Hello everyone and welcome to Product Schools. Today's event is so exciting. It is a women in tech panel discussion. We'll be chatting with two product management leaders about their experience working in technology. Hopefully they'll share some experiences that they've had, any challenges, and maybe you'll get some tips and advice from them as well. I am today's panel moderator, Karen Longbrake. I'm a Product Management Director at the Walt Disney Company. I'm going to hand it over to Judy to introduce herself. Hi everyone, I'm Judy. I'm a Group Product Manager at SNAP. I lead to add delivery and marketplace team here. Thanks Judy and Christine over to you. Yeah, hi everyone. I'm Christine. I'm actually based in London. I'm currently a Product Manager in Monzo. I've done a few short stints in Asia and I come from like a user research and designer background and that's sort of how I transitioned into product, maybe a little bit unconventional. But that's a little fun fact about me. Great. Thank you, Judy and Christine. And Christine, my product management entry is definitely unconventional as well. So I entered into product management by way of business analysis, which I know is pretty popular as well. So I've been in tech for a little while, but just recently in product management. All right, before we get started, just a few housekeeping items. Just remember this is a panel so the panelists views are their own and don't necessarily represent the company. Also, if you have any questions or comments, please post those in the chat and we'll try to get to them as time allows. I am going to kick off today's panel with what may seem like a very obvious question. Why is it important to encourage women to pursue careers in technology? And I'll leave it open to either Christine or Judy to answer first. Yeah, I can take a stab first. So, as we all know, the tech industry itself is a growing sector and it will be a matter of fact. I think it was like sixth biggest industry back in like 2021 data. But I think it's a matter of fact that it will even climb up in the rank by the time goes.  And I think like it is like really important for women and like who will be considered as like minorities to have the seat at the table. So that it can actually we can influence like the future that we were building and will be together so that that can be, you know, like that can be handed over to like the the generations like below us as well. So I think like because like we're in this like crucial point of like having a leap in this like whole like AI technology and its application as well. It will be really great to have like our voice heard where we are actually at this point of like setting what the future will look like and the strategies that will be built accordingly. Judy. Christine. Yeah. Yeah, I am. I agree with everything that Judy said. Yes, for me, I think the importance of having a diverse workforce is it effectively is a catalyst for innovation. I think in tech, especially wearing the head of a product manager, we're often sort of confronted with complex problems. And having like a diverse group in a way would allow us to be more comprehensive and creative when we're problem solving. And so I think that's probably one of the key reasons why I would say it's important. Secondly, I also think it continues to nurture like a growing community. And so that like future generations like Judy has mentioned can continue to be inspired and feel supported within like a community of female leaders. I love that and I think, you know, we are following leaders that that blaze the path for us. So I think it's important for us to carry that torch as well. I also truly believe that, and I think, Judy, you mentioned this as well, that we need to reflect our our customers are our guests in my in my situation. You know, if we can better reflect kind of the user base of our products, whatever our product is, I think we can be more creative and really be able to innovate better for sure. So thank you for sharing those wonderful thoughts. We're getting some great questions in the chat already. I'm going to hold on going to those for a moment. Just we have a few prepared questions that I'll that I'll walk through. And I think I'll bounce this one over to Judy again, as a product manager, how do you feel is the best way to influence without authority.  So I think it's like really important that you become the face of the the area that that you own and drive. And I think the, the, the number one way to do it is to build trust and instill the trust like with your working group. So you like people can trust you that only like Judy is an expert in this like this area of XYZ. So that I think that's a reflection of that. Okay, like I can actually drive the future of this area without authority. And I think that's like being built like with like the, the, all the knowledge that you're putting together, and then, you know, like actually driving the great relationships like across the all the cross functional teams that you're driving. But I think like at the end of the day that you have to have the, the ownership mindset as well, that okay, like any kind of like problems or escalations or inbound or outbound requests that are being made that I should know like ins and outs. And of course, no one is perfect and there can be some gaps like here and there, then just like, you know, admit it that oh, like I wasn't aware of this but let's get bottom to this and then bottom of this and then what are the problems that we're seeing. And just like don't afraid to ask questions like even like in those cases, and then just like focus on the fact that okay, like, I'm the owner, and I have to like, you know, like fill in the knowledge gap that I might have. But I think eventually that will set like the path like for for like to be a healthier relationship with a group that you're working with. I love that when you said I'm the owner but I don't have to know it all right. And it's almost better if you don't right if you come in to a role or to a project inquisitive asking questions trying to learn from the people who may be the experts as well. Christine, I don't know if you have any other thoughts on influencing without authority. No, I think Judy covered very similar points that I had in mind as well I think having and building strong relationships that are based off trust is very, very important and key. I think it also goes both ways in the sense that when I sort of work with my team and work with my leadership team. I try to sort of lead an act by example in like it how I want to be treated is like the same way that I would treat others. And so just also empowering other people to feel like I trust them. And like, we're, we're in this journey together, I think that helps with less like influencing but maybe like inspiring collaborating together on like a mission and vision that ideally you share because you're in the same team and in the same company. But yeah, a lot of that is rooted in having strong trust and relationship. I love that idea of the trust and the relationship and that really being the foundation of product management and building a great product. Right. You know, seeing some really cool things in the chat as well communicating with empathy. I agree that's incredibly important and trying to embody that end user that that product user so thank you so much for those wonderful thoughts. I'm going to shift gears for a moment. You know, we're, we're out of the pandemic. And, but a lot of us kind of had a shift in our working environment during that time, and either went into a completely remote work situation or, you know, now work on as part of a distributed team. And so I would love to hear a little bit about some of the challenges that you've encountered as part of a maybe a distributed team or working remotely. And then also just on the counter side of that. How has that been a really good opportunity for you as a as a product manager or just as a leader in general. I'll open up to either one. Oh, Christine. I'm happy to go through this one first. And so for me, I think there are two challenges that I personally experienced but I kind of see the other end of it like I could flip the coin around and sort of see the benefit that having having the situation of being in that situation has brought up. I'll share a little bit around that the first thing for me is definitely work life balance. I think it's harder working remotely to establish clear boundaries when you're working from home, even like physical boundaries. So I think one of us not do not have the luxury of having you know gigantic homes or huge separators so I'm mentally and physically actually setting that boundary becomes more challenging. Whereas in the past you could just leave the house and go to the office. And so I struggled with that quite a bit in the beginning, especially I live in London we have like relatively smaller flats. And so what I do try to do is still try to carve out a space in the living room which is like far away as far as I can from the bedroom. And I sort of just put the mental model that when I'm here that I'm working but if I'm not in this corner of the living room. I'm not. And I sort of be quite strict with myself on that. And something else I think I started to do more of is also to book in classes like workout classes yoga classes. At times you regularly would, if you were working in the office let's say appointments at six. I think that gives you a bit of like a forcing factor to really get off the seat. Because otherwise I feel like sometimes I could just run into the night without even realizing. So that's definitely a challenge but if you flip it around I think we can see this as a good thing as well because now working from home we get more flexibility to manage our own time and perhaps maybe stagger things in our day today in ways that pre pandemic when we work in the office we couldn't. So yeah I think there's like, plus and minuses on both. And then the other thing I think that I was struggling with and I still am is visibility. So I think, I think remotely it's a lot harder to feel like you're gaining recognition and getting visibility from the company or from your team. I tend to struggle with this because I don't, I don't think I shout about things as much on Slack or online and when things are completed or their accomplishments. So I'm trying to be more proactive about that, but something else myself and I got the team to start trialling out as well is to