Some people are also moving away from the word “mainland.” We say, sometimes, the Chinese “continent,” as a translation for 大陸地區. Translating that word as “mainland” would seem to mean that we’re on the fringe or something… Well we’re not on the fringe.

Well, many young people don’t even use the word “re-“unification now, as it implies there was a time where PRC government and the government in Taiwan were somehow unified, but there was just not such a time.

There are other often cited reasons as well pertaining to his work in Kaohsiung. However, as I’m not a Kaohsiung citizen, I’m not well-informed about that aspect.

Now, after Hong Kong, everyone drew the line against “one country, two system.” Mayor Han in particular said “Taiwanese can never accept it, unless it is over my dead body.”

It used to be that KMT maintained a certain distance with the idea. Their position was, “That’s not our interpretation of the “1992 consensus.”” The interesting thing about the words 共識 in Mandarin, by the way, is that it doesn’t readily translate as “consensus.” It may translate as “consent” or ...

This March, Mayor Han visited the LOCPG, the Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government in the Hong Kong SAR. That became a liability when the Hong Kong protests broke out, as everybody had to distance themselves away from the “one country, two system” idea, including Mayor Han himself.

Today, for people under 35, Han’s support rate is around 20 percent now. Last year it used to be higher for young people.

Because of that, the more authoritarian parties, traditionally the KMT, didn’t enjoy as much support as before. However, that changed when Mayor Han ran for the Kaohsiung mayor; there were plenty to young people seeing him as changing the nature of KMT and therefore associate themselves publicly with him.

By nature, they are educated in a place where there’s always a cacophony of voices because of the World Wide Web. It’s much less likely for them to believe in any authoritarian narrative. By nature, they are antiauthoritarian.

I still remember the martial law, how bad it affected journalism and free speech. People younger than me, as few as three years younger than me, don’t remember because they were three when martial law was lifted.

If by younger people we use the Youth Council definition, under 35, then it means that don’t remember the martial law anymore. The martial law was stopped in ‘87, when I was six.

This basically is the technology we brought from the Occupy into the national government. After solving the issues of the likes of Uber and so on, this now become a standard way for us to listen to people.

This is readily implementable. It doesn’t even cost much. It’s missing in the current public policy. Everybody across parties or whatever ideologies say they want it. Why don’t we just ratify it? There’s no reason not to ratify it.

In any case [laughs] , actually there are a lot of consensus among people of different party affiliations. The top consensus of Bowling Green, Kentucky is that in our K-12, where we have STEM, we really should add arts and make it STEAM, as simple as that.

This is a real consultation run in Bowling Green, Kentucky. It’s a kind of virtual town hall thing. There are usually, of course, five divisive issues. If you read institutional or social media, you would think that’s all there is about politics. I’m sure that nowadays, here, maybe it’s just ...

After a while, you start seeing the polarized poles to start converging more into the middle because people compete to resonate with both in group and also across the group. Every time, as long as we run it for three weeks or more, we always see this shape.

If you have a reply button, the people who have the most time on their hand wins the argument by default. If you don’t have a reply button, then people really cannot make a personal attack. They can only propose something for other people to vote on.

You agree or disagree. As you do, your avatar moves among the people who share a similar sentiment. This is a space for reflection and for feelings and not for trolls because there is no reply button.

That was then where we are invited as reverse mentors to the ministers and applied the same technology that we deployed during the Sunflower Occupy into public administration, we always, after deploying such technologies…Called pol.is, this particular one, where you see one sentiment from your fellow citizen.

Also, because at that time, really the administration was struggling with a lot of emergent issues, such as Uber, they really want this kind of technology, what we call listening at scale, to come to consensus about how to regulate Uber in a way that we can show conclusively that ...

There’s no legacy system, so to speak. When we start designing our democracy, Internet is already part of it. That also contributes to the buy-in from the administration.

We don’t have the split between people who study public administration and people who study digital technology. It’s the same generation of people who can do technology on the Internet as well as democracy. We don’t have a history of the republic to protect and honor.

In Taiwan, we have the same year that’s personal computer and lifting of the martial law and the same year of Wide Web, as well as our first presidential election campaigns. For us, Internet and democracy is the same generation.

After we invited ourselves in and demonstrated that this technology really works and g0v really can fork, not only the transparency part of government, but also the participation part of the government, then we get a lot more volunteers to join.

