Giovanni Allegretti: Good afternoon to everybody. My name is Giovanni Allegretti. I am the coordinator of the Centre for Social Studies of the Project EMPATIA, Enabling Multi-channel Participation Through ICT Adaptation.

Giovanni Allegretti: As you can see on the website of the project, we are today hosting at the Centre for Social Studies a working seminar of a colleague who comes from Taiwan, whose name is Audrey Tang, and is a civic hacker that we met during a series of other international relation development project is having with different country and parents.

Giovanni Allegretti: I had the happy opportunity to meet Audrey, which accepted to explain us a series of interesting movement that have been happening in Taiwan in the past year.

Giovanni Allegretti: We thought in the beginning to do like a web seminar, but because it’s a person who has a lot of...

Giovanni Allegretti: ...so in person, we prefer to have Audrey here today. Because we had several friends who asked us to be able to follow the seminar without being able to be here, we are transmitting live stream seminar.

Giovanni Allegretti: We hope seminar will be the opportunity especially for a large discussion on issue that could be of interest of whoever is interested to EMPATIA project, in terms of cross-cutting issues related to data, open data, to civic engagement and to the transfer of click activists to a stronger commitment in civic issues.

Giovanni Allegretti: That’s one of the reasons why I will stop talking here, and I will leave the floor to Audrey, which is doing also wonderful drawings on screen.

Giovanni Allegretti: Is that you waving behind me? I feel like an aura of something happening. I see people laughing, so I imagine people laughing on the other side of the screen. I leave to Audrey, so I will eliminate the possibility to draw so much. Maybe he’s doing a horn on my head.

Giovanni Allegretti: I have been transformed into a cat. Perfect. This is the start. Starting with a laugh, it’s always something wonderful, so we are happy. We’re sure that it will be a wonderful seminar. If I’m not wrong, Audrey opens the discussion in every moment.

Giovanni Allegretti: It becomes usually...it’s yesterday? No, two days ago, that you were doing the conference in Paris.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, two days ago.

Giovanni Allegretti: That became like sort of collective workshop, so we hope that it will be the same today. I left the floor to Audrey. Thank you very much for being here.

Audrey Tang: I’m very happy to be here, and since this is a very small room, I would encourage people to just interrupt me at any time. You don’t have to raise your hand, but if I happen to be looking elsewhere, you just wave your hand or something.

Audrey Tang: The idea here is, that for next two hours or so, I will go through five different talks, and I have no idea which of those five talks are of more interest to you. The five talks in very quick order, is introducing the political context of Taiwan and the Taiwan’s, what we call the g0v civic movement.

Audrey Tang: I will use one particular example, a crowdsourced dictionary, to illustrate. Then I will talk about the Sunflower Movement. Is there anybody here who have heard of the Sunflower Movement?

Audrey Tang: We occupied the congress for 22 days, and it’s one of the very few Occupies that is successful, defined in the sense that first we reached our goals, and also, we have a stronger consensus after the Occupy compared to before the Occupy.

Audrey Tang: Then I’m going to talk about the national level politics that changed because of the Occupy. In particular I’m going to talk about how we use the same technology that empowered the Occupy, to talk with transnational issues like with Uber, and with Airbnb, and with the other globalized factors.

Audrey Tang: Before I begin, I would like to know how everybody prefers themselves to be called or recorded. I’m Audrey.

Michelangelo Secchi: I am Michelangelo, and I also work in the EMPATIA project. You can call me Mike. My name Michelangelo, it sounds artistic.

Audrey Tang: Sure, artistic. [laughs] Great.

Audience Member: I’m Valdemar, and it’s a pleasure.

Giovanni Allegretti: Do you come from Mexico?

Audience Member: No, Bolivia. I’m from originally Brazil, so I’m Portuguese.

Audience Member: I’m Bruno and I’m studying society and social movements.

Audience Member: I’m Jenna, but if you call me Jenny, it’s OK.

Audrey Tang: Great.

Audience Member: I’m Luis. I’m also a member of the project EMPATIA.

Audrey Tang: OK.

Luis Cordeiro: I am also Luis.

Luis Cordeiro: I’m the technical coordinator of the EMPATIA project. I am very interested in trying to understand from someone who also has some technical background, how this government and citizens’ involvement, how can we handle this in the city? I’m very, very interested in receiving your feedback and your experience.

Audience Member: I am Andre, not a Luis, but similar.

Audience Member: I work as a project manager here and I also work with the EMPATIA project with delivery.

Sofia Antunes: I am Sofia.

Giovanni Allegretti: Wisdom. You can call her Wisdom.

Audrey Tang: Ah, Wisdom, yes.

Vanessa Duarte de Sousa: I’m Vanessa, and I also work on the EMPATIA project.

Audience Member: I’m Penn, and I’m a researcher here at CES. I am part of the EMPATIA project, too.

Audrey Tang: Without further ado, I will just go into my talk. At any point, please just stop me if I start using three-letter acronyms, [laughs] or if I am talking too fast.

Giovanni Allegretti: Have you heard of bill?

Audrey Tang: Yes, we could have that bill, yes. Also, if people are interested to go more in details into any particular slide, we just stop in that slide and start doodling. If I look at people and feel that you feel bored, then I will just fast-forward that particular section.

Audrey Tang: Fork, here, means in the ICT context to take something that is already here, not eliminating, not countering, but taking its doing to some direction. We take it to another direction. When we take to another direction, we experiment.

Audrey Tang: You may fail, you may succeed. But the most important thing about the name fork is that we also are open to the possibility of the original maintainer. This is calling merging back our work, because the way it was made to work in the ICT industry was by people abandoning part or all of their copyright.

Audrey Tang: This is like, this week in Paris is Fashion Week. In many jurisdictions, like in the US and in Taiwan, actually, any fashion designs cannot be copyrighted because it’s a craft. It is something you use every day, so you cannot copyright this design. You cannot copyright a type of sleeve or something.

Audrey Tang: Anything that shows in the Fashion Week gets copied the next week by other designers, because there is no copyright protection. Exactly because of that, we see a lot of forking going on in the fashion industry.

Audrey Tang: Anything that catches on, be it a color, a style or something, it becomes experimented in very different ways. Then, if some of the good ideas emerge, then it becomes just part of everybody’s wearing. Not designer clothes is, but it comes the fashion of the year or something. That is how the fashion industry already works.

Audrey Tang: The open source movement in the ICT industry is trying to use the same model as the fashion designers do to make the open source work, so that people who write programs to do user designs, and so on can also experiment with all different directions based on existing work.

Audrey Tang: Only the good ideas would be merged back to the next version of its original project. This is a very interesting idea, primarily used in the ICT industry, but the way we work in Taiwan is that we apply this idea to the government, to the society, to the governance procedure.

Audrey Tang: I’m literally from the future. I’m eight hours in the future, which is Taiwan in this place. Then I’m very happy to be here, jet lag notwithstanding.

Audrey Tang: The point here is that in Taiwan, because we are a very young democratic country, we lifted martial law in 1989, and then the first presidential election was in ’96. Basically, people only have less than 20 years of experience with representative democracy. They’re not very good at it.

Audrey Tang: When we start to introduce the Fork the Government idea with direct democracy, with deliberative democracy, with participatory democracy, it was not like, “representative democracy has 200 years of tradition, and now we’re introducing someone with 20 years, like a challenger.”

Audrey Tang: It’s like, “Representative democracy has 20 years, and direct democracy also have 20 years, so they are on par with each other.” We can say, “We take a better idea here,” and the government is much more willing to listen, because they don’t have a long tradition to uphold.

Audrey Tang: Now, something about myself. I’ve been working in the ICT industry for 20 years, and retired in 2013. That means that I started working in 1994 as an entrepreneur. When I retired, I do what retired people do.

Audrey Tang: I start to work on charities, voluntary work, [laughs] caring about the community, making dictionaries, [laughs] things that retired people do. Because my ICT career was built around open source and free software, naturally, I do also my volunteer work in the same way as I do my ICT work.

Audrey Tang: This becomes a very interesting factor for me, because then I started talking to the very vibrant community in Taiwan, where we call the voluntary sector, which is people, not based on taxing and redistribution, and not on exchanging of money to services, but just by people donating their time. It’s the voluntary sector.

Audrey Tang: The magic thing with open source is that when I start making, for example, a dictionary, as an open source project, which I will talk about in the next talk, people in the first sector, academics, could very easily take the product and then make it part of the Oxford University Press Dictionaries, which is a non-profit, academic endeavor.

Audrey Tang: Or when I make other deliberation platforms open source, then the National Development Council in Taiwan is free to take it. Then this is the subject of another talk, but not only the first sector. The private sector is also free to take whatever research we did as part of this, and make it, too, so that Siri speaks better languages in part of its process, or there’s social text, social computing company.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that while I work all in the voluntary sector, because my work is free for everybody to use, I was able to build much stronger connections to the first sector, the public sector, and the private sector, as well. That is the basic mode amount of the cross-sectoral partnership.

Audrey Tang: Is that OK? Am I making sense? OK. That’s great. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I started learning computer programming when I was eight years old in 1989. When I got my first computer as a gift from my dad, he then went to Beijing for the first time in his life, to cover this very interesting student movement that was going on.

Audrey Tang: We all know how that student movement ended. It’s the Tiananmen Massacre. He got back to Taiwan in time, so I still have a father. He then took a strong interest in civic movement, democratization. He decided to do his PhD in Germany, studying the dynamic of the Tiananmen Movement.

Audrey Tang: When he finds his professor in Germany, he visited Berlin, and something else happened in the same year, the Berlin Wall fell. Some people say it’s because of the Beijing Massacre that the German people decide not to repeat the same mistake. They were somewhat peacefully democratized.

Audrey Tang: Then I also moved to Germany to study with my father, because that’s his PhD thesis, is about interviewing all the people who were activists in Tiananmen, who flew to Paris, to Germany, to other places, when they continued their study.

Audrey Tang: They were just really students. They’re studying all sorts of different sciences, but was debate on how to make use of what they learned to help the democratization process. Certainly, the way that they choose to in the first did not work, so we talked a lot about what kind of ways would work.

Audrey Tang: I come back to Taiwan in ’93. That was a very interesting time because that was the first time in Taiwan when the Internet access was made available to everybody. That is not specific to Taiwan. The entire world was getting on the Internet at the same year.

Audrey Tang: The thing in Taiwan is that we have an education system that I was never fitting in, but I found on the Internet this very interesting project called the Gutenberg Project. It is a bunch of people typing the books, usually in the public domain, published before the First World War, and they digitized all the books for free for everybody to use and to read. That becomes my primary education.

Audrey Tang: Once I started to learn this way, the textbooks just lose their attraction to me, because that was how knowledge was being generated. In ’94, when Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web, introduced to everybody, I found that all the researchers who work on those classics, are online the same time as I am.

Audrey Tang: They were publishing their preprints on the World Wide Web, and had published their email addresses. Because the Web was so young, everybody was very eager to know each other. We worked a lot on all sorts of different things, from linguistics to AI, to all sorts of different philosophy, everything, mathematics.

Audrey Tang: The beauty of it is, across the Internet, nobody knows that I am a 13-year-old. [laughs] They treated me like a professor to another professor. We just did work together.

Audrey Tang: That becomes so addictive that I decided to quit school, because school takes 10 years [laughs] for me to reach that level, and also it would take another 10 years for the cutting-edge research to become a textbook to be taught in a university or something, from the preprints to the dissemination of knowledge.

Audrey Tang: I quit school and I helped to build the World Wide Web, because I took so much from the web, I wanted to give back. I’m sure that only the most geeky people will recognize all the projects that I’ve worked on. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I think this one, in particular, made a lasting impact that probably everybody knows about, is the Wikipedia project where people use the same open source idea, but use it to produce human knowledge.

Audrey Tang: There is one common thing in all this different project I worked with, is that it’s facilitating a safe space, where nobody could censor each others’ speech or drive a tank, or something, to stop other people from talking. In this relatively safe space, we can learn from each other, and just try one a time and many times, until we have something that’s working.

Audrey Tang: Before Wikipedia, there were at least 10 different projects like Wikipedia that I participated in personally. None of them worked, but the Wikipedia somehow clicked. It’s OK, because over the Internet, it costs nothing to fail. It is not a scarcity economy. We just keep trying until we get something that is acceptable to the world.

Audrey Tang: This is my colleague, Lu Chia Hua, who is the primary trainer of facilitators of participatory, and also deliberative, democracy in Taiwan. She said, “Behind every technology we should identify the values that identifies why we’re pursuing this kind of technology.”

Audrey Tang: My value was very stable for the past 20-something years. It’s just this value of the early Internet, that it was built through rough consensus. That’s all about me, is that OK? People are generally OK. The first talk I like to share with you is the g0v story.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan in 2013, there’s maybe 90 percent of Internet users on Facebook. It’s the most popular Facebook place in the world. There is a prediction that says by the end of this decade there will be more Taiwanese Facebook users than Taiwanese people. That means that more...

Giovanni Allegretti: We have that problem with cars. We have more cars than people.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. At least Facebook accounts doesn’t create congestions.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that people have more than one account. That’s first. Everybody’s on Facebook, and there’s a lot of activists, people, bloggers, civic media people that were very influential, like the author Zhang Dachun here.

Audrey Tang: Anything that he writes about the politics on Facebook gets any number of likes, shares, and so on. Of course Wired interviewed him, saying, “You are a very famous writer and sometimes a political commentary reaches any number of people, so do you think it will be a catalyst for civic participation?”

Audrey Tang: He was very cynical, because he thinks that people who share and like his political writings are not the same people who will go to the streets. When he calls people to the streets, the call to the people to the streets posts gets hundreds of thousands of likes but 10 people came, or something like that. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The conversion rate is really, really, really low. He says that is because people are so lazy. They would spend only, at most, one minute of their time on Facebook in response to any call to action. Calling them to go on street takes more than one minute.

Audrey Tang: They will just click like, share, and feel as if they have participated. This is what we call clicktivism. He thinks the idea is that we need something practical that allows lazy people to engage in an action that makes a difference. This is called one minute limit.

Audrey Tang: The g0v is basically a movement that builds ways for lazy people to engage in real action. I’ll take one very concrete example. This example is called a CAPTCHA. I assume everybody knows what a CAPTCHA is.

Audrey Tang: This is the way to tell whether you are a human not a robot, by typing in some random numbers or text from an image. It works until maybe last year, because this year, AIs are better than humans for this. This doesn’t work anymore. It used to be that this tells a human from computers.

Audrey Tang: What we did was that we built a web site that asks people to just type here whatever they see from the CAPTCHA box, and then click enter.

Audrey Tang: We say when you do that, you are saving the country, because what this is is the campaign finance record of all the elections that came before in Taiwan, which were kept in a paper-only form in this building the corrective auditing organ.

Audrey Tang: The law that mandates this kind of sunlight campaign finance record was done in an era with only papers and Xerox printers. The law, the bill says anybody can walk into this building, and require a photocopy of the tape of the campaign finance record, but you cannot download it. You cannot take a USB, disc, or anything.

Audrey Tang: Now, of course, people proposed change to the law, so that we can download it over the Internet. If you think about it, the only negative stakeholder of this change are the parliament legislators. While the entire nation wants this, the legislators, they schedule it, but they never really debate it.

Audrey Tang: It was always the last bill to be debated by the end of the session, so it’s never really actually voted on. It kept that way. Instead of rallying, protesting, or something, we decided to do something. We send people there to print these out, then we scan it, and we ask people to digitize it.

Audrey Tang: To do what the government would do but do it ourselves, this is the idea of forking the government. This takes only five seconds, and you’re saving the country. Now, when we take the print out like this, A4 paper, I tried.

Audrey Tang: It would take maybe two minutes or three minutes to type it as a cell or something like a spreadsheet. It’s too much. If we ask people to do this over the Internet, nobody would come. Why do we know? Because we tried.

Audrey Tang: Then we used technology, OpenCV, to cut this in to bite-sized tasks, what we call Tofu. Then for each one, you will just take five seconds. It’s the same amount as a like, a share, or as a comment on Facebook.

Audrey Tang: Instead of seeing more cute cat pictures, you can feel you are saving the country. That draws a lot of people. In fact, when we built a gamification website of this data, if people here have played FarmVille, Candy Crush, or any of those games, you know that as long as you have a progress bar and a counter, the countdown, and it says how many people are playing with you.

Audrey Tang: People will spend all night, not sleeping, doing some very repetitive task, just to see the progress bar reach 100 percent. This is human nature. [laughs] Basically, it became very addictive. People were calling each other to save the country by playing this game.

Audrey Tang: Then we have a lot of designers who made very cute banners of Tofu to call people to action. In the first 24 hours, the first batch that we brought out from the corrective building, like more than 300,000 records, were digitized by 9,700 people in 24 hours.

Audrey Tang: This kind of OCR technology, we call it the Otaku Character Recognition. Otaku is a Japanese word meaning nerd. This is geeks. Basically, geeks who have nothing to do but just swiping their phone or something help to do the character recognition. Now, we have to complete campaign finance record of the past elections.

Audrey Tang: Now, of course, when we have this data, and publish this data the corrective again said, “This is a not-so-good idea that you do this, because while you can say every Tofu has at least three people looking at it, two of them must agree, and so on, you cannot be 100 percent sure. You cannot be 100 percent sure this is actually what was printed.”

Audrey Tang: What we said was, “OK, so, you publish it. Then you can be 100 percent sure. Before you do this, we will keep doing this civil disobedience, because there really is nothing illegal of this kind of work.”

Audrey Tang: Now that they feel the pressure, we started doing a lot of data analysis. Based on this kind of data, we can correlate any legislators with the kind of donation that came, the individual donations, how it correlates to their portfolio, their stock options that they have purchased, the voting records that they did.

Audrey Tang: Also, when the campaign finance came from large corporations, we also have a network that says the holdings of those corporations. We also, because each legislator in some counties have this recommendation where they could recommend the building and constructions.

Audrey Tang: We also correlate the building of constructions and the owner of those companies, versus the companies that have donated to the legislator. This became kind of useful, [laughs] so that you can decide what kind of legislators you really want for your city. Then at the election of...

Giovanni Allegretti: Excuse me.

Audrey Tang: Yes?

Giovanni Allegretti: I have a doctor on the issue of the timeline. What you were analyzing first was a system of the nation, so the campaign. The other one that you show, this last one, was about during the legislation, what they asked to be done with the public money. You had to take, like, five years’ time.

Giovanni Allegretti: That means, because you have to analyze what the legislator did during the mandate.

Audrey Tang: Exactly, exactly yes.

Giovanni Allegretti: You took some years.

Audrey Tang: Yes, that’s a great question. When we do the voting guide, as Gio said, we could only really do this before and after analysis for people who are going to be re-elected, so that we can correlate their actual performance. For people who are going running for the first time, we cannot do the same kind of analysis, for obvious reasons.

Audrey Tang: Many people run for legislator, but before they are running for legislator, they are running for the county, a country counselor or city level counselor. There is still a track record on the national level, even if they are running for the first time for the parliament. They also already have a campaign finance record level on the local government before.

Giovanni Allegretti: You started backwards from the ones that were candidates?

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Giovanni Allegretti: You chose the new candidates, and you see how many of them had passed? The lucky ones were those that were running for the first time, because they didn’t have any control on their previous mandate, because there was no mandate.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand that also was the more disadvantaged ones, usually, right, when they are running for the first time?

Giovanni Allegretti: Yes.

Audrey Tang: This kind of oversight is a net negative to peoples’ political capital. Actually, as you said, these people are lucky, but when they are doing their campaign finance planning and so on, they were doing under the pressure that they will be compared with the people they are running with.

Audrey Tang: By the end of the campaign, within 30 days, we will publish everything that they have done during the campaign. They must be very careful because otherwise it will look very bad, even if they are elected.

Giovanni Allegretti: It’s funny, because what I imagine is, essentially, I think that, because we have a prejudice against the representative politics, I mentioned that somehow you were rebalancing the problems of the newcomers. You were reducing the image of transparency of the one, the previous government.

Audrey Tang: Exactly, the establishments, yes.

Giovanni Allegretti: There were, for example, cases in which you could show that there were, for example, no direct relation between the funding and what they had done. Did someone emerge as particularly honest or not, involved within...

Audrey Tang: Exactly. That’s a great question. Yes, for example, for the city level voting in the end of 2014, there is a record number of independents running. Even an independent won the Taipei, the capital city, mayor, was a surgeon, who never participated in the politics before.

