All right, anything I can help you with?

First of all, thank you so much for taking the time. I know you have a very busy schedule and this is crazy. Can you explain something to me first before I do this? What’s the demonstration outside about? Do you know?

I think it’s about the pension reform.

The pension reform.

Yeah, the pension reform is about to touch on the army, the soldiers’ pensions. A lot of them were unhappy about that.

Yeah, I heard about that.

That’s the basic idea.

It looked like it was about zoning and I read something about marines, something about AIT...

Oh, there’s another thing. It’s about the AIT expanding their office, which is neutral, but the Marines are coming to station as guards to the new AIT building, whilst before the AIT people were mostly diplomats. Marines is very symbolic.

OK, got it. Cool. Does that happen a lot?

Yeah. We get a lot of loud speakers, it’s background music for us.

That’s good, I guess. I don’t know if you know the purpose of my visit here. I’m on an exchange program currently, by Code for All and then Open Knowledge Germany, trying to learn what’s going on in civic tech in Taiwan. Of course, I’d be amiss if I don’t get a chance to talk to you. Thank you so much.

It’s great. You’ve been working with the OCF?

I have for a couple of weeks now, and it’s been really amazing. I feel like I’ve learned a lot. I was expecting to learn more about the projects here, and instead, I really learned more about community management, about the whole approach, which is so very different, really inspiring and amazing. I’m given to understand you’re also bringing in a lot of this to the government.

Exactly.

I guess that’s my first question. How do you think your approach is different than the ones we know about like 18F or GDS?

Right. How do we compare with 18F, GDS, or PolicyLabs?

Exactly.

It’s a fair question.

First of all, we’re not really a public service unit. The thing with the Singapore model or the UK cabinet office model. Actually, we can also add to it USDS, which reports directly to the president’s office.

They are organizational units either reporting to the prime minister or the president or the cabinet, somebody really high up saying, that’s OK, we need to have this office, we need to have this 100 people, 50 people, whatever. With this amount of people — of course they relax the salary requirements a little bit to lure people from Google or Facebook to join them.

But still, they are considered public servants, and they are considered working in a public service for an organizational unit. 18F is very well-known. They had this contractual relationship with other governmental units, so that they are basically an internal startup. That’s how they position themselves.

While at PDIS, which is Public Digital Innovation Space, we’re not even an organizational unit. There’s no permanent staff in PDIS. PDIS is weird in this sense that it is not an organ of the government. It is literally a space. By space, we mean this space we’re in. We have another space for hackers in the third floor in this building.

We have a lot of online spaces, we have chat boards, message rooms. Then we have weekly meetings at the Ministry of Finance multipurpose conference center, and we have a monthly meetup just nearby, that’s the next building. We have quarterly meetings with deputy ministers.

That’s the structure. On our own time, we have weekly, we have monthly, we have quarterly, and then we have daily, which is mostly online chat, and standups and whatever. Then we have the usual supporting structure, a Slack-like (Rocket.Chat) room, a Kanban (Wekan), a Dropbox-like shared folder (Davros). The usual online tools. This is our additional space.

You have about 50 people.

Right. When we say space, we mean people who frequent the space. People who do participate in weekly meetups. At the moment it’s about 20 people now. We have me, of course, being three days a week here, two days a week elsewhere, and then my two executive secretaries who come and liaise with me.

Then we had a lot of different ministries of people who randomly email me, saying, "I would like to work on the Digital Ministry stuff." I’m like, "There’s no Digital Ministry."

There’s just this space. But then they’re like, "No, as the minister without portfolio, you can send a memorandum that says, ’I would like such-and-such ministry station one or two personnel in this space.’"

Technically, their salaries and benefits are still being paid by their original ministries. They’re more like on-site customers. You understand this idea, right?

Because in this space, we’re working in the g0v style, I don’t give commands. They end up doing whatever they like to do. In this way, we have five people from the institute of the information ministries. We have three military service folks who prefer to work on this instead of military service. I don’t know why...

Oh, I don’t know. There are a couple of reasons I could think of.

A couple of reasons. So we have around six public servants who have volunteered to join this space. We have one-to-three participation officers from each ministry, so about 50 people now, who participate in this online space and then monthly we gather together for a lunch meeting, which is now anywhere from 50 to 60 people. It’s a lot like g0v, in the sense that you don’t have to show up.

