Thank you for taking the time to see us. I am based in Hong Kong, as Samson probably told you. I am just here for a friend’s wedding party actually. She is American. She’s moving back from Hong Kong. She’s Taiwanese American, and her family is here, including our 97-year-old grandfather who we all adopted. He actually adopted all of us [laughs] this weekend.

Anyway, she wanted to have...and her mother said, "You better have your Asian wedding before you go back to the States," since she has so many of her relatives here. I happen to have been in town for the weekend and felt what an opportunity to talk to you. Great.

How can I help...?

I’m really based here in Taipei. We’re always looking for interesting, new stories to do. I’m not sure if you feel this, too. Quite a lot of the time, foreign media, they focus quite a lot on a few very small topics, a narrow range of topics when it comes to Taiwan. Cross-strait relations, and...

...our food. [laughs]

Food and technology are the big ones, the important stories. One of the things we always feel we have to do is broaden our outlook a little bit and find new and interesting stories. I think your project here is incredibly interesting. It’s potentially changing government and the way government does business and how transparent government is.

That’s a really interesting topic for all governments right now. Globally, this is interesting. I don’t know if you could tell us a little bit more about what you’re doing, any recent successes you have or the direction it’s going.

My main mandate, so to speak, is open government at the government side, and social innovation at the civil society side. Those two are two sides at the same coin. This innovation plan that we have is essentially not top down at all. We are working "with" innovators, not working "for" innovators.

This is epitomized by a social innovation lab. It’s in the TAF cultural park, near the Jianguo flower market. I don’t know whether you know...

I was just there yesterday.

I was there yesterday.

I was amazed. I was like, "I want this in Hong Kong. I could go get lovely flowers for not a lot of money." Yeah, it’s lovely.

That’s great. My residence, the minister’s dormitory, is just next to the Jianguo flower market. For me, it’s just 10 minutes’ walk from one end of Jianguo flower to the other end of Jianguo flower market, where it borders the Jianguo jade market.

Where I also was, and bought a necklace.

I know your hood.

Awesome. On the other side of the Jianguo jade market is the TAF, which stand for the Taiwan Air Force, the TAF cultural park. In the cultural park, on the other end of the TAF, is the social innovation lab.

I know that you probably had to walk all the way there, so I will show you a photo. This is how it looks like. It’s quite interesting in how the space itself was created, as well as the business we conduct in this space.

How big, you said?

It’s two buildings. The whole TAF is, of course, very large. This is like one-tenth or some of the TAF. During my office hours, which is every Wednesday from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM, I am just there for anyone to approach.

As long as they are OK for the transcript to be published, anyone can meet me. Every other Tuesday, I tour around Taiwan to meet with the regional, rural indigenous social innovators. In the TAF, there is 12 different ministries’ people.

Using projectors, telepresence, 360 live stream, and other assorted technologies, I am like an investigative journalist. [laughs] I go into places. Then the different ministries, they see through my eyes the local innovators. When they raise issues, they are there to respond immediately.

This is like a connected rooms, connected space. We’ve been touring around Taiwan like this for, I don’t know, 20 times or so now. I return to one spot every two months. By that two months, all the issues that are raised are usually all resolved. Otherwise, I don’t know what otherwise, because it’s always resolved. [laughs] It is a way to publish a real-time conversation.

I think this is important because while I always hold that Wednesday office hour open to anyone, I find that it’s usually people living close to Taipei, or who live close to a high-speed rail station that makes use of my time this way.

You log where people are from, or you ask them as part of the conversation, or do you log, "OK, where are you from? Where do you live?"

Exactly, exactly. It’s all published as a transcript two weeks at least at latest after each conversation. When I, for example, go to Taichung, the whole conversation becomes the social object for the local people to connect with when I visit the next site two weeks afterwards and then continue the dialogue.

I think this is an interesting way of gathering the real-time feedback from people. Through this kind of tour, so that’s Tuesday. Wednesday, I’m here in the office hour. Tuesday, I tour around Taiwan. Friday, we have what we call collaboration workshops, which is usually with people who raised this kind of e-petition.

This is how we gather around one large room in the TAF and to talk about any issue that is part of the e-petition platform that is usually cross-ministry that couldn’t be solved by any single ministry. Then we use this network of participation officers which every ministry has a dedicated team now.

Any larger ministries, even third-level agencies now have participation officers. Just like we get officers who talk to journalists, just like the parliamentary officers who talk to the MPs, participation officers are people who talk to stakeholders such as this person here who last May raised a petition that says, "You know, on Mac, Linux and tablets the income tax form software is explosively hostile."

They get quite a following. [laughs] Then after 48 hours, the [non-English speech] , the Ministry of Finance participation officer is posted publicly online saying that whoever complained about our income tax filing software are invited to co-creation workshops this Friday or next Friday.

This is very interesting because whereas before about 80 percent of people online on e-petition forum are very negative, only less than 20 percent said, "I use Windows and I feel pretty good." [laughs] Nobody cared about it. [laughs] As soon as the invitation was posted, it’s reversed. 80 percent of the people offer very constructive criticism.

