If you just first tell me how you discovered this whole field of democracy advocating through digital means.

It began when I was about 13 years old. That was in 1994, and there was this new invention at the time, it’s called World Wide Web. It was invented by Tim Berners-Lee.

I don’t know about it.

He invented over the course of several years a browser, which you can use to view a web page, and a web server, which serves the web page, and a hyperlink, which is words underlined with blue ribbons and click to go from one age to the other. All these were invented in the late ’80s and early ’90s by this inventor called Tim Berners-Lee.

What’s the name of the...?

Tim Berners-Lee. No, it’s Sir Tim Berners-Lee now, but [laughs] he wasn’t a sir back then. He’s the inventor of the World Wide Web, and you can see his picture there.

OK.

Sir Timothy John...

Berners-Lee, OK. The system’s name is?

It’s called the World Wide Web.

The WWW?

Yeah, it’s kind of famous.

Yes, it is.

Yes, it is. It is. You discovered it in 1994.

Yeah, ’94 or so.

I quit school at the time. I discovered most of the researchers at the time are very willing to publish so-called pre-prints, that is to say before they sent it to the journal, they publish their draft of a preprint to the World Wide Web for a wider peer review, not just with the review board, but with anyone who have a Web browser.

In the World Wide Web at the time everyone’s new to this. Because my interest has always been what we would today called network sociology or Internet sociology, I want to discover why people tend to trust each other very quickly online.

It takes them a much shorter time for people to trust each other online. It’s easy to get people to organize into a large-scale movement, such as the Blue Ribbon Campaign.

Blue Ribbon Campaign?

Yeah, it’s the Blue Ribbon Campaign where everybody on the different websites that I visit, they turned the website dark.

The Blue Ribbon Campaign was in reaction to the so-called Communication Decency Act, the CDA, signed by Clinton, I think, at the time.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the EFF, I think that was in 1996, two years after I joined this World Wide Web. I joined World Wide Web mostly to discuss with fellow researchers. They don’t know that I’m only 14 years old. They treat me as maybe a scholar with very bad English, but nevertheless, very willing to learn.

Which specialty?

On internet sociology.

That was your main topic?

That was my main topic, to find out why people behave differently online than offline. I wrote to all the scholars that I can find working on that subject and have discussions. They trust me very quickly, and they don’t know that I’m only a early teenager.

I told my principal at my junior high school that what I’m learning on the World Wide Web is 10 years in the future, compared to the textbooks, even the university textbooks, because cutting-edge research usually takes 10 years to be mainstream, discovered by the curriculum committee, and turned into textbooks.

It’s like I’m stepping 10 years into future. It’s much more exciting to create knowledge, rather than to just consume knowledge.

Previously to that you were already interested with geeky things.

With Internet itself, of course.

Before Internet you were into technology, also?

I was very into mathematics. When I was eight years old I get into programming, mostly as a way to automate a lot of tedious calculations in my mathematical learning.

You were already predisposed to that kind of...?

To mathematics. To me, computer is like a instrument, in the sense that the music that one can make from programs are like spaces where people can interact. For me, it’s much easier for people to see or to feel the kind of mathematical structures that I’m working with if I can use program to make it very visible, to visualize it, so to speak.

This remains a solo tool for me until when I was 12 and I encountered the Internet. I found that there’s many people working on the same thing, and I previously did not know that. Then there’s a real community.

Then I got into the World Wide Web community, and the World Wide Web community is very special in the sense that the Tim Berners-Lee and other colleagues, they gave up their copyright so anyone can change any part of World Web without asking for his license or his permission.

That is very different from the previous systems, like Gopher or other systems where you have to ask for license first, before you can change it.

When you dropped school, what did your parents say?

They want to know that I’m still able to continue my education. At the time, I’ve been doing a lot of science fairs. In my first year of junior high I did a science fair on compression algorithm, like a Zip file, like how to make files smaller by compressing it. The second year of my junior high school I did a science fair about how to use computer to do logic reasoning, so like artificial intelligence.

The quality between the two science fairs are very large, but that’s not because I suddenly grew over one year. It’s the World Wide Web happening between the two science fairs. The first one was a normal junior high school student, learning from the books, but the second is picking up the latest research and trying to make some contributions.

It’s a very large difference between the quality, and my parents can clearly see it, so that they know that I’m learning more from the World Wide Web than from the school.

Because the school’s principal is also their friend, at the time it’s still mandatory, education in Taiwan, so the principal had to agree to help me to deceive the minister of education. She has to say, "No, Audrey is still coming every day to school," while I’m actually elsewhere. [laughs]

For the last one year and a half in my junior high school, I don’t even go to a school anymore, but I start working with the research community on World Wide Web and participating in these kind of things.

You had a computer, which at that time was very expensive.

Not at all. In Taiwan, the land of personal computers, it’s kind of cheap. [laughs]

It was already cheap at that time?

It was cheap at the time. It was kind of expensive in ’89, when I got my first computer, but it’s a commodity at ’94, ’95. There’s laptops at the time. Laptops are still pretty expensive, but personal computers are becoming much cheaper.

You had the equipment. Your parents provided it? They were happy with your...?

Back in 1989, where computer was kind of expensive, they didn’t, at the beginning, think it’s necessary for my education, but I read about programming, anyway, so I use a A4 paper, draw on it a keyboard and the cursor, and tied this paper keyboard and start programming.

