First of all, I just want to thank you for giving us the opportunity to interview you last time. I think we promoted the video. We actually got a lot of hits. I want to say we had over 500,000 reach and I think over 100,000 views. Best video that we ever had. Thank you. [laughs]
I wanted to meet you in person. Last time I think was Darice and Daniel who were handling the groundwork. I just wanted to meet you, of course I had some other friends of mine who have had the chance to meet you and said, "You need to talk to her, because she’s awesome." Since I’m in Taiwan this week, I wanted to do that.
I wanted to ask you a little bit more, I guess a couple of things. First, just how’s it been working in the government in general? What’s your experience been like? That’s the first thing.
Second thing is more about... I know you’re a little bit involved with the Asia Silicon Valley project.
I’m friends with David Wang, we’d known each other in the Silicon Valley. I saw him yesterday and told him I was going to see you today. I just wanted to ask you what is your role? How do you see the startup culture and trend happening in Taiwan? I know there’s a lot of buzz around it, but I’m still not exactly sure what is the health of where that’s going.
Then the third thing is more about online media. I think a lot of what we have been doing is publishing articles on a website or a mobile app.
I’ve always felt that’s basically taking a print newspaper from 300 years ago and putting it on somebody’s screen. I think we could do better. I just want to see what kind of ideas you might have. What is your imagination or vision about what news media could possibly be in the future. Those are my questions. [laughs]
The general experience has been great. I’ve been more or less doing exactly the same thing for many years now. Since I’ve got a staff which is entirely voluntary, basically I don’t have a ministry to command, which is great because I don’t like issuing commands. Which is what an anarchist means. Right?
Right. Or taking commands.
Or taking commands for that matter. I’ve been building a learning circle of sorts, where people of a very diverse background -- interaction designers, policy designers, code makers, and lawmakers get to learn with each other, and supporting what we call the participation officers of each ministry.
We are building a network of people‑facing officers. It’s just like how all the media communication people of all the ministries, though by "media" they just mean traditional media. There’s no similar group to face non‑specific people, both online and offline.
At the moment it’s mostly online, because online we cannot really know who those people are. We still have to talk with them anyway.
[laughs]
That’s the main work. We’re just facilitating and doing a lot capacity building with all the ministries who can face the online world as well as non‑specific people, so they can run their own engagements, public hearings and whatever, in a much more efficient way. Also consuming less resource internally, by also asking for help on external experts and so on.
In a sense it’s like running a media studio. All the ministries need to be there in what we call self‑media. We can’t really count on any particular media [laughs] to serve as a proxy of the translational and the engagement work that the ministry really has their own duties to do.
The media of course is our ally. However, we can’t really delegate all the work to the media to communicate to non‑specific people. That’s the main work so far. As of the second question, the Asia Silicon Valley plan, aside from the name and the concept redefinition, I’m mostly involved with the virtual reality arm of it.
One of the deliverables is establishing a cross‑discipline cross‑university online learning platform, which is tailor-made for things that are tangible. That means we have plenty of Coursera, edX, and the Taiwan learning communities on two dimensional videos, and the interactions with chat rooms and whatever.
Those are good to learn just mathematics, psychics, things that are more verbal, more knowledge based. You can’t really learn fixing a motorcycle this way though. For that matter, repairing IoT devices also quires a more interactive kind of education. We really need to charter something that’s based on augmented and virtual reality.
More hands on.
Right. More hands on and much more interactive. You see the whole teacher, or at least their hands and heads.
(laughter)
Not just a bodiless voice narrating on the whiteboard. That’s my main research interest anyway. I’m interested in that part.
The other parts of Asia Silicon Valley are most around investment and regional development. Those are handled out by the ASV agency, which is a semi‑independent entity, not really a branch of government. I’m not directly involved with that.
Whenever anyone wants to have some consultation around fintech, around regulation tech, around whatever, I’m mostly just this internal expert who can provide pro bono service. That’s pretty much my...
The in house go‑to person.
Right. Exactly. I have my most research interest around agile governance and so on, and I do have connections of the external community, which is not at all national or region‑based. We’re just a bunch of cyberpunks [laughs] experimenting with everything.
I think that’s an asset too. I wouldn’t call, we code makers, natural policy makers. I think policy making still has its place. Lawmakers still have their place.
My law degree still works to something.
Exactly. Just carrying this, what you call, west coast law...
(laughter)
West cost code into the east coast code. It’s very, very important to have this mutual dialog in this way, so it doesn’t get off track in the ASV project.
The third question, on the new media. During the transition time, like from the January election last year to May, we had an experiment that I contributed to, but not produced by me.
It’s called Talk to Taiwan (政問). It’s an interactive talk show of sorts. We really put into it a lot of imaginations, as you mentioned, of how the new media can be. Mostly it’s around the idea of an agenda of a media is to be co‑curated or co‑created by the audience.
