The idea is always the same. If we see the social media as something that engages people just for their initial response that’s two seconds or three seconds, their gut feelings through pictures, or whatever, and they click share without even reading through it, then it becomes viral. That’s what ...

In Taiwan I was, personally, one of the developers of the local free-net community that tried to circumvent the Golden Shield, way back. That’s one of the first P2P. Now they use Tor, or whatever other technologies.

Of course. It’s way before Snowden. [laughs] When Mainland started developing the Golden Shield Program, that was in the early 2000s. It was way before the Snowden revelations. We’re intimately aware that Internet is not just a force of good, like last century. [laughs]

That solution was discussed through this kind of method. If we just say, "OK, we’re going to solve it this way," without involving the taxi drivers, they would, of course, revolt. That’s because now they are a part of this discussion and they see, "OK, I can also get something ...

Now the taxi companies, they used to have to be painted yellow, but now if they are be called by apps, they don’t have to be painted yellow anymore. If they use e-payment, then it doesn’t have to go by the meter anymore. They can go above the meter, and ...

Once we have that, we run a live consultation. It reestablishes the legitimacy.

This brewing period, this three weeks or four weeks is to get all the stakeholders in. The consensus, it isn’t unique, but the process is unique. The process says the taxi companies and everybody who participate in the process implicitly give their assent to whatever the resonating consensus finally agreed ...

In order to create this kind of win-win idea, it actually requires all the stakeholders to agree with this process, otherwise it become ideologies, and you can’t really talk about this sensibly.

The best ideas, as we mentioned, it has to take care of everybody’s feelings, not just 90 percent of people’s feelings, everybody’s feelings, and now those ideas has a chance to be Pareto improvements, that doesn’t sacrifice anyone in order to move to the same state.

What we think is that deliberation is a vaccine against this kind of virus of the mind. The facts, the feelings, the ideas, and the decisions need to happen, each taken with the previous stage in mind.

It doesn’t even make sense. It’s not in the same category, because it’s in the people’s minds. It’s in the legitimacy of rule.

This meme is actually very powerful and it spreads just like a common flu, from drivers to passengers, to driver to passengers. If the government doesn’t come up with a regulation that actually makes more sense than what Uber proposes, then of course it’s a lost cause. It’s like negotiating ...

It’s not a Taiwan problem. I call it the epidemic of the mind. It’s a virus of the mind. It’s the meme that says, "OK, just because algorithm dispatch cars better than the current regulations do, we need to obey algorithms instead of regulations."

Yes?

Uber, when it initially tried to evade one of the key clauses, the professional driver’s license, we fined them extremely highly. They basically had to play by the rules. Now they play by rule. They are a legal company now. The consumer protection invoice, insurance, taxes, it’s all taken care ...

We now make a template of so-called platform economy principles, so that any other platform economy comes, they must go through the same checklist. The people doesn’t have to go through the same process for every new platform economy things because now, based on the Uber experience, we made a ...

In many other Asian countries Uber doesn’t even show up, but in this kind of setting if anyone doesn’t show up they’ll be villains in the stories, basically, because people have already had a wide discussion and converged on something. They had to show up and agree with those consensus ...

Then, after we get the consensus, we get Uber, and Association of Drivers, and local taxi companies, and co-ops, and whatever on a live-streamed meeting that was watched by these people and check with them the consensus items one by one, saying, "These are the people’s will. Why are you ...

Over three weeks we have discovered the consensus items that manage to convince everybody. People literally from the fringes converged to the middle, visualized, we gamified the feelings around Uber.

The second thing is that people see that their friends are all over the place. These are their Facebook and Twitter friends. No matter which side people are on, they are reasonable people that you already know, and you can have a discussion.

There is about 80 percent resonance about requiring a professional driver’s license, about tax paying, about insurance, and safety. It often get lost in the sharing economy debates that try to frame the discussion in a more left versus right way, which doesn’t even work in Uber.

It has two effects. The first is that for the Uber discussion many people saw that there is a common ground.

The idea is that people compete to have consensus ideas that try to convince everybody else across the board, even if they’re disagreeing otherwise on fringe issues.

In Polis we talk about any controversial issues, and you vote yes or no, each other’s feelings, sentiments. As you vote yes or no, your avatar moves toward people who are more like you.