They are not all necessarily from Beijing. They just happened to be there. They have to finish their learnings elsewhere in Europe. I grew up with these people. We talked about democracy all the time. That’s my earlier root.

He was doing his PhD in Saarbrücken, in Germany. I was literally grown up among his field subjects, who were all pursuing their advanced degrees anyway because they’re exiles. They can’t return to Beijing anymore.

That was then informed by my father’s involvement. He was a journalist covering the Tiananmen Square event up to the 1st of June that year. His PhD dissertation was about the communication structure during the Tiananmen movement.

The Sunflower technologies that I helped setting up is really just a technology for representation of what’s really happening in the occupied areas. That defies disinformation because people want real information if it’s easily accessible to them. A lot of the thoughts around making facts spread faster came from the ...

It’s a demo. It’s a demo of how using digital technology, half a million people on the street can come to a consensus in peaceful way. I wanted to say a leaderless way, but it’s not really true at that time. There’s still 20 NGO leaders. There are still leaders ...

Every day we inched toward rough consensus a little bit. It’s certainly nonviolent in the Occupy Parliament area. After three weeks, a set of rough consensus emerged. The demonstration is not a protest.

People talk about the impact on agriculture, on labor, on telecommunication, on allowing them into our 4G base stations [laughs] , and things like that. Each NGO deliberated one aspect. It’s all livestreamed. It’s all transcribed. It’s all available online.

The g0v movement made a lot of tools, like if you enter your company registration number or your name of your company it shows exactly how the CSSTA affects you in a very factual, not at all partisan way of deliberation.

Considering the MPs were on strike, people took their position and do their work for them. That was our legitimacy theory. It’s organized by around 20 NGOs, each one looking at one aspect of CSSTA. It’s a real deliberation.

People occupied it because the MPs were on strike. They were on strike because they refused to deliberate substantially the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement with Beijing, citing that it’s a regulatory level thing and not a treaty or law level thing, and so they shouldn’t have any say on ...

That was 22 days of nonstop livestream of an occupied Parliament.

I still have my old slides here. [laughs]

There was a political point. I don’t have my old slides, but I can find a proxy of it, I guess. Just a second, it’s somewhere here. Let’s look at one of the older slides.

We invited ourself by occupying the Parliament. [laughs]

Yeah, and altogether it’s 35 in our Youth Council. I’m 38 years old, I’m too old now. [laughs] I used to be the reverse mentor of the previous horizontal minister in charge of law, Jaclyn Tsai.

They care about whatever their minister cares about. It’s a reverse mentor, because their minister is like their understudy. They care about whatever their minister cares about, instead of just on issues concerning young people. They offer fresh directions to tackle the sustainable development.

Together they form the Youth Council at the administration level, headed by our premier, himself. I’m one of the co-chairs. The other co-chair is the founder of Impact Hub Taipei and has really good young connections to the UNDP and friends.

That’s right, especially to the nonvoters. We always say that these 16 years people, they lead the direction of the nation, and so each minister actually hires such a person, always below 35, but usually below 30, to serve as the reverse mentor of the minister.

That’s my talk. Thank you.

It’s not the only solution, but it is the only direction of solution Taiwan can afford to have with our history in the martial law, in effect. Nobody want to go back, even slightly, to the martial law.

That’s more or less my presentation. Partnership is really important. We use the metaphors from spam as something that’s a virus of the mind of epidemic of the distrust, and we use a public health metaphor instead of a war metaphor to talk about such things.

That’s the third of our proactive. It doesn’t cost any budget, but it really does take a lot of the vitriol away from public discourse by having people to collaborate openly.

The petitioner gets a large scholarship from one of the insurance companies and don’t have to go to strike on Fridays, [laughs] so that’s one of the happier stories.

Once you participate in such a meeting, which is livestreamed and live transcribed, there’s no way for people to understand this as anything other than a collaboration. Disinformation lose one vector because people have the entire context in their mind now. They cannot be persuaded into hating each other, and ...

It’s a story of people who don’t have voting power otherwise who control the agenda-setting power of the environmental minister, who eventually partner with the private sector.

The young girl talked about something like sugarcane waste that could be circularly used in a zero carbon fashion. We forged alliances. Now when you are in Taiwan indoor drinking plastic straw is banned, and you do get sugarcane waste made straws, or any other waste that lower the carbon ...