Audrey Tang: The environment was such that, when each county or each city click into here -- you see 18 precincts and 87 people running -- when you click into it you will see the analysis, as we talk about, but also a discussion board under every candidate.

Audrey Tang: People would crowdsource extra information based on what the public record and things like that. The primary use of this is that there were one legislator who said -- actually the one that I was showing on the photo -- [laughs] who said he is unbiased, he is bipartisan. He is not a party member. He often vote against his party line.

Audrey Tang: Then we go back to the legislative record and found that he never really did that. He was saying this on public television, because before, in mainstream media you can get away with saying anything, because people are not fact-checking it. If people are fact-checking it, it’s already past the news cycle anyway, so some people won’t pay attention to the corrections, even.

Audrey Tang: With this kind of technology, as soon as that person starts saying this, the commenter started saying, below, saying that, “But that is not the case.” His office has to issue a correction saying, “Oh, we don’t mean by the previous, because he was five terms. We don’t mean the previous term. We mean the terms before that.”

Audrey Tang: Then we speed up the digitization. In the 24 hours after that, we digitized everything in the previous terms and found out he really never voted against the party line in any of the previous terms. That becomes a tremendous pressure on the legislators to watch what they speak publicly about their past records.

Audrey Tang: Whereas before, you would take days or weeks in a news cycle to correct or to find the flaws in their speech, now, it is a matter of hours or even minutes, and that changed the dynamics.

Audrey Tang: People would click into it and say, “My precinct has 22 people running for councilor, and after I see this website I now only have to choose between two.” People become much more informed, and informed in a very quick way, of what kind of legislators they really want. This negates somewhat the mainstream media on a representative democracy.

Audrey Tang: We can also see which legislator received campaign donations from their own parties. We can analyze the Nationalist Party versus the DPP party. The red one was a, I must say, ex-mobster, because he’s not really a mobster now. [laughs] An ex-mobster who is very rich, so he can finance his own campaign.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that we make it very clear who is getting how much money from what. This kind of crowdsourcing of campaign finance records, of the news, and so on is not limited to domestic policies.

Audrey Tang: When we’re doing campaign finance records, we get contributions from outside Taiwan also, because you don’t really have to know Chinese. If you can read digits, you can help us digitizing the campaign finance records.

Audrey Tang: When the international community needs help, we also help to do, for example, this is working with the Humanitarian Open Street Map Team. Open Street Map is like Wikipedia, it’s a crowdsourced map.

Audrey Tang: When Nepal had this earthquake, all the major maps like Google Map, Bing Map, or Apple Map only really have the mapping data around Kathmandu and the major city connections. The street car doesn’t really drive to those rural areas, but those were the hit most hard by the earthquake.

Audrey Tang: What the HOT team did, in conjunction with the local chapters, was that we divided the satellite image that was taken before the earthquake into very small, again Tofu. Then we let people who have never mapped for their everyday lives take a half-hour course.

Audrey Tang: Then start to look at just one tiny piece of the satellite image, and mark the roads and the buildings on it. That’s all we ask them to do. Then again, just like the Tofu OCR project, it has to be two or three people looking on the same grid.

Audrey Tang: Then a mapping expert will do the review cycle, and so on. All this was done in 24 hours. After 24 hours of the earthquake, the satellite company donated the post-earthquake satellite image. That is the first time after disaster recovery we get donation in such short time-frame.

Audrey Tang: For the second day, people focused on the post-quake imagery, doing exactly the same thing, but now marking which roads are broken, and which buildings or camps have appeared, whereas there were nothing before on that grid.

Audrey Tang: On the third day, when the United Nations, the Red Cross field team came, they have an open street map on their mobile phone that shows which roads are broken, so you cannot enter there, and where are the refugees gathering, so you best deploy your logistics there.

Audrey Tang: This is something that couldn’t really be done with their ordinary helicopter, or any this kind of work. This has to be done on the satellite level. Of those 2,000 mappers, maybe 200 of them were from Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: Our President-elect, Dr. Tsai Ing-wen -- she was still only a presidential candidate at that time -- she held a launch on Facebook and other social media to call for her supporters to do this kind of humanitarian work.

Audrey Tang: What I’m saying is that with this kind of tool, the boundary of nations no longer exist. As long as we turn something into a crowdsource project, we can do this kind of crowdsource work anywhere. We can map all the buildings and all the roads that was impacted by the Nepal earthquake.

Audrey Tang: Using these as examples, I want to say that g0v, this movement, is really way for three different kinds of people to learn from each other, something that they have been missing in their previous lives. The core people, the first of our people who started to register the domain of g0v.tw had a very simple idea.

Audrey Tang: All the government websites in Taiwan ends with gov.tw. So, for example, the environmental agency is this. Now if you change in your browser the "o" to a "0" you get into the shadow government that is built by g0v.

Audrey Tang: It shows exactly the same data as the environmental agency. But whereas the environmental agency shows just tables, readings, and very boring things, in the g0v environmental agency, you see pretty pictures. [laughs] This is the air pollution level at this point.

Audrey Tang: People use that in news broadcasting, in everyday, because it was very useful. It’s a lot of fun. You can see the PM 2.5, the O3, the rainfall, whatever. Because it’s open source, you can look at the data, the code, and if you don’t like the color, you don’t like the font, or if you don’t like the way that the progression was spent, you can contribute very easily.

Giovanni Allegretti: You can customize the visual?

Audrey Tang: Exactly. Yes, you can just click the edit button. It didn’t start this way. It started in a much more geeky way, but then we have professional designers who are very much into this Japanese comics and manga called “Neon Genesis Evangelion.”

Audrey Tang: He used that font from the Eva, Evangelion fonts, so that it now looks like something from a cyberpunk design. [laughs] That was the idea, anybody who want to make contributions made contributions. This is much cooler than the government website for obvious reasons. [laughs]

Giovanni Allegretti: The data were the same, where exactly by the same source?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, we have web scrapers or whatever to take data from the government, but we present it in a way that’s open data, and that allows everybody to customize.

Giovanni Allegretti: While in the previous thing you show us, you created new data. For example, in Nepal. In this case, the data source was not put into that. You were accepting the data, and just helping them to be more clear and visible?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, exactly, and also mashing up it with other sources of data. It works with all the major government organs. For example, the legislation is "ly" and so if you change to ly.g0v.tw, you see all the bills being debated, and it’s like a shopping cart.

Audrey Tang: You can see a progress bar [laughs] of where the bill is, and you can see a difference that shows in red and green, the before and after bill, the way geeks like it. [laughs] That was the initial group of people.

Audrey Tang: It is not just the geeks, because while we are the open source, hands-on hackers, we were actually not domain experts at civic participation. The traditional NGO people, the traditional mobilizers, organizers, people like that, they were very far from us.

Audrey Tang: There were very little overlap between people who actually understand environmental campaigning, like the Greenpeace people, versus the people who do this environmental visualization. We actually got a lot of things wrong in our first tries because we were not environmental experts.

Audrey Tang: We had to make contact. We made contact first with the people in the civic media like the bloggers that I mentioned, who has this very cynical view, because they thought this software cannot really change anything. Facebook doesn’t really motivate people.

Audrey Tang: Then we say, “If you go to our hackathon and present your ideas, we will help to amplify your idea, and then to reach more people into actually make a real impact.” Basically, we teach them this hands-on spirit of not just writing blogs but doing something.

Audrey Tang: Then we engage with the social activists, who are again, very hands-on, very public-spirited, but their main problem was that they don’t trust strangers. This is a fact. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: There’s a lot of, I wouldn’t say schism, but doubts of people going to different directions or a misleading data or whatever. The first thing they ask is always, "How do we know that our opposition movement will not feed us fake data?” or things like that.

Audrey Tang: The way we work with them is showing that, with sufficiently number people and ICT technology, we can build a peer review system that is safe against vandalism, and doesn’t have data that you care about. We teach them the idea of open source, while they teach us the idea of the public spirits, the areas of concern.

Audrey Tang: Because g0v is using this domain, we are not limited in our projects. For every government agency or ministry, there is some social activists working on that area. It’s not limited to just elections or democracy. It could be environment, agriculture, education, whatever, you name it. There is a ministry for it. There is a g0v website for it.

Audrey Tang: This is three very different kinds of people, but because we learn from each other, we generally build something that is useful for all the three different groups of people. The way we do it is with very good food.

Audrey Tang: We hold every month hackathons and a large hackathon that happens every odd month. Like in March, it’s March 5, the open day that day. We have anywhere between 100 and 600 people in the same building, in the same room.

Audrey Tang: We use the standard, what we call the Open Space Technology. You’ll be aware that I don’t use three-letter acronyms. [laughs] Open Space Technology, it’s spelled out in full. We have this large room where we invite people from all walks of life to join and to share food with us.

Audrey Tang: When people ask about, “Where do g0v gets the money?” Well, it’s our campaign finance. We say that we only spend money on really good-quality food. It’s not that much money. We don’t spend money on anything else. We use free software. We don’t buy commercial solutions. It’s all zero or very near zero cost.

Audrey Tang: We spend a lot of effort and time to think about very good food, because a month after a monthly hackathon, most people forget about all the projects and all the people, but they will remember the food. If the food is particularly good, they will be inclined to join us on the next month. If the food is so bad, they will say bad words about our community. [laughs]

Giovanni Allegretti: You rely on low instincts of man?

Audrey Tang: Yes, the very basic instinct of people. Very good coffee and so on. We have a special domain called g0v.cafe, [laughs] where you can issue, print, and get this very high-quality instant coffee with g0v printed on it. It’s our souvenir. If you go to this web address, we ask for donations for the hackathon’s coffee and food.

Audrey Tang: That’s our fundraising way. When we raise funds and spend it on high-quality food, we spend everything immediately, so we don’t keep capital. When we run another month of the hackathon, we ask again for donations.

Audrey Tang: For your donations, the only thing you get is a guaranteed ticket to the hackathon. [laughs] This is purely without commercial interest. Because the hackathons were sometime very popular, they got sold out in hours. A guaranteed ticket to a hackathon is still very valuable. People were willing to sponsor for that, for the good food.

Audrey Tang: What I’m saying is that with this way of, the thing in common between the social activists, the free software people, and the civic media, is they love good food and good coffee. They come for the food.

Audrey Tang: When they join us early in the morning, in the hackathons -- as I explained, the large ones every two months. It’s 100 people. The every other month is maybe 50 people or smaller -- you will see a bunch of stickers on the large hackathons. Those stickers -- each one is like this high -- you would take the sticker that describes you.

Audrey Tang: For example, maybe I’m good at storytelling, maybe I’m good at making music, maybe I’m good at coding Python, or something. Then you take the stickers that represents your interests and put it on your shoulder. There’s also write-in stickers called “Nobody.” [laughs]

Audrey Tang: If you have a proficiency that we don’t have a listing here, you can write it yourself. If sufficient people use this, then we’ll print it on our next version of the stickers. This goes through many iterations.

Giovanni Allegretti: This idea of the stickers have two issues that could interesting for us. The first one is that in some parts of Germany, people has stickers to declare their belonging to lobbies or potential...

Audrey Tang: Lobbies, yes.

Giovanni Allegretti: For example, membership of an association of shopkeeper, trade unions, and all that. In order that when they speak, when they talk in public, people know from what position they are speaking, if they have one.

Giovanni Allegretti: The second issue is that normally Open Space Technology have the Two Feet Law. That means that if you cannot contribute to a self-organized group, you go away in the next one. Here, you can see what kind of people there is there.

Giovanni Allegretti: If you think there are too many engineers in that area or too many cook in that area, you can move not for feeling or not a tease in the group, but because you think that the group is too homogeneous.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. This is a diversifying way of the walking rule. This is not voting. This is diversification.

Audrey Tang: When you join for the first time you will take a deer sticker. Then, when you’re here for many times, a veteran, you will take a Taiwan bear sticker, and put it somewhere prominent. What are those stickers for?

Audrey Tang: The process is all day, sometimes two days. In the beginning of the day, everybody who has an idea -- “I want to do campaign financing. I want to do recall campaign. I want to do” whatever -- then I go on the stage, use PowerPoint, or some other tools to make a pitch for three minutes.

Audrey Tang: At the end of the pitch we ask everybody to declare how many people of what expertise do they need for this project to function. For example, for a public finance campaigning project, they will obviously need one engineer, and one designer, front-end designer.

Audrey Tang: They will need one legal people to negotiate with the corrective union, and they will need a storyteller to turn this into a public design for social media. That’s the initial four talents that we need for it to succeed.

Audrey Tang: Now, after maybe 20 projects, each present their ideas, people start to play musical chairs. That is to say, they crowd around the corner where the projects need those declared number of people. You can see it at a glance that this project already has an engineer, as the engineer go elsewhere.

Audrey Tang: Or that this project doesn’t really have a storyteller, as a storyteller, you will join them. By the end of maybe 10 minutes, 15...

Giovanni Allegretti: Sort of markets of talents?

Audrey Tang: Exactly, yes. Then, by the end of maybe 15 minutes...

Giovanni Allegretti: Free markets.

Audrey Tang: Yes, it is. There will be a lot of a deer caught in headlights, staying in the same position, not sure where to go. [laughs] There will be a lot of bears coming one on one, joining to the side of this first-comer, and start to talk with them, saying, “What is your concern usually? What brings you here? What is your daily life? What kind of issues you care about? Walk with me.”

Audrey Tang: By the end of the walk, they will find themselves in a project. That is the kind of mentoring that we do. For a 100-people hackathon, usually maybe 40 people or 30 people will be first time in the hackathon.

Audrey Tang: Currently the demographics is about maybe 20 percent engineers, 20 percent designers, and then other people, storytellers, news media people. There’s a lot of public servants now and people from all walks of life.

Audrey Tang: Then they have a project now, which we call kou, meaning a gap. The reason why we don’t call it a project is that people who are founding projects, in Chinese at least, have this notion of project leader, a project commissioner, a project organizer.

Audrey Tang: Sometimes people just identify a gap, and then they walk away. They just really have an idea, and they work on some other thing. They should not have authority or control on the people who actually fill the gap to do the actual work.

Audrey Tang: By rephrasing things this way, by identifying a gap in reality, where we have to hack on, we erase this kind of top two-button function of organization, so anybody who walk into this gap is a contributor. Then we hack for an entire day or two days.

Audrey Tang: Now, after the entire day or two days, every project has five minutes at the end of the closing day to present what they have built over the day. Usually, they will have the prototype already, because they have the right talents.

Audrey Tang: Then their presentation would say what in the next month, what is their participation policy? Some projects will say, “We meet every Friday after next month.” Some projects would say, “We meet in this chatroom in IRC, in Slack.”

Audrey Tang: Some project would say, “This is a long-term project. We just meet again at the next month’s hackathon.” Every project is different, but this is very important because then it connects people who already connect to the project to future meet-ups.

Audrey Tang: Many projects have this weekly meet-up where it’s just three people, five people, seven people, but they do sprints to make the project actually happen between the large hackathons. When you participate in those sprints or meet-ups, you will meet more people.

Audrey Tang: Then you will tell those people that hackathons are a great place, so they will join the next month’s hackathon and identify more projects. [laughs] This really is a circle, and g0v is not an organization, this is just a way of doing things.

Audrey Tang: Its just a habit, a way of living. Anybody who come is a participant, and who contribute is a contributor. We don’t have a leader. We don’t have a spokesperson. It’s just space, really, online space and offline space.

Giovanni Allegretti: I’m curious of one thing.

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Audience Member: My question was quite simple. Just give us some example of projects recently, you came up with this hackathon mechanism, just whatever. Doing this kind of project that has strong ICT content, or there are projects that are completely...

Audrey Tang: Yes, that was my next slide. [laughs]

Giovanni Allegretti: My question was different. You often say “we,” and so, I was trying to understand the “we” you say, what is referred to. Now, you are talking about something which is a space of encounter, and not a movement. When you say “we,” you talk about what exactly?

Audrey Tang: In order to be a g0v project, the only requirement is, if it’s a coding project to use a open source license, meaning that other people can use your product without asking your permission.

Audrey Tang: If it is a non-coding project, we ask people to use Creative Commons, which again, is a way to say people can copy your work without asking you. When I say “we” and people who agree to this protocol of social...I would still say it is a movement.

Audrey Tang: People say open source movement, the Creative Common movement, the free culture movement, but this is not specific to Taiwan, or specific to g0v. It is a global -- not even global -- this is a both global and also on the Internet, mixed-reality kind of movement that is happening all around the world.

Audrey Tang: g0v really is like a gateway into this wider, world-wide movement that is defined by the open source and Creative Commons, free culture movements. When I say “we,” I mean the people who see this way of doing things, and is willing to contribute or at least participate under this protocol.

Audrey Tang: Any other questions?

Giovanni Allegretti: Do you think that others also use “we?” You feel a strong identification with those principles. Do you think that this is spread around, so you all behave in the same way?

Audrey Tang: Yes, exactly, because we don’t really have a spokesperson. There is nobody who speaks for g0v. This used to confuse the media to no end. They would say, “I would like to interview your leader,” and we were like, “We don’t have any leaders.”

Audrey Tang: There was a very early motto of g0v that says, “Don’t ask why nobody is doing the work. Admit first that you are that nobody.” This is a combination of many different slogans before, [laughs] but this means that it is OK to start doing something imperfect.

Audrey Tang: When the media people says, “Why is nobody working on the project?” we will say, “Be that nobody. You come to our hackathon, and you start a project.”

Audrey Tang: This is a way, what we call, “Worse is better,” which is a core open source tenet. This is an example for you. This is 0th g0v hackathon. We count zero-based, we’re geeks.

Audrey Tang: On the 0th hackathon, there is a logo of g0v that was designed by two coders, two friends of mine. I wasn’t joined in g0v at the time. I joined two months later.

Audrey Tang: They were brilliant coders. They were master hackers, but they sucks at visual design. Anybody here can design a better logo than this. It’s very difficult to get an uglier logo than this, especially with the JPEG artifact.

Audrey Tang: This is so ugly. They had the guts to print this in A1, hang it in Academia Sinica, in open space as a welcome banner, “This is the g0v hackathon. Come and join us.”

Audrey Tang: For the 100 or so, 90 people joining, it became a very sore spot, because it’s so ugly. One of the visual designers wrote on social media that, “This is so effing ugly that I cannot do anything productive, unless I make a better logo.”

Audrey Tang: We infuriate a visual designer. He just looked at this very ugly logo, feeling completely outraged, and produced a better logo. This is at the end of the day at the hackathon. This is his only contribution, because he is immobilized. He cannot do anything else, so now, he makes something better.

Audrey Tang: This is like discussion. This is actually a lot like your logo. This is a lens that is viewing the society, and then this is melting. It has some culture in it, and it’s much easier on the eyes.

Audrey Tang: Then, because he abandons copyright under Creative Commons Zero, people were free to then iterate, to improve on this idea, which is very important, because this doesn’t look so well on mobile phone. If you look at it in a very low resolution, it doesn’t look like G-O-V or G-0-V anymore.

Audrey Tang: It will look like G-Q-V. We registered gqv.tw just because of this, [chuckles] because people typed in the wrong way. Then it was iterated. A much better visual design came, which looks like this. On low resolution, we just show the square, which is very identifiable as a zero.

Audrey Tang: Without the two shameless people who published their ugly work, they would not infuriate a designer. If they do not infuriate a designer, we would not have a better logo. It’s very minor things like this. We overcome the Asian culture of what we call “losing face.”

Audrey Tang: There is nothing to lose while doing something imperfect. There’s this Leonard Cohen song that says, “There is a crack in everything, and that is how the light gets in.” Without this imperfect thing, nobody will come and help, but if you do something a very ugly way, everybody will come and help you. [laughs] That is the basic operation way that g0v works.

Audrey Tang: That’s the first hour. Is it OK with people?

Giovanni Allegretti: Yes.

Audrey Tang: Now, a larger project. This is the project that brought me into g0v, and it is a dictionary. It is the Ministry of Education Dictionary.

Giovanni Allegretti: It is not the project that was born inside the hackathon?

Audrey Tang: It was, but it was on the first hackathon. It used to confuse the media, because the first hackathon is the second hackathon. The zero was the first. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: On the first, which is really the second, hackathon, we started this project called the MoeDict. By last year -- actually, this is an old slide -- we have seven million visits per month, and we have half a million Android, iOS, Windows phone, Symbian, Blackberry, or whatever users.

