Right, the internet of course has its good and bad, but for consultation I think you dramatically lower costs so people can look at all the information in the same place, and then go to face-to-face meetings, but with the face-to-face meetings recorded and then becoming the material of next ...

Right, I expect the first wave of comments may not actually be random internet users but ministries, like other ministries and even local and regional governments who will know that they now have a chance to realign their plans.

So at least for the social enterprise part, I think this is working really well. Like in the first meeting we actually found out both ministries independently declared November as Social Enterprise and Small and Middle Enterprise Month, but they never really coordinated. And it’s kind of fortunate that we ...

We start with actually just sharing all our meetings. We had two meetings already after I entered the Cabinet with the ministries of economic affairs and with labor, and the idea is that for people who are presenting the meeting, we have a stenographer who types out everything everybody says ...

Exactly, right, how they’re aligned.

LaPage: But even for the public service to know what the other ministries are doing, it is important.

Exactly, that’s what I’m doing, is mostly adding a new dimension to two-dimensional thinking where they may never overlap, but have a cloud in which that they may actually share all their information. And therefore the interested people, there’s a lot of communities like g0v, like Data for Social Good... ...

LaPage: So will that help? Because one of the issues we have is the silos of all the ministries, and the need to create intersecting lines out of parallel lines.

Right, we’re working on some infrastructures that makes this possible, I wouldn’t say overnight. The first is the transparency part because I’m also the Digital Minister in charge of open government. I’ve worked with the PCC, the procurement committee here, 工程會, that publishes, transparently, both the procurement that’s about to ...

Well, that’s great.

Definitely. Here in Taiwan, I think, the previous multi-year plan that was led by the minister before me that was really successful, and I’m really feeling blessed that all the important aspects has been covered really from scratch, because at the beginning of that plan there’s no such a recognition ...

It’s such a great model. Right, so, anything I can help you?

Actually I know of that BIM contracting house before, and I never really learned that it’s a disabilities social enterprise until I read on the online press about this. So I’m like, oh, this BIM company is like that.

I’m more familiar with social enterprise work a lot because I travel to Paris all the time—five months out of the 12 this year. So I’m actually more versed in the social enterprise theme in Paris or in maybe Madrid or in Portugal than in Taiwan. So it’s after I ...

Yes, I have very close connection with the Loomio team which is working in a similar space. I’m very interested in technologies that facilitate scalable listening.

Awesome, it’s called Othello?

What I meant is that, before I knew that I would become a Cabinet minister, I’m already very interested in participating in such kind of activities and I’ve already actually registered for Christchurch myself so that Taiwan doesn’t have to pay for my ticket. [Laughter]

Christchurch.

Exactly. At the time, I’m here in the office only for six weeks, so I’m a new minister here. I’m still getting used to this whole setting. At the time of the announcement of my entering the Cabinet, I was actually in New Zealand and participating with some, it’s called ...

Yes, so you sleep well on the plane? Any jetlag?

Hi! When did you arrive to Taiwan?

Cheers.

Thank you. It’s fun, so we’ll keep it up.

Have a good localtime. Thank you. Bye.

The zero option is not an option at that stage, not a real option, so people of course wouldn’t contribute their time, because they don’t get symmetric attention for their time.

Yes. In open multi-stakeholderism, it never works if the agenda-setting is just late-stage, or is fake, or something like that.

Mm-hmm.

In two words: Engage early.

If you engage early enough, you can’t go wrong. If you engage when you have no idea how to solve the issue, then you can’t go wrong.

If you engage with already a draft, it would take very, very high-skilled rhetoric to make this work. ...

When you say a city that wants to work, do you mean the mayor, the public servants, or the council?

Sure. I’ve sent you a link to the curriculum and a brief memo.

Yes.

That would be great. Another of our contributions, which I just sent to you, is what we call assistive civic technology. Meaning that, you mentioned people who are on Facebook or Twitter all the time and don’t have a fraction of the mindset to participate in the public space and ...

Mm-hmm.

It’s easy if they can find someone within the government structure who are not tied to one particular office, or ministry, or agency. The French has the Center of National Debate. At the moment they do it for construction development cases only.

Their staff is in government positions, but it’s ...

Yes, it’s very hard for them to ignore the consensus made this way. We had an election. There’s a new president, there’s a new cabinet, but whatever consensus we reached, it’s very hard for the new minister to say no, because it’s not the result of the previous ruling party. ...

Yeah, of course. Everything is open source.

It improves the decisions made by civil servants. They would need to inform, that is to say provide relevant information and expert assistance. Whenever they get asked questions, they must answer within seven days.

At the end of the day, they don’t make the decisions anyway, because Taiwan, like the ...

Certainly. If you go to any Pol.is conversation, you see one sentiment of your fellow citizen. Of course, the first thing that you will see is whatever preparatory materials that we calculated to make it eye-catching for the first five seconds, and then provides just sufficient inform in the next ...

It’s not. People generally find it a very interesting game to play.

The technical term for the kind of consensus we want to reach is called rough consensus. Rough consensus meaning nobody is 100 percent happy, but people can build empathy for each other so that even though I may sacrifice a little bit, I understand that it’s better overall.

This rough ...

People are pretty polarized as is. Otherwise, there won’t be controversial issues, right? Sometimes, deliberation, if the time frame is too short, it brings out the worst of people. It’s true. It happens.

By declaring, "We won’t conclude this stage until we reach a super-majority consensus feeling," we are basically ...

Sure, overly broad issues.

Yes. We also publish the Pol.is data for the reflection stage, that is the feeling stage, the second stage.

We identify the stakeholders that we know about. We send them invitation emails. We ask them to fill out the survey. They can recommend anonymously more stakeholders who may be interested.

Of course, the same form is published on our website and our Facebook pages. Non-stakeholders may still participate. We ...

Sure. We have a two-day curriculum for this, which we train hundreds of public servants in. I can send you the whole curriculum. Just to summarize, the key point is that we work with the focused conversation method pioneered by some Canadians 10 years ago.

The idea is very simple. ...

That’s true.

While we did provide public WiFi to the occupiers, that was very late in the process. That was the last three days of the occupy. Most of the time, we had a very high-speed intranet, but not such a high-speed uplink as I explained.

Which means that Loomio is only ...

It’s what Clay Shirky described as "situational applications". Every day we make applications in response to the demand of that day. Every day it’s a different technological stack. At the core, of course, there’s the parliament itself, industries around it, and because of that on the infrastructure level there needs ...

Sure.

Right, the gamification is really our main contribution, not anything technical. We’ve made it into a game. That always works.

Great.