[Spanish]

He was informed that you’re not a traditional student, that you didn’t want to follow the normal path.

Yeah. As I mentioned in my talk, I dropped out of junior high school as soon as I turned 15 years old, but it was the blessing of the rector of my junior high school.

I told her that education is happening on the World Wide Web, which was just invented at that time. My textbooks were out of date. She agreed and so the principal actually covered for me while I studied with my friends on the World Wide Web, and later co-founded a startup.

[Spanish]

[Spanish]

How did you convince your rector?

She told me if I study hard and get into the top university and pass GRE or something, and study with the professor, whose book that I liked, I have a chance of working in the lab of the professor as a postdoc or something.

I told her and printed out the email that I just wrote the professor directly by commenting on his preprint, his article, his essay. He didn’t know I am just 15 years old. We just started collaborating on the Internet.

After she read the print out, she understand that the goal is the same, but I found a faster route.

[Spanish]

[Spanish]

How would it work if you were to be summoned to Argentina and were in charge of causing the cultural change in Argentina regarding education?

As I explained in my talk, I think it’s important to get into everybody’s mind that broadband access to the Internet at affordable cost is a human right. Everything else follows from this.

Indeed, when I was 15 year old but I cannot pay for the Internet access, I cannot quit school. I must be confined into the old education system. Universal access to the Internet would be the first thing that I will try to get everybody to accept as the norm of our times.

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In Argentina, there is broad access to Internet. It’s comparatively very cheap, but we still don’t see this cultural change.

First of all, I think there is a difference between Internet access in the majority of population and Internet access as a human right. It’s a different idea.

Even in the most rural, most mountainous, most indigenous place in Taiwan, we make sure that we build broadband access. Even in places where people cannot afford tablets, we’ll make sure there’re library, carry fresh enough, like new in the past three years, tablets for people to lend to use as productivity tools.

I think the society only moves forward as a whole if people can see that their innovation work even for the poor, the least connected people. I think that actually increases the motivation for people to innovate for the whole society, not just for a few municipalities.

I still think that there is a small difference…

[Spanish]

[Spanish]

Even with access, here the Internet is seen as something for entertainment, for fun. How do you make a cultural shift so that it’s determined as a space for education?

I think the important thing here is that the teachers must not see themself as holders of standard answers. In Taiwan, when I was young, I don’t like the education system because it’s just one standard answer for many topics. Even if we think out of the box, nobody is rewarded for thinking out of the box to solve a problem in a shortcut.

Because my principal, being very open and liberal, accepted my shortcut, I was able to then work with the community online to change Taiwan’s thinking about the curriculum, starting this year, in all our basic education system, the teacher no longer hold the right answer, the standardized answer.

The teacher become a facilitator that learns with the student. The student determine which issues on the society, environment, or economy they want to solve. This problem-based learning is no longer just a few alternative schools, but part of our basic education.

[Spanish]

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Basically, in order to change, you would have to promote lateral thinking?

Yes. I will use one example, also, with somebody that’s just 13 years old. When we roll out a new curriculum and a different way to teach mathematics and science, the people in the first year of junior high school are now presented and then met with a teacher that introduce this.

Suppose you’re the president of the islands of Taiwan and you’re faced with climate change and also with plastic waste problem, and you must introduce a circular economy plan. Otherwise, by the year 2030, that is to say when this person become an adult, Taiwan will be inhabitable.

The student actually very quickly connected to the Internet community caring about eco-design, about circular economy and wrote very long slides outlining their vision of the 2030 sustainable goals. The teacher said to the parent that “Oh, this must be a very gifted children because they design such a good plan.”

Parents said, “No, actually, before the new curriculum, they placed completely in the last of the class when it comes to mathematics, because there is no motivation to learn mathematics. Now, because understanding that when they become an adult, the earth will be an inhabitable place, unless they do something about it, they find the motivation to solve the problem.”

[Spanish]

[Spanish]

He really wants to connect your solutions to the concentration here because he thinks it’s very interesting. For example, it’s very common here to see that people are seeking a job. There are three blocks of people waiting in line expecting to be hired. What they have in their hands is a printed version of their resume. It’s very likely that their future boss would just throw it in the garbage.

What would you recommend for these people to do? What is the alternative?

Back when I started my first company, I did not actually start with any customers or any clients in sight. I only started with an idea that it should be easier for people who auction off their items online. That was around the time before eBay got very popular. We built the first C2C auction site in Taiwan.

