Just a very simple example, for things like this, the implementation of people’s suggestions is up for the ministries and so on, in collaboration with people, but this is not about deciding something. The grouping for consensus means that even a group is very much in the minority. Still, there ...

Once we have this, of course we can have more substantial conversations, but that would not be crowdsourced as well. It would be between the partnerships that was forged between this conversation.

A face-to-face meeting is just to converge, but to converge is not to a policy implementation, which is what you were referring to. The convergence is just to a “How might we” question. Meaning that this is something that people across the isles identify as important.

The petition is just saying that we should talk about it. The petition is not a referendum. In design thinking terms, the petition is just for us to get people’s wide, diverging opinions of what the feelings and issues are.

Of course.

Please go on.

Then, we just go through each of them because they have what we call group informed consensus. Which side you’re on, whether you’re in the relative minority or the relative majority, these are things everybody agrees on, and so that’s the thing that we should first pursue if it’s not ...

If you’re a popular media, it’s likely that you would just dive into this wedge and then start asking polarizing questions, but with our system, we actually showed that there’s only one such statement that are divisive. Actually, most of the things, we will do agree.

We identified the groups as dividing over this statement, namely, how do we treat the PRC relationship? Is it part of a triangle, or is should it be decoupled from the Taiwan-US relationship?

I know that this is a little bit abstract, so, let’s look at one simple example. For example, the de facto US Embassy collaborated with us on a question called, how to promote Taiwan’s role in global community.

They’re very happy that we can just implement the good idea that widely considered good by everybody.

This shape, this reflective shape is what we always get after three or four weeks of one conversation. Once we show this to the people, people forget about them being in the minority or majority. This is not a referendum, after all, people, is about, “Oh, we do have same ...

Around each public issue, most people actually agree on most of those things. It’s just the media and the social media amplify the 5 percent into 95 percent of conversation, but in actual fact, we can regulate and just promulgate this rough consensus while continuing discussion on those divisive issues.

After each discussion, we share a picture like this, and this is very surprising because most people would think that if they are in a minority, it’s in one of those divisive statements that polarize the society. The fact is, minority or not, most people agree on most of the ...

Second, it shows that people’s positions can change. If a minority actually have more diverse ideas in a idea landscape, then that minority actually has a larger area. This is not proportional to the people, but actually to the diversity of their opinions.

As you press agree or disagree, your avatar moves among the people who share your ideas, and so first you can see that these are not anonymous enemies. These are your friends and family. You just disagree on this particular public issue.

So if you have 5,000 people going in, vote exactly the same, it’s not going to expand the area because the are is calculated by asking each person, for each comment, whether you agree or disagree.

This visualization is very interesting because as you can see, even though this is less than 200 people, this is 242, but the area is not dependent on the number of people holding that opinion.

Of course, they can post videos or so on saying that, “I initiate this petition,” but all they get is a chance to have a conversation. It’s not always to their favor because sometime you see a bad idea, and the contra side actually dominates the discussion. This is a ...

We allow a kind of pseudonymous effect. So even if somebody purports to be a very famous person, you don’t really know whether that’s just a pseudonym chose by a anonymous person, or is that really them.

It’s clear that all the 5,000 people who petitioned are probably public service, but without pseudonymous protection, they would probably not dare to propose it. What happened is that, only after this was ratified, signed into the regulation do the proposer came out and say, “Oh, it was me who ...

There’s many cases where we don’t really know who is the proposer, perhaps because it concerns a asymmetric power relationship. Like there was someone who proposed that public servants should be able to take absence by hour instead of by half day.

We’re not preventing that because, for example, this anonymous person that raised the plastic straws issue, she’s not famous at all. She basically just proposed an idea that really resonates with everybody, but we allow pseudonyms so that nobody knows she’s actually 16 years old.

That’s right.

This kind of design is for maximal inclusiveness, meaning that even if you don’t have Internet access, as long as one of your friends have Internet access, you can just participate in the town halls.

They don’t have to guess and they don’t have to copy the other ministry with just a A4 paper, but everybody is in the same room and they can brainstorm.

For them, it’s just a town hall. They go to where they usually gather, they talk the usual way, but the difference is that they get real-time response, not just a written response. The benefit for the ministries is that they can see the whole context.