Audrey Tang: People really use this to teach in school, Chinese, because Chinese in Taiwan is spoken in many, many different ways. There’s Mandarin. There’s Taiwanese Holo. There’s Taiwanese Hakka. There’s also the Taiwanese Austronesian upper region Amis. There’s also Tibetan, because of the Tibetan Buddhism influence, there’s people from the mainland China, who came to live in Taiwan, and so on.

Audrey Tang: There’s just a lot of different ways Chinese and Austronesian language is spoken in Taiwan. This dictionary website, this project, integrates everything together. You can type in French, in German, or in English, see the Chinese word, and how the Taiwanese Hakka, Holo, Mandarin people pronounce it, the strokes of how it should be written, and so on. It’s a very useful website.

Audrey Tang: It started in the first hackathon, by my very old friend Yeh Ping. He was a physics professor, quantum physics, in National Taiwan University, but he joined Google Taiwan, to work on Google’s cloud center in Taiwan. After working in Google for a few years, he moved to the Valley. Now, he works on Google Analytics, I think.

Audrey Tang: When he moved to the US, he brought his children with him. He found that it’s very difficult to teach his children Chinese when he was in the US. Learning Chinese is hard enough, [laughs] but learning Chinese in a foreign country is very difficult.

Audrey Tang: The way we learned Chinese in our generation was through the Ministry of Education Dictionary, which was available as a website in the Gopher protocol. Many people here will not remember this, but before the World Wide Web, there was Gopher. There was Archie.

Audrey Tang: Those were the pre-World Wide Web kind of World Wide Web. That’s how we learned the dictionary, because it was published on Gopher. Of course, after the World Wide Web came, everything becomes the World Wide Web, so it has a website, and that’s how we learned from it.

Audrey Tang: The website was built at the dawn of the Web. Nobody really knew how to do websites at that point, so it was an absurd website, but the content is top-class. It is the definition of Chinese language, in classical Chinese.

Audrey Tang: Because of Cultural Revolution, Mainland China doesn’t really retain that much material about classical Chinese anymore. It’s like the Latin, or ancient Greek of Chinese. This dictionary has all the citations, all the etymologies, and everything about classical Chinese, and how it’s evolved into modern Chinese. This is linguistically a treasure.

Audrey Tang: But, because this website was built in ’96, there was no idea of a bookmarking or a permanent link. You cannot bookmark and visit again. It won’t work. Because it was using legacy encoding, there was no Unicode at that time. All the difficult characters were done in 24 x 24 bitmaps, which you cannot copy and paste.

Audrey Tang: It doesn’t support mobile phones, because there were no mobile phones [laughs] at the time. If you view source, you will see it’s best viewed in IE5 or Netscape 4.7+. The plus here is redundant because Netscape has discontinued after 4.7. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: This is a very, very old website. I’m just trying to get through this feeling of a ruin, a living fossil, or something of a website. Because HTTP 1.1 has not been invented at that time, the idea of a keep-alive connection is not invented.

Audrey Tang: It automatically logs you out after 30 minutes of inaction to conserve server resources. The funny thing is that there is no login button, so you will get redirected to the home page after idling for 30 minutes, saying, “Sorry we had to log you out.” But there’s no login button. Why are you logging me out? [laughs]

Audrey Tang: All the dictionary websites after this took this as the spec, because it then became as procurement as part of the functionality spec. All the modern websites built by the ministry of education in the next 10 years have the same function, even if it makes no sense now. It became an absurd, ridiculous joke of an ICT technology, even though it’s a great dictionary.

Audrey Tang: Having basically attended a hackathon from abroad...

Giovanni Allegretti: Was it a useful function, or?

Audrey Tang: Switching to engineering mode, as a geek, HTTP was invented in a very draft form where it was not possible to automatically keep the connection between the browser and the server. This is what we call stateless. You make a request, like ordering something from the menu.

Audrey Tang: Then browsers evolved. Netscape 2.0 or something introduced this idea of a keep-alive connection where, when you make a request, it doesn’t close the connection. It will just keep it open in case you want to click somewhere else.

Audrey Tang: Because the server software were written in ’96, before the HTTP 1.1 spec, it doesn’t know that after five minutes of inaction, I just terminate this browser connection. Every browser connection was consuming one process, one resource on the server.

Audrey Tang: Because the server cannot auto-disconnect, it will become overloaded if too many simultaneous connections are kept.

Giovanni Allegretti: That happens within the agency. It’s called flag searching.

Audrey Tang: Or something like that, yes. Then, actually, in ’97, most of the modern Web servers has this idea just called, "keep-alive:closed." If a web server says this, the browser will not keep the connection alive.

Audrey Tang: Because the website was not updated, there’s no budget for it after ’96. A technical problem in ’96 lived on for 20 years, even though all they have to do was to upgrade to the newer version of the NCSA, later Apache web server.

Audrey Tang: Nobody was around to do that, so the same function [laughs] was there for the next 20 years. It was basically “out of maintenance.” All the staff they have just knows how to buy more hardware, things like that. The programmers, they all went away.

Audrey Tang: I imagine this is not a Taiwan-only problem. When you contract out the ICT solution, the funding is just for one year or two year, the team disbands, and it’s not open source, it becomes very difficult to get the second team to carry on the work.

Audrey Tang: Sometimes, they just rewrite everything, and if they rewrite everything, they ask for more budget. If they ask for more budget, and the ministry doesn’t have it, what you have is a legacy system that runs for 20 years. That’s it.

Audrey Tang: With that, Yeh Ping attended the hackathon from the US, and that is when we started to do live streaming for our hackathons, because they had to attend from all over the world, not just Taipei City.

Audrey Tang: For that hackathon, we had Taipei, Tainan, and Taichung -- that’s three cities in Taiwan -- simultaneously using this kind of telepresence. He outlined a vision, saying that, “I need data collection, data cleaning, structured data,” and so on, other the requirements.

Audrey Tang: Within 24 hours, we, the hackers, downloaded everything from the dictionaries and Yeh Ping designed a JSON -- that is to say, structured data -- that matched the HTML. Some other hacker wrote a program that converts the website into the structured data.

Audrey Tang: Some other hacker converted the relational database, and some other hacker turned it into a website, also an input method extension, also an online dictionary, also an offline dictionary, and also a mobile phone. All of this was done in 24 hours. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: This is called rough consensus, because we don’t need anybody’s permission. Everybody just works on whatever they need or their children need, with out any niche coordination.

Audrey Tang: About those 24 x 24 bitmaps, where we need to identify the Unicode for it, we set up a Google spreadsheet that asked people to look at the pictures, and then using handwriting input method something, to try to identify the Unicode for those characters.

Audrey Tang: Again, within 24 hours, we had participants all around the world, about 100 people. We thought it was a lot of people at that time. About 100 people identifying all those difficult words from pictures into the Unicode code points, so we can copy and paste the definition in the dictionary.

Audrey Tang: The fun thing of this is that we brought down Google Spreadsheet, because there’s too many people editing in the same time, and there’s too many pictures. This is going to become a trend. Anytime we try a new service in g0v, we would bring down that service. We’re like the scalability testing team for new services on the Internet.

Audrey Tang: For this case, I had to actually build a new spreadsheet system called EtherCalc. EtherCalc is like Google Spreadsheet, but because it’s free software and because you don’t have to sign in, the server overhead is much lower. People can just do whatever they want on it, without incurring the same server load of things.

Audrey Tang: Now, we’ll face the legal problem. The reason why the Ministry of Education, nobody was doing this before, was that they say, “All copyrights reserved” on their front page. It says, “You may not link to individual entries in the dictionary.”

Audrey Tang: Actually, you cannot link to it anyway, but they said you can just link to the home page and “all copyright reserved.” In Taiwan, the Fair Use law says you can use a reasonable part of a government-produced work, as long as you’re using it for non-profiting purposes or for educational purposes.

Audrey Tang: I imagine it’s the same doctrine anywhere. We’re not using a part, we’re using 100 percent of that data.

Audrey Tang: Correspondingly, we have to relinquish 100 percent of our claim. At that time, there is an invention firm Creative Common movement called Creative Commons Zero. When people use CC0, they say, “I relinquish even the attribution copyright.”

Audrey Tang: It’s like it enters the public domain immediately, without waiting for me to die, and the 70 more years. With CC0, we said all our code in the dictionary are CC0. All our data that we converted are CC0, meaning that we’re really just doing data conversion work for the government.

Audrey Tang: We’re not really claiming any copyright on it. We argue this is a fair use, because it’s proportional to the proportion that we use, zero, 100 percent. [laughs] This is a very interesting legal case.

Audrey Tang: While the lawyers in the ministry are debating this subject -- they took a year -- we try to say, because it’s not one individual doing in, it’s 30 hackers doing it, it’s called “civil disobedience.” [laughs] We maintained this fair use, peaceful doctrine by that.

Audrey Tang: Now, we have structured data, what we call five-star data, meaning that every word has a URL, has a website address. Data, ziliao, in Chinese, everybody knows its website address in MoeDict, because it’s just moedict.tw/資料.

Audrey Tang: There’s no need to remember. This is again, the same hack as g0v.tw. You don’t have to remember our website. It’s just government website change.

Audrey Tang: With linked data, open linked data, when you mouse over or hover over any word in the dictionary, it will show a cross-reference of the dictionary definition in other dictionaries or in the same dictionary, in a linked data kind of way. This is how we do permanent links.

Audrey Tang: People started showing each other definitions of words on Facebook. We did for Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ what we call an Open Graph cover image. The cover image means that anybody who types moedict.tw/開放資料工作坊, meaning open data workshop. Of course, there is no such entry in the dictionary, yet.

Audrey Tang: Instead of saying, 404 Not Found, we say, this is the definition of open, this is the definition of data, this is the definition of a workshop. Then we use beautiful calligraphic to produce an image that is whatever you have just wrote.

Audrey Tang: This became the sweetheart of mobilizers everywhere, because on Facebook, this virality is 10 times more than compared to if you just had a message without a picture. If you have a picture that doesn’t match your message, it could be a counter-influence. If you have a really good high-quality image, maybe it’s copyrighted, so that’s another problem.

Audrey Tang: The mobilizers spent a lot of time searching for high quality images that matched their message. Now with MoeDict, they don’t have to do that anymore. They just say, “Go to the streets tomorrow,” and then you have a banner that says, “Go to the street tomorrow.” It looks like this.

Audrey Tang: Then you can use whatever message you have and, because we abandoned copyright, nobody will sue you. This becomes the preferred banner tool for online mobilizers in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: With this kind of technology, if you think this calligraphy is not fitting you message, we offer you a whole menu of open source or free fonts, so you can tailor-make the font to suit your message, whatever you want it to look, very violent, very peaceful, or very classic, whatever.

Audrey Tang: People use this for most mundane things like, “I feel so good today,” or whatever. They just let their friends know their feelings. In a sense, we hack into the Facebook algorithm with this kind of dictionary technology.

Audrey Tang: When you see people share like this, you can then re-share it on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. It went viral very easily. Now, with this kind of virality engine, we have seven million visits per month.

Audrey Tang: When you have 7 million visits per month, whenever we put a call to action on the website, as MOE Dictionary, even though maybe 1 in 1,000 will donate their time, that’s a lot of people. We will start to ask people’s time to digitize old dictionaries made in the ’70s, that we only have very low quality print-version now.

Audrey Tang: We do a scan and then we ask people, again just like the Tofu, to adjust for the OCR because the OCR of low quality sometimes makes mistakes. You look at the OCR result, you correct the mistakes, and you send it out. Again, we have the progress bar that lets everybody know that you are contributing to preserving the culture of the Aborigines.

Audrey Tang: “You’re doing a good work, thank you,” and so on. It worked. The Amis-Mandarin-English trilingual dictionary, this dict, was digitized in just two days and a half by a lot of those people, and then we have an electronic dictionary.

Audrey Tang: People who love words spent a lot of time on this, just doing free work, and then digitizing the dictionary that they care about. They don’t even need to know Amis or Français, because it’s just typing in Latin characters.

Audrey Tang: While the ministry lawyers were debating our case, they were having an activity where they asked people to spot problems -- typos, errors -- in the MOE dictionary. They’re finally, after 20 years, trying to do a new version.

Audrey Tang: Now, within those 18 days, we started a campaign on our version of the MOE dictionary, saying we use a program to identify two entries that cites the same source, but differ by one word, meaning one of it is probably a typo. A computer knows which one is different, but it doesn’t know which one is correct.

Audrey Tang: We asked our readers to Google, see which one is correct, choose the one that is correct, and send it out. We collect more than 5,000 erratas from the dictionary this way, and sent it all back to the ministry. They have maybe 6,000 contributions, and a majority was from the MoeDict.

Audrey Tang: On the day of our sending of this dictionary errata in this huge spreadsheet, they gave us an award and say, “What you’re doing is fair use.” If they sue us, it’s not against 30 hackers any more. It’s against thousands of language lovers, teachers, high school students. They cannot risk even alienating any of those people, because they’re the core constituency of that ministry.

Audrey Tang: When we involve all the teachers, all the students, all the linguistics scholars, and academics, the civil disobedience becomes a national thing. Then all they can do is, “I give you an award. This is fair use.”

Audrey Tang: Now, we digitized the aborigine dictionary. This is the Amis, slada, meaning a square. The way we do this is not because a project leader like me or Yeh Ping, knows Amis, Français, or Hakka. We don’t, actually.

Audrey Tang: The way we do is that we work on a language we know, and then we open source everything. Then any other language, just take it, and build their own MoeDict website. This is different from how the ministry used to do things.

Audrey Tang: The ministry used to do things in a coordinated way. They have a committee of five people, and when the sixth people join, they have to know the other five people, each one representing one language, a community. There’s a lot of fighting of which council member represent that minority.

Audrey Tang: Some Aborigine will say, “We are actually two tribes, not one tribe, so it’s not fair,” things like that. Committees have a lot of problems, exactly because human beings cannot really know 30 people in the same room, and have the same share of time.

Audrey Tang: With the way MoeDict is doing things, which we call collaboration, if we have started something that we share, and then any other language is free to take it in whatever direction. Sometimes, like in Amis, they will have very good idea.

Audrey Tang: Then the Mandarin dictionary will just merge, because everybody relinquished their copyright into the Mandarin dictionary. Then other dictionaries will follow. If some ideas are so fringe that it’s only useful for their community, it’s still OK.

Audrey Tang: They just fork the project and maintain an independent website, specially tailored to that community. This is what we call a rough consensus. As long as people agree generally on the direction, even people who collaborate with enemies, are able to work together by going on their different ways. That’s another half hour of talk.

Giovanni Allegretti: What are we doing? Do you want to have a break?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Audrey Tang: Let me finish with just one last slide. Yeh Ping registered this domain. Now, you know what it means, edu.tw to 3du.tw.

Audrey Tang: After two years, the Ministry of Education finally says, “All our dictionaries, past, future, are released under Creative Commons. You don’t even have to do civil disobedience or fair use. We now join your movement.” It took two years and a half.

Audrey Tang: Or, for example, we have an open data portal where we wrote an open data license that we will want to see from all the communities in Taiwan. The government, the National Development Council, saw it as a much better license than the license they were using, which is not 100 percent open data definition compatible.

Audrey Tang: Because they merged back the data portal from g0v, suddenly all the levels in the city level and the national level are in an open definition compatible license. Because of that, the Open Knowledge Foundation Network, OKFN global open data index, Taiwan became, from g0v was first founded, the 36th place, to 11th place, to now, this year, the first place.

Audrey Tang: That is not because we produce more data, but because all the agencies merged the g0v way of doing open data, including the license and the infrastructure. I think we will have a pause for maybe 10 minutes, but people are still free to talk and ask questions.

Giovanni Allegretti: Do you need coffee or something?

Audrey Tang: Coffee would be great.

Giovanni Allegretti: Eh?

Audrey Tang: Coffee would be great.

Audrey Tang: Just a small one.

Giovanni Allegretti: Just espresso?

Audrey Tang: Espresso is great. Thank you.

Audience Member: Very interesting.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. We are just halfway, so I’m worried about time.

Audience Member: This is still recording, so keep in mind that.

Audrey Tang: We can go all the way to 5:30 or something? It’s not a limit?

Audience Member: We reserved the whole afternoon.

Giovanni Allegretti: I think it’s 5:30. I think, maximum, 6:00. Vanessa, for example, it’s snowing in her village, so she has to go before the snow cover. The majority of us, we can stay here. It’s just to learn some, and I think the next slide is on the budget?

Audrey Tang: Yes, it’s about PB.

Giovanni Allegretti: For us, it’s more...

Audience Member: I think it’s very, very interesting. It’s the first time that I see a presentation about egovernment and this type of movement from people who really know what...

Giovanni Allegretti: What they are saying.

Audience Member: Because most of the people have no clue what these agencies do, like the Clipper chip, and the Web. It’s important to see, also, if you understand that design is also important.

Audrey Tang: I was there when it was being done. I was reading all the RFCs when the Web was being created. Yes, because the laws on the Internet that...

Audience Member: How old were you?

Audrey Tang: 13 or something. The laws on the Internet are like physical laws that define what’s possible and what’s impossible. In policy discussions, if you don’t have people who know what’s possible and what’s not, it’s very difficult.

Audience Member: Did you participate in the IETF?

Audrey Tang: Yes, but that’s in the early 2000s, 2000, I think, ’03 or ’04.

Audience Member: More or less same time.

Giovanni Allegretti: You have the same age, more or less, ’81.

Audrey Tang: I started coding in ’89.

Audience Member: I’m ’90. We are the same age, like... I’ve been to several meetings, because I was working in a draft proposal. I didn’t like the way that was. I don’t know what is your opinion, but I didn’t like that much idea, because you have...

Audrey Tang: Which working group were you on?

Audience Member: I was in Mesos.

Audience Member: What is IETF?

Audience Member: IETF is a standardization where we, it’s where I grew up, the Internet, basically.

Audrey Tang: It’s like the Parliament of the Internet...

Audience Member: I was with guys from Siemens, and stuff like that. It pains me that most of them are there only to do work and business, and go forward. You see what, the old guys, the guys with white hair and beard...

Audrey Tang: Right. I think the IETF in the early ’90s is very different from the Millennials.

Audience Member: Exactly.

Audrey Tang: When I say to the media usually that I’m a conservative anarchist, I mean that I want to conserve the ’90s idea, spirit. It’s going narrower, but I think we still need to keep that tradition.

Audience Member: I saw so many stuff going around. I went something like three years, went around to all the meetings. I saw things like people discussing outside the meetings, what they want to be presented at what...

Audience Member: Should we start?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, we should probably start.

Audrey Tang: Should we start?

Giovanni Allegretti: We continue after the break. The floor is yours. If you need more water, I have it.

Audrey Tang: Sure. For the people...

Giovanni Allegretti: ...our things, our specific things.

Audrey Tang: It took much longer than we expected, but I was told that we have this floor until maybe 5:30, or even 6:00. The thing is that for the people -- hi, over there [laughs] -- we will continue for at least an hour. In the beginning of the hour, I will start talking about one particular case, that the g0v -- it’s actually the Zeros Project of g0v -- it’s budget.g0v.tw.

Audrey Tang: The magic about this project was that it was the initial thing that promoted the creation of this domain. It started with a television advertisement. The Taiwan government has, at that time, what they call an economic boost-up plan. It’s like one of those five-year plans.

Audrey Tang: The plan is very complicated. To spend the budget wisely, they reallocated all the different ways to spend public money on the national level. Now, they filmed a movie, an advertisement -- just five minutes, short movie -- that they broadcast on YouTube.

Audrey Tang: It was the first YouTube account movie that they published to the netizens in addition to television networks. That advertisement, which I will spare you, is basically showing the economic power-up plan on top and then five people looking very puzzled to this banner.

Audrey Tang: Then the voice-over says, “The economic power-up plan is a very complicated plan. We would like to explain in five minutes, but it is not possible. We will just tell you that we have everything figured out. In the five minutes time, I would ask you to not question the government’s decisions, and just go on with it. To do economy, we don’t need more debates, we just need actions to go ahead and do it.”

Giovanni Allegretti: So, “Trust us. Trust us, and don’t criticize.”

Audrey Tang: Yes. Trust us, and don’t criticize. It is a very complicated plan. “You must trust us, and we don’t trust you to understand.”

Audrey Tang: This is so insulting that the director of that advertisement was replaced promptly. Also, that sufficient people used this YouTube feature called report as spam on that YouTube advertisement so that the Taiwan government become the first government to be marked as a junk mailer and to be removed the account from YouTube. People were just saying this is spam.

