It doesn’t use diversity in a sophisticated way. It’s just saying, "Do you have the right to participate? Are you a member of the community?" Then, you’re stuck into a process which uses you as one data point in the whole thing.
I’m curious to what extent, I know you have a sense of stakeholders, and I’m fascinated by your division of the stake and the whole stake as the "Here are the issues involved, the interests involved." Then, there’s the holders of the stake, the people who are identified with one part of that or not, which I think is a really interesting way I’ve never cut it apart before.
Stakeholders are usually, in the circles that I go in, people who have an explicit interest. They will be impacted in a way that they’re very aware of in the outcome of whatever the issue is, and that either they or representatives of them, like representatives of the union are there as that piece of the system.
The fact is everybody is a stakeholder in everything, but they’re not self-aware, self-defined, organized in that way.
There’s something, when working with the multi-sector, multi-stakeholder emerging governance group that I’m part of, I learned that this ordinary citizen perspective is place-based. You are a citizen of a place. That’s the way the society is organized, with the mayor or the president or whoever in the legislature at a particular level of place.
I’m sensing all the time that stakeholders is who you’re looking to engage, both in your information generation and in your evaluation of that information. The public in general doesn’t show up in a visible, explicit way. I don’t know if that’s part of your whole approach or if you’re trying to expand that.
Your idea would be everybody in Taiwan is involved in pol.ises on every issues that’s raised, whatever. I don’t know if that would be an idea at a theory level or that’s not even an idea, you just don’t operate that way. The public as an abstraction, you’re not interested in. You’re interested in the diversity of stakeholder at a...
There are other things that I’m pretty sure you’re already familiar with, which are based on the individual citizen body considered collectively. Which is what the word "public" refers to, and I’ll get to that in a sec, but I realize in this conversation, any given agency or whatever has a group of stakeholders around whatever kinds of decisions it’s making.
There is also the fact that the resources that most governments work with are taxes that are theoretically paid equally by all the citizens. The money that goes into government is governed by tax laws, and the money that comes out of government is then filtered out through different stake channels. [laughs]
It’s not just budget, it’s that there is some theoretical value in the will of the public as to the general direction of where we’re going as a city, as a society, whatever. The idea of the sortition thing applied at that level, it’s like you have your citizen jury, not in the judicial sense but in the Jefferson Center kind of sense, about some public issue, or the Wisdom Council (Jim Rough’s random selection).
Then we’re going to talk together as randomly selected members of the community. We aren’t in any of these categories. We may be, but we’re not being convened for that reason. We’re being convened to be a generic member of the community, and to look at what the community needs and come to some kind of agreement about that.
A lot of my work has been an effort to generate a legitimate wise voice of the collective public, what’s involved in doing that. I keep looking for connections. I have tremendous respect for all that you’re doing in terms of its potential wisdom-generating.
Covering the ground of what needs to be covered is just very, very powerful, much more powerful than a citizen jury could ever do. You know Frances Moore Lappé?
Frances Moore Lappé, L-A-P-P-E, most famous for her first book, which is called "Diet for a Small Planet."
She’s since went on to democracy as a major focus. First, it was development policy, and then it was democracy. She created a whole theory of democracy, and in it she talks about the relationship between citizens and experts. Citizens are experts on the values of the community, the whole community.
It’s like, what do we value? Where do we want to go? What is important to us? From a cognitive science perspective, you can’t make a decision without wanting something.
You can use all the rationality and science you want, you can clarify everything about all these issues and options, but you can’t decide unless you actually want something, which is not a rational thing. It’s a simple, that’s what you want.
Frankie’s version of democracy it’s like, the citizens are basically there to articulate and act on the values of the community and the everyday experience of ordinary people. That’s what they’re expert in. Then, the experts are supposed to ideally...The experts are on tap, not on top.
The experts are supposed to help the citizens figure out how to actually achieve where their values are pointing, how to go in that direction given the complexity of the real world. If you’re ignorant you can push in a particular direction you think is going to work for you and make all kinds of messes, and you actually get the opposite that you want.
