Yes. [writes on tablet and holds it up] That’s my sign language.

Or I can practice my sign language.

Sure.

More or less.

Since October 1 last year.

Cheers.

Because I didn’t get a video to work, either. Anyway, [laughs] all right. Thank you so much. Have a good local time.

Right, sure. You did an audio recording only?

Of course, yeah.

If we start by explaining the Digital Signature Act or PKI, then it’s a lost cause.

There’s a lot of questions, but because it relates to people’s day-to-day use of their medical insurance card and their national ID card, the deliberation is made possible because it relates to their current day-to-day experience.

Of course, it’s going to change the dynamics a lot, because perhaps people would feel uncool if they don’t activate the PKI chip. If they do activate a chip, perhaps at the beginning, there will be questions on if I authenticate myself this way, with the chip, versus with paper-based ...

There’s a proposal from the Ministry of Interior, because both are organized by the ministry, they want to merge those cards together. The thing is, the PKI card is not compulsory, while the paper card is compulsory. So they’re like, "OK, let’s merge it, and then you can opt-in to ...

There’s also a deliberation, although not vTaiwan, going on for the eID system, where we currently have a PKI card, and then we have a national ID card. The national ID card doesn’t have a chip. The eID card doesn’t have a photo on it.

That’s a stretch. [laughs] If you have better metaphors, tell me. For mathematical things like that, I can’t really do better than this, which is why we always try to interest people with things that actually concern them.

For example, consider the metaphor of chemical pollution for data protection. If you don’t anonymize or de-identify the data sufficiently, then it leaks something about you. While the pollution isn’t that much -- it’s not really toxic, because it can’t really be directly identified to you -- if you combine ...

I think that’s one of the ways we engage the civil society, by actually having cases that happen in day-to-day lives. Otherwise, we’ll have to resort to metaphors, which are leaky. I mean that it doesn’t abstract really well.

Non-consensual porn is one of the more visceral parts of this discussion. First, it happens a lot, and also because, at the moment, the Taiwan criminal law system only punishes those footage that was taken without consent. If it was consensual when it was taken, but then the people break ...

That’s one of the reasons why we did this non-consensual pornography discussion. There’s, of course, privacy. There’s data protection. There’s secret-keeping. There’s the constitutional right of secure communication. All these are different concepts academically, but if you’re concerned about one, chances are that you can be convinced to be concerned ...

There is also an event website, www.vTaiwan.org.tw, which lists all the important dates that’s going on.

Otherwise, I’ll just remember to include you in our next notification. You can also come to our hackathon.

Look it up? Yeah, of course. If you participated, you’ll be notified. [laughs]

The online livestream and the transcript has a lot more views than people who have joined in one way or the other. A lot of people want to learn about it, but for things that are highly technical, not many people feel entitled to speak about it. But for UberX, ...

I think the average is, at most, in the hundreds.

It really depends. On highly controversial ones, like UberX, there’s thousands. On relatively obscure ones, such as the very technical data de-identification thing, [laughs] there’s really not much.

The regulations are teleworking, telemedicine, consumer protection of online shopping, distance education, the open data directive. What else? Personal data protection. I think there’s six or seven regulations, as well, so about six each.

The laws are, first, closely-held-corporation. Then e-Tax, that’s the second. UberX, that’s the third. The FinTech Act, that’s the fourth. Cybersecurity, the fifth. The new company law, if you count that, that’s the sixth. Six laws in total, and it doesn’t count the drones act, because that’s still in the ...

So the legislation never rejected anything from vTaiwan. Some of them are still in progress. Some of them already passed. The UberX one is, of course, passed, as well. Online alcohol sales is the only exception, because the administration withdrew it itself.

The cyber-bullying is interesting, because the multi-stakeholder consensus is that we don’t need a law for that. The Financial Experimentation Technology Act is now awaiting review. We expect it to be passed within a couple months.