Only 20 percent or so of people are still criticizing the Ministry of Finance. The thing is that we basically used all the issues raised by these online forums and used this kind of Post-It Notes to identify the actual pain points during the income tax filing experience.

Then, we held four co-creation workshops afterwards, after this livestream one so that the vendors, the contractors, facilitators, and so on all worked with people. It turns out that the people who complained the loudest are actually experts. They’re actually expert designers, expert IT people and so on.

They have the reason to say, "You know, we know more than the government about, [laughs] about how to make such a software." This May, just this month, so the old system became revamped by the co-creation workshop into the new system. The new system gets a very positive review.

This, I think the highlight is not in this software. If we spend enough money, we can eventually get this, [laughs] but in the co-creation process where we get applicants from thousands of people who feel that they have a say and participated in this creation.

Some IT experts during the co-creation, they pointed out that we can use cloud service and so on to reduce the operation costs. This project is actually operating on a negative budget, [laughs] saved a lot of money. We use a fraction of it to run the creation workshops.

It’s better and cheaper?

It is better and cheaper. We can’t get this with the government ministries alone. It changes the dynamic seen from the government ministries. Whereas before they see people who complain on the Internet as only causing trouble, a waste of their time, a lot of noise, using this structured way of incorporating their recommendations we held about 30 cooperation workshops now.

More than half the time it results in something that is better and cheaper for the ministry, which is a pretty good success rate. That’s an example.

What kind of issues do people usually bring up with you when you’re there on Wednesdays? Is it just all kinds of complaints directed toward the government or are there certain kinds of complaints that come up often?

There’s a trick. Instead of being an arbiter that directly solves a problem my philosophy is that we empower the problem solvers to solve their problem. The idea is that we find out which of their issues are caused by the government and the government can relax their regulations a lot.

Instead of viewing ourselves as the arbiter between different interests, we see ourselves more as a space. Then we ask the questions, such as, "What are the common values that you can discover even though your positions differ? Based on these kinds of values, are there solutions that work for everyone?"

Instead of being the arbiter that sides with one side or the other side, this is a rolling cycle of discovery. When people come to me and say they want to work on long-term care using blockchain or they’re advocates for universal basic income...

There’s many, many very interesting social innovators who come to me, because our conversation is posted online, so it is actually a rolling process. People will say, "I discovered that two weeks ago during your office hour you talked with this innovator and I think I can help by offering this technology," and things like that.

Basically, I’m like a catalyst that connect those social innovators without actually becoming a part of their cause, because I’m a public servant.

I offer mostly advice. If they run counter to the current regulations I work with the ministries people to see if we can relax the regulations and reinterpret the regulations so that they can operate legally.

We are very blessed, because currently in Taiwan the National Development Council has an idea that anything that is not explicitly forbidden by law should be allowed, even though there were interpretations to the contrary, those must be relaxed. They were using the KPIs as, "How many interpretations has each ministry relaxed?" They review it every other week.

This is very fortunate because then we can talk to the social innovators, find if their mission aligned with the ministry’s mission, because most of the ministries are charities anyway so they have an annual mission. [laughs] If they align, these ministries are much more inclined to relax their regulations for them.

Even if actually there is a law that currently forbids, for example, blockchain based banking and AI banking, or whatever, we have sandbox law now.

The Fintech Sandbox law, which is a law currently in effect, says that anyone can challenge the existing law to the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Finance, even though it’s currently illegal, as long as there’s a chance of being a social good they’re given 6 months to 12 months of experimentation during which they can break the law.

They can also point to any regulation, not necessarily the Ministry of Finance, they can point to any regulation and say, "I want to break this regulation from PDIS," "I want to break this regulation from Ministry of Transportation and Communication." As long as there’s a multi-stakeholder consensus of the experimentation process, the regulation must change according to this social experiment in fact.

Of course, two caveats. First is that there are somethings that are a red line that we cannot cross. You can’t say, "I want to experiment with money laundering for six months." You can’t say, "I want to experiment with funding the terrorists for seven months." That probably doesn’t work.

Those experiments are not to be started, but almost everything is fair game. Sometimes at the end of the experimentation there’s some law change required rather than regulation. For regulation, we can just announce for 60 days and have a conversation and be done with it, but for law change it requires the Parliament.

In the Fintech Sandbox, which is unique in the world, we allowed experiment to be extended up to three years waiting for the law to change. Once the law changes everybody else can enter this market. Now we have the Fintech Sandbox. Next, we are handing to the legislation the AI Mobility Sandbox which is for self-driving vehicles. They could be on the road, in the air, on the sea, that’s the AI Mobility Sandbox.

The third one that we’re working on at the moment is the Regional Sandbox, which is a general-purpose sandbox. They must be initiated by a regional, like county government that want to solve their particular social need. There again, they get to challenge the Central Government’s laws and regulations. Even the law itself is subject to disruption thorugh the sandbox law.

It sounds incredible.

