Here we are again. There was one very detailed thing. There was one point, in the last tape I think it was. I think the phrase said, "Name and tech line to point out controversial points." Does that communicate anything? Does that sound like something you would have said that you could articulate what it means?
Maybe it’s "name and tagline to point out controversial points." I don’t have a transcript yet for the second conversation.
Oh, could be. [laughs]
What is the tagline?
Of the whole issue?
That’s a question. Is a tagline basically a question, an inquiry?
It usually is a question though. It may have other things, also, but it’s a question. The other things are intended to provoke a little more complex thinking.
Thank you very much. That makes sense. I love that. That’s another way of creating brilliant questions. I think we discussed this when we talked with Miki. My view is questions point not to a specific answer, but to a space of inquiry. This is questions pointing to a space of controversy without saying, one way or another, what’s supposed to happen with it, but just stirring up the energy.
There’s an open space I was part of. The morning of the first five days was a world café, where the question was, "What question, if dealt with here really well, would change everything?" [laughs]
The world café went through three rounds, and then there was lunch. There’s no sense of trying to find the answer. There was lunch, and then after lunch, they opened the space. [laughs] I thought that was such a brilliant design. Everybody was all stirred up.
A few things on the way you operate. I alluded to it earlier, the sense that you are definitely for -- what’s the name for it? -- putting everything out there.
Transparency, right. Transparency is different from, but intimately related to, accessibility. It’s different from and intimately related to public knowledge. There’s a sense of having things posted on a website with it freely available, and how to look at it, anybody who’s interested.
I’d think putting that as a low level of this high-level thing. The next one is the wide streaming of process, where people can see the raw thing unfolding, in real time, and comment on it. I think you said many times you have chat function accompanying the live streams.
But the people have to sign into the live stream, have to be the kind of people who are aware of live streams, very different from what happened with Maclean’s and Canadian TV, which was a broadcast.
Here is a channel that people are...I’m not saying TV channel, although that was true. There is a media channel, through which information is always flowing to people. This thing is now being put out over that channel. Any people who are tuned into that particular channel see it. I’m thinking of mass media, not of the smaller...
I wasn’t even thinking interactive on this level. I was thinking of, "At four o’clock, Thursday, this interaction between these people will be available on..." I don’t know what your stations are.
We have 300 different channels, [laughs] but if there is some major ones, here is the major broadcast channel that you don’t have to subscribe to, you get it automatically with your TV. There is like 10 of those. The NBC, ABC, Fox News, those channels have something to go out over that.
That is another layer of public accessibility because people are already engaged with those realms and I think an awful lot of live streaming is either young people who are very tech acclimatized or the geek world. I hardly ever witness live streaming. I’m a different person.
Yes, I know. Very few people watch C-Span.
The design is horrible. It’s very often one congressperson will be speaking to an empty hall for their constituents, but not really because it’s anything terribly meaningful. It has a reputation for being really boring and only policy geeks ever watch it.
I’m not thinking of that, but I’m thinking of like what happened with Maclean’s. Here was a major newspaper, magazine. Every country has their major things, some to a certain extent communities have those things. People get them free or subscribe to them, but they’re different from the live streamed channels.
I don’t know. [laughs] I feel like, am I just this old 71-year-old guy who’s talking and stuff but some of these things don’t matter anymore.
Right, and there are branches of that. There is the journalist branch, which is, is it covered by media? Are the things that are going on part of the daily news? In Taiwan, the vTaiwan activities, are they being covered by the daily news? So that most of the population knows at least that it’s going on and that...
That’s the retroactive having proactive efforts. I don’t know, it feels like your work overlaps so much with the g0v world.
Whether the people in g0v, as a movement that’s trying to have an impact, might see proactive coverage by various public media, publicly viewed media, as something to find new ways to do and to actively promote because that will ultimately secure and advance the kind of thing that they’ve been developing.
You’re thinking of recruiting participants in the process.
I have a different agenda, which is embedding the vital nature and vital necessity of such processes in the public mind.
