The Pol.is system is designed in Seattle in response to the Occupy movement actually. The participatory budgeting, the budget partner you just mentioned, we took it from council. That’s from Madrid.

I think we, for the technological layer, I’m not talking about policies and politics, for the technologies, we actually invent very little. The e-petition system design we took from Better Reykjavík. That’s from Iceland.

Again, for a different purpose, not legitimacy but accountability. We’re seeing around the world, there’s a trend now for the parliamentary, for the legislative branch to adopt radical transparency including beneficial ownership of the council members and so on. I think it’s only a matter of time for the administrative ...

In campaign donations, we publish down to every record of campaign donation and various political advertisements, as well, because people are seeing, otherwise, money finds its way into policymaking through campaign donations, through advertisements for politicians, and things like that. It’s unaccountable.

In many countries, the parliament is now following this course. In Taiwan, the national parliament, even during the party negotiations, we publish the entire live stream.

The judicial branch saw really early on, especially in a common law system but also in our continental law system, you really have to be radically transparent, barring, of course, some exceptions such as underage court or whatever. Barring those things, you need to be radically transparent to build the ...

If you get proprietary in charge, everybody – the kind of things that elsewhere, not targeting them – but charging the publication or journals subscriptions, then you don’t really have a society anymore. You have fragmented law practitions.

Many countries judicial branches already work that way. The judicial branch builds its legitimacy by making the educations, the judgments, the rulings, and so on, free of copyright. In many jurisdictions, lawyers cannot claim copyright on their work exactly because it’s a literature not only about the law itself but ...

What we have discovered is as long as it’s bi-directional high-speed live streaming, then it’s good. In Taiwan, we say [foreign language] . Face-to-face builds 30 percent towards trust and live streaming in high definition maybe builds 20 percent. If it’s not high quality, then it’s negative 20 percent.

All these different places, we will start by making a round of self-introduction. If the sound or the video doesn’t work, we just drop the site because dropping the site and having people following the transcript afterward is better than people waiting for a lagging, pixelating, feels really bad projection ...

What we have found is the audio quality is very important. Video, also important. If we have these two figured out, we can connect to even five different municipalities. In my tour, right now, I basically always bring with me people in Taipei, in Taichung, in Taoyuan, in Kaohsiung, in ...

You would hear people say something but you cannot read their emotions and your brain feels something that is contrary to the thing that they’re talking about because of psychological projections. It actually decimates trust.

In our dreams, when we fill those in, it’s almost always wrong because those are internal psychological projections of ourselves. If we see each other as friends, I would project friendly gestures even if you are not doing any friendly gestures and vice versa. That actually hurts trust. It makes ...

If all we have is less than 10Mbps, that is to say, that we only have 480p or 320p, then that means that we are pixelated and none of the micro-expressions are visible. What the brain does if you haven’t met someone and you already know that they are speaking ...

10Mbps is really important because 10Mbps enables 1080p. That is just a high definition video. High definition video means that, just as you are now looking at me, I’m looking at you, we can look at each other’s micro-expressions. Meaning that if you look lost or your attention is drifting ...

We never ask people to come exclusively to the digital. Digital is just a way to determine the agenda and contribute more facts in synchronicity for the next face-to-face meeting.

Because of that, no matter where you’re holding this face-to-face conversation, it only takes one click using your mobile phone to make it also online. Once you make it also online, the technology kicks in. It can be summarized, put into a mind map, put into a transcript, and so ...

This is important because, in Taiwan, we have broadband as a human right. Anywhere in Taiwan, even on the top of Jade Mountain, which is almost 4,000km high, we have 10Mbps broadband. Anywhere in Taiwan, if you don’t have 10Mbps, it’s my fault. You can talk to me.

They may do this through, as you said, online voting, application, or a website, or whatever, but they can equally do so by holding their local town hall meetings and by doing any of those face-to-face conversations as long as they’re live-streamed or archived online.

We already know that sometime, down the future, like two months from now, we would have an ideation meeting, where, again, it’s face-to-face. We want everybody to know about these facts, so we use online platforms to broadcast it. When we’re broadcasting this, what we’re, essentially, asking is not representation. ...

We tour around Taiwan to bring technology to people. We’re not asking people to come to technology. You can think of our online part as what’s taking place between two face-to-face meetings. In a face-to-face meeting, we check each other’s facts. We make a handbook of the facts we have ...

First of all, what we’re making through our online technology is not we use them to replace face to face meetings. We never do that. For us, online technology is a way to amplify and to connect face-to-face meetings. It always starts with face-to-face meetings. All the collective feeling checking ...

I’m not mentioning any particular country. [smiles]

Everybody feels that they win, or they can live with it, rather than if you just go straight to the referendum, where half of the people will feel that they have lost.

That is an important insight in saying, if we let people share not only their feelings but also reflect on each other’s feelings, we always get better criteria to qualitatively ranked ideas. As a result, we may delay the policymaking for most ourselves, so that we recover this time cost ...

If now we have a stage dedicated to feelings and there’s no right or wrong, first of all, a polity is made by letting people understand, actually, most of the people feel the same about the same thing most of the time. It rebuilds the polity. The second thing is ...

