Thank you. Bye-bye.

Great. Thanks so much, Audrey. Thank you. Have a great evening.

Absolutely.

Fantastic. Thank you so much, Audrey. This has been really, really helpful. Thank you so much for you time. This is fascinating work, so thank you so much for sharing it.

As others are learning from you, who are you learning from at the moment? Who are you modeling in terms of open government and participation?

You’ve actually answered another question that maybe you can clarify. I’ve noticed you using the hashtag "taiwancanhelp." Is that something that is directed from Taiwan, the idea that Taiwan can help on the SDG specifically? Is that where that comes from?

How does that function in practice in terms of achieving outcomes? Are they self-selecting in that they have an agenda or a burning issue when they come to you? Are there set political issues that are introduced or from civil society? How do they determine what they want to act ...

That makes a lot of sense. I want to talk about your super ministry again and how that functions in practice. I read that you have too many volunteers, and now you’ve got at least a representative, that the goal is to have one representative from each ministry.

On the President’s Hackathon, are core participants all civil servants?

What are the characteristics or principles of the digital world that most need to be put in this reboot of democracy?

I’ve read in your interviews before that you’ve said that your introduction to democracy and politics and social organizing was online for years before you got the right to vote. Interestingly, the Citizens Foundation in Iceland also talk about upgrading democracy in the operating system.

It’s interesting, because it’s become so identified with Taiwan.

That’s interesting. Just to clarify, does that mean that actually this practice, g0v in Italy, the practice of forking or making a parallel...

I don’t think it was immediately clear to me what the relationship was between g0v and your role in the Social Innovation Lab. Can you explain to me how?

That’s interesting. I think we’ve become so seduced by the idea of tech tools that we don’t realize the importance of people being in a space.

I think it’s incredibly appealing. If you’re providing advice on how a city might take up a structure or a method like this, what advice would you provide?

I think that’s interesting. Is that process, and I understand it’s...What is it? The bonded coalition model? I haven’t that quite right. Let me have a look. The coherent blended volition model. This idea that it’s people who weren’t a coalition before but find themselves with shared values.

All off the shelf. The success that you had through that process in reframing the debate about ride-sharing. Are there any other examples that you can share that show that method in practice?

I’d love to ask you about the vTaiwan process. I read your paper and found the four steps fascinating and where that you’re using existing technology. It’s not needing to build anything new, really.

Would you define your role then as a connector?

Yeah. It sounds like when you’re in your office and having those consulting hours, you’re acting as a connector between these different parts of government and civil society, commercial/government entities or individuals and then linking efforts to broader missions -- whether it’s a sustainable development goal, Taiwan’s focus on expanding ...

Sitting and waiting and anyone can book in to see you. What do people bring to you? What typically happens when you’re at the Social Innovation Lab?

Yeah, absolutely. Tell me about your, when you have those consulting hours, and very long hours, by the way, 12 hours.

Can you explain what that means in an open democracy, and particularly in a youth participation context? How do you define it?

Oh, that’s fantastic. Let me just jump on that one point. You talked about optimizing for fun before.

How have you overcome that in Taiwan? What motivates people to have a more participatory role in their democracy?

The challenges I see, one of the big challenges that’s hardest to overcome, I think, is communicating how much time we need to take for citizens to have a participatory and ongoing relationship with their politics rather than a sort of set and forget, vote once, delegation approach.

Oh, nice. [laughs] I’ve been talking to a lot of people who are working on deliberative democracy and participatory budgeting and/or distributed forms of engagement, so people in Iceland, in Brazil, in Belgium, and hopefully, soon in Spain, once their election’s over.

No problem.

It’s interesting because what you say also accords with the economist Mariana Mazzucato, recently been talking about elevating and celebrating the public service and the way that public service has been hollowed out over the years and de-skilled. So much of their work and skill base has been moved to ...

That’s great. I noticed that Taiwanese public servants are using Apolitical, the platform. How has that been useful in your observation?

I find that interesting because one of the ways that we’ve seen the public service treated traditionally is as an anonymous entity where people didn’t get individual recognition or credit for their contributions. That seems to be counter to the way that you’re approaching it where you’re empowering public servants.

Even in my own experience, there is a resistance to new forms of input. Systems are the way they are. Governments are designed to counter against risk, they’re very risk averse. How have you been able to communicate to the public service that public participation actually reduces risks for proposition?

It’s interesting that you say that. Another one of my questions was how you’ve ensured that the bureaucracy and establishment are supportive of rather than oppositional to the idea of forking the government.

There was this very fervent moment, this fertile moment of disruption after the 2008 crisis around Occupy Movement and then, in places like Spain, with Podemos. So many of those moments faded out and they lost their energy. How has the Sunflower Movement and its legacy maintained the engagement and ...

It’s now been five years since the Sunflower Movement. Could you tell me what was most significant about that moment from your perspective and what you think the legacy of that moment has been?

Thank you. Thanks so much for making time. I’m really excited to chat with you. I have lots of questions.