Hello, Minister Tang.

Hey.

Long time no see.

Long time no see. How’s it going in Canada?

Good. One second. Let me turn my camera on.

Sure.

One second.

Here we go.

There you go. You can see my laundry in the back.

That’s right. That’s right. Not very high resolution.

I wouldn’t think it’s laundry hadn’t you told me. OK, now I know.

[laughs]

Now I cannot unsee them...

I sent a couple questions about 15 minutes ago. Most of them are pretty straightforward.

A lot of the questions I have are just following up on some of the things that happened with the OGP in Taiwan since 2013. That does appear to be the first time that Taiwan had some interest in joining the OGP. Does that sound about right to you?

Yeah. As far as I know, there was one official bid. It was back when Simon Chang was Deputy Premier, I think. It’s around that time.

I never saw anything in the news, in the English news at least, and I didn’t see anything in the Chinese news about what was the final resolution of that first bid. What happened to that first bid?

At the time, the steering committee considered the case and also considered the fact that Taiwan is not a UN member or a UN-defined universally recognized state government. The initial negotiation was predicated on this fact.

I don’t think it’s formally said that "it’s because of this reason that Taiwan is not admitted", but rather considering the fact, the steering committee at the time did not wish to accept Taiwan’s proposal and associated national action plan at the time.

At that time then, Taiwan also concurrently proposed a national action plan for the OGP at the same time?

An outline. Of course, per the due process, the NAP would have to be jointly discussed with civil society organizations. A proposing government is responsible to at least set some high-level outline to begin the discussion. For a consultation, you have to have this outline.

So yes, Taiwan did prepare an outline at the time.

From what I understand also about the OGP they also require that a specific department or unit is in charge from the government side. Which side at that time did Taiwan choose, I should say which government department or unit did Taiwan choose to be in charge of the OGP bid?

It’s just the administration, the Executive Yuan, the de facto unit who drafted the initial plan.

All the ministries related to the open-government issues at the time contributed, but the one who assembled or aggregated the departmental or ministerial distributions was the National Development Council, also freshly minted at that time.

Has Taiwan continued to apply to the OGP since that previous application?

Not as such. Not with an national action plan, not formally like the first bid, no.

What was the reason why that it hasn’t done a subsequent official bid?

The preconditions mentioned during the initial bid has not changed.

I find it quite curious from the OGP standpoint because I’m sure you’ve noticed a lot of their terminology uses things like member governments as opposed to member state or member country. That kind of language seems to not preclude Taiwan from joining. Was that your thought also when you went to Paris in 2016? Were you looking for...?

When I went to Paris, I was there to explore several possibilities. One is for a city-level government to join the subnational program, also freshly minted at the time. I told the g0v.news reporter, who happens to be the very same person talking to me now, about that. It’s not a formal proposal. It’s just an exploratory conversation really.

Far as I know, the conversation started around that time. During my keynote-ish speech, I said we’re open to any arrangement. We’re not specific about one particular venue or formality of Taiwan’s definition. Basically, I remained open to any possible conversations.

Was there any possibility that Taipei or any other city in Taiwan could join on the sub-national level? Is that a possibility still?

We checked the subnational charter, and one of the precondition at the time was that it has to be under a existing national-action-plan country. If the upper level does not have a national action plan, then the sub-national action plan has nothing to hook onto. That still remains one of the outstanding issues.

Basically, Taiwan would have to join first as a member government before Taipei, or Kaohsiung, or Taichung could join as a sub-national government?

That’s our impression at the time, yes. That was what, two years ago? Yeah.

That probably hasn’t changed also then from your understanding.

We haven’t received any indication that it has changed.

What is the level of communication between Taiwan and the OGP? Do you have any contact person, or is there anyone that you’re relatively familiar with that you keep in contact with at the OGP on a regular basis?

I wouldn’t say on a regular basis, but there’s several efforts like the crowd.law efforts that both the co-chair, Mukelani Dimba, and our designer, Shu-Yang Lin, both participated and is a signatory actually of the CrowdLaw Manifesto.

There’s various open government related endeavors that involves the OGP, OGP-active members, also active members in Taiwan’s open government plan, also the Personal Democracy Forum and the New York training workshop afterwards. There’s also plenty of people who wear multiple hats, and so on.

