In order to do so -- I think this goes back to the DIGI⁺ Plan -- the governance part is that what we’re trying to do is that we’re using free software, we’re using cybersecurity-hardened software, to do our own businesses, to manage my team, basically.

The political system, if you are talking about the current representative republic democratic system, I think it has both roles. It, of course, must react to the fact that the stakeholders now communicate among themselves much more effectively [laughs] than through intermediaries.

Their lives are represented to the deliberations and conversations that pertain to them. The idea is multi-stakeholder consultation. The idea is not forcing everyone to use digital technology. Digital technology is just there so their voices can be carried into the discussions that goes afterwards. It’s called assistive-civic tech.

They do ethnographic interviews and try to carry those things into the administration’s discussion period. The idea is that the socially disadvantaged people, they’re not represented by anyone they voted for, but they are represented by having a thorough video capture, an interview, or any kind of live streaming.

They just be themselves, and the Taipei City work with social workers to bring the equipment to those gathering places, to bring the sign language translators, captions, and whatever to the gathering places, the community that they’re gathering.

Without technology, there is no way for these people to talk face to face for an extended period until they come up with a consensus. It’s unfair if we just set up a website and expect those people to go to this website to do their, I don’t know, delegative, ...

We have aborigines, we have Singaporeans, we have HIV positives, we have a lot of people who try to decide how is it fair to distribute their housing allocations together. There are even paralyzed people.

Instead of everybody just randomly talk to each other, we try to design a process where people, just being themselves, talk in the gathering places that they gather. For example, in Taipei City, they experiments with this method to have the socially disadvantaged people to decide on how social housing ...

People just be themselves. They just show up in the street. They just start a discussion. They just have those town hall meetings. It’s our job, the technologist’s job, to make sure that what they say is carried in a binding fashion, in a consensus-making fashion, to tomorrow’s discussion.

Yeah, that’s a very good question, and we have a ready answer. During the Occupy, [laughs] the idea is not that the occupiers need to bring with them cell phones or whatever. The idea is what we call "assistive civic technology."

It’s essentially just one of the first pilot projects that I think can demonstrate that this model actually has some sense.

That’s a relatively new development. The idea is just -- I call this scalable listening process -- to develop the technology that enable people to listen to each other, at scale. Then maybe people will realize that they don’t require a government to do it, which is always why I ...

It’s like DIY governance for everyone. I think this will lead to a much better dialogue, both cross-generationally and cross-culturally. The idea of a hub or a linking that’s of benefit of everybody, or at least doesn’t harm anybody, is only possible because of the communication infrastructure that lets everybody ...

As an anarchist, [laughs] I of course look forward to have everyone see that this kind of multi-stakeholder government system doesn’t take a government to run. The ideal way, in my mind, would be that all the communities, be they are distributed communities over the world or just special interest ...

The problem we identified a year ago was mostly that the lower-level governments and the schools doesn’t have the hardware. They’re still running Windows XP on old computers and whatever. Then we used a special budget to upgrade them to the latest hardware, for cybersecurity reasons, of course, but it ...

All those digital developments are mostly required, even for the largest telecoms. In order to get a spectrum or whatever, they have to agree to go to those remote places and operate on a loss, essentially, in order to bridge the digital divide. We don’t have that much of a ...

We also constitutionally protect gender equality in the parliament and in all levels of...Because that’s a constitutional value, whenever people see that there is some digital infrastructure that only benefits schools in the cities, they will say it’s unconstitutional.

[laughs] That’s because, for the past 20 year or so, digital equality has always been the platform, no matter which party was in place. That’s because Taiwan constitutionally protects education with a fixed-size budget, and it’s kind of rare.

Not really.

It’s actually very easy for people to get angry about the government, but mostly it’s about frustration. If we have participation officers that engage within the first 48 hours, usually those anger goes into productivity. They essentially work for free, [laughs] so why not?

We ran five workshops and basically identified...In order to talk with the contractors, the civil service, and whatever, we just invited everybody in, and it’s all radically transparent, anyway. After those five meetings, the tax reporting system goes from this into that. It used to be Java applet, now it’s ...

Now people become very interested. They were UX enthusiasts, so they can actually bring something to the table. They’ve just never been invited into co-creation on the national level before. We just did a standard service design, a user journey, whatever.

The Ministry of Finance PO, Yang Ching Hun, then raised this within the 48 hours, and just went on the Internet to respond personally, saying, "OK, we’re now inviting everyone who complain about the tax reporting system into our collaborative workshops next week."

This tree of participation offices is responsible to respond to any random stakeholders that just petitioned on the Internet. Instead of just the media and the parliament, now we have officers that take care of this kind of explosive new things, like the e-petition, so we invite it in.

