s actually a quote from the Tao Te Ching from Laozi)—is that it tells us it’s a cycle. It’s reciprocal. If you give no trust, you get less trust. Government trusts people less, people trust government less, government trusts people less.

But it’s also possible to reverse that cycle, and it’s possible to do that anywhere. The first acts of government putting trust in people begins to turn that the other way. I think that’s what you can see from examples around the world, where just the first experiments with a citizens’ assembly, like in Ireland in one of our other episodes, or in Norway, or a big participatory budgeting effort in the city of Paris, or a climate assembly in the city of Brussels. These sorts of things begin to create a different relationship, and anywhere in the world, it can begin from there.

I just want to underline this because there is an instinct to project onto Taiwan as this deeply solidary nation in the face of an oppressor. By this year, yes, but not 10 years ago. Just to refer to some of those numbers you put out: trust in government was at 9% in 2014 and 20% in 2018.

This year in the UK we’re on about 20%. To give you a sense, we are actually double where they were at the beginning. The latest OECD data was 20%. So we’re starting at a slightly higher baseline, even with what’s happened here.

And then this point about a sense of a singular nation, but you’re saying 20 different languages. There is some deep polarization there, right?

Yeah. Well, there’s a lot. If you go to political rallies, for example, if you go to the ruling party’s rally for the presidential election, you will find that none of them are waving the national flag. They’re all waving this green island flag or rainbow flag. It’s actually at the opposition party, the KMT, where they wave the national flag. It’s very divided in terms of even the English name of our country; they will give you very different analysis.

Anyway, all this did not prevent the depolarizing work, because on both sides—and now with TPP, we have three parties, none of which have majority in the parliament—all three parties double down on the democratic process, open parliament, and citizen participation. It becomes a race to the top. Once the career public service knows that they have the social sector as an ally to foster this kind of work, then the political parties, the ministers, the MPs, they can compete, of course, on even more transparency, even more accountability. The ideology stopped being the stopping point to prevent the people from participating meaningfully.

It becomes a race to the top. I think this point really stands out. One of the most striking realizations I had when I joined the Tunisian government as an advisor to the minister of finance was the deep distrust high-level state officials had towards civil society organizations. I hadn’t fully understood just how deep that suspicion or even fear ran until I met with a member of the European Parliament who served on the delegation for relations with the Maghreb countries. She mentioned that during Ben Ali’s dictatorship, Tunisia was the only country that sent the names of civil society activists and political opponents to Interpol, labeling them as terrorists. Can you imagine?

Looking at Tunisia under dictatorship and Taiwan under democracy, I’ve come to see the relationship between civil society organizations and public servants as a kind of thermometer for the health of a democracy. The more trust there is between them, the healthier the system tends to be. To repair our relationship to democracy, we need to start looking at the relationship between civil society organizations and civil servants.

I totally agree. I think the relationship between civil service and civil society is another of these absolutely fundamental relationships where the trust has to be rebuilt. It speaks also to this underlying philosophy that is there in Audrey’s work and that she’d actually, when I brought her over to the UK, had just put out into the world in the form of a book co-authored with Glen Weyl called Plurality . I decided at this point to steer her into talking about that.

Let’s zoom out again a little bit to the underlying philosophy here. This is the book Plurality . The only 20-odd copies that are in the UK at the moment are at the back of the room and have all been signed—not that there’s a massive sales plug going on here or anything.

This isn’t just a story. There’s an underlying philosophy, a mindset that you’re now working with Glen and putting out into the world as an offer of something to step into.

Yeah, it’s 1 kg of distilled wisdom over the past 10 years of work. The idea, simply put, is that singularity may be near and nearer. There’s a new book that says that singularity is near by Ray Kurzweil. Every time that we see a technological transformation, we can ask whether this technology is in the service of the plurality—that is the diversity that collaborates around us—or whether it is a technocratic force that centralizes more power to this flying spaghetti monster, whatever in the sky. To every technological transformation, we can ask that question.

In Taiwan, we’ve been consistently asking that question. Are we developing AI as assistive technologies? Like this assistive technology—very transparent, and I can fix it when it has bias. It improves my dignity. It’s not transmitting photons to the cloud and back to my retina with advertisement pop-ups. The idea really is that AI should be assistive intelligence. It should not be technocratic.

Plurality, or collaborative diversity, stems from the radical kind of conflict that Taiwan brings, like earthquakes. There are three felt earthquakes somewhere in Taiwan every day. Because we anticipate that there are earthquakes out of this tectonic conflict between the Eurasian and the Pacific plates, we work on resilience, we work on the building codes, we work on the societal preparedness that turns this conflict into co-creation. It’s like harnessing the fire, the explosion. Before, when we saw fire on the ground, we put it out. Now we see fire on the ground and we drill it, knowing that there’s energy underneath. The idea is to turn that conflict into co-creative energy.

There are a lot of ways that digital technology can help the face-to-face, the in-person, the facilitative, the community sectors, the neighborhoods, to make that happen. If we look at the traditional Mandarin word for ‘digital,’ shùwèi , it actually also means plural—several, more than one digit. A Minister of Digital Affairs is also a minister for plurality. This is where the philosophy stems from. It is digital in the service of collaborative diversity.