That was only because we look at what we needed, our personal need, as well as innovative with people who share the same need, and then find a better way than storing it to a garage or to have a sale in the marketplace in the weekend, because that will only reach a limited number of people. You think online marketplace, we can reach a very wide variety of people, and build a community out of it.

I would suggest to start with your own needs but don’t do everything alone. Just find people around the world who are encountering the same issues, and then build on their innovations. There’s many innovations that are easy to replicate that doesn’t have a copyright or a patent. You don’t have to pay any fee or price. You can just start building with those appropriate technologies yourselves.

Perfect. [Spanish]

[Spanish]

How do you reach this level of consensus because so far in Argentina, at least, the Internet has been a space of total confrontation? Instead of consensus, there’s differentiation. There’s conflict. How do you reach this stage where this space becomes a place to agree?

I think it’s important to note that our idea of 共識 or common understanding in Taiwan. It’s not the same word as the English word “consensus.” Common understanding means in Internet language “rough consensus,” meaning that we can live with it. It’s a lower threshold. A high consensus is something you can sign your name on. It’s actually very time consuming to reach a real consensus.

On Internet, because everybody’s participating part time, if you want that level of consensus, only people have the most time, have the time to stay with you, and they win the argument kind of by default because they have more time to spend on it. Just by asking not the question, “What is your perfect answer? What is the best idea?” we just say, “Oh, here are some ideas. Can you live with it?”

It’s actually very easy to get rough consensus, if you just ask people, “Can you live with it?”

[Spanish]

[Spanish]

If we seek consensus, that’s the term we have in common, is there a certain amount of people you have that are involved in reaching this? Do you focus on the subject or on what? What is the focus of this consensus, and what type of group or what number of people do you need?

In order for any citizen to initiate a dialog of this kind with the national government, all they have to do is find 5,000 people to sign for them on the National Participation website. 5,000 people ensure a conversation, but it doesn’t have to be signatures. It could also be the local people decide to hold a workshop, a scenario planning workshop, on their common future of that precinct.

If they let the national government know, the national government also makes sure that as conversation happens to the local context. So one is the citizen bringing their issues to the national platform and one is they’re having their local issues but inviting the national public service to their local vicinity, and these two both work.

[Spanish]

[Spanish]

Is 5,000 enough to reach a consensus on a regional level and then national?

5,000 is to make sure there is a national conversation. 5,000 want to talk about this, but not all must agree on it. They just have to agree that this is important to talk about for us to notice it and hold a conversation. It could be on something that is totally not traditionally public service topic.

There were 8,000 want to change the time zone of Taiwan to be +9 from +8, to move it eastward, one time zone. 8,000 people petitioned so that we stay in the same time zone. 16,000 people together petitioned on the time zone issue, that, we hold a conversation about that involving both sides. They actually agreed.

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What happens with big topics? For example, in the region, there was a big problem with the fire in the Amazon region. How would you deal with a situation like this?

We talk about particular aspects of big topic. For example, we just, two days ago, concluded an online conversation about what do we do about lifting restrictions of hikers on our mountains, on mountaineering. This is a very big topic because Taiwan used to have a lot of restriction on climbing the mountains because of our authoritarian era regulations. We’re now relaxing them.

It is a very big topic, involving many different aspects. For example, there is an aspect about education, an aspect about infrastructure, an aspect about the online system, and aspects about the sharing of duties and so on. We make sure there is one conversation for each very specific aspect. We do five of them concurrently.

[Spanish]

[Spanish]

How was the transition from an authoritarian regime to a more democratic one, and so horizontal?

I think in Taiwan, because our constitution already said that it’s a republic of citizens (民國), within the constitution, there are already some roots for direct democracy or direct referendum to create new laws and direct democracy to determine the future of the country and not just representative politics. It’s always in the constitution.

Because people, even in the authoritarian era, hold these ideas as regulatory thoughts, like, “One day we will get there.” It’s still in generations of people educated in Taiwan that someday if the technology is right, that we don’t have to have a martial law anymore, someday we will have direct democracy. That’s well within the original ideas more than 100 years ago of Dr. Sun Yat-sen.

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It’s very fortunate that by the time we are lifting our martial law, partly, due to the fact that the personal computer is so easily accessible, people think about democracy when we had personal computers.

For us, it’s not about the elite bureaucrat controlling all the numbers, because when the time comes for democracy, everybody has their powerful machines called personal computers. The idea of direct access to information, for example, is from the very beginning after the lifting of the martial law. That enabled a strong social sector that has more legitimacy than the government.

