Theo Bass: I’ll go ahead. Is it OK if I record from this end?

Audrey Tang: Yes, of course.

Theo Bass: Great. I’ll start by asking you if you could start by giving me a bit of a note about the political context in Taiwan, and then some background about how g0v and why it’s formed.

Audrey Tang: How far back should I start? 1988 or...?

Theo Bass: Start with the beginnings of g0v and why it was formed. Don’t need to go into too much detail about the historic context in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: The g0v community started at the end of 2012 by a bunch of hackers, and one of which is my very good friend, Chia-Liang Kao. They initially started this initiative to build a domain name g0v.tw, that provides an alternate shadow government website for every national ministry, so that it solves the discovery problem.

Theo Bass: Interesting. I didn’t realize there was such a strong buy-in from government officials themselves. Interesting. Could you tell me a bit...what’s your role in the organization? Are you a volunteer? I know you are probably involved in lots of projects.

Audrey Tang: We’re all volunteers in g0v, it is not a formal organization. It’s just hackathons after hackathons. Anyone who shows up becomes a participant, and that’s about it.

Theo Bass: Tell me a bit about hackathons -- how to organize them? I remember hearing that you have 100 to 600 people.

Audrey Tang: That’s correct, yeah.

Theo Bass: A very large number of people. How do you go about organizing the skills, and how do you go about organizing people’s time? How do they work?

Audrey Tang: Sure. I’m not involved in organizing the larger hackathons — including the initial one. They are organized by a group of five to seven people now. It’s classic open space technology.

Theo Bass: I want to also ask you about some of the projects I just discovered within the links and the video that you sent. There were two interesting things regarding informing voters.

Audrey Tang: Sure. They were both very well documented, so I would share my perspective on it. The voting one, which is vote.ly.g0v.tw meaning, the "ly" being the legislative, then being our parliament. It’s one of the g0v long running projects, and it started when the legislative system was not entirely open sourced.

Theo Bass: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Great.

Theo Bass: The other thing that I’d like to say is that, while mySociety has several similar websites, I think they don’t have as many visitors as g0v does.

Audrey Tang: Right, the gamification is really our main contribution, not anything technical. We’ve made it into a game. That always works.

Theo Bass: I’m obviously asking to know about the Sunflower movement, and how g0v affected the protest.

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Theo Bass: I want to ask you specifically about if you could summarize the tech stack which the movement is using, and how they’ve been able to use it -- the movement.

Audrey Tang: It’s what Clay Shirky described as "situational applications". Every day we make applications in response to the demand of that day. Every day it’s a different technological stack. At the core, of course, there’s the parliament itself, industries around it, and because of that on the infrastructure level there needs to be electricity.

Theo Bass: How did you use Loomio, because I understand there was probably about half million people coming from the streets? How did you use this tool to create great deliberation? How did you use the outputs from those Loomio groups to actually effect some change in parliament?

Audrey Tang: While we did provide public WiFi to the occupiers, that was very late in the process. That was the last three days of the occupy. Most of the time, we had a very high-speed intranet, but not such a high-speed uplink as I explained.

Theo Bass: I’ll get on little more about deliberation now. You mentioned in the beginning the consultations which you do in partnership with the government.

Audrey Tang: That’s true.

Theo Bass: One of the things that we’re interested in is, particularly for Nesta, is how you reconcile the logic of deliberation with large groups and a lot of policy-making. Whatever issue we think about deliberating here, there’s no obvious solutions.

Audrey Tang: Sure. We have a two-day curriculum for this, which we train hundreds of public servants in. I can send you the whole curriculum. Just to summarize, the key point is that we work with the focused conversation method pioneered by some Canadians 10 years ago.

Theo Bass: That’s interesting. Just to clarify, usually at the beginning of the consultation process, is that open to anyone? Does everyone know why you’re doing this consultation?

Audrey Tang: We identify the stakeholders that we know about. We send them invitation emails. We ask them to fill out the survey. They can recommend anonymously more stakeholders who may be interested.

Theo Bass: It’s published so that you would see all of the consultations?

Audrey Tang: Yes. We also publish the Pol.is data for the reflection stage, that is the feeling stage, the second stage.

Theo Bass: That was interesting. Is this applicable to everything, or do you think that there are issues which don’t benefit in public deliberation?

Audrey Tang: Sure, overly broad issues.

Theo Bass: What about the idea of consensus? What do you make of the idea that deliberation sometimes leads people to become more polarized? Is that what your methodology specifically aims to try to prevent?