The ideation, always the problem is how do we rank ideas? What ideas are better than others? If two of them are equally feasible but addresses different aspects and they’re mutually exclusive in some way, how do we arbitrate between the ideas? Usually, the criteria is arbitrary.

That is to say, on the same fact, you may feel anxious, I may feel happy. There’s no right or wrong about feelings. If people give ourselves a few weeks, three weeks, four weeks to check each other’s feelings, it actually makes it much easier to brainstorm the ideas.

Finally, people would ratify it into decisions that people act collectively. What’s missing here, is that there is no stage for feelings. What we have introduced, and is not originated from Taiwan, it’s invented in Canada, part of the focus conversation method in 2005, is that after objective stage but ...

In the old policymaking process, usually people share the facts, public information, open government data and open data from other sectors, and then people will hold some brainstorm meetings to get ideas on how to improve gender dashboard, to propose a series of change.

They’re just squabbling on the few ideologies that masks the common concerns. If it’s a federation that spends multiple time zones, just getting everybody’s common values would take a lot of time.

In any case, the point is that if people share similar lived in experiences, you can always start there. In your city council, in your precinct, or even without the public sector, you can just run it in your co-op. This methodology works best if people don’t have to focus ...

Basically, I think Taiwan is just a larger municipality, geographically speaking. From the north most to the south most through high-speed rail, it’s just one and a half hours. We may have 23 million people, but it’s a really small place, and highest popular density, I think, or second highest.

I think it’s easier if you start with a level of governance that is smaller scale. If you’re just deciding for a local co-op of 200 people, that will be easy because everybody knows everybody, and you already shared the common values. If you start with a township of maybe ...

In desire thinking terms, to frame the best question of how might we find common values despite different positions, is more important than the decisional stage. If you’re asking the wrong question, no matter what you put to the referendum, the result will be terrible.

We still leave the implementation to the career public servants, and/or the social sector, and/or the private sector. Everybody can commit to the thing that it’s best for them to do, and hold each other accountable. What we’re not doing is that we’re just counting the headcount and say, Oh, ...

It’s a very simple idea. Also, in our e-participation, we often just set the agenda. It means that we’re not really going to referendum overnight. What we’re really doing is that to get everybody’s piece of the puzzles, of their take on a wicked problem, and then we share the ...

It’s a consultative, at most a partnership relationship. It’s never at deciding as in the ethnic Han, overwhelming the population of indigenous nation, and forcing them to accept something because they are the minority. The democratic principle is very simple. If something is systematically in the minority, as defined by ...

We call them indigenous nations. The whole point is that it is a semi diplomatic relationship, truth and reconciliation, and all that. It’s not up for a referendum. It’s good if the indigenous people with their own tribal elders, their own ways of governance and so on, engage in a ...

For example, in our referendum law, we spell out things that are not to referendum. For example, you cannot take away indigenous rights by a referendum, because indigenous people is maybe three percent or less of the population. If you put it to referendum, they always lose. The idea is ...

In any case, the limit is very flexible. What we’re doing really is to make transparency the default, and make it extra effort to redact, whereas the old bureaucracy is closed by default, and it takes extra effort to be transparent. That’s what I mean by radical transparency. It means ...

We respect other people’s privacy, other people’s trade secrets, confidentiality, and so on, and so everybody can edit their own words. I have encountered a journalist that consider, all the questions that she asked is company property. That transcript only has my answers, and all the questions are redacted, but ...

We only live stream if you’re live streaming. We only do a video record if you are video recording, which for Skype is mutual anyway. Otherwise, we were just publishing a written transcript. Everybody actually gets 10 days to edit the transcript. For example, if you mentioned your friend’s anecdote, ...

Essentially, state secrets, top secrets and so on, I don’t even know about them. That’s my working condition. I just told the National Security Council, “Don’t tell me anything that’s state secret.” [laughs] My principle is that every meeting that I chair, every meeting with a journalist such as you, ...

By being a conservative…I just named that. I think an intergenerational solidarity is very important. The way that their ancestors have always do things should be respected, and this extends to other ethnicities and cultures that’s on the Taiwan Island.

Because I’m a conservative, I help the ministries of culture, of education, and so on, to make sure that whether you’re a ethnical Han or some other ethnicity, if you identify with any of the indigenous cultures and languages, you are actually capable of joining both physically and virtually, and ...

If I’m not a conservative, in the sense of conserving the tens of thousands of years of western, of our indigenous traditions, it’s very easy to introduce new digital policies that essentially forces everybody to just learn the very resourceful languages and cultures. It will contribute to the decimation of ...

We have more than 15 indigenous nations, and they share the same culture with the entire Polynesian population. The whole Australian nation culture originated from Taiwan, and the culture extends all the way to New Zealand. We have in our New Zealand economic agreement, the NZTech, a separate track for ...

In Taiwan, this is very important, because while the west of Taiwan is more Western, the east of Taiwan is the indigenous nations.

To be a conservative is to respect a tradition. To understand that there are ways that people have honored their ancestors’ ways of doing things for hundreds, or even thousands, or tens of thousands of years.