That’s the meta-recruitment procedure, which is why I keep referring to these social issues as "excuses" for engagement.

People, by participation in one of those smaller games, as I said, end up learning about the toolkit of thinking and of feeling that they can contribute more to the progress of this evidently not perfect community and then is motivated to jump into this 坑, this gap and filling ...

The continuity of the community, as we’ve started discussing in the very first call, is the weekly hackathon. It’s actually how I channel this communication and so on, it’s the g0v background, without which, I don’t think any of these will result in anything that is more than an incremental ...

Right. Yes, which is why before the Pol.is, there always has to have a community. It could be stakeholder. It could be the state power, of binding power that brings people together. It could be something.

Yeah, exactly.

It’s to make facilitator distributed so that each participant has a micro-facilitating power, currently, only through voting and proposing statements but maybe more proactively so that their collective facilitating power is equal to a well-trained human facilitator. We are very far from that yet, but it is a very different ...

The traditional way to resolve this through face-to-face is by limiting the number of participants and have high-quality facilitators, human facilitators. That’s the traditional solution. What we’re exploring here is something else.

It is necessary for the user to be enabled or extended in some way so that their user agent can negotiate within the space, like their secretary and surface the main parts that require their cognitive input. Otherwise, it doesn’t scale. You go back to the place where the trolls ...

The challenge here is that, in computer science terms, it requires a user agent that can speak on behalf of the user, because a user doesn’t have the time for exploring these steps to thousands of statements or commentaries.

These are the angles that she’s exploring. That’s the part that kind of bridges what we call established system versus the physical system. You’re talking about something else. You’re talking about if you want to make it so that each statement can be more fully explored in a more completely ...

And the mixed reality part where it makes it possible to talk around concrete such as, I don’t know, urban planning or whatever, projects while still being face-to-face, basically, overlaying the online conversation with the face-to-face deliberation.

Shu Yang was exploring from three angles, the virtual reality angle where it adds dimension to the current Pol.is conversation, the conversational pattern angle where it desensitize personality and to make it more fun to go into more depths.

Yeah, a more holographic...Holos, that is also a...

...required the Holopolis...

That’s right. The thing is twofold. The one I was exploring, Holopolis, was the face-to-face magic...

Yes.

OK.

What if we consciously push the technology toward face-to-face deliberation but do it in a way that it could be asynchronous, meaning that we just have a conversation with whomever gets online, but our conversation becomes synthetic personalities that other people can carry on the conversation with? That’s the intuition.

There is nothing theoretically preventing us to do this over the Internet. It’s just the technology isn’t quite there yet.

That’s the main question Shu Yang is exploring. It’s very speculative design, but that’s to bridge the two dimensions, right? In face-to-face, it’s very easy to just sketch a model and get people to look at my perspective by using the whiteboard or using a legal -- why not -- ...

There’s much, much less bandwidth, right? [laughs] There is much less bandwidth. That’s what Holopolis is trying to explore. What if we can add much more bandwidth by having synthetic personalities that speak as the face to the group in our interactive way? It’s the game in augmented or virtual ...

Yes.

Right. Exactly. Yeah, the intuition here is that we use sampling mechanism because we can’t deal with large number of people. If we can deal with large numbers of people, then the territory is better than the map, so to speak. The population is better than the sample. We’re not ...

This is a representation of people by another representation of people and so on. Yeah, I would encourage you to explore a little bit of Yves Sintomer’s work because I borrow a lot of words from his work.

It entails a different design of space which is why they’re insisting live streaming or, at least, on the video recording or, at least, transfer of recording because only through the conversational context can we resurface the presentation around the time where it all happens which, in turn, outlines the ...

Yeah, I had long talks with Eve around the different ideas of representation. That is, in fact, where I get this where to be presentation as defined by how to capture the whole systems from which those diversities occur by presenting, as much as possible, the original proposal, or petition, ...