Once again, we’ve got huge ideas here. This concept of assistive intelligence rather than artificial general intelligence, the giant spaghetti squid in the sky. Audrey has some good images as well, right? But I think juxtaposing those two possibilities—the idea of using technology to tap into the ideas, energy, and resources of citizens to enable collaboration, to enable human experience, not user experience.

It’s such a powerful thing to juxtapose that with where things are arguably going at the moment. When you start from a lack of trust in people, when you see the role of government as being to manage or deliver for people, you end up with this kind of centralized power that is crushing. I find it so inspiring to see and hear Audrey talking about this. Seeing people as citizens, as capable contributors, means that you use technology entirely differently. The starting point is how do we make the most of what people are capable of and assist them to do it, rather than how do we supersede.

The private sector is guilty. To be honest, when you think of it, our technologies today are not designed to see people as citizens, but mostly as consumers—as people who need to buy and be addicted to the products they buy. The more addicted, the more we can sell them things, instead of seeing them as a resource for intelligence and for moving humanity forward. I think that’s our curse today because AI is not designed by visionaries like Audrey, but by people who want to extract more from us. How do we change that?

Follow Taiwan. Citizens not consumers—you’re not going to get any disagreement on that from me. Just to underline, the metaphor of the Eurasian plate and the plates crashing into one another is pretty powerful. I relate to this very deeply. In my work, I talk about three stories of the individual in society in this moment: the subject story, the consumer story, and the citizen story.

The subject story: the right thing to do is do as you’re told because the God-given few know best. The consumer story: the right thing to do is to pursue your self-interest because that will add up to collective interest. The citizen story: get involved because all of us are smarter than any of us. You draw on an analogous—I suppose seeing the same thing through a different lens. Maybe you could set out how you see that trio?

Yeah, I’ll just continue this story. The idea of the two tectonic plates bumping into each other is also the story of the tip of Taiwan, almost 4,000 meters high, Yushan, rising up to the sky half a centimeter every year because of these tectonic plates. In a sense, the citizen story says that if we have the capacity to face the conflicts and just entertain in our mind the plurality of viewpoints.

I’m non-binary, which means that I don’t see half of the people as closer to me and half of people necessarily farther away from me. In 2016, in my HR form, in the gender field, I filed ‘not applicable,’ and in the party field, also ‘not applicable.’ I do not have any political party affiliation, but in a sense, I’m pan-partisan. If there is a party that I feel I really can’t understand why people would feel this way, I would always think it’s my problem, it’s not their problem. I should spend time on an ethnographic study or just hanging out with them until I can really see things from their perspective.

I think this active seeking to balance different viewpoints, that is also plurality, and that is the citizen story. If you participate as an active citizen, you’re going to run into people who share some of the worldviews, but are also vastly different in some of the other points. The point here is not to build a bridge so that we can all cross to the other side. It’s to build a bridge so that we can meet a little bit in the middle to share some stories and then go back to where we came from. That bridge-building, I think, is core to digital democracy.

“I will always think it’s my problem, it’s not their problem.” She says so many things that are full of wisdom, and I would love to stop and meditate on almost every sentence. We have a political leader who sees conflicts as a possibility to grow by sitting and learning from the differing viewpoint. She sees herself as a bridge builder instead of a wall raiser. It is this ability to get close enough to everyone in the room to understand their viewpoint while being able to take a step back and have a look at the whole room, see the big picture. What can unite everyone—the common ground, right? Start from there to create understanding. That also means that she’s able to build trust with everyone in the room, which is one of the toughest tasks and one hell of a powerful skill for a leader.

Yes, and when I say bridge-building, I don’t mean it in a metaphorical way. I mean it in a very technical way. If you have participated in Community Notes on X.com (previously known as Twitter), then you probably know that the notes that get featured as a kind of context check to any viral posts that may be lopsided are the notes that convince people on both polarized sides. If people of two very different ideologies both resonate with one note, then that note flows to the top. It is a very different way to sort information. Instead of just sorting by addictiveness or engagement, however you want to call it, it sorts by how much bridge-making potential it has.

This open-source algorithm stems from something that I worked personally on in 2015: the Polis algorithm. The Polis algorithm basically asks people a very simple question. For example, on the UberX case. First, we mapped out the facts. Instead of the very idealistic, abstract ‘sharing economy,’ ‘gig economy,’ ‘extractive economy,’ ‘exploitative economy’—instead of those abstract words, we just say, “Okay, nowadays in Taiwan, there is an app that a person with a driver’s license, but no professional driver’s license, can use to meet strangers on their way to work, pick them up, and then charge them for it automatically.” This is the fact. The insurance situation, the registration situation, the metering situation, the surge pricing—these are the facts.

Now, we map out the facts and then we ask just one simple question to everyone: How do you feel about it? This is really the key because everybody is an expert in their own feelings. There is no judgment in terms of feelings. If people feel that UberX is not covering their rural areas very well, then they can say, “I feel that the rural areas are not being covered well.” Nobody can say that this feeling is right or wrong. It is just their feeling.