It’s good for my learning, because then I learned that computational thinking doesn’t need a computer. It’s a way of thinking. It’s like playing a instrument from the notes. The notes are still in your head, and it’s possible to create this way. My parents finally gave in shortly afterwards and gave me a computer then.

Your parents are also into math?

Not at all. Not at all. They were both journalists at that time. My mother was majoring in law and my father in political science, but they recognized that it is important to connect to the wider world, so they also learned computer as part of their job in the early ’90s.

You are a one-child family?

No, no, I have a brother four years younger. He’s also very, very into mathematics.

When you dropped school you were doing what?

Research.

Did you create some software?

Yeah, lots of. At the beginning, I was just supporting the Internet campaigns -- the Internet Society, the World Wide Consortium.

During the Blue Ribbon campaign, it really opened my eyes. Originally, I thought that the World Wide Web was just for learning together, but for this kind of campaign they were able to, essentially, make Clinton and the Supreme Court shut down a law that will hamper the Internet.

The Internet, in a sense, it’s sovereign, in the sense that they don’t want to be threatened by ordinary states. [laughs] That really opened the idea of Internet as a political apparatus, to me.

I worked with the Internet Engineering Task Force, which is part of the Internet Society. The IETF are the legislation body of the Internet. Inside IETF there is this, what they call, a open multi-stakeholder system, where anyone who think they have something to say that they would be affected by the Internet, they can join the IETF.

They don’t need to be a regional elected or whatever elected. As long as you can say, I have a stake in this, you can participate in this consensus-based discussion. The IETF, they have a document that says, "We reject kings and presidents. We, instead, believe rough consensus and running code."

This is a political system that is more like the ancient Greek. They value people from different backgrounds, and they value finding common values and finding solutions that works for everyone. This is a more deliberative, we would say, participative democracy.

Because I was part of this system since ’96 at latest, and I was just 15 years old back then, so I practiced this kind of politics for five years before I get to vote in Taiwan.

You practiced it over this platform?

Right, this mailing list, this kind of creation.

Basically, when I see part of the Internet that’s not working to my liking, I can invent a way of working, write it in the technical description, and try to bring it to the parliament, to the Internet Engineering Task Force, and say, "I think the Internet is better if it worked this way," and work with the stakeholders. If people generally agree with it, then it become part of the...

What did you contribute, precisely?

I contributed, for example, to the Atom Publication group.

The Atom?

The Atom Publication Group. The Atom Publishing Protocol, it is a new generation of the RSS, the Really Simple Syndication. RSS at the time is being worked on by Aaron Swartz, among other people. The Atom people are trying to make the RSS work better, not just as a consuming blogs, but also a way to publish blogs, so becoming two way.

I worked with the Movable Type community, which is a early blogging software platform, to provide Traditional Chinese translation of that platform, as well as to make the journalists and other writers to adopt this platform to be self-publishing. I’m involved not just on the technical side, but also on the advocacy. Our group translated the word blog to "部落格", and tried to spread this idea of self-directed publication.

Around that time, it’s early 2000, I also contributed to the Freenet Project. The Freenet Project is one of the early projects to let people who are whistleblowers, who are activists in a constrained environment to anonymously reveal the ideas that they know to journalists, to the outside world.

It’s around that time that the Golden Shield program and the Great Firewall is being constructed in the PRC. The Freenet workers has to work constantly in vigilance as the Greater Firewall is adjusting their way of working. It’s a little bit like a cat and mouse activity.

Did, actually, Chinese journalists use this Freenet?

Yes. I worked mostly on advocacy and Chinese translation in some content. It’s called "自由網" in Mandarin. We see a lot of Chinese dissidents at the time using this system. Nowadays they use Tor or they use some other system, but Freenet was one of the earlier systems that really provide a strong anonymous privacy guarantee.

Is it still in use?

It is still in use. I’m not very involved in the community anymore, but it’s still being updated. There is still a following. As you can see, the latest releases this year. It’s still very active.

That was what you did when you were 16?

No I also co-founded a company on a more commercial side. All these are the more civil society contributions, but I also worked with a few co-founders to reshape a publishing house. I didn’t found that publishing house, but the publishing house was trying to reform into a e-commerce company.

I joined during their transition to a e-commerce company. Together we built Taiwan’s first auction site. It’s like eBay. We call it CoolBid. Also, one of Taiwan’s first social media sites. It’s called CyberEye. I also wrote one of the first meta-search engines that can search not only the search engines online, but also your files locally. That’s one of the more best-sellers in the compu-techs Taiwan.

What’s the name of this engine?

Initially, when I wrote it, it was called FusionSearch.

Fusion?

FusionSearch. After I left the company, I think they call it the Inforian Quest. I think that’s the name.

Inforian Quest?

Yeah. The software got pretty good rating from the "PCWorld" and "PC Magazine".

It’s still working?

No. [laughs] It’s software from 1998.

Only the website remains.

No, it’s not working anymore.

The free software and civil society contributions, they last longer, but the private sector contributions... I guess they inspire new generation of companies. The company’s not there anymore. They got investment from Intel. It was the highlight of Taiwan’s Internet bubble, but I’ve already left by then. Then there’s a very public crash of the dot-com bubble.

Did you make money with that?

Yeah, for a 15 years old it’s a lot of money. [laughs]

You were rich, already, for a 15 years old?

