Right. Exactly.

It’s about the process. That’s the basic idea. Once we get people into the habit of paying attention, I think there’s no extra pressure for the career public servants, because it beats them having to explain to angry people on the street.

What I’m saying is that it’s not necessarily about specific trade agreements, but about a political and policy context that leads to those agreements, just as during the Occupy. The main thing was not about whether the cross-trade service trade agreement is a good agreement or not. It’s about the ...

When I visit the FB, I describe this to their VP. They’re like, "Why not? We’re happy to join." Last week, they did join the local e-commerce Association, here, and then worked directly with the people, the stakeholders.

This is somewhat related to your question because then this is diplomatic in nature. This is basically backing up a action from a civil society actor, a private sector actor, to the FB.

Also the consensus of that particular meeting is that Association of E-commerce who comes need to enlist FB to join their ranks, and then to go through a association multi-stakeholder system, to make sure that everybody knows how to flag those advertisement, with our education.

This is like the Minister of Transport now, and it becomes very high like this. Saying, "We really enforce this transportation idea."

If we don’t tackle this in a way that’s collaborative, the government will be seen as just sitting on its own and not doing things. By going through this process, they actually get much more time on their own to handle the cases that actually pertains to them instead of ...

The seller goes missing on the delivery slip, and Facebook has this advanced algorithm that led them to locate the most gullible people and so on. This is a very complicated issues like original spam wars.

More and more, we see cases like this one, which is about that’s a lot of automated chatbots on Facebook, their purpose to sell some goods but it’s actually counterfeit advertisement that when shipped to the door, it turned out to be a brick.

Yeah, but for things like this, this is actually already semi-diplomatic with a semi-sovereign entity. It’s not just Uber.

The idea is what we call assistive civic technology. It’s there for people to speak freely instead of trying to take it arbitrarily that you have to go on this website. The website is still important because it’s accountability trail of everything that has ever, ever happened.

Like next month, we’re going to Penghu, the islands, because the fishers people there, they will want to talk in their natural habitat. That’s why we bring apparatus there.

Now, when people want to contribute in ways that’s more face to face, we also bring this whole apparatus to them...

Yeah, sky high.

That’s a great question. We already lower to it to a degree where it’s just pressing yes and no, yes and no. Any elderly people who can use LINE...Actually we make sure that all the...like there was a labor union, the Association of Taxi Drivers. We made sure that their ...

Exactly. Now we’re like, "OK, you all agree on this. Let’s translate it to legalese." Then it was ratified. When MOTC ratify it, they did it knowing that Uber will abide by these rules, and they did.

Right. Now because they all show up, they’re now seen as heroes. Because everybody when we go through this consensus, they’re like, "Yes, we’re committed to it." Now because it’s live stream and it’s kept as a transcript, they can’t take back those words.

The reason they show up, and they don’t often show up, is that anyone who doesn’t show up will be seen as villains in this story.

You can see these other different people, but they do manage to agree on the insurance, on the professional driver’s license, and on taxation which is the eight, now seven, but it was eight points that we did use to negotiate, with not just Uber but pretty much everybody who ...

Because of the peculiar design in this interface, when people see these groups, you actually first see the majority opinions, where everybody managed to agree on. Then you can click into group A, B, C, and D who all have very polarized ideas, like A views it’s very risky, if ...

Right. But because of a peculiar design of this online space, the display of...Just a second. We did many cases, so let me very quickly find the Uber one. It’s here.

It’s critical because, otherwise, usually there’s only the loudest people, the people with the most controversial views.

It’s because of this, over the three weeks, we literally see people coming together toward the center.

We say, we bound ourself to difficult crowdsource agenda setting. If anyone’s feeling resonates with the supermajority of people, 80 percent of people, they manage to convince people across the aisle, we promise to use it as the term that we negotiate with Uber.

The other thing is that it lets people see that positions can change. After voting for a few times, you can also write in your own feelings, and then those feelings become the things that other people vote on. People actually compete for more nuanced feelings that resonate with other ...

