End-to-end encryption is not a “good to have.” It’s a must for the Taiwanese citizenry. We understand because there’s a lot of people who work in PRC jurisdictions, but they are Taiwanese and run Taiwanese companies. Ever since the great firewall wasn’t that great, in the very beginning, we understand ...

Definitely, and that’s why, the preferred instant message tool in Taiwan has always been end-to-end encrypted.

If there are jurisdictions that take a not rule of law, by rule by a law approach, it’s like they drop the “inter-“ from the internet and go back to intranets, essentially. I still think the core internet will prevail and it’s our job to make sure that people understand ...

the privacy protecting environments could be guaranteed. Then we’re talking about open innovation. I don’t think it’s a fracture or a balkanization, per se. I think the core internet has always been about working with the end users. In a sense there’s no end users, there’s only potential co-creators.

Well, I think it’s a great amplifier, the technologies that powers the internet today., it could and is being used to amplify the totalitarian technologies.. for the open innovations to happen, the first thing is just to adopt what Taiwan did back in 2014, which is a claim pass., we ...

But in PRC the word transparency means something entirely actually opposite, it means making the citizens transparent to the state. And in that sense the norm is dictated by the ruling party, and by making the citizens transparent, it’s the same word, different direction, they could then track public behaviors ...

that’s a great question. So the inter part of the internet is really what’s important to me. The idea of end to end innovation precisely as you put it, permissionless innovation, is really at a core of the “inter”ness of the internet, otherwise we might as well go back to ...

Yeah, definitely. In each ministry.our participation offices, unlike the media officer that talk through the press, our participation officers talked through hashtags. And the difference between hashtags and traditional representatives is that a hashtag has no spokesperson. Maybe some spokesbots but no spokesperson. And so the only way to make ...

That’s exactly right. And also because we don’t do administrative take-downs, the social sectors, the journalists actually have more room to work because in our K-12 curriculum we don’t teach media literacy anymore. We teach media competence, meaning that instead of being just readers and viewers of data and journalism, ...

And so, what I’m trying to get at is that, in multi-stakeholder forums, what’s important is this idea of running code. And running code shows people how a norm may actually be beneficial or not to people. But without a running code like a small pilot or a sandbox, the ...

Yeah. First of all, I think even Facebook would admit that whatever social sanction they may face in Taiwan, we’re not the one to do any administrative takedown. Just like we countered the pandemic with no lockdown, we wouldn’t counter the infodemic with an administrative takedown. And so for Facebook ...

A trade negotiator is only as strong as the domestic support. So When the grassroots people fight for this transparency, of course they would also fight for the same transparency in the global social media as a co-governant.

No, it’s just boycotting.

Yeah. But that’s precisely what we said to Facebook. It’s like a trade negotiation, right? We have a beta, like if they don’t agree to adhere to the norm of publishing, what they call the advertisement library, that’s to say the precision targeting during the elections in an open data ...

In a sense it only serves the whims of, I guess, people who study computer science at National Taiwan University, because these students maintain the space. And so they’re far more interested in getting the words out that looks like a public health crisis, than what will keep people’s attention ...

Yeah. When Dr. Li Wenliang, the whistleblower from Wuhan, posted on their social media that there is, and I quote, “Seven new SARS cases in the Huanan Seafood Market,” unquote, it gets reposted immediately by an ID code @nomorepipe on PTT, I think around 2:00 AM in December 31st. And ...

So, one thing is about a social sector, keeping the norm, keeping the social media in check. And by social sector, for example, the Taiwanese equivalent of Reddit is the PTT, and it’s run by the National Taiwan University.

I think it makes sense to just define the word a little bit because in Mandarin, 共識 is literally common understanding or even common sense. Like it makes sense to us. And so I think it’s even more rough than what the internet community calls rough consensus. This is more ...

And so, for things like opening up the oceans, opening up the mountains for mountaineering, of course, the environmental protection, the conservation, indigenous council, the tourism bureau, each one have a very different take on those broad policies. And so we use Polis for these issues and also for diplomatic ...

we use Polis, usually the cross ministerial issues, just like the original UberX issue, where for UberX, the ministries of transportation and communication, of finance, and of economy affairs were actually holding very different positions, even within the government.

Nowadays when we deploy Polis, it’s true that we do ask for some sort of ID. At this moment, we ask for an SMS number that we confirm that this SMS exists. But that’s it. So, if you have an SMS and you have an email address, that’s good enough. ...

And that’s coupled with the idea that you can very easily share a URL to any particular Polis conversation, makes it ideas worth spreading. Because in any citizen assembly or citizen jury, the final question is whether the people who were there can bring back to their community the rough ...