When you say social innovation, it sounds like you’re talking writ large, but there’s a technology component to most of the things you’ve talked about.

Yes.

Does there need to be in all the cases?

No, not at all. It could be a process innovation, it could be an idea innovation.

Can you give an example?

Yeah. It could just be adding a name. One of the largest social enterprises in Taiwan, the Children Are Us Foundation, or CAREUS Foundation, they use the Chinese name Xǐ hān er. Xǐ hān er is in itself a name is a social innovation because it stands for, "Joyful, Honest, Children." Whereas this group of people were previously called clinically people with Down syndrome or just morons.

By using Xǐ hān er, Joyful, Honest, Children as the moniker, it changes the social relationship between these people and the society. For example, the soccer playing field in the social innovation lab, that is a creation by the Joyful, Honest Children. [laughs] I can’t do that. They are very artistically inclined.

There’s multiple efforts, like the bakery, preparing of frozen foods, or a lot of artful creation projects that involves the Joyful, Honest, Children as the service providers rather than the service receivers. There’s social enterprise in Taiwan that is systematically working with for the first-time street dealers on wheelchairs and re-imagine their work into a service provider instead of a service receiver.

I think this is somewhere. Here, right. As you can see they used to look like this, but now with a designer firm...The picture on the right is also a creation of Joyful, Honest, Children...

...and so they re-imagined their wheelchair and connect to social enterprises that design ergonomic mobile stations, so now they can service WiFi hot spots, phone charging stations, and dealing not just with tissue papers or chewing gums, but instead fair trade tea, coffee or some other ways. The crowdsourcing and crowdfunding campaign was a huge success.

What I’m trying to say is that it’s not just one single intervention. The social enterprises we’re saying are now basically connecting to the supply chain, so that in this project, for example, the supply chain includes people who train the wheelchair people on more rich interactions, and that’s one social enterprise.

There’s people who work on the wheelchair itself into mobile station and that’s technological, but there’s also people who work on, for example, Taipei City which bills itself as a fair-trade city and therefore has a lot of fair-trade goods, some from the indigenous and some from the overseas, and for these mobile stations to carry.

Each project like this connects literally dozens of stakeholders and each of them brings on innovation and only maybe half of them are technological in nature.

Much of this seems to be focused on technology, but also in a broader sense of, as you keep talking about, innovation. It seems like what you had done in the private public sector is driving what’s happening in the public sector.

It is.

How has that been received both by the private sector and the public sector?

I think the unique value composition of social entrepreneurship is that it is at once private sector and civil society, so it’s the second end of the sector merged into one. I publicly announced myself as a conservative anarchist. The anarchist one means that I wish or I strive so that people see government as a useful solution.

Most of the things actually the private sector handles they can do by their own, so by systematically using radical transparency letting everybody know how the government is doing their business, people become empowered saying, "OK, but these things you can do as well."

That is one effect and I think that part is very well received. The conservative part of me says, "However, I will not order any ministry or any public servant to do things my way." I only work with people who voluntarily come to me. If the Ministry of Defense, or whatever, who doesn’t want to use radical transparency or cooperation, I don’t force them to.

How have they been about this?

That really would be radical.

Exactly, so I’m not like a radical revolutionary in that way. I only work with people. In fact, in Taiwan, for example, the air pollution measurement, the Air Box Project, these are more than 2,000 air pollution measurements, not very precise, but not at all funded or endorsed by the government.

This kind of grassroots is very special in Asia, because in most Asian countries, even "democratic" ones, these kinds of projects they don’t get to grow to 2,000 people or more than that.

Explain to me this project.

This is very simply people who put cheap PM2.5, NOx, or whatever sensors in their house, in their balcony, in their schools. Some primary schools use that as an education tool to raise environmental awareness.

The Academia Sinica people provide this online platform for all those IOP sensors to connect to so that they can do predictions. Not very accurate, I would say, but the predictions of how and why the air pollutions come.

All this is not at all related to the state environmental commission agency, the PA Sensor Network, which although they’re expanding it, so that they will eventually have multiple thousands of sensors as long as they’re not in your home or in your school it’s not really relevant to the people, because people really want to know how the air is like here instead of like 5 kilometers away or 10 kilometers away.

This threatens actually the legitimacy of the government network. We have a lot of professors who have competing air pollution prediction frameworks and they all use a subset of data. Once the data is different and the algorithm is different you can’t really do science [laughs] there’s basically factions where people follow.

In Taiwan, we allocated over four years about five billion Taiwan dollars to enhance this network instead of saying that they’re illegitimate, we’re embracing this technology, so that there’s two prongs for us that we are using the national supercomputing center.

We aggregate all the different data the civil society contributed, the private sector contributed and government on, not just air quality, but also water aspect prediction and during disaster, the roads are broken or whatever, disaster information, into one single platform.

All the different professors and scholars, they don’t have to download partial data they can just upload their code, their algorithm for prediction on the same database platform, so that we can compare it next to each other and actually do science this way.

