vTaiwan: new experiments in digital democracy (with Peter Cui)

10:42AM Jan 21, 2025

Speakers:

Dev Lewis

Peter Cui

Keywords:

Digital democracy

vTaiwan

civic tech

digital governance

Chiang Mai

digital nomads

community building

policy discussions

digital tools

stakeholder engagement

AI governance

social movements

public trust

digital innovation

transparency.

Just about

All right, I think we're at 545, on the dot. I don't have a very loud and boomy voice. So for the folks at the back, you might have to strain a little bit or welcome you forward. We're trying to keep it no mics, no AV, keep it more natural. Keep it more flow. Welcome. My name is Dev. Nice to meet you all, some of you I know before, some of you are new friends. Welcome. I'm one of the CO creators, co founders of digi-cnx, and we're sort of CO hosting this event together with our friends at four C's, thanks to Li Ron and Zeke and all our friends who are here for making the space possible for all of us. Before we have introduce our presenter, I'll just share a little bit about who we are, what we're doing, and then happy to have chats with you later on in terms of stuff that's going on in Chiang Mai. So I'll skip over this because we're already in Chiang Mai. So digi-cnx is a group we started about a year and a half ago, and our vision really is all about Cosmo local, which is about integrating global networks, like many of you presented here, with local communities, with local organizations, to sort of be at the intersection of where global and local networks connect, and how we can use the kind of resources that we have in digital spaces, especially these days, in this largely web three crypto space. How do we use these resources? How do we use these ideas towards more Chiang Mai based regeneration, check my base activity towards a more trans local future in defiance of the multinational trans financial system that we have today in Chiang Mai, we organize gatherings such as this one, we do workshops, we do retreats. We also moving in the space of organizing more experiences, so you can really experience the Cosmo local nature of Chiang Mai, and basically emphasizing and highlighting the very diverse community that we have here. We've got artists, we've got journalists, we've got human rights activists, we've got web three developers, community builders, academics. I could go on, it's pretty cool the community we have here in Chiang Mai. I love meeting people here, and I think you do too. So it's really cool to create this community and build this hive mind of intelligence that's here, and how we can sort of tap this and connect this to global networks. So we were started about two years ago in partnership with the School of Public Policy at Chiang Mai University. And our mission was to create a community, create a space, share knowledge, peer based learning and knowledge sharing and connections. And some of our values are really about openness. So we're called the DIGIC network for Digital Commons, because we want to create digital spaces that are pluralistic, diverse, that meet the needs of all the people of ecology, of nature as well. And so ecological balance is a big part of how we see digital spaces intersecting with our planet. Just some of our team and members, some of them you may know as well be familiar with. And Fauci is here as well, some of our partners here in Chiang Mai and globally. So our network really is trying to build a very diverse group of people who come from different backgrounds, because we believe the most powerful learning happens interdisciplinary and across different backgrounds. And last year, we've been sort of riding the web three wave, especially with Ethereum DEF CON happening in Bangkok, collaborating more with web, three communities and being part of that ecosystem, and so we had a chance to grow through that. And yeah, I'll just skip this bit. These are some of the events we've done in the last year, year and a half, talking about different topics, highlighting different areas. And a workshop we did last year at Fauci is Mountain View, where we talked about, how can we create a Chiang Mai? How can we create a culture of digital nomadism that sees itself as custodians of Chiang Mai, that looks at ways where we can contribute to the commons rather than purely extract and think about that and reflect on that more deeply. And I think with that, we also had the uncollect during the pop ups village in October, where we got to really talk about a lot of diverse topics and themes. I think many of you were here for that, and you got to participate, and would love to have conversations with you. Our networks are largely Chiang Mai based, but also regional, and welcome to have a chat. But with that, I'm going to move to our main event, which is a presentation by Peter. Peter twe from Taiwan. I wouldn't say too much, but Peter is one of the main collaborators of V Taiwan, and for those of you not familiar, Taiwan is probably one of the most progressive digital ecosystems on the planet. For the last 10 years, I've been doing research on digital economies and digital governance across Asia, and usually the stories are pretty bad. China, India. You know, these countries tend to lead in the in the space of more oppression, more digital authoritarianism. But Taiwan is coming in a sort of in the face of that. Taiwan's an opening space where I think they're trying out different things. There's a lot of unique collaboration that's happening with the government and with civic tech and activists. And I think there's a lot for us to learn. And I think vTaiwan, which we'll learn more about, has been one of the key platforms that have helped I think try something new. When we talk about democracy, we talked about participation, true participation from all people. And I think Taiwan has something experimental, maybe there's some things that we can learn, and we couldn't have anyone better than Peter to come share. So welcome Peter. Welcome to Chiang Mai. You're visiting for the week, and leave you

