I wouldn’t to say that this a victory of the petitioners, because we really should have communicated with the MPs at the beginning, not at the end of the six‑day process. We did change the process.

When she proposed this, the very next morning her Facebook page was awash with people posting their own cancer photos and things like that, saying that the one‑day you delay, that the more people you kill, or whatever. She resigned her objection, and then this was passed on time.

The MPs are kind of unhappy. The issue’s that the regulation really should go to public hearing by the MPs, by parliament review, because it’s new to them.

At the time we learned a lot, because the MPs were kind of unhappy. Because what they see, at that time, is the competition of the agenda-setting power by the parliament, so that they consider one person raising, 5,000 people petitioning, and then the administration rushed through it because it ...

Legally, there’s nothing really forbidding it. It’s the doctors must pay for this out of pocket, instead of charging to recover the cost. Even the most affluent doctor can just treat one or two cases by paying out of their own pocket, so they need to relax this part, and ...

The whole idea is that the Minister of Health and Welfare contacted the petitioner and found out that he, himself, is one of those terminal stage cancer patients who fly regularly to Japan because Taiwan doesn’t open up this kind of treatments. He, of course, can afford to do so, ...

The very first case, the treatment of terminal stage cancer using the so‑called cell immunology treatment method, that was something that’s genuinely new for the Ministry of Health and Welfare. Because it was the first petition case, there’s also no precedents to look for. There was a write‑up, I can ...

If you go to join.gov.tw, there are numbers for you to list. Not just petitions, but also regulation announcements, and also those large‑scale projects. That’s ongoing projects. These are all subject to civic participation.

There’s thousands more people, after replying to those 5,000 people, who will then ask other questions or express their own volitions. Of the 5,000 or so, there’s roughly 2,000 or 3,000 in it who will then contribute their extra viewpoints, and so on.

Maybe there wasn’t actually a very good mechanism to get their opinions into the President’s office or the administration, but nowadays it’s easy to quantify that. For any given petition of, say, 5,000 people, there is, for example, hundreds of people watching the live stream whenever we talk about those ...

It does make it seem quieter. It is true that it makes it seem quieter, calmer perhaps, but it also makes the quality of participation much deeper, because for people who are one of the half a million on the street, their contributions may be just one bit or two ...

Of course, it’s less active than it was back in 2014 now, but it’s probably not for the obvious reason. [laughs] The reason is, nowadays, that we have a standardized channel to work with young people, and to work with anyone from civil society who has something to say, who ...

There’s tremendous participation, but that was also because the young people were very, very angry [laughs] with the government. If we compare raw numbers, we would say that there is less young people engagement, if you measure by people on the street, or people protesting, or people proposing those petitions ...

If you just look at the numbers of young people on the street, a few months before the Sunflower Movement there was this Citizen 1985 Movement — the so‑called Silver Cross Movement — which is, again, a quarter million people. Then the Sunflower’s half a million people, and then there’s ...

It’s very hard to compare with the previous administration because many of those systems were built in response to the Sunflower Movement at 2014.

What I mean is that all the technical contributions that I make, which is all public, can be used by both representative democratic, and centralized democracy, and not-at-all democratic countries. They may interpret it in a different way. I’m OK with this, is what I’m saying.

Some regimes use the so‑called 信访 system, meaning visits directly to the top level, and very much the same techniques can directly gather opinions from the stakeholders, bypassing the mid‑level bureaucracy, and so on.

I also want to say that this technique of what we call ICT‑enabled, scalable listening is not actually threatening to any political system. Although it does work, as we saw, with representative democracy, it works equally well with centralized democracy or non‑democracies because technology, by itself, is neutral.

This I know, but whether there is some manipulation, or whatever, forces that makes this happen, I can make educated guesses, but I don’t really have any evidence or proof of what’s happening. I think I just deal with it on a as‑is basis.

Certainly. All I know is whether people come to the platform that we build or not. All I know is whether they approach us with extreme suspicion or with some sort of willingness to discuss.

Any other questions?

Conversely, this means that I don’t actually have access to the national security stuff because, by law, if I do have access, then everything that I output need to be subject to security review, which I wouldn’t want. I don’t have the access to the answer to your question, if ...

But because I practice radical transparency this way, I actually am barred, by my own volition, to enter any national security discussions or to touch any confidential material. If there is the national security issues, as you mentioned, I wouldn’t know, because by default anything that I hear, anything I ...

If you look at the transcript, then you can very easily identify his anonymous source. The wizard source is me, because I said the things that he quoted. You can look all this up yourself as of what I did answer him.

When a certain Nick Monaco interviewed me asking exactly the question you ask, about computation propaganda involved in whatever, I think he ended up publishing something about this just a few days ago as part of a Google Jigsaw‑sponsored study.