actually make time at the end of projects, especially big ones to ask for feedback. So that at the end of it, you can make sure you're still getting feedback from peer stakeholders leadership as a way to help you grow but also to like gain visibility through that way as well. And so yeah, again you can get some things out of that, but obviously there's also the challenge. I love that a personal after action review. Yeah, I agree with like the two points that Christina mentioned, but I think I have like two other challenges that I've like noticed. The first one is, I think regarding a lot of companies like now mandate like return to office like for X amount of days. And with that, I have like, you know, a flexible work from home option. But like sometimes, you know, like, I feel like if I dial in and not physically be in the room while like some of the folks like who are in the office are in like the same meeting room for us, especially like high stake meetings or discussions. Then even though like I raised my hand like virtually to wave in the queue to speak up. It's just like, it's very natural that like people like physically like who are in the room actually, you know, like jumps in and like takes over the queue. So it's just like really hard to, you know, like, just like make the make like visibility, and then like speak up and also you know, like bring in the ideas like at the same level as like people like who are there altogether. So I'm trying to, you know, like I actually am fortunate to have like also like the other option where if I like want to go into the office like it's not too far away and I can make that trip. So like, you know, I'm prioritizing like the really important meetings where it would benefit like me and my team where I would have a physical like attendance and representation. And like for those days I try to like go in so that I can physically like attend versus, you know, like the other meetings where I can join remotely I try to categorize them differently. But it requires like, you know, a lot of balancing there too, because like we all have that work and live balance like struggles like in this like in this stage as well. And my second, like challenge will be, you know, going back to like building trust like instilling trust and building relationship with your cross functional teams. It's really hard like when the teams are all distributed. And then, like when we just like, you know, like go into a meeting we have like a very small talk for a minute or two about whether or you know like our weekends very briefly but we don't have that hallway and we used to have like when everyone was working in the office and, you know, you actually get to know that person like better very naturally by like having breaks together or having lunch together, you know, without like meeting rooms. But that's not happening so it's not a perfect solution. But like, you know, some of our teams are trying to have like monthly social and block our calendars for 30 minutes and an hour and then not talk about work period. And then we can actually talk about like other stuff and that has been very refreshing. And then, you know, like you get to learn a lot of the other aspects of like the coworkers that you're seeing every day. So that have been, it's like having like a much better, you know, like bonding experience that not having it. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm seeing a lot of really great suggestions in the chat as well. You know, lessons learn doing demos at the end of a project to really keep people engaged. And then also, you know, for your coworkers and making sure that you're you have that presence, having a remote presence is something or a virtual presence is something that is connected as well. Have check ins. I know at the beginning of the pandemic we had kind of virtual happy hours that we would do as a team. And I find that I do that now not in larger groups but in much smaller groups just kind of check ins with people with groups of folks to see how everyone's doing to make sure that we do keep that personal connection going and that social aspect and not just concentrate on work all of the time so I'm going to have one more question and then I'm going to go over to the chat.  And I've been in several rooms where I am the only woman. And, you know, it happens quite constantly that I don't even necessarily recognize that anymore but I think being in that situation it's important to have a mentor or a supporter someone that understands the position that you're in. So Judy and Christine, do you have a mentor or a supporter someone that is on your side and maybe when you're in situations that are uncomfortable or where you don't really know how to move forward that maybe can help you in that situation. I can take this one. I think I learned through my experience that as like Karen mentioned that like because you know oftentimes like we're the the only woman in many meetings and then like we don't have like proper representation or you know like voice like when there is a huge like decision to make. I quickly learned. Okay, it's like really especially if you work like in a pretty sizable company. It's really important to find a right mentor and supporter so that like you can actually you know like bringing the questions that you might have. Like in terms of like career development advancement or if you're stuck in a situation and who someone like who can actually provide some insights like with their seasoned experience. So I like had a pretty like fortunate experience and my previous company where you know like my skip manager. It's like really important to have like some like one on one moments like even with your skip manager. So that's why I like I try to like build relationship with my skip and how I actually approached approach and build this relationship was that. If you have like some you know like ideas or discussion topics about work like it's like an easy way to start the conversation and then have that discussion and then you know like mix it with like some kind of like personal like questions as well like in terms of career. And then like while having that question just like suggest like if we can do a recurring meeting like this but not like too aggressive where it's like you know asking for weekly meetings but maybe like monthly or every other month so that you can have it in calendar. So then you know you don't have to make an extra effort to maintain that relationship like consciously but like because you have it in your calendar as well as his or hers that it's going to be you know like sustained in that way. And then but it's really important that you actually think through what are the questions or topics that you want to discuss with this person so so that that like the other big mentor or supporter will find this time valuable and and like very rewarding as well. So I tried that approach. I found a really great mentor in my previous company and because like she was also women who used to be in a similar situation. She really provided a lot of like meaningful and valuable guidance like some of the very tricky situations that I actually ended up being in and she was like able to understand what where I was coming from and what I'm trying to achieve and I'm like still like keeping like a really great relationship with her. So I think like that was a that was a great example and I I actually did the same like took the same model to my current company and then like started to find my mentor and supporter and have like a recurring meeting with with my my I think like mentor slash supporter right now. That's really great. Yeah and I think my my experience my journey of finding a supporter slash mentor is also very similar to what you mentioned Judy and also the ways of maintaining the relationship is also very very similar. So I think I first started off with identifying individuals within the company whose experiences and insights I admired either it was the way they present themselves or it was like a maybe a skill set that they had or it was a way that they thought about problems or the way they break down things. I just like identify these people that I really wish to learn from and then try to see if there's like a natural and casual way of sort of getting to know them and sometimes it could also just be like I think in one instance I hadn't even joined my current company yet and she was actually starting in the same day as me and we were onboarding buddies and we're joining the same team and so I think tying back to what Judy mentioned about having very being in very similar situations and maybe coming from very similar backgrounds you you just tend to be like easily connect and yeah I think that to me was how I started building this like close circle of supporters. I know I'm very blessed to have and then I think keeping the relationship going I also have regular meetings put in the calendar. Sometimes if one of us are busy we'll just cancel it but it's just good knowing that it's there and sometimes it's something that we look forward to so I definitely not shy away from putting in regular meetings. Of course like first build the relationship first but yeah as soon as like there's a little bit of foundation I'd say put that in and then the worst cases you could delete it. I personally have fortnightlies with the two or three close supporters of mentors that I have. So yeah I think sometimes you're just looking for advice sometimes you're even looking for constructive feedback. Or just simply someone you want to lift you up so it could be used for several reasons at least I have been using that and I try to do both ways as well. And so yeah sometimes maybe they need a little bit of a lift. So yeah it's definitely a two way stream. I'm glad you mentioned that Christine because I think it is important to not only seek mentorship but to also become a mentor to other people, whether it's women in tech within your company outside of your company. I know I'm seeing in the chat you know what what happens if I truly am the only woman in tech in the entire company. My advice reach externally I mean you have all of these great resources within product school on LinkedIn. You know we're certainly all there to support you because I think you know even if we don't know who we want you to be successful. And so you know I think there are definitely avenues to find mentorship outside of your current company if you can't find any within. I love this talk. And can I add one