William Charlton: How are you?

Audrey Tang: Pretty good. It’s 8:00 PM here, and it’s afternoon for you.

William Charlton: Yeah, it is, it is, just had lunch. [laughs] Where do you want to start? Or where do I want to start is probably the question. I think I sent you a document about the catalyst. There’s been many catalysts.

William Charlton: Given where we are, given the huge issues we face, a lot of the decision-making seems to be, not just here, but all over the world, it’s firefighting. It occurred to me that when we make a decision, if we looked at the causes of the issue that we are trying to treat, the first one is, actually ask that question. What are we trying to solve?

William Charlton: Quite often, that doesn’t get asked. If we stated the issue, rather than just come up with a solution out of a vacuum, we might understand better why our solution is tackling that issue. If we stated that issue, it then might be possible to say, "Well, actually, is there any other way of dealing with this issue?"

William Charlton: We’ve got one in the UK at the moment where we’ve got a housing crisis. This is probably a good example. The solution is to build more houses, which sounds obvious, until you start looking at the real reasons why we’ve got the housing crisis.

William Charlton: Actually, it’s because houses are more expensive. People aren’t able to afford the houses. Then the question comes, "Well, why are they more expensive?" and so on, and so forth. It occurred to me that if we actually recorded, and publicly recorded, the issues we’re actually trying to address...

William Charlton: Because what happens when it comes down to my locality, the experience we have, we just get a new housing development? The only thing we can really do is object -- we’ve got no choice to do anything else -- or accept.

William Charlton: There seems to be a disjuncture there. There’s a parallel with this when there was a competition...I don’t know whether you were at the global...

Audrey Tang: Challenge?

William Charlton: Challenge, yeah, to come up with an alternative to the UN. Lots of questions come up there. You’re not going to create an alternative, again, out of nothing. I was referring back to the Sunflower movement.

William Charlton: The sensible thing to me is, it seems to be, to create another platform where you could actually discuss the same issues, or similar issues. The problem, of course, then becomes is that, generally...I don’t know about Taiwan. I think you’re probably more engaged.

William Charlton: In the UK, the general population are very disengaged with politics, because it’s just one of those things that happens. We just put up with it. That’s possibly an issue. When you’ve got a local problem like we have with these...

William Charlton: To put it in context, I live in a village with about 850 houses. It’s evolved over the years. We don’t have roads. We have lanes. They’re the width of a good tractor. One modern tractor completely fills the lane. We’ve got 850 houses connected with these lanes.

William Charlton: There’s a few, you could arguably say, two-lane, but most of them are one-lane, because they’ve got cars parked along them. There’s a restriction there with the infrastructure. We are currently fighting 250 houses extra.

William Charlton: It’s not going to work, but we’ve got no alternative. We’ve got no way to debate an alternative. When you discuss it with local people, they say, "Well, what can we do?" I say, "Well, at least, we could just plan what we want and present it. At least we’ve got a starting point," but we don’t even have that.

William Charlton: There’s a gap, to my mind. A gap in our deliberative processes, not just for the way we deliberate, but in the places and how we deliberate. The Sunflower movement was a great example of how it might be done differently.

William Charlton: I set up a group to have a look at this challenge, using the Sunflower model as a mirroring, and then we needed a decision making process. How are we going to make decisions? That’s where I came up with this. Let’s try and hook it in with the system. Are you familiar with systems theory?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, sure.

William Charlton: If we hooked into it systems theory, we could then get a bigger picture and say, "Well, actually, what are we doing first, and why are we doing it?" Then when you’ve come up with a proposal, we can actually examine that proposal and say, "Well, what are the effects of that proposal? What are the knock-on effects, the unseen side effects?"

William Charlton: If we record them, then we can debate them at a later stage. We could actually invite experts in, because we’re going to find places where we don’t have knowledge most of the time. [laughs] We could then have this deliberation, get as far as we can, and then say, "We need experts. We need to understand the data. We need to find the truth."

William Charlton: What tends to happen in these -- we’ve had a few meetings recently -- they get very heated. People come up with their version of why. It’s blame it on the capitalists, the immigrants, the lazy folk, whatever. [laughs]

William Charlton: Let’s look at the truth. What are the figures? What are the figures of immigration and emigration? What are the figures for capitalism? Let’s look at the numbers. Within our community, we probably don’t have the expertise, but we can call on the expertise.

William Charlton: What came out of that was then if we had a deliberating process, say in our village, we recorded it, and we recorded it in a structure that identified the systems that we’re connecting to, any other community, if they came up with a similar issue, could say as soon as they punch in Lapland, building, housing shortage, our deliberation can also come up.

William Charlton: They can see what we’ve done. That could knock on, knock on, knock on, and knock on. I think that’s the core of what I’m trying. We don’t have the software. I’ve been playing with the schema. I’ve got a background in linguistics and database stuff, so that’s happy territory for me.

William Charlton: Again, you come up with, how far do you normalize, and for efficiency, how far do you normalize the data, or how vague do you make it so that it still works? There’s a place to sort out what’s efficient and what’s not efficient.

William Charlton: That’s the structure I’ve sort of got, but until it’s tried and tested, I don’t know whether it’s the right structure, and we don’t have the software. [laughs] Lots of catch-22s.

