But in normal, civilian life, a really decentralized architecture has to establish its worth somehow, like by offering better anonymity, which is very different for decentralization, or by offering trustless trust, which only makes sense if you’re doing things like shipping crates across the Atlantic. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter. Or ...

Of course at that time, you will want a mesh network, which is why things like FireChat got very popular, both during the Sunflower occupy and the Hong Kong occupy afterwards.

I also think decentralization has some very obvious use cases, like when you are part of a occupy, and your Internet connection just went down, but you still really want to communicate with seven million people around you.

This space has seen explosive growth ever since Ethereum appears. I’m acutely aware of these efforts. I think it’s great. It’s great that people are exploring the new protocol based on proof-of-work and things like that.

Sure. There is a lot of work in this area. Us, it is that we share one. There’s many. There’s one from the New Zealand occupy people, from Enspiral. There’s of course the original Diaspora*. There’s also the sovereign.software application from Democracy.Earth folks.

I had no idea, but I’m reading it now. I see the idea.

Not offhand, no.

I’m pretty optimistic. I think the intensely social generation, after a few years, will then make useful contributions in a much more deeper scale, and we can also accelerate the process if we want to.

It’s not just for nostalgia’s sake. It takes time to trust strangers. It takes time to really work with random people and feel that you’re at ease with people who you barely know and so on.

I would just say that there are attempts like Wikipedia that tries to take some of the same spirits at the core, and try to let people see it and participate, even, on the surface. I would say that the public sector is doing more or less the same.

At the core, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the ICANN, and all the organizations that keeps the Internet running is still using the old, anarchistic model to run. That has not changed. It’s just around this core, we have built a lot of intensely social -- as you said -- ...

Civilization.

Yes.

I would say it’s just catching up, whether it’s activists driving, or whether it’s private sector people driving modern administration folks, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that a new kind of tool -- with the tool, a new kind of organization structure -- is entering the public sectors ...

It’s only natural that when the civil society and the private sector already embraced the digital transformation and become much more agile, much more adaptive. It’s only the public sector that is lagging behind for quite some years now, for at least 10 years now.

Maybe. I wouldn’t say that I’m like the Pirate Party. First of all, I belong to no parties. I don’t really see the point of party politics to be honest. There is a lot of Internet-enabled activists.

It is dependent on the people’s will to access things in a way that is non-hierarchical information, non-hierarchical collaboration.

Of course everybody says 18F and USDS. We also learn from there a lot. I would say it’s not particular to a country. It’s always a bunch of people who just decide to do digital transformation one way or another. It’s not very specific to the political system they are ...

Yeah, sure. These are the two examples everybody comes up with. We also learned a lot from Helsinki, other parts. Also from the GDS. I think the Etalab is pretty well run. Singapore also has a GDS.

Yeah, of course.

Yeah. You mean do we have connections or did I visit other countries?

It’s getting there, is what I’m saying.

It also applies to, for example, us talking like this. It’s not the most natural way. We would still prefer to meet face-to-face. In a couple of years, technology will progress to a point where it’s indistinguishable whether we are meeting in VR or whether we’re meeting face-to-face.

Usability-wise, paper still has better usability. We’re working on tools, process, and things like that, to keep the usability of paper, but eventually lead to a way where everything is digital first. It will take a few years to get there.

I use stylus all the time myself. This only becomes possible in the past year or so, to replicate the experience of writing. That’s still not paper. If you use this to write on iPad, the writing part feels very natural, but you can’t really fold or make small notes ...

They think it’s pretty nice. A lot of the work that we’re doing is simplifying the paperwork. That’s the main goal, while keeping as much as we can the same ease of access. Paper is very easy to work on. I assume you’re working on pen and paper right now. ...

It’s fine. Take your time.

It’s Polis on the first diamond, but for the second diamond, we will use Discourse, which is another system.

We used to use Loomio. That was back in 2014. Then we discovered Discourse, which works a little bit better for our purpose than Loomio.

Yes. Our recent consensus was around whether we should give what you call social enterprises -- coop-like corporations -- its legal status. We also got some consensus there.

There’s a lot of cases. I wouldn’t say one is more successful than the other because their stakeholder communities don’t overlap. I’m sure that each community thinks their case is the most important one.

That’s one of the first cases that vTaiwan tackled. We also did a lot of telecommunication work, medicine, cyber bullying, remote education, taxation for oversea trade, national open data plan, Uber, of course, and things like that.

The greatest success is that we passed a new company law in the parliament with support from all parties while they were filibustering each other. Because this was the due process, nobody can actually block this idea of what we call closely held corporations. It’s a more US-like or UK-like ...

We always start with the facts, and then we initially diverge with people’s feelings, and try to converge into some shared mutual feelings. Then we diverge again from the feelings into useful ideas, and then we converge into the synthesis of feasible ideas that addressed people’s feelings. From there, we ...

Then we have a second round of divergence, where we invite people who have made useful contributions online into these face-to-face meetings that are live-streamed online so that people can still bring different ideas, but we’re now past the feelings and facts stage. Now people are trying to come up ...

Then we have the first convergence, where we use online discussion forums and synthesize documents to try to work out what exactly are the issues at dispute here.

It’s a shape of two diamonds. At first, you have the initial divergence, where we try to reach as many stakeholders as possible using this social media game called Polis, or other rolling survey open survey methods, and get everybody’s agenda, asking what do you think are important in this ...

It is, actually, a very different model, theoretically speaking than liquid democracy. We don’t do delegation and we don’t try to include everybody.

No, not at all. vTaiwan is inspired by the Cornell Regulation-Room project. It starts as a multi-stakeholder deliberation platform. We only invite people who make constructive contributions online to the face-to-face meetings. People who contribute online are stakeholders, one way or another.

Every single policy has a different stakeholder composition, so it doesn’t really make sense to ask how many people. Pretty much everyone in Taiwan have heard it’s possible, their participation or a discussion, but only about the parts that they’re interested in.

Pretty much everybody have heard of these, but they only participate when the policy in question are related to them somehow. For each case, of course for the Uber case, the stakeholders is not the same as the case where we talk about the national open data, which is not ...

...we make it just like a game, going to a movie, or going to a theater. The whole idea of a game is that you can spend however many seconds you have, if you have just 5 seconds, or 10 seconds, or a minute, or one day, or many days, ...

When we...

The whole idea is that instead of just doing full, deliberative democracy on the largest public-building cases, we are now in the age where this kind of discussion is low-cost enough, inexpensive enough that we can do it to pretty much everything.

I said that I’m interested much more in the process and the tools, not the policies. The idea is to still make policies, but make it in an open space that invites not just the ministry in charge of that policy, but other related ministry, and not just ministries, but ...

Digital Minister.

Yeah, sure, but not just climate change. Climate change is a good example because it affects everyone, but we can also see a lot of environmental issues that are not as long-term as climate change. It could be just air pollution, just very simple, tangible things.

Sure. Humans are connected, and we do feel it. It’s just, we feel a lot of other things also. So virtual reality is a way to temporarily block the distractions. If we are interviewing VR, neither of us will be distracted by people walking around us, or a telephone chiming ...

So somewhere between the blue dot and the sky blocking the view of the stars. Sometimes, just between those scales is the most useful scale.

Or the Pale Blue Dot, yes. But it needs to be a little larger than that to have meaningful discussion on it. We can’t really see the difference on that scale.