more thing. Yeah I totally agree with you Karen on you know like find mentors like outside of your group because you know like it's really it's not easy to find like women mentor like within the company I admit that especially if you're in the tech industry. But in terms of supporter there is a great article I think I'm blinking where I saw it but the difference like between the supporter and mentor and that has been very helpful so like supporter is someone who can like actually have like influence like direct influence in your career growth. So I think like on that end like it's important to like build like that relationship with your like leader directly or your skip manager. And like for that case like I don't think it has to be a woman or it has to be someone like who has the same background or experience. But it must be someone like who can actually help grow your career. So that's a distinguishment and then I think like mentorship or finding mentor. It can definitely you know like happen outside of like your own company or your like core group where you can actually get advice on something that's not like directly related to your own company or own team. If that makes sense. Absolutely. Yeah thanks for that distinction I think that's really important. Okay I'm going to shift gears again and take a question from the chat. So this question is how do you ensure that works work gets done on time by your team members and is also good quality so you know we've got to meet meet two of two sides of the triangle the quality and and the time part of it. I know those are hard things to balance you know hopefully you have unlimited money so you don't have to worry about that but any advice that you have on on that note. I maybe this is with remote workers to right like how do how are you measuring the quality of their work. Sorry Judy go ahead. The measuring part it's I think it's definitely harder with like remote work setting but between like how like which like you know want to prioritize like between like speed versus quality. It's like you know like a continuous like problem for every product development but I think like it's it's different from product to product so I think like you have to have a really clear understanding of like what the goal is and what are the key measures. That you're trying to move. So for example I'm working on like monetization products and like like because I work at a probably company sometimes like we have like some business goals that we want to achieve like within a quarter. And if it's like time crunched and sometimes you know like I have to prioritize like urgency and then like probably reduce like scope like to you know like very minimal viable product. And then you know like categorize like what can be a fast follow or what can be you know like the the the later version that we can add like after we ship like MVP. Versus like if it's a really foundational product that I'm building that takes like multiple quarters then quality might be more important factor than like you know us like delivering product like few weeks early or a few months earlier. So I think it depends on the scope of the work as well as like the the the metrics that we're trying to hit and the objectives of each initiative. Yeah I am if I if I jump in a little bit on here so I completely agree with everything that Julie said which was starting along. I guess maybe it's a question back to the floor in the sense that I'm curious to know where the timeline has perhaps come from. Is this maybe like like a timeline that you had originally proposed and then now is running behind of or is it one that's been imposing you because I think that also would change the approach a little bit on whether it's something you can do to cut scope. Or the or whether it is actually maybe doing like better estimations or adding multipliers to the estimations afterwards once you know the team a little bit better and figured out like what those co efficiencies are. So I think also getting to the problem of why it's some why we're running behind or running short on time could also help. Absolutely knowing those variables. We're sure. Okay I think we have one other question that now I'm looking for in the chat. All right. Oh yes and Michelle brought up the rice method along with business needs and compliance so so I think one of the questions was how do you how do you prioritize work across you know a bunch of different stakeholders that maybe do not agree. There it is. Thank you so much. I know I have a comment on this one so this happens quite consistently with with my work because and I don't think it's necessarily disagreement I think it's more of competing priorities right are we trying to drive drive revenue. Are we looking to enhance maybe a guest experience or or a cast experience. Disney I got to use my my terms here. And I think I think sometimes we just have different different perspectives and we've we've found that creating a matrix to prioritize work across multiple different realms really helps out a lot. So once again you know is this going to drive revenue is this going to make it process more efficient. Is this going to increase customer satisfaction. And I think those are kind of the three main pillars that that we look at to and then you kind of can weigh each one of those because I think you know in some areas customer satisfaction may be more important or in some other areas driving revenue is more important. And so I think if you look at it kind of in a technical way. I mean I love spreadsheets and any opportunity I can I can take to use a spreadsheet to kind of back up my my thoughts and and you know the way that I go about work is is always helpful. So that's that's kind of how we do it. And then of course you know I think there's there's discussion that needs to happen with the right parties you know making sure that you have the right individuals in the room talking about it. Wayne pros and cons of moving forward with certain features or certain initiatives. Judy and Christine I don't know if you have any closing thoughts on that one. Yeah. So I think I agree that it would come down to actually like prioritization exercise. And then if you have like your own thoughts like that doesn't necessarily align with other groups. I will actually bring up that question. So like you know let's say that if we have done like OK our planning and if we have like said like like K.R. is that we want to hit. And if like the new added like request is not like a line with with like our K.R. path then I'll bring it up to the table OK like this is like you know what we're we're going to drop like if we add this work. So do we all agree that this is the right decision to make. Like here are my thoughts like this is like how I think but just like be open minded and get like you know like other people's like feedback why like the other people think like this work like should be prioritized like over the others. And I think like usually if you have that kind of conversation then you get to understand where the other parties are coming from and then be able to adjust like your own like prioritization list as well. Yeah I think I second everything that was mentioned as well. I think this ties a little bit back to the original question or one of the earlier questions and we're talking about how to influence make decisions without authority and I think it comes down to effective collaboration which usually would just mean you have to share your thoughts and a very well articulated way and have a strong reason to believe why this thing should be prioritized or why this should be true. And I definitely do the same as what Judy does like have a anchor which to me usually is the KR or the KPI and make it really clear that like this is why I don't think it is or this is a trade off like I don't think it fits into this strategy or this value tree. And this is a trade off like I will be taking this which I think is a more impactful thing off the plate to prioritize this and just like making that clear and understandable for others but also trying like be an active listener of why they might be pushing it and what agenda they might be driving and maybe it's something that a collective or like sorry not collective. I'm using company terms a company level. So yeah I think it's being able to listen but also being able to articulate your points well as well. That's wonderful. And I know I could probably continue to moderate this panel for the next hour but we have run out of time. Christine Judy thank you so much for all of the wonderful thoughts and experiences that you've shared with us. Today. Thank you to all of the participants and all the great comments and questions that we've received as well. I hope everyone has a great weekend and thanks for joining. Thank you everyone. Thank you.


First, just want to say hi Audrey. Thank you for joining. I'm just thinking in my mind so Shui Yang is really wonderful because we're going very detailed through the process and I keep you know asking her very detailed questions. I know I know yeah let me not interrupt you so I would just no it's okay great listening in no but I maybe I can extract some of the some of the bigger questions you know while while you're here here with us one that we were just starting to talk about is you know I'm generally in in participative processes it's always difficult to reach out to sort of underrepresented minorities so you know whether it's people from racial minorities or people with lower education or sometimes women or you know less savvy people I'm curious if you're encountering this and and how you've how you're thinking about it is how you're trying to deal with these things well I think the general principle is nothing about them without them right that's the like overarching logic so um so I don't know whether you're talking about the VTAPM process or the e-petition process these are kind of two very different processes but I think there is one commonality in that we try to bring technology to people instead of asking people to come to technology so if it's about a regional issue in the e-petition process we actually go to the the place and have town halls and have like interviews with the local people before we even start the online part or the livestream part of the process and in these processes I think live streaming or any ICT technology is just a supplement to the face-to-face and kind of rolling wave survey and other well-known technologies for for discovering