William Charlton: I’m not quite sure how the system you have the parallel mirror, quite how that works, and whether there’s any prompts for where you’re out of your depth, do you ask somebody else, and how you work with all that, or how you’re structured at all.

Audrey Tang: It’s almost entirely dependent on the size of the group, how well the group knows each other, and how far physically are the group members from each other, how their life experiences overlap. Those three factors can almost determine the tool that we use to facilitate the process.

Audrey Tang: For tightly-knit groups, like 100 people or less, who already know each other, digital tools are just for archival. It’s just for recording, as we said, for like-minded groups, or for followup discussions. What’s really key at that scale is professional facilitation.

Audrey Tang: It is a facilitator that can get people into the right emotion, which is after everybody share their life experience, their story, their narrative’s told, get into the sense of, "OK, so, we have very different life experiences, but are there some common values?"

Audrey Tang: This facilitation, we found, was the key to small group who already share some life experience. My main work is on how to create empathy among groups who share no life experience at all, who have no personal connection, to speak of, to each other.

Audrey Tang: Using language of experts of different domains to put them on a shared mind map, so that everybody can understand the issue at hand, but using the vocabulary and structure that they are comfortable with. It is a little bit like simultaneous interpretation, but not between languages, but rather between worldviews.

Audrey Tang: That’s the main work. For 100 people or less, who already know each other and share the same language, like British English, that’s overkill, to be frank. Normally, a weekly or biweekly gathering, on ongoing relationship, plenty of food, [laughs] which people can bring by themselves, a good recording or capturing device, is all you need.

Audrey Tang: The capturing device could be, Discourse is pretty popular. For very tight-knit groups, Loomio is even better. There are already ready-made tools for exactly this purpose, for capturing structured data and the context.

Audrey Tang: That’s the main feedback I have, because it seems that in your case, most people share somewhat similar experiences.

William Charlton: Until you scale up. Then it gets more diverse, or until there’s vested interests, which is an issue. Going back to my example here, the people that turn up in the meeting are generally the articulate, the confident, the comfortable. Arguably, the wealthy.

William Charlton: The last one’s not so true. The demographic is definitely not representative of the community. That’s the bottom line. My concern, really, is how we get a representative quorum that matches the demographic. That’s the hard part.

Audrey Tang: I’m not sure about statistical representation, because even if you do sortition and get a demographically sound part, that’s just the first half of the problem.

Audrey Tang: The second half is to get the people who share the demographic who did not get chosen for the sortition, or invited to the quorum, to somehow accept the result as something that they are willing to get along with, that they are OK to live with.

Audrey Tang: No decisions are better without this. Anyone who can claim to be a stakeholder, but did not get discovered, or was not drawn in the sortition, or someone who shares their background did get drawn into the sortition, but they don’t have the rhetorics and oratory skills, and so they lost the argument, and so on.

Audrey Tang: All those different conditions may arise that makes the statistical representation void. Now, of course, if you compare it to the representative democratic system, arguably, you can say, "Well, but that’s still useful input to the MPs."

Audrey Tang: To that degree, everybody would agree, like this is useful input. This is useful agenda-setting. This determines what may be overlooked by the MPs and their crew, or the city council and the crew. To this point, everybody will agree.

Audrey Tang: If you try to replace even part of the policymaking or budget-making power of the existing representative system, then just statistical representation, or statistical representativeness, is not enough, because it does not factor in, as I said, the capability of propagation back to the community, as well as the still unequal rhetoric skill of the people who did get chosen for the quorum.

William Charlton: Are you sure about that? [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I am pretty, pretty sure about it. There’s quite a few examples that I’ve personally worked with.

Audrey Tang: We kind of went with a hybrid model, where we’d get stakeholders, experts, so-called representatives from communities deliberating in one room of maybe 30 people, and have a town hall where hundreds, thousands of people can watch the live stream of the experts doing the deliberation.

Audrey Tang: It’s a one-way live stream, because the town hall, there may be people who want to protest. There may be people who want to derail the discussion.

Audrey Tang: I’m personally in the town hall part, so they can come to me and make their point, or make their voice heard on a pretty good platform called Slido, S-L-I-D-O, designed for this kind of real-time crowdsourced agenda. The smaller room, which is being broadcasted to the larger room, gets to focus on the discussion at hand uninterrupted.

Audrey Tang: My role is like an ESPN anchor or something, who explains what happens in the smaller room live stream to the larger room, to the larger town hall people, so that they know in their layperson’s language what’s at play for each play, each move that the experts make in the smaller room.

Audrey Tang: In the experts room, we don’t mean academic experts only. We mean people with live experience, that are generally honored, recognized, and so on. People in the town hall can see that their group of person performing in real time, and informing their discussion through asynchronous and online participation.

Audrey Tang: That’s one of the ways that we try to maintain both the scale and the quality of the discussion. Still, with this arrangement, it accommodates maybe to 1,000 people. Scaling beyond that, we don’t have a very good experience.

Audrey Tang: Scaling beyond 1,000 people, we resort back to AI-powered conversations, which is crowdsourced, but it’s almost text only. There is very little supporting material. We can only do the problem discovery part, and check each other’s feelings in design thinking terms.

Audrey Tang: That’s just first quarter, or a little bit over first quarter, of the first diamond, but everything else, the how may we questions and so on, we still have to do it face-to-face. There is some active research going on in virtual reality and so on, but I would say they are not mature for this purpose for at least another two or three years.