Audrey Tang: People are pretty polarized as is. Otherwise, there won’t be controversial issues, right? Sometimes, deliberation, if the time frame is too short, it brings out the worst of people. It’s true. It happens.

Theo Bass: Do you think consensus is desirable in all cases? You want to know when there’s agreement, but there may always be dissenting opinions. Is it really possible to convince everybody?

Audrey Tang: The technical term for the kind of consensus we want to reach is called rough consensus. Rough consensus meaning nobody is 100 percent happy, but people can build empathy for each other so that even though I may sacrifice a little bit, I understand that it’s better overall.

Theo Bass: Is it difficult to keep people engaged over courses around three or four weeks?

Audrey Tang: It’s not. People generally find it a very interesting game to play.

Theo Bass: Can you tell me something a little bit about the user interface of the tool, and how that encourages people to participate, and particularly how you can see views converging and diverging on the matrix?

Audrey Tang: Certainly. If you go to any Pol.is conversation, you see one sentiment of your fellow citizen. Of course, the first thing that you will see is whatever preparatory materials that we calculated to make it eye-catching for the first five seconds, and then provides just sufficient inform in the next 25 seconds.

Theo Bass: Can you tell me a bit about how these online consultations improve the legitimacy of decision-making by the government ministry?

Audrey Tang: It improves the decisions made by civil servants. They would need to inform, that is to say provide relevant information and expert assistance. Whenever they get asked questions, they must answer within seven days.

Theo Bass: Everyone can see the voting pattern, if they want to?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, of course. Everything is open source.

Theo Bass: Has it any influence on the way in which the government then takes those decisions and acts on them?

Audrey Tang: Yes, it’s very hard for them to ignore the consensus made this way. We had an election. There’s a new president, there’s a new cabinet, but whatever consensus we reached, it’s very hard for the new minister to say no, because it’s not the result of the previous ruling party.

Theo Bass: It seems like public officials have found the g0v as neutral and worthy facilitator in this process. How do you think governments without active organizations, like g0v, might lay directives without this kind of active community?

Audrey Tang: It’s easy if they can find someone within the government structure who are not tied to one particular office, or ministry, or agency. The French has the Center of National Debate. At the moment they do it for construction development cases only.

Theo Bass: It seems like there’s a really active community, and there’s a lot of people and there’s a lot of hunger for participation and activism within the planning context.

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm.

Theo Bass: Also one of the things which I find most impressive in the big context is you have a country, which is basically electrified, and you have all these amazing experiments, and you have the model in place for such an innovation to evolve.

Audrey Tang: That would be great. Another of our contributions, which I just sent to you, is what we call assistive civic technology. Meaning that, you mentioned people who are on Facebook or Twitter all the time and don’t have a fraction of the mindset to participate in the public space and so on.

Theo Bass: That’s really interesting. Also, it would be great to have a copy of that. You said there was a kind of consultation curriculum.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Theo Bass: It’d be great if there’s a copy of that and have a look-through, just to see the methodology you just described in more detail, but also in terms of the practical advice you give the public officials, it sounds really quite interesting.

Audrey Tang: Sure. I’ve sent you a link to the curriculum and a brief memo.

Theo Bass: There’s a lot more to ask you. Let’s say a city wants to do something similar, in terms of encouraging greater public outreach and civic engagement, what are the practical lessons that you would suggest, and what are the main pitfalls that you would argue need to be avoided?

Audrey Tang: When you say a city that wants to work, do you mean the mayor, the public servants, or the council?

Theo Bass: Let’s say, take the lessons from the UK, it’s likely a ministry, or a ministerial select committee, or something a bit of a national level.

Audrey Tang: In two words: Engage early.

Theo Bass: In a sense, it’s really important that participants have agenda-setting power.

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm.

Theo Bass: They set the priorities for discussions, set the agenda for discussion.

Audrey Tang: Yes. In open multi-stakeholderism, it never works if the agenda-setting is just late-stage, or is fake, or something like that.

Theo Bass: That makes a lot of sense in the UK, since in the UK case we did have something called the public reading stage, which was where the draft is going out, and then it was read to the public, but they weren’t relating.

Audrey Tang: The zero option is not an option at that stage, not a real option, so people of course wouldn’t contribute their time, because they don’t get symmetric attention for their time.

Theo Bass: That’s great. Thank you, Audrey. I’m really appreciative of your time. You guys have got a lot of work to do in the next few weeks, so good luck. I will message you if we do write the blog about some of the stuff that we talked about, and I’ll send it to you first.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. It’s fun, so we’ll keep it up.

Theo Bass: OK, bye.

Audrey Tang: Cheers.