It’s a modest amount of money, but yes, some money.

That’s good.

Then, afterwards, I discovered this open source movement.

After this?

After it, because the term "open source" did not start until ’97. I went to Silicon Valley to found another startup around ’98, ’99, and then the...

What is the startup?

The startup, later on it became OurInternet.

It is about?

It is about enable open source creators to work in a community fashion, so unite different open source creators in a way that collaboratively form a software supply chain. Our software eventually formed the initial basis of the national Open Source Software Foundry, the OSSF.

It’s funded by the Academia Sinica. We got funding from the Academia Sinica in 2003, and built the first generation of the Open Source Software Foundry. They operated all the way until 2015. By that time, everybody used GitHub anyway, so they don’t really need this anymore, but for 12 years or so, OSSF is one of the core supporting structures of the Taiwan’s open source movement.

Wonderful, and then how did you get up to political advocacy?

All this is political advocacy. [laughs] It is a way for people to see that it is possible to participate in a political conversation of technology, admittedly, but still political conversation among very large companies, like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, or whatever, but still as a non-profit or social enterprise, like Mozilla Foundation, like Wikipedia Foundation.

They still have a equal say to where and how the Internet is evolving, so I still see this as political. Personally, my involvement in Taiwan’s domestic politics...

You came back to Taiwan after Silicon Valley?

Well, I stayed in Silicon Valley only half a year at a time. I visited there, but because at the time, early 2000, there was this invention from Estonia called Skype, which is very popular. [laughs]

I don’t need to be in Silicon Valley anymore, so all my work afterwards with Silicon Valley companies, like in 2008 I started working with a company called SocialText. It is the first company to bring Wiki to Fortune 500 companies, like internal knowledge management. In 2010, I started working with Apple on the Siri technology, which...

You contributed to Siri?

Yes, mostly on the globalization part. When I joined, Siri only speak English, and a couple European languages. I was part of the team that tried to make it work very fluidly on Mandarin and other East Asian languages. When I left Apple in 2016 to join the cabinet, I was working on various languages, such as Shanghainese, and the built-in Traditional Chinese dictionary.

My personal involvement with Taiwan’s domestic politics did not start until 2014.

You were working for Apple being here?

With Apple being here, yes. I work as a liaison between the open source community and Apple. Apple at the time was very closed. I was working with teams in Apple to gradually bringing more open source innovations, while convincing more Apple projects, like the projects I personally do at Apple, to releasing open and have a two-way conversation.

This wasn’t, basically, an Apple program? It was your program?

No, it’s a partnership. [laughs] For example, I worked on the Mac and iOS version of the built-in dictionary of Traditional Chinese. It’s at once a Apple program, a Oxford University Press program, and also the Wu-Nan publishing house. I was working as consultant to all three programs.

I get it. You were still based in Taiwan?

Mostly in Taiwan, but I travel a lot, but yes. Sometimes, like in 2005 or so, I traveled maybe 20 countries a year with the hackathons and other community spirits, but I never stay in one place more than Taiwan.

This hacker thing, is it related with all of this?

Yeah. Our early participants in the open source community call ourselves hackers. The hackers are basically people who immerse our self into a system, see the limitation of the system, and find creative ways to build new systems that doesn’t suffer from the old system’s flaws.

There are, of course, also cyber security hackers who see the same flaws, but exploit it to their personal benefit. We call them black hat hackers.

Black hats, so you were the white hat?

I’m not really a cyber security hacker. Cyber security hacker are white hat or black hat, but I’m more of a civic hacker.

Civic hacker?

A civic hacker is someone who sees flaws in systems, but builds better, or at least alternative social configuration that doesn’t suffer from the same flaws. It’s hacker for public good.

You were doing this hacking thing since your participation in open source?

Yes, so that’s ’97, ’98.

You are still doing it?

It’s still my job.

It’s still your job?

Yeah, I’m just being paid by taxpayers to do it full time now.

You’re doing it for government services, government platforms?

Or for anyone who would listen. Basically, my contributions here in the Executive Yuan, they’re also open source. Most of the process, the program, the transcripts, and everything we publish, they’re under a open license so people can use it without asking my permission.

If the ministries here are willing to use it, of course I help them, but if the ministries elsewhere, maybe in Iceland, in Estonia, in Madrid, in New York City, in Ottawa, or in Wellington, they want to use, I also help them. I’m working, in a sense, with Taiwan; not just working for Taiwan.

You need at least 20 lives to do what you’re doing.

No, no, I delegate the delegation to other people. [laughs] The people do...

How many hours do you sleep a day?

Eight hours a day.

You have time to sleep eight hours?

Yes.

How many hours to eat?

Maybe one to two hours.

How many hours to play?

Play? All the time.

This is my hobby.

If you want to change your mind and do something not significant, but very funny, do you have time to do it?

Yeah, very much so. The trick here is not personally do these things. I do a pilot, make it very visible, and other people can improve on it.

When you say other people, it’s not civil servant here?

It could be civil servants.

There are also other people, because you don’t have very much manpower here.

Here there’s about 20 full-time people and 35 interns, but we also have a network called participation officers, which is one team in every ministry, so when an innovation works here they could be replicated everywhere.

For instance, what is one of the programs that you have helped with outside of Taiwan recently?

