Allison Fine: Introducing the panel. So many lovely guests from overseas, a model we might follow. Wanted to broaden the conversation about what we can take from other places. What are gaps we know need filling? We know we have some. What can we learn?

Allison Fine: No presentations. We’ve discussed questions with each panelist, but audience should feel free to ask questions for conversational tone.

Allison Fine: This example and moment in time - the online, on-land intersection is helping us make democracy wide and deep. The chasm has been that tech goes wide, community organizing goes deep, weren’t matching up. Starting to see models when someone like Audrey understands the pieces need to be "yes, and". Wide and Deep. Line and Land. To make decisions.

Question: Taiwan is fertile ground for free software. Why is it so embedded?

Audrey Tang: Back in the 70s, a complete disregard for intellectual properties. Not part of WIPO, not a part of the UN, think China and Shenzhen, personal computers were just being manufactured in Taiwan. Before there was distro, there was slackware. Is distributed very quickly because we all want it and make it. The ideals of the 90s are what attracted us. This method has been adopted inside and outside the gov for making choices.

Question: Liz wrote an entry for Civicist about vTaiwan https://civichall.org/civicist/vtaiwan-democracy-frontier/. What matches up to Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and what’s different?

Liz Barry: Here as a close observer to the sunflower movement and of vTaiwan. Not actually doing any of it myself. Have felt aside an activist agenda to facilitate process, as I saw Taiwan’s Occupy doing in 2014. That was very different from observation of OWS in NYC and what I saw in Taipei. In Taipei, the g0v organizers used themselves to facilitate the process. They went around to stakeholder groups to build consensus live in the street so all the different camps had come together and shown that democratic process could work when supported properly. They were broadcasting the whole time, show an alternative to existing power. They were willing and able to be seen. There was a pathway in. It was really working. Regular citizens through the islands had seen it.

Liz Barry: OWS had a different relationship to existing power and to broadcast. There was "no, too antagonistic" relationship to existing power and a desire for anonymity. Let it develop for the people there. Not a clear model being broadcast outwards for an existing gov to extend a hand to. People in Zuccotti Park didn’t want to broadcast. Devin Balkind and Leah F said "where’s the marketing department?" pointed to a split between key working groups. The people not physically occupying the park. OccupyWallstreet.org wasn’t hosted by anyone in the park. There were separate communication channels.

Question: Anti-nuclear and LGBT organizing. Are those movements borrowing any tools or processes from g0v?

TTcat: I spent last 12 years in Taiwan’s social movement and I’m also a coder, that’s why I joined g0v in 2013. I think that either vTaiwan or other platforms that Audrey is trying to implement in gov, traditional civil society just doesn’t learn this kind of stuff. I mean CSOs have learned how to campaign, how to engage people, make protests, and organize events. But we don’t actually know how to talk with people or host deliberation. All we did is trying to convince people or engage someone who has already agree with us. The process of vTaiwan isn’t familiar to the people from civil society. If we want to scale up the impacts of vTaiwan, we have to teach civil society organizations how to campaigning with participation.

Question: It seems that the government doesn’t put restraints on this form of organizing?

Audrey Tang: Complete freedom of assembly and speech.

TTcat: Sunflower movement held deliberation meetings on issues we think the system goes wrong with near 2k people on the street. We used hand signals - like Occupy Wall Street. People in the meetings talking about our system and constitution problems. We did this only to show the government our demands, and it’s to express our demands to the leaders inside the occupy parliament. You see, the street has a half million people occupying, but there are few student leaders in parliament decide where the movement could go, should we stop it, what statement we make by their own. We wanted to do this deliberate on the street and show not only just to the government, but also the leaders of this movement, that it is possible that we could organize this movement together.

Question: 23-year-old Democracy - how did a country so recently under martial law not have military police pushing everyone down? We feel like that might happen here. How do you grow a government that says "yeah we gotta listen."

