Not to replace the national or regional councils and peace, but offer a chance to discover good enough consensus across the world that may not exist within a jurisdiction, but may be imported easily from other jurisdictions that have already figured it out.

The same for the disinformation crisis, for computer virus, and so on, because these emergent threats doesn’t know borders at all. Our conversations must be also across borders, and that is the main offer from the digital democracy world to the representative democracy world.

Because of the newfound possibility for people to transcend, even time zones, to have conversations with one another, it’s now much easier for the stakeholders, people who have a stake in it, who suffer, for example, from the climate crisis across the world to have a conversation and come to ...

Before, when the bandwidth was limited, people focused on the decision part, so you have voting, referendums, and so on, and leave the deliberation part to representatives of the people. However, nowadays, it’s as easy for 200 people across the world to have a conversation as it’s for the 200 ...

Democracy, to me, is a social technology that produces common understanding, common reflections, common interpretations, and finally common decisions.

It created a new foundation, a technological background, for the kind of democracy that is deliberative, meaning that people can deliberat,e to think about things together, and come to rough consensus or good enough consensus, meaning that we can all live with it. By discovering what we can all live ...

When early broadcasting technology were around, it was very easy to start world wars by broadcasting to people who hate each other without any way for them to understand each other through conversations. The Internet changed all that. It can connect people of very different ideas and opinions. Internet is ...

In the era of radio and television, one person can broadcast to millions of people, but it was very difficult technically for millions of people to speak to one another, to listen to the conversations between the people who share your view and also people who don’t share your view, ...

Of course, that’s a good foundation for every society, but nowadays with digital technology, we can afford to express our collective preferences continuously every day. Because of that, I worked to improve the bandwidth of democracy, making sure that we can, through participatory budget petitions, sandbox experiments, presidential hackathon, and ...

Democracy, as originally envisioned in paper technology, usually is very time consuming. Voting is very limited bandwidth. If you vote for someone out of eight candidates, just three bits, it’s very high latency — every four years. You upload just a few bits.

For our generation, Internet, democracy, the same thing, happens at roughly the same decade. We see democracy not as a 200 year tradition, but rather a design like semiconductor that people can improve five nanometers, three nanometers every couple years.

In Taiwan, we got democratization relatively late compared to other advanced democracies. We only got out of the martial law in the 1980s. Our first direct presidential election was in 1996, which was already after the world wide web.

Question not just the problems in your own field, but also the configuration of your field so that you can build interdisciplinary connections to other fields so that you can view it from the other field’s perspective.

To be a hacker is to familiarize yourself with the hacking community in any particular field. There could be a hacker in law, a hacker in science, a hacker anywhere. The point of being a hacker is to stay curious and also think of new innovative ways, in a way ...

A civic hacker needs to be humble in that we start a design, but do not finished it. We publish freely our work so that future generations can improve upon it and also hack it if they want.

I believe to be a good enough ancestor, meaning that we need to free the future. The future generations will face their emerging challenges with the tools and spaces and infrastructure that we create today. If we prescribe too much, if we are taking too much pride in our own ...

Cyber security research is a profession, yes.

I wrote a job description when I entered the Cabinet in 2016 and my purpose is embedded in that poem or prayer, which 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 ...

Mm hmm.

A civic hacker builds new systems that don’t suffer from the old vulnerabilities and contributes freely this new system to the society.

I’m a civic hacker. Civic means that my contribution is to the public good for the benefits of the society. A hacker is someone who understands the system, but think outside of the box. Now, a Black Hat hacker uses that skill to deliver hacks that profits themselves or their ...

Is that good?

After a couple of years working with the Cabinet, I was, I guess, promoted to a full minister-at-large at the Taiwanese Cabinet. Today, I’m Taiwan’s Minister of Digital Affairs in charge of cyber resilience. That’s like cyber security, broadband as human rights, societal benefit, and also the digital economy.

My background is a software engineer. I worked with Apple, with Oxford University Press, on Siri and other computational linguistics technologies. Now, in 2014 I participated in a student movement called the Sunflower Movement that occupied peacefully our parliament for three weeks. After that, I was invited as a reverse ...

You too. Live long and prosper.

Yeah, exactly.

And since we’re handing over to the new minister on May 20th, I may actually have much more time to play a consultative role. If you have additional thoughts and if you read the book and want to, like, expand on that paragraph, feel free just to send me an ...

Yeah, I think we can adjourn. Timmy will follow up with the slides. And I hope that if you have further follow-up questions, you can send to Timmy and Wei-Chung here will also help.

