We have existing training materials, classes for bridgemakers of a certain width of director, like, we were taught about confidence building measures, about commercial facilitation and so on, but always with a very kind of fixed conflict still in mind. But this kind of scale-free conflict co-creation, I think that’s ...

And within it, the scope is narrowed. So that it only talks about the things that even, like a catholic taiwanese, would actually not push back on because it’s not challenging any of their existing notions. And so a way to first systematically find it, and a way to foster ...

This is the idea of rough consensus. We produce some running code in this particular instance, the code for the constitutional interpretation. Right. So the act itself doesn’t have a name. The marriage equality act in Taiwan is just the enforcement act of a certain constitutional initiative. So this is ...

Exactly.

Exactly.

And so earlier in the referendum movement, we saw a very conscious, blended movie that says marriage equality in this stage only pertains to the rising duties of two individuals, but we are okay for them not to form kinship with the patriarchal family system, like slicing and dicing a ...

And this is something that you see in a lot of those conversations. So I think what’s missing and what Taiwan has been doing quite well, I would say, is this idea of rough consensus, of this continuous alignment, not related to ai at this time, that we settle on ...

But then it is sometimes criticized as too in group facing and too challenging, like too challenging to explain to an existing patriarchal family hierarchy culture, and so kind of not easy to explain and even harder to culturally transmit. But then it is important to the queer community and ...

Reinforcing a simple narrative that is actually overlooking the deep societal connections that is formed by this kind of family, extended bonds. Whereas people who work on, like, lgbtiqa+ community solidarity, they originally proposed a very complex law that recognizes all sorts of forms of bonding and so on. The ...

Or whatever. Right.

So one would say, for example, that, for example, during the marriage equality movements here in taiwan. If you take a non-taiwanese really, but kind of what happens anywhere in the world, you would say that people who fight for the equal rights and duties, recognitions and so on, as ...

It’s not always branded as that.

So, like, deeper connections between the actors in a space. These two, since we’re in space for a long time, we know they’re mutually reinforcing.

So scaling out the impact, meaning that you simplify your narrative, you have something that people can easily attach to to spread a message and things like starting a movement, like reaching more people, advocacy, and then this other direction being to more deeply find common ground, to build and ...

So that goes right back to the like, is this token empowerment tactical? Or what is the strategic missing map? So I think what it is really missing is for the people working on scaling out impact and people who work on deepening community understanding to realize that they are ...

And you can get both matching donations and also part of your business selling upcycled eyeglasses or something. So this tends to have a synergistic effect that is not found when you silo them in like donation-based merchandise-based or evidence-based silos.

And so I think by specifically calling out to a social sector, by empowering the co ops and so on, which was very hip in my parents era, but are now more and more kind of losing mind share, as opposed to closely held corporations or new organizational forms, by ...

And there’s no easy way to make exchange of network power between the different formulations of the same purpose, but by saying that anyone sharing the same purpose is part of the social sector, without any regard to the organizational form or the sector they are in, like, we’re all ...

And if you just look at the website, you will not think it’s a typical Tzu Chi project. It is like totally hip, sustainable young impact hub stuff, but it’s totally funded by Tzu Chi and actually connects with their existing connections. And this only happens when the social sector ...

I totally agree. Well, because my previous job was the ministry at large for social entrepreneurship, social innovation to be precise. And so what we have witnessed again and again is that, for example, Tzu Chi (慈濟) would work with Impact Hub Taipei and working on “FUN 大視野 想向未來”, which ...

And the national academy, again, is above all ministers. It doesn’t even report to the premier. So this is a kind of special academy set up by the president, fully invested in research, budget and so on, with no expectation for it to work with the current administration system. And ...

Yes. Credible neutrality stems from the factors you just mentioned. And neutrality stems from the fact that we’ve never seen Tzu Chi ally with any political faction or political party or anything like that. So the political ideologies come and go, but the social sector is always here. So its ...

Yes.

Yes, Tzu Chi is very resourceful.

Exactly.

So this is essential to understand because g0v, vTaiwan, whatever are built upon this foundation of social sector legitimacy. So I would briefly pause here and ask local feedback, like, do you have anything to add or clarifying questions?

And so this kind of structure has emerged in Taiwan even before the martial law was lifted. So even when the administration had a monopoly on not just violence, but also journalism or whatever, speech and so on, association based on shared understanding of environmental matters and charity and buddhism ...