The other thing is the ITRI, the Research Institute for Industrial Technology, we also asked them to produce really cheap but still much more accurate PM2.5 sensors so that these people can upgrade to a higher position.

All of this is open data, like the websites and all that somewhere where you can get them?

That’s right, it’s economic blockchain, so people can’t temper with it after the fact.

It’s been spreading over the world as well. That’s one of the things I really want to emphasize is that we use the SDG as our guiding stance.

I see most of my work as around SDG 17, which is ensuring that the private civil society and the public sector each choose the ones they are uniquely empowered to do, but sharing the results so that we can co-create something that is of higher social value than any single sector. This I think Air Box I think is one very good example of that.

Certainly, this year it’s become...Maybe the last couple of years, actually, right?

There are several mayors who really want this visualization aggregation platform to go online before the election.

Yeah, I’m sure.

We’re not promising anything.

Science has a much longer term goal, compared to elections...

How has this all been received in the public? What has been the response? Do you see many people during the office hours?

Yeah, I’m booked for the entire day.

Yeah, all the time. The public just seem to be embracing this that this is a way for them to be heard and for them to more than just give input, to actually be involved in the process?

Yeah, I think the already more organized people, this is the civil society, the NGOs and so on, all see this as a way for them to network and amplify their network. For individuals, it’s not until the more highlighted cases, like tax income software redesign case where they see one single designer essentially changing the fate of everyone...

...who uses a Mac to file taxes that they feel they don’t need to be part of a large NGO or NPO they could be just one single person with one insight, but still be part of the process.

I would say that it’s not yet universal. The e-petition platform, out of the 23 million people in Taiwan, I think we have close to 5 million people using that website. It’s not everyone yet, but it’s a sizable fraction of the population.

What will you see successes as? Will it be having things online that basically show progress, show success, show metrics, or to you, is it that the process is changing as well?

Well, it’s quantify and qualify. The quantify part we can measure quite easily, because it’s an online platform. For instance, we can measure whether people propose more positions, whether there are more positions that result in actionable policies.

Also, the very important thing is whether the ministries themselves feel comfortable publishing their projects on the online platform for everybody to comment on as social objects. At the moment, we have the Corrective Yuan, the auditing branch for counties or cities and the Executive Yuan itself.

Just a very recent addition, just last month is what we call the National Budget Visualization Platform, so that you can see how each ministry spends on their relative budgets. All of the more than 1,200 projects managed by the ministries themselves are also online for people to comment on and for people to see how it’s spending their money, how much procurement or research people are doing.

I think they see this as a tremendous step at the ministries’ part to be willing to trust the citizen to use this public data which previously was only visible to the auditing agency, the national auditing council. Especially, the people who are against policies, they trust people to use this information wisely instead of generating disinformation, or whatever.

It took us more than a year to convince the participating offices of all ministries. They were like, "How about the administration, the top level itself publish our KPIs first?" which we did. It’s like only 60 projects or so. We tried one year. There’s no trolls, there’s no interruptions to the way that we work.

The ministries see the administration itself doing one-year experiment like some kind of a pilot and say, "OK, it’s not that much of a risk." Just last month they agreed to publish all their projects now.

Budgets are published anyway, right? We get a book. You can go to the Ministry of National Defense and get that...

This is a quarterly or monthly report of what exactly...

I see, this is something that previously was not published.

Previously, very difficult to obtain. You can ask for a Xerox copy or something, but that’s not in a very friendly format.

Sure. Deliberately so, I think. [laughs]

This seems like the kind of thing that perhaps is getting interest, would get interest from other governments.

Yes.

Like I’m thinking in Hong Kong it would be very useful to doing things better with air pollution. [laughs]

We’re planning to do a workshop with New York City. We’re talking about Canada also, and previously visited Madrid and, what, Barcelona?

Yeah, Barcelona.

I lost count; maybe Avross can share some.

Last time in Barcelona, they are very eager to learn from this process. There is another platform called vTaiwan, which maybe they have already heard some cases about it on the Internet, because vTaiwan we basically use label as V, starting with a V, so now also for Japan they have a vJapan and vNYC in New York City.

We have a vTaiwan in this process to facilitate deliberation among public sectors, private sectors and all other stakeholders, the more the better. That process might be a little different from e-petition platform.

From my own personal view, vTaiwan is a process that lets the private sectors and public sectors on an equal relationship, so they can join a meeting face to face and discuss about any kinds of issues equally. E-petition platform, it’s from inside the government and they invite stakeholders from the outside government into the public sector, and to learn from the so-called wisdom of the crowd. For vTaiwan, it’s a process that’s more focused on the collaboration among, we suppose, community volunteers and the public sectors.

Also, it’s sometimes a little bit like community oriented, is because we hold a meeting, we have a call every Wednesday so we let the volunteers and contributors to figure out or like brainstorming in what they are interested. They are empowered to propose any kinds of issues they are concerned about. E-petition platform there is a threshold of 5,000 people?

