All this is not by law. All this is just by convincing them and putting them into contact with civil society that would just steer them toward a co-governance mechanism that is patently not run by the government.

For example, on disinformation, they voluntarily sign on a norm that Google and Facebook also sign on, that basically, they would start to work by featuring clarifications more prominently, and have a single affordance for people to forward anything that they see that’s information operation into the fact checkers community, ...

We, of course, also have plans, working with LINE, for example, to basically align their corporate social responsibility and their sustainability strategy with mitigating the negative part of their platform.

First, I think there’s the importance of digital literacy to teach our children that there are alternatives, you can either just install Facebook Feed Eradicator, or you can go on PTT, which is open source and maintained by the academic community and the National Taiwan University, that doesn’t even have ...

In that sense, Facebook is a lot like a liquor company. What I mean is that we should hold the same view as we have on liquor and other addiction manufacturers. In small doses, they have a public utility. A large dose means that people generally find that their lives ...

It’s just like liquor. A little bit may improve your thought process, but once it becomes addictive, then it’s purely negative externality.

All my computers and browsers have the Facebook Feed Eradiactor. I don’t even participate in this AI-generated dopamine addiction cycle...

If you extend the timeline long enough and design the market so that the social environment and the economic part agree on such a long-term view essentially for the benefit of people who have not been born yet, then we tend to agree on the common values instead of having ...

It’s not the market is a problem. It’s the tendency to just view the return from the next quarter. The shortsightedness, that’s the problem.

If you think about capitalism but in a seven-generation view, like if you want to build the most capital gain but seven generations down the line, like the Native Americans do, then you actually tend to think like people who are working on social justice or the environment.

We tend to assign equal, if not more, importance of social benefit, of environmental benefit into the market design so that it’s not just about short-term GDP.

It is market design. It’s just not for profit. It’s with profit. It’s not optimizing for capital gain. It’s optimizing for reduction of maintenance cost. All these different schools of thought must make use of markets. That is how we become open.

On the other hand, some people say "human resource," which is treating actual people as materials. Of course, I’m against that confusion of categories, but I’m all for markets. I think markets are the best thing. You can easily see Creative Commons and open-source and free software as a market-building ...

Of course, it’s been extended in every which way. You see relation capital, but that’s not capitalism. Nobody is a "relational capitalist." It doesn’t really make sense. [laughs] It is a perversion of today where we talk about for-profit entities like companies as if they are people, like we are ...

I wouldn’t say that capital and market is the same thing. They are very different things. Market just means that you can do relations building on transactions with people who you didn’t already know. It’s a very wide definition. Capital means some things that you can strictly accumulate.

Mm-hmm.

You cannot really trade one for the other two. You can’t sacrifice one for the other two. All of them must be pareto improvements, meaning that you can increase a little bit on one of the three without sacrificing the other two, and then people get more accepting and they ...

Working out loud assigns credit where credit is due, instead of having the minister soak up all the credit. By simplifying their work, reducing the chores, by absorbing the risk by mechanism design, and by giving credit where credit is due, that’s the three design criteria for public service intervention.

The third thing -- that is not just "in the flow of work" -- is "working out loud". Radical transparency means credit goes where credit’s due. Whenever I tour around Taiwan and the people from Taipei Social Innovation Lab, the central government public servants, figure out a way to deliver ...

If we figure out a good mechanism and have people’s innovation described as mechanism, then nobody is to blame when things go wrong, because when things go wrong, it’s public. Everybody learns from it. We write the postmortem, and because it’s mechanism, nobody is at fault. We just change the ...

The second thing in the flow of work means that it also makes sure that the risk is absorbed by the mechanism. As public service, most of the time, if things go wrong, the ministry can always blame public service for not implementing this correctly.

For example, the public commentary and up-voting in Join.gov.tw means that they can dedicate their time, not on answering 40 identical statements. It saves them time. In the flow of work means reduce the chores in the work. That’s the first thing.

The design philosophy we adopted in Socialtext is called "in the flow of work". That symbolizes two important things. First, we don’t design to replace an existing habit or existing workflow. We design so that people can feel that they’re just doing their normal work, while making sure that their ...

My design ideas for social interaction design or SxD is heavily informed by my work with the Silicon Valley companies, for example Socialtext, who just adopted all the trending Wikis, micro-blogging, collaborative spreadsheet, you name it, into Fortune 500 and largest NGOs.

This kind of permission-less innovation is ultimately the key. Because being actionable, connected, only ensures that it takes people’s attention for a news cycle, like a day or two. But if it’s extensible, then people feel that it’s there a while, and then people can expand it in a way ...

Third, I think it needs to be open, meaning extensible. We usually relinquish the copyright. Like this transcript, it’s going to be in the public domain. Anyone can extend and use it to draw a comic, to make manga, and to do video, whatever, without even asking our permission.