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[Spanish]

When you were offered your position as minister, who offered it to you? How did they offer it to you? What did they say?

The premier at the time, Dr. Lin Chuan, asked me to find a digital [laughs] minister. The interesting thing is that I work with the previous cabinet. Dr. Simon Chang was at the time the premier transitioning to Dr. Lin Chuan.

Both, they are nonpartisan. They don’t belong to any parties. Because of that, they were able to do the handoff in a transparent way. Simon Chang asked all the ministry to produce a checkpoint document for everybody to see. Dr. Lin Chuan’s team took the same information from the public Internet [laughs] to start doing the transition.

Even at the time I’m not part of the new cabinet, I still have the same access to documents as the new cabinet because of this open transition. After five months, they started asking me if I would like to help find a digital minister.

[Spanish]

Five months after Lin Chuan took the transition, they started seeking a digital minister. They asked me if I can recommend somebody. I asked all my friends, but they’re busy running their business. [laughs] Nobody wanted to be working as a digital minister.

I told Dr. Lin Chuan that I can serve this position, but only with three conditions. The three conditions which I talked in my talk is location independence, anywhere I work, I am at work. It’s radical transparency, all the meeting that I chair, I publish the entire transcript. Finally, it’s voluntary association, meaning I take no orders and I give no orders.

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In Buenos Aires, I’m working.

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[laughs] He doesn’t understand, how do you work if you give no orders and receive no orders? Does that mean it’s just creative?

I make suggestions, recommendations.

Of course, my office is, at most, one person from each ministry. For example, the National Communication Commission, Counselor Yeh Ning is previously a director general of the legal department there. He agreed to become a cofounder [laughs] of my office. We are not in a commanding relationship. He still reports to the NCC.

Theoretically [laughs] to the NCC, and NCC pays his salary.

Pays the check. All his scoring, evaluation, he does it himself. I’m not holding any authority over him, but I make some good ideas that NCC may consider implementing. Vice versa, the NCC may make some idea that I think is worth implementing.

Everybody who joined my office agreed to work out loud, meaning making their work available to other ministry to who join my office to access and brainstorm. This is the kind of horizontal leadership.

[Spanish]

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Brainstorming. There’s no Spanish word for brainstorming. [laughs]

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Just to be clear, not all ministry have joined my office. The minister of defense never sent anyone. We have the ministry of foreign service, of culture, of education, of interior, of the people-facing ministries, of law also.

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He’s still trying to figure out how…This concept is so new that no one’s giving orders or receiving orders, particularly in the executive branch. Are there other nations who have applied this form of governance?

In Taiwan, I’m just one of the nine horizontal ministers. This is not something I invented. The nine horizontal ministers, we don’t have our own ministries. There’s no vertical command.

The horizontal ministers enters the politics with the explicit mandate to make sure that the values that are incompatible across ministries must be made compatible by the horizontal minister. We call this the minister without portfolio. It sometimes have counterpart in other government. Just look for ministers without portfolio. This is not a new idea.

[Spanish]

[Spanish]

Which areas apply this method?

You mean in Taiwan?

Yes. One of nine.

Yeah, one of nine. I’m one of nine. I’m the horizontal minister in charge of open government, social innovation, youth engagement. There’s also a horizontal minister for legal coherence to make sure that the ministries’ laws and bills don’t contradict each other.

There’s also a horizontal minister in charge of science and technology planning to make sure that all the ministries share the same science and technology conception, and so on and so forth.

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Can you please list the nine ministries that have this open method?

No. There’s nine horizontal ministers. We oversee all 32 ministries together.

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How much personnel do you have working for you?

I work with the government. Nobody work for me.

As I work with the government, I don’t work by myself either, instead I work with the citizens, including public service. The important differentiation is working with, not for.

Perfect.

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Just to explain more directly, in my office, the space, there are around 22 people working full-time on whatever they want. [laughs]

In each ministry, there is also a team, what we call participation officers that are in charge for emerging issues like the petition and meeting with the people where they are.

Altogether, this extended network is around 100 people. Each of them is also maybe a section chief, maybe a director general. They also have their teams to back them up.

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What role do the audio-visual people, let’s say the press or also like you mentioned this TV show, the audio-visual sector, what role does it have in expanding this participatory form of governance?

I’m going to give you a gift that we are using as training material for participation officers. It’s a comic book, it’s a manga in six languages. Not only the Taiwanese languages, but indigenous, Japanese, and English. The important thing of delivering in manga, in cartoon, or in anime is because it reaches more people.