Exactly.

It’s up to them, basically. If people don’t like the projects they’re doing here, I’m not their employer. The next day, they just return to whatever the organization with it that they came from.

Your role is just to provide an open space to explore.

Right. That’s the reason I’m here.

What’s the overall agenda of this open space? Is it to have some sort of digital transformation of the government, just in a very general sense?

Sure. Of course, that’s actually a very good question. You’ve seen our website? It’s PDIS.tw. Our mission’s pretty clear. We say it here in the form of a movie, that we incubate and facilitate the public digital innovation and service. There’s the main vision, if not the mission.

Concretely speaking, we’re working to implement the open government principles: Transparency, Participation and Accountability.

I think there’s a difference there. There’s a difference between the mission and these three things. What is the traditional digital transformation part? You build a platform, you build standards, and then you have digital services, but I think accountability, transparency and participation are more about real open government in terms of public modes.

It’s about having a g0v approach, but really having an open community that participants. I think there’s a bit of a difference there. One is a one-way communication: I’m opening up my government in terms of the data.

That’s the transparency part.

Well, it’s the transparency part, but also, it’s very much one-way communication. It’s saying, "Here, here’s all my data." Then you have the part where you say, "Here’s my digital services, I’m building better websites, better services."

That’s also in the transparency part.

Right. But I think there’s also something about the participation and the accountability part that is more about the two-way communication.

Exactly. Transparency is like, "This is what we have and also what we don’t have." We make it bare, and then we systematically create ways for public servants to make this available without spending extra time doing transparency stuff, which was the main roadblock. Preferably, their own workflow tool captures whatever that needs to be made transparent. That’s our main agenda.

If you click "more about transparency," it actually talks not just standards in the process, but actually procurement and how to make all the validation, promotion and support, so that when people make information systems, the common APIs are built in by default. All they have to do is check a checkbox and then it’s open data. They don’t have to prepare another copy for open data. That’s the main idea.

That’s one step further than the traditional understanding of this process.

Yeah, but that’s our understanding.

That’s what I’m saying. It’s still very different to me compared to other government agencies that are doing this sort of work. You are adding this additional, I want to say more radical approach to it. That’s something we’ve not seen before.

Right. This has a background in Taiwan, of course, because after the Sunflower Movement, people say that if you’re selectively transparent, like in many countries where we have a FOIA request process, still you redact most of the things, because it’s ex post facto transparency.

That’s not really transparency, actually. Post-2014 in Taiwan, we don’t say that it’s transparency anymore. To qualify even as basic standards of transparency requires an in-the-flow part of the process, with a transparent process, which isn’t redacted. That’s the transparency part.

Then, of course, it’s still one-way. Then comes the participation, the participation being building consultations methods, empowering each ministry to make more efforts to include more stakeholders in early-stage processes, and then also have a public platform where all the regulation changes must be published 60 days before it’s in effect.

Also, the commentaries are public, and units have to respond publicly in due time. That’s the participation part. The accountability part is here because, after the participation we have a policy, which then translates into some projects, and the projects then translates into procurement, research, into actions.

The open spending, open procurement part enters the accountability picture because even though the policy is collectively determined, the actual execution still requires the experts, and if there’s no guarantee of the execution, then it’s not accountable. There’s no account of what happens next. That’s the thing that we’re building.

For accountability, we’re building a few things. First is that we’re making this audit trail of all the policies in the form of a QR code.

[laughs] Are you kidding me?

No, seriously. Seriously. I went on a press conference that says that these e-Sport athletes are now part of a new program. They can serve just like Go players or sport players. It’s an alternative military service plan. But seen like this, it looks like it’s just benefiting some stakeholders, but it’s actually part of a larger ACG plan.

To many journalists, is impossible for us to provide this amount of large picture in a short time. What we do is that during the press conference, we provide a QR code, then anybody who scans this QR code...

Or, for that matter, gets a picture of it. [laughs]

Yeah. Gets a picture of it. That is still scannable, by the way, because the URL is really short. It goes to eSport.PDIS.tw — which is a hackfoldr, a g0v specialty.

Yeah. I’m well acquainted with that.

Right. Our current update is February 17. The next one is around March the 1st. Then we have this whole plan of what we call a skillful cultural performer. That’s how we define eSport atheletes. Now what we’re working with what qualifies as mind sport. This is the whole picture. If you care about the education part, you can click the education part, which is here.