We had a mission learning based public platform where people ask one specific person, like Minister Cheng (鄭麗君) what her thought about culture is. We crowd‑sourced the interview questions. Then we channeled them through a professional journalist and an anchorperson.
Then tried to record in 360 at the beginning of the entire interaction. People don’t feel like they’re talking into this faceless camera, but into an ambiance. You can basically see that they gradually come to understand it.
I’ve seen someone... Usually when we watch a program like that, the image that we see is us talking. Then we’re looking at it this way. As you said, we’re supposed to be looking at a faceless camera representing the audience.
Exactly. We have an actual audience there. We had a 360 camera in the middle. If you tell a joke and nobody laughs, you actually feels that nobody laughs, because you can turn around.
(laughter)
It’s a psychological thing. It makes it possible for the person to talk with the anchor, but also with the whole audience, not with faceless people. The feeling that there is a gradual convergence in understanding. By middle of the show we also have online calls in in form of chat rooms.
We also have a curator who takes that and rephrases it into something that they can respond very timely, which is why it had to be a live show. Otherwise I would just watch a recording. Why would I watch a live show, if not for the possibility of influencing the production?
Right. To be a participant of some sort...
Right. Exactly.
...in that process.
Both before and during the show are our main ways just to see it not as a "content producer", but as an engagement device. It’s to get a person, like Minister Cheng, to engage with thousands and hundreds of thousands of people.
Within our media team, sometimes we have these slightly not so workable, or slightly not so realistic, just imagination meetings, where we ask questions like, "Why isn’t..." We think of media, we think of medium, like paper, analog waves, or digital transmission.
Say a convenience store, why couldn’t that be a media of some sort? If we were to present the tenants of the news media to have an informed electorate, to have a civil dialog, can that happen in the medium of a convenience store?
Of course. The Portuguese people are planning to have their participatory budget plan voted through automatic teller machines. That’s a media right there. You see all the PB plans and they have a screen and a drawing.
Which is great, because they have a lot of remote people who don’t have good Internet access. Everybody has an ATM card. They can authenticate their citizenship this way.
Right. That is really cool, actually. I love magazines, but I also love retail shops. Actual brick and mortar. I’ve always been thinking about this idea. What does it mean to have a brick and mortar news shop? It’s not just you sell magazines, snacks, water, and whatnot.
Something like that just fascinates me. I haven’t figured that out. That’s something that we think about sometimes.
There’s a lot of this community work around, I think, Tainan especially, but also Taichung and other cities where this brick and mortar shop, as you mentioned, just turns into a semi‑public sphere gathering place. Where they host maybe weekly or maybe daily discussions. They make sure that they broadcast this or at least video tape this.
They’re livestreamed so that people who don’t have any way to engage at least can watch it online and type in something, for it to participate into the next agenda of their regular meetings. I do think regular meetings are key. Otherwise a space doesn’t have its own character.
Sort of to change tracks a little bit. What we do is a little bit more different from say you have a news media in Taiwan reporting about Taiwan issues to the Taiwan electorate. What we do is try to, in a sense, brand Taiwan to the rest of the world.
I’m just curious if you have any thoughts on how that should or shouldn’t be done. What are some of the better ways or maybe not so great ways that we could do that?
Whatever that you think are fun is the best!
(laughter)
It really depends on the character and the cognitive mode of the entire team. Taiwan is just this geographic island. Everybody can project whatever they want on it. I don’t really have a preference.
My approach so far is just to engage people in this huge rich history of Taiwan, which spans for like four million years, if you count from the rising of this convergent boundary of the tectonic plates.
Really it is a useful view. Then you see that it’s something that’s larger than humanity, that there’s living beings here and there’s cultures here. There’s layers of populations, the beginning of the Austronesian population, and so on.
It is one pivotal stage on which the entire Pacific history is taught. I think it is a useful view, but I wouldn’t impose it on anybody else.
(laughter)
It’s a very geographic view, but it’s my perspective.
Actually, that’s the first time I’ve heard thinking about it. Taiwan as a geographic feature. When you think about it in terms of Taiwan began when the geographic feature...
Yeah. The tectonic plates started.
...came into existence.
They are raising 5 centimeters every year.
Instead of arguing which ethnicity, linguistic group, or which regime’s historical view of when they started...
Yeah. Compared with four million years, these are very short times.
Right. Exactly. We’re all just coming and going here. Coming back to the work in the government, I tried to ask this question last time too, I hear a lot of people complaining about all Taiwanese bureaucrats. The stereotype is they’re resistant to change.
Yeah. They’re risk‑averse.
They’re risk‑averse. I think you talked about re‑characterizing the risk for them. How has that been going? I imagine you run into push back on a regular basis.