There’s a co-determined process there. While the agenda setting is partly from the civil society, the process itself is co-determined by the participation officers, who are all career public servants. In vTaiwan the process itself is determined by the stakeholders and the government people are invited into the vTaiwan space, so it’s...

Most times, from the administrative agencies.

It’s true, but the process itself is co-created, is what I am saying.

Yeah, but it’s different from the e-petition.

That’s right. The e-petition process is a regulation. We have a regulation for the participation officers and for e-petition, but for the moment there is no regulation for vTaiwan. It is every case has its own process.

Mm-hmm, so is it more focused on majority?

It’s more fluid, I would say.

Yeah, more fluid and more adhocracy.

It’s a lot of adhocracy.

The part of vTaiwan experiments and the resulting use for technology we then bring to the Join platform, so it’s a research-and-development kind of relationship.

We see it as two experiments going on at the same time. We can learn the pros and cons of each and maybe in the near future maybe we can merge it into one and make it much better.

It is possible, but because vTaiwan is initiative proposed by society, we get a lot of approaches by the civil society, meaning New York City, in Barcelona, in all kinds of different places. Then they all use the same kind of leverage, saying, "Taiwan has been able to do this, why can’t we do this?"

I think Jeremy Corbyn used this as part of his platform back in the prime minister elections. It is an ideal one of those examples for those activists who are willing to collaborate with governments around the world and use this system.

The vNYC workshop will be two days. First day will be about vTaiwan and the second day will be about PO, the participation officer workshop. Maybe, the end of the second day we can make a collaboration between these two and let them decide what they want to learn or what they want to improve more from what we have been doing.

Maybe there will be a brainstorming workshop and we can learn from each other.

Do you miss being in the private sector?

I’m still in the private sector...

...and the civil society, too. I’m in this cross-section.

Yeah. I would think that there are things about the private sector in terms of being able to move forward quickly and deadline-oriented that...There’s bureaucracy everywhere. The question I’m trying to get to is, are you trying to bring some of those things that work in the private sector that way to this process, to the government process?

Yeah. This office, the Public Digital Information Space, or PDIS, is unique in the central government. We’re around 20 full-time people, 35 interns and we’re deliberatively leaderless. All these people are volunteers. They can quit anytime as long as they don’t agree with our philosophy.

They rank and rate their scores themselves, because technically I’m not paying any of their salaries. [laughs] The Triple I is still paying Avross’s salary, the NCC is still paying Ning’s salary. We make an implicit promise with every agency to not poach more than one person [laughs] to PDIS.

This means PDIS itself is a microcosm of many different ministries’ viewpoints as on-site customers. Because it’s leaderless, people here just choose whatever project they want to do. They lobby our colleagues to join their cause. We just make sure that we do a stand-up meeting, which you just saw, as much as possible every morning and do a weekly review meeting every Monday at noon.

Otherwise, it’s all tracked online and people don’t have to go to the office here. People can work at home. Our 35 interns, they’re all around Taiwan. They only go to Taipei, what, every two weeks?

Every two weeks.

Every two weeks for the group, but otherwise they just work on their own thing. This is a very HR, a very private sector way of working. We’ve been iterating this process like re-clones, for instance, so every week we can change our direction. Again, this is an experiment on the central government level. We haven’t seen any things like this of this size in the central government.

You’re NCC?

From NCC, yeah.

That’s very interesting.

That’s very interesting.

We have 14 staff from Ministry of Finance, of Culture, all sorts of different ministries.

Yeah, fascinating.

Is that the idea? Then they go back to their ministry and try to infuse them with this process? Is that part of what you’re trying to do to spread this?

While stationed here, they are still technically part of the administration. Without actually physically going back there’s already a lot of back and forth. It also helps because when we’re doing this kind of nationwide policy-making, it’s very difficult to assess the response from all the different ministries.

The PDIS colleagues are like first line outside customers. If it will not work for NCC or it will not work for the Minister of Finance or Culture they will know and so we will be much more practical in the kind of policies that we design.

Our second line of defense is the participation officers, which we have an online group and we meet every month so that we only work on the e-petition cases for example, raised by participation officers and voted in by all participation officers.

If there are some cases that are unsuitable for this kind of process, again, the participation officers just down-vote for that, so we won’t work on those cases. This is again a crowd intelligence, kind of a co-intelligence design throughout all the different layers.

This is fascinating stuff, I have to say. [laughs]

Yeah, it really is. The question, as I’m sitting here listening to this I’m thinking, "Wow, this would work in so many different ways, in other governments obviously."

At the same time, I’m thinking, this is this interesting trend coming from your background in technology and private sector, but we’re seeing in other governments, including mine in the US, where I come from, in some ways an opposite trend, to saying, "We don’t want openness. We want to very much control messages and try to control the media in the process."

What has been the reception, I guess, outside of Taiwan about this? Have you gotten pushback, people saying, "Hold on, you guys, what’s your silly little experiment over there [laughs] when we have to watch how the message is controlled?" Or do you think it’s a sense of, "Huh, let’s watch and see how this goes there."?

