I’ll go ahead. Is it OK if I record from this end?
Great. I’ll start by asking you if you could start by giving me a bit of a note about the political context in Taiwan, and then some background about how g0v and why it’s formed.
Start with the beginnings of g0v and why it was formed. Don’t need to go into too much detail about the historic context in Taiwan.
Interesting. I didn’t realize there was such a strong buy-in from government officials themselves. Interesting. Could you tell me a bit...what’s your role in the organization? Are you a volunteer? I know you are probably involved in lots of projects.
Tell me a bit about hackathons -- how to organize them? I remember hearing that you have 100 to 600 people.
A very large number of people. How do you go about organizing the skills, and how do you go about organizing people’s time? How do they work?
I want to also ask you about some of the projects I just discovered within the links and the video that you sent. There were two interesting things regarding informing voters.
Yeah.
The other thing that I’d like to say is that, while mySociety has several similar websites, I think they don’t have as many visitors as g0v does.
I’m obviously asking to know about the Sunflower movement, and how g0v affected the protest.
I want to ask you specifically about if you could summarize the tech stack which the movement is using, and how they’ve been able to use it -- the movement.
How did you use Loomio, because I understand there was probably about half million people coming from the streets? How did you use this tool to create great deliberation? How did you use the outputs from those Loomio groups to actually effect some change in parliament?
I’ll get on little more about deliberation now. You mentioned in the beginning the consultations which you do in partnership with the government.
One of the things that we’re interested in is, particularly for Nesta, is how you reconcile the logic of deliberation with large groups and a lot of policy-making. Whatever issue we think about deliberating here, there’s no obvious solutions.
That’s interesting. Just to clarify, usually at the beginning of the consultation process, is that open to anyone? Does everyone know why you’re doing this consultation?
It’s published so that you would see all of the consultations?
That was interesting. Is this applicable to everything, or do you think that there are issues which don’t benefit in public deliberation?
What about the idea of consensus? What do you make of the idea that deliberation sometimes leads people to become more polarized? Is that what your methodology specifically aims to try to prevent?
Do you think consensus is desirable in all cases? You want to know when there’s agreement, but there may always be dissenting opinions. Is it really possible to convince everybody?
Is it difficult to keep people engaged over courses around three or four weeks?
Can you tell me something a little bit about the user interface of the tool, and how that encourages people to participate, and particularly how you can see views converging and diverging on the matrix?
Can you tell me a bit about how these online consultations improve the legitimacy of decision-making by the government ministry?
Everyone can see the voting pattern, if they want to?
Has it any influence on the way in which the government then takes those decisions and acts on them?
It seems like public officials have found the g0v as neutral and worthy facilitator in this process. How do you think governments without active organizations, like g0v, might lay directives without this kind of active community?
It seems like there’s a really active community, and there’s a lot of people and there’s a lot of hunger for participation and activism within the planning context.
Also one of the things which I find most impressive in the big context is you have a country, which is basically electrified, and you have all these amazing experiments, and you have the model in place for such an innovation to evolve.
That’s really interesting. Also, it would be great to have a copy of that. You said there was a kind of consultation curriculum.
It’d be great if there’s a copy of that and have a look-through, just to see the methodology you just described in more detail, but also in terms of the practical advice you give the public officials, it sounds really quite interesting.
There’s a lot more to ask you. Let’s say a city wants to do something similar, in terms of encouraging greater public outreach and civic engagement, what are the practical lessons that you would suggest, and what are the main pitfalls that you would argue need to be avoided?
Let’s say, take the lessons from the UK, it’s likely a ministry, or a ministerial select committee, or something a bit of a national level.
In a sense, it’s really important that participants have agenda-setting power.
They set the priorities for discussions, set the agenda for discussion.
That makes a lot of sense in the UK, since in the UK case we did have something called the public reading stage, which was where the draft is going out, and then it was read to the public, but they weren’t relating.
That’s great. Thank you, Audrey. I’m really appreciative of your time. You guys have got a lot of work to do in the next few weeks, so good luck. I will message you if we do write the blog about some of the stuff that we talked about, and I’ll send it to you first.
OK, bye.
