This very fact of ICT making it possible for people with very different standings to listen to each other and converge on something is a public demonstration to Taiwan that this methodology, although very expensive, actually works.

Were it not for this kind of what we call the ICT infrastructure, the Internet and Communication Technology, then, like many other occupies, they tend to diverge and morph into being a purposeless crowd.

What happens after this dynamic, which I am part of the plumbing team, really, is that we see that every day they converge a little bit more. We see the things being settled, and things being not settled to be listed into the next day’s agenda, so that after 20 ...

We also set up projectors, so that on the external site, on the street, people can see with their own eyes what’s happening in the occupied place. Even though there’s police between these walls, it’s as if it’s completely transparent because it provides a view into the parliament to make ...

My role then was working with g0v people as one of the hundreds of civic hackers, meaning that we built the intranet, the network lines that connects these sites together. Then we also built a extranet, that is to say, the g0v today website that makes sure that whatever is ...

Back then there was this occupied parliamentary site, but there was also three different streets occupied respectively by the pro‑independence people, by the left, the labor union‑ish people, by the green, environmental, ecologist people, and also human right activists, and so on. There was like 20 different NGOs, all occupying ...

The 2014 Sunflower Movement, there’s basically a vacancy in the parliament where the MPs refused to deliver a trade service agreement, and the students occupied it, literally, for 22 days. Not just for protesting, but a demo, as in a demonstration of how, actually, to talk about trade service agreements ...

That’s right.

This is a very systematic weekly collaboration between the government, and then the civil society, and also crowd decision.

It is the same in this case for the vTaiwan project in g0v to experiment with those shining new toys, and then for the government’s own platform, the joint platform, to absorb these experiments into something that’s everyday done for every regulation, and so on.

We’ve seen it with participatory budgeting system, with dictionaries, with many systems where g0v first did an experimental prototype, and then the government take it in as something that is just normal, part of the administration work.

And for our g0v work, we often just relinquish our copyright completely. So by the next procurement cycle, the government can just take this "fork," well, we call it "forking," like taking the government data and doing something experimental, something different, and then merge it into the government’s service.

They ‑‑ well we, actually, I am still a participant of g0v ‑‑ we replaced the "O" to a zero. So that for whatever website that you don’t like, you just replace the "O" to a zero and you get into this shadow government website that offers the same data ...

The government websites here all ends in gov.tw, right? It’s the government website.

Bye.

I’m looking forward to visit as well.

Yeah. I’m never too much into grandiose claims — I don’t think they have much effect.

Yes. That’s plenty.

Technology for me is — if we are to change the system — it’s just to make up for the time and space differences. It’s not that we have anything against the existing system, we’re just to restore it to its natural circumstances.

The system for that — our existing language and so on — is pretty good for this purpose. But there are, of course, time and space constraints when someone in Taiwan wants to speak with somebody in New Zealand.

Ok. What I’m trying to say is that the natural circumstances for me is to have my full attunement, full attention, when I try to listen to somebody or have somebody else listen to me.

Well, If I want to listen to you, and say if our Skype connection had a glitch at this moment, would I not want to fix it? If I were to fix that, it’s not me wanting to "change the Internet", nor to "change Skype as an application" — is ...

It has a profound psychological effect, to look at the Earth and its surrounding stars and systems like that. And once that becomes my personal reality, existing political divisions have very little effect on my mind. I think that’s what "individual anarchism" means to me, personally.

Well it means several things. For example, when I was just falling asleep last night, I was wearing this Oculus Rift virtual reality goggles, and looking at the Earth from a satellite of Pluto.

I think it’s just we had the technologies for speaking to millions before we had the technology to listen to millions, that made our current political and media situation like this. Once they become symmetrical, I think it would restore some of the early balance.

Before television and radio, there wasn’t a way for people to speak to millions of people, either; it was just one-to-one speaking via telephones at a time, and the society was structured around that.

Well, I don’t actually think so...

I mean, listening, scalable listening, and building tools for scalable listening? I think that is a majority, that is what most people would want. And in fact they do jump on it when there are better tools for doing so.

Well, we have to qualify what is it that I am doing.

So it was basically saying all these cases, which was tried in a military court due to a glitch in our legal system, must be tried in the civil court and with due process. That demand was also met.

Essentially, it’s an "accidental death" of a certain soldier. When people asked what exactly happened, all the CCTVs — the camera recordings — mysteriously disappeared.

You mean the 1985 protest?

It is, and it prompted a quarter million people to the street. I wasn’t involved back then actually, I was involved in the collaborative document they created. Because that was a flash mob, really, by people who were not activist organizers before, so they collaborated on a Google Doc to ...

That is correct.

Well, I wasn’t so much directly involved back then. But it was due to a Ministry of Defence covering up of a certain accidental death of a soldier.

That is exactly the case, yes.

The outcome was that the Parliament — the head of Parliament — agreed that it’s probably not a good idea to ram through the trade agreement the way it were. So the outcome is the occupiers got their demands met. But the other demand, which is have a bottom-up constitutional ...

The meetings and the deliberations on the street were digitized in such a manner, and this is the first large-scale demonstration that Taiwan has seen, for this kind of deliberative democracy.

In this kind of space, people gradually found each other — people who thought they were in different ideological camps — they cross pollinate with each other, because every day starts with a recap of what got discussed, what reached consensus in the previous day.

Because of the help of g0v civic hackers, we have made sure that every corner of the occupied area was live-broadcasted online, transcribed, with a real-time translation and logistics team, so it became a safe space where rumors and violence have no place to expand.

So they occupied the Parliament. Instead of just demonstrating and protesting, they were demonstrating a different kind of consensus-making deliberation, by going over the suggested trade deal, one line by one line, and have all the people — half million people on the street — participate in this kind of ...

Certainly. So the short of it is very simple. There’s a bunch of students who didn’t like the way that a Legislative Yuan — that’s our Parliament — refused to debate the treaty with Beijing, because their interpretation of constitution at the time was that Beijing is a domestic city ...

Well, a hacker is someone who makes new rules out of new situations, instead of trying to retrofit old rules to new situations. A civic hacker is just someone who does this to the public sphere.

So it’s up to the people to mobilize, to convince, to somehow rally, or to come to a consensus. What we do is provide a space that is — unlike Facebook — trying to highlight the things that people have consensus on. So I would say a little bit of ...

It’s a little bit of both, because what we do is not human intervention during the deliberation; it’s just providing a safe space where people can see each other’s — your Facebook friend’s or Twitter friend’s — stance, on this kind of matter.

So it’s not that the regulation would not happen without this process, is that it would have a much harder time to convince people that this is where we are going forward.

Well it would take longer, I think. Because it’s not the consensus themselves, it is the process that brings the previously opposing or even very violent parties together, so that they could agree to a compromise.

For other cases like online sales of alcohol, we have a 80/20 split, so the threshold would be 90 percent. No matter how many people you mobilize to the majority group, you still have to convince over half of the minority.

Our formula is: To form a binding consensus. It has to cross the threshold to convince 80 percent of people, which is calculated by the 60 percent the majority group, plus half of the minority group.

Well, the idea is that, for example in the Uber case, we had two groups identified by a machine-learning program. It’s open data, and presented to everybody. There are roughly 60 per cent for legalization of Uber, and 40 percent for outright banning Uber.