A lot of. [laughs] For example, we’re just about to travel to New York and to work with the g0v NYC people on the training of bringing our way of co-creation and collaboration workshop to New York City.

To the city function?

To the city function, because they have a project called the Civic Hall. It is a way for the New York City people to work with the social innovators in New York City. We’re helping them to plan how to position their civil society co-creation workshops as a way that helps the civil service, rather than being threatening to the civil service.

We’re planning workshops very closely. We work on the training programs, and things like that. We’re in pretty close collaboration with various city level and national level governments.

Is there something in France going on?

Before I become Digital Minister, I spent five months out of the 12 in 2015 in France. In 2016 or so, when I get appointed as Digital Minister, but not actually going back to Taiwan, I spent the entire September in Paris, and also traveling a little bit, but mostly in Paris.

Having fun, or also...?

No, to work. To interview my counterparts in France.

You have counterparts in France? They’re not in government?

They’re in government. There’s, for example, the Etalab . There was a République Numérique consultation from the previous government. The people who powers this conversation, like the Parlement & Citoyens people, the 27th Region people, the SuperPublic people, and so on, I’m in touch with all of them.

The Etalab is also a government...

What’s the name?

The Etalab. The state lab.

Etalab?

Yeah.

How comes we never hear about that?

I don’t know. [laughs] Maybe they’re not very public?

You just never hear about that.

They did a lot of very good work. After the Sunflower Movement, I visited Paris. In early 2015, there was workshops done by Etalab for me to share the technologies we used during the occupy to the local civil society organizers. Then, just the week after I leave Paris, it was April something, and then Nuit Debout happened.

What happened?

The Nuit Debout, the occupy of the République Square, and where Anne Hidalgo was the mayor at the time. They were tweeting at each other and saying, "We’re giving back the public to the public. We’re not taking the public." It’s very funny.

In the Nuit debout there was a online part where they have a list of all the tools we used in Taiwan and how much of the tool they can use in the occupy there. We have a lot of conversation. Let me see if I can...Here we go.

How Taiwan solved the Uber problem.

Yes, so that’s one of the things that I shared. This was in Madrid. Here is the occupier from Nuit debout, from Occupy Wellington, from the 15-M, the Spain version of the occupy.

The Sunflower Movement people, we compare notes, we share a lot of different technologies, and help each other to formulate plans so that they can try this idea. Baki was at the time trying to incite similar things in Africa, and so on. There’s a large network where we compare notes and try to incite similar movements elsewhere.

Let’s go back to Sunflower Movement. This is an important one. That’s the time when you’re involved in Taiwanese politics?

Yes. At the time, the g0v movement had already started. The g0v movement is a decentralized civic hacker community for all the government functions that a civil society is not happy with. We registered a g0v.tw, so you can change the O to a zero and get to the shadow government. That, we call it hack democracy.

Hack democracy?

Right. At the time, I was responsible for many projects in g0v. That was the one that unified...

This is Taiwanese?

This starts as g0v.tw, but now there is g0v.asia, g0v.network, .us, .it, .nz. It’s everywhere now, but this starts as a re-imagination of government functions.

Re-imagination?

Yeah, of government functions. It unites the social activists, the civic journalists, and the free software people to build public tools together.

The idea, it starts with the visualization of government brought budget, but now it’s part of the Taiwan’s central government, also. We basically took the system and install it into the Taiwan government as of last month. This is now part of Taiwan’s democracy.

There’s also the MoE, the Ministry of Education dictionary, where we turn people’s crowdsourcing. A way to connect the Taiwanese Hakka, Taiwanese Hoklo, and also the Mandarin dictionary, as well as the French, Deutsch, and English dictionary together. Basically, this is a very popular dictionary that unites the various language circles...

This site is...?

It’s called MoE dict.

No, I mean the larger address. This site, this website, it’s called...?

G0v, g0v.asia.

G-zero-V-dot-Asia?

Right. Again, I’ve been working with g0v for two years before the Sunflower Movement

Two years before?

It starts in 2012. It wasn’t called g0v until late 2012, so maybe a year and a half before the Sunflower. We’ve already been working through this, what we call forking the government. Taking the government’s data and functions, and fork it into a different direction, like the shape of a fork, so the government still go this way, but we fork that way.

Because we also give up our copyright, so when the government likes the idea, in a next procurement cycle, that cycle, they can incorporate and merge back our contribution. This kind of fork and merge is the modus operandi of g0v. It’s political. Again, it’s a demonstration, but not as a protest, but as a demo.

It wasn’t considered as a protest?

It wasn’t considered a protest. It was considered as a demo of how the government could be. If the government likes it, they can always merge it back. In 2014, during the Sunflower Occupy, g0v played a different role as a enabler of civic media. The civic media at the time, there’s many different reporters, independent journalists, people with an iPad reporting of the occupied site.

What we would be doing is, essentially, building the infrastructure so that everyone can compare notes and share each other’s live streams. There’s teams of people who type very fast, and to turn what’s happened in the parliament into real-time actual reports. There’s also other teams who take these reports and translate it into 12 different languages.

There’s a nervous system to the occupy to make sure that everybody is on the same page and for the rumor to have no root to spread so that everybody can see with their own eyes where the occupy is going.

What we discovered is that we’ve seen this way it becomes very easy for people to converge our ideas. Instead of being just a protest where people fight over things, we create a space where all the different interests can join, find common values, and find solutions for everyone.

