Very interesting. Thanks for receiving me, and giving me the opportunity to spend some more time to talk with you.
Thanks a lot.
I think that’s our time.
Yeah. It’s harder to game when it’s secret, the problem is it’s easier to...
I mostly meant to the problem with Google Search for the public is that people could change their website to...
Google is a public goods because it affects society so much that it is grave if people can’t control what’s happening, and if it’s completely obscure. Problem is, the value of Google partially relies on that fact that it deals with our secrets, so I don’t know.
While they’re doing that is just to create an open source and viable alternative, like what you’re doing, except your thing is just for public deliberation. If someone were to create a state-sponsored search engine akin to Google that might be an idea to eventually give the ultimate control to ...
One thing is, I’m afraid of such technologies like Facebook or Google, and I think at some point there could the role of the states to be in this position. At some point when the private power becomes too big it becomes hard for the public to keep it in ...
People get information...we saw people talking about fake news at Saturday’s meeting and major tech companies control the information in a way. Which can completely change a public debate.
Yeah, just to add. What do you think of the potential impact of the debate platforms which are not public but which are private, via the effects of Facebook or whatever, should the state try to regulate?
It might have been something like 20 percent of the investment budget (correction : investment is 20% of the total budget, and participatory budget is 5% of that, so around 100 million €). I’ll have to check it. Is something burning?
Yeah, and it’s a lot of money.
I am quite in favor of that kind of thing. I think the Paris budget is a bit higher in proportion.
The people could propose ideas...
Each circle is a project?
Yeah, yeah, I’m talking about the circles.
This is one project?
OK. 12.5 million for the first year. I don’t know what Taipei City’s budget is.
How much of the budget is actually...What is the percentage of the city budgets?
When you talk about the participatory budgets, what exactly do you mean by that? We have a participatory budget in Paris. Is that the same thing?
Mayor of...?
We had one who within six months of being president would have started World War III.
We have a few who are very nice. Thankfully, one of them didn’t get enough signatures, but he really wanted to send nuclear bombs...
Should I wish for a fringe candidate to be elected in France, then? [laughs]
Do you think it can succeed? Listen to the people, but the masses aren’t really organized yet and propose a tool?
Do you think that you could actually have a top-down initiative because we are creating POP , and there might be a will of the people, but there isn’t an organized thing as big as the movement you had here.
Yeah, that demanded. You mentioned in one of your interviews gov as a consumer. The government has a need because it has needs. It has to answer to the people. Part of your job is creating the tools for the government to answer to the call of the people.
I had two more questions. Or three, maybe. [laughs] First thing is, here you had a bottom-up system. People called for such a platform where you had a movement that...
Is it in English? [laughs]
That’s interesting.
You mean that you check?
You say that it has to represent?
There is major reason for that is that sortition is basically the death of the political class, because once you give power to the people -- ultimate power. Maybe you have lawmakers, and maybe they are elected. That is not absurd. In the end, the real power lies with the ...
We have a problem, we were discussing it with my boss yesterday, who told me he saw one of the major politicians, whether on TV talking about sortition and attacking it, treating the other with such disdain.
Short.
Yeah, we do have some more or less gerrymandering with local elections and stuff like that, but it’s really not on the same scale. We do have...OK, I’m losing the words for that. [laughs]
Not gerrymandering, which is not applicable to French president, because we don’t have an electoral college.
Today, for politicians to get elected, they can’t have a strong mandate because the whole political system is based around them winning by the closest margin possible.
If you win by 51 percent, the following day you can lose by 1 percent. The population changes its opinion quite frequently. Not by much, but it oscillates. You want to have a strong mandate.
So lawmakers change it, and then eventually, the citizens choose. We can actually even go a bit further, which is if the citizens choose, but the margin is too small, then we want the public to be sure.
Then the lawmakers say, "Well, we changed the law. We didn’t implement everything because..." For example, that’s what happened for quite a few amendments to the République Numérique bill, is that they went against European treaties. They don’t have the political power to change this.
Public debate, lawmakers amend the law and put it in a legal form, but the ultimate choice is actually made by a group of random citizens. The random citizens are informed by the debate, by how the public chose on each amendment and such.
One way I was considering was you have a public debate. You have lawmakers using a system like this. I don’t know how the Taiwan one works...
Maybe that change can be more inclusive by using some of the technologies and some of the ideas you love in here.
Maybe we need a change.
It would be our sixth.
We really can’t decide. [laughs] Although I don’t if you’ve seen, but quite a lot of people are calling for a new republic.
I was quite impressed to see that Colombia is much older and has been stable. It’s the same republic as was founded, whereas France at some point during one hundred years once we were...a bit more than a hundred years we had 13 regimes, major regime changes.
Where the bourgeois revolution was invented.
No.
