Hello and welcome.

Hello, nice to meet you.

Hello.

Very nice meeting you. Do I go around shaking hands and giving name cards, or do you want to just very quickly get into the conversation?

I think we can get very quickly into one.

Nobody is into formalities.

That is excellent. Same here. I’ll just briefly say welcome. I literally just returned from Berlin, and really happy to synchronize what I have learned and share with you. How will we proceed?

We can just introduce ourselves a little bit. You came back from Germany. We came from Germany as well, some days before, on Wednesday. We have 10 days in Taiwan. We’re a group of young journalists organized by the organization “Journalists.Network”. We’ve been here four years ago, not exactly this group.

The same network?

Yeah, right. It’s about connecting in the world, reporting about other countries, and learning more. That’s why in Taiwan, we asked them over to meet you because we think you are quite a famous person in Taiwan and in other countries as well.

Thank you.

You’ve been at the Republica for example.

Virtually, but yes.

[laughs] I think we’re very pleased that you took the time for us now.

No problem. You’re here since Wednesday. You’re not jet lagged?

No.

I am.

It’s good.

I learned you have two days off in your week normally when you’re not in the office, right?

I’m actually only here every Monday and Thursday.

On the other days, you’re…

On Wednesday, I’m in the Social Innovation Lab. That’s my real office. We tried to reschedule this meeting there so that you have better pictures, but it seems the logistics didn’t work out. Here, there is no wall. Everybody can walk from the street and meet me there. It’s in the JianGuo flower market, near the TAF in Central Park.

It’s literally the Social Innovation Lab. It can be found on OpenStreetMap and also Google Map. Everybody can walk in and have a 40 minutes conversation with me as long as it’s on the record. That’s my Wednesday, from 10:00 AM. to 10 PM.

On Friday, I’m also often here, but I’m basically summoned by anyone who can gather 5,000 signatures in petitions. I go to them instead of having them come to me. Every Tuesday, such as tomorrow, I tour around Taiwan to the most rural, indigenous, and remote islands to have a conversation with them in the town hall style.

I listen and I bring five municipalities with me, including the central government people in the Social Innovation Lab to have ministries that also listens together. That’s Tuesday. I think I answered the question.

Every Tuesday?

Every other Tuesday or so. The Tuesday is either organized by the 12 ministries involved in the Social Innovation action plan or anybody who are from the youth council, the reverse mentors to those 12 ministers.

Each minister had about two people who are young social innovators or social entrepreneurs. They’re all under 35 years old. They can also summon me anywhere in Taiwan on Tuesday.

Do you want to go?

Yeah, I’ll start.

Hi.

Hi. My name is Celine. I’m working with Sven Hansen, someone you met in Berlin.

Yes, I did. Excellent interview, very deep.

Unfortunately, I don’t know what questions he had, so I hope I’m not asking the same…

It’s OK. I’ll let you know.

I guess what I feel most interested in underpinning is maybe you could explain a little more about your position in the government because we know that you’re a minister.

Working with the government, not for. It may be worth explaining that.

What exactly does that mean? How is your position different from, for example, other ministers who are working for the government?

Position, yes.

The next question would be your agenda on digital literacy and media literacy, because I also read that you have been very straightforward in the implementation of media literacy programs in schools. I didn’t get very clearly from articles that I read whether it’s already implemented.

It’s already implemented.

It’s already implemented, and maybe how the schedules look like, so what exactly are young people taught in the school in Taiwan about media literacy.

Thank you. That’s awesome.

I’m sorry…

It’s OK. Take your time. I know how it feels like.

That’s so nice…

Exactly. They’re radical, young, revolutionary.

Maybe it’s a good process that we answer the question first and let’s summarize, not collecting every question so you can answer now these two questions.

Really?

Yeah, if you don’t…

Maybe we collect a few more, like five. [laughs]

I have a few more, but I don’t want…

Oh, you have a few more?

It’s fine…

No, go ahead.

I’m sorry.

OK. You do five, and then I’ll have to answer all of them. [laughs]

I think I can do five. Actually, I don’t have five. The next question will be about simple transparency. The interacting with citizens, I read that there is a platform.

Yes, the Join platform, yes.

Where citizens, they can actually ask questions to the government or suggest what they would like different.

Uh-huh, and summon me places with 5,000 signatures, yes.