to it. And thank everyone. And it's actually my pleasure to, like, spare my son off on vacation time, because I'm here for vacation with my girlfriend and to share some experience with you guys, and I'm really happy and really delighted to have these kind of experience, to have these kind of change, to experience exchange your experience community building, and how to connecting with each other, and how to build these communities, and how to overcome some challenges when you're running different kinds of projects, when you're in Chiang Mai, and also my experience in Taiwan. So my name is sui Zhao Wei, and my nickname is Peter. Usually, you know that in the community, co linguist, nickname is always much easier, but if you want, and you can call me Zhao Wei as well. I'm currently studying law in National Taiwan University, and I got my bar exam. I passed the bar exam. So that is why I have a lot of time to do the things like that. And I also work as a COVID level contributors and also be Taiwan contributors as well. And some of you guys are actually from Webster community, so I have some relationship with Webster community right now because I'm currently working as a legal counsel in crypto exchange in Taiwan right now as well. So if you have any questions about like crypto law or whatever things like that, we have an Ask Me Anything session after my sharing. Yeah, okay, so for those who guys do not know what v Taiwan is, I think we must trust the origin back to 2014 which is like 10 years ago. And 10 years ago in Taiwan, we have a monumental social movement. It was called sunflower student movement. And the origin of the sunflower Student Movement is that the current government then from the KMT, the ruling party, then they want to pass a bill to make a closer economic ties with China, like opening more possessions in Taiwan for Chinese people so and also building more closer connection and relationship with China. And these issues, whether it is good or not, is still debatable, but however, the question is, the procedure is now legitimate, which means that the legislator on can see parties passing the bill without full discussions, or using only three minutes, and not only three minutes, less than one minutes, and says, Okay, 321, okay, we fine, we pass the bill. So that is that makes everybody angry about that. So a lot of students coming to get together and become the sound floor student movement. And the students, the volunteers, the protesters, occupy the parliament for three months, and after afterwards, the we peaceful. And is that the students was removed from the parliament. No one got hurt. Some people got hurt by the police riots, but however, no casualties, no people die like that. And afterwards, the civic society starting to feel that, okay, if we really get together, we have the change. We have the power to change the government so people starting to turning from a more passive atmosphere into a more progressive and more active atmosphere. But however, on the other side, the government sides realize that they must building a public trust with the citizens. So the government's representative, this one is lawyer Jacqueline Tsai. She is the minister without portfolio. So minister without portfolio is a special position in Taiwan's government. Its mission. We have several ministers with our portfolio, and their mission is to coordinate different government agencies to work together. Because usually these ministers are in charge of one certain agencies, but however these agencies, it is very hard for them to work together. So we need a third party to coordinate everything together, on working on some policies, like for Jacqueline Tai, she focusing on innovative policies and also how to build digital innovation and blockchain AI are also included. So Jacqueline Tai, in 10 years ago, she reached out to the COVID community, which is the civic tech community in Taiwan, and say, Hey, how about we create an online platform for digital policy discussion. So vTaiwan is born due to these atmosphere. So before V Taiwan is born, the government usually discuss the policy with professionalism, which means that the government usually resorting to the scholars and the corporations, usually send a lot of money, donate public donations, into lobbying, and usually, even though some record is some meetings record down. But however, the meeting record is not income. It's not completed, or it's not transparent enough. So be Taiwan's mission is to make it open. So first of all, its discussion is community based, which means that the v tau one community will hold all discussions together and nail down everything. And we have different we will invite different stakeholders together, not only the scholars, not only the professionals, but also the people who really got affected, got impacted by the policy. And finally, we use some online streaming services and the collaboration notes to make the whole process more transparent, because everybody can participate into the discussions with the video on online streaming or using the collaborative notes to do the record down together. So the structure of V Taiwan is just like that. So the minister office serving as the bridge between the government and the civic society. First is the Jacqueline Tai and then Audre tan. You must know that Mustang her. So this is one part of that, and the other one is st Li, Science and Technology law, Institute of industry. Industrial