Yeah, I think so. There’s one that was withdrawn by the administration itself, the one on online alcohol sales. Everything else, the Cybersecurity Act is still being reviewed. Closely-held-companies, of course, passed. The e-Taxation Act is passed.

Finally, the Minister or the Premier signs one of those versions into accepted version and sends it to the legislation. Or, if it’s a regulation, then it just takes effect.

Then, after we have those ideas, then we make it to the decisional stage, where the ministry must engage in an online, real-time, or at most seven days after every question the public asks, a conversation or dialogue, and explain their own ratification, translation of this into the beliefs. The ...

Now we simply say there is a consensus of feelings, and the ideas that are worth exploring are the ideas that take care of those feelings. I think that’s the other part. After the factual part of the initial setting and the reflective part, which is the online collection of ...

Then we make another presentation to explain this and ask what the participants feel about this shared, common feelings. The participants react with their own feelings, and then also try to come up with interpretations or ideas that try to address their feelings. Previously, in brainstorming sessions, there are no ...

Then the pol.is system automatically calculates the majority opinion. What is the divisive parts? What are the most controversial? What are the most unclear parts of this open-ended survey? Anybody can write in anything for other people to vote on.

Basically, the idea is that we provide a binding power tools like pol.is, by saying our face-to-face multi-stakeholder meeting will have its agenda entirely determined by the consensus on pol.is, which means that we don’t talk about anything that’s not on pol.is. It makes people want to contribute, because it ...

If they can’t make it to the face-to-face meeting, they can also include through livestream and type in their efforts. Of course, everything is transcribed in real time and so on. A facilitator then determines the agenda, which is always crowd-sourced.

Then we publish it to reach as many people as possible, often with rolling surveys or questionnaires, to make sure that it reaches as far as possible in audience. Then we hold a face-to-face meeting, livestreamed, and we invite everyone who contributed constructively during the align part to this face-to-face ...

All this, of course, happening in the open, outside of the administration office, on weekly small hackathons and meet-ups. Once we have a title that we all agree on and a time frame that we agree on, then the governing ministry or the proposer makes a slide explaining what this ...

What kind of title should we call it? We spend two months on the proper title for the UberX case to make it neutral enough and specific enough so none of the stakeholders will boycott the process. Just the frame-setting is very involved.

When we first come with a topic, we then survey the stakeholder groups, people who have published anything on this topic and/or people who have expressed an interest in any way, including legislators, and invite them to a series of pre-meetings to determine if and when they think is a ...

Then we have each ministry which offers the topics that they would like to consult about, and we have the previously cyberspace minister, now digital minister, who provides the binding power that binds those three groups together. Every agenda can be proposed by any of those three groups, but it ...

First, we have three different admin groups, for lack of a better term. We have the civil society facilitators and civic hackers. Then we have the Information Industry Institute, which serves as translator between legalese and layperson’s speech.

vTaiwan is many, many steps. There’s an article about the process called "vTaiwan: Public Participation Methods on the Cyberpunk Frontier of Democracy." I don’t know whether you’ve seen that, but I’ll just paste you a link. It explained the process pretty well, but I’ll quickly summarize.

They may see it as something that takes away their budget-allocating power or decision-making power. However, because we structured it in a way that says, "No, it is just collecting consensus, we still respect the legislation," and the legislators are free to join and help us set a due process, ...

I think it signaled goodwill between the legislation and the administration for a process like this. Internationally speaking, when we do things like participatory budgets or other democratic innovations, the first resistance always comes from the elected representatives in the city council or in the legislative bodies.

The legislators, at that time, was blocking each other, filibustering, as they are prone to do around that time of discussing constitutional amendments. They had to let this closely-held-company law pass through, though, because it’s obvious the stakeholders wanted and many of the aides in each party have already witnessed ...

Again, we can’t ask the head of a labor union to come. It’s not representative that way. I think the first few cases are very fortunate. They clearly addressed the cases where representation is lacking, and the results that we made are genuinely useful for the stakeholders involved.