Maybe just explain how it works and also, what are the main suggestions that Taiwanese people are bringing forward to the government right now these days.

Yes.

What, in your opinion, is the biggest challenge for Taiwan right now? Of course, for the past day, we’ve learned a lot about the threat from mainland China. I’m also wondering if that, in your opinion, is what people are most concerned with, or if there is other things.

OK.

That’s it.

That’s it? OK.

That was four, right, or five?

No, that’s fine. I’ll do very quick answers, and we can explore on that in your follow up questions. My position is called a horizontal minister. In Taiwan, there is 32 ministries. Each ministry has a vertical minister in the traditional hierarchical or bureaucratic, come in and control style, which is very important.

Then we have nine horizontal ministers. Each one is for coordinating several different ministries. Now, my portfolio, which is open government, social innovation, youth engagement is somewhat special in that it concerns potentially all ministries.

My office is one person delegated from each ministry. Each ministry can voluntarily send a person to my office, and one only, so my foreign service delegate. When people send the delegates to me, they’re volunteers.

Joel can attest that he ranks and scores himself, find projects, and so on. We’re not a giving order, taking order relationship. I am rather a horizontal leadership thing that just makes the space for the delegates to work out aloud.

Meaning that we take the synergies between the ministries, as well as because we publish our work daily. Everybody can also join the project that we innovated that I can get to later. By saying working with, not for, the government, I mean specifically that I am not giving them command or taking any command. I hope that answered your question.

Did that structure already exist before you took office?

There’s already horizontal ministers, of course, but as I said, the other horizontal minister have more natural affinities with three, or four, or five ministries. The portfolios don’t naturally extend to all ministries.

They also have delegates, more likely, from one or two ministries, and more than one person from those ministries, of course. Because my main point is to get different positions – because every ministry represent a different position, of course, otherwise they might as well merge – different positions to come to common values.

That’s why one each and not more. To be honest, I don’t have 32 colleagues to choose on the record. I have maybe 20-something colleagues, meaning some ministry never send anyone, like the Ministry of Defense. I didn’t really know anything about national defense, but more people-facing ones have sent people.

The K to 12 curriculum that’s rolled out this year includes media competency, as it’s one of the nine core competencies. We switch from a skill standard test, whatever, education paradigm, which I am not familiar with, because I dropped out of junior high.

I heard that this introduced individual competitions unnecessarily, because the fields do change, and it’s actually pointless to compete individually. We switched to a competency-based, where one person just furthers their own direction, instead of following preset tracks.

Those inner competencies – autonomy, interaction, common good – are the core now of the education as of now. Media competency, being one of the nine, now, there is a K to 12 working group of teachers and schools that rolls out media competency literatures.

It could be found in the, I think, it’s the media and learn, I think, and learn. Media learn, and learn.edu.tw, that shares all those materials. I think they’re revamping the website, and it will be online again in maybe two weeks or so.

That emphasis is a very important thing, because in Taiwan, we have broadband as human right, and anywhere in Taiwan, you’re guaranteed to have 10 megabits per second, even on the top of Yu Shan. Because of that, everybody is a media by themselves.

They are their own producers. They’re YouTubers and so on. Because of that, we don’t just say media literacy, which is like an asymmetrical – you’re the reader or the viewer – but rather, media competency, as in that one need to get basic journalism ideas, because everybody is potentially a journalist.

Rather, I want more people to become capable journalists. The Join platform, with 10 millions users out of 23 million people in Taiwan, is the single stop for everything pertaining to participation. It can be found in join.gov.tw.

I will not repeat anything that you can already find in join.gov.tw, but just know that the petitions there is particularly active, but also, the regularly pre-announcement, as well crowdsource auditing, as well as all sort of the other things.

As of what has been popular with people, it can be seen very easily here. These are the most recent ones. They concern animal welfare. They concern voluntarily work in the basic education system. They concern child exploitation prevention, concerns public construction of transportation systems, traditional medicine.

Somebody cares that our psychological welfare and dental welfare is currently in the same unit in the Ministry of Health and want that changed, because there is no logical connection. Somebody wants the Taiwan rails to allow for larger transportation options for cats and dogs.

Somebody want to change the somewhat already-declining culture of having very fat pigs to ritualistically compare their weight to the gods, I think. So on and so forth.

Do you collect any data for people, or are…?

Yes, we do.

Do you know how old they are? Do you know what gender?