III is triple i is a think tank in Taiwan, and it usually takes a lot of government policy research and consultancies works like that. So the STL I provides the resources and serving as a legal Whopper. If you are working in a community, you will know that if you want to receive a donation, no matter using what kind of forms you want to you need to have a legal agencies. You need to have a legal entities to receive these kind of money, to open a bank account, to receive these kind of nations and scholarship sponsorship together. So scli serving as a legal Whopper for V Taw community then and then also, they provide the legal research team for us to do a more deeper legal research before every deliberative discussion. Because before every deliberative discussions, we need to have context building. We need to make people understanding what is the policy going on and what are existing things, existing policies, and what are the new things? And we need to people to compare them together. So this work is focusing on STI, and finally, it's the GOV zero contributors, volunteers, and they are the ones who inviting the stakeholders and working together to make streaming services working well, working together to make a collaborative notes working well, so everybody can participate into the process. So the process like this. So three key words is digital tools, stakeholders and consensus. This is a more complicated one, but we have, like a more simple one afterwards. Wait minutes, oops, okay, I will use that to introduce so the first stage is the proposal stage. So the proposal stage, the citizens, the government agencies, will broad issue into the V type one community, and we will qualify the issue thinking about, what is the real question into these issues, like, what is the real problem? Like, one prominent example is that the Uber case. So when Uber first come into Taiwan, people are thinking about, what is the difference between Uber and the traditional taxi services? So Uber says they are the technology companies. They are platforms. They are not the agencies. They're offering the public transportations like the traditional taxi companies. But the traditional taxi companies argue that, okay, but you are doing the same things. You're making the drivers, taking the cost passengers and sending these people using the private cars to whatever they want. So what is the difference between Uber and the traditional taxi companies and whether they should be under the same rules or they should not be under the same rule they should have different rules, is the core of the issue. And then we need to discover the stakeholder. So discover the stakeholder. You can see that in Uber case is the more like an easier one, because we can see that the taxi driver is the and the Uber company is the two main stakeholders. But in some issues, like the in the artificial intelligence issues that we are currently working on, the things will become more complicated, because everybody can be influenced by the AI. Everybody can be influenced by the issue of AI, like discriminations, like the scalable issues or the cyber security or privacy protection, these issues will be more complicated and it will be harder to find the stakeholders. So sometimes we need many rounds of meetings and many rounds of discoveries to discover the right and try to covering most of the stakeholders in this issue. And afterwards, we'll invite stakeholders and through rolling questionnaires, and also we will identify the people who is not follow discovered in the first round of the stakeholders discovery. And then we will reach out to the public and also producing content digestible for the stakeholders to do discussions. It's very important, because if the stakeholders cannot understand the context of the policies, then the discussion will be meaningless. And then we are moving on to the online deliberation, which means that we were using some online tools, usually polis, but also we are trying some other tools, like Google Forms or slido, these kind of online services, depending on the issue and depending on the stakeholders, depending on the number of the participant that we want to try to reach out so using different tools to do the online iterations and also doing the common curation. Finally, well during the face to face dialog, we still believe that a face to face dialog is really important, because the organic feature of the face to face discussion is cannot be replaced by the online meeting, right? You know that if you are doing online meeting, you usually following the agent, but the agent down does not covering everything you sometimes the innovation inspiration is coming from the organic discussions between in during the breakout session or during the break session in the face to face discussion. So that is why we still keep these kind of face to face dialog in our process. And then we're using some tools. Now we have like AI, we spur these kind of tools to do the transcript. Before that, we still have some, like typhoons or other tools to do the transcript. And finally, we'll formalize the consensus within these kind of discussions. So one prominent example is that Uber and we can say we can use the polis to generate these kind of two groups. The one groups is more friendly toward Uber and one front line, one group, the other one is more friendly toward the traditional hixie drivers. Is a very prime examples of how B time was used in policy making, and in these cases, over four how 4000 participants provided your question online.

Hmm? Top

two. What do you mean? Top two, top

to bottom, left to right?