I would be interested in a survey, a standard public opinion poll, that had to do with to what extent do you know about, value, whatever various parameters of the public participation or the stakeholder participation in the creation of our governance - something that finds out how many people were aware.
There is actually a funny downside example, where this news comedian from the US who went to Moscow to interview, what’s-his-face?
Yeah, Edward Snowden.
The one point I wanted to mention was, he had gone around Boston asking people if they knew who Edward Snowden was and most of them, at least in his sample, didn’t know. Snowden was really thrown by that, because he’d just totally turned his life upside down in order to make this known. He thought his name would be known by everybody and not everybody knew about it. [laughs]
...not Citizen’s Jury as a public issue thing, but as a jury in trial.
OK, that’s it. I didn’t get what you meant by bootstrapping, but I get that. Each one is initiating a further spread of that particular approach. There is another interesting approach that is inspired by a mixture of Maclean’s and the Canadian broadcast thing and reality TV.
Which is the idea of having a dramatic presentation of a real-life public deliberation, which is sort of what Maclean’s and Canadian TV did. It went over two and a half days, but they did an excellent editing job where they talk about conflict sells in the media.
There is different ways to approach conflict, and look it’s a very dramatic story in the Maclean’s because of intense conflict. Something else is done with the conflict than is usually done in reality TV shows.
When Martin gets on, one of the projects he wanted to talk with you about and see if you might be interested in relating to in some way was a thing in Germany of having a civic council, like is done in Austria, on a topic that’s in a major city.
They would do coverage of it, dramatically. The outcome, whatever the recommendations were, they would then, in a positive deviance style, look for who is handling that well, and do further coverage of those people.
It has no official approval or sponsorship. It is just a TV show. It’s not journalism in a traditional sense, because it’s designed to sell rather than to report on -- to sell the idea, to engage people. That’s just another approach.
The question I had about stakeholders versus citizens and legislature versus ministries, my impression is, historically, the Sunflower Movement was deliberating about a law, which was going to be the trade pact with China.
The citizens were taking over not only the legislative physical space, but the legislative function at that time, saying, "Look, we can do this really well as citizens," and putting the legislature to shame and getting them to start engaging more citizens.
The genesis of vTaiwan is in that experience. Now, what I gather from you and Shu Yang, it’s around an 80/20 -- 80 percent regulation kind of stuff and 20 percent legislative. What’s the track of evolution that resulted in the shrinkage of legislative attention and the expansion of regulatory attention in the participatory process?
They need to be got together with Pol.is! [laughs]
Thanks for complexifying my thinking.
It’s a non-linear history. I was going, "Huh, how did this linear history happen?" You’re going, "Well, that linear history didn’t happen. There’s a much more non-linear history that happened."
Thank you. [laughs] I am learning so much, not just of the specifics, but of the nature of the complex realities, of which vTaiwan is only one. I tend to be usefully reductionist, but still reductionist, in a variety of my work. You helping me balance that with the realities that you deal with.
I was having a conversation with one of my other board members a couple year ago who had spent two years in Mainland China teaching English but engaging a lot with the students. One of the things that she introduced me to was the Mandate of Heaven logic.
I began to think, "What an interesting relationship could be painted between sophisticated public participation regimes and the Mandate of Heaven mythos." Without giving up power, you can access what the people want, and then do it for them, by using these participatory processes.
I’m wondering, from your proximity to that world view, if you have any thoughts about, "Oh, that’s a good idea," or, "No, that wouldn’t work," or, "You haven’t thought of these seven things," or whatever you might do with that. I’m just curious.
I understand that. Voting has a very minor place in my own ideology. I’m just curious, given the Communist Chinese structures, which I’m aware that they are hanging in your background, [laughs] in a very dominant way. There could be things that could happen that would be very messy for Taiwan.
Within the world of China, where there’s a lot of interest, apparently, in democratic reforms, but not democracy the way the West practices it, I go, "This is democracy in a way that’s different from the way the West practices it." What would it be like? Would this be a meme that’s a selling point for Chinese people who are trying to preserve the Chinese system?