Audrey Tang: Of course, all it takes is for a letter to YouTube to restore their account but one of the founders of g0v, CL Kao, was at the time in the Yahoo! hackathon. They were doing a very commercial kind of hackathon, where people present commercial ideas.

Audrey Tang: They were trying to do some eshopping, this kind of hackathon. Because of the YouTube account was restored that day, they feel very much insulted. They changed their topic on the very last minute, and decided to download all the PDF and Word files of the national budget.

Audrey Tang: Saying, “You don’t trust us to understand it because it’s too complicated, and cannot be explained in five minutes, but maybe the problem is the way you share your data. Maybe the problem is not with our brain, maybe the problem is with the way you show it, with 500 pages of PDF files.”

Audrey Tang: They took those 500 pages and made a website, budget.g0v.tw, that shows the same national budget but in a way that could be explained at the end of the hackathon in five minutes, as existential proof that this could be understood in five minutes. They had to register a domain for it.

Audrey Tang: They registered this domain, and that was the beginning of g0v, because they got some minor award from the hackathon. They used the money to buy very good food for their fellow hackers. That was the creation, so to speak, of g0v. [laughs]

Giovanni Allegretti: No food, no hacking.

Audrey Tang: Exactly, exactly. Now, from the environmental agency, I will now take you to the budget side. This is the Taipei City government. The web address is budget.taipei. If you type budget.taipei in your browser or something, you will go to this website.

Audrey Tang: This is saying very prominently on the top saying, this is a fork from the g0v central government website. It’s right on the top, and it has any number of Facebook likes.

Audrey Tang: What this is doing is, it’s saying to you that the education budget is the largest among all the city government budgets. However, it’s getting cut by about two percent, compared to the previous year because of the color. Everybody could see that right?

Audrey Tang: Then the environmental...

Giovanni Allegretti: The pink is the cuts?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, the pinks are the cuts. The red are the severe cuts. The green are the increase, year by year. The one that was a red circle around it, are the maintenance costs. Meaning that this has to happen every year. You cannot cut this. Yes, any questions?

Audrey Tang: The non-red ones are investment, meaning that it is subject to change year by year. Now, you could see that in a glance, that for example, social housing, social security is getting more and more, and so on. If you want to look at the entire budget, you can also do that. [laughs] The ones that are getting increased float.

Giovanni Allegretti: The areas are organized by areas with cuts and area with...

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Audience Member: The color is meaningful?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, that’s what the color is saying. You can see that the top one with the red circle, I have no idea what it is, actually. Oh, it is the pension because Taipei City is letting go of all their private chauffeurs for the city officials, in a way to reduce costs or something and all the benefits that the Taipei officials are having.

Audrey Tang: They’re now just taking the metro, like everybody else, but they need to pay the pension to those private drivers that were driving for them before. Anybody, in a few seconds, can see what this is doing.

Giovanni Allegretti: In the United States, I don’t know if you know. There is a thing called debt-in-taxes, which has been done by a marketing agency. There was a representation of the American budget, which is in the studio of each one of the members of parliament because it is the only way.

Giovanni Allegretti: They did an experiment and now it’s a three meters long poster that I have also at home, which is very interesting. It was an experiment of marketing but it became the only way for the member of parliament to understand the budget.

Audrey Tang: Exactly, to visualize. Now, here what we see is four buttons, meaning that you ask for more of this budget. You do not understand the explanation, you want to cut it or you want to delete it altogether.

Audrey Tang: Whenever you click that, you will be asked, why? The interesting thing here is -- all this in Chinese, obviously -- I will go to maybe social security, labor, whatever, social. I think labor is more interesting.

Audience Member: You have to be logged in to do that.

Audrey Tang: To comment, of course. For example, in labor, where they have a reeducation and whatever, you see a treemap, but you also see the very fine details. You can see, for the labor insurance, for the labor union or whatever, how they exactly are spending the money.

Audrey Tang: This is what they send to the council. This is exactly the same work as they send to the city council. With software, we can highlight the parts that gets increased or gets decreased, and the reason behind this.

Audrey Tang: When people have a discussion of this, sometimes we want people to understand exactly how this is like. For example, when we switch to the units that is perhaps iPhone 5 -- I don’t know why iPhone 5 is here -- it would tell us how many iPhone 5s is this amount of money and so on. When people...

Giovanni Allegretti: Calculate it in iPhone 5.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, exactly.

Audience Member: You can calculate it in pharma, for example.

Giovanni Allegretti: It’s food.

Audrey Tang: Yes. You can use very creative units.

Audience Member: Can I ask just one question?

Audrey Tang: Sure, yes.

Audience Member: Can you show, for example, what is the amount of repaying the debt in this budget?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, sure.

Audience Member: For example, in Italy we’ll have big, big bubble that is corresponding.

Audience Member: It’s obviously possible.

Audrey Tang: It’s here, actually.

Giovanni Allegretti: You can choose several things that you can use to calculate, can you choose here or the iPhone 5 the only option?

Audrey Tang: No. [laughs] The other ones are in Mandarin.

Audrey Tang: I will translate for you. These are, in order, yuan, which is just Taiwan dollars, and then this is a lunch, how many lunch there is, the average national salary, how many minutes of space travel. [laughs]

Giovanni Allegretti: Business trips.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, business trips. "How many bubble teas". "How many Icelands".

Giovanni Allegretti: Icelands?

Audrey Tang: "How many Icelands".

Audience Member: How many Icelands?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. I think they’re using the total Iceland’s bailing out money as the unit, I think, when Iceland went bankrupt...

Giovanni Allegretti: Ah, OK.

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Audience Member: Iceland, OK.

Audrey Tang: [laughs] Yes, as a loan. Yes.

Audience Member: There’s no loan from Iceland.

Audience Member: How many ports is that?

Audrey Tang: [laughs] Yes, and you can see this, how many relative size and things like that. To answer your question, the debt is here. It’s in the other expenses, which is not that much actually. Also, the pension, and also this is disaster preparation. Then this is like temporary workers actually, which is not so much. It’s OK. Yeah.

Giovanni Allegretti: So the main issue is it is a multi-level readability. You can adapt to the culture of the reader, different level of understanding?

Audrey Tang: Exactly. If you are an expert, then you debate on this level. But if you’re just a layperson, you still have a basic idea to what the budget is about.

Giovanni Allegretti: In iPhones.

Audrey Tang: In iPhones. Exactly. [laughs] Exactly in iPhones. Because each of this has a discussion board, people could click on it and say” I want more, I want less,” and so on and have a Facebook discussion on it.

Audrey Tang: After one month of people pressing like and saying whatever they like or dislike about the budgets, the city government surprised all of them by having all of the office reply to all of the comments directly.

Audrey Tang: This is amazing. We use the focus conversation method to reply first to the fact questions. Like, I see the stadium being invested by. I don’t see the construction what’s going on? Then the reflections. Like, this should be more, this should be less, then ideas.

Audrey Tang: People were very surprised when the city government people replied to them in this way. The reason why they do that, as I’ve said, the mayor was an independent. He doesn’t have a party. The entire city council is his opposition.

Audrey Tang: When he want to do participatory budgets, by allocating some percent of the city investment budget, the council was against that because there was no party backing the mayor. Then it was seen as they shouldn’t have attacked our representative democracy from the direction of direct democracy.

Audrey Tang: The mayor then said, “We bypass the council. We now recruit people who can make sense out of this information, who made interesting or useful contributions. We send them invitations through their local communities for them to attend classes to educate for them about budgeting.”

Audrey Tang: When they get 12 hours of education, they get a credit card. When they get 24 hours, they get additional training on how to talk with civic servants specialties. Then, if they enroll in another 12 hours of training, they train to become facilitators.

Audrey Tang: How to hold meetings, how to take records, how to do cross-sectoral stakeholder analysis, very basic facilitator training, and they call it deliberators -- city deliberators. By the end of the 36-hour training, they get this metro card that has their name on it, saying that this is the biz-B card.

Audrey Tang: You are now a biz-B of the Taipei city. That is like a civil servant, but from the civic society. When they have completed training of maybe 300 people in three different batches of these kind of deliberators, they now have the same kind of counter-expertise that could rival the budget committee of the city council.

Audrey Tang: Now, they see the same data and they have more or less the same level of expertise and knowledge. Then Mayor Ko could start doing participatory budgeting. Before that, he doesn’t really have the buy-in from the city council.

Audrey Tang: The city civil servants would be very scared, because then maybe all the budgets gets cut when the participatory budget process runs at the end. It still need a stamp of approval from the city council.

Audrey Tang: Now, with this threat, or carrot on a stick kind of thing, of saying, “You will get bypassed if you don’t buy-in into this process,” Mayor Ko now gets much more buy-in from the city council, which is now their role as the leaders of those civic deliberators.

Audrey Tang: Now, they are much more aligned in value, but this is because we have people who speak the civil service language or the elected council member language through this kind of public education for at least half a year. That’s how Taipei does its PB plan.

Audrey Tang: It’s based on the national budget work that g0v did as its Zeros Project. I hope I am making sense. Any questions?

Giovanni Allegretti: That means that he’s strengthening his weak political position through a program that was matching transparency, civic training, in order to create precondition to have a society that could support externally the lack of political support into him?

Audrey Tang: Yes. That’s brilliant analysis. Exactly. Yes.

Giovanni Allegretti: That was because you were there to help him with this?

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Giovanni Allegretti: Without your system, it wouldn’t have happened?

Audrey Tang: Right, because then the council would have to approve a budget to buy a system to replace them, which will never happen. [laughs] The fact that we offer this system for free is, of course, critical.

Giovanni Allegretti: Of course, we are trying to imagine what kind of things EMPATIA can offer. It’s attractive because it’s for free, but at the same time, obliged to a larger level of transparency, of responsiveness by the institution than what exists now?

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Giovanni Allegretti: We understood that also from your perspective, the fact of offering for free tempting things, although these tempting things included a responsibility, a duty of transparency, they continue to be attractive.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Giovanni Allegretti: Our discussion is exactly on that, on how we can get attention and try to contribute...

Audrey Tang: Also, when Taipei City did this, the Taichung City, the southern city, announced immediately that they would also publish their entire PDF in an OpenSpending format to join this platform, because they don’t want to be seen as less administratively progressive than Taipei City. They’re fighting for the capital position, actually. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Audience Member: All this budget platform relies on the publication of budget data and open data from central and local authorities in all the online?

Audience Member: A. Exactly, yes.

Audience Member: When you started already, you had this source of open data?

Audrey Tang: No.

Audience Member: The platform was also able to, let’s say, activate?

Audrey Tang: Scrape, yes.

Audience Member: Because one problem, for example, we met one of another project, which is like a clean or cozy project, also founded by the UN. It’s called Open Budget, and focuses exactly on providing semantic, blah, blah, blah, blah, for analyzing code.

Audience Member: The point is that it originally relies on the fact that it’s based on a whistleblowing principle, so that citizens will provide this kind of data bottom-up.

Audience Member: Which somehow, it’s a mechanism that can be enacted just when there is a certain kind of critical mass, I would say, that push other to imitate it with something that exists, but I’m not sure, how does it start? How did it start? What was the original for that?

Audrey Tang: I’m reminded that I should not write acronyms so I will write Freedom of Information Act. I think most countries have something like that where you can ask your government things, and they must publicize it.

Audrey Tang: The problem is, this act is read-only. The public, in most civil tradition countries, meaning that if they give you an A4 paper, or a PDF file that is scanned, the only thing you can do is to read it. You cannot sell it. You cannot change it. You cannot even put it on your website sometimes. All you can do is to read it, maybe aloud to other people, but that’s the only thing you can do.

Audrey Tang: Then, again, what it gives, is information, meaning, it’s understandable by people, but not necessarily computers. If they give a very low quality scan, there’s nothing you can do with it on computers, without human. The Freedom of Information Act is a start, but it’s never strong enough.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, where we’re pushing for open data, we make a very, very clear distinction saying, “When you go from public read-only to open read-write, you enable people to make things like this because you can now change the way the data is presented.”

Audrey Tang: You can make tabular data into treemaps, but in the original public Information Act, you cannot do that because it was not licensed using an open definition or a Creative Commons license, that enables remixes and creativities of this kind of thing.

Audrey Tang: We sell the idea of open data not through data policy, but through the openness that allows people to do the convincing, the translation, the visualization, everything, reporting, storytelling work for the government, for the civil servants.

Audrey Tang: For the civil servants this is very attractive, because that makes their position much more important than the elected officials, because they are the provider of this information, which then gets converted for free to reach more people. This is the first thing.

Audrey Tang: Now the next thing as you said, sometimes with whistleblowers or with Freedom of Information Act, all we get is low quality information, but we want to turn it into a machine.

Giovanni Allegretti: Maybe you are in a certain spot, a specific area, or have good information, but you cannot go over a...

Audrey Tang: Exactly. It’s not machine readable. If it’s not machine readable in its entirety with context, then it’s not really data. You can call it raw data, but this is very stretching it.

Audrey Tang: To make information into something that is also machine readable, we rely on the international community like the OpenSpending Community, the OKFN, the W3C, Code for All, the usual suspects to define the international formats.

Audrey Tang: That we say, “If you convert your information to this data definition that’s being maintained by 27 countries,” which is true, “you automatically get visibility to 27 countries.” Because Taiwan is not part of United Nations, it’s not part of WIPO, all the elected officials are very interested in getting pilot visibility anywhere in the world, [laughs] because it was like a hidden country.

Audrey Tang: Under OKFN where we were, the first place, they had to change this column. This used to say, “Country,” but now it just says, “Place.” Because of that, that Taiwan is not in the United Nations, they had to change for a multilateralism way of thinking, of sovereignty to multistakeholderism, where Taiwan is 23 million people of a civil society, or some other things like that.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that elected officials buy into this, because when they publish information in a way that it is also compatible with international data, then they get international visibility like the top space on the OKFN index, which is very good for publicly elected officials.

Audrey Tang: This way, we convince the public servants and the elected. This way, we convince the elected officials. Together, we change Taiwan’s norm from the public information to open data. Now, any information system that costs less than one million euros are open data Creative Commons by default.

Audrey Tang: They cannot even argue. They cannot even refuse. As long as this is built in under a million euros of total budget over the past three years, they must be open data in a machine readable format, under a Creative Commons compatible license. This completely changes the role of civil servants. I will explain how we get to there in the next slide. Is that OK?

Audrey Tang: As I said, all the technologies we worked that I showed so far is from the government to the civil society, and asking for the feedback, but the civil society is not satisfied with that. What we really want is agenda-setting power, is saying, "What kind of things must the government think about."

Audrey Tang: This is because the civil society, although it has solidarity, linking, whatever, is never getting the same amount of early-stage decision data as the private sector lobbyists are getting within the government.

Audrey Tang: Maybe individual academicians, scholars, committee members have some representation in those committees, like the environmental, or budget or development committees. The problem is that they don’t have this natural, what we call the "industry chain" connection that the lobbyists have.

Audrey Tang: A lobbyist in one industry naturally has affinity with their vendor’s and their customer’s industry, so their natural interests are aligned. Our individual committee members don’t have this kind of natural chain.

Audrey Tang: The reason of this is because, when they can share a lot of information within the lobbyist network, there is no comparable network for the civil society to share those early-stage decision-making information.

Audrey Tang: As a result of that, the protesters on the street, [laughs] even though they could mobilize a lot of people, they’re not really speaking the same language as the lawmakers are speaking. They could escalate however they want, but it’s not the same kind of process. This is a general enough graph. I think this applies to pretty much any democratic country on the planet.

Audrey Tang: One of the ways we turn this around is by Occupy. I imagine all of you know how Occupy works, so I will not explain the Occupy or the hand gestures. The place where we occupy is the Legislative Parliament, the Congress. Why we occupied was that it refused to do its job. The background, which could be very easily explained in one minute, is this.

Audrey Tang: In 2014, Taiwan is about to sign a cross-strait trade agreement deal with Beijing. When Beijing, China agrees on this much better than the World Trade Organization term, they offered cross-strait, very, very good deals about the service agreement, basically giving a semi-domestic monopoly, so to speak, to Taiwan-based companies.

Audrey Tang: Normally, when we sign something like that with, say, New Zealand, or with Japan, or with Portugal, there is a process. The Parliament must hold a hearing. All the impacted industries must send representatives, and then they debate case by case. They do an impact analysis. This is the same as in any other democratic country.

Audrey Tang: Constitutionally, Beijing is part of Taiwan in the Taiwan Constitution, because of a loophole in the Constitution, because the government that occupies Taiwan was the government of China. Constitutionally, they consider Beijing part of Taiwan, Mongolia part of Taiwan, Tibet part of Taiwan. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Any agreement that we sign with Beijing is like the national government signing a deal with the Taipei City. This is a domestic agreement, and a domestic agreement is administrative business that is nothing of the Parliament’s business. Because that’s how the things work.

Audrey Tang: If all the Taipei City or Taichung City budgets must go through the national Parliament, the Parliament doesn’t have to do anything else. This is too much for them. Because Beijing is a local government, [laughs] a Taiwan institution, this kind of trade agreement is when the president and administration want to sign it, the deal doesn’t have to go through the legislative.

Audrey Tang: The legislative, when they sit on it for 90 days, it automatically gets passed. There’s no way to not sign this sort of agreement. Clearly, this is against the intuition of everybody in Taiwan. But this is part of the Constitution and the Constitution defined the function of the Parliament.

Audrey Tang: The Parliament cannot really function, other than saying, “We cannot talk about it. We cannot deliberate about it.” By the date of this automatic expiry, that it automatically goes into effect, there was this large protest outside of the Parliament building, where I was supplying the Internet connectivity for broadcasting.

Audrey Tang: This is what we call the 0th Sunflower Digital Camp, because this is the first time, as a demonstration, it was not done on the street. It was done in the Parliament building.

Audrey Tang: The protesters were not doing their usual kind of mobilization, where they were just doing counter-power. They were demonstrating in a demo kind of way, “How should we talk about service agreement like this?” They were doing the legislator’s job in the legislative building for 22 days. That was the idea of the Occupy.

Audrey Tang: A few months after the Occupy, something very similar happened in Hong Kong. It’s called the Umbrella Revolution or Movement. Again, it’s self-organized. Again it was, just like in Taipei, called by the world’s media as the world’s politest protestors, which do garbage recycling for themselves.

Audrey Tang: I was in Dusseldorf, Germany at that time. I was joining with telepresence, typing the message which was projected on the Occupy Central walls in Hong Kong.

Giovanni Allegretti: I was in Hong Kong in those days.

Audrey Tang: Really? You saw those projectors, yes. Then, one of the people there tweeted saying the website of the Occupy Central has got to be the most technological advanced in history. Now, one of his friends said, "I have seen this website before."

Audrey Tang: Then CL Kao, one of the g0v founders, saying, “Yeah, because that’s the Sunflower movement website on GitHub.” They just forked the g0v Sunflower Movement website.

Audrey Tang: For people who have not seen the website before, this is crowdsourced bookmarks here. Everything is crowdsourced. You can add a bookmark here. This is all the live video feeds that is seen here, and this is the real-time map, so to speak. This is newsroom, and this is logistics.

Audrey Tang: In finer detail, the highlights shows you the medical areas, the barricades, the concentration of police, a war map, basically, that anybody who plays video games knows how to use. [laughs] This is to tell rumors from facts. Any rumors get triaged by on-the-field photo, and it’s done in a timeline map.

Audrey Tang: This is also a time mapper, and again, a g0v export, so to speak that correlates those rumors and news to the place where they happened. Then, this is all the cameras that people brought. In real-time videocasting, you can view four of it, or nine of it, at a time.

Audrey Tang: You can just correlate those news with real-time transcripting service that people do next to the videos. When I was in Germany, I can see that now there are maybe 12 different places occupied. For every Occupy, this is the last update date.

Audrey Tang: They say that they need water, Pocari Sweat, drinks, ponchos, towels. We see these places are being gas-attacked, so they need N95 masks, and things like that. Any new supplies, they know where to flow.

Audrey Tang: This says, “Urgent releases,” and what kind of extra supplies they have, so that they can also repurpose the supplies to other nearby Occupy areas, and so on. This is a very useful application, obviously, but this is what Clay Shirky calls a situational application, a sit app. Because if you use only Twitter, only Facebook, only Google+, you cannot do movements this way.