Yes. So it is like opinion, different opinions. So if people are the opinion will be falling on this diagram and people agree with these opinions will be quantified together like this, yes, another is the digital tools analysis. We're using digital tools to analyze these kind of opinions and try to visualize that, trying to visualize people's different opinions. And finally, we are using these kind of diagrams, these kind of visualization as a base for further discussions. So usually, when you are doing deliberations, one challenge is that you cannot understand what people's opinion in their mind, or even though they express their opinions, it is very hard to digest a lot of people's opinion. Sometimes it's really easy to like listening to one people. But however, if you are working on scale like 4000 people, you'll be clearly impossible for you to prepare all the things in the short time. But however, within the technology and right now, we have generative AI, we have chatgpt, and these things all become more easier so but however, even though, without these kind of state, with these kind of successful cases, like the Uber case, or we have discussion on the corporate law in Taiwan as well, but however, we still have some problems. The first problem is about reputation gap. The reputation gap means that the ultraton actually, during her career in the government, working in the minister with our portfolio, and then the moda minister, she always promotes golf zero and v Taiwan during her career. But however, in small systems in Taiwan still don't know about what is V Taiwan is, and what is God zero is. So it's like a reputation gap for people doing research like digital democracies abroad, V Taiwan is a very prominent example, and is famous and it's very popular. However, for people living in Taiwan who really get affected by these policies. They know little about the Taiwan. So, yeah, I have to say, in Taiwan we have like 23 million people, but however, we only have like 1000s. In our largest scale, we only have 1000s of people participating inside so there's like, little stage of that, yeah. And the other sense is we have the reliance on the critical public servant. So the Taiwan is now legalized, which means that the government have no obligations of using the Taiwan platform to doing policy discussion before they release a new policies. It is like optional the governments, if they want to do that. They can do that. They can spare some resources. They can spare some budgets to holding a hosting of the Taiwan's events, trying to reach out the stakeholders using these ways. But however, another platform in Taiwan we call join in Mandarin. It is gong, Gong Zhe sang ping Tai, and it was legalized, which means that government have obligations. If any government agencies wants to publish the new law or new regulation, they have the legal obligation to post it on the joint platform. And the joint platform is just like a policy version of Facebook, so the government agencies working as a user on Facebook and the article the new regulation is like article on Facebook, and everybody is well, if you have the ID number of Taiwan, you will be able to comment, leave your comments or thumbs up, thumbs on others, comments on the joint platform. So that is why the joint platform, right now, become more frequently used in Taiwan, because it is legalized. But however, one question is that whether these kind of legalized platforms is really have these kind of values, or really have these kind of energies in doing deeper discussions, because a lot of people are just common and model mobilized to comment on the policy they don't like like. Take one example right now, the five highest interactive articles from the government are all about medical services workers, like whether doctors can get the certificate when they graduate from the medical school abroad, like the doctors in Taiwan, cares about that because it actually enlarged the number of the doctors, and it actually decreased the salary, average salary, of the doctors. So doctors in Taiwan, if they are born in Taiwan, and they study the medical school in Taiwan, they do not want their salary to be decreased. So every, every time, when government publish new policy about medical workers, then they will be mobilized to comment on these platforms. So there was 3000 4000 messages. They are all coming from different doctors, like that, so and so, if the government won't really want to use V Taiwan is still determined by several critical public servants, like Audrey tan and finally, unconstitution, un institutional, the V Taiwan relies on the STL I as a legal Whopper and getting a sponsorship. But however, relying on the STL i is not really stable and it's not really efficient for V Taiwan community. So this is also the mechanism of the V Taiwan. So in the V Taiwan, we have a core group. I'm the main coordinator, so we will be never be absent, no matter what happens. And we also have heavy contributors, which means that they will participate in these events more frequently. And we have live contributors, they will attend the event. They will not showing up in a weekly meetup, but however, they will attend the events. They will be holding their interesting interest when they are participating in these events. And finally, we have micro contributors, which means that they will help us share the link, or help us bridging and connecting with different stakeholders, like these kind of things. So it was called Blue pass onion, which means that every civic tech projects, they will have different levels of different levels of CO working space, a co working vibe, so every contributors, no matter what they come from, no matter what they are working with, they can using these kind of blue pot audience to determine their levels to participate in different projects. And for the project managers of the civic tech projects, they will be also very clear to see how much the contributors can take from other contributors to work with. So time coming to 2023 and we knew one event was called democratic input to AI grant. It was a project proposed by OpenAI. So the project basically is the OpenAI will select 10 teams around the world, working with and 10 proposals, working with how to democratize, democratize AI, how to use scientific ways or proposals or online hybrid ways to make AI more democratic. And our proposal working with very prominent think tank in London, Chatham House successfully get selected by OpenAI. So we are 10 teams out of 800 teams to be selected by OpenAI. And we are also the only team with Taiwanese. So with the grant offered by OpenAI, we are able to provide a very huge, not a very human real meet up. Then this is working group, and I'm in middle. I'm also working as the moderator and the host of this event. And we invite a lot of different people coming to our event to talk about AI and how to democratize, democratize AI using the V Taiwan way, we

