There’s very little things the administration tried, to put fines and so on. It didn’t work. There’s protests, the taxi drivers surrounded the ministry of transport, just like it happened everywhere on earth.

Uber is very interesting, because it is a virus of the mind. It is a meme, basically, that says, "The algorithm is better than law," and that it dispatches things more efficiently. You can’t really argue with a meme, just like you can’t argue with flu or anything like that. ...

Afterwards, the previous prime minister, a political scientist, resigned. The new prime minister, an engineer, says, "OK, from now on, crowdsourcing and open data is going to be the national direction." The occupiers and the civic tech people who supported him are then invited as mentors, advisors, to the public ...

After the 2014 occupy, at the end of that year, there was this mayor election of the six major Taiwan cities, and five of them were won by occupiers or pro-occupiers, who are very surprised that they were elected mayors. It’s like something that happened in Spain, also. [laughs]

Thank you.

We know that freedom is never free of costs. Our parent’s generation, our grandparent’s generation paid dearly for it -- and we need to use the software freedoms to keep it free.

When we see free software, and we had this very long free software culture movement in Taiwan, we always think of freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, instead of free of cost.

Internet and Democracy, not two things, one and the same thing in Taiwan.

It arrived in 1989, with the personal computers. For us, the personal computer revolution and freedom of speech is the same thing. Our first presidential election in 1996 is also the popularization of the World Wide Web, so many of us worked as campaigners back then.

I think it’s because, I’m 36 now, we are the first generation that enjoyed the freedom of speech after three decades of martial law and dictatorship.

Why are there literally hundreds of professionals, like me, who spoke to my clients at the time -- Apple, Oxford University Press, Socialtext -- saying, "OK, I have to take a three-week leave, because the island needs me?"

It is one of those very rare occupies that, by the end of the three weeks, everybody converged on that set of consensus, which the members of the parliament then bought in. It was a victory instead of being more divergent across time.

During the Occupy, the g0v civic tech people worked as amplifiers to support the professional deliberators inside and on the streets of the occupied site, so that everyone just speaks naturally, but they’re transcribed. There’s translations, logistics, everything is kept on the open source nervous system, just as Colin described.

Quite a hack, isn’t it? Also, we released, under Creative Commons Zero, our copyright and everything, so that when the next procurement cycle comes, many of the g0v projects then become the official government websites. That was the movement.

We look at all the government websites that we don’t like that ends in gov.tw, and build a shadow website that ends in g0v.tw, so we solved the discoverability problem. You just look at a government website, change the O to a zero, and get to the shadow government, with ...

This is facilitated by professional deliberators and participated in by 20 NGOs -- the Greens, the Labors, all the people in the NGOs -- and was supported by the g0v civic tech community. This community is very interesting, because our call-to-action is to "fork" the government.

In any case, they refused to deliberate on the agreement. The occupiers, far from protesting, did a demonstration in the demo scene sense, meaning we take your parliament, and we’re going to deliberate trade service agreement with half a million people on the street, and show you how we can ...

That has happened because of the Occupy back in 2014. Back in the time, the Sunflower Movement students occupied the parliament. The MPs refused to deliberate a trade service agreement with Beijing, because they think, constitutionally, Beijing is part of Taiwan, or something like that.

Four years ago, if you pulled a random person off the street on Taiwan and say, "We’re going to move into a cabinet where not only a prime minister is independent, but there is more independent cabinet members than members of any party in the cabinet," they’re like, "You’re crazy."

How did we get there, to this post-party system?

But the societal, the cultural impact, I think is much more important. Dr. Tsai was saying her inauguration speech that we know, before in Taiwan, democracy was about a showdown between two different values. Now it must become a conversation with diverse values.

That put Taiwan into the top spot in the Global Open Data Index for two years running -- take that with a grain of salt, because it doesn’t measure the impact of anything.

This kind of transparent hand-off is borne out of Simon Chang’s idea that all the ICT systems produced in Taiwan under one million US dollars must be made open data, by default.

Simon asked all the ministries to publish their checkpoint documents, open data, everything, and upload it to the public Internet for the next cabinet to download as the transition team. I didn’t know I would become part of that cabinet a few months after it assembled, but I still looked ...

The new prime minister, the one that’s still now the prime minister, for a year now, Lin Chuan, is also independent. There are two independent prime ministers. Something that was unthinkable in Taiwan’s history is that the transition is public.

Last January, when the ballot opened, Dr. Tsai won by a landslide. But the previous prime minister is an independent. He’s Simon Chang, previously a director of engineering at Google; Taiwan’s first super computer maker; and he’s independent. He doesn’t have any parties.

The sixth presidential election is also remarkable in that it’s very peaceful, the only peaceful transition in Taiwan’s political history. The previous elections we see 49 percent, 50 percent. We see people unfriending each other after election results. We see a lot of people going to the streets, riots even, ...

You can bribe them with catnips, but they won’t interfere with the human species’ affairs.

This is our first family. They’re literally incorruptible.

Thank you. She run a platform of radical transparency, of marriage equality, of sustainability, and things like that, so I’m very happy when she was elected.

I keep mentioning this because both she and I are advocates for animal right. I live with seven cats and two dogs, [laughs] and we do believe that the human species doesn’t have an exclusive privilege on Earth, on Taiwan, or anywhere else.

Dr. Tsai Ing-Wen is, in our sixth presidential election, elected the president of human beings, the human species, us.

This is Dr. Tsai Ing-Wen, our president. I voted for her last year. We’re a very young democracy, 23 million people, and 10 percent of the earth’s marine species.

I’ll talk a little bit about how pol.is, far from being experimental, is now being done daily, seen as part of the administration’s normal working system for the controversial issues.

...12 hours in the future from the other side of this planet.

I am literally from the future...

I just posted to the forum and you’ll get in email.

No, I read a little bit of French, but I don’t ever stay in France long to actually speak French.

I will post the link to the forum that we set up.

Yeah, but if you can put a link or a QR code to the forum, that would be great, because the reader can then check the entire thing.

Of course.

Some level of machine intelligence plus human intelligence will do this.

Not me personally.

Yeah, of course.

It’s an important point. Just having the consciousness, the ability to suffer, having affective states, having all these things are just, I would say, just entries to this kind of conversation. It is necessary, but nowhere sufficient, for a conversation to happen. That’s my view.

I wouldn’t say that it’s the same, just like the metaphor I said with English. Just because we both speak English, it doesn’t mean that English means the same to us, or that we are the same people.

Right. I think that the important thing here is that there are, I wouldn’t say "sameness", I would say "commonalities to communication" where we can try to build more understanding on.

No, it’s not true.

If you declare something in the sense as "requiring a very high degree of humanness that excludes animals", it doesn’t really require an argument. Most people will agree that it excludes most animals and most children also. That’s just how you draw the line.

This is very interesting. It used to be an argument where one needs a neocortex to feel things. That you need a cerebral cortex to perform cognitive work. This declaration is basically saying no, if you have a certain pattern of connection, then it has access to some degree of ...