How did this happen practically, during the Sunflower Movement? Because there was some hard conflict, also?

There was one day of hard conflict when people tried to occupy the Executive Yuan, the administration building, but otherwise it’s very peaceful. That’s, actually, one of the first fights and first contributions we have, because the day after the occupy the mainstream media was trying to paint the protesters as mobs.

As sources of violence.

Right, that’s exactly right, but we have firsthand footage of the breaking in. There’s no policeman inside. Actually, the parliament was already a mess when the students got into it, because there was a fight by the MPs earlier that day, and so it was not caused by students.

Because there’s firsthand footage during the breaking in, and so on, and we were able to publish on YouTube and on Facebook.

It was published?

Yeah, and so it really put a stop on the mainstream’s way to paint this as a violent movement. Also, because when police surrounded the occupy site there’s a counter surrounding by the citizens, so it’s not just police footage, like surveillance. It’s also in French what we call sousveillance. The citizens all use their own phone to record what police is doing.

There is a truce between the police and the occupiers. If you want the nitty-gritty details, there was 10 days before we were vetting our equipments for anti-nuclear plant protest. It’s the g0v people, our first time using our own equipment to live stream a large-scale civic movement into the Internet.

Later on, when they broke in, they also using sandals to set up a broadcast station [laughs] in the occupied site. In the streets nearby, we were setting up high-speed connections. We were using this collaborative system called Hackpad to let people quickly, as I said, type what they hear out of the live streaming.

The live streaming is important because without which the rumors and the mainstream media has a lot of leeway on interpretation, but because it’s all live streaming real time, there is no way for rumors to grow. That’s the first few days.

By the 21st we have established high-bandwidth networks that is working on a different spectrum than other wireless. It’s called WiMAX. That connects all the different sites in the occupy. It’s the last show of WiMAX. A few months after Sunflower, WiMAX stopped operation. At least it provides some democratic value. [laughs]

You mean WiMAX stopped operations because it went out of business?

Yeah, because the 4G, the LTE network took over, and the WiMAX technology was not maintained anymore.

Now with the 4G technology you could do the same?

You can do the same, exactly. We were using a pre-4G technology to do similar things. Then we have a website called g0v.today. It is like a daily newspaper where people can see at a glance what is it like in the occupied site.

Then we recruited our own journalists by having people go to a website, typing their name, and uploading their photo. Then we will print this beautiful badge, so they can put it on the back of their iPad and say to any police that there is a Supreme Court ruling that any civic journalists doing coverage for the public good, they should enjoy the same civic right as any other mainstream journalists.

If the police...

This is Taiwan law?

This is a interpretation, yes, of the Supreme Court. It’s as effective as a constitution. This is very important for the civic journalists. Because that’s a relatively new ruling, we also printed the QR code, so if the police doesn’t believe it, they can scan the QR code and see the Supreme Court ruling.

Throughout this, we were able to build a CCTV network that let anyone who doesn’t participate on-site, they can, nevertheless, view online what is happening during the occupy.

It was 24/7?

It was 24/7. That’s exactly right. It’s only on the public roads and the occupy site, of course. It’s not privacy invading. Also, we supported any ad hoc protests. For example, there’s parts of it, the anti-protest protest, we also supporting the same equipment and the process.

Also, you provided the same...?

Everything is open innovation, so anyone can. As long as they have something to say, we let them say it. At the 30s, the same technology was also done that includes half a million people on the street. They were still able to use the same kind of technological broadcast what’s going on to the...

This is a drone photo, or is it...?

It is what?

A drone.

It is a drone photo, yes. There’s a lot of use of aerial drones to count the number. We also provided free WiFi to people who go to the occupy site.

To provide free WiFi for all the sites you need a lot of equipment.

Yes, so we worked with the Chunghwa Telecom, who provided a fiber optic line to a street, not to a address. [laughs] That’s the first time they provided. Instead of as street address, we just said to the camp outside the legislation, close to the 7-11. This you bring the high-speed fiber optic on.

In fact, it’s like you had a new account on Chunghwa Telecom?

They have a business where they can support outdoor activities.

They do that?

They do that already, but usually it takes a week or so to review, but because it’s occupy, it only took two days or three days. They also want to see high quality live stream, the Chunghwa Telecom people. [laughs]

They supported, also, the movement?

They supported, also, the movement. There’s also a bunch of journalist students. They call themselves the E-Forum.

E-Forum?

The E-Forum. They were professional journalist students. They were mostly people in the master class of journalism in the NTU, but also in other universities. They happened to be there, but they also broke in. They become the first bunch of people who report to CNN and to other international media what’s really what’s going on.

Basically, the g0v people took care of the infrastructure, the Internet connection, the website, where the E-Forum people provided the textual report, the interview, the unbiased coverage of the occupy. We worked very closely with them.

Your personal involvement in this g0v movement was?

A lot. I basically do anything that no other people seem to want to do. I’m the shortstop. As soon as there’s people taking things up, I'll just move on...

I was the first g0v person to go to the occupy site and provide my WiFi connection. At the time I didn’t know there was going to be occupy. I thought there was just protest for a night, so I just helped setting up connectivity for the civic media people there...

With your telephone?

It was my telephone, which is not exactly 4G. It’s HSDPA+, or pre-4G. After solving the network issue, I then switched to work on the website itself, the g0v website, the g0v.today. That’s my other project. I work with a lot of civic media people on this website, so it’s not just me. It’s a team of maybe 12 people.