Everybody was interested, and there’s quite a few campaigns, such as the Chou Tzu-Yu campaign, that did affect the election, but I wouldn’t attribute it to any particular source. To answer your question very quickly, there is this website, pdis.tw, where I publish all my interviews and meetings, and including ...

At the end of it, I think this is the only way forward, is to raise a generation of people who will demand to think for themselves and with the government, instead of just from the government. I think that’s the basic attitude we’re taking.

Of course, we’re facilitating this by making interactive games for educational purposes, by recording all those public petition processing cases as curriculums, and under Creative Commons, so all the schools can talk about it. Also, have our own FAQ, frequently asked questions, on major issues so that civic teachers can ...

This is the thing that we’re building in, into the basic education. We think that it is much easier if the kids are raised not blindly trusting anyone with an authority’s voice or authority’s print, because those things are very easy to fake nowadays. Growing up, checking their own balance, ...

All the while teaching them, by example, critical thinking, media literacy, checking different sources. The basic journalism training that you all went through. [laughs]

We do work on what we call inoculation of the mind, which is media literacy. We introduce, starting next year, part of the K‑12 basic education. Not a class on media literacy or on IT technology, not this kind of class, but for all the different classes we try to ...

Yes, cyber security is very important, and there is no particular enemy here. It is all people who want to undermine versus people who want to uphold the Internet as a democratic vehicle.

It is not just limited to one country or one region. Anywhere that people who feels that this kind of democratic process is to their detriment will have the motivation to undermine peoples’ trust on the public Internet. It is not limited to any region at all.

I would say that most of the operations is not designed to undermine the Internet infrastructure of the state, which is very difficult, but to undermine people’s trust on the Internet, which is much easier, as you said, around disinformation around all sort of different computational propaganda, and so on.

Actually, cyber security, of course, underlies the whole idea of safe space. If people don’t trust the Internet, then they won’t exercise the freedom of speech or freedom of assembly online, and this whole thing is void. This is built on the security, and security meaning a subjective feeling of ...

My answer to you is that by making the first few cases all about public servants as stakeholders, they get to feel both the hope, and the outrage, and the frustration of being people on the street. Then that gives them much more empathy to deal with other cases in ...

The whole platform is designed so that the information platform must protect whatever the steering group wants. Meaning that if they don’t want their IPs to be looked up, they don’t want their identity to be revealed, they want to remain pseudonymous, and so on, all the technical people need ...

Then we designed it so that they, themselves, nominate themselves to run the internal join platform. To date, there is already 111 public servants who nominated themselves as the initial steering member of the meeting. Member of which we will publicly draw about nine people into the first set to ...

In addition to join there is now, being constructed, a new platform called internal join, which is what’s suggested by the POs. The internal join meaning that only public servants get to post there and it has a much lower threshold. The external join needs 5,000 people. The internal join ...

Of course, them being stakeholders, the first two cases are all about civil servant rights, whether it’s legal for civil servant to go to strike [laughs] , and so on. We did have some very good results. For example, they also said that we need a safe space to voice ...

The first few cases, because the agenda is being set by what we call participation officers, or POs, there is one or more PO in every single ministry. Of the 32 ministries, there’s about 40‑something POs, and they vote the things that we process for this collaboration of weekly petition ...

The very first case that we processed in this new model is how to make civil servants legal to form labor unions. That makes them stakeholders. Also, it’s about the so‑called National Travel Card, which is a way to reimburse for their extra work time, and so on.

I wouldn’t say so. I would say mobilization is part of politics, but how to turn mobilization into organization, how to make mobilizing forces into organizing forces, that is the technical question.

The projector at that end seems to have fallen off. Maybe I should just get on with voice.

Then, the next Monday, I bring it to the Premier, so the Premier can also set his idea on it. This is a continuous, everyday practice, where we let the young people see that their petitions are being heard and being processed by the administration.

For them, this is a very concrete buying power where they set this agenda. We do discuss it every Friday, and then by the end of Friday we publish all the transcripts, often also live‑streamed, and then into the public for the public to see.

For people who are younger than me, they often don’t have access to this kind of channel, or at least not a agenda‑setting power level access. For them, this kind of e‑petition, e‑consultation, and so on are actually much more viable than the MPs or the media, which they have ...

Meaning that for people who are more established, people who are already heads of some association or something, there are actually, of course, other channels for them to engage in politics. To work with MPs, to work with media, and so on, to set their own agenda.

That is a very good question. The joint website currently frequented by millions of people, we just had a presentation that says the vast majority of it are people under 35 who want to participate in this kind of online consultation and deliberation platform.

My work in the administration so far is to make it work, but in a less expensive way, and so that we can do it for more regulations, not just for all the regulations when you have a million on the street. That’s obviously not as the scale that we ...