Have a good trip back.

It was very enjoyable.

That’s our time.

We can get a printout but it would take 500 years to read through it. [laughs]

It’s like alternate form of intelligence now, and we can’t very easily get a human understandable explanation of why it thinks this way.

I mean, they have incorporated so much machine learning component, such that even if they published the algorithm, but not the actual model that’s being trained, then it’s hard to game anyway.

To game it.

Given the examples in algorithm, none of the data that Google gains by is originated by itself, they rely especially on user input. It wouldn’t be possible to tune the algorithm as they did without user input.

In any case, I don’t think it’s just algorithm, though, it’s the user-contributed content that allows Google to see what’s important and what’s not important, the data also, not just the algorithm.

I don’t know. Personally I use DuckDuckGo.

In a sense that our platform’s rule is our platform’s constitutional principles and everything, it could be affected by people’s input and our algorithms of visualization. Everything is there for contributors to change it, and I think in the long run it may be more effective than Facebook, but we ...

Any affected party, anyone who says they’re being defamed and so on, should be empowered to create this kind of instant clarifications. Ultimately it’s a matter of self-regulation, and the thing that we have, and that Facebook doesn’t, is that we have the potential to be a recursive public.

Of course, by fact checking they need actual factual information, in short, one URL per fact form and so on. This is something that the government can’t help preparing for things that we originate, but we’re not special in any way.

Of course, which is why they are also now self-regulating because they don’t want to lose legitimacy altogether. They need to put some balancing, you know, fact-checking, next to the news and so on. We welcome these efforts, but we want to say that we regulate these efforts, it would ...

No. There’s always the private sphere, where people talk about non-policy issues, so it’s silly to regulate people’s private sphere. Of course, people use Facebook now also as a public discussion forum, and it’s very hard to draw the line.

No. Maybe the 3D printer is not working. You said you had another question?

It is.

Yes. It’s pretty high.

That are not already done, that are really innovative and they know how to fit it into the existing budget structure.

Basically, it’s a Q&A platform for the existing budget so people can be more informed when they are proposing ideas.

The idea is that during the PB, the first three weeks or so, every single item had a discussion forum next to it so that people can ask questions, and after three weeks, other public servants of other cities areas went on and replied to every single one of them.

It’s a group of project, and then you can drill down, and then look basically the entire report that, say, they sent to the city council. For people who are interested in only the transport and so on, you can see the details of the entire city budget, basically.

Yes.

Yeah, this is one project, and not one PB project, one city project.

In any case, it’s accompanied by this diagram of how much went to the education, how much went to social welfare, and so on, and whether these things are being removed.

Percentage-wise, it’s 0.3 percent. It’s not fair because a lot of this is maintenance budget, but the city doesn’t have a discretion anyway, so out of the investment budget I think it’s a higher amount. Let me get you to the numbers.

We could start saying for the first year it’s going to be 12.5 million Euros.

Let’s see what they are doing.

He’s short-cutting the relationship between an independent mayor and the citizens, and it did cause backlash in the city council, but they couldn’t really overturn the entire participatory budget that year, and it now becomes a kind of balance between the parties and...

Because he is independent, but most of his city council is partisan, it basically means that the entire city council doesn’t have to listen or have to agree with what the mayor says. By doing participatory budget, and by doing all sorts of direct connection between the city public servants ...

Taipei City. Famously, he said at a point, that the whole city council is his position because we have a direct vote to the mayor, and then we have votes to the city council. This is unlike the Paris system, where the mayor is simply the majority in the city ...

In any case, I’ll tell you the idea of Mayor Ko Wen-je in the participatory budget when he became mayor late 2014. He is an independent. He belongs to no party, just like our Premier and the previous Premier.

I don’t know.

I think it only happens when the legitimacy of the whole governing system is in crisis.

That’s right.

That demands this platform, really.

I don’t know, but I think machine translation is good enough that you’ll get the basic idea. It’s proposed to the parliament exactly one year ago. We haven’t seen a political window.

It’s just the political mandate of passing it...

I can send you the link to the draft. I think it’s pretty well-written.

These people first have a consensus, and then the MPs of their districts of course can also participate, but in the sense that they are merely enacting the legal translation of their consensus.

Sure, of course. I think it’s modeled after the British Columbia in Canada, where they had a very similar process before. The idea is that the MP still represents the district, but in order to form this kind of pattern of assembly, a random sample of a man and a ...

Yeah.

It actually mandates a sortition method that will say these 146 people will...

Yes, but what I’m saying in this constitutional reform procedural law is that it says that for each MP’s district constituents. It randomly draws samples, one man and one woman. The overall sampling need to reflect the overall demographics in age and in other criteria of the national population.

The thing with this whole system is that it’s not about technology. It’s how many of the MPs really want a new republic, which is why it’s been sitting in the parliament for quite a bit now.

They need to do a good enough job so that it will eventually pass a very high barrier of referendum, which will then enact a new constitution, essentially making a new republic. The procedure was pretty nicely designed by constitutional scholars and so on.

It would bring up all sides of an issue, with general constituents in which the members of this parliament are acting more as proxies, as you said. They need to be bound as lawmakers to translate this consensus into legal form.

Yeah, very short. The idea is it’s for civil society to participate in constitutional deliberation.

We have this bill in the parliament, called Citizen Participation And Constitutional Reform Procedural Law.