Yes.

Yeah. There is also, because it’s free software, we are not dependent on any vendors. If any public servant doesn’t like the system we are using, and they can code, they just contribute and make the system a little bit better.

There is, of course, saving money, because for the 60,000 public servants, to pay for per-seat license is impossible.

Yeah, sure.

We were able to adopt a lot of free software working methods, just by adopting this Sandstorm free software platform.

Previously, the roadblock was the cyber security issue, but we were able to find this community platform called Sandstorm, that solves the cyber security problem. It gets audited by our cyber security department, so that all the free software than runs on top of it doesn’t suffer from cyber security ...

One of the ideas is adopting this thoroughly free software platform called Sandstorm, as our public service internal platform. We use the same tools, like Etherpad, like Trello, like Slack, how the free software community is organizing ourselves these days, we also use it in the public service.

Now, with this completely accountable record, if things go right, they get the credit, because their name is on the transcript. Because it’s an experimental method, if things go wrong, it’s all the digital minister’s fault. Under this condition, they become very innovative and open to a lot of interesting ...

The effect of this is very surprising. The bureaucrats actually become very innovative and risk-taking. They propose some very good ideas under this condition. That’s because previously, before I introduced this kind of radical transparency, they would get the blame if things go wrong, and the minister would get the ...

It’s not just to the lobbyists and journalists, but also for internal meetings. For all the hundreds of internal meetings that I have since I was the digital minister, everything was transcribed. There was the written record for everything everybody said during meetings, and we sent them to participants afterwards ...

I get questions from a private email, I will reply and say if it’s OK to give my answers publicly. If not, I just give them links to what my previous statements are. Because of this culture of radical transparency, to my knowledge, I’m the only one in the world ...

Even more interesting than the technological contributions we are doing, is the culture that we are bringing. I’m a radically transparent digital minister. By that, I mean that all the journalists, all the lobbyists, everybody gets to ask me questions, but only publicly.

It’s like the Government Digital Service in the UK, or the US Digital Service in the US. It’s a digital service of the national level. We have designers. We have programmers. We have a lot of young people working to automate away a lot of those chores that the public ...

Maybe it’s not so good to make comparison like this? Anyway, we started PDIS...

This is why I was hired, right after the ratification, as the digital minister of Taiwan. We started this public digital innovation space, PDIS. It’s like the GDS, or USDS in the US.

We thought, but there is a lot of different ways that we can improve on this to scale this process of listening, and automate a lot of this stuff that we had real human beings doing, like collecting people’s ideas, and responding to them, and so on. All these could ...

It’s super time consuming.

Yeah, it’s super time consuming.

They are complaining about time. They had to put down other things that they are doing.

Maybe I shouldn’t say expensive. I would say it demanded a lot of commitment, or something like that.

If all the policy making needs to be...How expensive was it? It’s maybe 20 fulltime staff on the government side for three months, 20 volunteers on the civil society side for three months. It’s very involved.

Of course, people all wanted to see whether the techniques we had in Occupy can work for a national deliberation. It did work, but it was very expensive. As a consequence, the public servants, the bureaucrats, are somewhat turned...Do I say turned off? Do I say shied away? Do I ...

There is a rub. This process is very expensive. We put maybe a dozen full-timers, and a lot of mediators, volunteers also, who run this process over the preparation with three months or so. It was experimental.

Ratification. Everybody were... However...

That’s the second story. I’ll pause a little bit here. I remember you saying but there is a rub. Do I literally say but there is a rub?

They are bound to the words they said during the live consultation, and they agreed. When we ratified this in August, 2016, everybody knew that it’s coming. Everybody anticipated it. Uber now operates legally in Taipei, but so did the taxi companies, who are now adopting the same model that ...

They could not help but agree.

Yeah. They couldn’t help but agree.

Yes.

Uber cannot helped...cannot help. It’s actually not...

Here is the consensus of the people. Do you agree? If you do agree, how do we translate that into law? After the live consultation, which was livestreamed, and people had input, just as you are doing now, through their mobile phones, we ratified a set of regulations.

After we get everybody’s feelings in a set of seven feelings that resonate with practically everybody -- they may be taxi drivers, they may be Uber drivers, everybody agrees on those things -- it’s now much easier for the government to meet with all the stakeholders, and check with them, ...

I can take the g0v part out.

OK, that’s right. After a few weeks.

Visually aggregating to the center.

Yeah, I can produce them.

Yes.

This one?

Yes.

By the end of three weeks, we have seven that very strongly resonated with everybody, such as insurance, such as tax paying registration, and so on. We just translated that into law.

Second, it shows that over three weeks of time, people can actually converge to the center. At the beginning, the people were all on the side, but because we say we only give binding power of anything that people can propose that convince a supermajority -- that’s 80 percent of ...

Antagonist against each other, because you see all these people on different sides are your Facebook and Twitter friends, you just didn’t talk about this over dinner.

The interesting thing is, it lowers people’s antagonism. Is that an English word?

The thing is, when you enter this Polis website, it shows one sentiment -- I’ll translate it to English, by the way -- which you can agree or disagree. As you agree or disagree, your position moves on this two-dimensional map that represents all the possible different sides that people ...

We used AI to help facilitating people’s feelings. What you’re seeing here is my avatar sitting among my Twitter friends and Facebook friends, and we all have something to say about Uber.

When planning the Uber deliberation, not only did government published all the relevant transport data as open data, we also asked the private sector and the civil society to contribute to this pool of facts. Then we used machine learning, that’s artificial intelligence, the fear.

Once people are infected with ideologies, they become blind to new facts. They become blind to each other’s feelings. This is what we set out to solve.

That doesn’t prevent people on the street from talking about it. It’s just they develop a different set of language, and actually disagree on the same set of basic facts. Without the same set of basic facts, people become unable to empathize with each other’s feelings, and ideas in this ...

What prevented, before...I will say before. Before the focus conversation method, usually, the government, the private sector, and individual academics use an expert language to talk about policy, while not letting the people on the street know what they are talking about.

After we get everybody’s feelings represented, then we ask for people’s ideas. We brainstorm. The best ideas are the best ideas that address most people’s feelings. Then we ratify the ideas. We translate them into legalese, and sign them into law.