There’s a larger network called the Open Government Partnership who all commits, at least initially, [laughs] but most of them still commit to the open government action points. The OGP network is very instrumental in collaborative setting on the so-called government pillars.

The transparency, participation, accountability, and inclusion as the four overriding values of open government. I think the OGP still inform a lot of our work, but our day to day we work more closely with the Digital 7 nations, the D7. It used to be D5 but Canada and Uruguay joined, so it’s now D7... actually D7 plus Taiwan.

While on the Digital 7 on the home page you will not see Taiwan, but actually we are in the Slack channel , we’re in their monthly calls and we work very closely on the operational level. We share our GitHub, that is to say our source code in doing this kind of operation.

For example, the transcript-keeping technology we use is from the UK actually, and the e-petition platform’s pro-and-con visualization for example, is from Iceland. There’s also part of our process that then influenced say in Estonia and New Zealand, in particular, is very interested in this way, so there is an international network, but I wouldn’t say that it is overridingly popular.

As you say, there are other paradigms that work. At the moment, there is a little bit of back and forth I think. I certainly wouldn’t say that this is in all cases a useful replacement for representative democracy. In most of the countries this is seen as a supplement to representative democracy where you still vote for every two or four years, that’s every four years by the way of upload information.

Sometimes you can use part of our process to do preservation for your budgeting which is more balanced or using e-petition or other platforms to increase dialogue between a civil society and a government. I haven’t seen any lobbyists say, "We’ll just do away with government. We’ll just do a referendum for everything." I haven’t seen anything like that yet.

You could say, talking about a broader question right now that there is a bit of a challenge to traditional bigger democracies around the world right now that you see in the bigger democracies, maybe, US some steps back or some cynicism about the benefits of democracy.

Do you see what you’re doing as the antidote to that pushing it in the progressive liberal direction rather than another potential antidote which at least people feel is moving back into authoritarianism?

I think Taiwan is unique because during the occupy in 2014, this demonstration not as a protest but demonstration as a demo of how things could because we’ve engaged half-a-million people on the street and many more people online, "We have the crowd, can we yield some intelligence out of the crowd?"

Many of the things that are shown here are I would say, diluted [laughs] forms of direct democracy that’s demonstrated during the Sunflower Movement. We also exported some of the technology to the Umbrella Movement and so there’s a longer field test there also. Unlike many occupies in the world, Taiwan’s Sunflower occupy is a very rare one that see people’s ideas converge rather than diverge over time.

I think a lot of it is through this kind of facilitation technology. It showed the population that at least for some issues that everybody feels a shared responsibility to get consensus out of a lot of different, like tons of different NGOs during occupy, they could cross-pollinate and merge into something useful.

I think it is one antidote, I’m certainly not saying it is the only antidote, but it is the one that’s working in Taiwan.

This is interesting. I’m just thinking, this would be a great story to do.

Yeah, this would be a good story for us.

Would you at some point in the future, I don’t know when, we’d have to prepare, be willing to do an interview, just a chat like this?

Yeah, of course.

That would be great.

That would be great, because one of the things, I don’t know if Samson mentioned this, one of the hats I wear at Bloomberg, my title’s Senior Editor and National Editor and I go on TV and talk about often US politics and policy and try to explain it, which is not always really readily explainable.

Then I commission stories, a lot of them on gender diversity at large. I also wear a hat of I am co-lead of something called "Women’s Voices." We’re trying to get more women quoted in our stories. When we started, we were quoting men almost 17 times more than women and this was in Asia, but I think it probably would’ve been the case globally as well.

Now, in a good week we’re at about seven times, which is still not where we want to be, but we’re in the right direction and also including more women on Bloomberg Television, in our podcasts and on radio.

Now we’re trying to do this as even more diverse widespread voices. That just because we’re largely a finance and business organization it doesn’t mean that we have to have the same people and the same people who look the same talking for us.

Avross here is our expert. She wrote two books on gender studies.

Oh, great, then we want to talk to you about this.

She has a running column on Womany around what? Around gender issues.

That’s fascinating.

Where is it? A running column? Is it published?

Yes.

Can you send us a link?

Yes, but it’s all in Chinese.

That’s fine, that’s fine, I read Chinese.

He can do that. He can translate.

Where is it published, is it published?

On Womany.net. W-O-M-A-N and Y, woman plus Y, Womany.net.

What are some of the topics you write about? What have been some recent columns?

It’s mostly about every day, gender issue on daily basis, like the toilets of male and female.

Everything that I’m interested in and any kinds of things, gender issues, happening around me, and even from my own experience in my family. Sometimes I think my issue might be a little bit trivial compared to other big issues, but I want to make trivial things big.

I want to dig into a slight idea around me to show that gender stereotypes and sexism happens around us at every corner in every kind of aspect. That’s most of my inspiration.

We work together on trying to...We see one problem within our organization and so we try hard to rectify that. One thing we can do is at least make women more visible and more prominent and normalize that if you’re talking about stock markets or economies that it’s a woman trader or a woman economist. That you see them as often and as normally as you do middle-aged men.