Audrey Tang: This way of doing movements requires the hackers go for Hong Kong, in this case, being on the field, changing the software every day, responding to the need of the Occupy of that day, and deploying it in a matter of minutes to everybody on the occupied areas.

Audrey Tang: Without hackers at the front line of an Occupy, these kind of occupations could never happen because Facebook and Twitter, as great as they are, they were not designed for Occupy. The 0th prototype of it happened in the Anti-Nuclear Force Plant Protest.

Audrey Tang: A year before this, in 2013, there was a very large, almost quarter million, protest because that was after the Fukushima nuclear plant event in Japan. Everybody was very against nuclear power at that point. Taiwan was doing its fourth nuclear plant, and people went out on the street to say, “We don’t want that.”

Audrey Tang: When people were on the street, the news media came, and they found that all the cell phones were down because they could not report on the field, because the 3G network just got overloaded with that many people on the street.

Audrey Tang: None of the real-time media people could send out their footage. Even though there is very many people, you can only look at those next day’s newspaper, which decreased the bargaining power of the movement.

Audrey Tang: That year, in 2014, they don’t want to repeat the same mistake, so they searched for experts, that is to say g0v people. I’m not a CPR expert, but I know something about software. We worked with the cable power radio experts in the g0v team to a hackathon that we called the Parade Hackathon. The Parade Hackathon takes place outdoors.

Audrey Tang: Then we issued for a 50 megabit line to a nearby building. We want to broadcast. We expect a quarter million people to come. We would give all the journalists real-time footage. They could stream everything. We had everything planned out.

Audrey Tang: Now, but on that day a typhoon came, [laughs] and it was raining cats and dogs. Not even quarter a million people. It’s maybe 50,000 people, or even less. It became a very small kind of show. People were ready to help and it was raining so hard.

Audrey Tang: We had a very high speed fiber optic line, but we didn’t know what to do with it because, people could just use their 3G network. There is not that many people. Then YouTube just opened its YouTube Live platform a few weeks before that.

Audrey Tang: We have extra bandwidth and we have a high definition video connection from the stage, where the shows, the protests, the speakers, and those bands were playing. We just repurposed that line connecting to my computer with a Thunderbolt port and broadcasted it through YouTube online.

Audrey Tang: It was not announced because we did not expect that we’d have bandwidth to do that, but now we have all the extra bandwidth, so we do live broadcasting. Now, people feel guilty for not showing up on that day because of the weather, so they spread the news very quickly, as soon as we posted the link to the YouTube broadcasting.

Audrey Tang: In a matter of minutes, there are more people watching than people are around the stage and because we’re just broadcasting the camera, the people watching don’t really know that it’s just a few people there. It looks like still a very large festival, event, and whatever.

Audrey Tang: People feel like they are in a virtual parade, so to speak, that still has some kind of influence. We worked on the protocol of how to do this kind of live broadcasting on that day, and just 10 days after that, the Occupy Parliament happened.

Audrey Tang: We set up the same kind of gears here, and we expect it demonstrate for a night, and people would go home. One of the young students, who lent me his laptop, said, “This is my administrator password.” This is a laptop of 16, 17-inch-large laptop. He says, “You can use it as your broadcasting station and I’m not going to use my laptop anymore.”

Audrey Tang: I’m like, “This is a university student. He’s not going to use his laptop, huh?” It turns out that he went to the other side of the Parliament building and broke through the window and occupied the Parliament.

Audrey Tang: What we learned that day, all the occupiers -- there were maybe 50 or so students -- they are only allowed to carry MacBook Air. Anything that is heavier than MacBook Air they cannot climb over the walls with it, so they have to leave it on the street. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It makes sense, right, and iPad, of course. When they were in the Parliament building, nobody was expecting it, so there were just a few police. There was very civilized. They don’t even have to fight with police, there were no police.

Audrey Tang: Then the video team that supported this g0v live video happened to have this very high quality video camera, with this long stick, and so on. They covered the entire process of breaking into the Parliament building.

Audrey Tang: Once they are in the Parliament building, they set up this so called sandals broadcasting station, which has been broadcasting whatever happens on occupy area for the next three or so days. We have three video sources at that night.

Audrey Tang: The police soon came and surrounded this place. But because we already have people watching the live video, people went to take buses, take taxis to support, and they counter-surrounded the police. It was like 10 to 1 ratio.

Audrey Tang: The police dare not move, and the people were just counter-surrounding the police, so the new the police cannot join the people. It became a very interesting situation, where new people also cannot join the inner occupiers, but they were very interested in participating.

Audrey Tang: When they do listen to our YouTube views or the students Ustream views, we ask people to type whatever they hear into this Hackpad system that g0v uses all the time. This is like Google Docs. We brought out Hackpad immediately. They bought a new cluster, I think, in EC2 or something, specifically for g0v, because otherwise their other paying customers couldn’t use their service.

Audrey Tang: Then we used this to correlate the transcripts with the translations, which it was at the time, 12 different languages. This is basically a media apparatus that is like any other media, but it was built by civil hackers over the first 24 hours.

Audrey Tang: This is important because the news cycle. We occupied on the night, and the next morning, all the printed papers saying, “These are monsters. There were drunk people. They were breaking things,” what mainstream media do. But the agenda-setting power is done by the civic media already before the morning papers were printed.

Audrey Tang: People see on YouTube with their own hand how the breaking in happened, how there were peaceful negotiations with police, and so on. By the time the morning paper printed, people knew these were lies. Like, there were no fights and so on.

Audrey Tang: Then it became we set up the hack folder. That was the prototype of the Hong Kong system that you just saw and then the same designer who designed the g0v logo, designed the main visual identity. Then we crowdsourced all the bookmarks.

Audrey Tang: For the next few days, it becomes a war between traditional media and civic media. It’s a war on agenda-setting, on virality, on everything. We easily won that war in three days. Because the agenda setting power when you see it with your own eyes, the transcripts are accurate and the transcripts are translated and broadcast overseas. This is a reach that the traditional media just don’t have.

Audrey Tang: On the third day, we run into something that all the Occupies, when they are more than a week or so, run into. It’s the spreading of rumors. Because when there are more than one sites, for example, here we see people rumoring that the people in the Parliament are being attacked by the police, so they want to escalate the fight with the police, for example.

Audrey Tang: The leader has to come out and say, “No, this is not actually the case.” Because while people could fact check in their phones, the rumors still spread faster than the time it would take to check their phones. What we did was that we brought our own projector, and we set up this temporary projecting screen. We worked with a stenographer in the Parliament building.

Audrey Tang: She types everything she hears in the Parliament building, which is then broadcasted to the outside wall on the wall of the Parliament building. I brought to the ICT experts this very long Cat-6 line that’s 350 meters long, and they deploy this as an Intranet to all the three different sites of occupation.

Audrey Tang: It becomes a LAN party, so to speak, so that we have sub-10 millisecond view of everything that happens in the Parliament. People who don’t have the time to check the screen can see the stenographic transcript and say, “That is correct.”

Audrey Tang: It’s as if the police that is between the Occupy area and the streets don’t exist. It’s as if we can see straight into the Parliament building. Rumors spread now slower than facts. Because it’s such a good idea, the people in the Parliament building soon set up their own projectors that shows the projection on the streets. [laughs] It really just wired in a lot of people.

Audrey Tang: We provide this as a neutral role because during the Occupy, aside from the students and the protesters there’s a lot of other protesters on the street representing roughly speaking the separatists from China, independence.

Audrey Tang: And the environmentalists who protest against agreements, ecological impact, and the leftists, who protests against the delaying of the trade agreements that would cause the loss of jobs, or the loss of life, quality of labor people.

Audrey Tang: These three kinds of people are considered also protesters, but the other three kinds of people were considered neutral roles. They are doctors who upheld the right of health, so they will treat police, protester, or anything, and lawyers protecting the right of due process.

Audrey Tang: The g0v people used a g0v sticker on their shoulder. We call ourselves, “Upholding the constitutional right of communication.” We were the communication experts. Anybody who has anything to say, we are there to support their right to say anything on the Internet.

Audrey Tang: This is important because it’s only with this kind of neutrality people could trust us that we’re actually representing people inside and outside of the wall in a neutral fashion. This comes to test just two days after we declare ourselves neutral.

Audrey Tang: On the training floors, a bunch of students decides from the occupied Parliament building and the streets, three streets near it, to attack also the administrative building. That was just the next street. This is very dangerous because the administrative building is the executive power.

Audrey Tang: The police went and tried to evacuate the people who went there, and at the same time as the action which was un-pre-announced, we got cyber attacked through our crowdsourced bookmarks and our crowdsourced transcripts.

Audrey Tang: It’s like a coordinated attack under the infrastructure of communication. Because we use only free tools, because its open source, because it costs nothing, it took us only one hour to recover on another platform. We just changed the CNAME, and for the DNS provide it, that’s the only time we need to wait.

Audrey Tang: On the same time we send people with a WiMAX, that is to say, a high-speed connection, and as many battery packs as we can muster, and an iPad to cover, as a real-time stream, the attack on the administrative building from the occupiers.

Audrey Tang: Now, the police, who went here, and then the students, who went here, behaved very peacefully. Because they know they were being watched by 60,000 people online. There is a counter on Ustream. They broke the glasses, maybe. There was some shouting or something, but they behaved very civilly.

Audrey Tang: On the other side of the administrative building, there was police brutality of some degree. It was very, very brutal. That’s because there is no camera filming them. On that night we learned that people behave differently [laughs] under the camera versus not under the camera.

Audrey Tang: Of course we all know that, but we learned it very painfully. We decided then -- OK. I still have time -- to deploy not only the stationary cameras, which by that time, its numbers is in the dozens but they were stationary.

Audrey Tang: We decided that we need mobile cameras everywhere, around not just the streets but anywhere with any kind of possibility of escalation. We built a website. This is the Civic Journalism Batch Generator. All you have to do is to write your name here and upload your photo here.

Audrey Tang: It will print you a batch of your desired size that will fit your phone or the iPad that declares that you’re a journalist. Then we print on the other side of the badge, or the flip side of the badge, this QR code. What is this QR code?

Audrey Tang: It’s a link to a Supreme Court’s ruling a few years ago, that says, “Article 11in the Constitution protects not only speech, but also news gathering. News gathering is not limited just to professional journalists, but also protects any ordinary person who gathers information with the aim of providing newsworthy information to supervise the government.”

Audrey Tang: Whenever the police stop a civic journalist, we ask them to scan the QR code and read the Supreme Court’s decision. That says, “Any area where the mainstream media can enter, the civic journalist who printed this badge must be able to allow to enter. Otherwise, we will take you all the way to the Supreme Court.”

Audrey Tang: They assented, because this decision was done in an unambiguous way. Everybody voted for it, all the justices. The thing is that, with this kind of civic journalism badge, suddenly, we have dozens of mobile news feeds on the ground.

Audrey Tang: After that day, there is no injury, no fighting, nobody missing. It became a totally non-violent protesting. Now, when people become non-violent, we can actually do some deliberation. Beginning at March, 29 we went public this eight-months-old project from g0v, called, "Are you Affected by the Cross-Trade Agreement."

Audrey Tang: This is a website where you can be with your mobile phone. You can enter the trade you’re in. Maybe you’re in the IT industry, or you can enter your company name. Then you will show cross-linking to the company registration database the five trades your company is working on.

Audrey Tang: Then clicking on the kind of work that you do, it will show in a three-panel comic how exactly does the CSSTA affect you.

Audrey Tang: It will show you a mail-in Chinese coming by person or just the money, whether you can also do it to some province or the entire mail-in China, and how many impact would it have on your neighboring industries. Or if you are not in that service industry, it will show you that you are not affected by the CSSTA.

Audrey Tang: Instead of reading through hundreds of pages of PDF files, which was the launch we were working with, we correlated it with the registration data, with the UN data, with the WTO data, was the mail-in Chinese laws to show everybody in five seconds how exactly do they affect them, and to show the support of the occupiers on the street.

Audrey Tang: On that day when we started the deliberation in place of legislatures, the president said we do not acknowledge the result of this deliberation. We do not think, even though you can convince thousands of students, they are representatives in anyway.

Audrey Tang: Half a million people showed up on the street of Taipei and says, “This is not right. We must deliberate, and the administration digitalization must accept the result.” Then, what do we do with half a million people on the street?

Audrey Tang: We group them, again, according to existing streets into the independents, separatists, let deliberation, which talk about in sovereignty or the relationship with China of the trade agreement. Then the ecological, the green people talk about the ecological, the land, the farmland, and whatever impact.

Audrey Tang: Then the leftist people talk about the labor rights and so on. Our own ICT people started using Loomio, which is a specifically designed for the Occupy situation application, where people could share in their local area network how to reach consensus.

Audrey Tang: One of our topics here is how do we tell ICT volunteers from people who are just here to use this neutral, fast lane to get a very good view of the Parliament? Because g0v people, because our logo is creative common zero, anybody can print it, and put on one badge. It says that, “We are a radio-powered technology expert. We’re neutral, so please get us in.”

Audrey Tang: What they really want to do is to check in on Facebook. Basically, we need to tell the ICT people from the non-ICT people. There were a lot of proposals being proposed on Loomio, starting from very stupid ideas, like we could ask for their ID card, or something like that, or credentials, or something.

Audrey Tang: We would ask them to make a GitHub commit to prove, something like that. None of these are very practical in this kind of on-the-field setting. The beauty of Loomio is that we can have multiple stage of straw polls.

Audrey Tang: Whenever a new idea comes, we can do another stretch of poll until everybody agree, converge on the consensus. Our final consensus was that whenever a new person shows up with the g0v badge saying they are of the ICT team, we ask them what is 2 to the power of 16.

Audrey Tang: If they can answer this mathematical question, what is 2 to the power of 16, they’re probably a geek. If they’re not, they are probably not really the ICT team. 2 to the power of 16, that was the consensus. It was really effective.

Audrey Tang: Using the same technology, we captured the deliberation that was happening on the street in a different part of CSSTA. That was our first encounter with the people doing deliberative democracy or participatory democracy, and to lend ICT support to their cause.

Audrey Tang: That is how we met those people, and that’s how g0v, as a whole, gained a whole new dimension, that we want to set a mediation space where everybody could trust us, and for the private sector to sit down with the civil sector about the things that government’s not having the entire agenda-setting power.

Audrey Tang: I think it’s time for another 10-minute break. Are people OK with this story? Any ideas, thoughts, comments?

Audience Member: I actually have a question.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Audience Member: I was thinking about the participating budget and the website. I am from Turkey. It’s not really a comparison with being how many millions of people we have in Istanbul during the evening traffic.

Audience Member: Still, I was thinking about the other question that you really need to have a critical mass to be able to affect the politicians. My question is how many people follow this website? Is it really active in the society at large?

Audrey Tang: Yes, you mean the PB website? The budget in Taipei?

Audience Member: Or any other g0v website?

Audrey Tang: g0v website, yes. We have a million people on the street. They show up, but it’s easily 10 times this number online. This is because everybody is concerned about the CSSTA.

Audrey Tang: Now, the Taipei budget, I don’t have the numbers. In the ballpark, the day when the mayor, he said something very interesting. He said, “Without this kind of educational tool, any PB is just populism,” which is kind of true.

Audrey Tang: Then people are voting without knowing what they are voting for. This gets quoted on the national media. On the first day, we get, I think, almost a quarter million people who joined this kind of news cycle, who went very viral because...OK.

Giovanni Allegretti: Someone want to knock, and a big transparent...

Audrey Tang: Yes, exactly. Yeah, but I cannot speak Morse code, so we will need an interpreter. In any case, to answer your question directly. The number of people who care about Mayor Ko, the Taipei City mayor, is a lot nationally because there is a tradition in Taiwan that for the mayor of the capital to become the next president.

Audrey Tang: Mayor Ko was unique, because he have never done politics before. He was a professional surgeon. He was generally seen not a leftist. He was generally seen as somebody who thinks Singapore is a really good idea. Modern, efficient, you know?

Audrey Tang: Something a surgeon would like. Clean, and things like that. With this g0v partnership of participatory budgeting, he said something very, very important. He contradicted himself just a week ago. That’s another things he likes to do.

Audrey Tang: He would say something. Then a week after that, or even a day after that, he will say, “I was wrong yesterday. Sorry.” Now, he admits publicly he is on the autism spectrum as an Asperger’s person. It’s very natural for him to just speak the facts.

Audrey Tang: His child was diagnosed as an autist. He has this special quality of not feeling any shame or losing face, of saying, "OK. I was wrong. Now I think this way." Which is great, for a direct democracy.

Audrey Tang: Then, what he said essentially was this, that democracy is very young in Taiwan, but we can either roll back, and go back to the authoritarian Singapore model, or we can go forward. We can bring it to the 21st century, and do something that nobody in Asia has done.

Audrey Tang: Then for participatory budgeting he buys into this idea, exactly because nobody else in Asia is doing PB this way, as the Taipei City is doing it, based on open data and direct participation, bypassing the council entirely, having a counter-expertise to the council, things like building his own council, basically, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: He sees it as a democratic innovation. When a potential future presidential candidate says that, it gets national attention very quickly. I think everybody in Taiwan knows about this, but people check at his website, only maybe people living in the north region of Taiwan, which is slightly fewer. It’s still a large number of people.

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Audience Member: Something that you said before, it was like, I was seeing all this, which is this idea that...You are saying, “We were able to put cameras on a certain side of the school. The level of violence decreased automatically once transparency was projected in the public space.”

Audience Member: The public was pretty significant and transparent. That’s something that I was thinking about. I don’t know. I was seeing, for example, in Turkey. Last year we had a lot of public demonstration, a lot of cameras on the street.

Audience Member: Still, the level of violence on the people who was protesting was really strong and really high. I’m wondering, in what measured way...I think, the way in which you frame transparency and attribute a set of political band, entrenched in the concept of transparency, is not completely neutral, with respect to the effect that transparency has on the society, were you to implement it.

Audience Member: I don’t know if I’m being clear on this point.

Audrey Tang: Yes. This a very quick, so, there is two levels. There is transparency, and there is reflexivity or reflectivity. The important thing is not the camera, it’s the projector. It’s the thing that people donated two-story high projectors installed on the street.

Audrey Tang: Everybody sees everything that is taken by the on-field camera in real-time, as if they’re telepresent in the same space. The important thing is not the nation sees the street. The important thing is the street sees itself through a mirror, knowing that the nation is seeing it. Do you know what I’m talking about?

Audience Member: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Basically, this is a “Truman’s Show,” so to speak, that we make the space itself a space of mirrors, a reflective space. Without this kind of setting, with just cameras, people are not being made aware that they are inside a panopticon.

Audience Member: I have a theorem on that.

Audrey Tang: We have an entire social computing theory about this.

Audience Member: An example of the differences. I think, even if the cams could be used...it always depends about the power relation, where you set it down. I was thinking, for example, the rally of Donald Trump. The other day, they were clearly knowing that there were cameras on a position.

Audience Member: They used this situation to draw black people away from public space where Donald Trump was speaking. It was a clear political message to the people that was attending, and to the people at home. It was.

Audrey Tang: Yes. I have more slides that talk about that.

Audience Member: Oh, OK.

Audrey Tang: [laughter] Yes. Exactly. Yes, I agree with this analysis. This is completely true.

Audience Member: I’m not saying that you assess that transparency is a neutral plan. It is just that what we make it.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, exactly, which is why this is not enough. This setting is not enough, because if the private sector interests are much larger than what I draw here, then the civil society, this becomes a method of exclusion.

Audrey Tang: Because this becomes what the political analysts say is tokenism. You are here. Everybody can be here, but it doesn’t really matter, because you are still a minority. We evolve this idea in my next slide. Any other thoughts, ideas, questions, comments, tweets?

Audience Member: We have some people at home, they’re now asking questions. We can ask them instead.

Giovanni Allegretti: If someone at home wants to ask questions, you can...

Audrey Tang: You can do so.

Giovanni Allegretti: ...you can do it.

Audrey Tang: One of the relay people will relay for you. Now, evolving this idea. After the Occupy, the politics in Taiwan changed completely. After the Occupy, and the Occupy Central, there was this reelection of the city level government.

Audrey Tang: The Nationalist Party, which was the dictatorship party, morphed slightly into a democratic party, lost completely in that election. I’m glad to say that all the legislator voting guys, and everything that I had mentioned, maybe played a part in this.

Audrey Tang: A lot of mayors from the Progressive Party in the independence were surprised they were elected, because their numbers went, like, 10 percent more than they predicted. A lot of the Nationalist supporters just refused to vote.