It’s 100% going back to the foundation. It’s like Mozilla, not like OpenAI.

You can, I mean, not believe in Buddhism, but still appreciate Tzu Chi’s contribution to many things. And then they also have a very strong social entrepreneurship track so that the parts of their recycle, reduce, reuse, upcycle work, and so on become quite profitable. The DA.AI technology company that ...

Yes. So if Taiwan has an earthquake, if Tzu Chi published a number and the chief statistician of the administration published the number, people are going to believe the Tzu Chi number of these two differ. This is a fact we have seen many times. So. And it’s quite obvious ...

On the other hand, there are nexus of what we intel and call the social sector that gain their legitimacy through being incredibly neutral and credible neutrality is an alternate source of legitimacy compared to coercive, top-down power turf structures. A classic example we would use in Taiwan is that ...

Okay. Thank you. Those are hard questions first, but I will first tackle this existing power one, just because it’s upstream. So first of all, I think it is true that when an existing power structure perceives people’s voice as something that is a resource, competing for zero sum or ...

And so whether this system of societal solidarity, resilience or whatever, how does it maneuver in an existing power structure so that it does not fall victim to this obstruction? So this is about empowerment, and this is about, I don’t know, anti-fragility or something. Right.

So this is your first question. Your second kind of implicit question is that the existing privileged actors, they will not just sit there and say, well, of course, we’re another polis conversation constituent, and let’s find the bridges so that we can work with people of disadvantage and build ...

By essentially giving them a token voice that doesn’t actually meaningfully increase the mind share, the legitimacy? That’s to say, are we only operating on the tactical layer instead of the power calibration layer?

One is that you’re asking, when we say help the helpers, do we focus on actually helping them to gain what castells would call communication power or power of networking? Or are we just reinforcing their already disadvantaged power position?

That’s a seminar topic, so there’s essentially two questions. So let me just check my understanding.

Or as you go more intimate and co-present, you can only do this with 150 people, and that’s only in the most pressure environments, usually just ten or 100 people at most. But the point of these technologies, plural technologies, is to go here without sacrificing this. So this is ...

Usually it’s phrased as a trade off, like, as you scale, you have to lose some nuance.

And also that it helps to save their time to identify the crux, the nuance, to compress the nuance without sacrificing the nuance, as facilitators do at the end of an assembly. Usually they co-write an executive summary, but that is where the bias enters the most. Based on the ...

So I think the social infrastructure here is based on making sure that it’s like, help the helpers, right, the existing community organizers, grassroots organizations, civil society groups, and so on, see this as augmenting, not as an authoritarian force. So whatever polis or AllOurIdeas or whatever, must not get ...

Yeah, I would first say that we were just dealing with that, right, because the whole point of having open-source tools is that you do not wait for facilitators or urban planners or digital ministries to run such conversations. The whole point of v taiwan is that anyone who cares ...

But you can add your own idea, like something is even more important. And so after a while, you will have this rank order list, which can then be analyzed by GPT-4 into something like a constitutional document. Right? So obviously the top score is on disinformation.

Like you would like ChatGPT to behave this way, then you write it down, and then you get to vote on other people’s preferences as well. And so what this actually does is that it creates a prioritized result, a rank order list, which, as I mentioned, is the native ...

Yeah, that’s obviously part of it. It is the aggregation part. Right? So, like the collective intelligence project, as part of alignment, assemblies work with open air to do precisely that. They sent 1000 invitations to statistically somewhat representative Americans that are already customers of OpenAI and so on. And ...

But we can also open up the constitution so that it can be done at any level. Incremental fine tuning, I think that is the check and balance here, because I totally agree with you. Only the largest labs can afford to do this fine tuning and constitutional alignment, and ...

But if you run it like every day continuously, it doesn’t matter. So this is what the talk to the city people with the taiwan people are now calling this recursive public agenda setting. So it’s recursive public because we expect the agenda to shift and the community to evolve, ...

Oh, yes.

So then we use that to further tune the behavior, the ethics code of whatever you call it, to the resulting language model. But the preference is what always goes first, and then the exchange style, communication style goes later with the constitutional alignment.

Like when people situated in this kind of collaborative conversation agree to find common ground, they would agree on a constitutional document that they individually would not produce. So aggregating individual coalitions doesn’t guarantee this blending. This blending only happens when there’s a social object to blend into.