William Charlton: The other problem is that quite often, you’ll...Any technical solution cuts people out, because they don’t have the Internet. There’s still quite a few. I don’t know what the percentage is, but it’s measurable.

William Charlton: Certainly here, there’s a measurable percentage that just don’t have the Internet, and don’t want to have the Internet.

Audrey Tang: Certainly, you could bring the Internet to them, though. You just organize an offline meeting, and then make sure that it’s well-captured, like we did in your island. We capture everything in 360 video, but we had to post-process it and upload it afterwards.

William Charlton: How do you bootstrap something like that from here?

Audrey Tang: Taiwan has a very recent history with democracy. We only had democracy for 30 years. I still remember the martial law. For us, democracy is a very new thing, as is the World Wide Web. Because of this, it’s somewhat easier.

Audrey Tang: People find that there is so much room to experiment with, they don’t think democracy as just some other process, because this is a very new thing to us. In the UK, far as I understand, because I’m traveling, as I mentioned, to Edinburgh later this week, they share this model of the so-called Highland and Island Development Agency.

William Charlton: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Which there’s a lot of grassroot organizing, but they still use the social technology to empower the local decision-making, by essentially putting more and more of the building in the commons, and have the decision-making power vested especially to the younger generation.

Audrey Tang: Also, to people who are invested their life, their career, to the development, the betterment of this region in general, but just not to them personally. I think it’s been quite well-known in the international social enterprise community as a worked model, but I don’t know how well-versed you are in this community organization effort.

William Charlton: I’m familiar with it. I know of it, I’ll put it like that. In some ways, the highlands are -- probably because of their situation, and the necessity -- they’ve needed to get their communications. They’re very spread out, and it’s actually difficult to get to be.

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

William Charlton: They’ve had to facilitate it, in some ways. In many ways, they’ve leapfrogged the rest of the UK, England and Wales. Wales is actually, there’s some interesting things going on in Wales for much the same reason.

William Charlton: It’s been marginalized, and it’s difficult to get from your neighbor to neighbor. They’re not all next door. They’re not walking distance. They’ve had to leverage technology to actually get things done. The knock-on effect of that is, actually, they’ve got, I think, a more connected, more engaged community with decision-making.

William Charlton: Whereas in the bulk of the UK, we just go, "Yeah, it’s going to happen. OK, fine. Let me get on with the rest of my life." People are disengaged. Worse than that, probably because the only thing that they know how to do is object.

William Charlton: We tend to do that all the time. That’s our modus operandi. The unfortunate side effect, and going back to the situation here, is that the local council we have -- the parish council, which is the very local council, and then we have the district council, which is the next up -- they’re both seen as the enemy. [laughs]

William Charlton: That’s not helpful. To my mind, we need to find some way to break that them and us, so that it’s just us, and it’s not them and us.

Audrey Tang: Have anyone in the nearby city council or whatever tried, for example, participatory budgeting or any of those new devices that connects the people who object with people who make the decisions?

William Charlton: No, not that I’m aware of.

Audrey Tang: Then I think the most practical way is just to find a friendly or at least attentive person with facilitation training or with social work training -- that often helps -- and so on, in the local city bureaucracy.

Audrey Tang: If the council is not helping, often the career public servants are sympathizing with it. They’re largely anonymous, so they probably would not come out and just say, "I think there should be more local engagement."

Audrey Tang: Surely, there must be someone in a correct position to start piloting a dialogue to break the ice, so to speak. You can import facilitators from anywhere, [laughs] even from the Highlands and Islands, but it really needs buy-in, at least from a career public servant in the city to start even turning the wheels, so to speak.

Audrey Tang: If the council, as you mentioned, is generally seen as the enemy, at least some people will still trust folks and people working in the statistics department, people working in the planning department, and things like that, because they are career public servants.

William Charlton: I’m guessing on problems, looking ahead, I’m not looking for problems. I don’t know, it’d be an interesting one to, because I can think of a couple of names. It’d be interesting to try, because they might feel there are conflicting interests, conflicting interest. I’m not sure. That’s a good one to look at.

Audrey Tang: No, I’m not talking about forcing them to make a change to the decision-making process. I’m just saying, building rapport, just trust people between.

William Charlton: That’s a good point. I’ll be interested to hear what are your thoughts about the systems side of it. I see that as quite important as a way to explaining the bigger picture to people. We are faced with some huge issues that most people I talk to go, "Well, what can we do about it?" [laughs]

William Charlton: I think the only way we’re going to do anything about all these pollution, climate change -- the list is big -- biodiversity, and they’re all connected. They seem to be so big that we can’t do anything about them.

William Charlton: It’s left to governments to make agreements. We’ve seen what happens when someone like America, for example, pulls out and stops. I’m thinking, if we had a system like the one you’ve got, and was scalable...I think there’s the issue where you’re saying about the scalable, and how do you scale with...

William Charlton: The only way I can see you can actually scale is to have some form of representation, someone on the line. At some level, you’re going to need, because you can’t just have everybody connected, saying. "We should do this," and, "We should do that."

William Charlton: There is some way of scaling where we can actually engage the public to understand the issues, and then get buy-in for the solutions. That’s the hardest part. I think we’ve got more buy-in, for example, now with plastic. People understand.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

William Charlton: That’s due a television program. People understand it. Now, the tide is shifting a bit, where people are looking at things encased in plastic and saying, "Well, actually, I’d rather buy that without the plastic." It is happening. Whether it’s happening at the right, sufficient speed, I’m not sure.