Right. But this way of doing things, rather than, say, Facebook, has two advantages. First, you can see people on all the different corners are actually your Twitter and Facebook friends. They’re not nameless, faceless enemies. You just didn’t talk about Uber over dinner.

At the beginning, people were clustered at the edges. You can literally see the divide.

For three weeks, anyone with a mobile phone -- and it’s all over Taiwan, it’s not just in urban areas -- they just go online and see one sentiment about the UberX case, and they can click yes or no. If they click yes or no, their avatar moves on ...

What we do is that, through open data and through a collaborative triaging of facts - the one like RealtimeBoard, as you just saw -- we first get everybody’s facts together. Then we use a machine learning platform, an AI platform, to ask, "What do you feel about those common ...

A parallel reality in a parallel universe. In that fact and feelings absence, the ideas, by itself, grows into ideologies. Once you’re infected with ideology, then one becomes blind to new facts and other people’s feelings. It’s like, "We’re always right," and, "The sharing economy’s great," or whatever.

It doesn’t mean people on the street doesn’t talk about this. They talk about this in a very different reality.

The issue we need so solve, technically, is the translation issue. Because these people speak professional language when they’re doing policy-making because of one government -- before, the government resolved its internal lobbying with the professional lobbyists, with academics, scholars -- they tend to say nothing.

Now there is a metric. The best idea is the one that takes care of the most people’s feelings. Then we ratify it.

Then, from the facts, how do people feel about those facts? One may feel angry, another feels happy. It’s all OK. Once we find the feelings that resonates with everybody, then we go to the ideas stage.

So we knew that deliberation is an inoculation of the virus of the mind, meaning that if you really have listened to each other, then you become immune to propaganda. As I said, we always work on the facts, first.

By the end of the Occupy, there’s actually a very strong consensus, which the head of Parliament then agreed with, so it was a victory. So we’re like, "OK, if this can work with half a million people, then naturally thousands of people is a scaling down, right?" [laughs]

Instead of diverging, as other Occupieds tend to become, because we do the full transcript, we do the synthetic document, and with the help of professional facilitators, we leave unresolved issues that day, and the next day we deliberate on the same unresolved issues.

Right. Because during the Occupy, the people were using this methodology to deliberate, involving half a million people on the street and thousands of people speaking at the street.

There’s a lot of PR, of propaganda, but very little actual focused conversation.

It’s spread all over the place. It did cause some explosive protests all around the world during that time. It was like late 2014. We understand that a lot of it is because the facts were not...the definition of sharing economy, how exactly is the issue, or whatever, is actually ...

It has an interesting model called "sharing economy," which means many, many different things. If a driver gets infected by this meme, they tend to spread it to their passengers, and from the passenger to other drivers. After driving for a few weeks, maybe they decide it’s not a good ...

If you look at it like this, it’s like an epidemic of sorts. It spreads from country to country, and the virus of the mind, the meme. This idea is that algorithm dispatches better than laws for cars, so we should ignore the laws since no one is dead.

This was at the end of 2014, and Uber was...the red ones are the ones that having controversies. The green ones are the ones that have some sort of consultation going, and the pink ones are unresolved. Taiwan was in the pink at the time.

Right, it’s longer than a year. One of the flagship cases is, of course, the Uber consultation.

There’s plenty, actually. I’ve been working on this since late 2014.

It’s been exactly a year since I became the digital minister. I think next week we’re ratifying this into a regulation. It was like a pilot so far. Now we know this really works, so now we’re signing it into regulation.

That’s exactly right.

The second thing is that, by working with the local council, by working with the MPs, it was seen from the representative democracy system as something that helps their work, to collect more feelings and ideas. Whereas, in UK, as in other places, it was seen as a somewhat contesting ...

In the UK, the Policy Lab is not directly linked to the petition system; the petition system was only linked to the Parliament. This is the first thing.