This is, again, because broadband as human right. In 2015, we also used this methodology to work on the teleworking initiatives. We also worked closely with Japan on that, but always under the umbrella of the g0v civil society exchange.

We also worked on teleworking initiatives. In many places, in more rural places of Japan, they really want teleworking because that can keep the young people still staying there while they work jobs in Tokyo. They don’t have to move to Tokyo.

In our workshops, we do tackle with important e-governance issues, for example, how to replace or augment the seal system with a more digital system, which is controversial in Japan actually. We solved that controversy using this methodology a few years ago, so we do have experience to share of ...

I’m participating as a "community participant." Cabinet office members there are also participating as "civil society supporters" or "participants." That’s just a reality we’re working on.

They didn’t say no, but currently our workshops are conducted in the second track, in the sense that we run such workshops in Tokyo, but they are organized independently by the Code For Japan community as a civil society community in Japan, on one hand, and the g0v movement that ...

At the moment, we have, because of diplomatic relationships, work through my other hat, which is a participant in the g0v movement, the social sector. We did actually host joint workshops with people in Tokyo. Even people from the cabinet office did attend, but we have to phrase it as ...

Really, in Taiwan, we do understand the earthquakes and how hard it is for some place that suffer from earthquake to regrow its culture and its agricultural products after such a disaster. I’m always very happy to help to promote this. I did talk with the MOFA counterparts in Japan ...

...on the anniversary day of the earthquake.

I would love to [laughs] host a similar conversation. I did actually visit Tokyo quite a few times and even on my Twitter timeline shared a video of me eating the persimmons from Fukushima...

The next one after the June-July conversation would be actually security cooperation. What I’m saying is that the MOFA delegate here, right here, [laughs] serves as the delegate of the arm of what the Defense and PRC councils can talk about publicly.

The one that we’re going to launch is about US-Taiwan relationship on free trade agreements and commercial integrations, the so-called no-rent supply chain. That’s a very exciting conversation I’m looking forward to having.

[laughs] Exactly. Actually, if you look at Minister Joseph Wu’s Twitter, he also served somewhat as a PRC Council’s arm for public diplomacy [laughs] to comment on PRC affairs. This is kind of a surrogate where we talk about the four promotes.

The Ministry of Defense, as far as I understand, at the moment, they don’t yet have this kind of public diplomacy program. In a sense, MOFA works as the public-speaking arm.

These are actually what people always believe regardless of whether they think the US should interfere in Taiwan’s PRC relationships or not. That’s divisive, but these are consensus.

We can identify the polarizing points. The point is that we actually focus more on the so-called group informed consensus, which is how we should actually work on the Indo-Pacific region, how to share our good governance, how to make sure that we can integrate into the Indo-Pacific strategy, and ...

You can very quickly see, through this kind of radical transparency, we both identify the most divisive statements, such as this one, "Every time China closes an international door for Taiwan, the US should try to open one for Taiwan someplace else." Everybody on the right-hand side agrees with it. ...

We used the technology that I just demoed to run a conversation called digital dialog with IAT talking about the four promotes, the first one being how to promote Taiwan’s role in their global community.

That’s a great question. When MOFA first started working with us, they basically sent the people in charge of public diplomacy, that is to say, things that they want as many people to know as possible rather than secret conversations.

Obviously.

This is actually efficient policy-making. Questions?

Basically, what we’re working toward is making sure that liberal democracy can actually tackle emerging issues in a faster, more efficient, and more polity-affirming way through ideas like overlapping consensus, rough consensus, and things like that, as compared to authoritarianism, so that people won’t look at authoritarianism as the answer ...

That’s authoritarianism.

That’s right.

That’s right.

That’s the five-minutes pitch. [laughs] If there’s any question that you would like to ask, please ask away. Maybe identify yourself for the sake of the record.

That is to say, people can live with it. Then just making sure that the innovation are delivered to the benefit of everybody, as evidenced by the rough consensus.

We just turn them into regulations very quickly while tabling those divisive statements into further open collaborative meetings. Through AI-powered conversations, through open collaboration meetings, we’ll make sure that people have the same first-hand experience in data, on emerging technologies and emerging social issues, making sure that innovations can get ...

Contrary to popular belief, people actually have more in common with their neighbors on most of the things, most of the time, as compared to those divisive statements. Usually, we just take those consensus statements that we know are resonating with everybody, even though the popular media may spend less ...