Audrey Tang: I think there’s three kinds of scaling I would like to mention. There is, of course, horizontal scaling, scaling out. You’re correct in saying that there needs to be some kind of model, if not representation outright, at least some delegates, like small world network, to maintain when you scale out.

Audrey Tang: There’s also scaling up, which is a single message reinforced, and more and more people, like in a traditional social movement. For that, you don’t need that much representation. You need an actionable, connected, extensible message. That’s all you need to scale up.

Audrey Tang: Of course, it’s narrow. It’s not all the sustainable development goes here. It would be just one, and a very simple one at that, like the ice bucket challenge, or #MeToo, or whatever. It’s pretty good at scaling up.

Audrey Tang: There’s the third dimension, which I often mention as scaling deeply, meaning that in places where the cross-sectoral relationship is absent or toxic, one can scale deeply, meaning get fellows from each sector related to that problem to be in issues of the other stakeholders at play by just shipping people around, having fellowship, building rapport, sharing food, and so on.

Audrey Tang: That scales in a deep way, meaning if you have a, for example, university that embarks on a social responsibility program that have their students solve social problems as part of the course, then it actually determines how those students view the world down the line, maybe for the next 30 years or so.

Audrey Tang: Scaling deeply only works, of course, in formative years. It’s very hard to change someone’s worldview without resorting to existential therapy level stuff... though that also works.

Audrey Tang: I’m not saying that adults are hopeless. I’m just saying it’s much easier [laughs] if you start in basic education and in the college.

William Charlton: You can see my doubtful-looking face there.

Audrey Tang: Right. I’m 37 now, so I’m hopelessly optimistic. I don’t think anything will change that as part of my core personality. What I’m saying is that that’s because I joined the World Wide Web and the open source development in its formative days.

Audrey Tang: That ethic, I carry with me no matter where I go. That’s what I mean by scaling deeply. I think education is a large part of it. It’s not education systems or institutes, per se, but just getting kids in the habit of doing meaningful environmental and social work, and identifying with the purpose, but not the instrument, the skill, or the tools.

Audrey Tang: That’s the third dimension I would like to mention, which also scales, but you just need to wait longer.

William Charlton: That goes back to the education thing, which again, takes times, doesn’t it? Part of my thinking with the process of designing is that, if you collect a lot of people, say, "We’ve got an issue," say, with housing. Take this example, because it’s a real example.

William Charlton: You actually then say, "OK, what are the causes of this?" It gets people thinking. It’s a critical thinking, but at a very basic level. Once that’s started, and then you say, "OK, well that’s..." It doesn’t matter whether it is the cause, so much, but if you think it’s the cause, then we can discuss it.

William Charlton: You might want to discuss it with...Are you familiar with World Café and open...?

Audrey Tang: Sure, of course.

William Charlton: They’ve both got their different advantages, but World Café’s quite useful in that it can help people who don’t feel comfortable in large groups to actually participate. They get little discussions going there.

William Charlton: Once you start looking at the cause, then you can say, "OK, what’s the cause of that?" This is the Socratic question. Until you could ask them, or say, "When we’re doing this discovery, until you can get back to nature says it’s so, then you can find a cause that we can do something about, perhaps, depending on the circumstances."

William Charlton: That opens up a lot of thinking. Well, actually, what we’ve got now is not necessarily a given, so what could we do to make it better? Whether we can or not is not so much important, but it’s the education and the understanding.

William Charlton: Likewise, say, when somebody comes up with a proposal, you could say, "Well, what are the knock-on effects of this proposal, and what’s actually going to happen, the cost, consumption, materials, and the societal harm, necessarily?" and so on, and so forth.

William Charlton: To me, again, I don’t know. I’ve never really tried it yet that’s worked, but I have tried it, and it’s not worked. That’s, in my defense, I tried it as a protest group. When you’ve got a protest group, that’s all they want to do, is protest. They don’t want to hear the other side.

William Charlton: I think if you can get it neutral and say, "OK, we’ve got this issue. Let’s just get all the people and talk about it." Once you start looking at the knock-on effects of the proposals, you can see, because we don’t have much for maneuver now, whatever we decide to do.

William Charlton: I was looking at a thing today about Greece. They’ve got a smart city. They were doing all sorts of things, and they all sound good. I’m thinking about, well, actually, some of that doesn’t sound too good. It sounds like a good idea, and good fun, but where’s the power going to come from?

William Charlton: Where are the people going to come from? Where’s the employment going to come from, because that’s a big issue. There’s all these knock-on effects. If you get automated vehicles, effectively, you’ve done people out of a job.

William Charlton: I think the structure would help people understand the situation, as much as the bigger picture.

Audrey Tang: In my office in Taipei is called Social Innovation Lab. We have autonomous vehicles on trial. It’s an experiment. They are tricycles. They are just slowish tricycles. I live just close to this Jianguo Flower Market.

Audrey Tang: They solve a very real social problem, which is elderly people strolling along the central park of Taipei, the Daan Forest Park, going to flower market, bought a lot of flowers, pots, and things they’re like, and they’re heavy.

