They can no longer pretend that, "Oh, I’m not blocking this new idea. I have to talk with the minister of health and welfare." MOHW is sitting right next to them, so they really have to resolve this on the spot.

When I talk with them, I’m backed by video conferencing from Taipei, Taoyuan, Taichung, Kaohsiung, Taitung, and Hualien. It makes sure that a local social issue is broadcasted to all the municipalities that join this network, as well as if there are horizontal synergies, it’s resolved on the spot, as ...

Usually, I tour around Taiwan and I explicitly say that the farther you are from a high-speed railway station, the more likely I will visit you. I bring 360 live-streams, Zoom and other technologies, to that particular county, and then have a talk with the local elders in closed meetings ...

Even for marine national parks like the Pescadores, the South Penghu Marine National Park, we actually travel to the Pescadores, to Penghu, to have that conversation.

We always bring tech to where people are. We don’t ask people to come to tech. If you have an e-petition about Hengchun’s medicare, we just travel everybody to Hengchun to have a town hall deliberation. The same for fishing rights in harbors for amateur fishers. Again, we just go ...

As you can see in that event just across the aisle, we see leadership from the elder generation, but we also see a very young MP joining the conversation. That symbolizes our conscious attempt at making sure that inter-generational solidarity is a norm instead of an exception.

For example, this place, the Startup Hub, used to be called Youth Entrepreneurship Hub. That is an age-discriminative word. We just took it away. The best startups are the ones that starts by a young generation, an old generation, and the stakeholders group. These are the right formulation of startups.

The more we see, for example, 15-year-olds refusing to talk to their grandparents because of their different stands on LGBT issues or whatever, the more chance for polarization. That’s what we are working on very intentionally.

I think mostly it’s about 65-year-olds and 15-year-olds. Those two age groups are both very active on social media, have a lot of time, care about public matters. The more intergenerational solidarity we can build, the less risk of polarization.

By now, all the KMT presidential candidates, as well as DPP, as well as Mayor Ko, as well as previous Premier Simon Chang, all the presidential hopefuls are now strongly against one country, two systems. The old binary is no longer there. Everybody is against "one country, two systems."

What this year’s protests created is a, to reuse the word, unified front, against the so-called "one country, two systems." Hong Kong people made it very clear that one country, two systems is just collapsing into "one country, one system," and they are resisting that.

We do make all our toolkits and our thinking publicly available online, so of course, there were surely cross-pollinations of techniques.

I wouldn’t say it’s purely a Sunflower influence, even though there are Hong Kong newspapers that says I orchestrated the entire Hong Kong protest. I must say it’s utterly false.

This is very important in Hong Kong in that they just practiced and perfected this leaderlessness. That informed, of course, the 2019 extradition protests, which is entirely leaderless and coordinated on the Internet.

Well, part of the legacy of Sunflower is that a lot of techniques did get transferred to the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. The Umbrella, while not entirely leaderless, was actually the first time that Hong Kong shifted to a semi-leaderless movement.

Polarizing.

That, again, I think it’s directly prompted by the techniques that we have seen on the movement that you just mentioned.

Just by tying the referendum day to election day, it ensure that whatever deliberation you do is facing a headwind of polarity and binary thinking. I think, just by getting them into alternate years, we have the referendums having more than one year of more rational, or at least deliberative, ...

I think that’s also why I fully support the change recently to go to a more Swiss model of referendum by not tying the referendum to elections. In election, you tend to have binary mindset for people. For a referendum, you really want people of all the different sides to ...

I think it’s just people learning the toolsets of a new engagement strategy of inclusive participation, rather than one-way preaching. It’s spread to all the different parts in Taiwan. I think it’s generally a good thing, because if they don’t make their ideas public, there’s no way to have a ...

Of course, of course. The pro-nuclear folks is also very much young people-driven. Even during the Sunflower, there was the so-called "white justice." The white justice, again, is led by young people, even younger than Occupiers, actually.

I think this is a really good boon to our democracy, both in the government side, and especially from the social sector side.

That really had a lot of movement. They don’t even have to go to the street on Fridays. They can just communicate through the e-petition platform. Indeed, starting this July, we are implementing the idea proposed, indeed, by a 15-year-old.

The people who are 15-year-old, it is the first time that, even in their civics class, they just practice direct democracy. They don’t have voting rights yet, you see. [laughs] Practice direct democracy by, for example, petitioning for a gradual banning of plastic straws.

The most active people are around 15-years-old and 65-years-old. The 65 years old are retired. They were in the social sector. They have time to care about public benefit and their descendants, of course. They were the key generation when the martial law lifted. They are the backbone of the ...