The experts are there help the citizens understand what’s really out there? How do we go about actually getting where we want to go? That’s the job division. You’re mostly centered at the people who know, there is a heavy gravity towards that. There is people who know in diverse ways, and you’re trying to engage and all that, but the generic citizen is not in the pool.
I think I wrote that in the first paper, a part of me could imagine a scene where there was an annual Wisdom Council for Taiwan which said, this is where our attention is, these are the things we’re longing for, and then that somehow plays into what happens in your existing situation. That’s an influence that shapes how people are thinking about all this.
[laughs] The sense of having a...
No. I’m thinking of having a...There is a different identity. From what I’ve heard so far, the people who show up have a specific interest in something.
They’re more stakeholders holding a function of some kind, rather than the man off the street.
It’s different in kind from something to take as an...It’s not an ideal necessarily but as a perfect example of, "We, the people, voice is randomly selecting people," and then having them come to a consensus of some kind is a different approach and then having people watch...
What is that?
Right. It’s one of the things I’m glad that got clear on. I have an ongoing inquiry into the relationship between the stakeholder way of cutting the pie and the citizen public way of cutting the pie. I’m getting, between the engagement with you and the engagement with the emerging network government from this, rapidly learning how to think about this, but I’m still intrigued.
It feels like there’s a potential synergy. There’s a funny way in which because the parliament is elected, there’s a way they can...like you say, you don’t have the influence on parliament that you have on ministries. It feels like the connection to the we-the-people public would give more leverage over parliament too because that’s the elected parliament.
[laughs] OK.
That’s very fascinating. Hopefully, Shuyang tell me what he’s going to say, anyway, bye-bye. [laughs]
Wow.
OK.
Yeah. What a position you got.
Audrey is going to be a witness to a parliamentary hearing of some kind?
I do. Since we’re at this point, I’m curious what...She was talking about integrating some kind of integration between what you’re doing and parliament. I’m wondering what is that piece of the puzzle. Can you describe a bit of that?
A little taste....
That’s a funny...I can feel trade-offs. You know the word trade-offs?
The sense of if the government is going to make a policy regulation law about something, it has a certain solidity to it. One of the most powerful things about vTaiwan is its liquidity. It’s like it flows and changes all the time.
You can’t...
You can have guidelines, but you can’t have, "Here’s A, B, C." The government is going to want to do an A, B, C, and you’re not an A, B, C. You’re the river....
If you can somehow have, say, an annual review of whatever policy the government makes about this, have it include review of the policy every year by a public participation process or by vTaiwan process so that it has a chance to evolve.
Even though it’s going to be evolving in a more jerky step-by-step way rather than in the flowy way that you guys have, having something in the law that says, "Aw, that law is going to be reviewed and changed," would be valuable.
Yes, I know.
That’s a whole other thing if you, guys, just review it anyway.
Part of what I got...Yeah, if you make it official, then it has to have some periodicity, but you, guys, don’t have anything like that. There’s certain rhythms, but they’re overlapping rhythms. They have different...Some of the rhythms of your work go like this. Some of the rhythms of your work go in with more slower kinds of things. It’s all in the math.
Mini-public and...?
The abstract public is a pure abstraction. It’s like "the public." It’s like public opinion polls, "This is what the public thinks."
A mini-public is as specific form of public engagement, which is on usually randomly selected, sometimes scientifically, demographically balanced group of people who deliberate in some form, on a specific public issue. That’s a mini-public. Within the world of deliberative democracy, that phrase, mini-public, means that kind of forum.
Yeah. It’s called a cross-section, a microcosm of the macrocosm, a small version of the larger public. Like you guys know, you can’t facilitate millions of people, but you could facilitate a small group of dozens or hundreds of people and have them come up with something.
You would assume that that was something like what you’d get if you did the same process with all those people, with everybody in the society.