This works so well so that like six cities and municipalities are now all joining this network, which we tour around Taiwan every other week or so and talk with the local people on the local issues.

While I go to there personally, it’s not just me, all the relevant ministries, 12 ministries that are here in the Social Innovation Lab and seeing through the two-way video conferencing to the local people.

So for example, just one quick example, I bring this conversation to wherever the petitioners are. Like people in Hongxiu, I go to Hongxiu, people in Pescadores, I go to Pescadores. People who petition about fishing rights of amateur versus professional fishing in harbors, then we actually go to a ...

It’s only with 1080p or better can you actually feel what it feels like to be that person, and so we always insist on high-definition live-streaming. We actually bring those conversations to the people. We don’t ask people to come to the social technology.

If you have video access, but only in 240p or worse resolution, again, you see people in a very abstract painting kind of way. You can still project the micro-expression that they don’t have into it, and that actually widens the divide instead of bringing people together.

We have witnessed that if you don’t have broadband, if you have to rely on text, then there’s a lot of psychological projection to the text that doesn’t work.

This is on the baseline. In Taiwan, we have what we call broadband as human right. No matter where you are in Taiwan, even the most remote, indigenous places, you’re guaranteed to have 10 megabits per second, which enables live-streaming, not just textual representation.

First, let’s compare it to the baseline. It’s not like representative democracy does better here. If you’re illiterate, if you’re someone who don’t have physical access to computers, it’s almost impossible for you to participate in representative politics either.

How to be more inclusive.

This is a concrete example of having Internet and having people’s different positions be gathered in a face-to-face meeting that is then broadcasted for people to see that we have some same values after all, and then move the democracy forward in intervals that’s a week, or a month, or ...

We have the Internet playing the same role as the Friday strike, but gathering people’s opinion in a way that actually enable the EPA to see this as signal and not a lot of noise, not very loud, but only the top, very reasonable suggestions. They committed to it, and ...

Where we meet the petitioner, the EPA thought that it must be a very senior environmental activist because they get 5,000 signatures in no time, but turns out she’s just 16 years old, and it’s her civics class assignment to find something that can resonate with people. [laughs] Unlike in ...

So, this way, we look at the most, in absolute numbers, topmost ideas from both sides and have the ministries in charge, like Environmental Protection Agency and so on, to similarly design a handbook for the people who participate in the petition, and invite them into a face-to-face meeting that ...

So this is the kind of design that makes the petitioner not only write their petition, not only see the 5,000 people, but also have a column of pro and a column of contra. Each statement can be upvoted or downvoted, but they cannot reply to each other. There’s no ...

Because if you have the reply button, people with the most time dominate the discussion, but if you don’t have the reply button, and this we learned from Reykjavik from Iceland, if you can only upvote and downvote, then the best ideas surface to the top, but you don’t have ...

The important thing is when they propose this petition, they get 5,000 signatures from all walks of life, and each of them have a different reason to sign this e-petition, which is part of our e-participation website, called Join, now with 10.6 million unique visitors since 2015. For each petition, ...

Now, with the Internet, the person who raised an e-petition, for example. Two years ago, we had a person raising the e-petition of gradually banning all one-time use plastic utensils. That’s a very imaginative proposal with a lot of photos like sea turtles chocked by plastics and things like that.

My work is using technology to enable people who are 15 or 16 years old to have a say, not only individually but also to organize. And to organize online, you need a technology that is good for listening, not just good for speaking. Speaking is very easy. If you ...

Nowadays, it’s still that animals and rivers don’t have a say. So today it’s still for the elites – that is to say, the human beings who are of 20 years or older if you’re in Taiwan, which are very unfortunate, because in our continuous democracy, the most active participants ...

Right, exactly. Clay. Clay-powered technology. Social technology. I read on Wikipedia somebody modeled the ancient Greece operating system of the entire democracy as a kind of connected systems. And it’s very interestingly designed. Modern technology expands on that.

Democracy is a kind of technology, actually. It’s a social technology, right? In ancient Greece, people used very interesting machines to [laughs] do tallying and voting and…

Within this time frame, which is usually 10 months every year we do our work by enabling continuous democracy.