Audrey Tang: Taiwan’s democratization with protest and first election was 7 or 8 years. Saw a growth of civil society. Not direct democracy or some elections, but lifting of bans on freedom of speech and assembly. Those NGOs (gender equality, environmentalist, etc) cut their teeth on local issues. Not threatening the diminishing dictatorship. They were seen as rights people. Coexist with the rapidly democratizing. The military and police didn’t see them as someone to suppress. The dictator’s child was educated as basically a communist, working on drastic non-violent transitions of power. Not perfect but insistent to take something fascist into a peaceful democracy.

TTcat: Agreeing but you know Taiwan’s situation with China. We want to show the world that we’re different with China. Like we are open, they are closed; we are democracy and they are... China. That’s why the Sunflower Movement was so big and how we got to this stage.

Audrey Tang: After Tiananmen, the wild lily movement made sure same mistake not repeated.

Allison Fine: Part of a larger movement.

Question: People from the Sunflower Movement were in parliament. Were they voted or invited in?

Audrey Tang: They broke in during the night. That happened because there were very few people there, didn’t want media press. Wanted a livestream, just wanted to get in and there were no police. No one said "we will occupy 23 days" every day felt like the last day.

Question: Colin founded pol.is for vTaiwan which scales in ways I haven’t seen. What has vTaiwan taught you about this?

Colin Megill: We build this hand-in-hand with Audrey and the vTaiwan team for literally years. Pushed whenever they asked. The whole thing was open sourced at their request and auditable. Public good.

Question: Any bumps in the road?

Colin Megill: Noooo. Specifically regarding the consultative process- we learned everything from people on the ground. We know the tight verticals, building the very specific thing they support. Needs to be flexible enough for their processes. From a software developer view, we are trying to not be a monolith. If people know who someone is, they don’t have to plug into Twitter or Facebook or etc.

Question: Compare Taiwan’s with Hong Kong and the culture?

Audrey Tang: We worked with Umbrella Revolution, students were using Pol.is. Didn’t take root because joining conversations with institutions has a power play in it. New York Times dials about election night - when our actions are connected to real power we’re so willing to show up and make change.

Question: How much do you guys think race and class plays into how the Sunflower Movement versus our [Occupy Wall Street] movement from a place of racism? You’re moving to a new democracy so effectively, and we’re trapped in a bubble.

Audrey Tang: Sunflower was also class struggle. Unionists wanted to replace students. Two generators of power. Broadcasting live from the occupied parliament generates counterpower, which decimates the legitimacy of establishment. People on the street generate communication power, i.e. network-making power. Both were widely broadcasted to people who felt powerless. Geeks were learning deliberation, journalists were learning cryptography, it was about everyone learning in front of each other. We’re about to have a reconciliation process. During Occupy the students tried to keep everyone focused on class struggles instead of expanding outward.

Liz Barry: It’s a conversation I hope we have here. Now that we’re learning what has been achieved in another democracy. It’s not going to be the same here with our institutionalized white supremacy. vTaiwan has wrapped process and facilitation around some really interesting math. Facilitation is at the core. Now it’s students-of-students-of-students of those facilitators during Occupy -- these people facilitated to be neutral in bringing out these thoughts and feelings. Their role cannot be over-emphasized because at the start of tackling any divisive topic which has paralyzed society. the vTaiwan facilitators (who are still volunteers trained by g0v) go to each stakeholder group one by one and the prompts are vetted and edited. It takes months, but they can tackle difficult issues. The topic is articulated properly. That’s how the consensus is possible - before the voting - when everyone agrees on the prompts is when it becomes binding with the government. Then the math is legitimate.

Allison Fine: Social media, social change books all point to leadership as critical. But here we have the listening and facilitation as vital as well.

Question: I’ve been following this avidly. Talking to my students about it. Went to Hong Kong and the result is so very different. Someone thinks social media has been evil, has been a space of control. Do you have any advice for the Umbrella Movement? Was it a failure in facilitation, or was it ruthless power of China (political)? Second, how social media was used - Hong Kong is different from Taiwan, more Western, felt like the world let down.

