Yes. The idea is that, instead of people just looking at the title and coming up with lower-level associations, we start the associations by provoking people to think along the main controversial and conflict-resolution lines.

It’s a provocation. The sharing economy, the provocation is, "Is it yours, is it theirs, is there a mine? What is ownership in the platform economy?" It’s a provocation.

Yeah, of the whole issue. If we go to vTaiwan and see the issues there, the tagline of the data integration is, "How do we make full use of data, along with the public service?"

Of the issue.

It is by pointing out a problem statement or a quick summary of the main contention point, and therefore conflict resolution point are to all the participants involved. In the vTaiwan process, it is essential that we surface this tension, if there is tension to begin with, in the title, ...

If I said that, the main idea -- and I’m just filling in Shuyang’s mind in a simulation in my brain here, if I said that I’d be channeling Shuyang -- would be more of the kind of focus-level- or function-level-raising intervention that Miki was saying in our first conversation.

Yeah, that’s right. It sounds more like a Shuyang thing.

Tagline?

Thank you. Cheers. Bye.

By having senior executives as POs, we’re betting that, six years down the road, many of them will be in the general secretary for their ministry level, or many of them will be even deputy minister level, and they will, again, support this methodology from within the career public service ...

It is traditional to have one politically appointed deputy minister and one deputy minister that is a senior executive. In larger ministries, it may be two and one or one and two.

Within the six years, those senior executives. who are our first batch of POs, who are very much starting -- they’re mostly in their 40s and 50s -- will raise to deputy minister level, within those six years. Under a minister, there are traditionally two to three deputy ministers.

However, the POs are not just POs. They’re also senior public servants, so senior executives, and they’re career public servants. My main strategy is based on the fact that our current president is in the second year of a traditionally eight-year term -- two four-year terms -- which leaves us ...

There is this mutually supporting cloud of regulations. One of the current vTaiwan topics is how much or how deep should we lift parts of these things into a separate law. Or, shouldn’t we? That’s one of the ongoing vTaiwan conversation. That’s the current status.

There is many regulations, as well as the Government Digital Service Principles, the GDSP, which are in draft stage, that again defines stakeholder involvement at the very beginning as a core component for any digital service.

This is, again, at draft stage, but the Referendum Act is already firmly here. At the regulation stage, the POs are in this level. The e-petitions are in this level. We actually revised the e-petition regulations, so that it links to the POs, and so these two are now linked. ...

We hope to soon have the Digital Communication Act, which is like the embodiment of vTaiwan spirit, by exclusively defining what a multi-stakeholder, consensus-gathering, participatory platform is, and the very important note that it doesn’t have to be controlled by the government, but the government should be supportive of any ...

There are two levels. If it’s at the law level, then the president has to go through a lot of hoops to cancel it, because it’s a very firm structure. Basically, we would say it’s part of democracy. At that level, we have the National Referendum Act.

If you want to overturn that, it takes, again, a majority vote in the Parliament. Many other things, like the e-petition and the Participation Officer Network, are defined in the regulation level, so technically a new president can just cancel them.

The structure, the participation officers, the align platforms, petition platform, referendum platform and so on, they are variously defined by regulations and laws. The National Referendum Act, which just passed a couple of months ago, is binding because it’s a Parliament saying.

By far, the president.

The reference here is called you count but there’s many other things that are in the same domain.

There’s a bunch of people who want to combine some form of this with random sample voting, which is, again, a way to cryptographically or mathematically protect against the various attacks you just mentioned and still have the representative fragments or parts of the society to be able to deliberate ...

Of Pol.is, but Pol.is now work in conjunction with many other technologies, and so we can talk about many other technologies, as well. It doesn’t have to be digital technologies.

Yes, and the governance of the technology itself.

There’s two broad segments, the past and current is the first half. The future is the other seven hours. But seven hours is a very long time, and we can fractalize it however we want.

You have plenty of time to revise that if you prefer a different structure.

It’s a draft that I came up 15 minutes ago.

Starting from lunch, we delve into much deeper topics of governance in the future. If you’re OK with that, you’re, of course, welcome to join at any particular point.

There’s lots of English material that wasn’t produced, because the crowd just wasn’t large enough for this kind of material to surface. I think it would be great to go over those materials with the Taiwan delegate, as well, in a very large show-and-tell, question-and-answer format.

The structure would be, in the half past 10:00 to noon -- because we also have deputy minister of science and technology, as well as other people from Taiwan delegate -- we start with a brief overview of the past, the current applications of Pol.is, especially the ones that are ...

No, I literally delayed my flight because of this. I go back to Taiwan one day later, so there’s no meeting scheduled for that day.

Yes.

Just logistics, for the day that we’re supposed to meet face to face, I have selected a place. It’s TECO, Seattle. TECO is a consulate setting, and the meeting room should be large enough. We have booked half past 10:00, all the way to 7:00 PM. You, Tom, have a ...

OK, cheers.

That’s right, yes.

There’s this brilliant link that Colin just pasted called "Testing Tech for Consensus in a Purple Town" that goes into the play-by-play.

The whole idea is, of course, we almost always see those general, general consensus items, but as time goes by, it will be repetitive if people see a majority opinion that is not exactly surprising. It very gradually goes into more wise suggestions if you let the game play long ...

You can share this link. What I’m saying is that the Pol.is system doesn’t have a component that really determine how wise is any statement. However, it does list the statements that achieve broad consensus not just in the final report, but throughout the game.

Please do.

It’s a very balanced cabinet...

At the moment, in the cabinet, ever since the beginning of President Tsai Ing-wen’s original cabinet, there’s more independent ministers, parts of that cabinet, than members of any party. The ratio is around 40 percent independent, 30 percent DPP, and 20-something percent KMT.

That’s right, and that’s very important. At the end of the Ma Ying-jeou presidency, the premier was independent, Simon Chang. At the beginning of Tsai’s presidency, for a year or so, the premier was also independent, Premier Lin Chuan.

Not a requirement. The previous president, Ma Ying-jeou, was also head of the Nationalist, the Kuomintang Party.

That’s exactly right, which is why we call premier "premier." To even more complicate things, it is a custom for the President to be also the head of the ruling party. That’s been true for quite some time now. President Tsai Ing-wen is also the head of the Democratic Progressive ...

None of those people in EY are from the Parliament. It is not like in some countries, where the ministers are also MPs. None of us has a constituency.

Those are the three cross-cutting ones, and here are the six more traditional ones.

However, because he is also minister without portfolio, when he goes to, for example, regional touring-around meetings to explain the policies, he has now the power to pretty much call any ministry and any agency to go along with him. So this role is a superpowered spokesperson.

We also have, and this is a new invention, Minister without Portfolio Hsu Kuo-yung, who is also the spokesperson of the Executive Yuan. This is a new invention. The spokesperson, generally speaking, is reporting to the general secretary, and he speaks on behalf of the administration, but it’s as purely ...

There’s also Minister without Portfolio Deng, who used to be the minister of economic affairs. He is responsible for trade diplomacy, all the trade service pacts, the Southbound Policy, and the new US/China trade situation. It’s all his mandate. Again, this cross-cuts into pretty much all the ministries.