Yeah, we know how old they are, and also, we know the vicinities that they live, up to, I think, district level. Two observations. One is that there is no municipal-rural divide. The activity is roughly proportional to the actual population, which is good.

The age groups that are most active are people around 15 years old and 65 years old, because they have more time on their hands, obviously. [laughs] That’s the joint Join platform.

The threats, I think there was a real threat that because we tied the referendum and election together that the representative, partisan democracy thinking is threatening to take over the deliberative referendum agenda-setting.

That was a real threat to the democratic system, but we’ve changed the laws so that it’s on alternating years. The upcoming election is presidential, but one year after, it would be referendum, national level. The next one would be mayor elections, and then national referendums, and so on.

We have one year for representative and one year for deliberative democracy, so we defused that threat, so to speak.

Can you tell us about what you did before becoming…

The minister?

…digital minister? You were not as…

I was an understudy minister.

What I assume, you don’t see yourself as a typical politician, right?

What is a typical politician, anyway? [laughs]

It’s somebody who writes…

“The Vitruvian politician.” [laughs]

Did the Tsai Ing-wen administration ask you to come, or did you fight for this post, or how did you come to this post, and what did you do?

I joined the cabinet for fun. It’s not something that I fight. It is something I enjoy. I was the understudy minister to the previous cabinet. At that time, when we occupied the parliament for 22 days, back in 2014, it was a large demonstration, in the sense of demo.

People understand half a million people on the street, and many more online, can come to a consensus after three weeks of nonviolent occupy. Those consensus was taken by the head of parliament, so the occupy was a success.

At the end of that year, the mayors who supported the occupy won. The mayors who didn’t didn’t. Every understand that participatory democracy is the future of Taiwan. The cabinet at the time, headed by Premier Mao Chi-kuo, decided that those horizontal ministers need to recruit reverse mentors who are under 35 from the occupiers and their facilitators and to work with them closely.

I was one of the two people from the occupy movement that was reverse mentor to Minister Jaclyn Tsai at the time, at the end of 2014. We run quite a few consultations together, the UberX one, the Airbnb one, and so on.

After working with the public service for two years, and trained maybe 1,000 or so care public servants, when Lin Chuan came around, he was the independent, nonpartisan premier of Tsai Ing-wen, the first premier of Tsai Ing-wen.

He just asked me quite naturally to find someone that could continue our work. I asked around, and nobody have too much time on their hands. I told Lin Chuan that, and then Lin Chuan asked me to maybe do it.

I am like, “I have to run a consultation with people,” so I run a public Q&A with people for a month. We settle on three negotiation terms, conditions upon which I would join. That was the voluntary association, giving no order, taking no order.

Location independence, I get to work on the Social Innovation Lab, instead of this building, or really, anywhere on Earth. Also, radical transparency. Every meeting I chair, we keep a transcript. We co-edit for 10 days. We publish to the Internet.

After those three conditions crystallized, I just negotiated with Premier Lin Chuan, and he agreed. That’s why I’m here.

One follow-up. You were part of the Sunflower movement, and you were into the building? You were part of the occupier?

I was at the night before they broke in to provide Internet connectivity. I also visited after they went into it to help set up the connections equipments and also, I guess more importantly, to tweet about this whole nonviolent process.

In the first few days, some media tried to portray the occupiers as violent, but we were really not, so we provide documentary evidence that it was nonviolent. Later on, I would help to maintain the one-stop portal for everybody to see the map, the transcripts, and the live streams of everything across the occupy.

That was the extent of my role. I wasn’t in the originally 20 NGO group that decided to break in. I thought it was just for one night, but it continued for 20.

Just a short question. Could you give a little more context about this mentoring system, like mentors under 35?

Ah, yes.

The age of under 35, that were appointed to public service.

Yes. It’s now formalized as the Youth Council. This is the website, I think. The idea, very simply put, is that, in the previous cabinet, it was informal, and only a few horizontal ministers did that. Starting from Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, it’s formalized.

Each ministry pertaining to the social innovation, maybe 12 of them, they each have two people that are under 35. They’re all social entrepreneurs or innovators, and they work with the minister to show the direction.

Of course, the minister, being somewhat older, takes care of implementing them, of course. We convene with the chair as our premier, and we have the ministers of Education, Labor, and Economy. Otherwise, it is a very free-wheeling group that can just propose anything. Like, literally anything.