That’s exactly right. And also, by holding ourselves to account, setting this agenda of what people resonate with, this is called crowdsource agenda setting, unlike the citizens’ jury, where the agenda is sometimes already preset. We enable the citizens to essentially set the agenda and uncover the parts of the ...

That’s the first difference.

Yeah. I think there’s two things going on. One is that we do have a face-to-face, multi-stakeholder forum, not unlike the citizens’ juries. But instead of using sortition, we learn from internet culture… Anyone who shares anything that is resonating with other people gets an invitation to the multi-stakeholder forum.

So it proves that the social norm around UberX is actually very much reachable without the fanfare about the controversial definition of platform economy or sharing economy.

But actually, most people agree with most of their neighbors’ points on most of the things, most of the time, and that’s regardless of their political inclination or whatever. And so, for example, on UberX, everybody agreed that a fair registration system, a fair insurance system, fair taxation and so ...

And every time we run a polis discussion, we discover that the ideological differences around sharing economy and so on are just those very few points.

And so, people would understand that these are not nameless trolls. These are not others. These are your friends and family. It’s just maybe you didn’t talk about Uber over dinner. And so we publish, of course, the facts crowdsourced and then ask — for three weeks — people’s feelings. ...

Sure. So, when in 2015, for example, when UberX become available in Taiwan, they were working with people with no professional drivers licenses and it reached a pretty controversial situation where some people will support it because it’s new, innovative, sharing economy and all that. And there’s also people who ...

But for the first time in Taiwan’s political history, millions of people talked to one another, but got rough consensus. And that got ratified. the reverse mentorship system was instated to basically recruit people who are under 35 years old, including yours truly, to serve as reverse mentors to cabinet ...

That’s right. So, we’re happy that people are doing the same economic assessment on whether it has been controlled by the party or not. And so we reached out to consensus on the street in 2014. And it has a happy ending. the occupy was a success and people opened ...

And so, the people occupied the MPs seats… It’s not a protest in the usual sense, because more than 20 NGOs, each occupying one side of the parliament deliberated their favorite aspect respectively. So, there’s people who work on the human right angle, working on the labor right angle, the ...

So, in 2014, we occupied the parliament for three weeks. The legitimacy theory of the occupiers at the time was that the parliament was rushing through without substantial deliberation, the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement, or CSSTA that would open up, for example, the then new 4G service telecom industry ...

Yeah. And the quote by Dr. Tsai Ing-wen shows to me that democracy is a technology. Like any social technology, it gets better when more people strive to improve it. It’s not a tradition for hundreds of years in Taiwan. We actually amended our constitution five times during that short ...

That’s great.

Oh, wow. Okay.

That actually instilled in me this deep belief about the innovation capability of the public servants. A year later, I would find a startup working on web technologies. And I joined through the Perl community, the fabulous internet society that runs with this crazy idea, an open multi-stakeholder political system ...

And surprisingly, after reading the email printouts, the principal said, “Okay, go ahead with it. You don’t have to go to school anymore. Starting tomorrow. I will cover for you.” Meaning that she will fake the records. And so-

It’s still around… And so, I found that people offer their preprints for free. I don’t have to pay for any journals or anything, and I can write to the authors. And they’re all very eager to collaborate, not knowing I’m just 14 or 15 years old. Before long, we ...

Certainly. So, I understand that I have a very strange condition in that I think that public servants are the most innovative people and it’s this very strange condition that started when I was 15 years old and that was 1996. We just had our first presidential election. And around ...

Hello and good local time everyone.

A great pleasure here, too. Live long and prosper.

I think in English mostly nowadays, if you talk about natural language. For me, Mandarin — along with Mandarin, Taiwanese Holo, which are my two native languages. I reserve them for more poetic expressions, but my work language is now definitely English.

C, C++, C# — not really C# — OCaml, and also C. OCamel is F#. English, of course.

Perl, Raku, [laughs] Haskell, and Python not very fluently, Ruby, of course, and so on.

Javascript pretty well.

The other thing is also synthesize more of the cultures that I have come across into a more transcultural way of living, transcultural way of thinking, and that includes up to the name of the country itself. Taiwan — the name of the country is officially Zhōnghuá Mínguó, which I ...

Yes, I think a couple more things. I need to learn more languages. Now, with the help of assistive intelligence, such as machine learning and translation, it’s becoming much easier. I take a step doing that, translating how to use the traditional rice cookers that you see right there to ...

Yes, but I’m talking about democratic cultures and democratic norms. If we shorten the iteration to not four years, but actually maybe 60 days, as is the standard iteration in Taiwanese citizens’ initiative, the e-petition platform, then we can iterate more. Each particular generation, of course, in that 60 days, ...