Now, after we do things this way, and now, it becomes the norm, it means that nobody is now having political risk by talking about those things in public. We’re now creating an atmosphere where there is no taboo subjects.
Unless, of course, it’s clearly anti-the constitution text, in which case we can’t do anything. Otherwise, everything is up to discussion.
Yeah, the POs.
They’re senior career public servants. They are nominated by their deputy ministers, and report directly to the deputy.
Actually, you would be surprised.
Yeah, many of them are after their work active people, Internet forums, or other Facebook, PTT, or some forums. They do have experiencing working in the civil society space. It’s that before, it was a site job. Now, it’s their day job.
We explicitly recruited on the PTT board for the public servants to join the PO workforce. We actually get the career public servants. It’s important, because otherwise, people will think it’s particular to a cabinet, and once the election cycle comes, all the system goes away.
Now, PO is a regulation, and all the key POs are career public servants. No matter who the government are, the system will just like, officers will talk with media or officer will talk with the parliament. It will be part of the constitutive element of the administration.
To make it fun, yeah.
Exactly. The join platform, join.gov.tw, we don’t just put the petition there. We also put all the regulatory announcements, the 60 days in advance there. Also, we put all the national budget allocated major issues tracking there.
It’s a whole life cycle thing. It’s not just for petitions. Out of 23 million people in Taiwan, almost 5 million now use that website, which is a huge number, when you think about it. People generally enjoy the experience, because they can win most of the time.
The thing with e-petitions, with regulatory discussion, or with participation budget, is that unlike winner past the post voting, for voting, half of the people lose each time. People lose most of the time, actually, over the course of many votes.
Here, when you counter sign 10 petitions, maybe only 2 become policy, but you still win. You still feel that you win. It’s the same with participation budget. You vote for five PB issues. Only three makes it to the agenda, you still win.
The idea is that all the contribution counts, and then the contribution is much higher than voting ought of actually making good policy.
I’m a minister now, yeah.
It makes me have access to more systems. My methodology was always the same. When was 12, 13, when I participated in the first forming of the World Wide Web, there was already a political system. It was the Internet Engineering Task Force political system.
Rough consensus, running code, and people trust each other, even though they haven’t met before. They make decisions by humming, and things like that. That’s like living as an indigenous person on the Internet on an early Internet culture.
That was the culture I was raised. I was 12 then. I got my voting right when I was 20. After that, I encountered a representative democracy system. For the first eight years, I was learning from this rough consensus, multi-stakeholder system.
The idea is that the two cultures, they all have some advantages. I think what is best about this multi-stakeholder culture is that it’s entirely adaptable. Whatever the political climate is, whether it’s a representative democracy or even a central democracy, there is still some room for multi-stakeholder discussion to take place.
All the contributions that we make, it’s not specific to Taiwan. We have many other different governments taking part of our methodology, like the AI-based conversations and things like vTaiwan.
Mm-hmm.
That’s right.
Just a year, but yes. [laughs]
Definitely. We’re now working to amend the [non-English speech] , the Proceeding of Regulation Act. Previously, it only include things like [non-English speech], the very formal hearing process that is very expensive to run, anyway, and doesn’t seem to be very attractive to people.
I think not even 5,000 people have a lot of experience with such hearings, let alone five million. What we’re now doing is that in [non-English speech] Act, we are now putting into a more relaxed public hearing chapter.
Then for it to have the Internet-enabled part, that takes place before, during, and after the public hearing. Now, I understand that in France, for example, the CNDP has a national debate prerequisite for a very large constructions.
What we are now doing here is for everyday matters, for all the small public hearings, for it to use Internet to save time, not to increase burden on the public servants. I think only with that, can people see that it’s now just part of everyday life, anyway.
They could participate, come and go, whatever they like. Then because we run this without any partisan agenda. I think people who are more into this is mostly not against or for any party at the moment now. We’re a very party agnostic force in the political arena.
Now, I am not saying that the parties are go away, but at least in the cabinet, there are more people who are independent than people of any party. This is a pretty balanced cabinet.
How do you do when there are some local quarrels or trouble. If everybody’s of good faith, it could work with the system you’re currently running. But very often, you have some local power that might be abusing or overusing their power.
You might have some people who actually don’t care, or don’t want to take in consideration what the other camp does. How do you deal with that? Sometimes, you must make some people very unhappy, or some people might want to retaliate, revenge, or something, because you’re fixing problem they wouldn’t like to fix.
I think mostly, people who see the persistent problem as to their advantage are people who already have some idea of how it gets better. It’s just they don’t want to share it or doesn’t really want it to happen for the fear of losing some stake here. Which makes them a stakeholder.
The idea of this process, it’s only legitimate if all the stakeholders at least agree that this process is there, is needed. If we don’t previously get commitment from all the stakeholders, it will be a failure.
We try to get commitment from all the stakeholders, understanding that ideally it would be like Pareto improvement, in the sense that nobody is worse off, and people who are worse off gets compensated so that they are no worse off anyway.
We only say that this is not binding. This only becomes binding when all the stakeholders agree to move forward. That way in the PengHu case, you would note that all the things that we now take as policy are pretty calm or pretty tame versions of the original petitions and proposals.
That’s because that’s the thing that people can actually agree on and, as they said, are still in dispute. It doesn’t get any buying power. People understand that we’re not forcing anything through. We’re not saying after two months, anything that’s unresolved will now be determined by rolling the dice or the digital minister saying so. No, it will be just for the next year’s discussion.
That’s exactly right. We keep running it until we get consensus, at least on parts. Then, we ratify those parts.
We’re shortcutting in our methodology here, because there are at least 5,000 people who count their signature, the petition. It’s very easy for us to find five stakeholders on all different sides from the people who petitioned.
Even if only one in a thousand person would want to take a day off to join, there are still a lot of people. It is a methodological improvisation.
As a robot, for sure.
[laughs] Yeah, sure.
There’s two main forms. One is the robot that moves and can turn and talk to people, the one that Edward Snowden uses all the time. The other is a holographic projection, where there’s a light background, and it projects on a black mask. It’s like a hologram.
I was appearing in Barcelona, actually, the day they declared independence as a holographic projection. I can send you an email of how that went, and you can decide which one is better.
The geography is our unfair advantage. It’s very easy to get broadband access to everybody, because it’s just this one island anyway. But there’s a lot of people here, so the density prompts the use of Internet.
Also, we have the highest number of, for example, women using the Internet for social issues and things like that, and also have participation on public issues.
I think all of this stems from the core idea of education should be a basic human right. With the Internet, that access to broaden, to further education and public discussion should be a human right. It is actually Dr. Tsai’s campaign, anyway.
We kind of had that, because the two sides all petitioned on the joint platform. Each side commanding more than 10,000 people. It’s 20,000 people, all subscribing to our newsletter. What do we do? [laughs] It was ultimately determined by the Supreme Court, anyway.
What we’re trying to do is that we look at the petitions and realize they’re looking at entirely different media. That their information source are completely non-overlapping.
Only maybe 10 percent of each side are radical in the sense that they truly think there’s no compromising solutions. The 90 percent was mostly because they were feeding on different information sources.
The way we’ve been doing that is that we synthesize into a mock debate. It’s not a real debate, but we try to present, fairly, the points.
