The regions have changed. In Tamsui, there is now a street that’s actually a main tourist street, but it’s not part of the original tourist zone, so you can’t actually spend money there. The original zone has moved a little bit, so I had to go to the other side ...

For example, back when the National Travel Card was first introduced, there were so‑called traveling areas, areas of interest, and then you can only spend the National Travel Card around those areas to promote tourism.

Yeah, the National Travel Card. I went to Tamsui, and found that all the public servant colleagues, the participation offices, all they said about the difficulties of using this card was true. I ran into all those difficulties myself.

Cheers.

Sure.

Do you have anything else?

That’s good.

Or you can channel outrage into an outrage against ignorance, which is better than an outrage against one specific person.

I think it’s natural. I wouldn’t say democracy is declining or anything. I would say it’s part of the process, where every region is trying its own experiment, just as we are trying here. Experiments that will end up solving actual democratic governance problem will actually spread in the long ...

...boost, or even a privilege in engaging people emotionally. What outrage does best is generating counter‑power. When the counter‑power had its day, something has to fill the vacuum. Then basically anyone who can make the best of the narrative and outrage ends up filling the vacuum, whether they can deliver ...

It’s just that on the Internet, especially on social media, outrage spreads much faster than any other emotion. Any political movement that can capitalize on that gets an automatic...

I wouldn’t say so. I would say it’s the same outrage that drives both these phenomenon and the Occupy Movement. I would say it’s both. All of them are manifestations of the 99 percent trying to get some more dialogs going.

Neither code makers nor law makers should monopolize the process. That’s the only thing I would ask for.

It could happen with things like blockchain. You’re end up taking things that were in a law domain and putting into the code domain, which is even less accountable if you don’t put in safeguards into it.

A few lawyers doing the whole process. Worse, a few programmers doing all the process.

As long as it is transparent, and most importantly that it’s convergent. What we don’t need is a process that excludes more people out of the way, that more people feel disenchanted along the way, that more people feel that it’s just a few constitutional scholars or a few politicians ...

It should definitely take in the technological reality. We’re not in the time of telegraph anymore, so we need to take telecommunication into account. As of what features they would demand out of the constitution, I really have no preconceptions... I can live with anything. [laughs] Whatever people want...

There is actually a bill in the Parliament now that talks with this. It’s a bottom‑up constitutional reform law. As I’m not MP, I’m not supposed to talk about the specifics. I do agree with the spirit, in a sense that because it’s the covenant between all the people.

Yeah. It’s like the electorate. Right?

It’s just like virtual reality. It’s been around for decades. Now it’s the first time it’s affordable. This kind of convergent deliberative democracy was always available back to the Greek times, but it’s now finally cheap enough that we can run it as part of standard procedure.

Sometimes you just lose hope because of too many previously failed attempts. But really, we are in a convergence of very high bandwidth, real time live streaming, and artificial intelligence that takes a lot of burden away for things like this. We’re now in a time point where you can ...

It’s definitely got a lot more visibility of the work we’re doing. Also for me personally, more importantly, it convinced a lot more people that this is possible. In many old democracies, things like this has been tried too many times.

It went well. I got a lot of inquiries afterwards of the methodologies and the progress that we’re making. There’s a flurry of Parisian media. One just came an hour ago.

Right. It’s much more gradual. It’s less like a waterfall or something.

This provides a kind of psychological assurance to public servants in a sense that there is now a time frame, a mechanism. They don’t really have to fight politically to get a proper dialogue or something done in sufficient time. Now, the time is bounded. It’s 30 days to do ...

It’s true. I don’t run into push backs because I don’t give commands. That’s true so far for the past few months. Also defining risk, I think especially time-boxing. This 60 days. If you handle it well, well it’s gone in 60 days.

By definition. People who are resistant, they never come to me anyway. I don’t even know them.

No. We only work with volunteers. You never run into push back.

Yeah. They’re risk‑averse.

Yeah. Compared with four million years, these are very short times.

They are raising 5 centimeters every year.

Yeah. The tectonic plates started.

It’s a very geographic view, but it’s my perspective.

It is one pivotal stage on which the entire Pacific history is taught. I think it is a useful view, but I wouldn’t impose it on anybody else.

Really it is a useful view. Then you see that it’s something that’s larger than humanity, that there’s living beings here and there’s cultures here. There’s layers of populations, the beginning of the Austronesian population, and so on.

My approach so far is just to engage people in this huge rich history of Taiwan, which spans for like four million years, if you count from the rising of this convergent boundary of the tectonic plates.

It really depends on the character and the cognitive mode of the entire team. Taiwan is just this geographic island. Everybody can project whatever they want on it. I don’t really have a preference.

Whatever that you think are fun is the best!

They’re livestreamed so that people who don’t have any way to engage at least can watch it online and type in something, for it to participate into the next agenda of their regular meetings. I do think regular meetings are key. Otherwise a space doesn’t have its own character.

There’s a lot of this community work around, I think, Tainan especially, but also Taichung and other cities where this brick and mortar shop, as you mentioned, just turns into a semi‑public sphere gathering place. Where they host maybe weekly or maybe daily discussions. They make sure that they broadcast ...

Which is great, because they have a lot of remote people who don’t have good Internet access. Everybody has an ATM card. They can authenticate their citizenship this way.

Of course. The Portuguese people are planning to have their participatory budget plan voted through automatic teller machines. That’s a media right there. You see all the PB plans and they have a screen and a drawing.

Both before and during the show are our main ways just to see it not as a "content producer", but as an engagement device. It’s to get a person, like Minister Cheng, to engage with thousands and hundreds of thousands of people.

Right. Exactly.

We also have a curator who takes that and rephrases it into something that they can respond very timely, which is why it had to be a live show. Otherwise I would just watch a recording. Why would I watch a live show, if not for the possibility of influencing ...

It’s a psychological thing. It makes it possible for the person to talk with the anchor, but also with the whole audience, not with faceless people. The feeling that there is a gradual convergence in understanding. By middle of the show we also have online calls in in form of ...

Exactly. We have an actual audience there. We had a 360 camera in the middle. If you tell a joke and nobody laughs, you actually feels that nobody laughs, because you can turn around.

Then tried to record in 360 at the beginning of the entire interaction. People don’t feel like they’re talking into this faceless camera, but into an ambiance. You can basically see that they gradually come to understand it.

We had a mission learning based public platform where people ask one specific person, like Minister Cheng (鄭麗君) what her thought about culture is. We crowd‑sourced the interview questions. Then we channeled them through a professional journalist and an anchorperson.

It’s called Talk to Taiwan (政問). It’s an interactive talk show of sorts. We really put into it a lot of imaginations, as you mentioned, of how the new media can be. Mostly it’s around the idea of an agenda of a media is to be co‑curated or co‑created by ...