Then what we did was, we have a participation officer by regulation now in every ministry. They have their own teams, so they’re like their ministry’s Audrey. They have to assemble their...It’s like a fractal. They then have a participation officer in all the third level and the fourth level ...

We make sure to reflect that in our presentations. For example, one of the cases where the people petitioned, saying the tax reporting system using Java applet is broken on Mac and on Linux, so we have a petitioner.

The idea is that, because it’s an experimental method, if anything goes wrong, it’s always Audrey’s fault, but if anything goes right, the credit goes to the career public servants that propose it on a meeting in the first place. The journalists do go back and check, so I think ...

I’m very eager to share credits, anyway. Basically, instead of the traditional politician who are usually credit-seeking and blame-avoiding, what I’m engaging in is essentially blame-absorbing and credit-sharing way of doing politics. I think they love that now.

After I run this idea for three or four months, they discovered something else. They discovered that journalists will go back and check those transcripts and find who was the career public servant that proposed those awesome idea in the first place. Instead of a minister getting all the credit, ...

They actually disagreed or they have better ideas, but those were often masked if you don’t do a radical transparent meeting record, where everybody see what everybody else is saying. For the career public servants, this reduces their risk, because they will not be seen as backing a bad idea.

The other ministries, they essentially see it first as a risk-prevention method. The risk for career public servants is usually that the top minister make the decision on behalf of people who attend the meeting. On the meeting record, you will just see everybody agree with what the minister has ...

That’s the requirement. Otherwise, it’s arbitrary then, so I just exclude myself. When there is a military drill, I just take a day off. I don’t even know where the bunkers are, [laughs] things like that.

In order to have me as the chair in any internal meeting, they have to agree with this. Otherwise, they just find some other chair, right? [laughs] That’s my working condition. Of course, in exchange, I’m not involved in any top secret or national confidential discussions.

We also have schools specializing in philosophy and whatever. Yeah, there are different ways to tackle this.

Yeah, we already have schools specializing in using e-sport, [laughs] and recruit those e-sport athletes to educate people in digital literacy, digital rules, ethics, and whatever. It’s working pretty well. People actually flock to those schools that has the star e-sport athletes. It also gives them something to do after ...

Yeah, sure. One of the other K-12 innovations that we do is that every senior high school now are basically universities. Now they can design their own special classes, their own special programs, and then also allow their students to have different combinations.

Of course, this implies that even primary schools have broadband Internet, have projectors, have those equipments, which now we ensure using special budget. We’re trying not to recreate a digital divide, but upgrade all the teachers, so that the new generation will be growing up with critical thinking and media ...

They, together, find those information from all over the Internet, and the teacher demonstrate how to do fact checking, critical thinking, and fact finding, and whatever. This is not just a two-hour class that everybody must use. It’s all the different classes, all the different fields are now required to ...

We’re shifting from a sore and skill based into a character-based education system. One of the key characters is that the teachers are now, instead of lecturers, a co-learner with the student.

I was part of the design team. We put -- I think the first in Asia -- ICT and media literacy as one of the core characters in the new curriculum.

Those are, to be honest, superficial solutions. The real solution, I believe, is in our K-12 curriculum, which is going to take effect about a year from now.

We’re acutely aware of the threat to common sense. The response that we have is to get everybody back into a dialogue and try to use those automated fact-checking services to make sure that people have media literacy.

That’s the role that we play. This civil society effort, of course, is working in tandem with fact checkers everywhere in the world on AI and on other technologies related to it.

Eventually this kind of immunization process is just like the original spam wars that already happened everywhere on the world. It’s important for the government to make sure everybody knows what everybody else is doing without going into censorship ourselves.

We do have a lot of ways if it’s in a public channel, but in the private channel it’s very difficult. This is one of the very few tools that actually gets a lot of adoption on the private channels, and things like that.

This is collaboratively checked by a lot of volunteer journalists and a lot of people working on the co-facts program. The idea is that once we invite this bot into your family chat channel, they would fact check the rumors that’s spreading there, because it’s much harder if it’s in ...

This is a bot that lets anyone add them to their line. It’s like WhatsApp groups. Once you see a rumor, you can very easily tell the bot whether this is a rumor or not by sharing it to the bot. The bot will come back saying, "OK, this is ...

There’s a shadow part of the Taiwan government website on a lot of things. If the civil society thinks that the government should have a collaborative fact-checking facility, but the government cannot do it for various constitutional reasons, then the civil society go ahead and create one themselves.

As you can see, the domain is called g0v.tw. That’s basically any government website that a civil society that think they can do better. They use the same website address, but change the O to a zero. You can discover the shadow government website very easily without remembering any new ...

To counter this kind of virality it’s essential to have facts spread faster than the rumors, to have facts be more attractive than rumors, and to have what we call the co-fact system. This is developed by the g0v community, which I’m still part of.