[laughs]

This is a structured conversation you have already that is covering a lot of ground that I want to cover, and I can join in that.

You can have three hours during the day?

You have to do other things there. You’re saying I could have the whole day?

Nice meeting you.

Thanks for joining us.

OK, great.

Hopefully, by the 28th, I will understand it enough to have an intelligent conversation with you on that.

OK, great.

I just realized you could do this with a group set aside. Say, "OK, group, work on this." You could also have Pol.is be fractal, so that the Pol.is process starts over from a point in the Pol.is process.

Could there be some way where Pol.is could branch out at that point, where there’s particular kinds of question where another Pol.is is created about that item? It has focused it on concerns.

Part of what I was thinking was, when you have something which is 95 percent in agreement, what are the concerns of the people who are part of the disagreers? You focus attention on things that are nearly complete consensus. I go, "That’s a really valuable place to be, and ...

The final thing is one of my focuses in my efforts to be more inclusively wise is people have concerns, and addressing those concerns has the power to make a solution better.

It feels that there is some potential synergy with the Pol.is outliers that are not specifically collections of dissent or collections of agreement. They have a uniqueness which may or may not be fruitful. I’m curious, given that you can identify them.

Positive deviance. There it is.

There’s a specific process that focuses on people who have creative solutions that are outside the norm, identifying those people, and spreading their things into the society. Is it positive dissent?

Pol.is, I understand in the fields of opinion that are given, there are some outliers who are not really part of any of these groups. I’m wondering if you would ever think of doing something to explore them. What is it called?

I will poke around more with you in that when I visit on the 28th. [laughs]

I’m not thinking of them as necessarily opponents of each other. I’m thinking that there’s potential synergies between them. There’s differences and they serve different purposes. I wanted to talk around in that space.

I don’t know that. Is that another similar?

What?

Codigital is a prioritization thing, which does pair comparisons, "Do you prefer this option or that option?" It’s similar to Pol.is in the sense that anybody participating can offer an item in....

Can I insert? You’ve basically given me enough to answer my question. I want to try a couple more quick ones. Do you know about Codigital?

It’s a level...

Once you start moving towards that, there’ll be more effort.

With an algorithm, you could cancel all that effect out?

It would hide consensus. That’s what I’m thinking.

If you have the bot that gives random answers, and you have lots of those, so there are more random answers than there are real-people, intended answers, what would be the response of the system to that kind of intervention?

A new one I came up with since my last talk with Audrey would be somebody who’s not trying to bias a system towards their perspective but is trying to demolish its ability to do its work.

I love that. There’s a bunch of things I’d like to talk about. You can only have five more minutes, so we can’t talk about all of them. I’m imagining, again, Audrey and I discussed the different ways it might be able to be messed with.

I think that’s a fabulous example. Thank you for an English-American example I can dive into.

The other is somebody’s suggestion that came out of the process that happens to be a brilliant suggestion that encompasses a lot of what needs to be taken into account, and everybody, from all sides is recognizing that. That’s closer to wise consensus. I’m assuming both of those are generated ...

A lot of my inquiries come out of that. One of the things I’m assuming -- although I can’t read Chinese to tell what’s going on with the specific results of the vTaiwan/Pol.is things -- is that the Pol.is process surfaces two kinds of consensus, one of which is lowest-common-denominator ...

Pol.is, one of the central things in my search for inclusive wisdom -- participatory wisdom is one way to talk about what I’m interested in -- I’m interested in the quality of outcomes. I think participation is necessary because of the complexity of the systems that we’re dealing with and ...

If we can go back, I want to continue from there in a few minutes.

I will shift gears, temporarily, to Pol.is.

Interesting.

Right, but they’re not voting for the party. They’re voting for the president. That president...

But that’s a tradition, not a requirement, like it is in...

Then the prime minister is a function of parties that are in control of the legislature. That name is usually associated with that kind of function.

In this, there’s the general secretary. The premier I guess would be the prime minister. What’s called the prime minister in some places is called premier here, something like that?

They’re in a multi-disciplinary and diplomatic kind of role, but one has a very specific realm within which they do that.

How does the minister without portfolio exist? Digital stuff is needed by every part of the government. I can assume that’s true of other ministers without portfolios or not? What makes a minister without portfolio?

Whoa. [laughs]

[laughs]

It’s like the executive branch in American politics?

You talked about other ministers without portfolio. What is the minister without portfolio?

I followed maybe a third of that in terms of the specifics. Part of me needs to have the quick run-down of the structure of the government. The minister without portfolio, is that what any head of a ministry is? Or, is it things that are needed across the boards, ...

They’re not appointed by particular departments? I though they represented their particular departments.

What you’re saying now is from earlier before POs were created.