stakeholders and we never let the online parts replace the the face-to-face part for discovering stakeholders the other thing is that usually disadvantaged people they can nevertheless get into the process if you make it long enough to accommodate for for time and if you also use a way that is more comfortable to them like in their natural habitat instead of asking them to to do powerpoint presentations or whatever right so so just by touring around Taiwan like I tour around Taiwan every other Tuesday and I go to indigenous places rural places and so on and bringing with me a video recorder or event 360 recorder and ask the people in Taipei to see kind of through my eyes how it is like in those disadvantaged places how they are doing social innovation I think after one or two such trips where I return every two months but after one or two such trips to one specific place the people in central Taipei they nevertheless have a feeling of how it is like to be living in that place and I think this kind of empathy building is also part of the initial setting one of the the other aspect I was curious about some from a high level is that you certainly know this better than I do that a lot of the people who are working in sort of part of its super turret democracy work with elements of sortition so randomly you know chosen citizens as a way to avoid electoral you know representatives and to capture by interests what I find interesting in the case of we Taiwan we Taiwan is that in many ways you've chosen a model where you put stakeholders together more than randomly selected citizens where you think like hey if we can get the stakeholders consensus say you know then you know that's and so I'm just curious how you were thinking about this no I think that's because we work usually with the career public servants in the administration rather than the representatives from a parliament or a equivalent referendum process right so for us it's in the discovery process if you're using the ideal double diamond methodology or analogy for for all its flaws it's still very useful to say that we're more on the first diamond and especially on the divergence part of the first diamond and just converge a little bit more but most of the sortition processes are already well past the first diamond and they're trying to make a binding process that that results in a referendum like decision power at the at the very end of the double diamond process and so I think these two ideas are complementary the more the more you're into the late places of the binding process that you try to be as good as referendum the more you will work with you know parliamentarians and to referendum people and sortition people the more you work on the early stage where nobody really know what's going on and it's just discovering how things are going the more you're going to the stakeholder side and the administration and career public servants whose job is to discover what's going on so so I think it's a natural thing that we're aligning more toward the administration rather than the parliamentarians and the referendum people but I think our results are nevertheless our synthetic documents are very good informative documents for the second part of the diamond so that people can consider the options more thoroughly and make sure that all the options are valid and that people can live with instead of through a normal referendum process where you ends up being you know yes or no questions that alienates half of the population so I think we are we're providing valuable service to the second diamond is what you were saying okay yeah thank you that is interesting I hadn't thought about that that perspective from sort of divergence and so would it make would it make sense like in the in the face-to-face meetings that you organize typically sort of after the polis you know gathering yeah polis is just a you know crowdsource agenda right but we still talk through the agenda yeah um is there like in the invitations that you do at that stage of for the face-to-face meetings is there like um are there a few seats reserved for just ordinary citizens people who don't have a particular stake in the conversation well if they offer as much as one comment they declare themselves stakeholder so I think it is it is what we call open multi-stakeholder model anyone becomes a stakeholder just by showing up uh and say I have this thing to say we were not saying that you have to be a stakeholder because every other stakeholder consider you want there will be a closed or invitation only stakeholder model okay I got it so if if in the polis conversation you know I'm not a I might not be somebody that has been identified as a stakeholder but I make interesting contributions and I show up and I the top scored uber x consultation contribution it's done by arvin who is a local firefox or mozilla developer and he has no stake in the uber consultation other than as a someone who are interested in public policy and uh transportation policy right so he is very much a hobbyist but then he's able to propose the one that was the most resonating um comment so so I think the stakeholder really is a very vague term right at some point a participant become a contributor but it doesn't really need a membership card for anyone okay that makes a lot of fun thank you um is that that wasn't clear to me um I'm curious with what you just said before about you know the the general principle of you know we we bring technology to the people not the other way around right that I see is just sort of a supplement to to face to face what we call assistive civic tech yeah yeah um I'm curious about this limitation that you have so far and um about only doing vtai one for digital cases yes um and if that's the case you know are you are you ready to lift that or are you considering lifting that limitation um well I mean vtai one is a community endeavor so if the community feels ready then I'm sure that um people will eventually graduate out of it but I think um what what's currently which seems like a very useful even politically useful distinction to make is because with digital issues usually the public officials really doesn't know it's better than the civil society or the community and with digital issues there's no clear um solution that's the best and also with digital issues usually there are solutions that work for everybody's benefit and nobody's detriment it's not zero some it is innovation based right um but with non-digital issues especially very old issues that are more like a resource allocation and more zero some in nature it is less clear that we can always come up with a Pareto improvement and that is their win-win solution it is much less clear that if it fails the zero option will still be available it is much much less clear that somebody that like a minister is is willing to hold the political repercussions if the consultation falls right but but with the digital it's none of this is a concern so so I think just by you know declaring it's digital it provides a safe space for the community to experiment but with the participatory officer network we're often tasked with exactly such zero some games and for quite a few cases we have to make a very clear line between like the rights of fishing and the rights for the fish to renew on a marine like a national park but for these kind of cases it's very much not clear that a multi-stakeholder process can always generate win-win solutions and so at the moment we have the participation officers absorbing this more non-digital kind of political issues and for the digital kind of issues be kind of a safe ground for the community to explore but of course all this can change in the future it's just the political convenience at this point okay I get it um something else that we we talked about um just before you joined um was the question of the sort of the restore the resource constraints so one of the things that you have in um electoral representation is that you know parliament you know all these people only have so many hours and so so many things that they can discuss and I think it's it's one of the topics I I see discussed very little um of the problems we with current democracy is it's just the severe bottleneck you know if parliament is busy here in the US discussing you know changing the tax cuts then so many other valuable things cannot be discussed because you know all the attention is just on this one particular topic and and what we v taiwan or similar processes offer is sort of bottlenecking of the system because in theory you could run quite a lot of these processes in parallel oh yes and and we also part of the things that v taiwan helped passing is this whole idea of sandbox laws where for AI banking or very soon this week for AI mobility AI banking is already part of the law here we have a fintech sandbox where anyone can challenge existing regulations and laws when it pertains to fintech and break the law for six months there's some limitation you can't experiment with money laundering or funding the terrorists but otherwise you can challenge many other laws and regulations and a multi stakeholder panel just like v taiwan gets to discuss this um AI banking or whatever blockchain innovations throughout the six months or one year and at the end of it co-determine whether it's a good idea for society or not if it's a good idea regulation and laws get changed if laws take time to change the experimentation can extend to up to three years and for AI mobility we're doing very very much the same also so what i'm trying to say is that we're kind of getting the legislation to sign off this blank check but not to the administration but to this kind of multi stakeholder model so that people can experiment with breaking laws a little bit but in a control risk fashion and so co-create the law and i totally agree that it is a way to kind of parallelize um the legislation process so that it's the bottleneck does not always become the throughput of the parliament it is a little bit like how in the bitcoin world the lining network or an other off-chain methods kind of works around the transaction limits of the main blockchain that is bitcoin or ethereum and and so we we're then discussing with wish we young what what is the current sort of resource constrained of we taiwan so currently there's something like you know six seven processes a year through it and could you imagine this becoming 60 or 600 you know is there um yeah what we're trying to say is that btaiwan is very