The Polis system allows everybody to express their opinions, but in a very structured way, instead of on Facebook, where people try to dominate the discussion with strange views.

Basically, we try to make our PR better than their PR. [laughs] When Uber came to Taiwan we engaged using a gamified Internet game system, really, called Polis.

Exactly.

Now we’re seeing more and more tilting to the private sector, the multinationals. At least we can get the nonprofits and the governmental delegates the same readiness to engage in dialogues, but we’re not thinking that they, in any sense, belong to any particular nation state.

That’s the governance model that I’m looking at, because that’s the culture I was raised in. One of the Internet’s promises was that everybody on the Internet governance is equal with everybody else, whether they’re from the state or from any other sector.

In an Internet and multi-stakeholder dialogue forum we don’t even have more say than those semi-sovereign entities. We are peers, basically.

It’s easier for me to think that I’m just one of the operators in one of Asia’s largest non-profit organizations that calls itself the Executive Yuan, but it doesn’t really matter. We’re an NPO that try to safeguard privacy, consumer protection, or whatever.

My role here is also as a semi-diplomatic person to those semi-sovereign entities, and to recognize the fact that on the Internet, especially on digital economy, that a sovereign state is somewhat antique.

They don’t really have a national preference. I don’t think they buy only US companies. It’s not like that. [laughs] It’s getting absorbed into this new world order.

Basically, what I see is that they try to absorb innovations that happens anywhere. It could be in Estonia. It could be Israel. It could be in Taiwan, or whatever. It eventually get bought by Google, or Facebook, or Microsoft anyway.

The idea is that those, I would say, semi-sovereign entities, they may be borne out of a particular American culture in the Silicon Valley, but they’re something else now.

First of all, I don’t think those companies consider themselves American, either. [laughs] They’re semi-sovereign now. It’s not like they’re loyal to any particular...maybe they’re more loyal to California. I don’t really know. [laughs]

Because the original public conception is that we can bootstrap a Silicon Valley ecosystem out of nowhere, without linking. I don’t think it would work anywhere else. It’s the idea that’s bad.

What? Sorry.

That’s the connect part.

We’re also, as you just saw with the automated scam on Facebook, solving the problem caused by Silicon Valley companies. That’s another thing that Taiwan can do, is that we connect much better to the regional user base and can provide a much more well-rounded way of how we expect ...

It’s not like we’re replacing or Shenzhen in Silicon Valley. We’re playing a role that Silicon Valley doesn’t play.

Now that we’re having Google basically setting up their largest hardware manufacture R&D center in Taiwan, and also Microsoft with their AI center, and maybe very soon Facebook, we’ll see, the idea is that Taiwan can connect the local talents to the Silicon Valley value chain.

What we’re good at is being the connection between the traditional verticals in the Asia area and the innovators, the software-only companies like Google in Silicon Valley. Taiwan has traditionally always played the hub role that connects those two cultures.

What Taiwan’s best at is, of course, a very good integration on both the sensors, the semiconductor chips, the hardware part, as well as we have a lot of young user experience designers. There’s designers, the human related part, and the culture that could fuse the hardware and the service ...

First, it wouldn’t work. [laughs] Second, it doesn’t really improve the perception that Taiwan is actually different, but should be complement, not competing or trying to replace Silicon Valley.

It does face some backlash, because originally the popularly perceived idea, was that we’re going to select a place in Taoyuan and enlist the universities nearby to act like Stanford, and build a local copy of Silicon Valley.

Asia.SV. I put the dot in, so I always pronounce the dot. It used to be, during the campaign, the Asian Silicon Valley Plan, which for somebody who worked with Silicon Valley companies for six or eight years, it completely doesn’t make sense. [laughs]

Any questions?

That’s the five-minute version [laughs] of what I do on the governance issue. The innovation inclusion we basically let the private sector and the civil society, respectively, drive the agenda. I hope this makes some sense. [laughs]

Then I fly to Facebook and talk to their VP saying, "OK, everybody has done their job. It’s just you missing." Then they, after two weeks, agreed to join the local business association and basically play by this map. We used this for Uber, for Airbnb, for Facebook, for every ...