For example, the reverse mentor for Minister of Labor, Huang Wei-chan, proposed that we invite everybody who want the World Skills Competition, like Olympics for skilled people, to the champion car parade on the National Day.

In the middle, we see the gold medalist of the car painting, for example. He invited the labor minister to Russia, where they did the competition, crowdfunded this whole documentary. It’s played in our cabinet meeting.

Everybody thought it’s a great idea, so that they don’t only go on the parade in the years, this year and afterwards, but also, work with basic education as well as higher education. we revamped the curriculum so that these people can work with, for example, a basic education school to rebuild or redesign their halls or their buildings together.

That gives students more practical knowledge of how to revitalize a community, and it gives them a really good platform on which they can became role models for people who want to specialize in skilled work so that we can adopt a more balanced culture between intellectual and skilled work, as Germany does.

About radical transparency that you talked about, could you define what that means to you, and also, whether you faced some opposition while trying to implement radical transparency in your work?

I also have a follow-up to the media literacy that you had spoke about earlier. We met told us a lot about your news coverage in the election campaign currently. What do you think is to be done, other than media literacy, in order to make kids more sensitive towards fake news?

OK, good question. Radical transparency, very simply put, you can see it on the SayIt website. After being the Digital Minister, I talk with 4,700 people over 200,000 speeches over more than 1,000 meetings, and this one will be one of it. [laughs]

For example, I had a conversation with Deutsche Welle business, and that’s journalism, but we also have a conversation with lobbyists as well. We also have conversations internally, in internal meetings, and also with people who petitioned. This is the tour, and so on.

These are not quick summaries. These are literally everything that was said. For example, there was a German visitor that asked about so-called “wiedervereinigung” with PRC. I said, “There is no wieder- to begin with,” because it was never unified since the Neolithic era – the Jade Mountain and Taihang Mountain were never unified under a single jurisdiction.

When I said that, it could be quoted very easily, and can be found very easily. You can always see it in context, instead of out of context. The same with the DW business interview, which is also shared on YouTube.

The basic principle is that they record – DW, of course, records – then I will record the video as well. If you are only doing sound recording, then I’m only doing sound recording. If you’re only publishing in text, I will only be publishing in text.

After you do, we respect the journalism profession. Then only after co-editing. Even for internal meetings, people have 10 working days to go over it, because sometimes people mention anecdotally some of their friends’ or families’ cases.

These people have not cleared for publication. We go back and change it a little bit. The point here is that the openness is the default. It takes extra effort to change the text. That is what I mean by radical, meaning at the root. Did I answer your quetion?

Yeah.

OK, good.

Just like a little more, because that seems quite new, I guess, working in the context of being minister and being so open about it. Did you have some problems?

Oh, yeah, challenges. It’s not actually new. The judicial branch have been doing that for, I don’t know, centuries. The entire judicial system is built on the idea that the lawyers’ writings cannot claim copyright, and that the entire proceeding is open, aside from some more sensitive or junior courts.

The court proceedings must be open. This is not a new idea. That is how the legitimacy of the judicial branch is built on. In Taiwan, starting from this, from Tsai Ing-wen’s presidency, the parliamentary negotiations between parties are also live streamed.

That is also how the legislative branch build their legitimacy. If we keep doing nothing, the other branches will gain legitimacy, and we will decline in legitimacy. That’s not good for democracy. What I’ve always been saying is that this is at the drafting stage, instead of the Freedom of Information Act, that just says publication after the drafting stage, which nobody has a problem with.

We’re publishing the initial discussions at the drafting stage. This is important, because at drafting stage, sometime, we consider five ideas, discard four, and do the other one. The people, if they only know that one, will question us by asking again the four options that we did not take after careful consideration and consultations.

Mostly, people don’t know, and so we’ll have to spend a lot of time rebuilding context. It’s very easy to do so if you have the entire policy discussions, the why of policymaking, explaining how we have consulted the other four stakeholder groups, and why the fifth was the only working idea.

People can still protest and dispute that, but at least we’re on the same factual ground. Resistance, no, because it’s voluntary. If the Ministry of Defense don’t like this way of recording, they just send nobody to my office.

And the question about fake news?

Right, so I don’t use the f-word here, because while in foreign languages such as English, journalism and news are two different concepts, in Taiwan, they both translate as 新聞. Like journalism is literally “news work,” 新聞工作.