Then it brings you to the conclusion of our internal meetings, the actual transcript that accounts for the policy. It’s color-coded so that we know which are resolved, which are still pending, and which will require maybe another meeting. But the normal meeting records are just executional conclusions. It only provided this part, but we also provide what everybody says.

Right. All of it.

The whole thing that leads to here. That’s the basic idea. For all the meetings that I have convened, for all the interviews, whatever, these tracks are here that shows, in addition, a beautiful word cloud of all the names, all the transcripts, all the recent recordings.

Things that are recorded this way ends up becoming an accountable trail of how each individual policy gets decided. We have more examples, but the whole idea is to make the platform work so we don’t go back and collect an accountability trail. We will collect these bits during the forming process and also in execution. That’s the basics of it.

You really are pioneers in this government. How does it feel? [laughs] You’re getting a lot of attention, obviously, from the international standpoint and open government people. At the same time there is, I bet, a lot of pressure from Taiwan itself for what kind of things you’re about to implement. I don’t know. You’ve been office for about four months now?

It’s about five months.

How does it feel? Are you regretting it?

Not at all.

Not at all?

I’m enjoying every day of it.

OK. [laughs] That’s good.

It’s exactly the same thing as we’ve always been doing, even before the g0v movement, in the open culture movement, the free culture movement. It’s basically saying that the government is just one of those outlets. Just like the way we worked with Microsoft before.

I wasn’t part of the "Microsoft is evil" camp. I thought there’s a better way of doing things, and there will be a day where Microsoft sees the light, and they did. That’s always my agenda. It’s to just hang in here, with some things that lets people go to work, enjoy their work, and go home earlier. That saves their time in addition to providing accountability. That’s the basic idea.

Then we, of course, have a lot of g0v predecessors.

You can just employ directly.

Exactly. It would just be deployed directly.

I guess that was the thought of g0v.

Exactly. This is a wider accountability model. You can click on any of those ministries, and as the order of the public’s many projects, these are six-year projects, seven-year projects. If you click into it, it shows you a beautiful rendering of what a project is about, which year it’s on, and then the goals of this project.

From looking at projects, we also show the spending, the completion rate, the procurement or research ID, so then you can go in and check whether it actually did what it says it goes to. It’s about, I don’t know, 1,007 or so projects being managed. Oh no, 1,009.

You also have the regulations from the government, like publicly where you can comment on them. I saw that earlier.

Exactly. That’s the Join.gov.tw part. All the regulations that’s published in 60-days gazette. You can see NDC is planning a foreign talent act. We have a lot of foreign talent chiming in. [laughs]

What happens to those comments? Do you have people read through them? What can you expect as a comment thread? What kind of feedback will you be getting?

At the bare minimum, the proposing ministry must have this final report where they say, this is the things that we changed as a result of this participation. Or this we got, but it’s not possible, and why is that. But some of the more, let’s say, pioneering ministries are actually doing a lot more. If you look at, for example, the NCC. There’s also some local governments such as the Taipei City which use this for social housing policies.

Let’s look at the NCC. Where is the NCC? Here we go. NCC has this Digital Communication Act, which is like the constitution, the basic law of Internet. In addition of replying line by line to all the comments, they also publish a lot of this overall responses, which is crazy, they do this every day.

Yeah. You can see that. It’s almost every day.

Yeah. It’s almost daily. They’re basically using this as an FAQ system where they get all the substantial questions from the discussion and then publish an FAQ alongside the main discussion. It gets really detailed: "Protecting the right of gamers so that their virtual goods do not get cheated by their gaming operators," and "whether it’s still possible to go to domain in China to see comics."

"Are we putting a custom control? Are we serving net neutrality?" Pioneering ministries, they use this in a much more active form.

It seems like it’s not just a tool to them. They actually use that as policy driving.

Yeah. They do convene and once they hold their meetings they post their records here. It’s an active trail during those 60 days.

That’s fascinating.

It is.

One of the questions I’ve been thinking about myself a little bit recently, also in light of political events around the globe is, what kind of a value statement does civic tech come with? Obviously we all come from an open-source culture.

There is this mantra of open development, of collaboration which, I guess, we are showing this right now. It’s more about the form more than the content of the policies.

That’s true.