Audrey Tang: Trying not to get the Minister of Foreign Affairs angry with me. [laughter] The Umbrella Movement it was very difficult because the sites kept changing - had to make the message heard in many different channels. Many of the Sunflower technologies were deployed during Umbrella. The Civil Society part is still being generator. Can’t yet create a counter-power to Beijing yet, can’t reach consensus as Sunflower did. Social media isn’t the root of the problem, it’s a symptom. Easier to share than to listen. A lot of memetic warfare during Umbrella favors people who can massively generate misinformation. Occupiers didn’t know how to respond (yet). Not prepared for memetic warfare.

Question: One of the major problems China has is lack of freedom of expression, no free flow of information. In a way it’s similar to ?? where there’s a strong nationalist. ... How you see the online troll during Sunflower, impact to the movement? Online culture on the street, how does that play a role in discussion, gov work?

Audrey Tang: my hobby is troll hugging. Summarizing my work in the Perl community by handing out "commit bits", community rights. They complain, they get a commit bit - invited to contribute. There is computational propaganda and there are trolls - other counter movements going on. Net Neutrality - we provide equal live streaming etc to everyone, especially interlocutors. We are like the medical team, neutral, shouldn’t be attacked. We had Loomio and Discourse - people who want attention add exclamation points. We respond to the three words that make some sense but only those three, and always constructively. It’s only by offering authentic, constructive feedback do they get response. They see that works and go towards it (or find somewhere else). It’s not time-consuming because the things you want to defend, instead take a deep breath and calm down. Tie those experiences to pleasure instead of anger. The ego structures gets large enough that there’s enough space to contain those personal attacks and form a reasonable response. Then others see that behavior and model it as well, reforming themselves.

TTcat: Subculture has been an important role in the social movements. For instance, anti-nuclear movement is near 30+ years old in Taiwan, and it’s deeply connect to our political movement. Every time the generation of my parents hears anti-nuclear, they just think it’s DDP’s propaganda. But after Fukushima disaster, people start change because independent bands and individuals make stickers, music, painting and small events. It start from the subculture and became mainstream after. There’re artists now wear the anti-nuclear sticker walk on the red carpet. I’ve learn that it will not be a movement unless people can participate in their own way, using their own creative and specialties to be part of this movement. And the young people they’re the most creative generation, so the subculture have always been leading the social change ahead.

Question: Are you making policy and political structure? What is the re-invention part of democracy you propose for our situation? That democracy itself can allow for the entrance of dictatorial takeovers.

TTcat: I don’t know if Taiwan have already reinvent the democracy or not. But there are many lessons I’ve learned from civil society. From the Sunflower Movement, we see the representative system failed - they couldn’t hear what people really want. But why we need the representative democracy? Hundreds years ago we didn’t have the capacity and the bandwidth for all the individuals to express their opinions on the politic. But now everyone lives in a social media network and spreads our thoughts and feeling every single day. Our policy making systems should become this new way to interact with us. But no only the system needs change, we also need to change. Our life is lack of the experiences and success model about how we deal with openness, decentralized or bottom-up governance. Unless we have adopt this slow, complex democracy process in our daily life as a culture, we couldn’t really reinvent the democracy.

Colin Megill: what does it mean to re-invent democracy in the US? Avenues or pathways that we can do right now. Hoping on a call with a town which is not as divided as the council is. They see the vTaiwan process as a way through. It’s in Alabama. But we don’t come with Sunflower, we only come with a very specific part of all this. But we have stories. What is happening in places in the US with facilitators are saying "we can map our experience to this." And we have a facilitative technology for it, and a model to follow. There are lots of parties who can just DO it right now.

Liz Barry: "reinventing democracy" we’re talking about the signalling between constituents and elected officials. Help plural voices find the points of consensus and be totally ok with moving forward on. We can send that clear signal, as clear as a single corporate voice. Just think about what it would be like for an elected official to get a clear signal.

Colin Megill: a million comments coming in about regulation. One full time person and a half-time person taking all those comments, and taking those into a consensus session with 80 lawyers.

Question: What does this mean for a progressive agenda? The more progressive the outcome when we get people into the same room.

Audrey Tang: The canvassing organizer has 90% of the human part of our facilitation. We were trying to design the room as the ambient computer so the facilitator doesn’t have to look at a device. Turn things into a quantifiable signal. Deliberation is messy, magical. We are not taking the messiness or magic away. This room of people came up with something they can all live with, live together makes them more progressive. But also make it possible to bring to the next group or next group. Don’t have to recreate the whole things in their heads. Virtual reality is so useful - but doesn’t remove the mess (and we wouldn’t want to).