Then, later on, I worked on the CCTV, as well, the public WiFi, as well, but always as soon as there’s someone more professional taking care of that, I switch to the next project. I was fueling the need.

You were already a group of people, this g0v? You are how big?

In our hackathons, people who show up it’s in the hundreds, but online it’s easily tens of thousands.

In Taiwan?

In Taiwan.

That many?

It’s a lot of people, but most people just participate casually. When there is a call for people to help digitize the campaign finance records, which are all in paper, the g0v people scan it, dice it into small chunks of pieces of text, call for people to crowdsource it, and very quickly 9,000 people came.

This kind of crowdsourcing is the way g0v operates. Whenever we need something for the public good we let the public do it. The casual practitioners and...

Would you say that this is easier in Taiwan because you are already a digitalized society?

Yes, definitely.

More than maybe even France?

It’s the combination of two things. It’s, first, because broadband is a human right here.

Broadband is a human right?

Yes, it is. Not just the digital opportunity centers, from schools to rural places, but actually even the most remote islands, we make sure there’s microwave or there’s fiber optic lines connecting these islands.

Since when?

It’s been NCC’s policy since forever, right?

It started in the late ’90s.

Broadband?

Broadband at the time was ADSL.

NCC was founded in 2006.

You’re very advanced, compared to others.

For a long time, it has become a policy to provide universal service of WiFi or broadband access for everyone.

There’s this element, and then?

The other element is that -- I’m 37 now -- we’re the first generation that enjoys the complete freedom of speech and assembly. People older than me, they were raised in the martial law era. People younger than me, like my brother, do not remember the marital law. [laughs]

There is a generation thing. The first generation that has the Internet access is also the first generation that has democracy.

Unlike in France, where people who work in the public administration, they’re a very special kind of people who understand the glory of 200 or 300 years of the Republic, [laughs] and the people who work on very geeky things, they’re another kind of people. In Taiwan it’s the same generation, and they’re the same people.

For me, and for my generation, Internet and democracy, they’re the same thing. They are not two things. That’s the second thing, in that there’s no glorious Republic and tradition that informs how to do democracy. Everyone is making as we go.

You’re just creating on the go. Very nice, very interesting. This was more or less a success?

It was a success. That was, actually, our motto during our intervention. I wasn’t aware that people were going to occupy when I supported broadcasting, but only a neutral Internet connect people inside/outside the wall, because we strongly believe that communication diminished conflict and misunderstanding.

It’s one of the neutral roles that g0v is playing, along with the pro bono lawyer team and the pro bono medical doctor team. The communication team, the g0v team, was also one of the three neutrals during the occupy. We were given a lot of trust and legitimacy, and provided the occupiers, but also the counter-protesters, as well as all the NGOs, tools to do consensus gathering for their work.

That’s my first foray into domestic politics.

Then after that you, yourself thought that you should do more politics, national politics, or was it that they just came and asked you to...?

Yeah. At the time, because this is a demonstration, so everyone can see that people who are initially very opposite to each other can nevertheless converge. We were sought, at the time, as advisers when similar things occur. For example, right after this, there was a free economic zone, the FEPZ.

OK, yes, Free Economic Zone.

Yeah, the Free Economic Pilot Zone.

FEPZ was, at the time, one of the things that the National Development Council really wanted to push, but the civil society has a lot of reservations, especially whether you increase our reliance on PRC and also whether you will result in an equal treatment, especially to the farmers, other medical practitioners and so on.

During the FEPZ discussion, I was sought by both sides. The National Development Council want to make a direct communication with civic media and journalists in a way that is very open and transparent. The civil society people who protest against FEPZ also want our advice on how to make a viral small booklet that let people see what’s interest about FEPZ.

In this neutral facilitating role, we were able to conduct a series of public live streamed communications directly between the head of the National Development Council, Professor C.M. Kuan and also the heads of the civil society protesters and civic media in a very pointed way to fuse each other’s’ visions together.

That was one of the very early examples of a collaborative meeting between who are nevertheless not cooperating with each other. Then, afterwards, there’s the Uber problem.

The Uber problem.

At that time Uber was operating legally in Taiwan, but after a while, in 2015, they started operating illegally. It used to be that they only worked with chartered costs and drivers with professional license, but around that time they started working with amateur drivers and using unchartered costs. It’s a problem everywhere in the world. It’s not just Taiwan, right?

It is.

At the time Minister Jaclyn Tsai reached out to the g0v people saying that we have a bunch of this kind of issues, where we continuously solve by inviting stakeholders, because it is epidemic of the mind that that spread through the society. It doesn’t really matter if we disclose Uber’s operation, Lyft will come in, everyone.

It’s easier if we can engage with all the stakeholders, rather than just one or two selected people. We are tasked to design a process that can accommodate thousands of stakeholders, not just one or two representing...

You mean all the drivers?

All the drivers, all the association of drivers, the Uber drivers, the passengers, also, and so on. It was a success. We were able to use...

Basically, you created a website?

Yeah, this is the website. It’s called vTaiwan, and we used artificial intelligence to let people propose their feelings and for other people to vote on each other’s feelings. They can see the Facebook and Twitter friends clustered among different feelings.

