Then very quickly, because at the time, we’re working on weekly iteration, we roll out a new mechanism every Thursday. After three iterations, we work with all the pharmacists so that they can publish their different opening hours and their ways of taking the NHI card. They can press a ...

You will see that the stock numbers in their pharmacy grow very slowly downward, while everybody who show up thinking that there are still some masks available, run into a situation where in very large font, it says on the front door, “Don’t trust the app.” [laughs] It was a ...

Instead of swiping the NHI card and give out masks as we imagined, they are taking the NHI cards and give them those number plates so that they can walk away and then collected the mask at evening. Then they very slowly process the NHI cards.

We fail all the time, and we fail very loudly. For example, the mask distribution map that I just show you that the civic technologists contributed didn’t start that way. On the very first day that we launched, a lot of very angry pharmacists used the feedback form, tells us ...

Nowadays, of course, the plastic straws are actually banned for especially indoor drinking, but increasingly, outtakes as well. I use this simple example to say that we didn’t set a time, we didn’t say the agenda. We make sure that people responded to it in the here and now with ...

They are also looking to improve their business and have a higher margin, so they collaborated on new marketing campaigns to make a carbon-neutral or even negative capturing devices out of circular economy and so on. The young people used their protesting energy to advocate basically, to market the social ...

Anyway, then they manage to work with the producers of the straws and the straw makers. The utensil makers say that we were social entrepreneurs 30 years ago, because Taiwan had a very bad case of hepatitis B, and we used these things to make sure the virus doesn’t spread. ...

She was like, “Well, it’s our civics class assignment. Our teacher just tells to start a petition that will resonate with people.” We’re happy that we included her in the conversation, because otherwise, she may go to strike on Friday, and what will happen then, we don’t know. [laughs]

Of course, it takes some time to prepare, but will never take more than two months or four months, tops, if it’s exceedingly complex, but usually no more than two months. People are invited to talk to other stakeholders. We meet the petitioner, she was just 16 years old, and ...

We very quickly set up this collaborative meeting where the meet the petitioners and the people who collect the signatures, as well as people who make such straws and such utensils in a collaborative meeting. Face-to-face meeting, that is at the agenda of the citizens.

It’s, of course, an environmental petition, and it gets people support it. We learned a page from the platform called Better Reykjavik that collects all the supporting arguments and all the counterarguments but never allow them to reply to one another, so we get both of the very good arguments.

There was someone with a random pseudonym, because we allow pseudonyms, the pseudonym was, I think, "I love elephants and elephants love me", nice pseudonym, and started a petition that very quickly collected more than 5,000 signatures, which was the threshold, and the petition reads, and I quote, “We must ...

The first question which is about how to make that people participate, the answer is very simple. They set the agenda. They set the time and place.

By absorbing the risk, spreading the credit, reducing the time spent, and also make sure that there’s less risk of everybody involved, that is the Pareto improvement, we never trade one for the others. We must always make movements that increase one of those access without sacrificing the other field. ...

The idea is that they engage in their work also more because they get a credit if I amplify their idea. I always say, oh, this is the public servant like 楊金亨 — former participation officer at Ministry of Finance — who decided to work with the petitioner that said ...

Also, the most compelling argument is that in those face to face meetings, in those Presidential Hackathon conversations in those teams and so on, the public servants themselves are recognized as the experts as they are. They are no longer anonymized abstract PowerPoints or Word documents, where we use Open ...

If you introduce something without considering some stakeholders, in Taiwan, we’re a very free country and parliament gets occupied, the Ministry of Education gets occupied, people go to the street all the time. [laughs] If you include the people who complain the loudest into co-creation, then chances are that you ...

If you get the R value of your messages higher than that of conspiracy theorists, then the citizens actually spreads this ideas for you and you do not have to answer their questions one by one. People will basically train themselves to become amateur epidemiologist. It saves their time. Amortized, ...

These dogs are basically companion animal of our participation officer in charge of deliberations and citizens engagement for the Ministry of Health and Welfare. Whenever there is something that need to be discussed, for example you wear a mask to do what? To protect yourself from your own unwashed hand. ...

Having a semi-automated system that can generate cute dog pictures that serves frequently answered questions as memes. For example, this is our physical distancing advertisement that says if you are indoor keep three Sheba Inu away, and if your outdoor keep two of those dogs away.

I just replied it on the chat room but will say it loud again. [laughs] The solution is simply to show that for lower level bureaucrats, it saves their time. It’s much more preferred than sifting through endless phone calls. Each phone doesn’t know that 50 people have already made ...

I hang out with them for a couple of days and make sure that I can understand where they are coming from. Then we empower the people closest to the paint by essentially broadcasting, amplifying their message to the people in municipalities and so on. It always augments face to ...

Then connect through video conference to the municipality and the Social Innovation Lab where the 12 ministerial people, section chief, or above, listen to what is happening around Taiwan. By viewing connected spaces for people who are going to be included in this discussion, for them it’s just another town ...

