Thank you. Thank you so much.
Hello. Can you hear me?
Yes, I can hear you all right.
It’s my pleasure.
That sounds great.
I’ll have the entire recording that you’re already recording.
I’m free to publish it afterwards, after you had your...
...display. Time-wise, I have two hours, so we can talk about pretty much anything.
Certainly. The Sunflower Movement was an Occupy movement for 22 days in March to April 2014. During those 22 days, students and activists occupied the parliament. They did this for demonstration, but not demonstration in a protesting sense, but rather demonstration in the demo kind of sense.
The reason of the occupation was that the MPs at the time were refusing to deliberate a trade service agreement with Beijing. Because of that, the students did the deliberation for the MPs because they went on strike. They occupied the parliament and did the deliberation with the people.
At the height of the Occupy, there was about half a million of people on the street and even more people online watching the live stream, the real-time transcripts, the various discussion boards, and all the different products of this massive Occupy movement.
Two things distinguish this Occupy movement from other Occupy movements around the world. The first one I think is very important, is that during the 22 days, mostly non-violent, every day people converge a little bit more on what they think about the trade service agreement.
This means that more than 20 NGOs, concerning labor, concerning equality of the genders, concerning, for example, environmental protection and so on, each had their own kind of corner around the occupied place.
They were all linked with a kind of nervous system that channels all the consensus made, all the points made, all the people’s feelings into a shared document that is shared by all the more than 20 NGOs in the Occupy. The end result is that like cross-pollinating ideas, people would just go from one NGO’s booth to another. Over the course of a day, maybe they would visit five different corners.
At the end of the day, people did a recap, a synthetic document. By the beginning of the next day, people just talk about the things that they did not yet have consensus. That’s the first distinguishing factor in that it converges rather than diverges. The second factor I think is...
No, it’s good.
That’s exactly right.
That’s right. The second distinguishing factor is that we allowed people who participate in any corner in the street to view a real-time live streaming of what’s happening inside occupied parliament.
There’s also a live chat channel where people just type in what exactly they were hearing from the 20 or more debate stations so that people can just at a glance see what the topics are being debated as well as getting the consensus that’s being made from this debate on the street.
This is an ICT technology, but it is for enabling people to listen to hundreds of thousands of people rather than speaking to hundreds of thousands of people. We often see social media or even television or radio used in a broadcasting manner, that is to say, it enables people to obey, follow the party line, or to somehow get the talking points from one or two people with stellar.
This is the inverse of that. This technology enables tens of thousands of people to listen to one another. It enabled the people who did occupy in the Occupy parliament to listen to those people and get them their voice as a single voice. This is a deployment of what we call assistive civic technology that led people as points being heard in a way that is accountable.
Afterwards, I think at the 21st day or so, the general occupiers as were participants converged on the set of recommendations toward the trade service agreement. The head of the parliament and head of the MPs accepted every single one of them and so the occupy was a victory.
The idea, very simply put, is that people want the treatment with Beijing to be treated as any other foreign treaty to be deliberated by the MPs in exactly the same way.
They also called for a national forum on making a real-time responsive deliberation system modeled after the ICT system deployed during the occupy so that people can look at any part of the budget, look at any part of regulation, do e-petitions and so on so that they don’t have to occupy again if some other controversial topic comes up.
During the National Forum, it was decided that we did a national e-participation platform called the Join platform. Of the 23 million people in Taiwan, about five million at the moment is using the Join platform.
On an active basis. That’s right. About one-quarter of people who can use Internet. Of course, that number can still grow, but still, I think we’re performing much better than other countries.
Yeah. At the time of the Occupy, I was an independent consultant to a company called Socialtext, which is called a Wiki company.
We make wikis, we make microblogging, we make a lot of so-called social media tools but for Fortune 500 companies as well as large non-profits in order to enhance their internal communication and make sure that the knowledge is captured within the organization rather than inside specific silos.
Basically, we do something that’s like Facebook plus Twitter plus Wikipedia, but with the aim of getting people’s things done in the flow of work, rather than just keeping them on the website and watching as many advertisements as possible. It’s the same set of technology, social technology, but with a very different goal in mind. It is deployed to people’s business hours rather than off hours.