They don’t write about what shoes they’re wearing anymore...

...or most of the time.

I got a story the other day where it actually mentioned what the woman was wearing. It was a pre-publication. At least they knew to show it to me.

It was from Japan and I said, "Why are we writing about what she’s wearing?" "Well, it’s interesting." I said, "Yeah, but it makes her not serious, she’s not talking about clothing." It was this bell that rang, that’s still sort of what we’re doing. It sounds like that’s what you’re dealing with.

That’s right. That kind of report has trickled on a zero, I think the second most of our President Ing-wen when it’s the inauguration. For the first couple of months the media used to write about what she’s wearing, but afterwards, this not newsworthy anymore, [laughs] so I think that she has really done a lot for gender mainstreaming.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think a lot of news organizations, we haven’t done it, but want to do a story about being Taiwan’s first woman President and she’s like, "No, I’m not talking about it. I’m the President of Taiwan, I’m not a woman President of Taiwan. I will not talk to you." That’s great.

It also helps that she’s not anyone’s daughter or anyone’s wife.

Yeah, I think it’s the fact that she was independent, that it was not a familial connection that got her to where she was is certainly remarkable on the world stage. I think that’s really helped.

Our chairman, Peter Grauer, he came to Taiwan last September. He did a conference on corporate governance. One of the things he really advocates for is women on company boards.

Before he came he was like, "I want to look at some recent comments and some recent news about, where does Taiwan stand?" I asked our team here of reporters, "Have you seen anything recently about...?" "It’s not a conversation in Taiwan." I’ve been looking for people who are writing about it so that I can tap in a little bit more to what current issues are with gender relations.

You want to see or you’re wanting more about women in positions in corporate and public sectors, like social positions kinds of things?

For us, there’s the 30 Percent Club, I’m not sure if you’ve heard about it, in London. It started in London...

It’s in the US, too.

This advocates for getting a minimum of 30 percent of companies on the main stock exchange to have 30 percent of their board positions taken by women.

And senior management.

Yeah, and senior management. Actually, right now, Taiwan is in about 10 percent of all board positions.

Still in Asia, that’s not...

That’s quite high for Asia. [laughs] Japan and South Korea are at one or two percent. Hong Kong’s a bit better than Taiwan.

Did you see the alliance for women board members in Taiwan? Do you know about that?

No, I don’t know that. I’d love to.

I think it was headed by the 101 chairperson, Sung Wen-Chi. Another member I know of is Jaclyn Tsai, the previous cyberlaw minister. I was kind of her understudy. They may be worth talking to.

I heard it.

There’s one case proposed by the community member of vTaiwan. It’s called non-consensual pornography or non-consensual intimate image. I was the proposer. In the first place, I thought I could propose this issue by my own understanding of gender. Later, I realized that I shouldn’t emphasize too much on gender issue when I talk about this.

Although most of the victims, maybe over 90 percent of the victims, are women or female, I found out that, just like our presidents have, I shouldn’t focus on gender issue only because if I do that in the public, maybe more in our mini hackathons, then our male volunteers might feel excluded from our discussion.

Later, I tried to exclude all kinds of gender factors out of our conversation so that I want to include more people, not only gender binary but also people like Audrey, ungendered, it’s a gender spectrum. I want to invite more people into the conversation instead of just focusing on gender.

When I studied throughout these years, I found that sometimes I cannot focus on each gender too much because it’s dangerous sometimes. In every kinds of issue, there’s one gender maybe the victim of each specific issue. If I focus on that gender, then, in that specific issue, other gender will feel excluded. I try to be careful talking about each issues. I’ll talk about every aspect and kinds of.

I always find it funny how attacked many men feel if you talk about women’s issues. When men feel attacked by this, I’m like, "What are you talking about that angry?"

Yeah, like men-hater, that feminism would be a men-hater. I hate that.

[laughs]

Actually, our project started really taking off when we got more men involved, like Samson, one of the champions. Almost half of our champions are men, so it was like, "This is something we all need to do. This is something we need to do for our coverage, for our branding of Bloomberg."

It’s helped us recruit people. It’s come to a place where we’re not just talking with the same people we’ve been talking to for years. It’s not easy. Frankly, we still have a lot of trouble getting women to go on television.

I’ll go meet plenty of women at events and things. I’ll say, "Oh, you should go on Bloomberg Television. You’d be great." They’d say, "Well, then you want my boss." I said, "No, I don’t. We’ve already had your boss."

"We’re still happy to have your boss on occasion. I’m not excluding him, but I know what he’s going to say. We’ve had him a lot. Give it a try." They’re still this, "Well, you know, I’m not..." the old, "I’m not going to be perfect at it." It’s like, "We’ll give you training. I do this a lot, and I’m not perfect at it. This is what you want to do."

It’s still hard. It’s not just a matter of saying, "Hey, we’re going to do this," and then we do it. Then you have to convince people day by day, person by person, including the people you want to participate.