I seek out the least connected places, the remote islands, the rural places, the indigenous lands and so on, and work with our young reverse mentors, people who are under 35 years old, and advice each of the cabinet member so that the people in those indigenous or rural lands ...

The only thing that I ask is that the conversation of our transcript or video is published online. When they lobby, they always lobby for the public interest. In this part, we make sure that people who have anything to say can get listened to by the 12 ministries.

Very carefully. [laughs] For example, this is my office, literally my office. It’s called a Social Innovation Lab. It’s in the heart of Taipei, and we tore down all the walls. You can see very clearly that there are no walls. Just this soccer field contribute by people with trisomy ...

We discovered that automatically using assistive intelligence on Pol.is, which is first used in vTaiwan and now also used in a national platform called a Join, which has more than half of the population as visitors and deliberate very large polices, far beyond what is originally the vTaiwan purview which ...

In design thinking terms, if your exploration deviates, then you cannot actually do the defined path and agree on a common understanding. That is why a fielding checking part is always important so you know what other people’s arguments come from. Maybe while you seem very different in your positions, ...

The Internet Engineering Task Force have long since figured out if we seek not the fine consensus, but rather, something we can live with, something that is more like consent, a common understanding that we hone to show that we can OK live with this, then it actually creates a ...

Basically, on Facebook, for example, people who have more time to respond to each other’s face instead of the book part will dominate the discussion simply by dwarfing out, in terms of noise-to-signal ratio, other people’s points.

In online communities or in face-to-face committees after COVID, it’s the same thing anyway, in committees and communities, if you seek only fine consensus, then people with the most time wins by default.

This is our contribution from the Internet governance world with the idea of a rough consensus or harmony.

What we are doing is essentially crowdsourced agenda setting that focus on the things that people have broad rough consensus about, instead of the debate that leads to polarization, and maybe find consensus, but most of the time just enmity.

When people can see that we are a polity after all, we have very similar feelings, for example, around registration, around insurance, and things like that, then people can then expand to the kind of face-to-face, habemus-style deliberation that you just alluded to, and we live-stream them, too.

What we want is actually design thinking, just to explore people’s feelings. The facts and interpretations are what the traditional deliberations focus on. What Pol.is does is that it adds a step called reflection of feelings between the facts and interpretations.

If they are required to show up with their real name and/or have a reply button where they can question and even interrogate essentially each other, very quickly, you will get people who get pulled into those divisive statements, like what is sharing economy, is Uber even sharing economy, is ...

I’m also very happy that it participate pseudonymously. This is definitely not your ordinary habemus conversation deliberation. [laughs] There’s a very simple example here in the Uber case, is that for people who are driving for Uber at the time, they are actually doing very questionably legal things.

Of course.

It’s just, if you look into a very antisocial social media, you will forget about this.

Because of that, every time we had a Pol.is conversation – we just concluded one about our ocean proposals – we always see that, of course, there are some ideological differences. People have maybe five things that they fight about, but actually, most people agree with most other people on ...

For three weeks, people just resonate with one another, and you can see one fellow citizen saying maybe that insurance for private vehicles is important for the passengers. If you agree with me, you will move closer to me. If you disagree with me, you will move further from me. ...

Then it creates a tension in Taiwan. We used a technology called Pol.is, which is artificial intelligence tool, or as I prefer to call it, an assistive intelligence tool, that clusters people according to their feelings about UberX. The feelings are there’s no right or wrong about feelings.

That is where vTaiwan and other g0v communities come in. For example, when Uber first came to Taiwan, they work only with professionally licensed drivers, but very quickly, they introduced UberX, which X, I think, stands for no professional driver license, maybe. [laughs]

If you turn it on, it projects the president handing you the trophy – the trophy describes itself – promising whatever you did in the past three months will become national policy in the next 12 months. We do all the regulatory, personnel, budget, and so on as needed. Of ...

The Presidential Hackathon is a enabling annual thing where the president, Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, gives an award to five of the winning teams out of 200 or so. Each need to correspond to one of the sustainable goals. The five teams, the trophy is a micro-projector.

People in different sectors co-producing and co-using the data so that people, for example, can detect earthquakes, floods, predict air quality, and things like that, in a very collaborative environment, so that anyone really, in their primary school and so on, can set up air boxes, very inexpensive – less ...

Yeah, certainly. But before I talk about vTaiwan and Join, I need to talk about Presidential Hackathon, which is really where the social sector teams meet their counterparts in the ministerial teams and build this common, what we call data collaboratives, which in GDPR terms would be joint controllership.

The people queuing after me will be able to confirm that this system is indeed working as intended, and then if anything goes wrong, like if I buy nine masks but the people queuing after me refresh the map and actually see it actually grows, they will call 1922 right ...

For example, when I go to the pharmacy, I show up my National Health Insurance card, which covers more than 99.99 percent of not just citizens, but also residents, I can see in real-time that this simple triangle that represents the pharmacy that I go to actually have their mask ...

That’s not the whole story. The civic technologists volunteer to create this very simple mask map that can show people where in Taiwan do you still have masks and where not. You see the real-time tally after each procurement.