collecting the opinion online first, and then we use the opinion as a base to do a discussion, and we invite different, very versatile people, diversified people from different area, like this one is a lawyer, but also he had his own media company, and he is the legislator, current legislator, and also work As a legislator is still in Parliament right now, and she is the former NCC. NCC is the national net. A National Communication Council is like FCC in Taiwan, Federal Communication Council in Taiwan, working with internet facilities and the Internet infrastructures. And we also have people from working in the hospital as an AI engineer, independent engineer, and people from moda and people from different areas, scholars, Aboriginal people, and people from LGBTQ groups, they are all talking about the their feelings about influence on AI. And finally, we collecting our opinion and all experience gathering together, making the report like this. So if you want to read the report, you can scan the QR code here, and I can send the link to Dave, and Dave, you can share with peers and folks with your forms as well. Yeah, okay. And also, I write down article sharing this experience of holding the AI discussions on fnf foundations, thanks to Federation no man foundation in Germany and their project manager in Taiwan, invited me to write an article on that and recently was published on the website. So I would like to invite you guys to read and key take three key takeaways, that, for First of all, is how AI issues some right now is still really complicated, especially when you want to talk it with different groups of people, like LGBTQ groups or the indigenous people. Now they may know that AI will influence their life, but they do not have very tangible feelings. So sometimes, if you want to have these kind of meaningful discussion with them, you need to have more, like talk chat with them about AI or web street see these kind of issues at first time before the discussions. Or you need to have more make them understand what is AI and what is the mechanism of that, and what you will be, maybe influenced like that. And the second thing is that the AI issues are always interconnected, which means that, like for the discrimination of the AI systems, usually it is coming from or resulting from the data that AI did not collect in enough data, or the data is being polluted by the discriminative content. So AI reproduce these kind of discrimination coming from the database. So how to make people have sound data, or how to make a better database for those people who easily exposed to discrimination, is really important. So these two things, like the data governance and the discrimination is interconnected together. So how to discuss on these issues based on different scenarios is very important as well. Okay, so we are now working like this. We have a weekly meet up online using just see an open source software. And we have people from Switzerland, we have people from Taiwan, we have people from United States, we have people from UK. So online media makers able to connect with each other, stay in different areas. I think it's also working the people in Chiang Mai, because Chiang Mai also connected. You also have the different connection with people in other countries. So it can be replicated. Yeah, and we also using the AI to analyze the data we get like we use the using generative AI to summarize the opinion we feed. We take the raw data from polis and feed that into the AI and ask the AI to circulate these opinion with us, so we can get these kind of conclusion to visualize and we can make people easily know that what are these three people focusing about, and what are they going to talk about during the face to face discussions? And this is also another try in Taiwan. Last year we have another social movement. It was called Blue Bird social movement, and the origin is also from the parliament. The Parliament is going to pass some laws that will make the whole national system unconstitutional. So people starting to get on streets and get together, have the protesters, and we have, we send a questionnaire to the people working on the streets, and then we collecting back the data, and we try to analyze the data by AI as well. So we have group A and group B, and these group a group B actually visualize different party people, supporting different parties and supporting different kinds of opinions, which is really interesting. Yeah, and right now we are working on a social issue meetup, which means that we trying to building community with discussion connection and cooperations. And we want to foster the discussions with digital tools, and like the polis or other opinion gathering tools online, and then we have face to face discussion together in a small space. And we want to have like multiple times, not only one times discussion, but have multiple times discussion. We want to people to continue concerning and connecting with each other during these kind of social issues meetup, and we want to create a space for everybody to express their opinions, because we know that no matter in Taiwan or United States or in other places, in Thai in the world, people in the whole society, thanks to the social media and other online services, it people become more and more polarized. So we want to make people together and make people think about doing face to face discussions with snakes, with drinks, people will be in a more easier, easy mode, so that they will be able to discuss with people with different opinions, with them to talk about the social issues together. And also we want to leverage NGOs in Taiwan or civic participants to build a stronger democracy. So like, the linkage will be like that. So it was like civic tech community, researching and developing digital tools, fostering discussions. Right now we are also talking how to make people participating online like we have these hybrid mode, which means that we have real face to face discussions here in the real spaces. But also we using online meeting tools to make people who cannot reach out to these real spaces to come participate online. But however, participating online still very challenging, because for those people, they will be like more like an audience rather than a participant, they can only listening, but also it can hardly and also it's very challenging for them to express their opinion. Even though we prepare a very good sound instrument or very good amplifier, it's still very challenging for them to do so. So we are thinking about how to use the AI like a transcript to provide a live streaming transcription to for them to participate online with these kind of collaborative notes. And we also talking with NGOs, like right now, we have working with TW NIC Taiwan, internet Taiwan in

