[laughs] That’s right. Thank you. Bye.

Yes.

Thank you, that’s such an excellent answer. Great way to set the scene for the debate, and incredibly useful insights into what we might be doing. Thank you again so much. Thanks for speaking to me.

Good.

That’s good. Just at the end, you froze for a second. I’ll finish with a question that we’re going to go on and debate at this Women’s Equality Party Conference. That’s really whether data-driven technology can actually help to resolve inequality. Do you have views on that issue?

Sorry. I just lost the sound for a second there.

I’ve been wondering. I’m very glad that you’re in Taiwan and doing what you’re doing, but there was part of me that was wishing that you were in America maybe finding ways to revitalize the democracy there right now.

I see, but not...

I may be misinformed here. I thought you had founded a startup very young.

There are so many things here that I want to know about. I mentioned before that you came to Silicon Valley ridiculously young, didn’t you? Did I read somewhere that you...?

That’s completely fascinating. I am very aware that I’m talking to you for much longer than I intended to.

What we might refer to as revenge porn, for example.

You said you’re using it on a consultation around the non-consensual sharing of intimate images.

Then at the end of all of that, you might have a vote on something in the way that you would expect in a democracy, presumably. You go through this process of deliberation and moving people using both direct and representative democracy?

That should be, as you say, the websites that look like government websites, but actually have the information in them that the government websites don’t. All those things requires a lot of work. My question to you is, how is this actually done practically? Who is doing the work here?

As we’ve been speaking, I’ve been imagining the very few people that we actually have in our team with their heads in their hands, because they know I’m going to come away from this conversation going, "We should do pol.is. We should do pol.is."

Is that platform something that anyone can use?

Yes.

By competing to win people over to their viewpoint, it’s almost like a game.

I’m going to interrupt briefly. pol.is, for people who haven’t read or heard about it, it’s a platform, yes?

We were talking before about the ways in which you were able to find consensus from very strongly polarized viewpoints. Is pol.is something we as a party could be using? What would it look like if you applied it to some very polarized debates that there are within feminism, for ...

That seems to me a very important principle for anybody who is trying to make policy around these issues, to understand that aspect. Can I ask you about, I think it’s called pol.is?

How should we approach these different strains, if you like, in evolving technology? You can see the beauty of something that can’t be censored and can’t be changed in some cases, but then it may have other unintended consequences.

For example, there are some women and certainly people from minority populations, for example, who would be very worried by something that was irrevocable and which identified them and held information about them irrevocably because they have spent a lot of time actually trying not to be seen or not ...

One of the things that strikes me about a lot of conversation about what distributed ledger technology, which yes, people here mostly know is blockchain would create it is that people don’t always think about the different impacts on gender and the different ways this would affect us.

Yeah, I was laughing.

[laughs] I was...

That’s the other thing. It’s what we see coming towards us. What would you see as the technologies that are heading our way that might make a difference as well?

No, I think there are some wonderful ideas in there. How feasible they are, I don’t know just because different legislative environment and different cost base for these things. I absolutely believe that we should be exploring all of this and seeing what we can do, because it’s not as ...

One of the things we have to think about is how we can be clever and do things that try and mitigate some of these in-built disadvantages under which we are acting. Do you have any particular tips for us about what that might look like?

The bigger parties that can afford to pay for that therefore have an advantage when it comes to, particularl y in a first-past-the-post system, in terms of targeting their voters.

I’ll give you one example. There was a lot of concern here around the Cambridge Analytica controversy. What that actually showed, although this again got very little coverage, was not just about that one incident. In fact, there are many people who legitimately provide such services, where they get a ...

Thank you. That’s an incredibly useful way of looking at it. I’m interested if you have any particular thoughts about how we as a small party operating in a system that is in many ways stacked against us might use technology ourselves or think about using technology ourselves.

Also, that if you are building these kinds of things, it’s very important, presumably, to have real diversity in terms of who is inputting to these technologies. You talk about bias. Presumably, you would see a danger if there are too few women, as we know there are, in STEM, ...

Do you worry about this as well? Do you think that technology can be the answer to the concerns around technology?

[laughs] When you were in Silicon Valley, you also saw at close hand some of the difficulties with that culture. One of the things that people worry about technology is that it’s been made by a small and not-very-diverse group of people with certain ideas about what it can do.

You are now Digital Minister. As I say, you’re bringing all of this to bear as not just something that is part of a protest, but something that is everyday politics.

I don’t know of any other part of the Occupy movement that’s actually ended up in government anywhere in the world. You actually went from this uprising, this popular uprising, to actually being in government and putting these things into practice from the top down, even though what you’re talking ...

What was your role in this? You came into this as somebody with Silicon Valley experience, which is also fairly unusual for a politician.

Five million people using it on a basis that helps form policy very directly.

What happened after all of these debates?

It’s moving away from echo chambers and towards a way of facilitating debate and a way of creating information. Sitting here in England where we’re now living with the results of a referendum, which in some way looks like people power, but of course was based on only partial and ...

And you were already using technology for this as well as live debate.

You moved away from polarizing politics.

In Taiwan, there had been a dearth of democracy. You had a government that was not listening to the people. Instead, what you got through the Occupy movement was not only people coming in to make their views heard, but you found a way of having a discussion that created ...

Sorry to interrupt.

I wanted to talk to you in the beginning about the Sunflower Movement. There wasn’t as much publicity around that in the UK as you might have imagined. Would you mind starting by explaining the Sunflower Movement and your involvement in it? It was really something quite amazing.

Minister, thank you very much for finding the time to talk to us today. I’m very excited to talk to you because there are very few politicians who I would say are engaged in transformative politics. There are fewer still who are finding ways to harness technology to that transformation.

We’re intending to have a much shorter excerpt, but I’m happy to talk to you for longer. There’s a lot I think I can learn from you. Thank you very much. I’ll begin as for this segment now.

Exactly.