You’re opening up a lot of ways, communication channels for citizens. It’s really different as to what kind of things are being said, what kind of things are being decided on.

That’s right.

Does that worry you sometimes?

Not at all, as an anarchist...

As an anarchist... We anarchists, like David Graeber or Noam Chomsky, care about process. We care about the tools that enable the process. And we care more about the culture that forms around the process. We want all the polities of all different sizes to share this effective form of self-government. To have a pseudo-process — and have the government dominate the use of this process — is the antithesis of anarchism. [laughs]

I don’t see a difference, during my term at least, between Gov tech and civic tech. For me, if this distinction is made, it means by default that there is something the government has and the citizen doesn’t.

And vice versa. [laughs]

And vice versa, right. There’s no form of open-source license that says "government can’t use this." Conversely, there’s no open-source license that says, "OK, other countries can’t use it." We don’t see this kind of open-source licenses. There is nothing legally that makes the distinction between the private sector and the public sector or civil society, of the use of these tools.

So it’s culture. It’s not anything legal or technological. My main idea, it’s because we have this open space, this PDIS, and the participants are career public servants, civic tech people like me, professional technologists, also NGO people and also private sector people. The Institute for Information Industry are private sector themselves.

We enter this space with our own agenda, but we share the same process and the same tools, then we go back and basically infect our community with these tools, and then we import better tools into the societies.

One of our participants was actually a Policy Lab designer. She initially worked for the cabinet office. While she shared the process and also tools for internal policy development after she joined PDIS, she also has to customize a lot of those tools to include the stakeholders, the petitioners.

The Policy Lab didn’t use to invite people with petitions into their Policy Lab discussions, but because we’re in the same space, all these tools need to be adapted to these stakeholders.

I guess what I’m trying to get at is, of course your agenda has to be focused on what the digital minister can do and what your open space can do, about the general public and multi stakeholders. I fully understand that, but coming from the civic tech sector, and maybe also being super determined about this, I have concerns.

I feel like, what if we open source or have a collaborative approach to our constitution? I’m beginning to understand that most Taiwanese people think that capital punishment is something legitimate or to be desired?

No.

Is that not true?

That’s not a fair assumption. It’s more like people don’t trust the government enough to not release people who deserve capital or life punishment.

That’s even grimmer.

That’s an actual statement.

I see. I guess my point is, what if popular decisions are being made? I guess as an anarchist you can’t say a lot about this. At the same time, I would be so worried, and I would feel like that there has to be more than just the right infrastructure for people to participate, but also the right education and training. Is that the right words to say?

It seems that there’s concerns and there are ideas that this radical open government might also result in chaos. Do you see that?

No, I don’t. I completely do not. There’s the usual ORID approach, where we talk about facts, feelings, ideas and then decisions as a sequence, the usual schema. When we say "direct democracy," which is just the word of this century that people use for "anarchism." It’s actually the same word, but it makes it easier to accept or something.

When we say direct democracy, a lot of people actually just jump to step three and four, saying that we hold a referendum for everything, or we depend on current polls to decide what the politicians do. That’s never what anarchists sought for, nor should this be whether direct democracy is about.

Anarchism was initially, back in the syndicate days, about a communal ownership of facts, of what’s going on, of sharing what’s going on. Everything else flows from this root. People have to come to an understanding of what’s going on.

Without this, which is what we call "evidence-based" nowadays, a very scientific word. Without this common understanding of what’s going on, none of this is possible. I wouldn’t call it even democracy, because it’s not a kind of rule. There is just a dēmos of pure pandemonium.

But you’re currently providing infrastructures for direct decisions.

No, no, no! We’re mainly focused on the factual part. This is our main work.

Right, but then there is something missing between providing the facts and letting people decide, which is making people actually use the facts.

That’s right. That’s where the feeling part came into existence. In PDIS, what we’re doing is that we innovate in a lot of ways for people to express their feelings about the same set of facts. There’s no right or wrong about feelings for the same fact. You can feel angry, I can feel happy, there’s no right or wrong.

Consequently, we do not vote in the usual way, because ultimately it doesn’t really make sense when it’s about feelings. If you have a Facebook post that has 500 hearts, and 500 cries but 100 laughs or whatever, it doesn’t really make anything. It just means different people have different reactions, and it’s normal.

