Of course, yeah.

Imagine we launch an issue. We’ll ask this database with people’s readings and notes already over there. Say we key the issue, say unmanned vehicle, and anything around this topic, any kind of reading materials, notes, comments, thoughts, comments on social media, and so on will be ready there as ...

Right, that’s important. That’s why the project Audrey mentioned, sense.tw, it’s more like a study group online, altogether, for people to read different materials and highlight pros and cons online. We can share our perspectives when we read similar documents. That would give a rough understanding on different issues.

For example, we have the data of Uber’s unmanned vehicle conversation, and so on. We can use those data and APIs from pol.is to create a new experience. Now we’re thinking to make it in a VR environment, but it could be just a fun game in any platform.

We were coming up with this new project. We’re still looking for people and place to work on that. It’s called Holo-pol.is. It’s using pol.is’s library. We’re now trying to run a pol.is server locally and pull some data we have.

How do you spell Brigade?

Yeah.

On one end, it’s comment that has super consensus, really good consensus. On the other end, will be the very controversial comments. You can, of course, go through all the comments that is part of the consensus. If you have time, you can also go through more comments that has ...

That sounds really cool. I’m mostly in contact with the development team of pol.is right now, and I think they’re making a new visualization, which I think has that feature. You lay out all the comments on the pol.is conversation along a scale that is the consensus level.

...video watching and so on. The algorithm was more delicate on shaping this consensus on what video to present to you or what kind of consensus you are going to be attached to, in a sense. I do think it makes sense, but also it depends on if it’s really ...

If you can think in that analogy, for me, the measurement of I watch the video, it could be just on and off, I watch or a don’t watch, but it could also be I watch for 20 minutes.

I think the fidelity of this consensus will be different if we have more scales on the vote. When I look at pol.is’s algorithm, it’s exactly the same logic behind Netflix, when people are watching videos, movies on the Internet. If I watch the same set of videos as you ...

It’s interesting. The voting was just to connect different comments. It’s actually possible to divide not only yes and no or "I don’t know," three options, to more options. There could be a scale of 7 or 10 options in the end.

Participation.

What kind of democracy? Is it direct, is it digital, or is it fluid democracy we’re trying to achieve in the end? Different powers from different kinds of technology we could use.

It is very different. I’m also very new to this process of implementing or making democracy in Taiwan. For me, it’s very similar to what you’re doing, but I’m trying to understand our definition to what democracy’s actually about.

...tradition.

...more biased. [laughs]

That’s true. We always have Taiwanese people.

We actually didn’t limit people from other countries to participate in vTaiwan. Actually, there were so many international people we count as the community, as well.

Yeah, it’s always different stakeholders.

I think pol.is did help us to facilitate more people than one person could. How would you describe vTaiwan’s community in this public term?

Mix of diverse people who could represent the public?

Abstract public.

You mentioned abstract public, and there’s also another term called mini-public. I’m very curious on what’s the difference you think around these two terms.

Of course, yeah. The different policies should go in different rhythms. It also makes sense to have this community.

He was arguing if we should let this recursive public running this recursive process. Should it be a month, a day, or a week, or a year? [laughs]

I just had this conversation with Eric Gordon from Emerson College about this vision of having a platform provided by the government, no matter what form it will be in the future, and to have this vTaiwan open consultation process.

vTaiwan is evolving every week. [laughs]

Yeah, every year, every month, every week.

If this law, if this act is going to take few months to pass, then we can expect the government will run vTaiwan as fluid as vTaiwan’s community. I do think it’s important to have both forks, both the government regulation and the vTaiwan experiment living at the same time.

You can have guidelines. [laughs]

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

That’s still in the parliament. We were not sure if it’s going to pass or not. We’re really looking forward to have that, because that means we are having this vTaiwan experiment in a public/private side but also having a merging-back version in the government as well.

The digital communication regulation is writing that government should provide a platform inspired by vTaiwan that provides platform for citizen participation. I think Audrey was talking about that.

If the government, in the end, is interested in merging these projects back and writing a regulation around it, then the government is trying to institutionalize vTaiwan. There’s actually a regulation called National Communication Regulation.

In the g0v community, we did lots of forking projects to the community. Then when they create some kind of better-experienced websites or projects, the government sometimes merge it back. I think vTaiwan experiments also from g0v to try to prototype a open consultation process.

If that is the case, we are kind of regulating the government’s involvement to chat conversation with citizens on the policy-making process. You can see that. If you are familiar with the fork and merge idea from g0v’s community to the government organization right now.

This also connects you to the last slides and when we talk about if we should institutionalize vTaiwan in a way if the participation from the government side or from the citizen side should be regulated. Actually, we’re talking about if there should be a regulation to talk about the ...

I think the storyline will be from we are doing this experiment actually called vTaiwan, right? We are trying to experiment an open consultation model from this public/private space. It’s because vTaiwan is public funded but private operate by the community.

I’m not sure if I can describe the whole piece. [laughs] I think a very limited observation.

She’ll be there to understand the situation over there. I think we’re still discussing about...I don’t know if you have more questions you want to...

Yeah, she’s going to the parliament meeting. In a parliament period, she attend the meeting every week. Many will be just sitting there and using her computer, and checking what’s going on, and trying to participate in a very limited way. Actually, she couldn’t be answering questions from the MPs.

I think we’re privileged. [laughs] It’s a good opportunity to work with many amazing people.

Yeah, for me, it’s a lot of learning also from Audrey.

I’ll be happy to stay for another 30 to 40 minutes...

OK. Yeah, I think it’s all right.

Then it’s very good enough instead of having 4,000 people from the same background and talk about the same thing.

All of them. We want to attract all of them. When we talk about stakeholders, we actually are thinking not really so much about the quantity of the stakeholders, but actually the dynamic of the stakeholders. If there’s a issue, we can interface more stakeholders from, let’s say, different groups, ...