You signed this, maybe you want to sign another. Sometimes in the petition discussion board, you will see that ‘join this Facebook group where we support each other,’ right? Exchanging signatures, which is great.

Yeah. We… Because the joint platform uses a single platform, so we can do this Amazon and Netflix trick of ‘recommend it for you’.

Yeah, so all of this is about contextual confidence. The more confident you have around your community’s context, the more partnership you can come into.

Again, for most of the referendum topics, you see them first taking place in consultation and in e-petition just as a training wheel to get a referendum movement going.

So, it’s like training for this. And beyond JOIN, we also have a referendum system, which requires collecting close to 300K signatures on a national issue.

So, because consultation is sometimes about hitting the brakes, right, like stop doing this. But e-petition is more like, oh, let’s do that instead. But without the common availability of the budget and the regulatory consultation, there is no community to talk about alternatives. It’s impossible for a single person ...

No, they feed into one another.

So, focus on things that the public administration also needs help with. So, this is not like civic tech needs government’s help. This is civic tech can help.

But in certain countries that just elected a new president where the inflation rate is very high, then Web3 has a thriving ecosystem, because no matter how volatile Ethereum or Bitcoin is, their currency is even worse.

No, this is not being cynical. This is just political reality, right? So, I mean, like in Taiwan, the central bank works really well, which means that cryptocurrency doesn’t easily take off. Because even if you have Bitcoin Cash or whatever, even if you have stablecoins and so on, the ...

Yeah. As I mentioned, it doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to be better than the current administration, right? So, back in 2014, the trust in the administration was below 10%. So, it’s very easy for us to demonstrate our methods are better than 9%, right?

Of course.

That’s really good. It seems that you started well within the horizon, which is great.

Exactly.

Right, exactly. Exactly. Like you’re asking me to jump off a cliff and say that I can fly. How does that work?

Yeah. For senior public service, as long as each step is short and you’re well within their existing horizon, they’re happy because they would love to share from slightly more people. Or they would love to have the income signal to be better instead of just noise. Because these two ...

Does that make sense?

And this is something that we work with Anthropic and OpenAI et al. So, this is a people’s AI. So, the word of plurality is about extending this horizon to the second horizon, but this cannot be done in a one push. Every point needs to be slightly pulled out ...

And you can infuse a lot of existing recordings of your community organizers, and let the people’s voice talk. And once you have a feedback mechanism for that constituent to tune the summarization, maybe they say, you know, I did say that, but not in that tone. Things like that. ...

So, the cultural translation tools can work in both directions, right? It can elevate something that is more like a pole into a co-creation. And it can also, through translating 22 languages, turn something that is more like Polis into a conversation with a synthetic avatar of the Polis, right? ...

And once it’s destroyed, there’s no way to get back. And there’s a backlash. And your horizon actually shortens. So, all the way so far, which I call conservative anarchism. It’s basically keep doing things that are just a conversation with stakeholders, maybe here, like well within the horizon, but ...

For anyone, really, intimacy is really only shared with a few people. And so, we have this constraint of design of mechanisms. Let’s call it the first horizon. So, mostly, like if you want to hold a conversation, and you try to move beyond this, you hit real logistic problems, ...

Now, the original constraint was that if you wanted these audiences in the world, we only really have a few.

So, you’re already aware of the plurality mindset. So, let’s just talk about plurality for a bit.

We are the rebels.

Well, we are the resistance.

Exactly.

So, we’ve always designed our participation process with this double diamond in mind. And initially, before this ministry started most of our work is in the first diamond, because first we don’t want to compete with MPs on the second diamond. And for most of the topics we explore they ...

Now, we are talking about self-selection when it has universal impact. And so, combining these two, it is conceivable that for something that has a universal social impact and no specific competent authority or overlapping competent authority, to be designed as a like double diamond system, where first the exploration, ...

For matters which a statistical representation is needed, for example, in Taiwan, we aim for that in the original design of the public healthcare single payer system or the electronic version of the healthcare system including dentistry coverage and so on. Now, that is truly multi-stakeholder. But if you don’t ...

So, like nowadays is generative AI because it’s everybody’s business. It’s nobody’s business. So, what are the risks that can be caused by generative AI? For example, over reliance to opaque models - which ministry owns them, right? So, for this shape of things, our Taiwanese administration is perfectly fine ...

So, for these two, there is a shared clear urgency for clarity. And whenever there is a clear urgency for clarity in the administration, they don’t mind letting the citizens set an agenda. So, just focus on these and ignore everything else if you are focusing on the self-selection model.

No, this is public administration 101. So, from the very beginning we focused on things like Uber which is which exists in the intersection of the ministries of transportation, finance and economy. Or, for truly emerging things like Bitcoin, which is the purview of nobody.

Yeah. So, there are, roughly speaking, two ways. And in academic words, it’s self-selection and sortation and because you know all the theories so I would just go straight to the point. Self-selection works best if the agenda is set by the people. And for most government initiatives, they only ...

Like informing citizens.

Of course.

So, there are a lot of such design ways to essentially harness the flame, the energy of the conflict, the tension without letting it diverge into polarization.

So, we restructured the discussion board around e-petitions so that there is no way to reply to each other. So, there are two columns. One is the supporting arguments; One is the counter arguments, but there is no way to reply across them. And you can only upload or download. ...

So, the main argument in 2016, when we built the participation officer network, is to convince them that if 5,000 people want something to be answered, to answer them well once actually saves you a lot of time down the line compared to each petitioning through their input or whatever, ...

So, in Taiwan, we have for more than a decade the freedom of information laws. So at least the FOIA requests, there’s a standard request. The problem being the response to FOIA requests are point to point. So, if as a FOIA requester, I send to five ministries, first, none ...

So, 5,000 people with e-collecting can summon a minister or their team to go where people are and listen to people’s ideas and respond point by point exactly as a member of the parliament’s inquiry. So, 5,000 citizens is equal to one MP, essentially, when it comes to demanding a ...

So, we handled a lot of things like closely held corporations, crowd sourced funding, Uber, Airbnb and so on. And so, the new government, Dr. Tsai Ing-wen’s administration, expanded the vTaiwan model to become the national one-stop participation service, the JOIN service, which combines, that was regulatory pre-announcement, but JOIN ...

So, the more frequently you respond, the more substantially you respond, you score higher and it’s transparent, like everybody can see the dashboard. So, there’s a friendly competition. And so, each and every ministry related to e-services need to bring at least one law, and later on, at least one ...

We’re not working for any political party. We’re working with the government and with the people, not for the people. And so, I think this solves a very important coordination problem. No ministry wants to act first on this unless every other ministry is working on this. So, in the ...

There are exactly 120 such people. So, we had three training sessions. And so, they’re the director generals, administrators, right? And so, at once, they understood that we are on their side.

So long story short, I think we built alliances with the senior career public service. So, I remember that when I was first introduced to the cabinet end of 2014, Minister Jaclyn Tsai didn’t ask me to talk to other ministers. They asked me to talk to level 12 senior ...

And so, at the end of 2014, the original premier resigned, and the new premier Mao Chi-kuo along with his vice premier Chang San-cheng said that crowdsourcing, open data, transparency is going to be the national direction. And so, to that end, we, who participated in the Occupy Movement, were ...

This sends a very clear political signal that the issue transcends political party affiliations. This is about a citizen’s will to essentially accept nothing about us without us.

And at the end of that year, all the mayoral candidates that didn’t support open government lose the election. And everyone, including William Lai of Tainan and Ko Wen-je in Taipei won the election. And they are now doing another election on the president now. So, on open government platforms.