Allison Fine: Becky Bond is the author of the book "Big Organizing". Progressives having policies and selling them. That’s different than what we’re talking about here. Uplifting problems, co-creation of solutions. People-oriented.

Question: How do you prevent tyranny of the majority, protect minority people in a system like this? Indigenous, non-technical?

Audrey Tang: no presidents or kings. Instead of voting we have a lot of struggle which is not binding. You don’t pass a law unless everyone signals consensus which is not articulated verbally. If only one or two minorities see something wrong, it doesn’t pass. That’s the only political system I know since my youth, now bringing to the political arena. Utter respect to minority view. If you have two different groups, one of 5k who all voted exactly the same and one of 2 very spread apart, the latter shows up with more space.

Audrey Tang: We are very careful about choosing questions only through online work. Housing etc we bring technologies to the people. Flying out to one of the most rural areas so they can speak in their native habitats but include their Prime Minister. A good assistive technology should disappear when people use it. Same with Civic Tech, people should use their best cognitive and emotional abilities.

TTcat: Just add one point: For certain controversy topics, there would be a lot of people join to the debet, those model they mention should work well. But for those topics is not so popular, how you get people focus for a certain amount of time to talk would be a challenge.

Question: How do you strike a balance between online and offline for inclusion?

Audrey Tang: At the moment we have only reached the magicalness of facilitation in person. People focus on what they’re saying and each other’s faces etc. Doing some virtual reality experiments, but still a year or two in the future. We are using only face to face when there are actual ideas to explore. Facts, objective facts can be shared online. Personal experience can be verified. Feelings take a lot more time. Reduce bureaucracy. Now can be done more effectively online through new tools. But it’s only binding in the agenda of the face-to-face meeting, not in the decision way. Diverge online and then converge on-land. This diamond-shaped process can iterate for a long time. For all the discussion we try to bring livestream and VR. Keep their interest so they can help bridge. Multiple on-land discussions.

Allison Fine: If anyone is trying to get elected officials to try this, try the "on-land" stuff because it’s a "yes, and."

Question: Been watching participatory budgeting processes. Similar to what you’re talking about. This way of doing things is anti-hierarchical and it’s great. Stanley Fishkin has shown in his research that we’re more likely to reach consensus etc when we meet offline. The second part is about politics being a complicated business. To simplify it into a series of decisions rather than looking at the whole system builds a piecemeal system. Who chooses you to make those technological choices?

Colin Megill: I think this embraces the complexity within each issue. Having hundreds of conversations at once. Agenda setting power adding people back in. Political decisions in the algorithms, which is why they have to be open source. Can fork them and make different decisions.

Liz Barry: Available for NYC crew who wants to get a vigorous EN community going on about this, help execute. ES has lively discussions, loyal antagonist work. BetaNYC is a great community. Work on the facilitation wrapper around polis.

TTcat: During the Sunflower movement, I personally facilitated 2k people doing deliberation on the street. And there’s one guy propose a question kind of out of the topic but I can’t forget. He said: Why those civil society always set up the topic we’re protesting or statement by themselves and we can only chose to follow or not? Open is not only transparency but also open up to participation. While we asking government open up for the people, can we also make our own organizations more open for people to participate? It’s the question I’d like to leave for you all.

Audrey Tang: Complicated arena we’re navigating. Deliberation is about policy, whether it’s budgeting or de-budgeting; whether it’s a council or a mayor. But comparing the vTaiwan process versus participatory budget - in PB the role of the councils etc have some of their power taken over by citizens. Here we work with legislators. All the signals are ones they want to hear, but don’t have a good way to do so. We send them bills about Uber etc that they know won’t upset people because people have rallied behind it. It’s different to centralized democracy.

Audrey Tang: About the technocratic part - I worry about that a lot. Process as product. Open source everything, put all our playbooks online. Change it, distro, fork, bring to new heights. Show this listening process is something you can do just like software.