When they’re busy, they are distracted, they’re still attracted to the idea of public service because it’s fun. It demands only 15 seconds of their attention and they can understand the social issue in a very quick way.

After that, when they’re interested, they would donate 15 minutes of their time to start participating. If their idea became public policy, they would donate then 15 hours of their time for face-to-face consultations. It’s a gradual thing, but the first always starts with good communication.

[Spanish]

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How do you imagine the year 2050?

By year 2050, it won’t matter if you’re in Buenos Aires and I’m in Taipei. We will be able to very transparently just meet, both in reality as well as in virtual reality anywhere, so that we can put on some glasses, and people from all over the world would join us in those empty chairs.

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The physical distance will no longer constraint our social circles. We’re able to build our social circles based on the common values that we identify.

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[laughs] How old are you?

I’m 38.

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From the moment you were born until you were about 15, did you imagine the world how it is today and you expect it to be?

Yes, completely.

[Spanish]

[Spanish]

You seem to be very optimistic. For example, there is a current now with the whole subject of climate change that is very catastrophic. There’s also the menace of a nuclear threat. What keeps you so optimistic?

The copyright law, because when I dropped out of high school, my education is from Project Gutenberg. People volunteer to type all the classics into an electronic book that I can read. However, because of copyright, at the time of 1996, the copyright says that everything must be published only until around the 1910. Everything else afterward is still under copyright.

Project Gutenberg cannot digitize those books. My entire reading before I become an adult is from the public domain books published before the First World War. That paints a much more optimistic civilization picture.

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When the Premier Lin Chuan asked me what motivates me, is it out of societal duty? Do I have some social mission I want to achieve? Do I have a vision I want the society to follow and so on as a minister?

I just said, “No, I’ll start working with your cabinet for fun.”

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[Spanish]

[laughs]

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He said that’s probably the best response, because if you’re having fun, it means your mind is in full attention.

Yes. Also, if it’s out of passion, it will just decrease over time. People burn out when they’re working on passion alone, but because it’s fun to meet new ideas and new people, I stay refreshed every day.

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[laughs] Are you the same in your personal life?

What do you mean? I enjoy…

Outside of the workspace?

[laughs] I enjoy my personal life. I also must confess that after working in the public sector, I become like a celebrity. There is not much of a personal space now. [laughs]

[Spanish]

[Spanish]

What political leaders do you admire? Not necessarily politicians, it could also be public figures, social activists.

When I first stepped into the world of free software, I read a lot of the early anarchists’ work, people who are religious anarchists, and people who are anarchists because they have this idea of Daoism, of the natural order taking care of people’s needs without pushing too hard on it, of the Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu schools in old Warring States and the Springs and Autumns time.

Both the Eastern and the Western anarchist traditions, or Daoism depending, informed my thoughts.

Is it Dao or Tao?

Dao, Daoism.

[Spanish]

[Spanish]

When you refer to anarchist, do you mean political anarchist or is this a more liberal-minded movement?

I call myself a conservative anarchist. Conversation means that I respect the traditions of the indigenous Austronesian culture, of the ethnic Han culture with the lineage from Confucius and Lao Tzu and Mozi and so on.

I respect the traditions of our newer immigrations with their ideas around, for example, the Muslim idea or Christian ideas. All those culture traditions must be conserved and respected. That’s what conservative means to me. What anarchist means to me is just people starting to form common values without the need to give order or take order.

[Spanish]

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It was a pleasure to meet you. He’s interested in knowing if you’ve met in other places people who have a role similar to yours in any type of government?

Many governments now, I think Australia and many Scandinavian countries had this idea of a digital ambassador, someone who works to communicate the philosophies of that country to the large multinationals like Facebook or Google and so on.

A digital ambassador that talk to those semi-sovereign entities is not a Taiwan-only idea. Many other countries have them, too. That is also part of my job. My job is also to make sure that there are free software alternatives to those global companies.

[Spanish]

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Lastly, if you could please leave two pieces of advice or recommendations for Argentina to execute now. [laughs]

The first is a favorite lyric from my favorite poet, Leonard Cohen. He said in a song called “Anthem,” “Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything… that is how the light gets in.”

[Spanish]

[Spanish]

Very beautiful. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

We will publish this transcript after you do. We will embargo it until you publish.

[Spanish]

[Spanish]

He publishes first and then…

Yes.

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[Spanish]

This is the manga. [laughs]

Wonderful.