Unlike many people today, I’m an optimist. This strange condition began when I was 15
years old. That was 1996; I discovered that the future of human knowledge is on the Web,
and my textbooks were all out of date.
So I told my teachers: I want to quit school and start my education on the World Wide Web.
Surprisingly, the teachers all agreed with it.
Then I founded a startup working on Web technologies, and I get to join this fabulous Internet community
that runs with this crazy idea — an anarchistic no-one-was-in-control political system that
powers the Internet until today.
Today, I’m Taiwan’s first Digital Minister. I’m putting into practice the ideas that
I learned when I was 15 years old: Rough consensus, civic participation, and radical transparency.
Surprisingly, it’s working and it’s transforming our society.
In the spirit of participation, I would like to ask you to enter this website on your phone,
on a browser: “Slido.com”. This website will ask you to enter an event code, it’s
the numbers you see on screen, that’s today’s date.
Once you’re in, you can ask me anything, and if you see a question from someone else
that you’d also want me to answer, you can “Like” that question.
I will answer the questions right after this 10-minutes talk, starting with the question
with the highest number of likes.
In 2014, there was a live demo of mass participation — We occupied the Parliament for 22 days.
At the time, the MPs in Taiwan were refusing to deliberate a Trade Service Agreement with
Beijing, so the occupiers got into the Parliament at night and stayed there.
For 22 days, we demonstrated how to deliberate a Trade Service Agreement with the whole society.
There were over 20 NGOs participating. The Greens, the Labors, the Independents, everybody.
We supported this whole deliberation with a radically transparent broadcasting, live
streaming, logistics system, which we exported to Hong Kong for the Umbrella Movement in
the same year, and was powered by this community called g0v.
g0v is a civic tech community with a call to “fork the government.” We take the
government websites, which all ends in gov.tw, and make better open alternatives, that ends
in g0v.tw.
For example, the annual national budget is hundreds pages long, in a PDF file, and it’s
very hard to read.
The g0v community’s very first project was budget.g0v.tw, which shows the national budget
in a way that everybody understands, and you can drill down to each and every budget details.
Today, this system is adopted by seven city governments, and powers the participatory
budget platform for the Taipei City at budget.taipei.
Anyone can just look at this map, find the part of city budget they care, and type in
any question they want to ask, and a career public servant actually comes forward and
answer for that part of the question.
It becomes a direct dialogue platform, not through the city council, but for the career
public servants to communicate with citizens.
So why are there so many civic hackers in Taiwan, like me, who spoke to my clients during
the Occupy movement — Apple, Oxford University Press, Socialtext — saying, “OK, I have
to take a three-week leave, because democracy needs me?”
I think it’s because, I’m 36 now, we are the first generation that enjoyed the freedom
of speech after three decades of martial law and dictatorship.
That freedom arrived in 1989, the year of personal computers. For us, the personal computer
revolution and freedom of speech is the same thing. Our first presidential election by
popular vote, in 1996 is also the year that World Wide Web got popular.
Internet and Democracy, not two things, one and the same thing in Taiwan.
So for the past 30 years, when we see “free software,” we always think of freedom of
assembly, freedom of speech, and never “free of cost.”
We know that freedom is never free of costs. Our parent’s generation, our grandparent’s
generation paid dearly for it -- and we need to use the software freedoms to keep it free,
as we did during the Occupy movement in 2014.
The movement caused a revolution, although a peaceful revolution. There was a radical
transformation of social expectations at the end of 2014, and many Occupiers just found
themselves elected mayors when they did not expect it.
Because of this, the Prime Minister resigned, and the new Prime Minister, an engineer, said,
“OK. From now on, crowdsourcing, open data are just going to be the national direction.”
Occupiers, and the civic tech people who supported them, were then invited as mentors, advisors,
to the public service to solve issues like Uber.
Uber is very interesting, because it is a meme — a virus of the mind.
The meme was called “Sharing Economy,” and it says that algorithms dispatch cars
better than laws, so we don’t have to obey laws.
The meme spreads through apps, from drivers to passengers to drivers, and you can’t
really argue with a meme, just like you can’t argue with the flu. It’s not in the same
category.
There’s protests, the taxi drivers surrounded the ministry of transport, demanding negotiation.
But how do we negotiate with a virus of the mind?
For us, the solution is through a deliberation that involves thousands of stakeholders. It’s
a scaling down of the deliberation we just did with half a million people, so we think
we can do it.
Deliberation, thinking deeply about something together, is an effective vaccine against
a virus of the mind. When everyone — passengers and drivers, academics and public servants — listened
to each other and formed a consensus, we become immune to divisive PR campaigns in the future.
A proper deliberation, with the “Focused Conversation Method,” involves four stages.
The first stage is “Facts”, where we collect evidences, first-hand experiences, objective
data.
Then, after that is confirmed, we move to collect everybody’s “Feelings” about
those same facts. You may feel angry. I may feel happy. It’s all OK.
After people converge on their feelings that resonates with everybody, we then talk about
“Ideas” — The best ideas are the ones that address the most people’s feelings.