Audrey Tang: They don’t want to rent a taxi, because it’s just 15 minutes walk’s away. They want to keep shopping. They don’t want to be dragged down. There is just so much they can do with the autonomy, without enlisting their grandchildren or something.

Audrey Tang: Having a tricycle that just accompany them, and you can just put stuff on it -- and at the end of it, you can just hop on it, and drive yourself home -- is actually very helpful. I don’t think it made anyone lose any jobs. I think it is a purely socially beneficial device.

William Charlton: I think it’s worth asking the question. I don’t want to go necessarily on the specifics. On that particular one, you actually said they don’t want to ask their friends and family. There’s a connection. They’ve lost a reason to make that connection. That could have a knock-on effect.

Audrey Tang: If they ask their family, but their family, it is just to help picking and carrying stuff, then they can’t do as much real conversation as they would do, if they have invited a normal accompany trip. They’re taking the trivial part out of the connection.

Audrey Tang: I don’t think the grandchildren or teenagers or very happy if they are just reduced to a carrier or something. That’s what I mean by equalizing the relationship between humans by automating part of the work that is not seen as a desirable job, but as a kind of filial piety.

Audrey Tang: I know this concept doesn’t quite mean as much in the UK, but something, an obligation to your family. It makes the family dynamic more dynamic, is all what I’m saying. I don’t think it really deprives any social connection.

Audrey Tang: Again, we’re just on field trial here. What I’m going on is, because this open source technology, and the local students loves to modify the build. It’s slow enough, it collects useful data, open data, but it doesn’t hurt anyone, even if it runs into something. It has the right to road as any pedestrian.

Audrey Tang: We are basically saying these kind of autonomous vehicles are the key to deepen the understanding between AI and collective intelligence. Instead of seeing something that pulls them apart, it ties them together. It may not be the perfect example, but it’s the one that springs to my mind.

William Charlton: You understand what I was saying about asking those other questions, that it’s useful to ask them, because it’s very easy to get beguiled into thinking, "This is wonderful"?

Audrey Tang: Very much so. We really need to do quantitative studies before and after. That’s why we run experiments.

William Charlton: Yeah. Given what we’ve talked about, apart from the human side, where I can find the right people to...Facilitate isn’t so much a problem, because it’s open space technologies. There’s enough people who understand that stuff, probably, to be able to get somebody to facilitate. That’s less of an issue.

William Charlton: Engaging with the authorities on that, I’d have to give that some thought. The deep thing is, or the long term thing is, if I am going to use this structure with issues, causes and effects, proposals, and effects, ratings, is how...

William Charlton: You mentioned Loomio. It has some of that, but it doesn’t have that structure. It’s getting the software to, what software would be available to...The only thing I can think is to build some, build it from scratch again.

Audrey Tang: We’re working on some early prototypes. The one we actually use day-to-day is called real-time board. Real-time board is just Post-It Notes online, collaboratively. It all depends on how you organize those Post-It Notes.

Audrey Tang: That takes skill. We use, actually, the PolicyLab UK policymaking toolkit, and their way of using the Post-It Notes. At least that’s something that your government invented, and therefore should understand.

Audrey Tang: I think the Policy Lab people, the policy toolkit the lab developed is worth looking into, if just for the shared vocabulary. As career public servants, they are required to know this stuff. That’s Policy Lab UK.

Audrey Tang: We are developing ourselves -- as you said, in-house -- quite a few software to automate the process of just putting Post-It Notes of the right color on the right points to connect cause and effect, stakeholders, and so on.

Audrey Tang: There’s currently two efforts in Taiwan, but they are both, I think, being developed in the early stages. One is called sense.tw, which just making sense of something, sense.tw. It’s trying to basically link...

Audrey Tang: I don’t know whether you know the idea of web annotations, which is a web standard that you take a PDF file, a local development planning picture, a website, whatever, and start highlighting and annotating any part of it, without the support from the site administrator. It’s an overlay. What it tries to do...

William Charlton: There’s a Firefox plugin that does that, I think.

Audrey Tang: Sense.tw is trying to turn that overlay and mark it with the cause and effect lines, as you said, and make a mind map out of it, so you can have a bird’s-eye view. You can also zoom into the actual sources, where there is evidences, facts, or whatever are being presented. That’s sense.tw’s project structure.

William Charlton: That sounds interesting. Again, the thing I think is the first thing that comes to mind there is that, effectively, back to the curated library thing, which is great if you’ve got lots of curators. What I’m aiming for is that the process is self-curating.

Audrey Tang: The other thing is Wikum, W-I-K-U-M, Wikum. It’s like Wiki and a forum, so it calls itself Wikum. What it does is that you take an unstructured conversation -- as you said, Loomio, Discourse, Reddit, you name it -- but then it recursively enables people who participate to build mind maps that summarize fragments of discussions, until you have a bird’s-eye picture.

Audrey Tang: Unlike sense.tw, it doesn’t come from library or citational sources, but it comes from a live dialogue that takes place in a threaded discussion. The author is now working on porting the same technology to Slack, which is kind of different, because it’s real-time. It’s far more back and forth than a forum, which it tends to be self-containing.

Audrey Tang: If they solve it for Slack, then it also solves for capture or transcript of face-to-face, open space technology. It’s like Slack, if you type it down. Wikum, I think it’s also something you can look into.

William Charlton: W-I-K-A-M?

Audrey Tang: W-I-K-U-M.