This is what we call a reflective space. The point here is not to tally people’s feelings. It’s about people seeing each other, having different feelings. It’s about people having this overview of what everybody feels about this project, on this same set of facts.

This is actually the extent of our work. We’re not about building a better voting mechanism, about building a better tally mechanism or e-ID or whatever. On the decisional stage, of course, we try to make this process accountable so that we can complete a policy cycle and lead back to the facts. This interpretation stage, we logically still have professionals and MPs do it.

So we still have the professional ministries. It’s just that the agenda was set by people expressing their feelings — they determine what ideas should be focused on. This is what we call "crowdsourced agenda-setting," it flips the consultative format arounds. The traditional consultative format is the ministry deciding what to consult about. The ministry already has some feelings, they just want to hear people’s ideas.

I see.

But we flip this around. We say, "OK, we first want to know how people feel." Then, after knowing people’s feeling, the ministry’s experts and MPs talk about the things that people feel that are important, that people feel most polarizing. We try to find a way to resolve this issue. But we don’t actually do a referendum, yet.

Right. I guess the best example for that would be what we did with Pol.is and Uber.

Exactly, but we’re now doing it with Social Enterprise laws, with everything basically.

You mentioned something that I wanted to talk about, the wider acceptable term is direct democracy, not anarchism. Yet, it’s kind of hard to operate in the spirit following direct democracy within a democracy that still by and large representative.

I think Germany has seen that with the spectacular failure of the Pirate Party, which wanted to implement direct democracy, and instead shut down all of the people who...

That’s right.

...wanted to be the politicians. Is there something similar going on in Taiwan, maybe, after the Sunflower Movement perhaps, where individuals...

I get the impression that maybe there is something similar going on in terms of people believing in direct democracy, and thereby not wanting to elect any personas, any faces to the outside of the movement, into office?

Yeah, of course. Back in 2014, there’s this idea of a generational shift, which is really more about generation and less about direct democracy. The young generation of people want to have politicians who speak their language, who understand their ways of expression, and for them to participate in the agenda-setting.

I think Taiwan took a fortunate turn, in that the cabinet, starting late 2014, are led by technologically informed people, or technocrats. [laughs] Even though they’re not exactly young -- they’re in their 50s and 60s -- they are from IBM, from Google, from companies who actually specialize in this kind of thing.

There’s a very peaceful transition, in the cabinet at least, to accepting the Internet as one of the valid forms of expressing their ideas. Although by doing so, the cabinet somehow shortcuts the legislative.

Which is also a little bit worrying.

It is. It is very worrying.

In traditional public administration theory, we have the local representative, local reps, then mayors, and then we have MPs. The local reps, the MPs, and the mayors, they’re the representative of the people. On the national scale, we have the cabinet.

Here is the people. We’re supposed to be four steps away from the people. We’re supposed to hear people’s voice from the local reps, from the mayors, from the village elders, from the MPs, from the heads of associations. But because of the Internet and the cabinet’s embrace of Internet technologies, there’s now a shortcut.

It is worrying, and we also had backlash from MPs in 2015, because they feel that they were being left out of the decision-making process and, in this new form, being reduced as the bureau of legislation of the cabinet, which is kind of worrisome.

Starting this cabinet, we’re shuffling it a little bit. For example, if you go to the Join.gov.tw platform, you actually see all sorts of different entry points -- the administration, the cities -- and the legislation is joining next month.

Basically, when making a petition, you can petition to a ministry, but if it requires a law change, you can also propose directly to the MPs. Even if it’s ministry-initiated, in the multi-stakeholder discussions, we always invite the particular committee in the legislative to join.

For example the upcoming vTaiwan multi-stakeholder consultation conference, we have MP Karen Yu as part of the stakeholder. She doesn’t really have more minutes to speak compared to other stakeholders, but she’s there and she cares about this a lot.

Basically, the idea is that we have this new form of participation, and we consider MPs professional participants, in the sense that they’re full-time participants. This, of course, still have to result in something that they consider into law. They are also legal experts, or at least their teams are.

We also work their teams in this ratification part of the work. They’re part of this, if we talk about this diamond-shaped process, a double diamond, perhaps. First we have something to talk about. This, we get people’s feelings by sharing the facts at this stage, and then we try to converge by building these online/off-line mixed multi-stakeholder spaces.