A good example is the slogan #TaiwanCanHelp. It can be remixed any which way, and indeed, a lot of social sector people just remixed this for their purpose. Again, this kind of memetic engineering, it’s very important.

For example, of course, you know the ice bucket challenge. Even though it takes less than one minute to splash cold water on your body, it’s meaningless if it’s not social. It doesn’t make any sense if it’s not social. [laughs] It’s also very important to have memes that people ...

More than that, of course there’s fatigue, but usually, people do have one-minute of kindness, no matter what you want them to participate in. Just lowering the threshold, making it very actionable is very important. The second thing is to make it connected.

I think the key is to make sure the actionable intervention takes less than one minute. That’s our main design criteria. Whether to upload or download a Polis statement, whether to sign an e-petition, whether to view informative infographics that counter, say, popular disinformation -- it’s all less than 60 ...

All my work is focused towards making sure that establishment is in the service of the people. The anti-authoritarianism is actually a boon to this project. Then the anti-elitism wouldn’t have room to grow, because essentially, there would be no elites, but just stakeholders of different positions and knowledge.

My mandate is just convincing the establishment to give room to such social innovations and give them, for example, a year to break the regulation and prove that the civic side is better. Then we just absorb them into the national regulation. That’s the sandbox project and many other projects ...

If the masses don’t like this kind of explanation, they can always just -- based on their open government data, based on the open government policies, open budget, and so on -- create their own counter narratives, by their own counter expertise, essentially doing citizen science and collecting their own ...

These two combined basically says that in many other policy areas where it requires technical knowledge and things like that, it is the duty of the people who hold this knowledge to translate them into a way that is very easily acceptable for the masses.

I prefer to have the social sector and the private sector set the agenda, and the government to respond to that agenda. Anarchist in this sense means relinquishing the agenda setting power, and for the people to hold the agenda setting power.

Anarchism means that I don’t give or take orders, and given a choice, I always prefer norms over laws. Norm making preferably is social innovation, meaning everybody can participate to everybody’s benefit, rather than more classical civic participation, which usually means the government sets the agenda but people have consultative ...

[laughs] To be a conservative is to respect the traditions -- whether they are indigenous traditions, whether they are Hakka or Hoklo, or whether they’re old or new immigrant traditions -- it’s very important when developing policies to not sacrifice the respect for those traditions in the service of mere ...

As a conservative anarchist, I am...

I think we need to distinguish anti-elitism, which is what you refer to, to anti-central planning, anti-authoritarianism, essentially. They often have very similar rhetoric, so it’s not always easy to tell them apart.

This kind of local-driven policy making is our answer to populism. The people are great, but we want your innovation to be seen widely by everybody and include all the people who normally don’t have voting rights into this conversation, such as new immigrants and others, like younger people.

It’s one step further than Porto Alegre, which pioneered participatory budgeting using a fixed percentage of the discretionary budget. This time, it’s not just about budget, but about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), about investment, about adjusting of regulations, about sandboxes, about all these things, but it’s always in response to ...

Once they have a common vision of the local people’s needs, then the National Council just talks to all the different ministries. Up to 10 percent of all the relevant projects of budget is now being distributed in such a participatory way.

Rather the policy making, including the budgeting and the policy, is made by what we call regional revitalization plan, which always starts in the precinct level or county level, and unites the scenario workshops in a deliberative way -- again, the Sunflower legacy -- across all the different sectors.

What we have done so far is just by traveling across Taiwan and letting people meet, sometime virtually, to make people think that the central government is not there to issue top-down orders, which are often out of context and out of touch.

The Occupy is all about everyone joining and getting informed and getting influenced into the ultimate rough consensus of the Occupy. In that sense, I’m all for populism if it doesn’t exclude anyone.

The first, appealing to the masses, appealing to people’s voice and making sure that people can feel that they have a meaningful participation in policy making, that’s what we’re working toward. You can, in a sense, say that the Sunflower Movement is a prototype in a populist re-framing of the ...

I’m all for populism if it’s not tribalism. There are populisms that speak to all people, and there are populisms that exclude certain people from the population. The latter is very dangerous, and I don’t have to elaborate at all.

This is a really good use of broadband as a human right, because no matter where I am in Taiwan, I’m guaranteed to have 10 megabits or more connection to the backbone of the conference.

Even though we have broadband as a human right, they don’t have to exercise their broadband connection. They can just be there and I’ll go to them, and then we have a regional regulation co-creation conversation. Then everything is followed up.

The radical transparency ensures an accountability scheme that everything everybody says is kept for ever until it’s resolved. In this process, we make sure that people who have a local issue, they don’t have to connect to the Internet. They don’t have to go to Taipei.