That’s great.

Focus group as well as individually?

Let’s get started.

Thank you.

All right, so I’ll send a transcript to you.

The social innovation lab, including the basement which was freshly decorated and opened today, [laughs] there’s a basement. Yeah, you can take a quick tour. The whole cultural lab is very interesting, as well.

That’s right. That’s right. For how long are you staying in Taiwan?

Finally, the ideas after this recognition, then we can co-develop them into implementations, knowing that everybody will be at least not against it. This is what we call a rough consensus at the decisional stage. The framework is focused conversation.

We should also reserve time for people’s feelings, to check in their feelings. That’s where pol.is and the whole Open Space thing comes in. The best ideas are the ones that take care of most people’s feelings. This is, again, a non-violent communication thing, right? We have universal needs that ...

Also, we are indebted to the focused conversation method, which actually is where the polarized conversation is situated in. The focused conversation method says that we should first lay out the facts. Changing time zone doesn’t save energy.

…Atlee’s blog. We are also informed by open space technology. Pol.is is a kind of online open space technology, where people just go to the people who feel like them, right?

You can see the basic check points in the CrowdLaw manifesto. This is all in the CrowdLaw website.

There is the catalog and a checklist that if you do these things, at least people will not feel cheated. They will allow the second chance if the first one doesn’t work. There are also things that it doesn’t work. If you do this once, then people feel that they ...

We can’t just transfer a process. It’s just like democracy itself, and so I cannot give a shortened answer that works for the whole world. [laughs]

Based on where you are, and what kind of level of engagement you want to be, and the political power, whether they’re aligned with this process, and so on, this allows you to find natural allies across your region to implement it because a lot of it is cultural.

There is what they call a CrowdLaw Catalog. This is a what we call a digital compendium of everything in the different stage – the level of government, the stage of the government, the task that you want to achieve. It’s not about the technology. The technologies only comes in ...

I’m at a advisory council of a effort called CrowdLaw. If you type crowd.law [types it on a tablet and shows the result], I think it’s this one, it shows not just our methodology and case study, but actually what everybody else is doing as well.

The IT department implement it this year, and they save a lot of money, of which running the workshop is just a fraction of cost, and so the net budget is negative.

They’re like, “Why don’t you just reject the telecom’s proposal that you rent for the month and, anticipating this flow, you can just rent this in a elastic way?”

They observed that only the first two days and the last two days have high usage because people were in a rush to file a tax and they’re in a rush to catch-up on filing their tax, but the middle three weeks, there’s almost no activity compared to the first ...

They said there is this idea called elastic computing, that you can rent the computer as you want it.

Yeah, because during the workshop, a IT engineer, after talking with the civil service in charge of tax filing, noticed that the ministry was paying the rental of the bandwidth and the machine the entire May for the tax filing, and anticipating the influx of people filing the tax online.

This actually takes negative budget.

We can always get this design if we spend a lot of money, but we cannot engage people with the goodwill, the kind we do here.

And so by voicing your concern, you get invitation up to the time you are willing to spend into the co-creation and design process. At the end of publishing this, we have thousands of people feeling they had a part of creating this, and so they will actually be volunteer ...

Once we meet face-to-face, and share food, and start drawing together, the toxicity is gone, and so, together, they made the new tax filing system that is widely approved.

We run four following workshops inviting the most toxic people online to join, because they must care the most, and then the people who they attacked are here. [laughs]

Even though there’s thousands of comments, if you lay it out in a matrix, then all the duplicates are just consolidated into one single Post-it note and so this mess is the entirety of the problem.

He cares the most, so he suffers the most, and then we live-stream the co-creation workshop. We have people going online, and we use user journey to map the before, during, and after of tax filing. People’s actions, needs, feelings and how we can adjust those feelings and the burdens ...

Turns out the petitioner, while the initial wording is very toxic, he’s actually a interaction designer, so he feels the pain the most because he’s the professional. [laughs]

I obviously reply saying, “Oh, I’m Audrey Tang, and what he said is true,” and so basically everybody, 80% started offering constructive criticism instead of just flaming because they now see they’re invited to the kitchen, so to speak.

This person from Ministry of Finance, the PO at the time, just said, “Everybody who complains is now cordially invited to a co-creation workshops,” two weeks later in the Ministry of Finance, so that we can create the next year’s tax filing together.

The actual case that did get adopted is someone who proposed that the tax filing software is very hostile to use two years ago. Because in every ministry we have a team of participation officers who engage with people in real-time, so once they post that and we see 80 ...

This room of conversation provides this far more creative potential than a simple referendum where everybody can only contribute one bit. That’s a actual case.

It doesn’t really help. People probably agree, and so all 18,000 people said, “Oh, this new way of using budget to promote Taiwan, that may actually be a better idea than changing time zone while achieving the value that we petitioned about.”

Beijing can just say, “You know, Hong Kong has its own currency,” right?

They auto-adjust. You don’t even feel about it. [laughs]

People have a lot of brainstorm ideas. [laughs] People also pointed out, nowadays, the watch – they are all smartwatches.

People start brainstorming, and people said, “Oh, actually, if we let everybody know we are the first Asian country, actually the only, with marriage equality, that actually makes Taiwan more unique.”

This is not a referendum, so people actually converge on the idea. As you put it, there must be better ways. If we are going to pay a one-time large cost to change a system – we calculated how large – and a smaller, but still significant, annual cost. Then, ...

As you can see, if it’s a referendum and so on, like half the people would feel hurt because their side did not win, right?

That must be fun. [laughs]

The conversation is very fruitful because there’s another counter-petition at the time, also 8,000 people, that says Taiwan should remain in the GMT+8, and we invite both sides into a face-to-face dialogue.

For example, there was a petition that say we should change the time zone of Taiwan to +9, the same as Japan. That did not get implemented. [laughs]

Of course, and with partnership. In our collaborative meetings, about half of the ideas after a face-to-face conversation, people collectively decide that it’s good to implement, and so these are implemented. Another half, people thought of another, better way of implementing, and so it did not get implemented by its ...

Because it takes time to understand the issue, to have meaningful conversation, but this is essentially saying, “Go online and see if you agree or not with the concern that your fellow citizen have.” You’ll spend maybe 15 seconds, and so everybody has 15 seconds of goodwill and of kindness, ...

By making it easy and fun.

[laughs]

In your example, the excluded minority, unless they have like 80 percent supporting the feeling that they would love to be driven out, as long as some condition is met perhaps, then it will not even enter the agenda because it need to convince all the groups, no matter where ...