It’s not like we live stream all these meetings. We don’t. What we did was we do a full recording, or we do a real‑time stenography, and then we make a full transcript.

This part is new. We wouldn’t have arrived to this workable conclusion this quickly, with this kind of efficiency, if not for the input for those pseudonymous input sources.

Even for those people, if they have something new to say, if they have some constructive opinions, there’s now a systematic way to include their opinions into the final policymaking process, and for them to track that, actually their input has been made into this particular red or yellow light ...

Even if we trust the people fully, there’s always people who don’t trust the government yet to show up in‑person in public hearings. They would rather remain pseudonymous.

This is a trust to people who does not trust us enough yet to reveal their real identities, because trust, you see, is mutual. If the government doesn’t trust its people, there’s no way for the people to trust the government.

The only difference here, and the primary difference here, is that I’ve added inputs channel for nonspecific people who don’t have to reveal their real identity, but providing hard facts and their feelings toward whatever process that we’re making.

Most of the decisions that we make at this iteration of the eSport consultative process are actually the input from individual athletes. Those individual athletes are sometimes pseudonymous. They’re just one nick or one handle on the Internet, but they provide insight that are otherwise not possible or are not ...

Previously, without this kind of online consultational mechanisms, there is no way to talk to nonspecific people. What ends up is that heads of associations or heads of representatives who claims to speak on behalf of the stakeholders ends up getting all the input into the policymaking process.

One main difference is that when I’m talking about stakeholder input, I mean stakeholders that I don’t personally know, because when this is published to the online discussion boards, I really don’t know who exactly is going to provide their input back.

It’s a very small case. It’s one public hearing and three meetings, but it shows the essential idea of not having any meeting go to waste by having each meeting recorded, and having the camera representing the meeting stakeholders that couldn’t make it here.

The MPs, the ministries, and the stakeholders behind these ministries, and athletes themselves all contributed to our final decision. It’s done in the open and it’s completely transparent. Now, we have a good classification and a legal basis for the eSport community to move forward.

Fortunately for the eSport case, every yellow light has, since then, turned into green light.

By the end of each meeting, we used the same color‑coding technology we used during those deliberations, by saying, "OK, this is now green light," meaning that everybody can agree with it, "It’s yellow light," meaning that we have to agree on it after some external factor has happened, or ...

We released that, also, to the public, and then the leagues, the associations, specializing in eSport would join us on the third meeting to work out the details of how exactly they can help in this kind of implementation plan that the government is planning on having, and which we ...

It turns out people are generally OK with it, with this kind of new arrangements with the schools opening up new classes catering for eSport athletes, and having eSport athletes classified as intellectual skill, instead of a physical education athlete, and enjoying the same protection, or the same alternate drafting ...

After checking this and making sure that people’s feelings are generally covered, we move from the facts to the feelings stage where I ask all the ministries to share their feelings of those facts, and whether they are OK with it.

People would say, "If you follow this kind of regulation, you could have actually an alternate pass for the people getting drafted who are professional eSport athletes," and so on.

After their contribution, we held a second consultative meeting between all the ministries, basically just checking those inputs from the PTT BBS, from all those Internet online discussion boards, and fact checking whether these are factual.

If we are policy makers in this meeting room, even though it’s a pretty good meeting room, we still lack a lot of evidences and hard facts that could be observed by the civil society and by the private sector.

We release whatever we have at the factual level online, because all the meetings that are held is published in its entirety as transcripts online. Because of this, the athletes, the professional eSport gaming leagues, and so on then went to my public Q&A site to provide me with a ...

What I have done is, essentially, do a coordination meeting that assembles all the facts that the ministry have so that we understand eSport is not a physical education, because it’s much more intellectual than physical. On the other hand, it is a skillful competition, and it is a kind ...

Before, it could be classified as one trade or the other, there is no such class possible, afraid that parents would probably oppose to it.

ESport, because there’s no game status of it, it’s not subject to it. On the other hand, there is also some schools who want to open the special classes, specializing or attracting people who are more into eSport gaming, and then teach them maybe about general Internet media, and communications ...

Primary around that is, of course, whether they could be...There’s a military draft in Taiwan. If you are a professional athlete, or if you’re a professional Wei Qi Go player, then you can go and serve at alternate draft, working to further your game, basically.

Everything was transcribed used Sunflower‑like technology. Everybody speaks, knowing that whatever they say will be entered into this binding space, where I would coordinate with all the ministries to look at each of the words the athletes said, and try to find a resolution to some of the issues that ...