A lot more focus is placed on people who are around 15 to 17. That’s never happened before. It’s very exciting for the NGOs to have fresh minds joining their movement. Even in our e-petition platform, we tend to see that the two most active segments, like one-quarter of population’s ...

Indeed, have the young people led their own social movement, because the next major movement after the Sunflower is the senior high-schoolers who campaigned against the changing of the curriculum. That movement is almost all led by people who are under 18 years old.

The Sunflower made public discourse cool again. It became mainstream for the young people who are around 20-years-old to just participate in public discourse. Then the NGOs shifted their strategy to allow more meaningful participation by the young people, as well as changing their discourse as to attracts more young ...

That applies to pretty much all the NGOs who co-orchestrated the occupy. It’s that their main supporters are 40 years old or older. The young people, who are 20-years-old, do not, at that time, consider it to hip to talk about human right, to talk about LGBT politic, to talk ...

Then it creates a generational gap, because while the most respected charities, like Tzu Chi and so on, they have very devout followers, and indeed, have a lot of financial sustainability. However, their engagement with young people was pretty lacking in 2014.

The social sector began growing around the time of the lifting of the martial law, which is in the ’80s, but the presidential election is late ’90s. It gave them a decade or so of head start to accumulate legitimacy.

In very broad brushes, I would say that, because the NPOs in Taiwan always had more access to legitimacy than the administration, and it’s an historical fact...

I think she will be very interesting for you to interview or at least get access to her master thesis, which is about quantifying the answer to your question.

She was actually one of the main facilitators in the occupied parliament. I was on the periphery, making sure the communication works. She was actually there and making sure that the people who occupied the parliament can get into a rough consensus in a facilitated way.

I have a colleague, En-en Hsu, who used network theory and quantitative analysis to basically establish the co-occurence of NGOs across the years. One interesting connection that I may make is just to introduce you to her work.

Many of these are actually campaign promises of Dr. Tsai Ing-wen.

I think the reverse mentorship was their response. All the member of the cabinet is supposed to recruit one of the Occupiers to work alongside them to learn this art of public engagement.

Now, this new norm would have prevented the Sunflower from happening in the first place, because at least they have to have 60 days of public commentary and debate.

These are norms that where, previously, it just wasn’t there back in 2014. Sunflower started exactly because the administration at the time considered the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement a regulation-level policy, instead of a law-level policy, so that they can just pass it without substantial deliberation.

We do see agencies and ministries just delaying the regulation for a while after they receive things from different angle. They make some changes, and they do another announcement of the same regulation.

Also, there’s no exception. It creates a new norm that new regulations are subject to public debate, instead of people discovering it after the fact. It did, of course, create social controversies, but I think the controversies are created before the regulation takes effect, and thereby still has room to ...

Then after I joined, I made sure that the 60th conversation always takes place on a public commentary board. That means that people who already see an idea that they agree on, just upvote it. You don’t have to write the same thing twice.

It also create unnecessary burden on public service. Around 2016 -- just about the time that I joined -- Secretary-General Chen Mei-ling worked with all the different ministries to make sure that all the pre-announcement of regulations is 60 days.

It really doesn’t work, because it only allows one round of clarification, and there’s no accountability at all. The ministry at hand doesn’t have to respond to people’s comments, because those are private. Each person who calls them didn’t know that there’s 50 people already making the same point already.

That is very important, because previously, at the time of the Occupy, all the regulations -- which is not law -- they were only pre-announced for 7 days or 14 days. There’s no way for public debate. You would just call the ministry by phone.

That, I think, would be legacy of the Sunflower movement, because immediately after the Occupy, there was a national forum. That’s one of the consensus points of the Sunflower Occupy. On that forum, a lot of Occupiers and Occupy sympathizers just outlined the need of a, for example, a regulatory ...

This shift from representativeness to re-presentation of people’s genuine, authentic opinion, I think that is very important, and that directly led to the e-participation process, including petition and participatory budgeting.

Occupy is all about everybody who show up, just speak for themselves. We make sure that, using information technology, we re-present their positions, rather than we as communicators represent their positions.

People who show up should give the autonomy of expressing their opinions, arrive at a collective decision, and so on. All this is very different from a traditional representative politics, where people of an association, a trade, or whatever are assumed to be homogeneous. They just send one representative to ...

I think the insistence of making a maximally inclusive space, I think that is very important. In Occupy, elsewhere as well as in Taiwan, the decision-making is always about having an open-space technology point of view, like whomever showing up is the right people.