much just a kind of research model and all the process is open and currently there's multiple multi stakeholder networks being set up in taiwan there's the taiwan internet governance forum which is also trying a msg at the moment and the very fact that there's fintech mobile fintech ai sandbox and very soon a mobility sandbox also says that every maybe even regional governments in the future will have a similar process pertaining to um you know evaluation of the the fintech or the a mobility cases so i think while they may not call them so v taiwan in the digital communication act we just say open multi stakeholder processes without saying it's v taiwan or anything else i think this as long as the spirit is upheld we will be able to work across all the different communities sharing very much the same process and and ideas what would it take to you know to to increase the capacity of v taiwan or to multiply that is it is it a question of documenting it is it a question of training people is it a question of the government putting more into it is it a question that some of the community people get paid i think there's already very very much v taiwan inspired and that they always call it so v something right so the latest one being the v new york city and they they they try to replicate and but i like a philosopher called tom athlete he said that v taiwan is just one particular configuration out of the taiwan social norms and in other multi stakeholder networks it will take other ways to manifest so so i think what what's i think that the main thing that lets v taiwan scale is not so much the particular political circumstances but just the the what we call a recursive public a a self-aware cross sectoral loose partnership that allows itself to be improved every week or so i think v taiwan even v taiwan itself has been rebooted at least three times with very different bunch of people and i think that's what enabled this idea to grow is not one particular particular configuration but just this idea that it is possible to establish useful synthesis of ideas in a way that is politically meaningful through this cross sectoral idea so i think documentation of course will help but what will also help is that in various very different political circumstances people try it out anyway and documenting their successes and failures and share it just like a sandbox i'm curious how how does the how does politics feel about about this it it seems like you've managed to find yourself a niche and you know the digital side where that's right it's threatening yeah it's at the worst we're mostly harmless right and at the best we can solve very difficult problems yeah yeah exactly um do you see a path a path forward for you know for this to become more more mainstream or for this to break out of that well for non-digital we already have the the participation officer network uh and if the e petition is not binding enough at the end of this year we're going to have the national referendum act which for the first time we're introducing swiss style um referendums and i my feeling is that eventually people will see that proper deliberation before any referendum and for the kind of citizens citizens council maybe sortation based and maybe multi-state holder base maybe the multi-state holder determine the agenda and the sortation determine the final synthesis will will try various models out but some combination of these models that informs the final ballot what is put on the final ballot of natural referendum i think will be a huge difference on the quality of democracy right so so i think um we will converge not exactly to the swiss style referendum or oregon style but something along those lines and i think there's every reason to believe that taiwan will evolve a combination between you know the stakeholder the sortation and the referendum models to have meaningful direct democracy and i think that is the obvious like short-term um way for us to scale to the the nationwide but for many other ways like participatory budgeting participatory land use planning participatory environmental um impact assessment or whatever there are other people working on it and they're often dropping by v taiwan to share dinner but they will not call themselves v taiwan contributors but we nevertheless share many of the ideas what are some some other places outside of taiwan that you that you see that excite you i mean from everything i hear you seem to be you seem to be pretty advanced compared to others and others seem to be wanting to catch up but other other places that inspire you well i think um estonia with no legacy on paperwork and no legacy on pre-internet bureaucracy right there constitution is literally written after the internet um can can offer a lot especially on the administrative site the x-row system for example and it's very wise handling um portable data and and privacy and whatever i think offers a much more um advanced and solid way that we can still learn a lot like for example we started just last year to hand out our eid cards to to foreign people not taiwanese people but people with other nationalities and we also started handing out aggressively arcs and reentry visas we call it the four in one gold card but um it doesn't really get the same international visibility as estonia with this eid card for uh overseas uh people right with the e residency is over the world so i think we can learn a lot from its marketing at least but it's not just marketing but the general idea of having the whole um human population as as potential constituents and stakeholders and and not just taiwanese people i think there's a lot of this global thinking that we can learn a bit what is uh what is next for you what are what are you excited about like one of the experiments that you're excited about right now well um so just tomorrow i'm going to talk with legislators about the ai mobility sandbox so i'm at the moment very immersed into this idea of co-creating a norm a social norm of codomastication of safety and explainableness and uh viewing things from a ai vehicles viewpoint to kind of fuse the horizons of human population and driving self-driving ai population uh and i think that is one of the key areas that a lot of shui yang's research on mixed reality and on um chat boards and on other things can be put to use because if we are going to enter a a self-driving vehicles world we will need a lot of augmentation to to reason effectively and to co-creating the ai norms together so at a moment that excites me the most and we already got tremendous interest from uber from nvd uh from google from microsoft um they want to participate in this program because frankly speaking in asia there is nothing comparable going on and we cannot wrote this out unless we're pretty sure that multi stakeholder consensus works in taiwan so it's interesting how you're building on the existing things yeah they're like lego blocks one thing i'm i'm curious about is you know this this question of legitimacy you know with you know people argue for ever and ever on the smallest details of any political process you know the constitution and and in your case you're running this these cases like v taiwan with just a bunch of people who show up oh yeah they were willing to do this and um and i'm i'm curious what makes that so far you have been considered to be legitimate parties i know some of the history you know some of the sunflower movement and what was the initial legitimacy but right now when you run a new process um you know what in v taiwan you know what gives this process legitimacy oh yeah i think when we're explicitly just doing it in the brainstorming stage and not the and even just the ideation it's in this first diamond it's never in the later part of the second diamond we don't need that much legitimacy right the only thing that we need to prove is that we're not partial to any particular interest that our facilitators are as neutral as can be that our weekly meetings are documented on the publicly readable place and so basically just like how internet engineering task force the internet society gets its legitimacy right because the internet society is also a bunch of people who happen to show up at a special interest group and the the internet society by and large get by by having the process well documented by having radical transparency by live streaming and using mental lives and weakies to keep everything and by being held accountable by a collective sense of responsibility that's where we get the idea of recursive public and i think um because it's in the brainstorming stage and it's on things digital it will not be challenged by existing representative because they know that there's always a chance it becomes a law for them to go over it in a parliamentary debate if they they don't and often they don't they just pass whatever that we hand them but in in some other cases they do go over it and review it but armed with the knowledge that is explored by the multi-stayholder model so the legitimacy i think is derived by us being an alliance to the representative democracy and not positing ourselves as a replacement that's the first one and the second is that by having the public servant see this as a signal generating and not a noise generating process because otherwise they have to run public hearings anyway and they often collect lots of noise with our proper facilitation as they call the discovery so it's seen as an improvement of the existing public hearings and whatever they already have to do anyway and so it's a process improvement for the administration and it's a kind of natural alliance on fact gathering for the representatives so i always say we're piggybacking on the two branches legitimacy by enhancing both and not taking anything away so what you're what you're saying is that if at some point you would consider that the the output of a process you know becomes law by itself you think it would become trickier oh yeah it would be it become far trickier yeah or it still goes through the ministry you know to approve the regulation and so they're still yeah yeah the the ministry still finally the minister takes the final responsibility so they're free because all we don't ask is that if they don't use any point of the synthetic document they answer why and that's the only requirement so it is from the outset it is a consultative process right so it is not what we say a binding process the only thing being bound is the agenda of the face-to-face meetings and but