I would say there’s an ongoing discussion, but it’s not specific about OGP or Taiwan’s membership of OGP, but rather using open-government ideals or open-government values to collaborate on specific projects and specific networks. It’s not specifically about the Taiwan government and OGP per se, but rather endeavors of common interest.

I see. Taiwan would be such an ideal partner for the OGP just in so many ways. Taiwan is a leader in open data. It’s a leader in participatory platforms. The vTaiwan platform, the Join platform are great platforms and good examples for other countries in East Asia. It has one of the strongest civic tech organizations in East Asia, possibly all of Asia.

It seems like Taiwan would have a lot to give to the OGP. Do they see that also, or is that not something that they have noticed as of yet?

Certainly, we have already contributed a lot just by participating in previous events, the Paris Summit for example, there’s plenty of Taiwan participation. Even this year without any pre-planning, there’s also 20 people from Taiwan. The civil society certainly made a very strong statement that Taiwan has an active civic participation community.

Of course, the government -- because of this year’s venue, we cannot plan well in advance -- but we did support in terms of logistics and in terms of the planning and scheduling of the flights, accommodation, and things like that.

It is by itself a show of mutual trust between the civil society organization and the government in Taiwan at the highest level. My office, we sent two people to the OGP. OGP is generally aware that Taiwan is not only a qualified but an outstanding contributor to the open-government values.

If Taiwan can’t contribute to the OGP, what are some ways that you think Taiwan could contribute to open government, open data, or the civic tech movement regionally, perhaps the Asia-Pacific region, or globally?

The g0v Summit is a very good start. Seriously, because it really is growing in not only the amount of attention that it receives from the global networks, but actually, after each summit, we see a lot of spawned international collaborations that invites people in Taiwan with similar experiences that they would see in g0v Summit to visit, or to be fellows.

We get a lot of interest from also academics to study the Taiwan experience in doing civic tech, and so on.

So the civil society organizations here clearly plays a leading role in not only setting the agenda regionally on the topics you just mentioned, but also globally by positioning Taiwan as a partner.

I love the term you used, a partner, as in partnership for the goals, not just sustainable development goals but also all the other regionally important agenda.

This position of partnership is one of Taiwan’s strongest when it comes to international awareness, in what Taiwan can offer.

From an international-relations perspective, Taiwan is often blocked from joining very important international fora because of China’s position on Taiwan. Is that the case with the OGP, or is it something that could be potential, or is it not just because it’s something that China’s not interested in? They’re not interested in open governments, so they don’t care about this particular issue.

I have not received any message or indication that the PRC has or has not an interest on the open-government partnership. I don’t have any communication around this.

I’ve never in my experience seen anything that says that China is interested in this concept of open government even. We’ve certainly seen open-data portals before, but this term of open government has not been bandied about by, say for example, by the PRC or by Beijing from what I’ve seen. Does that also mesh with your experience?

There is a qualifying standard in the OGP that any participating governments need to qualify before even submitting the outline of the NAP. It is a self-assessment, but I’m not in contact with anyone linked to or from the PRC in relation to the self-assessment. I really don’t know.

If Taiwan can’t join OGP as a member government, what other ways do you hope Taiwan can participate in the OGP?

There’s various topics or thematic areas that OGP are currently actively looking into. There’s the Open Parliament e-Network or OPeN. There’s various networks around the topics you just mentioned, around open data, around collaboration on civic participation, spaces for civil service organizations and things like that.

One of the very good step is just to continue to make these themes vocal and apparent in venues such as the g0v Summit or the various other endeavors like, for example, the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy recently signed the CrowdLaw Manifesto.

Maybe the crowd.law activities is one of the ways where the Taiwan, maybe members of parliament, maybe members of administration, can also showcase our commitment to those open values. It will intersect naturally with the OGP endeavors.

Maybe formally, as members who both participate in the same network or the same endeavor, or maybe informally like people just run into each other at the g0v Summit. That level, the operation level, is where we found the least resistance. That is where we’re focusing our energy on at this point.

