This works much better than the previous norm, where after a meeting, three people get interviewed by three different media in these three different meetings. It makes sure that people don’t quote each other out of context. Indeed, the 10-day editing period is very fruitful for the people who do ...

There’s even people drawing manga comics based on these materials. This is the raw or the source material, but people who usually access it out of interest are the people who are actually cultural translators, that are making sense for their communities using the same raw material.

I also write columns biweekly on "Apple Daily" here, and also monthly on "Business Weekly." All this is just a way to translate this raw material, but opening up to any other journalist as well. You can also see investigative journalists taking data as raw material and then package their ...

Yeah, totally. We do so because it’s not just the text to a transcript. People have different modes of communication. Some people prefer text, and that’s fine, but we also publish small snippets of video. We also publish mind maps. We also publish all the different modalities to make sure ...

We’re spreading these new democratic technologies everywhere in the world. Meanwhile, being a minister. This is...I think the word is slushy. The idea is that I’m still working as entrepreneur, it’s just not for personal profit but, rather, social impact.

The retirement "from the private sector" only means that I would like to maximize the social impact of my work, but I’m still working very much with the Silicon Valley and with the other side, for example, New York City. I just joined the board of directors of a new ...

In a sense, I didn’t leave the startup scene. This is maybe my seventh startup as an entrepreneur. I’m just leading this theory of change within the government, but having this kind of lab space and organized pretty much exactly like a startup.

Democracy here in Taiwan is just like any social technology, and as a technologist, I’m happy to just adapt and tinker the technology in a way that makes the fit better with the society.

Five years later when I was 20 years old, I started learning an outdated retrogression of democracy that is representative democracy. I always thought that in Taiwan we got the World Web and the presidential election more or less on the same year.

Then I discovered Internet governance. There was a way, five years before I even had the right to vote, for everybody to participate in the shaping of the Internet, the Internet Society and so on. For me, democracy is always that.

They were very reasonable people and they said, "OK, from tomorrow on, you don’t have to go to school anymore." That instills in me an optimism about bureaucratic flexibility in a very tender age.

I just convinced my teachers and the principal, saying, "You’re telling me that I need to work 10 years just to get to that lab, but look at this. I’m already exchanging with the director of that lab and we are figuring out research proposals together."

It turns out that the researchers there who published the preprint doesn’t care whether I’m 14 years or I’m not. As long as I can write an email, people just considered me researching partner.

That is just by the virtue of our junior high school teachers at that time. I just showed my teachers my conversations in email with this, at that point, very new website called Arxiv.org. It’s still there. Now there is also SocArxiv. There is all sorts of archives.

That’s still a very good question. I actually wouldn’t consider my career particularly fast. It’s just I started early. My first startup was when I was 15 years old, in 1996. Like everybody else, it took me 20 years or something like that to reach retirement.

I’m not really working in or for the government. I’m working with the government. I’m kind of at a Lagrange point between the movement and government.

That concludes my seven-minute opening. Feel free to ask any questions.

That is the main thing that we’re designing toward. It is a way for the government to trust the people. People sometimes trust back. Sometimes they don’t, but people grow to trust each other more.

They invariably all report the same, that people thought they were divided, but they were actually not. After each process such as this, people’s trust with each other, as well, as the public service trust to the people, increases.

That’s how we work to regulate issues that requires a people’s common understanding of the norms, and we just trend those norms into implementable ideas. We have run this with many partnering organizations, such as Columbia University in Bowling Greens USA, Alternativet in Denmark, in the UK, in Madrid, in ...

That is often forgotten by the popular discourse, and each conversation then drives those rough consensuses that we agree would bind ourselves to hold as agenda, meaning that we talk face-to-face on these and only these consensus statements.

I will end on this slide, because this is the most important slide. Every time that we run such an open conversation, people discover that what the mainstream media and the social media shows is just 5 divisive statements out of 200 that we would have thought that it is ...

There is no reply button, because we discovered that if there is a reply button, people with the most time wins the argument automatically, because they have more time to troll [laughs] people. If you take away the reply button, there’s no way for a troll to grow, and instead ...

In practice, it looks like this. You see an avatar that represents you. You see fellow citizens’ statements. You can agree or you can disagree. As you agree or disagree, your avatar moves toward the cluster of people sharing the same feeling with you.