Audrey Tang: After that landslide victory of the counter-power, the ruling cabinet, the prime-minister resigned immediately. Then a new prime-minister came, still working for the Nationalist Party, but knowing that he only has one year, until the election cycle that changed the president and the entire administration and legislation on a national level.

Audrey Tang: When he was tasked with directing the country’s agenda, when he have only one year left, and he has essentially two bosses. The president that’s going down with an approval rate of nine percent, and the president’s that coming up controlling all the cities, but not yet the national parliament or national administration.

Audrey Tang: The new prime minister is in a very difficult position, but he is an engineer. The day he went on office he was quoted saying, “An engineer has no right to say no to a technical problem,” which is a very good mentality, which I completely agree with. He then set a completely new agenda for the next year that will not alienate any of his two bosses.

Audrey Tang: The three agenda are open data, crowdsourcing and big data, because they are infrastructure. All these three things are infrastructure. No politically elected official could be against that. Plus, it is the same agenda the g0v people has already been advocating about, so they know they have natural allies.

Audrey Tang: He appointed the vice prime minister, a Simon Chang, an ex-Google engineer, so he knows something about open data. Then Simon Chang recruited Jaclyn Tsai, a legal expert, an ex-judge who worked for IBM Asia, Head of the Legal Department for a few years.

Audrey Tang: Again, she knows something about the ICT industry and the legal things about it. It becomes, for the first time in Taiwan’s history, a cabinet lead by engineers, or technocrats, if you are against them. [laughs] Then they identify for the next year the topics they want to talk about, that is neutral to any of the left, right, or whatever. It has to happen.

Audrey Tang: They started with the open data definition. Then, an equity-based crowd funding, and closely held LLCs. Then, taxation, privacy and de-identification, security, telework, telemedicine. Again, none of this is partisan. Whatever ideology you have, this is the bridge between the civil servants and the rest of the Internet. That becomes the new agenda of the year.

Audrey Tang: The first thing they want to do is to talk with people doing this kind of mobilization on the Internet and saying, “Now, we finally want to treat you as a peer, like face to face. How do we use the social media tools for rule-making? Because we know that you can mobilize any number of people, and we cannot say. How about we start talking about those kinds of things?”

Audrey Tang: The problem is that a government-initiated deliberation is completely different from an occupier-initiated deliberation. The occupiers knows that the people on the street are already interested in the topic. Otherwise, they wouldn’t show up, but the government don’t really know who the stakeholders are.

Audrey Tang: The stakeholders don’t know what the government is deliberating about. If they set up a website, people don’t know how to actually comment effectively, even they have all the open data and things like that. They are often trolls, they are often partisan attack, ad hominems.

Audrey Tang: Even if you have a really good moderator, people were still faced with information overload, because there’s a lot of three-letter acronyms in all of those legal code and things like that. It is like coding. When you change one line, you change the entire system.

Audrey Tang: If you are not a legal expert, you don’t know how the entire system will get changed. It’s a very difficult problem. They lost the election here, and then a few days after that, they brought some g0v people, and said, “We now want to start to edeliberation, the way you do in Sunflower Movement.”

Audrey Tang: Then we select a topic that concern all of you. It is called the teleworking from the start-up company that don’t have a physical office address, which is a good topic. This is a topic that obviously concerns everybody on the Internet.

Audrey Tang: They say the way administration do things is to hold a public hearing. When they do hold public hearing, they want representatives from the associations, from the guilds, and from the labor unions. That’s how they do things.

Audrey Tang: They ask us, “Is there a union for all the teleworkers in Taiwan, who could speak as representatives for everybody who work at home?” This is ridiculous, because a programmer who work at home, a musician working at home, and a designer working at home, is completely a different kind of trade.

Audrey Tang: Nobody would dare to speak for other kind of people, because the entire work flow, the labor and the company relations is completely different. Nobody would stand and say, “I represent all the teleworkers.”

Audrey Tang: They change course. They say, “OK, but how about the companies, early stage startups who only have an email address. Maybe they go on Kickstarter or some other you know confounding website, registered their company in Cayman Islands, and then they’ll have a physical address. Is there an association of such early stages starters and representatives?”

Audrey Tang: Of course, there are not. They have problem paying their next month’s salary. Why would they form an association? This is ridiculous. Then, they were faced with a problem because if they ask only the startup entrepreneurs and the teleworkers they know, everybody else will say this is lobbying, this is just closed deal with the people who are so close to administration, and so on.

Audrey Tang: They were very afraid that they would get occupied again if they do that. It is always this sword hanging over their head around that time in Taiwan. Like, if they do the deliberation wrong, they will get occupied again.

Audrey Tang: They need a different solution. They want to talk with people who already registered at Cayman Island or work for a company registered in Cayman Islands, and find those people. Ask what kind of loss of teleworking, and of startups, the company loss, will it take for you to register in Taiwan? Why are you registering in Cayman Islands, and why are you working at home?

Audrey Tang: They want to reach everybody who would do that. This is an engineering problem. The fun thing is that Jaclyn joined the hackathon as a civilian. We call her Jaclyn, not minister. Then, she took three minutes, just like everybody else, showing this design saying, “We want to reach people registered in the Cayman Islands.”

Audrey Tang: The phrase is an engineering problem. We need one editor, a few engineers, and so on, so play it by g0v rules. Then, we gather around the white board, using Open Space Technology, and work on the website that will enable this kind of edeliberation. That was at the end of December.

Audrey Tang: It took actually only a month for us to build this system and this slide was our first case, the company law change. The way we did this was modeled after IETF in the early ’90s, in the previous century. This is saying we held a mail list, a public forum and everybody can join as long as you have an email address. Then, we welcome discussions.

Audrey Tang: We are not saying anything about law. We are asking for stakeholders to identify themselves. Are you a startup lawyer? Are you an something, and something? Then any experience that you share is very much appreciated. When people share something useful or contribution, they get marked as being valuable.

Audrey Tang: We invite those people to the administration building and hold after-hours -- we are not wearing suits or anything, but it’s in the administration building -- with the ministries of economy, finance and something, and with the leading scholars of civil law and case law, and all the local government people working on registration of companies, to talk with those people.

Audrey Tang: Anyone who contributed on the mail list in a constructive fashion are invited to attend. Then, it was done in the same technology as the Sunflower Movement. It was captured in real time, transcripts broadcasted outside of walls, whatever.

Audrey Tang: The way this works is that we identify all the concerns everybody have, and then we ask people who make contributions to form a working group. The working group is responsible to produce a document that’s called a request for comment that is a request for commentary on the closely-held companies.

Audrey Tang: It used the language of the IETF, saying, “If Taiwan must make a law on the closely-held companies, like the Cayman Islands, it must allow multiple votes per share,” for example, and “It must not limit the crowdfunding venues and it should, for example, allow a telecommuting shareholder meeting.”

Audrey Tang: Then, “It should not, and may, or may not, or something...” This is language the Internet Engineering Task Force. Now, we produced this, and then we sent it to the ministries to translate it to legalese, to legal code.

Audrey Tang: They agree when they translate this to cross-link back to this suggestion, so that this is the first bill in Taiwan where every line was annotated with the demand or specification where it came from. They become our coder, and we are like project managers. They have to identify the specification-implementation link.

Audrey Tang: At the end, the suggestions were then linked to the specific points in the video feed when and where people brought this topic up. After this deliberation process, when the two parties are in the parliament filibustering each other, they couldn’t pass anything at that time.

Audrey Tang: The season ends in June the 3rd. This is the only bill where none of the parties want to block. Because first, all their parties have participated already in the working group. Unless they discover new facts that was not covered by the working group, they don’t have any rights to say we don’t have consensus. We have consensus.

Audrey Tang: Again, if they blocked this bill, they were against the entire startup community, and all the teleworkers who paid attention, thousands of people who viewed this policy consultation deliberation. They are not blocked this. It was passed in record time and signed into effect. Now, Taiwan has this kind of law.

Audrey Tang: To go into detail because you are experts in this, we use Focused Conversation Method. We identify all the speech and online mailing list discourse, and we separate it into the facts, the objective layer, the feeling of those objective facts, and the suggestions resulting of the feelings.

Audrey Tang: We use a font with six different weights of the font, showing the strengths of consensus. Just in a glance, you can see the overall strengths of different options that has the support. We talk about one aspect of the standard law.

Audrey Tang: Every slide using this pen and paper technology -- well, screen technology -- which is then broadcasted online. People will participate online. We take 20 minutes to talk with face to face with the group members, and then we shift to here, and then see what people online have to say.

Audrey Tang: We give them also 20 minutes to set the agenda for this particular slide, particular topic, so they can express their consents, their worries or their total support with cat smileys, [laughs] and things like that. There is a lot of non-verbal kind of communication going on.

Audrey Tang: We have a professional deliberator online, Lu Chia-Hua, who takes care of that online part, and carry it to the offline space. I was the first for the term, offline space, and was using the kind of technology to broadcast it to people who attend from the remote. You don’t have to be in Taipei City, and you’re guaranteed the same amount of representation to working group meetings.

Audrey Tang: This is very effective, and when the whole country is seeing this, either from a recording or from mainstream media reporting, there is no denying seeing that there really is consensus being formed in this deliberative process. That is how we run the working group meetings.

Audrey Tang: Again, every word, every sentence was captured on SayIt platform, so you can do a link to one specific utterance within context, which the mainstream media people, it saves them work. They don’t have to think of a very contentious title, topic, or something. They just copy and paste, and make reports out of it.

Audrey Tang: The design principle of this system is this. To reduce the ignorance problem, all the ministries who propose things, like the Ministry of Labor, of Economy, they must first do a slide on SlideShare that explains the problem statement very clearly, and we have amateurs trying to read it, and make sure.

Audrey Tang: Then for every keyword -- "startup," “closely-held cooperation,” “telework” -- we ask for a 140-letter definition, because most the online deliberation is wasted on fighting over the definition of keywords.

Audrey Tang: When we start to define the lexicon the way the MOE dictionary does when you hover it, you see a definition, it saves 80 percent of people’s time. Now, we say, “We know ’startup’ means different things to different people, but for the sake of deliberation, it means exactly this.”

Audrey Tang: Then when we do the initial stakeholder interview and agenda-setting, we make sure that one representative from elected official office, from Jaclyn’s office, one from public servant’s, one from the Information Industry Association representing the private sector, and one from the ground zero civil society people.

Audrey Tang: At least, four people, but sometimes five, six, or seven people. These people are the people who built this website. We set the term of use together, the license together, everything together.

Audrey Tang: When we do interview of the stakeholders on some agenda-setting, we lend each other a kind of legitimacy that any other kind of initiation would not have, because everybody knows that all the agenda-setting are being done in balance with each other’s sector’s ideas.

Audrey Tang: Then we ask people’s opinions. We say, “We’re not asking you to vote, we don’t do voting.” What we are asking is an agenda for the face-to-face hearing. When we’re running a public hearing on it, we promise we will only talk about the things that you propose to us online, where you reach a consensus on.

Audrey Tang: This completely changes the dynamic of the ICP, of the virtual part of the deliberation. Now, it’s responsible for the objective, that is the fact, and the reflective, that is the feeling, parts of the deliberation process. We leave the idea interpretational part and the decisional part to the face-to-face meeting, but we use the eforums or whatever to collect as wide as possible.

Audrey Tang: When you bring a useful contributory idea, then you are invited into the working group, who do the idea and the decision. This is a self-selecting process.

Audrey Tang: Now, this is a very geeky point, but I always want to emphasize this. It’s a safe space, meaning that when people propose their responses online, sometimes you see 10 sentences, nine of which is very useful, a disclosure, or a useful contribution, but one sentence is an attack, either to the agenda or to other people.

Audrey Tang: As a moderator, you’re faced with a dilemma. If you censor this, if you kill these comments, people will say that you’re draconian or something. If you keep this, the next reply is not going to reply to the civilized part. It’s going to reply to this one sentence that’s attacking people.

Audrey Tang: Then you will get another reply that is 50 percent attack, and then the next reply is going to be 80 percent toxic. The next reply is going to be a cat picture, and then [laughs] once you reached the point of cat picture, there is no return. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The challenge, then, is to how you construct a safe space where you can have a discussion before the cat pictures arrive. The way we do this is by editing the comments. When anybody sign on we show a very clear term of use, code of conduct, and say upfront, “Your comments it’s an ad hominem attack, when it’s toxic, it will be deleted.”

Audrey Tang: We delete only that part of the sentence, we keep everything else. We delete may be four words, and then we send a private message to that person saying, “You’re a violation of our terms of conduct. You say public servants are just pigs, wasting taxpayers’ time. This is not OK, this is not constructive, so we deleted that, but we kept your other very useful, sensible contributions.”

Audrey Tang: Because it’s version controlled, everybody who is so willing to do dumpster diving can [laughs] see the original comments. For most people who enter the first part of discussion, and reply to those civilized points.

Giovanni Allegretti: So you keep memory of all the original comments?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, sure.

Giovanni Allegretti: But you give like visibility to...

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Audience Member: Even if you want to see, the disclaimer posted..

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it says edited, and it says version three. You can go back to version two and version one, if you have too much time. [laughs] Yeah, exactly.

Audience Member: For the troll, that is important.

Audrey Tang: Since people seem disproportionately interested in this, I will go into details. Trolls on the Internet are just people who crave for attention that they cannot get from the real life. For people who...

Giovanni Allegretti: [laughs] I had a problem in the airport of Florence with a bagger.

Audrey Tang: [laughs] The important thing is that you must hug the trolls, knowing that even if they say 10 sentences, 9 of which are trolling, just one sentence is useful.

Audrey Tang: It was not actually, but you can read it peacefully. You ignore those parts that was toxic. You maybe delete or moderate it out, but you respond very enthusiastically to the part that was constructive, because they are just people craving attention.

Audrey Tang: They learn with seeing one or two exchange that bringing something useful to the table was the only way to get attention. Because they crave attention, they now think of ways to do constructive work. We reform the trolls very quickly with systems like that, by giving them due attention to just a part of it that was of benefit to the community.

Audrey Tang: The safe space was not just a moderation thing. It was also acculturation. We bring a culture of civilized discussion saying, “If you crave attention, this is the only way you’re going to get it.” I hope I’m making sense.

Giovanni Allegretti: Just to step back. You said that most of the interaction you bring in-person and online is mainly based on the idea that online, the function which is done online is the agenda setting. You will have the, let’s say, final development of the idea and the decision in-person?

Audrey Tang: Exactly, yes. We use telepresence to extend what in-person means, of course. That was the principle.

Giovanni Allegretti: You never vote, neither in person?

Audrey Tang: We do straw votes. The way IETF votes, basically, it’s a vote that is never binding. It is a way to see what people feels. People can change their votes anytime. This is not really voting, right.

Giovanni Allegretti: Wait, you’re talking online or in the final?

Audrey Tang: Online.

Giovanni Allegretti: When you’re go in-person, you’re voting for the final decision, or not? In case the idea is fork, and there are competing ideas which are not easily...

Audrey Tang: The idea of rough consensus is that the deliberation never ends until we have consensus. If we don’t have consensus, we say we leave it to the next administration. We don’t even vote. That’s the idea.

Giovanni Allegretti: I’ve got a question online. Are there examples in other communication spaces of these more measured approach to dealing with toxicity and trolling?

Audrey Tang: Are there more examples to deal with trolls?

Giovanni Allegretti: Toxics nowadays and trolling?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, sure.

Giovanni Allegretti: In other communication spaces, out of this.

Audrey Tang: Yes, I see that. I’ll show one about Uber in the next slide.

Audience Member: Show us the next slide, please.

Audrey Tang: Yes, but I want to stress the idea about safe space. Safe space means usually that anything that’s violating the code of conduct is not tolerated. It means zero toleration, but there is a difference between a safe space enforced by people and safe space enforced by algorithms.

Audrey Tang: If you have an algorithmic safe space, the trolls don’t play attrition game with mediators. Whereas before, like in Wikipedia, a Wikipedia editor, when it fights the trolls, or the revert wars, or something, the operators must put in exactly the same time as the people doing the vandalism, even with the help with bots, with robots, like automated tools.

Audrey Tang: The vandals also have automated tools. You have to put in, when you are playing by the same rule, exactly the same amount of attention. If the trolls outnumber the moderators, then they dominate the attention of other people nearby.

Audrey Tang: It could only be controlled when the mediator puts in disproportionate amount of time and attention, so that it overrides all the vandals and all the trolls. What our innovation, I would like to say, is that we watch what the moderators do, and then we turn them into code. That is to say, we automate this kind of process of mediating of moderation, so that any number of trolls are now faced with robo-mediators. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: They cannot waste people’s time. When trolls see that they are not even wasting the operator’s time, they lose interest, because there are much more interesting ways of wasting other people’s time.

Audrey Tang: Griefing, that’s how they call it, other parts in the Internet. They go to those other parts of the Internet. I am going to show an example with another automated system in the Uber case. Thanks for the question. Let’s go on, because we’re almost...

Giovanni Allegretti: Six.

Audrey Tang: ...at six, yes. So with the vTaiwan system, we spent a lot of time saying no to the ministries’ proposals. Because the ministries always want to talk about the things, that they feel like hot potatoes. They’re civil servants, and civil servants in Taiwan are in this very unenviable position, as a new democracy.

Audrey Tang: If they do anything wrong, because we don’t have an anonymous civil servants culture like in the UK, they get blamed for it publicly. If they do something right, the elected officials get all the credit. The thing is that they’re in a very powerless position. With things like vTaiwan, public servants feel very much empowered.

Audrey Tang: They offset their responsibilities, but they gain credibility, because they interact meaningfully with netizens as part of deliberation thing. They bring us a lot of very tricky issues, like gay marriage. They say, “Let’s have a national deliberation out on gay marriage.”

Audrey Tang: We say no. We must keep saying no to these kinds of thing. vTaiwan was designed for a town hall. It must affect only people who are netizens as the main stakeholders. We’re like a small town of network-using people, negotiating with the government. This is how we get our legitimacy.

Audrey Tang: Otherwise, people would say it’s just a technocrats, the elites doing the deliberation, who are so good at typing at a keyboard, or using a pen and pencil online, or something, or showing up with telecommunication, deciding the fate of people who are not so good at this sort of thing.

Audrey Tang: We don’t want that. We must ask all the ministries to prove a very high correlation between the people they are going to affect, and the people that’s on the Internet all the time, the netizens. Because the Ministry of Justice cannot prove there is a strong correlation between going on the Internet and being gay, [laughs] we don’t do that case.

Audrey Tang: This is very important actually. Then it must be something that is codifiable, because otherwise, it doesn’t really work.

Giovanni Allegretti: This exclusion was not motivated by a more political issue, related to minority and majority? We are not going to discuss an issue of minority in front of a majority, but was more related to the internal coherence of the system of deliberation?

Audrey Tang: Exactly. Because, what we are saying, essentially, is that for the parliament, we’re getting all the stakeholders on a multistakeholder dialogue, that gets all the facts, and all the reflections, and give a recommendation. If this stakeholder does not represent everybody that’s going to be actually having a stake, because those people don’t use the Internet, then we’ll lose this kind of legitimacy.

Audrey Tang: The parliament could very easily find a representatives from other fields of life, saying, “But you’re missing their voice, because they are not on the Internet.” Then we lose the entire basis of this legitimacy, of the vTaiwan system. I hope I’m making sense.

Audience Member: I understand the issues exactly to the certain stakeholders, or between what’s a stake and in the discussion, and what the participant hopes.

Audrey Tang: Yes. Exactly.

Audience Member: Do you think, progressively, are you able, since you use for example a typical netizen dynamics, to start to introducing a technology, this can include...

Audrey Tang: More and more people...

Audience Member: ...once it shows its effectiveness, and a possibility to actually influence the public relation?

Audrey Tang: Yes. That’s three slides.

Audience Member: Three slides.

Audience Member: You can just strike that.

Giovanni Allegretti: I think that someone asked this, and he was like...

Audrey Tang: Yeah. I’m very happy actually we get into so much detail. In Paris, I was one minute per slide. Even though it’s taking everybody’s time, I think it’s important...

Audience Member: No, we want a space in which to have a discussion. These are ideas that serve to...

Audrey Tang: That’s great. That’s great. Then our other requirement is that the ministry must not send us drafts of any laws or regulations. Because by that time the window of opportunities is so close. It’s like we’re building a nuclear plant, but the color of the wall is up for deliberation. [laughs] It doesn’t make sense, right, by that stage.