And in general, you can frame the breadth of diversity as a time saver because frankly, it takes time to talk to that many people. And if you have technology that lets you reach an order of magnitude more people at the same cost, then the career public service is ...

But in general, you can say that if you move from a scalar to a vector to structured input, you generally reduce risk because then what you get is more nuance. And when you have more nuance, it’s far harder for things to blow up after the fact when people ...

Yeah, I think it’s two things, right? It’s time saver and it’s a risk reducer. And these two may not be true at the same time, right? During the pandemic, we’ve seen lots of trade-offs of these two.

If you go back to 2014, 15, 16, 17 in our collaborative meetings, our participation offices, you will know that every consultation looks like the one month before it, except with one slight methodological change. And so, 10 years later, we reach this point.

Usually, when you improve both at the same time, it becomes brittle. It becomes fragile. People don’t have a reference model of it. And so, you probably run into this minstrel blank stare, like what you were talking about. But if you’re phrasing your improvements as just improving on one ...

And now, we’re using augmented deliberation that’s like a conversation, which is natural language and so on, as in a frontier. And each technological improvement that we do, language models, immersive shared reality, real-time translation across cultures and so on, moves these points to the up and right a little ...

If you can click it, it’s from the book Five Zero. So, if you open that link, it shows the idea of plurality or interoperable coexistence, not as a trade-off between the two sides. So, it’s like more depth or more scale. But rather, you can fold it into two ...

Anyway, but to answer really, really briefly, I think there’s a frontier here that’s like the Pareto frontier or the frontier for productivity. The degree of collaboration and the breadth of diversity, which used to be framed as trade-offs, maybe are no longer that trade-off-ish as we may think it. ...

I just wrote a book about it. So, it’s a plurality book. If you check out part five, you can begin reading at part five, Collaborative Technology and Democracy. It outlines the future as we see it. And I think Amazon will start selling it on May 20.

Yeah. Prateek?

So, I would say, of course, there’s some digital gap to be considered. But because Taiwan is, I think, the country with the fastest internet speed for any country over 10 million population, and we have broadband as a human right for a flat fee, you can have unlimited broadband ...

And also, I would argue that for many people, receiving SMS from the state and using the same phone to participate in this video conference is easy enough. They don’t need helpers. They don’t need people to help setting it up. In fact, we do have elderly people and so ...

I think for this particular one, info integrity, the relevant public are people who are online. And because we have an internet penetration rate of easily like in the high 90s for people in this age bracket, I mean, if you’re consulting for very senior people’s rights for people 80 ...

And fortunately, the ADI, the Administration for Digital Industries under moda also has some projects working on this automated or at least remote-controlled sign language interpretation. So, it’s really, really important. And I think that’s the key. We have to take, I think the language interpretation and multilingual interpretation. I ...

So, at this stage, then mini public has the, like it has two good things going for it. First, it’s really inexpensive. It’s a really good tool to set up now with the streamline process. And second, it’s far harder to have explosions when you do things online. But of ...

Yeah, so I think when we need new ones, when the scoping is more on the discovery and a little bit of defined side, we tend to use face-to-face and not necessarily with mini-publics, because at some points, it may actually help to have a rolling stakeholder discovery process instead ...

And going forward, I think the latest crop of generative models, we can do some side-by-side testing and so on vs human summarizers. I think they’re generally at a good point so that if we don’t like how they’re summarizing, we can also fine-tune it because specifically, the larger LLaMA ...

Talk to the City remains experimental, right? So, it’s an addition to the methodology. In fact, we did not use Talk to the City this time when drafting the Anti-fraud Act. We plan to use it as a kind of supplemental information, so that people can go back to the ...

And so, because we kept at it, then the ministries eventually, after like five years or six years, discovered that, oh, there’s no way it will explode when you set topics such as this. Hope that answers your question.

And the second answer is that we made sure that we tackle the issues in a way that doesn’t result in explosion. So, at the very same time, in Taiwan, we had a lot of very explosive topics like marriage equality and so on that went all the way to ...

So, it is always built as a time-saving tool which also scores points with we carry a public service. So, this is the first answer. It’s a time-saving tool to address something that has urgency anyway, that is set by the civil society or the people in general. First answer.

So, because there is a ministerial duty to answer these petitions anyway, Polis is then set as a kind of signal-through-noise tool. I wouldn’t say noise cancellation, but it’s at least a kind of catalyst tool because nobody has the time to read through the 5,000 petitions. It’s impossible. But ...