The trick here is that we say that we only give binding power, that is to say we only take to our consultation any sentiment that can resonate with a majority across all groups. People compete on consensus, rather than dissonance.

Also, you can’t reply to each other here. If you see something that you don’t agree, propose something better. In this kind of design, we see that, really, the only divisive statement, that there are very few, but actually most people agree on those things.

This is something that people don’t usually see on Facebook or on Twitter. On Facebook or Twitter, these divisive comments took 90 percent of people’s time is, frankly, a waste of time, but here we were able to get into the fine consensus of people.

Then we converge on the seven here that really resonate with everybody, like how insurance must be mandatory, registration must be mandatory, and professional driver’s license should be mandatory. Then we check with all the stakeholders on a live stream consultation so that they can see people’s consensus and commit to it. Only after everybody commit to it do we translate it into law.

Now Uber is operating legally in Taiwan, but only with chartered cars and drivers. You can call taxi using Uber app, but then you can also using other taxi app to call with search prizes or with cars not painted yellow so they’re competing on fair grounds,

Everybody see that it was coming, because it was a consensus including the Uber drivers. They are also agreeing with such things. We were able to use this process to process maybe a dozen or so emerging issues working with the minister, Jaclyn Tsai at the time, all the way to late 2015.

I do see. Was it your idea to do service to the government as a minister?

No, I don’t really care about my title.

It’s not title. It’s a function, anyway. You have a position that allows you to do things. Was it your idea?

No, it was Premier Lin Chuan’s idea. After this was ratified, it was August 2016. Around the time it was ratified, Lin Chuan was trying to find someone in a role of Jaclyn Tsai in the previous cabinet. Has asked me, and I said I can ask around my friends. I asked my friends, but none of them want to join the cabinet.

I’m like, "Well, I can give it a try." It was Lin Chuan who, during the redefinition of the Asia Silicon Valley plan that brought me into the discussion, and then asked me to find a minister.

Are you happy with it?

Very much so. I’m enjoying it.

You can do things that you couldn’t do if you weren’t in this position?

Not much.

Not much?

Not much, because I was kind of an understudy, already, in 2015. I worked, already, with thousands of public servants, but always in the role of a coach. They have something they don’t know how to engage with people. They find me, and then I try to give lectures and...

It’s kind of facilitator?

It is facilitator. Even now, in the role of Digital Minister, I’m still primarily a facilitator. I never give command to ministries or public servants. Usually they come to me.

Basically, your role is to the betterment of the public service in Taiwan?

Yes, exactly. That’s right, or anywhere.

Or anywhere. It’s not for the betterment of democracy, maybe, in itself?

If the public service trusts the people more, then the people have more power to set agenda. If the public service doesn’t trust the people, the people never really get a say anyway. I would say I’m not working directly with a representative democracy or traditional democracies, but through this kind of work we were able to create space for participative democracy.

It’s not directly on the referendum or the elections, but we’re creating a environment where prior to any referendum or any voting there’s better understanding.

Do you think that what you are doing now can help to ease one of the problems that we have in Taiwan, that’s a very divided society with blue, green, not trusting each other at all, and having hard feelings?

I think so.

Can you help that?

We did already helped with some very concrete cases, like in our e-petition there was a petition with 8,000 people petitioning for Taiwan to change our time zone to the same as Japan and Korea as symbolic moving away from the PRC. There’s also 8,000 people petitioning for us to remain GMT+8, that love to stay the same as our current position.

Our collaboration workshop, we’re able to find the petitioners on both sides. The two of them both came to talk with all the different ministries to find our common values. We were able to discover through that collaborative workshop our common value is to make Taiwan more visible, more visible uniquely in the world. That’s agreed by those sides.

They were also able to agree, because we checked with all the facts, that it’s not really energy save thing. It may complicate the labor schedule and things like that. At the end, it doesn’t really help because while you may make international news briefly, the PRC can just say, "Hong Kong has its own currency." It’s normal for a country to have two different systems regionally.

It doesn’t really help the cost in the long run. We were able to say, "This will cost this much money, not too much benefit. This much money may be better spent on promoting Taiwan’s uniqueness overseas." Then, we were able to brainstorm various ways for the Minister of Culture, Minister of Economy, even PDIS to contribute to this uniqueness position.

Together, we shaped the civil society’s expectations on diplomacy without actually changing the time zone. It’s very well received by both sides of the position. 8,000 people on each side is 16,000 people, it’s a lot.

It’s a lot.

Bit by bit, we’re not saying that we’re able to make the blue-green thing go away. Just 5,000 people every time, we were able to change people’s perspectives and find common values.

It seems that even talking with the taxi drivers, some of them are Taiwanese. Some of them are mainland, maybe not themselves, but their fathers. When you talk to them, you have totally different appreciation of what is going and what should be done in regard with China.

This is a huge problem I see for this small country. How to address the huge problem? You’re sure that you can help with that?

Yeah, I think so. A little bit of plate conflict and earthquake may not be a bad thing in the end, because Taiwan grows five centimeters every year because of earthquake. What we need to do is work on the infrastructure, the building material of democracy, so that when every time an earthquake comes, it makes us stronger, rather than falls down and kills people.

The resilience of the civil society is key, because the resilience is around people who care strongly about social issues. In Taiwan, there’s people who care about our environment very much. There’s people who care about animal rights. There’s people who care about LGBTQ issues. All these are not restricted to blue and green. The stronger we can make the civil society, the less hijacked we’ll be by ideologies.