that's not saying much we're not binding the conclusion okay so things would become a lot trickier if at some point you were to claim that the outcome what you do is binding rather than in which case we will switch very quickly to random sample voting or any other flirtation methods yeah yeah yeah that makes sense I I remember reading a long time ago that some ministers said that you know really all process in the future should be run you know vtai one-way there seems to be like regular sort of of this yeah it's it's done I mean it's a water down process of course but every single regulation is now pre-announced on the joint platform and every budget spending even once projects monitored by the ministry is updated at least quarterly on the joint platform as well so so yeah the administration has fulfilled the promise there's a lot of resistance from our participation officers a year ago but after a year of kind of pilot testing and they see there really is nothing lost by having the public review their kpi's their budgets their procurements their spend spending and their regulatory pre-announcements so so now it's part of the the the joint platform we have 1200 regulations sorry 1200 government projects ministry projects and hundreds of regulations at any given time in the joint platform for the public to comment and for the government to summarily respond in a synthetic fashion so so yeah it's not necessarily done in a face-to-face consultative setting but at least the online part that is has been fulfilled thanks the the point we too young and I got to and in our you know detailed conversation was sort of like if you know you go through a typical process and I know that there is no typical process because every case it's reinvented and rearranged so yeah but I was sort of after the the pollist process when you get a number of people experts officials you know participants together um on a face-to-face yeah I'm I'm curious how do you how do you decide who gets who gets invited I guess you know the number of seats are limited and that might be you know a place where your partiality might be put into question you know well actually you'll be surprised because even if hundreds of people participated online at the end only only maybe five or six people have the time to attend face-to-face so we don't usually limit the number of community participants anyone who signs up gets to show up because everybody knows there will be live streamed a vast majority prefer to view it in their comfort in their home their live stream and participate by typing to a channel right so so we don't actually I don't remember deleting people who want to show up in the face-to-face we usually make up for the missing people for some less relevant cases or less popular cases maybe only two people or three people want to show up from the online community and we have to fill them up using people from academia and so on yeah okay but I even beyond you know people from general community I could imagine that you know you invites two people from uber or one person from uber or three or you know there might just be like a lot of these these questions like you know how balanced are you you know there's like two people from the taxi companies and there's like you know um does that is that a headache or what is the rule of thumb essentially we don't invite two people if they are going to say exactly the same thing so so if there are two people from uber that's because one is from their legal department and one is from their maybe management or you know strategic department and they have different things to say and or maybe it's uber and it's a lawyer who doesn't actually work for uber he's just advised for this particular case and actually that's the same principle we apply to the collaborative meetings in the e-petition workshops as well if there are multiple people wanting to come from one NGO one civil society organization or from one agency or whatever we ask do they have different things to say and if they do then of course they're welcome but if they are going to say exactly the same thing we just invite one person I'm curious about the the process of these meetings because I imagine that's really the place where you're hoping for consensus to emerge between stakeholders and so I was I was impressed I haven't read the transcript yet from some of these sessions with google translate I could read but for instance I think in the uber case you mentioned that it was like a two-hour session yeah but it starts from the consensus from the apollos and there are so there are so common sense and people see that already 94 percent of the population are for it or even higher so unless people have a really really good idea it's very difficult to say I don't agree with that okay so the the polis really gives you sort of the head start and you know forces people into very much so and like in collaborative meetings in both vtaiwan and po we start with a briefing that summarizes what we already know and what are kind of undisputed facts and that is very important in a focused conversation method because if people go through a period of not disputing facts usually they would converge on some common values but if you start by having each side proposing facts previously unreviewed to other side then people start challenging each other's legitimacy right and and we we get nowhere so it's essential that we start from some undisputed points yeah and when you talk about undisputed facts do you consider the polis result to be an undisputed fact is that well if if like 95 percent of the people participating in polis does not dispute it then it's very close to being undisputed of course stakeholders showing i mean a meeting can still dispute it but so far nobody really did uh it's very difficult to to to do this actually hmm that's interesting is there is there a particular um facilitation method of methodology that you use and in this session yeah personally i i use the focus conversation method uh and um yeah it's uh what i also try to um in lectures and also training workshops uh talk to other facilitators but many facilitator have their own um heritage and we we are not fixed to any particular facilitation process um what is the output of of these sessions like is it a is it a list of of items that should make it into the the the bill drafting yeah um so it depends uh like for for example the cyberbullying uh consultation at the end of it is the general awareness that there shouldn't be a cyberbullying law it there there may be it may be good to have separate policies or regulations or even laws on maybe stalking on non-consensual images or whatever but bullying is such a wide term that it's impossible to derive a consensus so so having no consensus is a a possible outcome and it may not be a bad thing right it forces uh the stakeholders to kind of drill down to more detailed issues and then talk instead on those detail issues because well we discovered that it's impossible to if the idea is vague it's impossible to get consensus and even if ideologically opposite camps if the specific case is specific enough then they can always generate some overlapping consensus so many of this stakeholder meetings is about to clarifying and nailing down the typical cases that we can argue about specifically and if that is done during the face-to-face meeting then we generate a list of items as to say right there but sometimes it needs further refinement and then more meetings are held like for the social enterprise and company laws interaction we ended up holding easily six meetings or something just to get to the very specific points okay so you the first meeting sort of drill down the sort of to the specifics under the general umbrella of the topic and then you had specific meetings with the same sort of stakeholder group right right right and and uh sometimes we discover that some stakeholder groups are missing uh and and then maybe we go and find these people as i said there there's just this meta process there is no process that is the same for each case yeah um and are there other cases where out of the stakeholder like you come out with sort of a a list of things that can go to bill drafting where you say like hey you know it sounds like the uber case wasn't like that yeah there's many cases that's like that um the earlier vetoing cases like equity based quail funding uh is like that uh the closely held company law is like that and of the later cases uh we also have the specific chapters in the company law like allowing foreign names of foreign aliases essentially of a registered company in taiwan at the moment only chinese characters count but very soon you can also use latin characters and maybe even taiwanese holoc or haka by written in latin characters as viable alternative company names because it's such a very specific domain we were able to get a list of recommendations right there in the face-to-face meeting and that translate directly into the law that is currently under debate and hopefully going to be passed next week uh by the parliament today okay um and so how does um how does then the next step work of the of the policy drafting because i imagine that that's where the whole legalese comes back to work and where you know experts might take over and there's a whole risk of whatever has come down as as a consensus not being respected or being tweaked or or even no it's going to be tweaked anyway right if the consensus is fine enough of course the legalese people will not dare um go against the grain but if the consensus is starts vague to begin with then there there's a lot of room for interpretation and we see it happen both ways right so so i think the the community is under no pressure to to to release something very fine but if we do release something very fine it usually carries over to legalese very easily but if it's something that is more on the general direction then of course the the legalization process can take a lot of liberty that's just the nature of things yeah is there is there a process where whatever is drafted goes back to yeah it's always posted back to vtaiwan but at the second draft review stage um there's still guarantee response from the ministries but then there's no guaranteed face-to-face meeting anymore okay and so when it's posted back to vtaiwan what do you mean is it like on the on the vtaiwan website yeah yeah in in that topic you always see a extra line that links to the draft and the online place where you can still comment on the draft