William Charlton: K-U-M. We come across that, don’t we?

Audrey Tang: It’s from Amy X. Zhang, called W-I-K-U-M.

William Charlton: I’m old school. I’m XML Schema, that sort of technology, where it’s predefined, which has its issues, obviously. At some point, you have to define your categories, somewhere along the line. Eventually, you’ve got to give them field names somehow.

William Charlton: That’s the conundrum, whether you start with field names, or whether you have it general concept fields, as opposed to specific field names. I’ve gone for the specific field names in a general sense. The specific field name would be issue.

William Charlton: Or actually, the specific field name there would be point of interest type issue, because they’re all points of interest on the system or cycle. That’s fairly generic.

William Charlton: The other thing I hope, if I pursue this -- which is another question altogether -- is that you could have a place for somebody who comes up with a solution for an issue, and says, "Well, I’d like to store this, and enter it into a database, so that people can actually use it, and benefit from it."

William Charlton: They could do that, too, but it would ask them what issue, and what part of what cycle it’s trying to address, so that it could actually act as a potentially global repository. I could talk to you about it for hours.

William Charlton: Another aspect of it is that, going on like the domain name registrars’ model, you could have multiple registrars of this data who could do their own manipulation, if they wanted to, and examine it in their own way.

William Charlton: Again, you and I are talking from a place of a democracy. There are places where they don’t have democracy, and it’s not so easy to do what we’re talking about. The model I think would work in places of slightly more strife, because it enables communities to do it in a protected way, so they don’t have to connect to some central service, or they can actually run it from their smartphones.

William Charlton: Then they can put it in one of these repositories, and they can learn from there. Really, there is the other aspect of it, which I can discuss, if you want to.

Audrey Tang: I have a bunch of friends who’s working on it. They call themselves the Secure Scuttlebutt Consortium. They’re in New Zealand, and they are doing something that’s...I’ve pasted you the link, but the idea, very simply put -- and I think Mozilla has some support of it now -- it is exactly as you said, a distributed, secure, offline-capable, LAN-enabled, peer-to-peer social network.

Audrey Tang: They have built a lot of infrastructure so that you can do Git development on it. If you can do Git development on it, then you can do everything, really, because then everything else on top of it is just an overlay. If you want to build an application, this could save you some time, is what I’m saying.

William Charlton: It certainly would. Again, my thinking is that they could output their meeting data is an XML file, validated against a schema, stick it anywhere on any public space. Then the bots, when they arrive, and when some people build them, can search for these XML slugs, incorporate them, and they’ve got the data.

Audrey Tang: The schema we are using for our deliberation is called Akoma Ntoso, which is a proper XML vocabulary for parliamentary, legislative, and judiciary documents. It just so happens that it can work for deliberations as well.

Audrey Tang: The flagship product of the Akoma Ntoso movement is also a UK product called SayIt. SayIt is a mySociety project. I keep all my meeting records in SayIt. I think that the good thing about it is that, just as you said, if I have a meeting transcript -- say, this one -- I just append .an after it to get the XML representation.

Audrey Tang: People are not restricted to the visualization. People can do a lot of cross-culture, even, comparisons, like compare between constitutions, compare between judiciary positions, and so on, based on the Akoma Ntoso vocabulary. That’s also a useful foundation to build on.

William Charlton: I’ll give you a link to mine.

William Charlton: This is very early, very early days. I’ll give you the second one. This came from a hackathon in Cape Town meeting, which again, it was very linear. It was done in Discourse, actually, but in OSC days.

William Charlton: They used Discourse within that. Of course, you lose stuff. It disappears. That’s styled at XML, so then what you’re viewing it on, you’ll probably see. If you view source and see, it’s got XML behind.

Audrey Tang: I think this is a pretty good as a way to capture the proposal at the issue level. I think this is pretty good.

William Charlton: I’ve got a document I can, which I’ve been playing with, which probably explains a bit more. It’s very interesting talking to you, because this is the first time I’ve talked to people who seem to understand the bigger picture of what’s going on.

William Charlton: I’ve done this pretty much for a long time in a sort of vacuum. [laughs] I called it climate change. I have documents on this...

William Charlton: ...can’t we? Have you eaten?

Audrey Tang: I’m sorry?

William Charlton: Have you eaten? I’m not holding up your supper.

Audrey Tang: No, it’s fine, yeah. I eat XML tag soup.

William Charlton: [laughs] That’s good, because most people go, "XML, it’s dead."

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

William Charlton: Which it isn’t, of course. It’s very much alive, it’s just not visible.

Audrey Tang: It’s just become like democracy in the old democracies. It just functions in the background.

William Charlton: In many ways, I had a useful grounding, because I started with PostScript, trying to do stuff on printers. I don’t whether you’ve come across PostScript. PostScript is actually where PDFs came from. PDF is just an encapsulated version of PostScript. This is before the Web.

William Charlton: Then from there, I went straight into XML, because I was trying to do something with the mobile phones. They had a thing called WAP, which again, disappeared. Technology overtook me.

Audrey Tang: I started coding in ’89, so I still remember the days before the Web.

William Charlton: What were you coding in, BASIC?

Audrey Tang: Back at the time, Logo, of course, but also BASIC, yes.

William Charlton: I’ve got friends who started in assembler, which is a form of madness, I think.

Audrey Tang: I learned that much later. It’s not my native language.