My last question will be about China. We know that China is putting right now a huge surveillance system with the social credit system and everything. This is the nightmare becoming true. It’s becoming true for Chinese people. At the immediate front, there’s you, Taiwan, and maybe even us. Who knows? Do you think that whatever you’re doing can help against that?

What we’re doing is not directly in opposition to that. What we’re trying to show is that if people voluntarily contribute, instead of being passively scored, it actually results in better collective decisions.

This is existential proof that information technology can be used in an active way, rather than a passive way. As an existential proof, again, it’s up to people to see that this is a preferable alternative to violence. We are not directly saying that our system must be transplanted to the PRC overnight. We’re not saying that.

It won’t.

Not overnight, but perhaps in the future. I still have hope.

[laughs]

In PRC, you may think that their great firewall is a lot of power. Still, they cannot shut down the open source collaboration website, GitHub, because they have a scientific community. Their artificial intelligence and other research community, they need connection to the open source world to thrive.

If they cut out GitHub, if they cut out the blockchain systems, even though they may be shielding themselves away from some inharmonious speech, the scientific programs would suffer greatly. At the moment, PRC’s science factions are still winning this battle. They are still allowing access to these international networks.

All the things on GitHub that reveals the past, or some people want to hidden the cultures of the PRC, they are still plainly visible on GitHub and on blockchain systems. I do not think that the PRC now has the absolute dominance on information access. In fact, there are plenty of people inside PRC that can still climb over the walls and access the outside.

Less and less, you know that. The VPNs are being...

It’s becoming more technically challenging, yes. But on the other hand, the VPN technology is also improving. I’m not exactly pessimistic. The current generation of VPNs may be shut down more easily, but there’s more generations.

To come?

Especially the blockchain related systems, unless they don’t want Ethereum and Bitcoin inside PRC.

That’s possible.

It’s not that easy, though. Especially Ethereum, is becoming one of the clearinghouses even of MasterCard. Other systems are using or trying to use the Ethereum technology. It’s becoming a new generation of Internet protocol. On it, it’s even harder to censor things. You can’t take things off. If they have...

You think that one day we will have a system that will be un-censorable.

Without shutting the whole thing down, yeah. We’re seeing a lot of decentralized technology that’s shaped this way. I don’t think, even technologically speaking, PRC has an upper hand in continuing their censorship regime.

What we’re trying to do, again, is just popularize these kind of open innovation ecosystems. Let the people in PRC see that this is not actually this level the way they imagined it. It could be a useful open innovation either for their economic sector. Internally, they’re having this debate as we speak.

They are having it.

They are having this debate as we speak. Maybe it’s not a lost cause... I am not that pessimistic.

If people there want access to those tools, where do they go?

They can download through what we call the dark net.

You have first to access the dark net?

Yeah, but then after you download the first copy from the dark net, you can replicate it very easily.

It’s not illegal to operate such networks per se, it’s just the content that’s being censored. Part of our contribution is to make sure that even in a restrictive environment inside an intranet controlled by a corporate or a state, we can still run collaborative technologies securely inside it.

For example, Sandstorm.io is one of the systems that I brought into the public service here, and for it to work in a very firewalled, cyber security hardened way, but it’s still a collaborative software. We pay quite a bit to hackers to try to attack it and harden it.

I also give lectures to anyone who’d want to use this kind of intranet democratic systems. There’s free software communities in the PRC also who are very interested in this kind of systems. They’re also using it domestically, and they’re...

If you’re just an ordinary Chinese, and you want to access this, what do you do?

You have to find a friendly civic hacker at the moment, which is not the hard part...

Not that hard?

Not that hard.

I don’t know.

Especially in the cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, or other more Pacific-Ocean-facing cities, it’s actually not that hard. Of course, I can’t talk the same about the inland cities. Even the Internet infrastructure are still brittle there, and it’s very difficult. Especially in the coastal cities, it’s not hard to connect to the local civic hackers.

Do you know of the so-called dissidents who are already connected to this?

Yeah. There’s many journalists...

Journalists?

...working on whistleblowing or working on protecting the human right there and so on. It’s not a coincidence that the headquarter of Reporters Without Border is in Taiwan, because we’re kind of a hub, which we can provide 100 percent freedom of speech to any foreign journalists working on whistleblowing about Taiwan or about any other jurisdictions.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

My pleasure.

I see that you are very busy with the journalists, but you have some other things to do also.

Yeah. We have our weekly meeting starting in 10 minutes. [laughs]

Can you send me the transcript of the previous...

The transcript?

Yeah, I have.

You have already done it?

Ning Yeh, he has already done it.

When can I receive this transcript?

I don’t know. Maybe in a couple of days. We’ll send it for a transcription service.

You will send it to me directly.

Yeah. It’s a website link that you can open it and edit on the website.

You can open the link in.

Fantastic. It’s really inspiring. You know, we’re not used to have so much detail. It’s all government things. It’s not related to what people do in France usually. As a journalist, I can tell you we’re not in touch with this world.

Maybe you can talk with it a little more. [laughs]

Probably I should, but I know a lot of journalists. No one of who I know is in touch with this, maybe because we don’t need to protect that much ourselves.

That may be true. It can be true.

We are not aware.

Cool.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

Thank you.

Wish you all the success.