I have a lot of hope, because I was also a conductor of this type of work, but with the government and the private sector. When Uber comes to Taiwan, they did not ask for anybody’s permission.
Uber charged, initially, higher fees than taxis, so taxi people were okay with it. But then they also had UberX, which is private, non-professionally-licensed, without insurance protection for passengers, and they did not have to pay taxes, so they were able to offer at a lower price point than the taxis.
They started in Taipei city, the city with most taxis already, so it interfered with taxi drivers’ livelihood, who also surrounded the Ministry of Transport, demanding governments to declare UberX illegal.
There were no laws about Uber, because there were no such things before. The lawmakers had no idea of how to do with this. Sometimes, the Ministry of Transport says it’s a transport issue, but Uber says they are just a platform, so it’s an issue for Ministry of Economic Affairs. But the Ministry of Finance also had a different idea.
Even within the government, there is no consensus of what this is about. So what we did, was that we crowdsourced — meaning we listened to thousands of people online, asking them “what do you feel about UberX?”
We asked all the stakeholders — the Uber company, the Taxi companies, the Association of taxi drivers, and all the passengers. They were using this virtual space, which they say see with their own eyes, were do other people stand — where do their Twitter friends, their Facebook friends, stand on this matter.
The algorithm paints those groups in a way that everybody can see in a very simple way, how their positions relate to each other’s positions, just by saying they agree or disagree with some of the positions.
The result of this, is that after three weeks of deliberation, people who were very antagonistic, who initially hated each other, were able to deliberate on a space where they cannot hurt each other, forming a consensus where everybody can accept.
Then we used these consensus to run a meeting, with all the stakeholders — Uber representatives, the Associations, the scholars, the Ministries — for two hours, using these consensus as our agenda. We then extracted promises from all the stakeholders, until we can reach a way forward.
The same way was used for Airbnb. People from Airbnb said because the Uber deliberations were transparent and public and published as web transcripts, they saw all of them, they knew how we are doing it, so they participated in collaboration with the government before any boycotting or protesting happened.
This is how policymaking should be like in the future. Now after the problems, but when innovations first occur. We can listen to everybody’s feelings, everybody’s ideas, until they convince each other to reach a rough consensus.
The capacity of the social media, and the Internet as a space of mediation, gives me hope of its future.