but there is no guarantee that it will result in a face-to-face meeting okay um have you had cases where where the the things threatened to take a whole different direction than than what was discussed like you know is there yeah there's one single here's a one single case that's like that yeah it's the online sale of alcoholic beverages uh case and what happened how did the community no the the the the new uh parliament came into effect and and so whatever consensus reached from from the previous cabinet and previous parliament is back to square zero um the community reacted kind of um badly um both in the open government report from the open culture foundation as well as from the previous premier uh sam and jung as well as uh from other people in the previous cabinets and parliaments and they all use that case as saying you know vtaiwan is not biting enough because he doesn't um you know survive uh the change of the cabinet and the parliament and it's also one of the cases being made uh by the one of the civic media in taiwan the reporter they also use that single uh case to kind of put the the meta process in question so yeah i would say that that one single case did more uh to raise um awareness of the brittleness of the the legal status of the vtaiwan process uh than any other case because for any other case it's just a degree of and and speed of whether it's taken into account but it's never to reverse but on this single case it is the reverse so it also spur a lot of discussion about uh whether we need something more legally firm for the vtaiwan's existence yeah um coming back to the drafting has there ever been a sense that the community could be doing the drafting yes um so for for some cases the community has lawyers or uh technologists and so the recommendation end up looking very much like law uh yeah so and and and that's um and some of the cases where the community version did not make it into the administration's version uh the community were able to find mps and essentially port their version back to the parliament by picking back in it on the mps version we're seeing that in the social enterprise and company law so i understood what you mean by so in the part one of the vtaiwan cases is whether we put in in the company law uh what's called benefit cooperation uh and for the for the um general benefit of the society and environment in addition to for-profit motives the administration's version is the bare minimum of that uh it is constituency clause it's the company may declare a public um goal or purpose other than the for-birth purpose but it's opt-in and the company may announce its charter or constitutional document publicly using an open data platform by the minister of economic but again it's opt-in and there's places where the lawyers in the community during the vtaiwan consultation who came up with a more binding way like to be a benefit corporation you have to at least release the public benefit reports and the publication of the charter or constitutional document is mandatory it is not actually something that you can opt in a year and opt out the next year and so on so it's much more locked in uh that version although not finally picked up by the ministry of economy nevertheless find itself into the version of NP Jason Xu and also NP Huang Guo Chang and so just just this week they're they're they'll fight it out and see which version finally it may get into the final company law but i would say that all the different alternatives has been explored and proposed during the vtaiwan consultation okay that's interesting um so they they people from the community address themselves directly to some sympathetic MPs to bring their version to the floor yeah and and i think that's a process improvement of vtaiwan because after the alcoholic beverage over the internet which did not involve MPs even if we know that there will be future MPs i think that caused a change in the meta process and so for for example social enterprise or company law or whatever we try to notice the respective MPs of course they they did not came the only MP that came to a vtaiwan consultation is mp karen yu but as a stakeholder because she is a founder of a fair trade social enterprise but otherwise the MPs usually just pay attention over live stream or send their assistance to to our meetings and things like that but there's still an improvement because then they can harvest the part of the community uh non-consensus maybe it's still disputed but they can harness it as their version uh back to the parliament i get it um i in the english-speaking world the uber case you know is the case that has been most published or you know most talked about yes um and i'm curious is that because you consider it to be the most successful no no no no because everybody see uber as a headache uh but for for many have for many jurisdictions benefit corporation is already passed or they're not they're never going to pass it or for many jurisdictions that cyberbullying is already settled or maybe they decided never to settle and so on so i think uber is the thing that affects is a global epidemic so everybody sees the same problem at the same time where every other case it requires some understanding of the taiwan political context i get it um which would be the one or two cases you would highlight in terms of you know this process just working well in the way that you know more traditional process might not have might not have well i think that the teleworking case really worked very well uh and the the few telemedicine cases also worked really well but i think it means a lot to us but for like jurisdiction like the us where there's no restrictions against telemedicine or telework to begin with that will not make much sense yeah yeah can you say a little bit more why why you feel this was an important one for yeah i think the teleworking case is important because um at the beginning the ministry of the labor always want to find a union leader of the labor union leader of teleworkers and that's never going to work because teleworkers work across all the different disciplines a a teleworking programmer would not presume to speak for a teleworking uh you know uh psychotherapists is completely different profession right so so of course that's not going to work and then then they they changed their mind they think you know uh people who set up their companies uh using Kickstarter or other crowdfunding maybe they have employed the most telework because they're e-commerce startups so they try to find a leader of the association of the internet startups and there's no such thing so i think um the the traditional way of consulting stakeholders from the administration always rests on the kind of representativeness of uh industrial unions and associations and speaks persons of large industries and so on but that completely breaks down when you talk about telework which is a a completely horizontal thing uh that affects all the different industries so i think it really gives veto and legitimacy because it can reach people who are teleworkers themselves or their employers who employ teleworker but they don't presume to speak to for anyone else rather than just for themselves right so the synthetic document at the end of the teleworking process is really good because it has a section for journalists a section for i i don't know a section for bus drivers a section for programmers and and so on and and they don't presume to to unify uh any of these considerations i think it's a really um enlightened uh result and it's messy from the minister of labor's viewpoint uh but if they had had they used a traditional way and consult only the the people they know it would end up fitting very well to those particular industry and uh nine man for every other industry so i think it's a very good thing uh just from a public administration theoretical viewpoint yeah yeah really switching from thinking in terms of representation to reaching people directly right right so so to to re-presentation right for for people to present themselves and then recorded in full in context so they can re-present themselves along the way um and is telemedicine case well well the telemedicine case i think it's also important because um it is has been a long contested issue uh but uh i think we started that v taiwan process has been able to find uh psychotherapists as a kind of entry point and which is very very wise because it requires no extra equipment and uh also it is a subject to a different set of law than medical doctors and so we can start arguments from kind of a blank state uh it is not like um that um a psychotherapists uh have to work in one particular location or particular equipment so it simplifies um the arguments a lot we get to instead focus on uh what equipment what bandwidth what kind of setting is good enough for diagnosis and things like that which is the core of the telemedicine case but if you started from any other medicine discipline then the relationship between the hospital the equipments and whatever that that enters plays an important issue so i think uh v taiwan has been instrumental in having uh the the uh flexibility in the process for the research team uh and the law um lawyers uh to to kind of use um the telemedicine for psychotherapists as a entry point a kind of a a beachhead uh and before talking about the whole telemedicine and doctor's practice and i think uh if not for this flexibility these two different agencies within the ministry of health and welfare will not really listen into each other because it's technically different agencies within the moh w but because v taiwan allows the process to call in specific agencies as needed right so we were able to talk through the the mental health agency first and then uh the wider um like general practice the agency follow up after the clarification with the mental health agency has been settled it there's something that that strikes me about what you just said and in general like reflecting on on v taiwan is you know how often the success depends on clever little hacks or you know you guys thinking about what is the best entry point and how do we get yes you know civil service like this and you know how do we make them allies and and how do we make it on the commenting system so that people don't post pictures of the cast right exactly yes so a lot of it is just you know thinking very cleverly around hacks and being and being very flexible yeah there's a word for that it's called social prick a lodge you know i