TW NC the phone, and we'll look at later, but it is in charge of the network services in Taiwan, and it is NGO in Taiwan. So we want to leverage with NGOs to provide domain knowledge on different social issues, like right now we are talking about AI governance, and the next round we are talking about the scam and fraud, fraud crime in Taiwan, because currently Taiwan is a lot of people in Taiwan are suffering from the fraud crime. They are being scammed. They are being frauded, and also their money lost a lot. And some people even be trafficking to Myanmar or Cambodia to for get forced to participate into these kind of jobs and civil participants. We know that in Taiwan there's still people caring about a society, caring about a community, but they don't know how to start their F they don't know how to put their effort in. However, we will enjoy encourage them to participate in our social issue meetup in order to like having discussions, building connection with each other and building stronger democracy together. So back to the problems with V Taiwan again. How to solve these problems? My plan is, first of all about the reputation gap. I want to use the working with NGOs and other communities to promote V Taiwan to make me have more don't have more domestic reputation. And also we are cooperating with OCF open Culture Foundation, there's a NGO in Taiwan, and working with a lot of different communities, like student community, like the open source community in Taiwan, to gain resources and the reliance on the critical public servants. We're trying to get independent from some influencers like Jacqueline Tsai or Audrey tan. We're trying to build out our own events, organizing our events and testing some deliberative tools on our own and unconstitutional to solve unconstitutional, uninstitutional questions, we open up a community account in OCF, making OCF as our legal Whopper, so that right now we are able to receive the donations. We don't need to rely on the third party. We don't need to rely on other agencies to receive the donations and get a sponsorship for us. So right now, we are having our own funds, and we can organize our events with these kind of financial resources. And finally, we have online events, regular events, and gathering is very critical to prevent preserving the contributors and also making contributors have the vibe of cooperating together and working together and get together to chat, to connect with each other and to exchange their opinions and experience. So this is Contentful of V Taiwan community. And if you want to connecting to V Taiwan, just send it to vtaiwan.tw, gmail.com and for me, it's like, this is like a like, SDF, ghj, 101, on 1001, gmail.com and we also have Facebook page and Instagram, and we have weekly meetup like this. And from nine seven to nine on every Wednesday night this week will be Thursday, because I'm in Chi my right now. Yeah, so I'll also have the slate. If you want to join into the cloud zero slack, you can search on join that G, zero, v.cw, and you can get the link to get into the cloud zero slack and become one contributor of the governor community. And V Taiwan has our own Slack channel. It was hashtag V Taiwan like that, yeah. So yeah, Lewis, usually it will be Mandarin. But if there's international contributors coming up, we will switch to English node. Yes. Okay, so this is the end of my sharing. If you have any questions about the Taiwan or about graph zero experience, I really encourage you guys, if you want to look more about graph zero, this community book, I know that there are some several books brought by vivid and Chen. Thanks to vivid and Chen bought into Chiang Mai, but there's one copy, I think this last copy of these old version, we are going to get a new version this year, because it was, you know that it was 2023, two years ago, two years ago from today. So you can take a look at it. And if you want to, if you because they were single copy, but however, they have the barcode here. So if you want to copy here, they will have bar code and use have different version, English version, Chinese Mandarin version, right now. We also have Japanese version if you need like that. So just take a look at it, and you will know more detail about how to build a civic tech community from scratch on your own, or how to build a civic tech project on your own. And we'll also have some examples, including contributors from Japan, from South Korea, from Thailand and in Thailand, actually, we have one civic tech project. Is called for kit by from Taiwan. It was called COVID Yeah. COVID Thailand, yeah. It was actually forked by COVID community in Taiwan, yes, so take a look at it, and if you have any questions, just ask me anything right now. Yeah, I

think you have about 15 minutes. Yeah, Q and A round, yeah, yes.

We have questions. I think I will collecting some of the questions and answering yes, two questions at a time. Yeah, cool.

Oh, I guess this isn't amplified, okay, yeah, I guess I'm just curious about what you see as the distinction between like join and V Taiwan, yes. Do you think the increased engagement on join has more to do with like, its mandate by the government to use it, or like, to what degree do you think its simplicity versus like, sort of the complexity of V Taiwan, yes, has something to do with adoption? Yes.