MPs enter already at this stage. They’re also in part of the fact-gathering stage, like in public hearings. At this point, where we have the contentious issues that we need to resolve, this is traditionally just for experts only. At the expert-only stage, MP is also considered expert.

Finally, at the ratification stage, this is part of our work, which includes MP and other stakeholders again. Then finally we make the law. Whereas before, MPs were worried that they get left out this stage, we now explicitly introduce them here. We’re also saying that they still drive the discussion here. We just provide the first diamond. They still set the agenda in the second diamond.

That seems like a good compromise. Are people happy with it?

It turns out not many people are into full-time lawmaking. So we still need professionals to do a lot of the work. It’s just that a lot of the MPs during Sunflower was challenged for their attitudes, because the process, especially the cross-party negotiation phase, was not live-streamed. It was not public. There’s no transcript.

People were saying "MPs must go" because they think the second boundary here is entirely opaque. As of this cabinet, the MPs also opened this for live streaming, and so that’s no longer a problem. It was like we have a more open process here, a less transparent process there. They are now equally transparent.

At the same time, you do have the direct democracy parts.

Yeah, the upper part, which is direct.

That’s interesting. I think you said somewhere that, really, to implement this sort of process you need almost a constitutional change.

Yeah.

It’s far more radical than I think people sometimes see it from the outside. I think it’s really interesting.

I also have a very silly question. [laughs] You use a lot of VR. What’s your vision? Where does VR, where does that technology come into your own government?

Mostly it’s just a time-saver. I have my headset here. It’s for everyday use. The idea of VR, very simply put, is that it’s a high-bandwidth way for people who are not physically in the same space to feel like they’re in the same space. It’s just you and me here, but if we had VR sets, we can just put it on, both of us, and then see three people magically appear on the couch. [laughs]

Then, in addition to sharing this screen, they can also seeing our screen here. This is really just a way to save traveling. This is very practical. We know VR is preferable in this way, because if we just use Skype or whatever, people get distracted. They swipe their phones. They get called to something else. But if I’m in VR, everything else is blocked out anyway.

So it’s more of a method to block people from using their phones.

Right, exactly!

Everybody is there, and I’m certain, [laughs] during a VR conference call. If I’m just looking at my phone during a conference call, even if I’m wearing headphones, people feel entitled to interrupt me. Also, psychologically, because I’m not in my office anymore when I’m in the VR room, psychologically, I’m just part of this public discussion. That’s the mundane practical use of it.

The reason why I ask is I feel like a lot of the things that you have on offer in terms of government services is really democratic in the sense that everyone can access it. Whereas VR, I think is a little bit less inclusive, perhaps, because it’s...

Why’s that?

Because I think it’s not affordable for everybody to...

Anyone who has a phone can do VR.

You mean with the Google Cardboard?

Not even Google Cardboard. If you go to our PDIS website, there is a "How we work," and then there is a "Robotic visit." This is a 360 recording of my recent visit to the National Palace Museum.

I also just went there.

Oh, really? I went to the south one...

They have a very silly media part. Did you see that, with the...

My robot was there.

I wasn’t there. The robot was there.

Just a second. Let me open it in the native YouTube app.

So you were talking about the 360 zoom, where you can kind of swipe around.

Not swipe around, just look around.

Hopefully, this will work. If it doesn’t, that’s technology for you.

[laughs]

Open YouTube, connected to YouTube, to AirPlay. No, it doesn’t work. Too bad.

Theoretically, the idea is that I can swipe my...

You can move your phone and...

Yeah, I can move my phone around, and then it would just rotate and zoom into whatever view modes that we have. Then if I zoom out... That’s how it should look like. See that? Now you can look around.

Oh! Yeah, I guess that works. But it’s not the same.

No, it’s not the same, but if you just want to look at one of those exhibition parts, then it’s a very cheap way to look at this virtual Buddha statue or whatever.

VR is only expensive if you want to be a VR producer. It is true that it’s currently very expensive to produce, but it’s the same for 4K TV or for UHD. The production tools are always expensive. Fortunately, we only need to have one set in each space, so it’s still inclusive I would argue, because to view it is not that expensive.

Who knows? Smart phones were very expensive, and the price kept going down.

And now it’s just...

Exactly. Yeah, that’s pretty cool. I know it’s a very clichéd thing just to ask, why do you think this sort of work is possible in Taiwan and nowhere else?

It’s happening in Madrid and Iceland...