just learned it recently what do i call it social prick a lodge prick a lodge as in like do it yourself uh so just clever little hacks yeah but apparently it's a thing in in theory yeah oh i'm i'm reoccurred if it's in theory then i'm i'm and this is maybe a question you won't like but to what extent you know is a lot of this dependent on you as a person and that particular biography and background and you know set of values and and assumptions that you oh i like this question um so i think uh less and less is my answer yeah yeah so at the moment i guess still quite a bit but less and less why so because we've got shuyang here right if i get if i get hit by the bus i'm 99 percent sure that she'll be able to to continue this Taoist way of not doing so so i mean 99 percent yeah well the other one person this day you also get hit by the bus right because we may be on the same bus you know um so air bus um bound for new york for example so what i'm trying to say is that um this particular way of not doing it takes a lot of unlearning but but i think there's a lot of people in the community kind of already very far along on this way of unlearning um and so at some point i think it will just be a accepted way of of not doing things yeah what uh what do you think about this question shuyang to what do you agree does this still depend a lot on audrey um we depend a lot on the transcription uh of audrey oh yeah it's very important to have all everything transparent so we can read everything through and audrey speaks very fast so that helps a lot uh and also not not only audrey's opinion actually every meeting we transcribed uh has been very helpful um like learning and relearning or learning everything so i think audrey does contribute a lot kind of a big portion of all things we're working on right now that doesn't matter in the in the no matter in the government or or in in in the community but um but um i think what's very variable uh essentially every uh the knowledge we kind of collect every moment we have meetings and kind of bump into brainstorming sessions with everyone we talk with so it's spreading that's what shuyang's saying it's spreading what's the is there sort of a next generation of leaders that you participate that you're a part of shuyang like is there is there like five six other people you know who feel oh yeah they have a lot of circles like some good friends of open government or whatever right what are you talking about yeah they're you mean who are the people i also find the smartest already no your colleagues your colleagues yeah there's so many other people in in a team um their extended network also internationally especially in the v taiwan network we have this v network going on right now so people from new york people from japan are also joining and there's also a french embassy in japan they're also kind of just found out vita one from japan and then think to taiwan so they are now also trying to copy v taiwan to v japan reference v new york and also our friend at nesta who has been spreading it to new uk and so yeah yeah um but within taiwan like the reason i'm asking is there's there's often this um this tension in in any self-managing system or you know you don't rely on leadership in a traditional way as you were saying um a particular way of not doing things and yet the reality is that the system very much depends on a number of people stepping forward and feeling ownership and you know and bringing their particular history and skills and and so systems like this can also very quickly you know fall flat or you know get see their energy drain if there aren't the right people who step forward energize the system that's right that's right yeah that that's why the mini hackathon kind of rotates chairs and rotates processes and and i think at least half a dozen people now can can easily chair a whole v taiwan process for a single case yeah and they're they're not public servants right so and within pitas there's more people yeah what are what are things that you're thinking about that nobody ever asked you a question about i the other day i've read everything that tom atlee you know wrote about the taiwan i've listened to quite a few youtube talks and stuff but i'm just curious what are what are things that people like me don't see and what you guys are trying to do come should we all ask me some difficult questions he wants to hear difficult questions are you happy um yeah i'm pretty happy i'm content even not not quite joyful but i'm pretty happy yes thank you for asking difficult questions not difficult but there's things that that you guys are busy with that for you make an integral part of you know the things that you're working on and that typically outsiders don't understand or don't see well the the thing is that we have new interns all the time in pitas and and v taiwan also has new commerce all the time so we get asked newbie questions all the time and they get pretty well documented so so it's not like a a cabal where there's only four old people and then it's it's constantly rotating so so i think a lot of things in v taiwan is just fresh people bringing fresh pairs of eyes yeah i think most journalists uh to ask very very good questions um that should depend on people actually it depends on how much material how many materials have read already before they ask but i think most of time i found a very valuable answering questions because just give you another point of view and looking at the project from a different different point of view and i do can kind of try to compare v taiwan or p o network with other systems in other countries so i think that's very the version says well has has any of this percolated at local levels like i you know i've recently looked at some places like there's you know two municipalities in france that do really interesting things that i'm i want um yeah yeah the the e petition system in taipei city in particular is more advanced than the national one uh they have a binding i voting at the end of it which is a lot like referendum and it's done over the internet uh and uh there's many participatory budget uh processes being um experimented in taijong and new taipei city as well um i think um what i'm trying to say is that uh the v taiwan like ethos um to the wider public administration uh is not about this particular bunch of people but about that it can work in first place and and that such internet enabled tools they can be cheap and cheerful in a sense that you don't have to adopt the whole process you just adopt some part of it like um slido or polis or whatever they all get individually used uh in in a network of other democratic uh inventions or interventions so yeah we do see a lot of that in the in the city level and even at the community level we see a lot of adoption as well um a whole different question that just pops up um i'm always curious and in participatory processes of you know how how could we get voices of wisdom into the room beyond the people that are there you know people how can you know get the the voice of of the planet of future generations of elders of of native people you know how how um it's something that we've completely lost in modernity right we we are with the here and now and the you know the people who are in the room and i'm curious if this this is something that you've been concerned about um yes and and also one more do you want me to say i mean um for for for our collaborative meetings we have been considering uh the the benefit of the fish the the ecology of the sea right that that is one very deep case we explored over seven meetings or something there's a case where we talk about the right of the babies born to single mothers who choose to use artificial insemination and again that is about future generation and the future sociology or society we talk about the benefit of animals who suffered cruelty but but there's no police well trained to rescue them nor um animal uh help us who are qualified as a kind of police right so that's about animals welfare animal rights um there's many cases in our discussions where the main stakeholders are have not yet been born or is born but it's not equipped to talk uh or or maybe equipped to talk but not in a language that human can understand and so so we did deal with with such cases um i wouldn't say with ease but with with ways of essentially have spokespeople um who who try to speak for for for the fish for the animals for the unborn children and and in in various different perspectives and i think the beauty of it is that um for those cases we're able to reach i would say on average higher quality deliberation because people are not very deliberative if they think about self-interest but if they think mostly about the interest of stakeholders that are not human beings or not not yet human beings uh then then i think the quality become much more selfless and people are able to um converge on consensus even if they start very differently and that cannot be said by people who only speak about self-interest so you had people who stepped up forward as spokespeople who fit who felt yes a strong connection that's right so people people from ngos or people from or just from the academy now yes yes thank you very much i uh i'm looking at the time i don't know it's very late for you guys and it is um i'm digesting everything i um you guys have shared with me um yeah hope that's helpful helpful yes it is it is extremely it's extremely helpful um yeah i um i feel like it received so much that i just part of me that feels like i want to reciprocate but i wouldn't i i don't know how i would oh you can you can you can just say you know i allow the part that has ordering it to be released to youtube as a creative commons video has shui an being recording i don't know uh yeah i record it after after you joined okay i have a copy of everything since i joined so so so if you're okay with it we'll just release it so i thank you on behalf of the the humankind who can go to youtube at least the fraction of humankind that can access youtube 17 people who will watch this alrighty thank you so much yeah thank you have a have a good local time yeah a good day thank you thank you and thank you sir shui yang also for all the time that we've spent together on this um if i it's been lovely it's been very good to talk to you if i um if i have some more questions i uh i will come back to bother you um of course of course come follow me okay bye bye have a good day good good night a good local time okay