William Charlton: I didn’t even bother.

Audrey Tang: I don’t remember punch cards, either.

Audrey Tang: We’re the relatively personal computerized generation.

William Charlton: We’re digressing slightly, but there was a very interesting chap called Richard Feynman you’ve probably heard of. He fought for a while to keep one of the old computers going that was analog. He had an analog weather computer.

William Charlton: For a long time, it was much better, because it was stepless, because it was analog. I think there’s something there that I think we might have missed. I think there’s something useful there about that, because digital, there’s always steps somewhere.

William Charlton: You’ve got to define your resolution. Whereas analog, it’s at an atomic level, I don’t know, quantum level. I don’t know what level it is, but it’s very deep.

Audrey Tang: I’ve encountered a fabulous education tool -- I don’t know whether you know it or not -- it’s a computer game called Democracy 3.

William Charlton: [laughs] Now, you are kidding me.

Audrey Tang: Its user interface is, like, 80 percent the same, similar, as the document as you just sent me. It shows through green lines, reinforcing cause and effect, through red lines, a negative externality, and the speed corresponds to how fast it’s affecting other externalities.

Audrey Tang: It has a very detailed policy model of the populations affected by policies. You can also add on some downloadable packs, such as Social Engineering, Clones and Drones, Electioneering, or Africa. I found this as an extremely good education tool.

Audrey Tang: So much so that I made a mod for Taiwan, using our National Development Council’s data, just so that I can explain policies. I think this is a good way, if not accurate for actual policymaking, to get everybody on the mindset of systems thinking.

William Charlton: That’s very important. The thing I haven’t mentioned, which, actually, I’m not sure it is entirely relevant...Tell me when you’ve got to go, because I can talk to you for another couple of days, I think. When I started looking at this thinking, well...

William Charlton: I like to go back not quite to assembler, but somewhere close, looking at something I’d like to -- there’s a link now. Grab the Google link -- understand the causation, as I said. When you go back, you go back, and you go back, let’s look at our history.

William Charlton: Most people go back to the Napoleonic. They might go back to the Middle Ages. They might go back to the Dark Ages. Actually, to see where the inflection, the inflection point is 10,000 years ago. There’s an awful lot of interest, I think. I don’t know whether it’ll be of interest to you.

William Charlton: There’s an awful lot of changes -- and there’s a couple of books. I can give you some books as well -- that illustrate what happens. It’s a mindset thing. We have this duality of nurturing empathy, and as you were saying, about getting people on board in that frame of meeting helps in a meeting.

William Charlton: Otherwise, they’re competing for their square, their circle, their space, or their whatever. They don’t know they’re doing it. People don’t know they’re doing it. They don’t know they’re in a war footing or a loving footing. Those are these two footings.

William Charlton: There’s lots of arguments about why we went from hunter-gatherer to agrarian. The jury’s still out on that. What happened was that suddenly, things had value and worth, whereas they weren’t exactly worthless before, but they weren’t ascribed a value, you could then park it and say, "It’s worth that much."

William Charlton: "My this year’s harvest, I know how long it’s taken me, how much it hurt, how the work, effort, and so on. In my head, it’s worth..." I’ve got the figure, and I can see what the equivalent is, and it’s mine, which is a very different mindset to, you were talking about the meetings where people bring food.

William Charlton: If somebody goes to a table, gets a plate, and piles it so that he can’t get anything more on the plate, he’ll get looks from other people. If he started filling his pockets as well, somebody would say something.

William Charlton: Whereas when it’s converted to money and a token, it’s then not connected with any emotional, somehow it seems OK to collect it, hoard it, and gather more. It’s a very different mindset. There’s some really interesting understandings, I think, from the Bushmen.

William Charlton: There’s a lovely story, another one. This is my favorite subject at the moment, so do tell me when I’m boring you. Otherwise, I’ll just carry on. There’s a lovely story of, say, East meets West. It’s not East meets West, but it’s that sort of thing, where an anthropologist fell foul of the innate rules that he didn’t understand.

William Charlton: Extract for this, yeah. [quiet muttering] This is an extract from a book by an earlier anthropologist, where he falls foul of the unwritten rules. It’s a lovely story. He should have known, really, but he didn’t.

William Charlton: This is part of his anthropology. He should have really understood what he was doing, but didn’t. They had to explain to him in simple worlds. They have this thing, they call it cursing the meat. It’s a way of, as the previous writer James Suzman, calls it, "fiercely egalitarian."

William Charlton: They are fiercely egalitarian. Rather than just expect it, they will actually enforce it, which is unusual. I’m not sure you’d get away with that today, in our current culture. It’s counterintuitive.

Audrey Tang: There’s many parallels in that, like recently, Taiwan has a trade agreement with New Zealand, but within their trade agreement, there’s a parallel chapter between the Maori people and the indigenous people here.

Audrey Tang: All of the Austronesian and Polynesian culture, they came out from Taiwan. Taiwan is like the originating place for them, for the language and the cultures. In Taiwan, we have more than a dozen nations of indigenous people, some still pretty much around.

Audrey Tang: They have a separate diplomatic track with the Maori people. Recently, just a bunch of Maori people came to visit their heritage, their ancestry. I think part of the lure of this is that a lot of the culture you just described, those fiercely egalitarian culture, in some nations, it’s matriarchal.