I also wanted to ask you, what are the biggest challenges that you see for adoption, and if you are putting into effect some counter action to What are you doing in order to increase adoption? Yes,

one by Okay, so one by one for the first question. I think the distinction between V Taiwan and the joint platform is that the joint platform is more like opinion gathering platform, which means that everybody get leave your comments on the government's policies, but the government will never may offer more explain, explanation to you. And this is not interactive, but however, in the Taiwan community and in detail on process with the face to face dialog, you will have the you'll have the change to doing the real conversation, like interactive conversation with different contributors in become different contributors and different stakeholders in the community and in the society. So I think, is the main distinction, and also the joint platform do have some advantage on simplicity, because it works on social media. You can leave comments and really, really simple works really simple on that, but these kind of simple ways also make people lazy and make people not willing to offer more ways, like doing a deeper conversation with each other, even with the people with different opinions. So that is why we want to use, like the small issue meetup, trying to use an easier vibe, an easy vibe for to attract everybody together, to make people adapting to these kind of conversation. So this is my answer to your question. And for the second question, I think the main challenges is, since we Taiwan, is you designed for the policy discussions? But however, you know that if a policy is not followed by the government, or it's not it's not getting to the government agencies, then the policy discussion will be minimalist. People are just like bullshit, talking like that. So how to persuade the government agencies to really realize the policy is really important. So why we are working with TW NIC to do the small issue meetup? One reason is that the TW NIC work with the governments on the some internet governance issues so they have influence. They have the bridges. They have the key person in the government agencies to work with, and also 20th work with other online platforms, well, like Facebook, like meta, like Google, so they are able to influence these kind of huge corporations or technology platforms to alter their or change or adapt their policies. So that is what we the most challenges we want to solve is that how to make our discussion be realized in the policy making, no matter is from the government or non government entities, yeah? Okay.

Question there. Yeah, okay, yeah, okay,

yeah. I have two questions, yes, but the first one is that it seems golf Zero has been existed for a decade, right? Yes, but your slides still say that most citizens in Taiwan do not know about you or your mechanism. I wonder. Why is that? Yes? The second question is about you said that your platform is not institutionalized, and I saw that that's like DVD positions a part of your team. So I wonder, for example, if the next government is from KMT, is there any possibility that your platform might be reduced, might be halted, or might be dissolved? Oh, yes,

yeah. Two questions. Yes, I know. Okay.

Yeah. Go ahead.

This might seem a ridiculous question, but what is a stronger democracy? Like, what is a strong democracy? Yes, like in Australia, they're centering the internet and putting in digital ideas to control people, and they think it's stronger and everyone's voting for it. So like, is there a North Star? And what a strong democracy is? Yes,

it's a good question, but I will answer it one, one by one by order. So the first question will be, why this the reputation gap, and also in COVID zero and B Taiwan also surviving for like, 10 years. And for B, Taiwan is like we are about to moving on to our 10s years. So why most citizens in Taiwan still know little about the mechanism? I think the first the reason is people knowing what gov zero is, or have, like, very slight impression on that, like, oh God, little is the group of people working with technologies and trying to use technology to solve the social issues, but they cannot know more detail about that. We trying to some God real projects are working with education, like working in schools, working with public schools to try to promote these kind of digital values, or digital literacies, to try to bridging these kind of gaps. But I think we still have a lot of things to do, a lot of things to make people more understand deeper about gov zero. Gov zero also, another reason is that the GOV zero, we have a one manifesto with code, nobody can represent nobody, which means that in gov they roll. We usually say, we usually joke about, never say why nobody does that. Because you are the nobody which means that before you complain, you should take action. Before you complain why nobody does that, you should become the nobody in your, in your, in your words, to take the action. So, but however, the nobody, which means that we cannot represent others. So that is why my sharing is focusing on the Taiwan better than other different projects in golf zero, because I think I have no power or authority to represent others to talk our discussion on that. But however, these ways also means that the GOV zero cannot find a good representative to like promote the whole community, which means that media coverage will be decreased and people are have blur views about the GOV zero community. And the second way is institutional. Yes, that is also why the Taiwan got into a low vibe after 2020 after the pandemic. So we're trying to figure out how to solve these kind of questions. And after we receive the files from open AI, we have some rest of the money when we are finishing the project, so we put it into the OCF account. I think the OCF serve as a legal Whopper for many different open source communities in Taiwan, and it works as a best mechanism for us to keep our money, and also we are be able to receive donations from other entities as well. And so also, for your question about a stronger democracy, and there's no clear and there's no right answer about the stronger democracies. But however, from my view, is that people will invest more of their effort, invest more of their time into the public affairs, like making discussions or reading the news or participating the votes. I think in Taiwan, we are still preserving these kind of vibe in our community, in our society, people are still willing to go into votes. People are still willing to read the news and making discussions, even though some discussions are in a bad quality, like they're scolding with each other, cursing the people with I don't think that is good. So that is why I trying to V town community, trying to use the smell issue, meetup, trying to make people with these kind of face to face gathering up we can talk in a more easier way, and not with the not cursing each other, not talking in a very violent way, like that. So for my for this part, it will be the stronger democracies, but however, there's definitely be any other, a lot of ways, different ways of achieving a stronger democracies. Like in Taiwan, we have different kinds of civic tech projects. They're working with different side. Like from one side is like disinformation. We have COVID projects that using community based approach to solving the disinformation on the internet, and we also have a small group of people working on cyber, cyber resilience, which means that right now, there's a recent news is that Taiwan's undersea wire is being cut off by a Chinese boat, which means that, and then these kind of undersea wire is really critical about Internet, and also Internet is very critical for the digital nomad like you guys as well. So how to deal with these kind of situation when all the sea wires are disabled, are destroyed during a war or during a natural disaster like earthquake or typhoon, that it will be really critical, and that is also some other different project in Godzilla community are working with. So I think there are different forms of stronger democracies, and we have different ways and different approach and different people focusing on different side of that. Yeah. Okay,