It makes it impossible to say the f-word without offending journalists. Both of my parents are journalists, so I cannot use that word out of filial piety. [laughs] In any case, we say disinformation. The disinformation work, basically, is really not to guess somebody liked it or somebody not liked it, but to sow discord to destroy trust in public discourse, so that democracy cannot go on.

Either by divisive hatred or by just misunderstanding. It also hurts the image of journalism. I think it’s a dual crisis. Legal framework that we use is that we say, if it’s intentional untruth that does harm to the public – not just the minister’s image, which is just good journalism – to the public…

For example, public health, public disaster recovery, election itself, and so on, then it’s no longer free speech, because we already have that doctrine in the law already. We haven’t updated them to the digital world, so the application have some issues.

In the past few months, the legislation have passed the upgrade rules to make sure that all these different laws which only covered newspapers, radio, and so on, adds digital media to it. We’re not making new laws, new acts, or new sections.

We’re basically only upgrading what’s already there to the digital world. We contribute by saying, “A minister’s work must never choke a journalist’s word,” which is what some of our nearby jurisdictions have done in response to the disinformation crisis.

They say, “A minister can force a journalist to change their words publicly,” and we don’t do that, because we still remember the martial law. We don’t want to go back to the martial law.

Instead, our ministers are now all equipped in the pertinent ministries to roll out within 60 minutes after a disinformation gets viral, or before it gets really viral, a clarification message that’s very funny.

We found that humor, such as this one, that says, “Perming hair will be subject to $1 million fine if you perm and dye your hair,” and that’s not true. This is less than 20 character in title. The body says, a young prime minister’s image says, “I may be bald now, but I will not punish people who look like my youth,” Premier Hsu.

It says, “The laboring requirement for hair products takes effects on 2021.” It’s not about the people who perm their hair, it’s about the chemicals. Finally, the second, and this is always less than 200 characters.

Finally, we always have two images. The second one, which is the premier as he looks now, says, “If you keep perming your hair many times during a week, you will not harm your pocket, but you will harm your hair. When serious, you will end up looking like me.”

This fits on a phone screen, and you laughed. We show, with pretty good evidence, that anyone who laughed is inoculated against the outrage. When you see the disinformation, you will only think of something funny.

You will not actually turn this helpless anger into the outrage that seeks revenge or seeks diminishing other people’s social status. Rolling this out and have it go viral is very important, because then we work with the large platforms to make sure that the fact-checkers we have met can bury, move to the spam folder, the disinformation that was false.

If we do nothing, or if we do something only a week afterward, and only with press release, they still have room to mutate. If we just roll this out, this memetic engineering assures that people associate with something funny.

When they wake up, they form a long-term memory of fun and joy about this particular issue, so that when you google for perming your hair, fine, and whatever, you see this picture, and not the disinformation.

This is just one illustrative example, but I think humor, by far, is the best response. Humor, of course, making fun of oneself, and not at the expense of the other, is also important. Otherwise, people become divisive and also vicious sometimes.

Do you get invited by other governments around the world who want to learn from you, learning radical transparency and social innovation?

Yes.

Which countries are particularly interested?

Every country.

I’ve held classes and workshops in, I think, more than 20 countries.

Which countries in Europe?

Many. [laughs] Actually, this way of just clarifying disinformation is broadly learned from the European Union versus Disinformation, the EU vs Disinfo Project. I am in contact with, for example, the French people who did the cross-check and the toolkits to empower that.

I think the name was Vidhya or something. He used to be the head of Etalab, of the state lab, but is now more of a digital ambassador. We work on aligning this philosophy and tools together. Before I become the Digital Minister in 2016, I spent 7 out of the 12 months in that year in Paris.

I’m almost like moving to Paris, but Lin Chuan moved me back. From there, it’s like a hub. Then I had a lot of connection with also our Icelandic piratic counterparts, the Better Reykjavik people that we also learned in the Join platform.

It’s loosely modeled on Better Reykjavik and the pirates in particular. Also, Five Star Movement, of course, and also the 15-M Movement. They took, for a while, Madrid, and so Medialab-Prado, Pablo Soto, Yago, and friends.

Actually, we’re now still working together. They moved to Amsterdam to start the council, foundation that continued their direct participation work, and Barcelona, of course. Many hubs in Europe that’s part of the European Union.

