We do this through the focus conversation method. The focus conversation method means that we first collect everybody’s facts, and then we collect everybody’s feelings about the same set of facts. The same set of facts, I may feel happy. You may feel angry. It’s all OK.

It inoculates people against future PRs. It inoculates people against future incitements, from Uber or from any other agency. We think it’s essential that we get all the stakeholders, and get them to sit down and agree on a set of consensus.

To solve this problem, we thought about the way we did during the Occupy. It’s through deliberation. We think deliberation is inoculation of the mind. It inoculates after sitting down and listening to everybody’s side about everyone’s ideas, and coming to terms with a consensus.

The thing is this, you can’t negotiate with a virus of the mind. It’s in a different category. You can’t negotiate with flu, either. The idea is that if this idea, like a meme, spreads to sufficient people, it will just keep Uber running.

If a driver suddenly discovers after a couple of weeks this is actually not working, they’ve already passed it on. Just like any other epidemic, it really made a pandemonium -- is not a very good word -- of the taxi drivers industry in Taiwan, and everywhere in the world. ...

This meme is very powerful. It’s like a flu of the mind, a virus of the mind. If you catch an Uber, and you catch this meme, chances are that you will spread it to other drivers and other passengers.

As I mentioned, there’s very little, actually, what the sovereign state can do about Uber, because it’s an app. To me, it’s a meme. A meme is called sharing economy, by the way. At the time, the meme essentially means that algorithms dispatch cars better than laws, so we don’t ...

That’s the lead. It can also go into the presentation itself.

For example, the Paris city, they seized the Uber’s office and confiscated all their equipment, but it’s just an app. It kept running. It is actually a very challenging problem for any national government to solve.

At the time, Uber was operating illegally in many different jurisdictions, and causing a lot of protest, and taxi drivers surrounding ministries everywhere, and so on. There is very little a sovereign state can do about it.

Instead of going to the presentation, I’m explaining it now.

OK. Let’s go to the Uber part. At the time, there’s this very interesting...

Because of this, the Prime Minister resigned, and a new Prime Minister, an engineer, said, "OK. From now on, crowdsourcing, open data is just going to be the national direction." Does that work better? Or something like that?

OK. Let me just fill it up. At the election at the end of 2014, many Occupiers just find themselves mayors when they didn’t expect it. It turns out there’s a radical shift in the society. People start demanding for open government, and everyone who campaigned for open government magically ...

End of 2014.

OK.

It’s a revolution, but peaceful.

Yes, and a change of leadership in all of the major cities’ mayorships.

We, civic hackers, were recruited to solve one of the most interesting policy problems at that year, which is the Uber problem, and this is not...

After the Occupy, there’s many cities adopting the same methods and the national government has a changed leadership. The new Prime Minister said, "You know, crowdsourcing, civic hacking, everything, it’s just going to be the national agenda."

It was ended peacefully, and the whole society learned that there is a way for people to deliberate at scale.

Free software to us never means free of cost, because our parents’ generation paid dearly for the freedom of assembly or the freedom of speech. This is why we were able to run this Occupy completely peacefully and agree on a set of consensus that the Head of the Parliament ...

This is not a coincidence that we have so many free software civic hackers. Because, as I said, back in 1996, when World Wide Web was first invented, it’s also our first presidential election. There was 30 years of martial law, and we are the first generation that has both ...

There were thousands of civic hackers at the time working on the street just to make facilitation possible and make everyone who care about their service agreement put their input over the phone, over the Web, over anywhere, or just walk into one of the booths we set up.

If there’s any website that anyone in Taiwan doesn’t like, they can just create a fork of the version and abandon the copyright so that the country, in the next procurement cycle, can just include and merge back these ideas. When the Parliament doesn’t deliberate this kind of thing, instead ...

G0v is a community with a goal to fork the government. We take the government websites, which all ends in gov.tw, and make better open alternatives, and ends in g0v.tw.

The key point here is that we supported this whole deliberation with a radically transparent broadcasting live streaming logistics system, which we exported to Hong Kong for the Umbrella Revolution, by the way, and was powered by this community called g0v.

22 days we demonstrated how to deliberate a Trade Service Agreement with the whole society. There was over 20 NGOs participating. The Greens, the Labors, the Separatists, everybody.

Yes.

22 days.

In 2014, there was the first demo thing of the radical participation idea. We occupied the Parliament for 22 days. At the time, the MPs in Taiwan were refusing to deliberate a Trade Service Agreement with Beijing, and because the MPs were on strike, we got into the Parliament at ...

In the spirit of participation, I would like to ask you to put your phone and enter slido.com and ask me questions. Ask me anything by entering 1029, that’s today’s date, on the browser, and I will answer them after this 10-minute talk.

Today, I’m Taiwan’s first Digital Minister. I’m putting into practice the same rough consensus, civic participation, radical transparency ideas that I learned when I was 15 years old, and surprisingly, it’s working and it’s transforming our society.

I started founding a startup, working on web technologies, and I get to learn this fabulous community who all run with this crazy idea of this anarchistic no-one-was-in-control political system that powers the Internet until today.

I discovered this shiny new thing, and thought that the future of human knowledge is on it, compared to the pale textbooks, and I told my teachers that I want to quit school and start my education on the Wide Web. Surprisingly, the teachers all agreed with it.

Unlike many people today, I’m an optimist. This strange condition began when I was 15 years old. That was 1996, when the World Wide Web was first invented.

That’s great. I say it like "I’m an autist, this strange condition..." I can say that, OK.

Thank you. That’s great. Strange condition.

Yes.

Unlike many people today...

Unlike many people, I am an optimist today. And I’ve always been an optimist, but especially, when I dropped out of junior high school back in 1996, when I was 15 years old, I discovered this infinite World Wide Web on which there’s...No, it’s run on sentences. Again.

Yeah, sure.

Anyway. Do I just start saying, "Unlike many people..."?

Taiwanese Holo, and then Taiwanese Mandarin, and then German, and then a little bit of French, which I have completely forgotten now, and English. That’s the sequence. I think I forgot French completely when I learned English.

Yeah, sure. Go ahead.

Stories From the Future of Democracy.

Something like that. That’s the OK bridge.

"Just go to slido.com on your phone or any Internet connecting device, and enter today’s date, which is 1029, and enter your question anonymously or like others people’s questions. And now, back to the story." Is that...?

That sounds good. Or, I can just not say how it will be handled, but just say, "Just before getting into the story, I’d like to invite you to ask me anything. This is called ’Ask Audrey Anything’."

I’m still far, because people take time to typing these questions, so I found that it’s easiest if I just record the whole 10-minute thing and answer on the second part. But if there’s a really good question, I can of course interrupt anytime myself.