No. We only work with volunteers. You never run into push back.
(laughter)
By definition. People who are resistant, they never come to me anyway. I don’t even know them.
(laughter)
It’s true. I don’t run into push backs because I don’t give commands. That’s true so far for the past few months. Also defining risk, I think especially time-boxing. This 60 days. If you handle it well, well it’s gone in 60 days.
This provides a kind of psychological assurance to public servants in a sense that there is now a time frame, a mechanism. They don’t really have to fight politically to get a proper dialogue or something done in sufficient time. Now, the time is bounded. It’s 30 days to do this, 60 days to this. That provides a time frame which is a great assurance.
My mental image is a downward ladder (下台階). They have steps where instead of jumping off the cliff, there are steps where they can gradually...
Right. It’s much more gradual. It’s less like a waterfall or something.
Also a lot of people ask me to definitely check in with you on how the Paris meeting...How did you feel about that? How did it go in Paris?
It went well. I got a lot of inquiries afterwards of the methodologies and the progress that we’re making. There’s a flurry of Parisian media. One just came an hour ago.
(laughter)
It’s definitely got a lot more visibility of the work we’re doing. Also for me personally, more importantly, it convinced a lot more people that this is possible. In many old democracies, things like this has been tried too many times.
True.
Sometimes you just lose hope because of too many previously failed attempts. But really, we are in a convergence of very high bandwidth, real time live streaming, and artificial intelligence that takes a lot of burden away for things like this. We’re now in a time point where you can realistically run this.
It’s just like virtual reality. It’s been around for decades. Now it’s the first time it’s affordable. This kind of convergent deliberative democracy was always available back to the Greek times, but it’s now finally cheap enough that we can run it as part of standard procedure.
Even say 100 years ago, in the constitution here, there was the National Assembly, which was almost a technological workaround.
Yeah. It’s like the electorate. Right?
They’re supposed to be representing the people, because technologically they couldn’t go vote in a timely enough of a fashion. There was one question from the interview that we put in that we had to cut because of time, which is, "If you were to design a new constitution for Taiwan, what kind of features would you put in it?"
There is actually a bill in the Parliament now that talks with this. It’s a bottom‑up constitutional reform law. As I’m not MP, I’m not supposed to talk about the specifics. I do agree with the spirit, in a sense that because it’s the covenant between all the people.
It should definitely take in the technological reality. We’re not in the time of telegraph anymore, so we need to take telecommunication into account. As of what features they would demand out of the constitution, I really have no preconceptions... I can live with anything. [laughs] Whatever people want...
As long as the process of it was...
As long as it is transparent, and most importantly that it’s convergent. What we don’t need is a process that excludes more people out of the way, that more people feel disenchanted along the way, that more people feel that it’s just a few constitutional scholars or a few politicians doing all the process.
(laughter)
A few lawyers.
A few lawyers doing the whole process. Worse, a few programmers doing all the process.
(laughter)
It could happen with things like blockchain. You’re end up taking things that were in a law domain and putting into the code domain, which is even less accountable if you don’t put in safeguards into it.
That makes sense.
Neither code makers nor law makers should monopolize the process. That’s the only thing I would ask for.
Last thing. We’ve been talking about, at least on the liberal media side in the West, there’s this lamenting of the right rise of the ring wing nationalists. You’re talking about Brexit, Trump, Marie Le Pen, Turkey, and all this stuff.
Intuitively that seems to run counter of the spirit of open government, transparency or maybe not. I don’t know. What do you think?
I wouldn’t say so. I would say it’s the same outrage that drives both these phenomenon and the Occupy Movement. I would say it’s both. All of them are manifestations of the 99 percent trying to get some more dialogs going.
It’s just that on the Internet, especially on social media, outrage spreads much faster than any other emotion. Any political movement that can capitalize on that gets an automatic...
Boost.
...boost, or even a privilege in engaging people emotionally. What outrage does best is generating counter‑power. When the counter‑power had its day, something has to fill the vacuum. Then basically anyone who can make the best of the narrative and outrage ends up filling the vacuum, whether they can deliver or not.
I think it’s natural. I wouldn’t say democracy is declining or anything. I would say it’s part of the process, where every region is trying its own experiment, just as we are trying here. Experiments that will end up solving actual democratic governance problem will actually spread in the long run, evolutionary speaking.
Somehow if somebody could basically build a system where instead of outrage you have thoughtfulness, compassion...
Or you can channel outrage into an outrage against ignorance, which is better than an outrage against one specific person.
That is very interesting. That is very insightful.
That’s good.
That was really quick.
Do you have anything else?
(laughter)
No. Actually I have to run to another thing, as well.
Sure.
Thank you so much for your time. That was like a roller‑coaster ride, as one of my friends warned me about. Thank you so much.
Cheers.
Good luck with everything else.