Right, but this is a national level. You’re a digital minister now.

Yeah, sure.

We don’t have anybody from the community who’s really joined the government and holding such a high political office. That’s really crazy.

That’s a sure thing, it is.

You mentioned the Sunflower Movement, you mentioned g0v, lots of factors. Many factors are very unique to Taiwan, but what could you recommend other governments do, maybe other civil society agents, too? What is a key to opening up government like this, like what you’re doing right now?

I really do think it’s just like with personal computers. When it’s cheap enough, everybody adopts it, and there has to be such a threshold. Taiwan leads by a couple years, because there’s tremendous social pressure. We adopted it even when it’s expensive, process-wise.

With machine learning and then with the commoditization of these process tools, there will be a point where, just based on the argument of cost-saving alone. This was the old Free Software & Open Source debate, where ESR made a similar economic argument.

The civic tech and the Gov tech worked well. They merge, I think, when the civic tech becomes easy, trustworthy, robust enough so that it makes no sense not to adopt civic tech. The same with ministerial positions.

Axelle Lemaire, the French counterpart of me, said that maybe in 10 years there won’t be this digital minister title, because all the ministries will be digitally transformed.

Maybe we’ll reserve an analog minister or something for the analog population, but most of the ministries will already be digital and presided over by people who are digital natives. I really think it’s just a matter of time.

You think as technology exponentially gets better, it should be increasingly easier for us to campaign.

Yeah.

Wow, let’s hope that. That’s motivating. [laughs]

Of course, because the reference, the comparison with the previous generation is paper, it’s words typed on paper, filed in a cabinet. That’s the thing that most of the civic tech around scanning, around data mining, around proper audit trail, or whatever, they’re basically just saying, "OK, let’s do something better than paper does."

But paper is very good at what it does. Currently, our display technology is not as good as paper. This piece of glass is actually bulky. Only this year do we have things like this stylus, where you can write as easy as pen and pencil.

Then maybe in a couple years, we’ll have rollable display, which solves another thing about glass. Then maybe after a couple more years, we’ll have e-ink that is as responsive under normal light, instead of just blinking into everybody’s eyes. At that time, it’s just paper.

Then we don’t have to argue anything, because you write with pens, they still do signatures, they do whatever, but they’re now digitally capable. I think most resistance comes from the public servants who actually see paper as having a better user experience, which we can’t argue with. Paper does have a better user experience. What we solve that, a lot of those efforts and various services they do will just work.

Maybe a final thought. A lot of your work has bringing the open-source culture into the government. If you were to turn it around, what could the government do for open source, both in terms of culture, but also in terms of what it could actually do?

I come from a current project, which is to provide some funding for open-source platforms in Germany. Do you have any plans? Do you have any ideas?

Of course. We have a procurement reorganization plan. Our current procurement is only compatible with MIT license, the permissive license, and it has some conflict with AGPL — it doesn’t work with AGPL in our current procurement rules. It’s an artifact, because when the rules were being written, nobody had heard of AGPL. [laughs]

That’s something we can concretely do. We can harmonize our regulation if not have exclusive preferential treatment, at least not disadvantage open-source procurement.

In this, we’re helped by this international trend to turn more software into services, instead of packaged with an appliance or hardware.

If we you procure in a subscription kind of way, of course you will want to save cost on the basic foundation of the stack. Then if you have a thousandfold of people join suddenly, when you have to make a thousand virtual machines, now if it’s running proprietary software that charges per CPU, then it’s a procurement nightmare.

Yeah.

We’re actually helped by the software as service movement, saying for any elastic part of procurement it has to be licensed cost-free, if not Open Source. In that case, we’re helping a lot. When the government shifts into this direction, they will start demanding at least freeware.

That’s a start. I’m not a dogmatic Free Software person. If the proprietary vendor agrees to provide its free to charge software in those elastic parts, we also take it.

We also say that it must at least conform to the bulk export/import open API, so that when there’s a open-source vendor who wants to take over this procurement next year, they can at least do a bulk export using compatible APIs and import it into the open-source package, and vice versa of course. That’s our strategy.

Very cool. I should make that something that a recommendation for other governments, too.

Anything else you’d like to chat? There’s 10 more minutes.

I have ten more minutes on the wall. That’s a luxury. I don’t know. Maybe the g0v community? I felt that it’s a very active and a very driving force in this place, and it’s really a lot of things that I can learn from. You’re also an active member yourself, obviously.

