The digital helped us a little bit by making sure that people, when we are having face-to-face understanding, listening, and so on, these could be amplified, so that people can enter the same empathy space.
Previously, before digital, it’s easy for a room with 20 people to end up, if you have good facilitation, agree on each other’s values. These 20 people cannot bring that feeling back to their comrades, back to their communities, and so on.
Digital helped a little bit by putting us in each other’s shoes when we’re forming the common understanding. Around the year 2025, quantum really helped a lot more.
With quantum, we can now have people enter the space adjusted, tailor-made to their personal feelings, so that they can voice all their fears, or their doubts, or their misunderstandings, or their uncertainties and participate in a tailor-made virtual conversation.
With everybody trying to not convince them, but also, just listen to them and provide a good overview effect, feedback, so that people can feel that the Earth itself is talking to them. That became only possible after quantum computation.
Yes. Around 2020, we introduced this idea of Internet of Beings. It is not just people, like adults, humans, that participate in the democracy, but gradually, all around the world, people starting including rivers, mountains, animals, and so on.
All the different species capable of sentience, as well of collection of environment that could be translated into an avatar that speaks on behalf of them. All these were included in the participatory deliberations that we talk about.
Of course, on the final decision and implementation in the ‘20s, because of technological restrictions, these are still mostly human, but including the environment, the social, and future generations in the first diamond is already helping a lot in the ‘20s.
Of course, by the ‘30s, we now have pretty good sentient quantum simulations of future generations, as well as of the environment, so that they can also participate in the second diamond, although this is somewhat experimental at this point.
The market has been expanded, so that it is not just about trading services or products, and so on. We use this simple idea called quadratic voting, making sure that people understand that each of our strength of preferences is best if we just share our private assessments of common issues with the community, because that ends up resulting in the best possible outcome.
This solved the old election paradox, the arrow paradox, because that was built on the idea that a person only have a limited number of votes, and one vote per candidate. That was because the bits were insufficient.
The uploaded information is not sufficient, and that is the cause of the paradox. When everybody switched to quadratic voting, people discovered that they can save their voting points. They can save their voice credit, and everybody understand that it is the best for everybody if they evaluate only the parts that they actually have an idea about.
Also, learn from the other analysis from other people that they care about, and just almost magically, because each increasing return from each vote is the same as the increasing expectation of the cost. Because the cost and the return are the same in this voting game, people are motivated to disclose their true feelings.
Without a top-down, authoritarian distribution of political budget and so on, a good, fair, sustainable distribution just emerged because of this market of votes.
In a zero-sum world, which is the bad, ol’ days – I think it was last century, it’s so long ago, I didn’t remember – people had this idea there’s limited resources, and we have to compete on a win-lose mechanism.
People who have lost make it a lose-lose mechanism to basically get revenge because of the systemic imbalances. Using quadratic funding, quadratic voting, and other methods designed from the RadicalxChange movement, we discovered that, if we, instead of playing game theory on zero-sum games, we can do reverse game theory, which is mechanism design.
Once you turn mechanism design into a participatory game, everybody start devising games that are truly win-win for everybody involved. Because of that, people now engage in a lot more creative pursuits, when it comes to poll politics.
If people detect that there is a win-lose dynamic going on, people will say, “Hey, let’s just have jam, a hackathon, and come up with a better mechanism,” instead of focusing their energy on winning the game and making other people lose.
Yes, the Serenity fork actually prompted people to have a new imagination about what a rough consensus-based governance can do, because previously, people understood blockchain or Bitcoin in a very fixed term, like they are here to provide a public ledger that are self-funding.
Which sounds OK, but it doesn’t really expand to other part of the society. With the Serenity, people now understand that the Ethereum naming system, for example, it could be adapted and used for legal identities.
Those legal identities don’t have to come from a top-down government, bureaucracy, or a bank, but rather can be gamified so that people – or authorizes – authenticates each other using what we call, at that time, a distributed identity system or social identity system.
Nowadays, we just call it the identity system, because the old, top-down, fixed, single point of failure identity system has just rendered obsolete after the new Serenity system came about. That became of the key points that enabled people to have multiple jurisdictions, cross-jurisdictional identities.
The imagination of an alternate governance system become not something that you have to rent an island, but can do right away in your existing communities and are compatible with existing contract law, and so on.
OK.
Hi, everyone. Really happy to share what’s happened in Taiwan for the past year. Just a quick refresher for people in the audience who wasn’t at Edinburgh. I am Audrey Tang, and I’m Digital Minister in charge of social innovation and youth engagement.
I got this job, because I helped Occupy in our parliament five years ago. Five years ago, there was a deliberate about a trade service agreement, and the MPs were on strike. Many people, mostly in their 20s, just occupied the parliament, totally nonviolently, and started doing deliberations the way that they would wish that the MPs would do.
Somewhat magically, over the course of three weeks, the 20 NGOs that supported it, many with leadership in their 60s and 70s, built this what we call intergenerational solidarity.