It was called Decent, for decentralized decision making. Now, I think it’s Decode, and many other horizon projects that pertains to this way of thinking. I’m in close collaboration with them. That’s the European picture. I’m probably missing 20 more, but that’s what I can think of at the top of my head.

You said you are not giving and taking orders from the government.

That’s right.

How influential do you think you can be in changing the policies if everything depends on voluntary cooperation of the ministries? Are there plans of yours that say they just must do?

I don’t have any plan. You see, the ministerial delegate come up with ideas. I talk to the president about those and talk to the population about those to make sure they get the credibility, and I absorb the risk. That’s the formula.

You must have your own perspective.

I don’t. I take all the sides, like literally, all the sides. If 12 ministries are sent to my office, I take 12 sides.

Your own agenda?

My agenda is crowdsourced. Anyone can crowdsource the agenda on the Join platform. Every Monday, noon, we have lunch together. The delegates just brainstorm, bring out their ideas. I never say, “No.”

I say, “We can make it more risk-free,” or, “I should talk to the premier about that,” or something like that, but that’s it. We’ve done some pretty amazing things, including the Presidential Hackathon, which is the way for the delegates to bootstrap this way of risk absorption and credit sharing to the highest level.

Like every year, we take 100 such ideas from public sector, social, and private and make sure that those ideas get incubation, that 20 ideas get incubation, to form data collaboratives across all three sectors. The five winners every year get a trophy from our president. The trophy is a micro projector that, if you turn it on, it projects the president handing the trophy to you, which is very meta.

If you are a public servant, and your director-general says, “Oh, this idea you had that saves water by building a chat box that tells the repairs people where the next leaks would be and save their time is good, and you prototype it on the Jino Region, but we simply don’t have the budget to scale it out to the entire country,” you just summon the president.

Your DG will say, “Oh, actually, we have some money.” For example, one of the other, the winning team last year was using telemedicine to enable people offshore islands, the nurses, to connect to the medical doctors on the main island, so they don’t have to send everybody by helicopter back.

That builds trust of the local people to the local clinics and nurses. That was violating maybe one law and five regulations, but they were given three months to prototype. It really worked, and they got the trophy.

Their Minister of Health would say, “Oh, this is…We have to talk to the MPs, and actually, the helicopters are owned by the Ministry of Interior. This is cross-ministerial collaboration.” They just turn on the projector, summon the president, and they go off and have a meeting.

Fix the law and five regulations, and now, it’s deployed on all 105 remote clinics in Taiwan, offshore and indigenous lands. The point here is to get this political buy-in from the highest level. This represents the presidential promise that whatever they have prototyped in the past three months with this popular mandate, we will make it happen in the next 12 months as a national agenda.

This is participatory agenda-setting, but none of these teams…Here, this is a top 10 team. None of these top 10 teams are my idea. I don’t have a preference. I just set up a voting system where the 10 million people on the Join platform each get 99 points, can vote on those ideas.

If they vote one vote, that’s one point. If they vote two votes, that’s four points. 3, 9, and 4, 16, and so on, so it’s quadratic, so that people can very balanced and nuanced way evaluate the sustainable goals. Each one have to correspond to a target in the Sustainable Goal.

We get a palette of the 20. The MPs will almost always – actually, always so far – assent to the necessary changes, because it represents the collective intelligence of more than 200,000 votes. Also, importantly, that it gets the presidential buy-in.

If you have both the presidential and the popular mandate, all the ministries in the middle would work together. If you asked me if I have a favorite, if I have an agenda, I have none. I’m just making the mechanism to make it happen.

As previously mentioned, because of the indigenous people also mentioned you travel a lot of rural areas. What are the main topics that people ask about e-identity in an indigenous context.

Yes, of course. The Orchid Island decentralized identity, the Tao Coin, I think that’s what you are referring. We have a social innovation platform that tracks these ideas, and I’ll switch to English.

You can look at what they care the most. We order by preference, so I think telemedicine and plastic reduction are the two main things, but everybody can propose their own solutions and their own ideas. We can also see that, in different municipalities and counties, they have different focus on the different sustainable goals

For example, in Yilan, they care about these more. Also, the social innovation organizations that works with them. You can also see what they have proposed in the tours. For example, this is an indigenous long-term care base that works on the SDGs 3, 8, and 11, and so on.