Audrey Tang: What we ask is, at least, even if you have a draft, don’t show it. Show your problem analysis. Show your stakeholder analysis. Show your cost-benefit analysis, whatever. For 30 days refrain from making any suggestions as public servants. You now only serve the fact-finding team, the online discussion.

Audrey Tang: After 30 days you’re allowed to show your drafts. Everybody in the working group is also allowed to show their drafts, so we can have a competing version of the drafts. If the ministries show their draft first, before we have 30 days to get everybody understanding this topic, then they have an unbalanced power in setting the agenda.

Audrey Tang: After 30 days, when everybody knows about these things, more or less, then their alternative draft is going to read at least coherent as the ministry drafts.

Audrey Tang: Then it’s possible to bring them together. Otherwise, it’s impossible. It’s just the public sector dominating the agenda setting. That’s the power analysis we did on that hackathon for this system to work, and it really worked. We have one million visits per month. We have a lot of subscribers.

Audrey Tang: As you could see, just like in Wikipedia or flashmob, or anything, this gets progressively down. Like, 10 percent, 10 percent, 10 percent, but this is normal. Yes?

Giovanni Allegretti: I was thinking that this rule that you describe it now, has a meaning, for example, in the planning system of Tuscany. Traditionally, you had a project, and then you worked with the analysis to justify the project. The analyses were following the project actually.

Giovanni Allegretti: In many cases of law happens this, you have a political, ideological idea. Then you do analysis to justify your idea. The fact of inverting, of obliging people to show the analysis, and then each one by its own think about the solution, then you can compare the solution after a certain time, inverts the way in which usually the laws are conceived.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. This is actually very much empowering the civil servants, but it’s decreasing the power of elected officials and parliament members, who used to do all the initial setting of the drafted law, because they have think tank, the parties, and so on, who know the initial context of doing this thing. This is weakening your mandate.

Audrey Tang: Because of three independent, non-nationalistic party engineers running the country, it is not a problem for Taiwan at that particular point of time. This kind of opportunity doesn’t really happen all the time everywhere. We have a very good Net Promoter Score, meaning that people want to recommend their friends to go on vTaiwan.

Giovanni Allegretti: Do you have any idea about...? For example, you have 30,000 subscribers, and 2,000 commenters. Do you have anything to check the degree of attention of the subscribers? Because the risk is, subscribers aren’t a very good number to sell. Then you can imagine that they are completely silent, in the sense that they’re not even reading.

Audrey Tang: Yes. That’s the next slide. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It literally is the next slide.

Giovanni Allegretti: You got that in the next slide. How long is that?

Audrey Tang: Let me just go to the next slide. As a trainer, this slide, I can spend an hour on. We don’t really have an hour to spend on this one slide, so I will talk in very brief terms. This is all, either free software, or at least free of charge software, or free under 10,000 users, or something like that. This system is zero cost, is what I’m saying. It costs nothing to set this up.

Audrey Tang: To answer your question, we use MailChimp, to send a monthly newsletter to our subscribers. It includes a tracking pixel that tells me how much time they’ve spent reading the email, whether they actually click the links, and whether they engage, in what kind of topics in the newsletter. We do actually AB testing.

Audrey Tang: I can talk for hours, but you do get that idea. Then we do surveys and registrations using Typeform, which is a very mobile-friendly kind of choice-making or voting platform. We vote for things to talk about. We don’t vote for things.

Giovanni Allegretti: The issue is that you have a strong analytics part, in order to have an idea of how many subscribers are not just formally subscribing, but they do...?

Audrey Tang: Yes. Then we know that people want to talk about Uber, and then Airbnb, and then Bitcoin. Then we know people do not want to talk about evoting or something like that. This is because Typeform has an interesting thing called a randomized...This is like a survey technology.

Audrey Tang: We show people in random order, and ask them to pick what people think they’re interested in, and things like that. We correlate that with the contributions they’ve made before, and the time they’ve spent on the website, and so on, so that we know, for absolute certainty really, when we talk about Uber, how many people will come in the first day, within maybe 10 percent of margin of error.

Audrey Tang: Without this data analytics, we would not launch deliberation blindly, is what I’m speaking. This is Typeform. Then the forum software that we use a lot, people use that now actually. The Etalab in France use that. It’s called Discourse.

Audrey Tang: The company startup, who produced this open source tool, is called The Civilized Discourse Construction Kit Company. This is optimized to have a civilized discussion, where you can edit people’s comment, and where people who contribute frequently automatically are promoted to moderators. They get badges.

Audrey Tang: When you register, for the first three days, you cannot post anything with pictures. It has very, very tiny rules like this. Taken together, it enforces civility in a way that doesn’t cause attrition on the moderator’s time. We asked all the ministries to publish their statements of analysis on SlideShare as PowerPoint slides.

Audrey Tang: We ask them always to use a sans-serif black font. The font weight must be more than 300. We put a restriction on the fonts, because people in Taiwan used to use fonts that are more calligraphic. That looks very good on paper, but very bad on mobile devices. That’s how they always used to do things. They do, I think, Times New Roman.

Audrey Tang: Times New Roman will look very bad on a deliberation space online like this, when people are looking at a phone. We even have a style guide for the ministries to publish their deliberation material.

Audrey Tang: Then all the issues, agenda, and settings were captured on GitBook, which is a way for people to write Markdown, to publish structured data online like a book, where people can download in PDF or EPUB, or something like that.

Audrey Tang: Any three-letter acronyms in GitBook are defined in a Google spreadsheet. With the keyword, the English translation, the description, the cross-referencing, or else. All these are published using this free publication platform, called GitHub Pages, which costs nothing, and scales to hundreds to thousands of viewers, without us paying anything.

Audrey Tang: Then we have YouTube, of course, to keep all the video records and real-time interactions. We use livehouse.in, which experiments with us virtual reality recording techniques. We are not really using it in the early stages of deliberations now, but we have a lot of pilot projects, where in this room, they just throw a spherical camera up here, mounting here.

Audrey Tang: It captures everybody’s number of expressions in the same time. The company is called TripMoment. We do a lot of pilot projects. We’ve done six like that. It changed the quality of the discussion.

Audrey Tang: When you see it from the real-time, it’s feels like you’re there on the ceiling, really. Then you can see what everybody’s face looks like when I speak a sentence. It feels less like theatric performance. It puts less incentive to people to speak to the camera, and try to make a very good impression, because they know they’re only going to be capturing this square.

Audrey Tang: It creates an incentive for people who really get, constantly understanding from people actually around the table, because the spherical camera is capturing this also. If everybody is rolling their eyes, people will see that. That is another important method.

Audrey Tang: Of course, we have stenographers, who published the transcript in real-time, that’s the Sunflower technology. Hackpad plus SayIt. Then I explained that we use the FCM, the Focused Conversation Method. That says we explore all the facts before we ask people’s feelings.

Audrey Tang: We ask all the feelings before we ask for ideas. We ask for the ideas before we do a decision. It must be done in this sequence, because ideas are sticky in people’s mind. Once people have an idea, they ignore other people’s feelings. We don’t do that. We strictly follow this.

Audrey Tang: We follow this so strictly now that when the ministry proposed their problem analysis, we asked them to rephrase it in an ORID form, and in this sequence. What facts do the ministry know? What feelings do the ministry have about the facts, and what ideas they have? Only in this sequence.

Audrey Tang: This is our toolkit, so to speak. I will talk about Police, the robotic facilitator system, is my last talk. This slide really is our entire toolbox of every kind of deliberation system. We did not amend this. Many of this methodology is done by Cornell University Regulation Project. We improved on their methodology.

Audrey Tang: They had professors and students, post-PhDs as mediators, but we have ministries with their own user names on the forum software. We created a rule that’s shown on the login, saying anybody who tags...

Audrey Tang: That is to say, who press @ then after that, for example, MOF, meaning Ministry of Finance Or MOEA, Ministry of Economic Affairs. Any ministry that gets mentioned this way will get an email, saying, “You’re getting mentioned.”

Audrey Tang: By the second they’re getting the email a countdown starts. Within seven days they must provide an official public reply to anything that mentions their username. This changes the dynamic completely.

Audrey Tang: Whereas before, they could reply privately, they could stall, they could say, “This loses face so we ignore it,” we say, “If you don’t do this the platform will not do deliberation on any of your cases,” so in order to join you must do this.

Audrey Tang: With a four-week deliberation period, that means four exchanges with anybody’s concerns about fact-finding about that ministry. For many of ministries they really just print this foreign email, and then they sign it with the initial idea. They send it for approval for the head of the ministry, with a pen and paper and so on, and have another people type it into the forum.

Audrey Tang: This is still OK. We allow seven days for this entire paper-based process to go through. The important thing is that it is still public. They cannot go retract their words.

Audrey Tang: They were forced to admit a lot of shortcomings that were not possible if they don’t have this guarantee. Whereas in Cornell, the synthesizers are the professors. Here the synthesizers, the working groups, are just anybody who makes an active contribution, IETF style.

Audrey Tang: Then again, any offline collaboration that we meet face-to-face, even the preparatory meetings are kept on record and published online. Any online forum, system, software, whatever, are printed to pen and paper to the ministry’s archives. This is, anything that happens in one space, happens also in another space, in as much fidelity as possible.

Audrey Tang: This is the design principle that we adopt on top of the regular sharing of knowledge. Yes, we are expanding it to the general public. [laughs] This is because the National Development Council thought this such a good idea. They really want to talk about gay marriage. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: They set up another website called, Join Government Taiwan, that is government run. I don’t have time to go into a lot of details, but the innovation is where they have a toll-free number, where you can call and have somebody read to you the top concerns currently trending on that website.

Audrey Tang: You can tell the operator over the telephone your input. They will type it to the forum software and if you’ll please leave your mobile phone or telephone number, when the government will reply to you, they will call you back. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: This expands netizens to people with a telephone, which is a lot more people. [laughs]

Giovanni Allegretti: It’s a little bit more costly, also, I guess.

Audrey Tang: Right. g0v, we are volunteers, so we can only run things with zero cost, but this is the government speaking. They can hire telephone operators.

Giovanni Allegretti: Call center.

Audrey Tang: A call center, exactly. [laughs] Yeah, a governmental call center. We only do early consultation. But because it’s government, they also do epetition, which is something we cannot do. It requires empowerment from the administration, obviously. They also do that.

Audrey Tang: Because they extend for anybody with a telephone, I think I am of the last generation who will draw telephone this way. [laughs]

Giovanni Allegretti: That’s my generation.

Audrey Tang: Yes. My childhood is also this. Yes, bzz.

Giovanni Allegretti: My teenager would have your childhood.

Audrey Tang: Exactly, yes. [laughs] Yeah, because we expand the World Wide Web to anybody with this kind of phone, they now think they have sufficient legitimacy to talk about gay marriage, because everybody has a phone or something like that. Without going into too much detail, yes, this is being adopted as a national agenda by the National Development Council.

Giovanni Allegretti: By this temporary government?

Audrey Tang: No, by the next government.

Giovanni Allegretti: Oh, the next.

Audrey Tang: Right, because this is the ending...

Giovanni Allegretti: The temporary government you’re talking about ended? It was replaced?

Audrey Tang: Well, the election happened in January. That is, to say a month ago. The legislators are already in office now, and the Nationalists kept 30 percent, 20 something percent, a negligible amount of the seats.

Audrey Tang: Then the equivalent of Podemos got five people in the Parliament, which is great, and then the Progressive Party, the main counterparty to the Nationalist government gets 60 percent or something of the Parliament seats.

Audrey Tang: It completely changes, it flips the seats. The new President of the DPP, she was elected but she’s not in the office until May, May the 20th, because of a constitutional loophole. We have a lot of those things. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Now, we are in a waiting cabinet, so to speak, who now answer to the new legislators, but is not answering yet to the president that has already been elected. For those three months, this is a lot of fun. The civil engineer training at MIT, Mao Chi-kuo, he resigned as all the cabinets must do after a national level election.

Audrey Tang: The new prime minister was the vice prime minister, so we have a Google engineer now as the prime minister. Then the prime minister knows he only has three months of time.

Audrey Tang: He says, “I will work with the new government administration team to transfer everything, but I have a precondition. Any meeting that the new administration is having with us, I promise not to destroy any records, any archives, but in exchange I will only do the transfer of power and explanation of the current ministry agenda, and everything under a direct live stream.”

Audrey Tang: He is basically transferring the power not to the opposition party, but to everybody, so it means that everybody now has the same knowledge as the new president and they can now oversee the new president, in a way.

Audrey Tang: He could only do that because vTaiwan ratified this open data policy, this open government policy, saying that anything that the government does must be transparent in a reusable way. He writes on this, and saying, “OK, there must be no secrets between the party that’s losing power and the party that’s gaining power. We are now transferring the power to the general public,” which is great.

Audrey Tang: It will take three months to do that, and join.gov.tw or vTaiwan, are a very important part of it, because then it allows technical topics to be debated or to be shown to the national populace that the policymaking from now on has a deliberative, democratic spirit and attitude.

Audrey Tang: This is also because the new president, Ms. Tsai Ing-wen, run on campaign platform that says, “Open source policy-making and maker spirit.” To make good of her campaign, she also must agree to this way of transferring power, otherwise her platform means nothing. That’s a lot of fun.

Audrey Tang: To end my talk, which I will take maybe another 15 minutes, unless people are so interested, we’ll take another half an hour, I will talk about something that is not domestic. The vTaiwan or the Join process that we design after that, as me as an advisor, are only really good for domestic issues.

Audrey Tang: With Uber even if we get all the representatives, all the stakeholders, they sit down, they agree on something, Uber shouldn’t care, Uber wouldn’t care. They don’t even have a physical operating center in Taiwan. If the consensus is to shut down their business, their business is already shut down. There’s an app banned elsewhere.

Audrey Tang: The thing is that this kind of thing really is domestic, and we are facing what the scholars say post-democracy entities, where they could ignore the entire rule about democracy altogether, because they operate on a completely different domain of human behavior.

Audrey Tang: Because they are not part of any physical place, they ignore the multilateralism part of sovereignty. Uber, basically, is a symbol of a lobbying power that transcends sovereign power. I will make just one very quick example.

Audrey Tang: In New York, when the mayor is not even deliberating, starting to think about a law that will limit the quantity of Uber charges, Uber introduced a new button in their app in New York. It used to be UberPOP, UberBLACK, UberX, as some people know something about that. You can call different kind of things, even a helicopter in New York.

Giovanni Allegretti: Even a helicopter?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, even a helicopter and a boat in Amsterdam. In any case...

Audrey Tang: Uber introduced a button that says, “Uber with the mayor’s proposed laws.” If you call an Uber, it’s usually saying you must wait for eight minutes or five minutes. If you slide to that button, it shows 50 minutes, one hour, five hours.

Audrey Tang: It’s a very effective lobbying tool. It’s telling all the users, “If the mayor’s law passes,” whether it’s true or not, “then you will wait forever for Uber and this is not acceptable.” From a social computing perspective, this is genius, this is wonderful operation.

Audrey Tang: From a deliberative democracy viewpoint, this is a nightmare. We now have a non-answerable to sovereign power entity, who could engage or mobilize much more people than public servants could do. All the celebrities were retweeting this, because it was sensational and the mayor has to retract even the idea of talking about this law.

Audrey Tang: Uber is Uber. It’s super. [laughs] Here are the places. The green means they were legal in those cities. The red, meaning they’re illegal, but they’re operating anyway. The pink, meaning that they’re controversial, meaning that they’re being debated. They’re of questionable legality.

Giovanni Allegretti: In some cases, it is regulated at the state level, and some other at the city level?

Audrey Tang: Exactly. When we did a poll to all the vTaiwan members, of bottom-up topics, not ministry topics, people who want to talk about, that doesn’t have a ministry support yet, Uber is at the very top. Any time we run this, Uber is at the very top.

Audrey Tang: For Uber, we had to redesign the entire flow of deliberation, because we know the existing process doesn’t work with this kind of entity. We identified the Ministry of Transport, who at that time has been fining Uber for violating the law, for over a million euros, by that time.

Audrey Tang: Uber says, “We are not under the jurisdiction. We will take it all the way to the Supreme Court,” which they did, “to fight saying, ’We are really an economy, share-riding, ride-sharing, whatever, platform, so, we are under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Economy. It’s not a transport problem.’”

Audrey Tang: Then the Ministry of Economy does not want to propose their problem analysis, because their problem analysis doesn’t agree with the one that the Transport Ministry is saying publicly. They were afraid of losing face. They will feel like one ministry fighting against another.

Audrey Tang: Then Jaclyn, the Minister who went on g0v hackathon, says what she really cares about is taxing and maybe insurance, and this belonged to the Ministry of Finance. The Ministry of Finance says, “We don’t have the expertise. Indeed, we don’t have the interest to do a vTaiwan problem analysis. We think this is the job of the Economy and Transport ministries.”

Audrey Tang: I think Taiwan is not alone. Everywhere in the world we have the same dynamic, the three ministries playing sometimes against each other’s interests for challenges like Uber. [laughs] This is what we did then, is we think professional mediators are needed. A mediation space is no longer enough.

Audrey Tang: We must have somebody who connects directly to all the taxi fleets, who already surrounded the Ministry of Transport, as other taxis in other countries did, also Uber itself, and Uber’s competitors, Lyft, whatever.

Audrey Tang: Then, through them, we should reach the individual, like limousine drivers who are in the civil society, but they don’t have an association, which is why they are dotted in this graph.

Audrey Tang: Then, again, some independent drivers have an association, and we have to include them in the deliberation process, because outside of the fleet, they may want to join Uber, they may want to join the taxi fleet. So, we have the association.

Audrey Tang: Through the association we also reach the local governments policymakers, like the cities where Uber operates in, and also the other for-hire companies that’s already locally operating somewhat like Uber, but in a much more smaller scale, like the mom and pop shops of ride-sharing, ride-sharing companies. Again, they don’t have a representative, which is why they are dotted.

Audrey Tang: Our power analysis of this challenge, is then to find people who the Association would trust, who the taxi fleet would trust, the Finance Ministry would trust, for those mediators to talk to each other, to design a deliberative process that will please, at the same time, everybody who connects with them and gets a buy-in from the civil servants from the three ministries.

Audrey Tang: That took us two months. It’s very, very difficult, but we did it. We designed a process that will allow us to reach all these people at the same time. Basically, all the drivers in Taiwan was the stakeholders. Then all the passengers of whatever taxi fleet, ride-sharing, Uber, whatever, were also stakeholders.

Audrey Tang: We must prove that we can reach all of them before this deliberation starts to have a comparable mobilization power versus Uber itself. It could very easily reach this amount of people, like in New York City. We’d have to reach at least this amount of people, and then more. The process we did for this is, again, we crowdsourced the agenda.

Audrey Tang: We used this idea called overlapping consensus, that says, “People with different ideologies, they could never agree on ideologies, but if we make the issue specific enough, they would agree on the practicalities.” I think this is well-known in the academic circle by now. We choose a specific.

Audrey Tang: It says, “What about, you don’t have a professional driver’s license, but you carry somebody as part of your driving to their wanted destination, and you charge them for it?” That’s it.

Audrey Tang: That is our issue. It says nothing about Uber, not about sharing economy, not about transport, anything. It’s says a very specific thing that anybody could do, and people could have a consensus on, that is a very tiny slice of the entire Uber challenge.

Audrey Tang: Then we say, “Everything that we collect from the people on this deliberating process for a month, will be published for independent analysis, as open data.” We don’t do any analysis, because no ministries are willing to do an analysis. Instead, we ask what people feel about this thing.

Audrey Tang: We ask what they think about this thing. We record everything. We publish everything as open data. We ask people from the academic community that they’re not scientists, Uber themselves, whoever, look at this data, and tell us what your analysis is. That becomes the agenda, which we guarantee a deliberation a month from that day.

Audrey Tang: This is the interface that we came up with. This is the designed for drivers, of course, and people on the taxi. They don’t have a minute of time, which was the Facebook limit, of the old vTaiwan process. They don’t have one minute. They have a red light, that’s maybe 10 seconds. We did say, “No voting while driving.” [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The idea was that they could park to the street a little bit, and spend maybe 15 seconds on our deliberation interface. This interface only demands 10 seconds of their time, and then they could start riding again.

Audrey Tang: This interface is very simple. On your phone, which you will get this link on the same hour of the day, in one specific afternoon, we announce the URL to all the mediators, to those different interest groups, so they get the URL at the same time.