I hear what you’re saying that you don’t want to be too strident in what you’re trying to say and do because we want to continue the conversation and bring people along. This has been terrific. Thank you so much for giving and being generous with your time. We would love to have a proper interview and would love to look at, if you would send along links and Samson could help me translate. [laughs]

Is there anything coming up, any initiatives? You mentioned, is it AI sandbox?

Yeah, it’s the AI mobility sandbox.

AI mobility sandbox. That’s very interesting. It’s next week, you were saying.

It’s next week. If everything goes as planned, we’re sending it to the legislation next week.

Sending it to the legislation and then...?

Hopefully they’ll fast-track it.

It’s impossible to know.

It depends how tied up they are with our friends from the military.

There’s that and there’s also other like the additional Communication Act, which is like the basic law for cyberspace, real space bridging and that’s also in the Transportation-Communication meeting. If they fast-track that they maybe have more room for the AI mobility. [laughs] Of course, they’re working on that. Also, the company law rewrite is I think due to be passed this week. Next week?

What changes with that?

Everything.

It is a very large rewrite. Basically, it moves this much of Taiwan’s continental law based company system to a more US-UK-based system, where there’s much more way for the company to organize among itself.

For example, how the share is distributed, the special voting stock and how important things are to be conducted, and how fast the registration should be, so the government is managing less and relying on transparency and public auditing more.

That’s the basic idea. It enables start-ups to much more easily get the kind of funding structure that they need. There actually is a vTaiwan case that passed a version of this called, Closely Held Corporations, but it’s limited to 50 people, so 50 shareholders. Now we’re taking most of the closely held law and expanding it to any non-publicly listed company, which would enable a new class of companies.

For example, personally I care about companies that have a triple bottom line that is to not just profit but also social and economic benefits. Now with the new company law they can have a company charter that lists explicitly the social and environmental needs.

The government will publish the charter as open data with the company’s consent. They will be able to raise funds all the way to Series A, but still retain control the social, economic, environmental purpose using special shares and veto shares and things like that.

All of these were not possible using the old company law. The old company law even said, "The company exists to earn a profit," and we even have to have the Minister of Economic Affairs to do an interpretation saying that for the profit is not necessarily just for profit. It’s a stretch of the interpretation. [laughs]

Now we’re changing clause one of the company law to say, "The company may also declare additional bottom lines that are equally important as the for-profit motive," and things like that, so there’s quite a few changes.

That’s absolutely fascinating. One thing on the transparency side, talking about companies, a lot of companies in Taiwan are very untransparent, and it’s a constant struggle for us when we...

One of the main things we have to do is we have to write about company earnings, financial results, and just trying to get them to say, "OK, we are going to announce them at this time, on this date," absolutely impossible.

Yeah, it is.

These are publicly listed companies. There’s a certain level of transparency they’re supposed to have, but you try and call people and, they absolutely won’t talk to you. Like company spokesmen, this position, you can never get a hold of these [laughs] people. There’s a very guarded but also very antagonistic attitude to public accountability...

Some of these are in line with independent board members; and now with the new company law, also so-called corporate secretary, that this chief of compliance. There’s many sections, I think, inspired by the US, Hong Kong or UK law that try to improve this particular regard. I’ll be honest and say these are the sections that are meeting the most resistance.

During the company law re-write that we had to use anti-money-laundering and other international issues [laughs] to try to get some progress forward.

This arrangement, have you come across anything that intersects with money laundering or anti-money-laundering, because I know Taiwan has, ever since the Mega Financial got fined two years ago, Taiwan has at least made efforts to...

Yes. There’s a very strong AML push.

Very strong?

Very strong push.

Have you come across anything in part of that push that was...?

I think it’s mostly managed by the Ministry of Justice. During the company law conversation, of course, I attended part of the Ministry of Economy and Ministry of Justice debate [laughs] on these particular aspects. I think they eventually settled on a degree of revelation of the real benefactors of company transactions and things like that.

That’s all required by the international AML community. That’s one of the hotly debated issues in the legislation right now, like where do we put the dial. I think all this will be settled in a few weeks. [laughs]

What’s the argument against releasing this information? What’s the argument against, say, there’s some company in the Cayman Islands and you’ve done...?

It’s mostly saying...

In the final ex-beneficiary...

...tell when it’s mostly small and medium enterprise and more small than medium enterprise, and anything that increased their operational costs is not good for entrepreneurship. I think that’s the strongest argument I’ve heard.

It’s their argument.

It is their argument. The main response to that, actually, during our public hearings is that what we’re going to work is ICT tools that makes it simpler for them to reveal the information.

Maybe we can re-purpose part of the tax-filing information for this purpose. Maybe we can re-purpose some Ministry of Economy registration for this purpose and so on, so we lower the cost of very small enterprises for compliance by piggy-backing on the thing that needs to be done anyway. That’s our main response so far. It’s being lukewarmly received...

That’s interesting.

That’s a start. [laughs]

That’s a start.

Thank you so much.

I’m going to say, start from where you are, right? [laughs]

Exactly, exactly.

Thank you so much.

Great, this is terrific. Thank you again.