Thank you. Bye.

Thanks. Happy New Year.

Yes. Sounds good. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

This sounds great. Thanks a lot. I really appreciate your time. Let me know if ever I can help you out, or if there is any information I can provide you with that you might need.

I like that. [laughs] That would be really cool. I like the idea. Let’s work towards making that happen.

Yeah. Could you send me the information, what’s needed for this robotic performance, or appearance, so then I can look into that?

I like the idea. I’m thinking about, this would be at the University of Helsinki. It would be really nice to have the immersive aspect to it, but I don’t think that the technology is there at this point, unfortunately. We would need help in setting that up.

It would be really valuable to get more public attention to these topics in Finland from somebody who has been working on these topics for such a long time. You have so much insight and perspective.

That would be up to you. We would organize the event your talk. Whenever would work for you. For instance, just to name some times, the end of March, early April, May, or next fall.

What is that?

It would be really great for our Finnish audience to hear about your work in Taiwan. They would be very much interested in it, if you would be interested in giving a talk, and maybe having some meetings with interested parties in Finland. Would that be of interest to you?

Another thing -- thank you so much. I appreciate all these -- I wanted to ask you if you would be interested, we would like to invite you to visit us in Finland in this tackling bubbles and biases of democratic participation project.

Yes, that would be wonderful. I’m in the US now, but then soon, I will be going to Helsinki for a while before I come back here. That would be wonderful. I’ll be visiting the UK in a couple of months, too.

Have you done case studies? Are there articles, blog posts, written resources that I could look into in more detail?

I like that. That’s really fascinating. I’m just making notes here. This is wonderful. Thanks a lot for sharing all this information. I’m going to follow up with all these links that you shared. Is there any other resources I could find online about these cases?

I love this graph. I love it.

I love this graph, by the way.

Now, there is many, but it’s still called The Finnish Experiment.

It was supposed to be one and only crowdsourced experiment, but then it just has continued.

Oh, yeah. Sorry about that.

First, I’d like to hear, because I recall you mentioned we the maverick talk about crowdsourcing -- also, you mentioned here a couple of times about crowdsourcing videos from people -- have you used crowdsourcing in policymaking, policy decisions, or urban planning projects? Do you have any cases like that?

I’m trying to look up what’s going on with the website. Anyway, I want to take the next step now, take these models further, and study more of maybe digital storytelling in crowdsourced policymaking, and so on.

Let me see. I think the network is getting worse. I’m calling from home to...

Then it’s publicly, freely open for anybody to participate. Then the government officials input the crowd’s input, and then decides how it’s going to be applied in a law.

We have studied many different aspects, people’s motivation factors to participate in crowdsourced policymaking. These projects work so that any ministry in Finland who wants to crowdsource people’s feedback, they will give instructions online for people to participate.

I can show you, we have crowdsourced [indecipherable 24:39] lawmaking privacy. If you go to a website called www.thefinnishexperiment.com -- I’ll share you the link here -- you’ll see all the projects we have done.

There’s [indecipherable 24:22] technologies I’ve heard of you capture such video, and then also watch it. The other interest of mine in this project is crowdsourcing. In Finland, we have a done massive amount of crowdsourced policymaking.

I like the idea of this 175 video, because there’s a debate around, do we even need 360 degrees? Maybe 180, or 200, 175, would be enough for the feeling of sense of presence. I find that really meaningful.

Then studying the implications of these different environments, visual as compared to some more traditional ways to give information to people. That’s what I’m trying to explore. What would be the most meaningful direction to take?

I’m thinking about buzzing out different ideas about creating VR in unity environments to show some simulations of policy decisions, or 360-degree video to show some environments that these politic decisions are about.

I’m curious about, one of the research interests that I have in this project is to see how could we use VR in a way that would help people to understand the implications of policy decisions or different facts, different background information that help them make policy decisions.

Sounds great. That’s really impressive. In terms of research, what type of research questions would be of interest to you, in terms of the projects you have done? If there was any research to be done that you thought would be relevant, what type of questions you would like to ...

That’s amazing.

I like that. Thank you.

Yes, I can. That’s really cool. Thanks for sharing.

VR in democracy and AR in democracy is one of the areas where we want to investigate where we could use these technologies for democratic values.

If you could recap a little bit what you have been doing, and then also, what is the current status? Are you working on something in VR in democracy currently?

I’m really glad that we have a chance to talk now. I was curious to know if you had a chance to tell me a little bit more about the VR experiments that you have been doing. I’ll send you a link to the project website.

Our goal is foster democratic innovation, study them, and then also collect case studies from all over the world, what has been done so far. Of course, then, your work there in Taiwan is really interesting in many aspects.

The aim of the project is to tackle bubbles and biases in democratic participation. I’m leading a part of the project where we develop these democratic innovations in a hub called Democracy Accelerator.

Nice. Well, Happy New Year. I’m really happy that we have a chance to reconnect. I really enjoyed your talk in Madrid in the Open Government Conference some time back. I’m part of this very big project in Finland, where we develop democratic innovations.

How are things going in Taiwan?

Thanks for making time for me. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, I can hear you pretty well.

Hey, how are you doing?