Audrey Tang: Then they spread this URL through whatever channel they have, telephone, SMS, Line, Uber has its own, closed group of instant messaging and things like that, Facebook, whatever. The point is that on same hour of day, when they go on this place, they see people in four or five different groups already. They don’t feel overwhelmed by only one kind of people dominating the discussion.

Audrey Tang: When they go on it, they see one simple sentiment. This is picked at random from a poll. They just click agree or disagree, and that’s it. When you click agree or disagree, you see your avatar move.

Giovanni Allegretti: It’s agree or disagree with the friends, with the sentence?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, with the sentence, yes.

Giovanni Allegretti: Not with their belonging to the group?

Audrey Tang: No.

Giovanni Allegretti: OK, because the group is based on the sentence.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, we have three sentences that says, “I have a professional driver license,” “I have a driver license,” and “I have taken Uber before.” You can say yes or no on these.

Giovanni Allegretti: The groups are created on the cross sentiment of the three sentences?

Audrey Tang: No, the groups are created automatically based on any number of questions. This is like a survey, except all the statements aside from the nine, which we prepare initially, when you tap nine times, you will have answered all the initial questions, and then you will feel that your interest is not being reflected.

Audrey Tang: We ask, “What do you think? What do you feel?” Then you can say, “I feel passenger liability is actually very important, and you didn’t actually mention it in any of my questions.” This becomes then the thing for other people to vote on after you. Any sentiment that they write must begin with, “I feel,” or, “I think,” which is the same word in Mandarin.

Audrey Tang: They become, then, things for other people to agree or consider on. When you agree or disagree on something, you see your position gradually change based on your answers. If you log in with Facebook or Twitter, you don’t have to, or email, then you have the capability of writing new sentiments. When you log in with a social account, you see your friends.

Audrey Tang: Otherwise, you see people like celebrities, or people with more followers on Twitter instead. The point is, first, you see at a glance that there are four different groups with very, very different views. Your friends are among all those groups. These are not your enemies, these are your Facebook friends. It’s just you don’t talk about Uber usually.

Audrey Tang: Now, for the first time, you know how they feel about Uber. It creates a non-antagonistic relationship. Second, you see people’s positions can change. Third, we use algorithm it’s called dimensional reduction.

Audrey Tang: In a nine yes or no question, this is like a point in a nine-dimension space. People are really grouped in a nine-dimension space, but we don’t usually think in nine dimensions. As more people contribute, we are now in a 40-dimension space, which is a very large dimension.

Audrey Tang: When people have a natural grouping on some of the most divisive, that is to say, this is the most controversial on Reddit, some questions will naturally group people as a yes or no that will become the determinant of their other answers to other questions. Those are called “primary factors.”

Audrey Tang: The algorithm could identify the two primary factors that’s currently going on, and using the primary factor as the x-axis, and the second primary factor as the y-axis, so that you can see on your mobile phone, how people really are grouped on those two most divisive issues.

Audrey Tang: Am I making sense? This is technical.

Giovanni Allegretti: How many questions can it take, this kind of system?

Audrey Tang: Seven, it takes seven to start to do the grouping. Then it could scale to dozens of questions.

Giovanni Allegretti: There’s not another...?

Audrey Tang: There is not a limit, but there is a limit of...

Giovanni Allegretti: Still, it focuses on the two most controversial opinions, person’s questions?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. The thing is that once you answer, because you only start to show up in the group after answering seven random questions. By that time, you probably already know what has been determined before. Especially, you can click into it to see the current consensus.

Audrey Tang: People will only write when they have new sentiments to contribute that they feel is not being reflected on this space. This is Open Space Technology with a reflective projection, but it’s carried online. This is our simulation of the Sunflower reflective space, but on the online space.

Audrey Tang: Whereas we were occupying, people who are leftists joined this street’s deliberation. People who are ecological greenists joined this street of deliberation. They vote with their feet, but it was still reflected through this projection and then captured online.

Audrey Tang: We’re trying to recreate this kind of experience on a mobile phone, basically, that requires only 10 seconds of people’s time. As they are doing this, the system rewards consensus by only showing within each group the highest agreement.

Audrey Tang: People are motivated to convince their neighbors. At any given point, we can run a generalized linear regression, or you can run a primary factor analysis, or run any kind of those geeky words on this data to find why people are voting the way they are voting.

Audrey Tang: In the first week, we had four groups. Uber drivers, taxi fleets, Uber passengers, other passengers. Then within the group, they now try to convince each other because we show, again, only the top ones with consensus.

Audrey Tang: Group one initially was under [laughs] consensus saying, “They are criminals. We should cancel their registration immediately.” The other group was united under this sentiment, “When I’m not in a hurry, even if taxis are passing in front of me, I will call an Uber.” As you can see, it’s very polarized.

Audrey Tang: Initially in the first week, people couldn’t really agree on anything, but they agree on the other side is the enemy. When you do a multiplication, these are minorities.

Audrey Tang: They convince nobody on the other three groups, and even within the group, when you tie in with the group that represent the overall population, they are not even 50 percent of the entire population. When you click into the majority opinion tab, you see nothing. There is no majority opinion.

Audrey Tang: Because people compete for the intra-group agreement, they start to propose sentiments that are more moderate. Group one, after five days converged, saying, “This is not about Uber. The Minister of Transport and Communication should fine any unlicensed passenger vehicles. The fact that they are only fining Uber and not other ride-shares may be a problem. But this is not about Uber, it’s just them doing their job.” This is getting much more consensus in that group.

Audrey Tang: Group two, invented this kind of thinking, saying, “Many of the large city taxis are joining a taxi fleet, because the fleets are capitalistic. They have advertisement and whatever. They have other ways to earn money than the taxicab. There are economic pressures.

Audrey Tang: “Now, Uber is a way for an independent driver to join many fleets. It increased their labor union bargaining power against the taxi fleet.” An ingenious argument. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: When they proposed this argument, not only did they garner the support of everybody in the Uber sympathizers, but they gained two percent of populists. Some taxi drivers jumped groups [laughs] just by seeing this sentiment.

Giovanni Allegretti: Uber was not having a good experience with her fleet, probably.

Audrey Tang: Yes, exactly. They now think, “This makes some sense.” [laughs] They compete for their intra-group. Still, when you time this, it’s still not a majority. This is barely 50 percent.

Audrey Tang: Now, the first majority opinion appears on the second week. That is also the week where the four groups become two groups. The Uber drivers convinced their passengers mostly, and then the taxi fleets convinced the non-Uber passengers, mostly.

Audrey Tang: This one, everybody agrees, “Laws and regulations should progress.” This is so general. You cannot really act on this. This is a true feeling that the regulations are not set in stone. We show, of the 400 or so people that have seen it at the time, most of it has agreed. Now, once the first majority opinion appears, people now compete for the majority opinion ratio.

Audrey Tang: Now, they try to improve on this score. People now compete like this, “Review is important. We must balance the interest of riders and drivers, but safety is the most important.” Who would disagree with that? [laughs] They get even higher score on the scoreboard. That’s the second week.

Audrey Tang: By the third week, we have a winner. This is the highest score that anybody has ever got. This is from Irvin of Mozilla Taiwan, a Firefox developer, a free software guy.

Audrey Tang: He said, “The government should leverage this opportunity to challenge the taxi industry to introduce the same five-star rating system that Uber has to guarantee quality, because now if all the taxi cabs, independent or in a fleet, must answer to the same five-star rating systems, where the rider can also rate their passengers, then we’ll get a very high quality,” and so on.

Audrey Tang: Everybody agrees. It is a very good idea. [laughs] Then this opinion, which was, like, 60 percent for in the first week saying, “We don’t argue with criminals,” basically, started declining on the third week. On the third week more people did not say, “Even if they are criminals, in my opinion we should still sit down and have a deliberation with them.”

Audrey Tang: That number only increases. That is to say, more people are in favor of deliberation on the third week. On the fourth week, we start getting real suggestions.

Audrey Tang: Our cut-off point is 80 percent consensus in any group, so it has to convince at least four people out of five in all the groups. These suggestions survived this test and most of them only appear on the fourth week when people already are done with competing for majority feelings.

Audrey Tang: Now, it says whatever the law draws up, it shouldn’t be because of Uber, and the taxation. It must have a good story about taxation. This is a new thing.

Audrey Tang: All the UberX things must register. They must have a U or something on their windshield, knowing that they’re operating for Uber. When inside it, you must check the photo, number, and so on, so that you know that it’s the same person driving than the person that’s showing on the phone. This is also very sensible.

Audrey Tang: The other sentiment is saying transport is like food and medicine, so it makes sense to be more stringent, because it is a matter of not only just economy but public safety. Everybody agrees.

Audrey Tang: Then some people say some people, “Say private passenger vehicle, when they do ride sharing, they should not be taxed.” It’s OK for them to not be taxed, but if they do that, they should be limited to be two shifts a day, meaning that I go to work, I go back to work, I ride people, ride-sharing platform. Why not?

Audrey Tang: It should be limited in numbers, so that if you want to evade tax, you can do it as part of business. Even if you do that, passenger insurance should be mandatory and the insurance company should take this kind of insurance.

Audrey Tang: Finally, people should be able to join multiple fleets. If you join Uber, we must not preclude you from joining Taiwan taxi or some other fleets. As you can see, this is actually very reasonable. Like, this is actionable suggestion.

Audrey Tang: Then we use those suggestions to do a comparative analysis internationally. Then say, for suggestion one through six, this is how other countries are doing it. We show it to everybody before deliberation, and now, we have the deliberation.

Audrey Tang: We show the consensus sentiments. We show the consensus suggestion, expectations, and the six criteria. We show it like a progress bar. We try to extract promise out of everybody who showed up. This is the scholar’s ministry. The three ministries, Uber, Uber Hong Kong, Uber Asia and also Association of Private Drivers, the fleets and so on.

Audrey Tang: They all sit down and we look at the consensus. Then we ask everybody, “Do you agree with those consensus? Are you willing to make compromise, accord of those consensus?” For example, the insurance policy. The CEO of Uber Taiwan said, “We will help people claiming their damage if they are by the Uber.”

Audrey Tang: I asked, “How many claims that’s happened before in the two years or one year and a half?” Gu Likai said, “There hasn’t been any cases.” Then somebody asks, “What is the insurance terms? Can you show us the terms?” The association leader says he doesn’t have it with him today.

Audrey Tang: Then their lawyer said, “Just after this deliberation meeting we will send it to Jaclyn’s office, our executor of private insurance, so that is checked.” We asked the minister of transport what kind of legal basis they are on to fine Uber.

Audrey Tang: Then the taxis fleets saying, “If we are allowed to do surge pricing,” that is to say, a higher end of taxi cab, “We can compete with Uber on their own terms.” The ministry says, “OK, we will deregulate that, so you can compete with Uber on that term.”

Audrey Tang: Then the Independent Driver Association says, “The reason we are not talking with Uber is that they take 20 percent of the cut. If they are willing to lower it to two percent, we will start driving for Uber tomorrow.” What? [laughs]

Audrey Tang: This becomes a matter of negotiation. We extract promises. At the end, everybody in the nation sees that Uber is checking four of the six marks, but it’s not willing yet to register a local company that pays the local tax and the insurance.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, the ministry is still fining them. If a local government agrees to take on that registration, it could be made legal. Everybody knows why it’s not yet legal, and there is no need to fight because they are not fulfilling the consensus of all the drivers and passengers in Taiwan. This is what we call an empowered space.

Audrey Tang: This is why we say all the ministries agree, saying, “We share our early stage effects and reflections. Each of us agreed that the agendas that empower does not belong exclusively to us.”

Audrey Tang: Then we bridge it out to this cross-sectoral space where we know beforehand, the private sector and the civil society will enter on equal terms on the same day, and then we empower the space to decide the political Uber in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: This is how we redefined the deliberation process for Uber. The very good thing about this is that the initial nine questions -- “Who is involved?” or they want to know "How shall we respond?" -- is then carried verbatim for Airbnb.

Audrey Tang: The Airbnb people has been watching the Uber real-time transcripts, everything from the very beginning. We didn’t know that. [laughs] They know that we are using a timeline based on Wikipedia.

Audrey Tang: An Airbnb sympathizer has edited the Wikipedia page that we were about to use [laughs] to reflect better about Airbnb. Then they sent an email to everybody that has used Airbnb before in Taiwan, because they have their email address, saying, “Go on vTaiwan, and place your opinions in support of Airbnb to keep us legal in Taiwan.”

Audrey Tang: When you see three groups of people, all these people responded after the Airbnb’s call and there are three groups of people. One-third says it has to satisfy for checkmarks.

Audrey Tang: Another group says, “At least we should ensure that when people say ’It’s their home’ it’s really their home. One must not have 10 homes in the type of city renting on Airbnb, always identical photo. That is not bed and breakfast.”

Audrey Tang: Group three says, “The government, stay out of it,” but they are in the minority. All these groups of people, they came at this point in time. Before that, we have pretty good consensus of people who haven’t used the Airbnb before.

Audrey Tang: Once the Airbnb sent email to all their members, [laughs] we get an explosive growth in participation. This is why we don’t call ourselves a voting platform, because if we call ourselves a voting platform we will have lost at this point, because it is so unbalanced representation.

Audrey Tang: Because we say we are just a reflection and objective fact-gathering platform, we were able to say, “We know there is actually not that many people are using Airbnb in Taiwan. Let’s assume that this is their consensus degree.” People have not used should have at least the same importance, and this is their consensus.

Audrey Tang: We were able to show the side-by-side, not just determined by the sheer numbers but by common sense. [laughs] The main contention, regardless of whether they have used Airbnb or not, is that they are in favor of being an Airbnb sharer, but not a tenant.

Audrey Tang: A tenant doesn’t have insurance, but a landlord has insurance according to Airbnb regulations. That’s the main contention. The reflections are generally positive and their expectations are generally positive.

Audrey Tang: Airbnb is not a troublemaker, because they are really just another evolution of Agoda, booking.com, or something, but still those three points are important. We still did a comparative analysis of the same format.

Audrey Tang: Now, we have the hostel association, the youth hotel association and Airbnb, Hong Kong Airbnb, Korea Airbnb, co-founder even flew to Taiwan and the scholars, the administration, and so on. The magical thing is that the Airbnb people said, “We send things to our members. We are a company who respects our members. We see this is their consensus.”

Audrey Tang: Every point that I show on the screen, they said, “We have discussed this, and we agree. We agree that Taiwan will be the first place where we work with the authorities on ensuring that no people rent 10 identical houses. We will ensure this kind of tenant insurance. We agree with everything,” in short.

Audrey Tang: There is nothing for deliberation. By the end of the deliberation, the hotel chain association, who was actually protesting before this deliberation process, and went up into the Airbnb with a book of all the thousands of legal hotels in Taiwan and say, “I see you agree with everything, so I think of you as a good guy.

Audrey Tang: “Please help us because Agoda and booking.com takes 15 percent cut. I understand that you only take 5 percent, even after taxes, so please help us to bring all your hotels on your platform.”

Audrey Tang: That is how the deliberation ended. This is because we made an example out of Uber. It is like a checkbox, that it doesn’t fit so it is not legal. Airbnb played by the rules. Of course, we thank all our contributors. That is the last slide.

Audrey Tang: The ideal after this Airbnb is, of course, try to think of not as sectors of people specializing in the public, private, or a civic sector, but think of a fluid kind of role where people, when they share with money, they become the private sector. If they share with volunteer time, they become civic.

Audrey Tang: They’re texting and redistribution from government, that they can play many roles, even within a day, even within a deliberation because the space was designed by robotic, algorithmic mediators who don’t care where you’re coming from, as long as you can make convince each other of their consensus.

Audrey Tang: This is how we transform people who could only like and unlike to share our links, which takes maybe 10 seconds. To do questions and answers takes one minute, to do real discussions takes five minutes, and with deliberation it takes an hour or so.

Audrey Tang: Finally, if they make contributions, we invite them to a face-to-face agenda-setting meeting, where they spend two hours with us. This is my last slide. Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: No, it’s fine. What about this kind of process? Any other...

Giovanni Allegretti: It’s not easy to answer because there are so many things to digest in terms of the small variation into any other. The general structure seemed to make sense.

Giovanni Allegretti: The few knowledge, for example, I have of the tools that you use in each one of these spaces, so the tools are tracing the cluster, does not allow me, at least -- I don’t know about the others -- to judge the feasibility, for example, in a case here.

Giovanni Allegretti: It convinced me the idea of starting with feelings and slowly arriving. I mean, the timeline you set for the second, the third, and the fourth week, then the deliberation space, make total sense in relation to the progressive opening of people to the switch of people from one way to the other. Obviously, there are so many questions in my mind that I’m not even able to formulate them.

Audience Member: Probably it could be used. That plus one combination you use in that kind of setting, which is a problem online collaboration. It would be interesting to test it in a local setting and face to face. That’s something, in my opinion, what is really interesting is that it is on one hand, not gamified for people.

Audience Member: On the other hand, it also takes you to think a little bit. It’s not so pure gamification. You are not a fake person that gain points and...

Audience Member: ...over creating a fake identity. It sounds to me what we were talking about, the kind of serious game that takes you in that direction. This could the same. Find a nice way to attract people, at least at in the beginning. Create a stream of opinions, and after that apply more classical maintenance...

Audrey Tang: Yes, exactly.

Audience Member: ...role of informations.

Audience Member: I would make free the...

Audrey Tang: Thanks for staying so late, and also across the Internet. [laughs]

Giovanni Allegretti: Maybe the people on the other side of the Internet, they are eating away, like, “We are not doing it.”

Audience Member: ...behind the camera. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: But for...

Giovanni Allegretti: ...pajama may be relaxing in...

Audrey Tang: Exactly, yes.

Giovanni Allegretti: ...at least.

Audience Member: We had 11 people last time we checked, I know.

Audrey Tang: That’s great.

Audrey Tang: For municipalities, I think it will depend a lot on virtual reality, which is another three-hour workshop, but not for today. [laughs]

Giovanni Allegretti: No. It’s possible that the positive result you had are driven also on the -- oh, what’s it called -- the emotions that are catching around these two issues. The existence of tensions in society, if I think of how many times I got to the station in Portugal and I found the taxi driver protesting against Uber.

Giovanni Allegretti: You have also to think about how much the issue you’re proposing intersects the interest of the general population, which can happen in a specific moment. My question is, this method seems also very posed.

Giovanni Allegretti: My question is, you have the setting that now you already tested in some cases. Is it possible to decide to apply it from one day to the other, if you have the very hot issue, a hot topic around? Because you did in some time. These two issues it ears that they were, have been discussing in society.

Giovanni Allegretti: A sort of instant poll. I don’t know, a fire disco. I’m thinking about a stories that happened in Romania that involved the government, too.

Audrey Tang: Yes. We used this tool not in a national empowered space but as a civil society, as a test-drive long before it is Uber or Airbnb. We did a death penalty deliberation with this.

Giovanni Allegretti: Death penalty?

Audrey Tang: After a random killing in Taipei. Taiwan is one of the last countries to still have the death penalty, and a lot of people...

Giovanni Allegretti: Last country among the democratic ones. Because in the undemocratic ones...[laughs]

Audience Member: Do you release also all the data, obviously, all the data you collect?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, of course.

Audience Member: They are released in an open forum?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, of course.

Audience Member: You find a place that you would...

Audrey Tang: Yes, because otherwise we cannot run an independent analysis. That is a basic...

Audience Member: ...other people who run their own analysis.

Audrey Tang: Yes, that’s right.

Audience Member: Was that a non-question?

Audrey Tang: Right, as you can see this differs from the usual vTaiwan ministry proposed, because we asked ministry to provide their initial analysis. For topics like this, nobody is willing to be the one to do the initial analysis, so we asked the entire academic community to do it.

Audience Member: Obviously, because in Uber case, for example, the level of violence between that cab driver and the Uber driver was a really...

Audrey Tang: Exactly. If the ministry used one wrong word, they’d get occupied tomorrow.

Audience Member: I remember in Milan, they follow the whole month the vice director of Uber Italy, after a conference, and they start hanging things outside the home of this person. [laughs] It was really getting a level of...This was the right bottom on your map. It’s just becomes illegal after that.

Audrey Tang: After we did the Uber deliberation, of course, there is still the Supreme Court ruling and things like that, but we don’t see people on the street anymore. People now know what are left to be done. Before that’s done, the the Ministry of Transport keep fining, and then people generally think it’s a good idea. That’s it.