Instead of a reply button—there is no reply button, so there are no flame wars—there is instead, ‘I resonate’ or ‘I don’t resonate’ with this feeling. When you go to the Polis website, all you can say is ‘I resonate,’ ‘I don’t resonate.’ Then the next feeling comes, the next feeling comes. At some point, you’ll be prompted also to write your own feelings about the UberX thing.

Next to the interface, there is this visualization that shows the clusters. Initially, very much polarized. You can literally see in the four corners people who identify more with the taxi associations, people who identify more with the UberX app startup ecosystem, people who identify more with the transportation ministry and the rule of law, and the people who simply really don’t care about all this, but they care about rural coverage very much. All these are valid.

The great thing about this is that this is not a vote, not even a straw poll. If you have 5,000 people all joining, all voting the same, it doesn’t increase the area of the cluster. It only counts as one point because the idea is to surface to the top the bridge makers. First, the bridge makers that build bridges within clusters, and then the bridge makers that manage to build bridges across clusters.

For example, there’s a statement that says, “Surge pricing is fine, but undercutting existing meters hurts the livelihood of the people who drive. So it can only go up and not go down.” That’s a unifying sentiment across two islands. After three weeks of non-violent communication, people literally see those clusters merging to the middle. Then we have like 10 high-consensus (85% or more) statements that we can then read as an agenda to Uber and the taxi association on the open, live-streamed multi-stakeholder meeting that says, “Okay, this sounds very reasonable. Would you like to commit to it?” Once they all commit to it, it then becomes law. Since 2015, we’ve had more than 20 such laws and regulations passed this way, and more than 100 collaborative meetings from citizen initiatives that also used Polis as a bridge-making algorithm.

I think this UberX story is a powerful example showing how the design of a tech platform and the values it is promoting can influence the outcome of dialogue and the real possibility to reach consensus to eventually become law.

And it’s all built out of an underlying mindset, right? That plurality is what we want, that we can actually build the best solutions by understanding and seeing all of these different perspectives and finding the consensus out of them. We can use technology to help find consensus rather than just to deliver goods and services to people more efficiently.

That’s so inspiring. The joy in this conversation for me was knowing that these tools, these approaches, are available and are also starting to get picked up.

Now, the thing is it’s taking too long, but I do believe and see that these sorts of conversations, this sort of work, is actually happening all over the world in many different places. In the UK right now, there’s a new campaign called Our House, which is seeking to use some of these same tools to crowdsource what they’re calling a people’s charter for the 21st-century democracy, trying to crowdsource what the rules of democracy that might need to change might be from outside of the political system, drawing inspiration from g0v, using some of the same tools as Taiwan. This is starting to replicate.

This conversation is making me understand how important it is to have ethical political leadership aligned with good technologists to build the kind of platforms we need to advance democracy.

Right. Political leadership cannot be disconnected anymore from technology, and they need to have the tech people with them to build the kind of platforms that will eventually become the societal values that we want. It just feels like such a different conversation, doesn’t it? It’s a conversation about how this could actually create a better world, rather than how do we limit the damage that technology does, which feels like it’s about the best conversation that anyone can dream of at the moment. This is just another level, and I find that super exciting.

At the end of the conversation, I asked Audrey what advice she would give, particularly to the UK, but maybe it’s relevant more widely as well.

I think it really is the time for demonstration, for demonstrators. There’s a very clear energy in the air about ‘let’s just do something.’ In the first 100 days—we yesterday had a workshop with the Chatham House community, and there’s just a huge amount of energy there that says, if we manage to build something from the social sector, from the impact communities, in the next 100 days, then there’s a real chance that it gets institutionalized.

That is the kind of movement that we faced in 2014 and 2016, and we did institutionalize a lot of the stuff. That then led to this what we call ‘people-first public-private partnership.’ So PPPP. That then defined Taiwanese politics for the past five years. I would encourage you to think as a demonstrator, and with an eye on perhaps institutionalizing the stuff that you’ll be doing in the next coming months.

So one last massive idea from Audrey there: the PPPP, people-first public-private partnership, and this invocation to build and to demonstrate. That’s such a powerful note to end on. She was talking in summer 2024, just after the election of a new Labour government in the UK. That’s the specific context, but these moments keep coming. The moments when things could change dramatically. If we can have a different model available for a government to step into, like they did in Taiwan with that Occupy moment, then things can change very quickly. The work needs to start.

Maybe I want to take us back to your comment at the beginning about the two kinds of leadership that are present here: the leadership from the outside of demonstration rather than protest, and the leadership from the inside of being prepared to step into the space that’s made. Powerful.

This was How to Save Democracy, the podcast for people who love democracy, but know we’ve got serious work to do to save it.

This episode was hosted by John Alexander and Omezzine Khelifa and produced by Joe Barrett. The studio engineer was Kristen Kaca. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, or if you want to get closer, find us online at howtosavedemocracy.co and sign up to the mailing list. How to Save Democracy is produced in partnership with the Conduit and with Urban MBA, and wouldn’t be possible without the financial support of our listeners. We’ve got big plans, so if you can chip in and help us to make them happen, we’d love to have you on board.