During those three weeks of conversations with deliberations online and offline, we managed to convince each other to settle on a common vision of what to do with the trade service agreement within the three weeks.
The best of things is that the head of the MP at the time just adopted the consensus from the young people. From that point onward, the cabinet started systematically recruiting people to serve as understudies.
The understudies to a few ministers, me included – I was still young at the time, I was 34 at that age – everybody was under 35 and served as reverse mentors, really, to the ministers. Now, starting from 2016, when Dr. Tsai Ing-wen became our president, she made it her campaign promise to start a cabinet-level youth council.
With all the 12 ministries participating in the Social Innovation National Action Plan, each of them will have two or so understudies that are really reverse mentors, and all of them are under 35 years old. For example, this is our National Day parade.
The National Day parade features a national champion, a world skill gold medalist in the middle, winner of car painting, I believe.
The reason why we’re featuring world skill champions, instead of just athletes, is because there was a cabinet-level meeting where the reverse mentor for the Ministry of Labor, Wei-Hsiang Huang (黃偉翔), raised the idea that we should feature them in our National Day parade from this year onward, so that everybody can learn the idea of skilled people as world champions, and also as something to look up to.
Huang is a social entrepreneur. He was 29 when he made the suggestion. He runs a social enterprise called “Skills for U” that invites those world champions into the rural primary schools and work with the students to rebuild their schools.
They redesign, co-design the schools into something that benefits the entire community, not just the children, like including their families, and so on. In this way, it shows the vocational training, the skills, as something that’s really useful and applicable to the community, not just something abstract, not just something that’s competitive.
The Minister of Labor, after listening to her reverse mentor, actually visited Russia with the delegation from the Taiwan world skills, where we won the fourth place internationally. They brought this back to the cabinet meeting, and lo and behold, it became a national policy, again, agreed by the head of the parliament and the head of the administration.
The idea of reverse mentorship across all 12 ministry that can become national regulations very regularly is the first idea of the Institutional Design Taiwan that I’d like to share with you. There is more social entrepreneurs in our youth council that are reverse mentor.
For example, the reverse mentor for the Ministry of Economy Affairs, Rich Chen (陳昱築), is also a social entrepreneur. He runs the Impact Hub Taipei, which is the global network. Throughout the influence of Impact Hub Taipei, not only does he helped running our own social enterprise summit for the Asia Pacific, co-branded with SEWF, but they also followed through event to register in the Social Innovation platform.
It’s that all the social enterprises, all the social innovation organizations around Taiwan, is now registered as of this year on the common platform, called SI Taiwan . Here, you can at once view the various different municipalities and counties.
Each one, with their voluntary local reviews, or the voluntary national review parts, would declare which SDGs they’re focusing on. All of the over 400 social enterprises would have to declare which SDGs they’re working on as well.
The reason why reach advocates, this kind of declaration, is that we can use AI systems, machine learning, to automatically bridge these goals -- missions, markets and measurements -- to the geographically nearby public listed companies.
Over half of Taiwan companies that are publicly listed are using GRI for sustainability for reporting. Just with one click, as a social entrepreneur, a young social entrepreneur, you can find the likely supply chain then for you to integrate with.
If any of those publicly listed companies or schools, whatever, bought your service or goods in total, maybe every year for more than 160 million USD, then I personally go out and give out an award to the procuring company or organization.
If it is a school, a university that does this procurement, maybe they don’t care about the Digital Minister. We’ll make sure that the Minister of Education goes out and gives out the award, and so on. Basically, what we’re rewarding, at very little additional expense, is a full integration of a young entrepreneurship into the supply chain.
I just received in my email this morning that Rich Chen is bringing out in our cabinet-level meeting the week after I fly back to Taipei next week, that he now wants all those 400 social innovations organizations to be supported by all related ministries, for example to have a symposium around the UNGA time in New York as a kind of public diplomacy initiative.
Very interestingly, already eight ministries wrote back, and seven of them said it’s a good idea. Basically, having reverse mentors really works to not only work across sectors, but also across the silos, across various ministries.
Now, the moderator, the chair, asked a really good question at the beginning of this panel. How can we start from having the representatives that are exceptional use young social entrepreneurs into the idea of actually really talking to their constituents, to their communities, to their local, rural indigenous nations and so on?
In Taiwan, we have this design where every Wednesday from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM, you can talk to me in the Social Innovation Lab in Taipei for 40 minutes at a time. The only thing I ask is that we publish the conversation as a radically transparent transcript on the Internet after 10 days of co-editing.
For people who cannot make it Taipei that easily, I actually go to people. Every youth counselor and every ministry in the Social Innovation Plan can summon me every other Tuesday or so across Taiwan in all the different municipalities and counties.
Because it’s Taiwan, we have broadband as human right, even if it’s the top of the Yu Shan Mountain, 4,000 meters, or the south-most Pacific islands of Dongsha and Taiping, you’re guaranteed to have 10 megabits per second at US $16 per month, otherwise it’s my fault.