He was arguing that the proxy representation through representative democracy or through the numbers-based representation could be extended to more heterogeneous kind of way. It’s not exactly this paper that I’m looking for, but it is a starting point.

There’s this person, Yves Sintomer, a French theorist and widely regarded as one of the leading thinkers around participatory budgeting and things like that. I read one of his papers -- it’s not this one, but it’s very close -- where he argues about where does this representation idea actually ...

I think Colin wasn’t even a professional programmer to start with. I think he taught civics in senior high school or something, Habermas and stuff. He learned programming to realize his political vision. I think Colin is more suited than me to explain the choice of the Pol.is system.

It is true that if we choose to ignore the duplicates, then the face of the crowd is different, as opposed to if we want to emphasize the relative numbers. It will look very different, and I think it is the conscious defined decision of Pol.is, of Colin to do ...

I think it is more of an emphasis than anything else. It’s not like we can suddenly discover the spectrum of diversity without there being a base of people to start with. There has to be a little bit of both, both on the number of people and the diversity ...

Right, then it disappears.

10-years-old level fluent, but yes. I stayed for a year in Südland when my dad was doing his PhD in the Südland University. It’s very rusty now, but I still read a little bit of original German material. It’s OK if you just send me materials in Deutsch. I will ...

Mm-hmm.

Sure. Let’s carry on this conversation over email. My trips to Europe, I don’t have anything booked yet, but Shu Yang goes to Europe very frequently in the past few months. We’ll find someone.

It’s just fine. Martin, do you have any other points you want...

Yeah, the MIT Media Lab, yes.

That’s another network that I’m not intimately familiar but am aware that they’re doing a lot of these catalyst work that connect rich companies and the social impacts they could have had with the leading thinkers. That’s another network.

There’s parts of affective computing, from playful systems, from the human dynamics group, which are all Medial Lab things. They get their sponsorship from Lego, of all places. They’re like a bridge between the thought leaders or wisdom leaders and the Lego-ish companies and try to find synergies between those.

I’m not exactly sure how robotics and your work mix, but it actually mix a lot.

They’re all computer science-ish people around Media Lab that focus on bringing the human side out and focus on the existential issues that you are also focused on, but from a "How do we make humanity itself less selfish through intervention of artificial intelligence and extended intelligence?" borderline trans-humanist angle.

There’s this Media Lab Network that looks at what they call "extended intelligence." It’s mainly a Joi Ito thing, but I think I learned that from Sandy, Alex Pentland.

I don’t know an equivalent in the developed world of old democracies. [laughs]

Along the way here in Taiwan, a lot of g0v grants are done by individually wealthy people. They form an angel investment club and focus on democracy. I think that is very particularly Taiwan thing. When they were made rich, Taiwan wasn’t even a democracy. [laughs] They channeled a lot ...

There’s many other partisan entities, the National Democratic Institute or something like that. There’s one for major parties in many other countries, as well, but because of my work, I can’t really interact with them anymore. That’s pretty much it. That’s the extent that I know of.

Then you have to frame yourself as an enabler for social innovation, in the sense that you make social enterprises and CSOs function on a higher level, due to these technologies or these ways of working, in which case it will be billed as a process innovation. That’s the threshold ...

What else? There’s the larger impact investing network. At the moment, we’re talking with AVPN, which is the Asian Venture Philanthropy Network, but they focus their work on anti-investing around Asia, but I’m sure that there is their equivalents in other parts of the world.

I understand that there’s Google.org, there is the civic tech part of Microsoft, so all those Silicon Valley huge companies, they have an arm to work, this kind of community at work, but I don’t know the criteria. I haven’t interacted with their investment arm or grant arm directly. I ...

That’s the Omidyar’s main idea. Of course, the Personal Democracy Forum folks, the New York folks, they also have pretty good sponsorship, but these are all from technology companies.

You can, but it’s generally a very large amount, so with a plan to serve as intermediary. They’re investing or putting grants to intermediaries, who then distribute this money in a more coordinated fashion to effect some synergy, as the sayings go.