People can answer yes or no, one of those questions. Once they answer, two things happen. First, their avatars moves on this two-dimensional component map and the second thing is that they see another question in the same place, and they will keep pressing yes or no, yes or no. ...

Then, we run a three-week online sentiment gathering for the feeling part. We present people with facts and ask them a few yes or no questions. We ask all the different ministries to provide with us one question that they care most. Like the Minister of Finance wanted to ask ...

On the deliberation, we started with the collective fact-finding, it eventually evolved into this RealtimeBoard thing that you’ve just seen. We did a crude version of using shared bookmarks, directories, and whatever. Still, it’s very useful, because people are able to see there are collective facts.

Once we were infected with ideology, you lose access to new facts. You lose the ability to empathize with people’s feelings.

Once people in this kind of environment, when the same word doesn’t even mean the same thing, like sharing economy, it seems to mean anything in Taiwan’s public discourse, then ideas become ideologies.

Because of the one government idea, the government doesn’t tend to say much when they’re still deliberating. It doesn’t prevent the people on the street from talking about this, so eventually people have come to different ideas about facts.

When we introduced this methodology, what we are looking at is essentially a translation problem between the professional language that’s used by professional lobbyists on the industry chain, on the academics or individual counselors, scholars, as well as the administration itself.

Then, a way for people to come up with ideation, with possible solutions, and the ones that are ranked highest are the ones that takes care of most people’s feelings. Finally, the ratification of the suggested solution.

The process is basically four stages. It’s about the collection and publication of all the facts and data that are relevant to this case. Then, a way to automatically gather people’s reflections and sentiments about the same data.

We introduced the focused conversation methods. An important thing about that is this process is pre-agreed by other stakeholders, including the taxi companies, the associations of drivers, Uber itself, as well as potential competitors in the co-ops, and whatever.

There’s a lot of memes and PRs, and whatever during the time, which makes the factual discussions very difficult. We believe that only a deliberation can inoculate people against such divisive, like sharing economy is always good, or whatever, these kinds of blanket beliefs.

Once a driver believes this meme, they become a spreader of the meme. Maybe they have driven just a week and decided it’s not actually their job at all and quit, but during the course of the week, they would have spread this meme already.

The special thing about Uber is that it’s what I call semi-sovereign, meaning there’s actually very little a national government can do about an app, because it’s an app, and also it’s a meme. It’s a belief that algorithm is better than law, can supersede law when it comes to ...

It really takes a political will at the national level that want to make this a prime example of effective crowdsourcing in order for this to happen. They also said in a hackathon, the Minister at the time said, "We have no idea how to run this, so you’re going ...

They were able to reach out to the civic tech community that was very active during, not just the occupier, but actually the mayoral election staff was insane. We have a issue here in Uber and we would like to crowdsource a solution.

Starting from the national policy, the new prime minister enlisted the help of his deputy minister, a director of engineering at Google, Simon Chang. Also Jaclyn Tsai, previously at IBM Asia. These people speak the language of civic tech people. We’re the same kind of people.

Certainly. Just a second. You can see this, right? This starts at the end of 2014, after the city-level election that put the occupiers into mayors, the previous prime minister resigned, and the new prime minister at the time, engineer, says from now on crowdsourcing open data is going to ...

Through this process, we were able to show that we’re more transparent, more accountable, and respond faster than a Silicon Valley company, which is why it’s made a flagship case. But if Uber only upgrades in Taiwan, and not in other jurisdictions, there’s no comparison, then I don’t think there ...

The main difference is that the Ministry of Transport acting on this consensus now knows that it has a better PR angle than Uber, itself. It’s a remarkable success exactly because in many other jurisdictions, Uber is decidefully on the upper hand when it comes to PR.

Yes, of course, I think the Uber case is really interesting, because it’s not about the consensus that we eventually reached. Any academics that researched this TNC stuff can write more or less the same recommendations.

Someone has to move first. Certainly the government is the one that has the worse track record compared to other civil society actors. The radical trust needs to start from the government and the government needs to start from career public servants.

My headline would be: "Before expecting the people trusting the government, the government needs to unconditionally trust its people." That would be the headline, because it’s reciprocal.

Instead of achieving any specific achievement, I think the general culture of the public servants... honestly it’s about their perception. There’s now a much lower level of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. I think that’s our main contribution.