We always need this picture. This picture I think is the most convincing picture in all of the consultations. If the mainstream media and some social media focus on those five divisive statements, this is not actually what we should focus our calories on.

There is no button that says reply because if there is a reply button, then trolls tend to dominate a conversation where they can make personal attacks and derail the conversation. Here, you can’t really do that because you can only ever disagree and propose your own sentiments for other ...

In terms of interaction, it goes like this. You can see one sentiment from a fellow citizen. You can agree or disagree. As you agree or disagree, your avatar just moves among the people who think more like you.

We focus on the facts and then asking people to share feelings. After three or so weeks of sharing feelings, we get the best ideas that are resonating with the most people’s feelings. Then we turn them into decisions.

Here, you can see people’s different opinion clusters in different places. The important thing is we’re not counting the number of people. We’re counting the plurality of opinions. People’s friends and families are actually all over the place, so they can see each other as more friends and families instead ...

These are my regional tours. When we want to get the sense of people’s consensus, whether a sandbox experiment or a new innovation is good or not, we usually use a AI-powered conversation called pol.is. This is a open-source software that we also helped develop.

When I meet with the local co-ops and multi-stakeholders, social entrepreneurs, NPOs, the 12 ministry that join this program are in the major cities in Taiwan and telecommunicating through telepresence and two-way video conferencing to make sure that they can understand the local people’s need and introduce decision-making that is ...

Even if people have different positions, we ask people, "Are there common values after all?" If people have common values after all, then we make sure that we use sandboxes and other means for other people to see, for the first hand, what exactly is it like, for example, to ...

We design all those everyday participation methodologies that are working complementary to representative voting. I would like to quote Dr. Tsai Ing-wen in her inauguration speech where she said, "Before when we think of democracy in Taiwan, we tend to think about opposition between two opposite parties and values. Now, ...

My office basically practices what we called a continuous democracy or participative democracy in the sense that it’s not about voting. Rather, it is about people setting agenda of what the government’s priorities are. They can do this through e-petitions or participatory budgeting, through sandbox experiments, the Presidential Hackathon.

For example, Yin here is dispatched from the National Communication Commission and so on. The ministry that is more outward-facing, like Culture, Education, Interior, Justice, you name it -- these are the ministries that would be more willing to send people here to talk about cross-ministerial projects, like self-driving vehicles ...

...that much. The public diplomacy arm of the MOFA, actually, they have a lot of work working with us.

I don’t really have 32 dispatches, because not all ministries have joined my office. For example, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of PRC Affairs -- they never send anyone, for obvious reasons. Maybe they don’t like the transparency...

Many ministries want to send more than one person. I think the MOFA, the Foreign Affairs, has a list of maybe five people [laughs] are willing to join, but I had an agreement with the Secretary General that they can join only one at a time. They had a kind ...

For example, I like self-driving vehicles here. They easily touch five different ministries’ portfolio. My office -- there’s one person dispatched from each ministry. There’s no digital ministry. My office is literally one person at most poached [laughs] from each ministry.

Each has a vertical minister and nine horizontal ministers, meaning that we are in the administrative Yuan, and making sure that the different ministries can coordinate on shared digital transformation projects.

The third thing is called voluntary association. As a "conservative anarchist," my office is basically assemblage of people from all ministries. Taiwan has 32 vertical ministries.

Even if we decide not to do something, at the end, the social sector can see what we originally planned to do, and then they can carry out the work in the social sector. Even if the government decides that it’s not the wisest use of our budget, the Taiwan ...

What it makes is a radically transparent environment where the public servants are very free to innovate, because they get the credit if things go right, because all the journalists will find out who is the person that brought the innovation, while I absorb the risk. As far as I ...

Each of these meetings, note, is not just a summary. It is actually a full conversation, like who actually said what, where, when, and then you can individually quote on it.

This is basically publishing before a decision is made, so you can see that I’ve been, after being the digital minister, talking to 4,000 people, around 200,000 speeches, and thousands of meetings.

This is basically the next condition. Oh, they got a projection going. That’s great. [laughs] It’s called radical transparency. My work conditions says that everything that I see can be published online. This is unlike the traditional FOIA laws, where we’re only required to publish after the decision is made.