It’s like a qualitative algorithm that selects maybe 10 mails every day to read aloud to the President Obama as a way to give both that diversity but also the direct voice.

I think in the President Obama’s White House, he hired lots of people like volunteers and also dedicated staff to just handle the influx of people writing to him. They have this kind of ratings scorecard mechanism.

Everybody who writes for recourse doesn’t even know that there is 5,000 people before them, so the person becomes a bottleneck when it comes to consultations and so on because there’s just a limited language that they can go through.

Everybody just connects to the public service, maybe just one person, and they have to handle like tens of thousands of incoming messages if it’s a controversial regulation.

The second thing I would like also to mention is that the advent of machine learning in particular made it easier for people to automate away the choice. For example, previously, there was regulatory preannouncement in many countries, but every contact is through snail mail or through telephone at most.

The document serves as the presentation, again, of our ideas, but the document itself is not a representative. The intermediary shifts from a human being into a mechanism. That’s the reconfiguration.

Representativeness gives way, to a degree, to representation. If we record this recording, if we make a transcript, people can very easily find it with search engine, and they can relive through the context of our exchange. That is the representation.

Now, it is actually possible to listen to 200 people, 400 people. We do that every day on Twitter, on social media, and so it is for the first time easier to coordinate with what we call weak links across the Internet as compared to people just having to step ...

Right. Essentially, pre-Internet, where we’re talking about representative democracy is a solution, a compromise, if you will, with the fact that it’s impossible to listen to more than 20 people at a time. That’s why even the legislation have these subcommittees and things like that.

That makes it possible for the first time in human history to have listening at scale, as I prefer to call it, so that one person can listen to millions of people, but more importantly, millions of people can listen to one another. It is a fundamental change in configuration, ...

Arguably, that’s how World War II at least started, and to some extent World War I. Basically, it made it very hierarchical. Now with Internet, everybody has more or less symmetrical connections, that is to say, they have the equal bandwidth to receive as well as to send.

The digital basically meant two different things. One is that it makes it possible for people to listen to one another much more easily. The pre-Internet technologies, like radio or TV, usually makes it very easy for one person to speak to millions of people.

Since...?

Let’s get started.

Excellent.

Sure, of course.

We’ll make a transcript and all. It’s explained in the email.

Thank you.

Yeah, we’re good.

Yu-Hsin here is our MOFA delegate.

That’s right. Very much so. Anything from MOFA?

It’s a plus.

Since we passed marriage equality, nobody confuse Taiwan with Thailand anymore.

Anything from your side?

The handle is better? OK. We’ll work it in.

Or do you prefer @OsloFF?

I will tag also #OsloFF. That’s the hashtag?

@MOFA_Taiwan is like 55K, so not too bad.

[laughs] That’s right. We can take a while. I don’t have massive followers on Twitter. I think it’s just 25K or something, and this will be syndicated by our embassies.

Is there any message that I should mention in the MOFA’s tweet that would work to your benefit?

If you have already connected to the Taiwan Women’s Center, then from Taiwan Women’s Center and the Marriage Equality Platform, I think you have all the right connections for the marriage equality side of things. I think you’re in good hands.

That’s three blocks of time. The earlier you let our staff know [laughs] how do you plan to use that, the more sure that I will be able to guarantee my availability.

I’m just giving you my available time. If you arrive on the 10th, I’m available, at this moment, from 5:00 PM onward to maybe 8:00 PM. On Thursday, as I mentioned, I’m available from half past 2:00 to 8:00 PM or something. On Friday, I can give you the entire ...

Those kind of themes, I’m very happy to coordinate both making this message more public, domestically, as well as working on specific civil society organization or international guests, one-on-one meetings.

The freedoms are the necessary foundation for the open culture to thrive, as we see in many places in the world. Long as you have a thriving, not even democracy, just ensure of basic freedoms, nowadays, the Internet can just bring the best and brightest to the locality and deliver ...

Your two partner organizations feels very close to me. [laughs] The language of open culture is my native language. Of course, the entire open culture grows out of fundamental freedoms. Without freedom to assemble, speech, and expression, there is no open culture to speak of.

I’ve been part of the open culture movement in Taiwan. That includes both OCF and Wikimedia.

We can figure out logistics. When will you be back to Taiwan? In September?

Sure, of course.

That’s right. Suppose I have all morning for you. How can I be of maximal use to you?

Very much so.

Of course.

This is extremely broad and inclusive. [laughs]

Shortening the corridor, that’s right.

Wow, OK.

By Bitcoin, you mean cryptocurrencies in general, or specifically Bitcoin?

I think it’s a great idea.

Yeah.

In Europe, they are also working on neutral gender at birth, neutral gender by choice, or other issues like that. That’s going to be a topic in Taiwan, too, in the next couple years. Now that we have a solid marriage equality framework, people can put a lot of their ...

I’m aware of her.