Audrey Tang: It’s not without its gender biases, but with good environmental consciousness. The consciousness is permeating to everything they do, not just for the sake of the environment.

Audrey Tang: It’s part of their identity.

William Charlton: Absolutely.

Audrey Tang: All this is without the help of "sustainable development goals" or "social enterprise," because that’s part of their national identity. A lot of what we do here in Taiwan is just to honor the nations as they are.

Audrey Tang: Also, unlearn what we do from a Han ethnic, very much currency, financial, trade-oriented culture, to the ways of living of the still very much living indigenous people. I think that is also one of the very useful ways to think about it.

Audrey Tang: Then these people, they also, all over Polynesia, and all over Madagascar, I think, all share similar lifestyles.

William Charlton: Did, yeah.

Audrey Tang: Still do. Many of them are still reinvigorating. When I came to New Zealand, I visited three times in the past two years. Many different places, they are just revitalizing this, because they realize that may be the shortcut.

Audrey Tang: Their constitution is the treaty. They have to honor, for example, the Maori people consider a river have a personhood. They actually give that river legal personhood, so they can take place in board meetings and things like that.

Audrey Tang: I think all this helps us to anthropomorphize the negative externalities, so that we can all see that we’re harming the river, which is not a river god, like some Shinto belief. It helps to think in Shinto beliefs, and in Maori, and in indigenous cultures.

William Charlton: I’ll throw in a curveball into that lot. When you look at the early migrations, actually, the ones where the Maoris came out of, that branch, and the later Native American branch, they actually caused a human amount of damage.

Audrey Tang: Of course, as humans are wont to do...

William Charlton: Not so much that. I think it’s because the tribes, if you look at the megafauna loss in Africa, it’s far less than anywhere else. What happened, the megafauna and the humans evolved together. The megafauna in Africa were aware of how dangerous humans were, and they avoided them.

William Charlton: Whereas when the then-humans landed in Asia and in America broadly -- Asia and America, those two migrations -- they found fauna that just didn’t understand what humans were. They just stood there, and bang, gone.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

William Charlton: The amount of extinctions that we caused outside of Africa is phenomenal. These are the early humans.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

William Charlton: This is pre-Maori, pre-Aborigines. These are pre-where the Aborigines came from.

Audrey Tang: I am talking about maybe 4,000 years ago, so it’s already pretty late in the game, so to speak. It’s mostly cultural migration, not actual human migration.

William Charlton: The Bushmen, the Kalahari, and that Central Africa stuff, that had taken hundreds of thousands of years to evolve to a stage where they were in harmony, in effect. There was no such thing as an externality. [audio drops out] from this, because if you didn’t, you died.

William Charlton: There’s a lot of interesting, I think, a lot of very interesting lessons. Actually, probably deeper, there’s probably interesting lessons to look at the different indigenous communities, to see how in balance they are, compared to the Kalahari.

Audrey Tang: I think I’ve seen this word before. It’s a pack of icons for the Ubuntu operating system. They just chose the name Kalahari to honor the Kalahari people. Ubuntu came out of that culture.

William Charlton: It came out of the Zulu language, yeah. There’s Ubuntu social movement now, as well, which is reusing it. The word ubuntu, I’ve seen it used by social groups that weren’t even aware of the operating system.

Audrey Tang: That’s a good thing, I guess.

William Charlton: They’ve taken it straight from the Zulu and appropriated it again, without realizing it’s already being used. That’s a funny one. I actually helped somebody build a website, and I said, "You do realize Ubuntu has other meanings to a lot of other people?" "No."

William Charlton: I said, "You’re going to lose that on the web if your search term is Ubuntu, because you just won’t be found." [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It’s like with Salesforce tried to trademark "social enterprise", without being aware that it has a meaning in the UK. Then, of course, they graciously gave it back, because, well, there’s just no way they are going to win on search engines.

Audrey Tang: I think I have move onto dinner sometime soon.

William Charlton: That’s good. I think we’ve gotten to the point where we’re at the water cooler.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. You’re OK with us publishing this video or the transcript?

William Charlton: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: The video is fine? OK.

William Charlton: That’s fine, that’s fine. It’s been good to talk, good to talk. Ask any questions you want down the line. I’m still thinking that this has a place. We could survive without it in the UK. You could survive without it.

William Charlton: I still think it has a place somewhere. I’ll explore it, and see what comes out of it.

Audrey Tang: I’m sure it does. First, you are not alone doing this. [laughs] There is many different groups of people doing this. The good thing about open innovation is that it doesn’t have to scale. In open source, 99 percent of projects, they just push on GitHub, and then disappeared, and people just pick up and run with it.

Audrey Tang: It doesn’t even need to scale in any of the three dimensions we just talked about. It’s just there.

William Charlton: That’s one comfort.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. That’s one comforting thought.

William Charlton: Good. Enjoy your supper.

Audrey Tang: Take care. Yeah, have a good localtime.

William Charlton: If want to meet up when you’re in London, just give me a shout, and I’ll hop on a plane.

Audrey Tang: I’m still finalizing my schedule, but I’ll let you know.

William Charlton: It’ll be interesting to hear your take on the Scottish experience. I think you’re going up there first, and then coming down to London?

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

William Charlton: Interesting comparison, very interesting comparison.

Audrey Tang: OK. Well, cheers, then. Until next time.

William Charlton: Cheers. See you. Bye.