also, I wanted to ask,

Why do you think,

what makes Taiwan so special that civic tech is so advanced in Taiwan?

Oh, it's a good it's a big question, and a good question. Yeah, so why Taiwan have like a very good environment for the civic tech groups to grow. Well, I want to talk about the origin of the governor community. Why gov zero is constructed in 2012 about 13 years ago. So the GOV zero is constructed by It was founded by several engineers who it is unsatisfied with the government. At that time, the ruling party, the ruling government, actually have the video and saying that our economic policy is take action. Take action is better than saying anything. So people is very angry about it, because you didn't say nothing about that. Because, and it is totally intolerable, intolerable for the digital, for the democracy democratic countries, because the for the in a democratic countries, the politicians have obligations to explain their policies to the public, but the governments shape these kind of shed their shoulders and says, Okay, I don't want to talk with you about these detailed information because it was too complicated for you to understand. You are so dumb, and we want to take action. That's it. So people already get angry about that. So the first project of the GOV zero community is the visualization of the government project in Taiwan. We have two right now Thai baht is like the same value of Taiwanese daughters. We right now we have 20, $200 billion a year for the government budget. So the government. So these projects, the government budget visualization, using the software and the apps to visualize these 200 billion budgets on the internet and making people easily found out, what government invest more, what other invest less, like that. And they also have some other functions, like comparison of different years and comparison of different areas like that. And they even using some analogy like our government budget is able to offer 1 million students who eat their free lunch, like that. These kind of analogy to make people easier to understand what government budget is, and all these kind of things, is trying to make people easier to get into the public fairs. Just as I said, people are have interest to into the public affairs. But sometimes these kind of technical, technological terms or some very detailed information make people confused, make people tired, make people feel tedious about public affairs. So that is why people are starting to feel nothing and starting to feel indifferent about public fears. And a lot of projects of their community is working with these kind of how to make people raising people's awareness and making people easier to get into the public fairs. So that is one reason why Taiwan have these kind of, like civic tech vibes, and this better, good environment for the civic tech groups and community to develop this. We are unsatisfied with the government, no matter what parties comes on. We are unsatisfied with government, and want to like do better, and also we want to make the governments feel that, oh, we are losing the civil workers. We are losing we are losing against the engineers so people, the government, will feel the pressure and get better like that. The Taiwan is also the production on these vibes as well. And another thing says that Taiwan, I think Taiwan, why we have a lot of people concerning about the Public Affairs is that we are anxious about our identity, because in Taiwan, we know that Taiwan is struggling with China. China always, Chinese government always claims that Taiwan is a part of that. But however, we didn't recognize ourselves part of China. We want our independent identity as well. So these kind of independent identities actually motivates a lot of Taiwanese to cares about public affairs, because I think these kind of caring about public affairs actually help alleviate these kind of anxiety about identity, yeah, as well. So this is my answer to your question. Thank you. Yes. Thank you. Yeah I will. I can send I have sent the slides to Dave. So, yeah, yes, yes. Nice.