People couldn’t really agree whether electronic eSport is a sport, or whether it’s physical education, PE, or whether it’s a skill, or whether it’s culture, and things like this. During a public hearing...It’s different from other public hearings, not only because it’s hosted by three different parties and the members ...

All its versions. The Battle of Wesnoth and NetHack. I’ve played NetHack for a very long time. In any case, what I’m trying to aim to is that this is a classical issue out of the misunderstanding of the basic facts.

What’s my game? XCOM 2, and then Civilization, in all...

There’s a broad misunderstanding on the society. It’s almost like a generational gap between the digital natives, who generally understand eSport as contests of skills, and something that’s just a lot of fun, versus people who did not have firsthand experience, and see it as some kind of video games, ...

In Taiwan, for eSport electronic competitions, for a very long time there was no ministry willing to claim the ownership of it. The result being that those large scale competitions of LoL or other electronic eSports cannot, for example, rent the Taipei Dome, or for example, get the foreign visitors ...

I’ll just pick a tiny, tiny case because it’s very self‑contained. It only contains maybe one public hearing, and three meetings. We did get a broad consensus out of it. I’ll talk about very briefly the eSport case.

Exactly.

It evidently works, because toward the end of the occupy, there is a set of consensus that people could not 100 percent agree on, but at least could live with. These are the kind of consensus items that the head of the Parliament at the time eventually agreed on, which ...

This is basically the scalable listening technology that we have deployed during the occupy, with help with professional deliberative democracy facilitators to make sure that ‑‑ be it an ordinary citizen, be it someone who feels concerned about democracy, whichever side of the street they went on ‑‑ there is ...

What this does is essentially a cross‑pollination between all the different occupy side streets so that people begin each day, not over the same topics but picking up of the consensus items that was left the previous day, that was undecided the previous day, and then do a deliberation for ...

There is these kind of factual, evidence‑based tools that lets you make informed decisions. Now we also, during the occupy, not only videotape all the deliberations that happened, but also worked with stenographic transcript people to type it down to those online documents, which are collaborative edited, and then translated ...

As the ICT Geeks, we also built with Eight Mons before. We worked for Eight Mons to build one particular app that lets you enter your company’s name, or the trade that your company’s doing, and look at exactly the part in the cross‑trade service trade agreements that affects you. ...

We have the green, ecologically‑minded people here. We have the labor‑minded people there, the left wing people, and also the separated independence people. Each street held their own deliberations. The occupied parliament also held their deliberations.

What I did at the time was not taking any particular sides, but rather developing the kind of listening technologies that let anything and everything that happened within the occupied parliament, and also in the streets surrounding the occupied parliament, each one was basically populated with people in a very ...

The occupiers ‑‑ what they did essentially ‑‑ is to deliberated on the MP’s behalf. Because the MPs were on the strike, of course the occupiers could go there and deliberate on exactly the same topic.

The Sunflower Movement is a demonstration. It’s not a demonstration only in the protests in the streets sense, but it’s also a demonstration of the technologies that we’re talking about. It is a demonstration because the MPs at those time ‑‑ the Members of Parliament ‑‑ were on strike, essentially, ...

There is always room for improvement. It’s always better already than the previous generation of technology.

It’s because of this that I’m experimenting with this, as if in a laboratory, on various public governance topics. It’s because we’re early in this new, what I call, scalable listening technologies that we need to tailor‑make it to each different specific policy issues.

Now that we have a current generation of technology using machine learning and using a lot of other assistive technical tools, we can actually now listen to millions of people with some degree of success.

While the multi‑stakeholder deliberations, or deliberative democracy, is always part of political theory, there is not much room for it to grow if you work with only the previous generation of pen and paper, or maybe with radio and television technologies, because then the only way to listen to millions ...

In the current political climate, it is not part of a democratic tradition for us to say, "OK, before a referendum, maybe we should listen to each other for much longer. Maybe before each voting, there should be a much more informative communication between the different parts of the stakeholder ...

This is what we have done in the Internet community, especially in the Web community for ages now.

With the Internet, of course, this is what we call the mass self‑communication, meaning that people can select who to listen to, but still there is no way for the governance structure to systematically run a millions‑people consultative process and let these people listen to each other.

In a sense, it’s asymmetric technology. It lets millions of people listen to one or two persons, but it doesn’t let one or two person listen to millions of people.

[laughs] With radio, millions of people can listen to the way we’re talking about it right now, but with this radio technology, there’s no way for both of us to listen to the millions of people who will listen to this talk between us.