That’s my background. I’ve been working with Socialtext since 2008, so quite a long time. At the same time, I’m also a consultant and independent contractor in Apple’s Siri team. I’m also working on machine learning, on cross-language understanding, on semantic understanding, and things like that.
I bring my contribution to the Occupy mostly by setting up the communication network and making sure that fact spreads faster than rumors. This is easier said than done because rumors have a way to provoke outrage. Outrage makes people share messages even before they fact-check them.
The only way we can stop it that makes facts spread faster than rumors is to make facts fun, is to make facts something that’s interactive, something that you can just type in your company, registration number, or your trade you’re doing and you see a very interactive graphics that shows exactly how the trade service agreement affects you. Of course, all these are done by a wider civic tech community.
My main role is just to maintain the portal, the information portal of the Occupy movement, and making sure that all the different endeavors that makes it possible to have informed discussion is aware of each other’s existence, as well as maintaining the backend infrastructure against the cybersecurity attacks and things like that.
It is somewhat comparable with the 15-M movement in Spain, where many Occupiers at the time was also becoming like Madrid mayors and also people in various important cities.
That’s right. We see our demonstration as a demo. [laughs] Now I am deploying demo into production, as we talk about this, yes.
It is a concern. At the beginning, when we were doing the mobile version of the Socialtext, what we call Signals, which is very much like Twitter, we didn’t anticipate that it kind of has an effect on the habit of people.
Back in 2010 or so, it’s like if a person only installs one messaging system on their phones, it actually increased their productivity. If a person installs three or four instant message systems, it’s like a cocktail effect on the mind because the mind would be constantly context-switching.
It actually, from a mental health perspective, puts people in an always adrenaline rush or a fear-of-missing-out state that is not conducive to the kind of deep listening or deliberation that we were just talking about.
We were part of the problem, I guess [laughs], but we’re, I think, also aware that it is possible to have technologies that reduce the demand on attention and indeed the inherent bias that certain technology has introduced.
In early 2000s, I also participated in the so-called spam wars. At that point, people thought that email is helpless and email may soon go away because it costs nothing to send junk mail. It wastes everybody’s time. It also degrades the trust that people put on each other’s messages around the Internet.
The solution to the spam problem was not a single, top-down action, a law, or an act. Neither was it a single technological change. Neither was it at a protocol change. Neither was it a single intervention by any civil society. Rather, it is all the different points that I talked about coordinating in a way that is accessible to all the stakeholders involved.
Every single action increased the cost by spammers just a little bit and reduced their expected reward just a little bit. Taken together over maybe three or four years, we delivered a coordinated action that made it much more manageable. Now people don’t complain much about spams anymore.
I think this is one of the blueprints that I’m using in order to look at the manufactured addiction problem, the inherent bias problem, machine learning, the people’s distrust in general.
For example, algorithmic decided outcomes and things like that, all of it is much easier to solve if we get all the stakeholders on the same table, in a continuous relationship, and mapping out exactly what everybody’s stakes is and keeps it transparent and accountable, just as we did in the Internet society and related organizations during the spam war days.
I think there are a set of technologies, civic technologies, that can help solving these problems, but I don’t deny that there are also actors that would like to maintain the monopoly on precision persuasion for a lack of better term. This is an ongoing dialogue.
When I founded my first startup in 1996 in Taiwan, actually people majoring in computer science or working on IT and so on, the gender ratio is very healthy. It’s close to one on one.
When I got online, I discovered that the free software community, the maker community, and so on, many women are forced to use male-sounding nicknames, not because they identify as transgender [laughs], but rather, they did this to avoid harassment.
It’s apparently a very important and significant issue on the Western, English-speaking world. That took me completely by surprise because Taiwan is not like that. [laughs] I think this highlights the importance of participation. In Taiwan, we have different problems. For example, the indigenous people, they don’t participate enough in the design of everyday technology that affects them.
As are the other ethnicities because Taiwan is like 98 percent ethnic Han. The other ethnicities’ voices don’t often get heard simply because of their language or their lived experience differences. One of the main points in diversity is not just getting sufficient number of people, although that helps, like our spokesperson now is an indigenous women.
Our President is also partly indigenous, she’s a woman and not anyone’s daughter and wife. We think this is very important. Rather than just diversity, I think real inclusion means that all the different people participating in the end result of the designs, such as, for example, in our K-12 education, we emphasize that people use technology to work with children. They must prefer open source technology.