Taiwan can participate in the OGPs by sending members of civil society to the OGP Summit. At the same time, I feel that it’s a bit of a shame that Taiwan can only send members of Civil Society to it. I’m sure you’ve seen it in the numbers of people that Taiwan sends compared to other countries in Asia-Pacific.

Taiwan sends a huge amount of members of civil society to the OGP. In 2016, they sent 13 members, which was the largest amount of members in East Asia if we’re talking about, say for example, Korea, Japan, China.

Then this year, I haven’t looked at the other countries, but almost certain with 20 members from Taiwan, that’s probably also the largest amount of members from East Asia that attended it. Isn’t it just a shame that it’s only civil society that can participate in the OGP?

I personally participated in Paris. Also, people in my office also participated this year.

Speaking personally, not as a minister but as a conservative anarchist, I have no problem of giving a keynote and being introduced as the Digital Minister of Taiwan, but labeling Taiwan as a nonprofit. Personally, I have no problem with that, for the record.

I do understand that our Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other diplomatic-relationship people would prefer something that’s more official and something that’s more formal. I do respect their wish in that way. I’m just speaking personally, because I do wish that anything the government currently can do, at least the civil society can have a picture of, have a context of the government’s proceedings.

Eventually we’ll maybe evolve into a multi-stakeholder a governance system -- maybe not in my lifetime. But at least in this lifetime, what I’m trying to do is to making sure that all the government proceedings, all the government projects, all the government regulations, and so on, there’s sufficient space for the civil society to participate in the agenda-setting.

So I have no problem; I don’t think it is a shame when I participate in Paris that I’m labeled as a Digital Minister of a nonprofit called Taiwan.

Most people in Taiwan actually don’t know about the OGP. Let’s be honest. I think globally we can say that open government, open data, civic tech is still very much a niche thing. Do you think if there was wider attention about what the OGP was or open government was, do you think that there’d be more demand from the Taiwanese public for it to participate in the OGP as Taiwan?

Part of my narrative at the moment saying that we’re focusing on #SDG17, partnership for the goals, is to position civic tech and position open government as an instrument for cross-sectorial, international collaboration for the sustainable development goals.

This is a role that is more outward-looking and that is not something that we do open government for open-government partnership’s sake, but that we do #SDG17 to further the trust between the various sectors and various interest in humanity.

I would admit that #SDGs is also not a household name in Taiwan either.

It’s not in Canada either.

It’s not like it’s gaining us much... On the same point, in Taiwan because the general population values innovation, that’s part of Taiwan’s identity. "It’s where innovation happens."

Also, in addition to industrial innovation, Taiwan people also pride ourselves on social innovation, meaning that innovation that works with the society that solves social issues. On this, by definition, civic tech is a subset of social innovation -- like civic-social, tech-innovation.

It is a larger umbrella that the Taiwan people can feel more comfortable identifying with, because civic to social is like the democratic process, the participation, and so on. If we position this as an instrument for more social participation, it’s easier for people to accept. Again, tech sounds like one fraction of engineers, but innovation, that’s something that everybody can get behind.

The National Social Innovation Plan is consciously embedding the civic-tech values but using open government and #SDG17 as the rallying value, to enable the society to deliver the goals together.

The larger Social Innovation umbrella term, at least, is the one that PDIS, that my office is using at the time, to describe something that certainly includes civic tech and open government, but not limited to civic tech.

That’s about it. My last question would be if the OGP offered Taiwan membership, how would you reply to that? How would you feel about that?

Awesome. I would feel great. I would feel awesome. The open government partnership in the end is a partnership. As I have stressed in our interview, Taiwan is a partner regardless of whether we’re an official member of any sort.

Taiwan has been a stable partner to the open-government values. Any way to mutually enhance recognition of this partnership, for me, is a step forward. That’s it. We’re a partner regardless of whether we’re an official partner, and any mutual recognition is a good thing.

That’s about all the questions I have then, Minister Tang. Thank you so much.

Mm-hmm. I get to publish this on YouTube?

You totally can. Absolutely, feel free.

OK. Let’s do that. I’ll send you the link. Thank you.

OK, great, yeah.

Cheers, bye.

Have a great day.

Mm-hmm.

Bye.