Then we translate them into legalese and sign them into “Decisions.”
However, if the decision-making process is not transparent, people on the street would
speak a different language than people in the government — so they’re not even agreeing
on basic facts, let alone each others’ feelings.
In that situation, ideas become “Ideologies” — viruses of the mind so potent, that they
can blind people to new facts and to each other’s feelings.
So our first step is open data, that is, making all the facts available, and ask the private
sector and civil society to share what they have.
Next, we created an interactive survey on Pol.is, to ask about how they feel. Four groups
of people soon emerged: Taxi drivers, Uber drivers, Uber passengers, and other passengers.
The Pol.is system shows each group how their shared sentiments are received by other groups.
The interesting thing is, it lowers people’s antagonism. Because you see all these people
on different sides are your Facebook and Twitter friends, you just didn’t talk about this
over dinner.
At the beginning, the people were all on the corners, but because we say we only give binding
power of anything that people can propose that convince a supermajority — that’s
80 percent of people — the participants converged on feelings that resonate not only
with like-minded people, but across the aisle.
After we get a set of feelings that resonate with practically everybody, it’s now much
easier for the government to meet with all the stakeholders, and check with them, one
by one.
Here is the consensus of the people. Do you agree? If you do agree, how do we translate
that into law?
They are bound to the words they said during the live-streamed consultation, and the stakeholders
agreed. When we ratified their agreements in August 2016, everybody knew that it’s
coming. Everybody anticipated it.
Uber now operates legally under the new framework, but so did the taxi companies, who are now
adopting the same model that Uber is using for dispatching its cars.
So this method works. The next question is: Can we scale this process of listening?
So right after the ratification, I joined the cabinet as the Digital Minister, to explore
this possibility through PDIS, the public digital innovation space.
It’s like Policy Labs in the UK. It’s a digital service at the national level. We
have designers. We have programmers. We are automating away a lot of those chores that
the public servants are doing, in order to make participation possible.
Even more interesting than the technological contributions, is the culture that we are
bringing to the government.
For example, I’m a radically transparent digital minister. By that, I mean that all
the journalists, all the lobbyists, everybody gets to ask me questions, but only publicly.
If I get questions from a private email, I will reply and say if it’s OK to give my
answers publicly. If not, I just give them links to what my previous statements are.
It’s not just to the lobbyists and journalists, but also for internal meetings. For all the
hundreds of internal meetings that I have since I was the digital minister, everything
was transcribed.
There was the written record for everything everybody said during meetings, and we sent
them to participants afterwards to check for 10 days, and publish.
The effect of this is very surprising. The bureaucrats actually become very innovative
and risk-taking. They propose some very good ideas under this condition. That’s because
previously, before I introduced this kind of radical transparency, they would get the
blame if things go wrong, and the minister would get the credit if things go right.
Now, with this completely accountable record, if things go right, they get the credit, because
their name is on the transcript. Because it’s an experimental method, if things go wrong,
it’s all the digital minister’s fault.
Under this condition, they become very innovative and open to a lot of interesting ideas.
One of the ideas is adopting this thoroughly free software platform called Sandstorm, as
our public service internal platform. We use the same tools, like Etherpad, like Trello,
like Slack, how the free software community is organizing ourselves these days, we also
use it in the public service.
Previously, the roadblock was the cyber security issue, but we were able to find this community
platform called Sandstorm, that solves the cyber security problem. It gets audited by
our cyber security department, so that all the free software than runs on top of it doesn’t
suffer from cyber security attacks and issues.
We were able to adopt a lot of free software working methods, just by adopting this Sandstorm
free software platform.
We have a lot of interesting systems proposed by young public servants, like an app for
ordering lunch together, or to plan travels together, or whatever. It’s really good
to have this choice.
Also, we had a e-petition platform as a way for people to participate. It was like the
“We the People” platform in the US. It did not receive much attention, because for
cross-ministry issues, people would get those very blank, very bureaucratic answers that
doesn’t really solve their problems, but just explains why they can’t do much about
it.
After I become the digital minister, we asked each ministry to send a team, at least one
person, to serve as participation officer. We assembled this virtual team of 50 people
online, using Rocket.Chat and all those tools for online engagement.
Now, in Taiwan, when people start a petition, they know instead of just a dutiful response,
they will actually get to meet with all the relevant ministries in Taipei, or we will
travel to those rural areas and islands, if they are petitioning for local development.
We solved a lot of very interesting problems like this, without exposing any public servant
to risk. So we relieved their fear, uncertainty, and doubt around civic participation.
The idea is that voting and clicktivism is very easy. Everybody can do it, but there’s
not much bits.
By sharing open data, by having interactive public Q&A forums, by setting up binding processes,
and by bringing the technology to people instead of asking disadvantaged people to use technology,
we are building a deliberation system, that scales to all levels of the society.
Through this, we are building —
a unified democracy, not hijacked by ideologies;
an efficient democracy that responds to the demands of the society;
and an empathetic democracy that lets people take care of each others’ feelings.
We do this, just by listening, and building technologies that help us listen to each other.
Let’s all keep listening to each other.
Thank you, for listening.