Over the past few years of our work here in Taiwan, now at the national level, career public servants see civic participation and think, "OK, this is just something that happens every Friday," or they think that "OK, this is just part of the administrative process."

Mostly, the career public servants see it very differently from elected officials, they see it as something that’s time-consuming, that’s potentially risky, and that engenders: Fear, meaning that "My power could be taken away?" Uncertainty, meaning, "This technology, could it really work?" Doubt, meaning that "Culturally, this is not the ...

For many career public servants -- even in the administrations that have a civic participation and social innovation office -- the career public servants not necessarily see this and think, "Hey, this can save me time and this can reduce my political risk."

The most successful remedy is that we systematically reduce the fear, uncertainty, and doubt to the words "civic participation."

In this sense, the feeling between the citizen and the government are felt to be so large that the mistrust is now very easy to happen. This is just a side effect. I don’t think Taiwan is exempt from this.

That engenders this feeling that the government is so far away from the actual needs of people, although the distance hasn’t really changed, but the distance between people has reduced so much that the subconscious are overlapping. It’s like negative distance.

The reality is, of course, that to actually effect change and social production, it takes much more than the superficial connections. The lobbying and whatever, if it doesn’t connect to the decision-making process, then the empowerment turns into a sense of helplessness and disempowerment.

That leads to what we call "swift trust," meaning a quick trusting of strangers, just because you share the same keywords or the same the meme, or wear the same badge, whatever. That leads to a sense of empowerment.

There is now social media. There is a very good way to find like-minded people, even if you feel alone in your own neighborhood caring only about senior care. Chances are, you will find a community, no matter what, online.

I would include Taiwan in that. It is as the WEF report, itself, said. It’s the "(dis)empowerment." Disempowerment is like "(mis)trust." Let’s take a variation on that idea.

I would agree with that, but all the other ways are essentially variations on the same theme.

The ballot box, itself, is just a information-gathering device. Of course, you can argue that by having a first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all design, there’s not so much efficient bits, there is no sufficient bits for the positions.

Mm-hmm, right. The ballot box could be in any shape though. In a liquid or delegative democracy, you essentially have 10 different ballot boxes, one for each area of interest. In participatory budgeting, you essentially have the ballot box in the sense of dollars on programs, and so on.

These are valid arguments, but I think a empowered place for doing debates like this, whether we call them MPs or not, I think it’s still very valuable.

Maybe there will be people who say, "But I want to vote for this person only for these matters," and so on, and argue for liquid democracy. Maybe people will argue that for certain cases, it makes more sense to have a random sampled people instead of elected officials who ...

Why not? We can save a lot of their time by gathering the consensus and the public fact-finding. Because they already have a place to debate in the public and also a well-accountable system of doing the proceeding, I don’t see anything should really change in the way that they ...

During the WCIT, during the CivicTechFest, I think those two process improvements are the thing that the other, like F11 and other organizations, see as the most compelling. It’s not that they have to learn or do something new. It’s just their position could be different.

Because we focus on the fact-finding and the reflection phase, it does not at all move into the positional power. There’s no e-voting. There’s no showing of hands, or whatever, so this is seen as a welcome addition to the normal process that they do to their job.

The second is that we see ourself as a fact-finding, essentially, consultancy, not just for the administration, but for everybody including the MPs, local city counselors, and local city government. That solves an issue where always in cases like this...It’s actually not necessarily found in national government level, but from ...

This is a approach that involves more simplification of administrative work, instead of the highlighting of a certain prime minister. Our first contribution is a reposit of this AI stuff, of this augmented reality stuff, all this collaborative ideation stuff as time-savers. It’s actually welcome, and so that’s our first ...

Our contributions are two-fold. The first is we make it regular. It’s not something that a prime minister wants, not something the cabinet office wants, but something genuinely to create public servancy as reducing their risk and saving their time.

It’s not that we are particularly innovative on any component. We mostly use the component that’s well-developed and even proven, by people in Iceland, people in Madrid, people in USDS, and so on.

To be completely fair, a lot of the tools and thinking we used actually originates from the UK. The idea of development, we took from the Policy Lab. There’s a lot of insights we took from the e-petitions in UK and also from the GDS, and so on.

Absolutely, yeah.

This is a semi-diplomatic way of dealing with semi-sovereign entities like Facebook also for cases like this.

Actually, last week, Facebook did join our local business council on this particular reason. They joined, saying, "OK, we’ll look into this."