Maybe you can speak a little bit about what g0v is as a movement compared to other movements. How is it different? How is it special?

That’s a very good question. The most special thing is the domain name, g0v.tw.

I think the domain name works as a hypnotic reminder that self-governance is not just possible, but it’s desired. If you set up a website that says — no offense to our French counterparts — "Citizens’ Parliament," then it doesn’t connote the same binding notion of "You must take it very seriously."

But if you call your website "Legislative Yuan dot g0v dot Taiwan," there is implicitly the promise that you must do something that’s as serious as the actual Legislative Yen.

I think for all the domain names that g0v hands out, people are compelled to take it seriously.

That’s a very good trick in terms of managing a community like this, because of course there are people who are makers and doers and build very interesting apps, but this is a compelling argument for that.

Yes. It is. Because at the next year’s procurement cycle, if we do things really well, we are trying to get the Gov counterpart to take this into their system, and they did. They took it very well. The Gov takes g0v seriously, because g0v doesn’t engage in traditional activism’s way of denouncing, mockery, selecting sides, and things like that.

The g0v is really just focused on the fork, and then a patch of governmental services. For the cabinet, this is a godsend. People are doing all the POCs for free. [laughs]

That sort of mentality doesn’t really resonate in Germany, at least that’s my question, it seems there are procurement processes for government and legislative services. There are people who are supposed to be doing this sort of work.

We, as civil society, we don’t see ourselves in the role very much to provide free services. Rather, we’re there to demand and to give inspiration, to build prototypes, perhaps.

That’s right.

Your projects are really thought out and almost ready-to-ship products. It’s very democratic thinking.

It is. But it’s also because if you undertake a prototype fund to do exactly that sort of prototype, but a connection between the prototypes and the systemic procurement of German government services, as I understand it, it’s not very clear. There’s no formal vetting process.

In Taiwan, I think mostly because the government itself procures most of the information systems anyway. The government IT personnel are good at selecting proposals, writing RfPs, but not actually at building things themselves.

That’s a very Taiwan thing. But I think it’s also German. [laughs]

It’s also definitely German.

It’s also German. What I mean is I think the only trick you need is to get the people who write the procurement criteria to consider this kind of early-stage prototypes, what we call micro-grant, micro-purchase, and things like that.

For Taiwan’s current procurement strategy, I work on this decoupled architecture, and also decoupled procurement. This is less radical compared to the UK GDS, which says that it has to be less than one million pounds. No IT procurement must be over that amount. The civil society got a equal footing versus huge semi-integrators.

By decoupled, we mean very simply that the storage part, the elastic part, the backend part must provide a API, and then the display part — be it website, or handheld app, or VR, whatever — these are separate procurements.

We’re trying to discourage people from procuring these as one thing, because then you get some integrators who are not particularly good at any of this, or they are very good at backend, but very bad at adapting to RWDs.

By staying with decouple architecture and decouple procurement, and forcing all the communication to go through API or open data, which must be listed publicly, we also say that each module, because they have a well-defined input and output, can be independently reinvented by not just g0v, but also small and medium enterprises, while the backend itself — the high availability parts — remains in professional hands.

You’re basically taking all the precautions, so that these services are sustainable.

That’s right.

It’s very impressive.

Well, it is.

I guess I’m out of questions. Do you have any questions for me maybe?

When do you go back?

I go back next week on 228. [laughs]

What’s your general impressions of not just g0v but the whole visit?

My whole visit. Where do I start? First of all, Taiwan, it’s so many different cultures and so many different ideas. I was saying to people I talked from g0v that I’ve not had a single boring conversation in Taiwan this whole time.

It’s very inspiring and I’m very personally touched by it. Mostly because I think I grew up in an environment where whenever I spoke Chinese it was either in very constrained environments or with my own mother.

It seems like for me very personally this has been a valuable experience. More exchanges, [laughs] is what I’m saying.

歡迎隨時回來。

好啊，很願意再回來。想在這邊長住。

真的！那回來之後歡迎來 PDIS 玩。

好啊！這是個 Open space 嘛。

是個 Open space 啊，你可以決定每天來。

All right, 那就今天先這樣。

今天先這樣。謝謝你啊，真是。真的很榮幸。

很開心。