I may feel happy. She may feel angry. It’s all OK. It’s only after the feelings resonate with each other that we ask about brainstorming ideas. The best ideas are the ones that take care of most people’s feelings that we can turn into discussion.

We publish all the open data, which in Taiwan means open government, but also social, private-sector data, and we allocate three or more weeks for people to reflect, to share their feelings. That’s what often went missing in previous generations of democratic social designs, is that there’s no sufficient time ...

Finally, just one last example, whenever there’s thousands of people caring very much about an emergent social issue, we use AI-powered conversation to review the fact that they actually have much more in common about this than we previously thought.

We introduce such new ideas in exhibition cities like that Shalun Smart Energy Science City just outside of Hainan High-Speed Rail Station, which is also part of the Taiwan autonomous car lab.

If things go wrong, if people start flipping tables -- it’s not actually very easy, because you’re across screens -- but if there are controversies, I absorb all the risk. In this kind of environment, the public service become very innovative.

The greatest thing about radical transparency is that they get all the credit if things get resolved. If they have names on the public transcript, when the journalist interviews me, I make sure that they are fairly represented, that I actually let the journalist know who is the actual person ...

Instead of saying, "We’ll have to copy the Ministry of Interior on that," minister of interior is literally sitting next to them. They have to really brainstorm something out in order to respond to the people’s emergent real social needs.

A great thing is that whenever it’s cross-ministry, all the career public service don’t have to copy each other on A4 papers. They can be just sitting next to each other.

In Mandarin, we say 見面三分情, you get 30 percent of trust just by meeting face-to-face. Through high-bandwidth connectivity, we get maybe 20 percent of trust versus face-to-face.

The different municipalities, Taipei, Taichung, Kaohsiung, Taoyuan, and now Hualien and Taitung have all joined through telepresence. Whenever anybody’s talking about a local issue, all the municipalities learns about it in real time.

If it’s one-to-one, it’s often about private benefit. Because it’s radically transparent, people talk about things in public benefit ways.

The local co-ops, social entrepreneurs, charities, and activists just gather in this kind of facilitated conversation. I’m the main the facilitator. People in this kind of setting they have to speak about public benefit.

The other example is that I personally travel every other Tuesday or so to the rural places who are least likely to participate in Taipei policymaking. I go to where people are with technology. Instead of asking people to come to technology, we bring technology to the people.

Meanwhile, the experiment, including the business model, is still legal. This is limited-time monopoly in exchange of open innovation by sharing the data and all the things that we learned if it fails. If it works, of course, it become part of the regulation.

After that year, it may be scaled out or scaled up. At any time, the MPs can say, "OK, we want a new law about it, and we are going to deliberate for three or four years."

Everything else is fair game. [laughs] You’re given one year to show the people that your idea of a self-driving hybrid vehicle or whatever is a good idea.

That is the main thing about co-gov. We have lot of ways. We have sandboxes where people with a disruptive idea can ask for a year to break existing regulations, other than money-laundering and funding terrorism. Those two, we know what would happen, no need to experiment.

Now we ask a different set of question, ask if people have different positions, and we don’t know what to do. Despite different positions, are there common values? Given the common values that people discover, is there innovations that can deliver on those values without leaving anybody worse off?

For each emergent issue, there’s no way to have a emergent agency to look at it, so we should ask a different question. The old way is about asking, "Who are the representatives, and how do I make a fair arbitration between them?"

As we realize that we cannot invent an agency whenever there is a trending hashtag, so people’s organization and mobilization has really changed.

Each knot is like a vertical minister, and the rope here is the anonymous career public servants that absorb all the tension and gets none of the credit. [laughs] That is the bad old days.

It could be economic development on one side and environmental sustainability on the other. It could be disruptive innovations on one side and social justice on the other.

The governance, nowadays in the UN, they call it co-gov or co-governance. I think President Tsai put it best. She said, "Before when we think of democracy, we think of a position between two values."

Rather than having the code decide the law, decides the market, decides people’s norms, we’re entirely the other way around. We ask people to figure out the norms that informs the market policies, that informs the regulations. Finally, we turn them into law. Norms-first approach is what we’re saying.

Through a year or so, people just tinker for it to have two eyes, not one eye, to have an express number of expressions, to figure out the norm of having these self-driving tricycles integrating with the society, a process that we call co-domestication.

They’re very slow so they won’t hurt people. They are open-source, open-code, and open-data so that everybody can tinker it.