(laughter)

It’s just saying I’ll not begin by speaking in JavaScript or something.

Excellent.

Sure. I’ll quickly, because we have 40 minutes, maybe take 10 minutes to go through my slides that talk about the Taiwan model without making any specific technological references. If you want to dive in on any specific part, just interrupt me, and we can talk about that specific part.

At the end of this month I think our let’s say alternate model, a Singaporean model, is going to take effect in Singapore, where the minister like me can auto correct anything on any media. It will be very interesting looking at the two. Neither are take down cyber norms, ...

I think the Taiwan model of fighting disinformation I’ve outlined actually in my NDI speech of the placing the power in the community sector -- as we say here, the social sector -- rather than the private or the public sector, if you have any thoughts around that.

That’s right. I’ll probably be there too.

That’s right. What would you like to talk about? I understand you just came from the DPP?

I’ll speak in my normal speed then.

Still feeling OK now?

Wow. Jet lagged?

When did you arrive?

Feel free to email me, any time really.

Right. Last year I was also visiting during UNGA session, I had a collaborative session with one of also UN youth ambassadors, and it’s a really good experience.

Yeah.

It’s the social innovations we need to talk about. That’s my main platform during the UNGA.

Well, there are industrial innovations, but there are also social innovations.

“It’s a byproduct of industrialization.”

When people think innovation, they often think about “Oh, innovation, I know, it’s one of the SDGs, it’s SDG9, right?”

It is. I really hope people can focus on the governance side, community governance side as well, because you can all the dashboard you want, but the innovations, you don’t see the innovations on the dashboards. That is where I really want innovation to come.

A professor, right. Then from our office, maybe three people, something like that. From MoFA maybe three more people.

Right, but each one is going to bring… They are also inviting the academia?

Ten-ish? Yeah, Ten-ish.

Not just me. The presidential hackathon winners, which is the…

Something like that, 24th.

I’m going to attend the GDS-run design in government conference, their annual conference in Rotterdam, I think, November, just to talk about this.

Because previously we only meet their representatives, which are not actually re-presenting their arguments, they’re presenting, but not really re-presenting. Then the “how might we” only focus on those represented subjects.

They’re working, trying to transform, they call it the design government initiative, because if you introduce design thinking, it becomes immediately obvious that the young people, the people who are vulnerable and so on, are much better candidates in a cultural anthropological, or human geographical way to find the real ...

This is in conjunction with research by Nesta UK. Our facilitator for this discussion when the office was formed was from Policy Lab. She’s still working with us, but she’s back to London now and working with Indy Johar in the Dark Matter Lab.

A discussion at all.

Exactly.

These things are new. They’re innovative. They’re not yet government policy. They’re not yet norms. The private sector isn’t endorsing that for the fear that they may cause backlash. We can show, conclusively, everybody think it’s a good idea. Why don’t we just ratify this and table the discussion later ...

Every time after we run a pol.is conversation, we see the same…This is all machine-generated report. There’s actually one five points of difference, often ideological. Most people agree on most of the things most of the time. It’s just that the media, institutional or social, only focus on those five ...

There’s no reply button because if there is a reply button, the people with the most time wins. There’s no reply button, so you can’t attack anyone for their opinion. You can just propose a better one.

In this sense, we have three weeks dedicated for feelings so people can share what they feel is important agenda-setting. They see that, as they click agree or disagree on each other’s sentiments, they move on this visualization toward people who feel like them. You can see the consensus in ...

That’s often what’s lacking in public consultation. We jump straight from facts to suggestions, but we don’t ask about people’s feelings. The people get more polarized as they see each other’s ideas. Only the most divisive ones get any airtime… I’m not going to talk about referendums.

In each of those sub-topics, this one was about self-driving vehicles. You see a fellow sentiment from a citizen. It’s what we call focused-conversation method. First, we crowdsource the facts, the data. Sharing the data, we ask people how they feel.

…and people who care about ecological sustainability. They’d have to find their common values.

Yes. Once the local people set the agenda, we have a AI-powered conversation engine which we’re using right now to discuss not just US-Taiwan diplomatic relationship, but also, domestically, about how to improve our hiking experience so we can balance the need for people who like mountains, like Councilor Yeh ...

That’s right.

Very much so.

People on the eastern, on the indigenous, on the rural, on the off-shore islands, it’s a higher time cost for them to meet me for 40 minutes in Taipei. Which is why I travel every other Tuesday to those places and bring technology to people rather than asking people to ...

You can put things into it. Once it’s full, it summons another one, and things like that. It’s social design right there. People who live in the western part, because of high-speed rails, they take full advantage of my office hour from 10 to 10 every Wednesday.

The only thing I ask is that it has to be radically transparent so that everybody learns from our exchange. People did learn, and they just modified those self-driving tricycles into things that actually make sense for the elderly to help them, like in a shopping cart that follows them.

Yeah, their pets. There’s a one-in-twenty chance that people bring their perpetual motion machine.

When they draw the world they see, it’s like Mangold. You get inspired. It flips the thought around these contributors so that they become contributors. They’re not “vulnerable people.” The design is all like this. Every Wednesday, you can bring your pet self-driving tricycles [laughs] and meet me.

…the Taiwan Social Innovation Lab. The place itself is co-designed around Taiwan with 100 social innovators. The public art here is contributed by people with Down syndrome. We saw them as vulnerable population, but actually they see the world through geometry or topology, not like us through text or numbers.

Literally, every Wednesday, and in my real office. This is my real office…

Once a week.

Office hours.