We do matchmaking to find them the CSR and USR for university social responsibility resources. Also, that we have the space. Of course, the Social Innovations Labs, not only the Taipei one, but also, all around Taiwan, so that people can incubate their ideas there, in the Taipei case, for a year in the National Social Innovation Lab.

It’s a very intrinsically iterative system, so that everybody can just, in a rolling fashion, every two months or so join this regional tour, and also have a conversation based on the earlier ideas to make sure that the earlier solutions can apply to their vicinity.

If you say, “What is the most important priorities?” I think education and innovation, because the new curriculum, taking the alternative schools, like the Board of Shula, into the everyday basic education.

Eco design is also very hip right now, and comprehensive telemedicine, like there was a team that did tuberculosis detection using AI that moves it below US $1 US per check, while the WHO standard now is, the expert system, I think, it’s US $7 to $10 per check.

That massively helps. We also went to Addis Ababa with that team to share with the African countries. There’s many other things, but basically, it’s all indexed by the global goals. These are the priorities in the past few months. It will, of course, change. I hope that makes sense. OK? It does.

When you showed us a map of the implemented ideas, you said none of these were your ideas, and were just…

I’m just a facilitator.

Yeah. Coming from really stone aged, analog Germany, it all sounds so easy.

Yes, it’s very easy.

In your opinion, when you look at something like Germany, where the times are different, what do you think is our, what are we missing? Is it just that joint that you are, or is it the ideas? What is it?

I think it’s the legitimacy that we have inherently by having a broadband as a human right, because none of this will make sense politically if it systematically excludes people. That is why we have to commit by saying all the rural, indigenous places, we must have 10 megabits per second at €15 per month for unlimited connection.

No exceptions, even on the South Pacific island of Dongsha and Taiping. We achieve altogether 98 percent coverage, and the remaining 2 percent are mostly above 3,000 meters high. We are now, from the Ministry of Interior, using helicopters.

They’re practicing runs to set up telecommunication towers to get the remaining two percent on the line. That’s fanatical commitment, but only through that can we say that digital democracy is just complementing democracy, instead of taking democracy to only people with broadband connection and leaving behind people who only have SMS and so on.

I think, in many places in Germany, the 4G coverage – not to say 5G, the 4G coverage – is spotty at times. Because of that, one would face the challenge of saying, “The more you introduce, the more you exclude those people who don’t have connectivity.”

We face many critiques, for example, saying that, “OK, they have the broadband, but they don’t have the device.” We have to lend them a device for free from libraries in the Digital Opportunity Centers for everybody who don’t have a tablet and in the education system as well.

There’s also people saying that, “But what about the very old people?” We have to show that we have the Empowering Learning Centers as part of the long-term care plan to get them online by bringing technology to them.

Not asking them to learn typing or anything, just having them to do town hall meetings, as I showed, and bring the amplification – that is the zoom, fishbowl-like telecommunication – to the sites that they’re meeting, so they understand that they can also talk across television screens and projectors to people in other places in Taiwan, and so on.

All this sounds easy, because it’s really easy once you have the universal broadband, universal access to Internet, universal media competency education, in-place. People just figure out things themselves. Without those, if you leave 20 percent of people behind, those 20 percent of people will legitimately say that this is actually to the detriment of their participation.

You think, if we would have the access.

Yeah, the broadband.

If we had 100 percent Internet over Germany, the strategies would come themselves?

Yes.

Don’t you think it’s because Germany is a country full of hierarchies? We have a very complicated political system. We have the states that can prevent the federal government…

Yeah, and the continental law system that we all inherited, actually. [laughs]

You have much lower hierarchies in Taiwan.

Not really.

I’m assuming it’s a smaller country as well.

The foreign service correspondent might beg to differ. [laughs] We have pretty serious hierarchies in our public service. I think the way that we circumvent the hierarchies is not by abolishing hierarchies, but going on a value level.

Where I just show people that the people are OK to work on the economic sector with hierarchies, the environmental work with hierarchies, and the societal progressive movements, also with hierarchies. It’s not like our social sector don’t have hierarchies.

If they agree on common values, then across those hierarchies, they can work in a horizontal fashion, as long as they agree on sustainability. Nobody is against sustainability. That is the art of getting the hierarchies to work on a horizontal fashion.

We all have our hierarchical structures, and maybe the horizontal ministers are only making sure that they align together. The implementation still need the vertical ministers. I am against verticality, I am just working specifically on the horizontal structure. Yes?

You describe a lot of benefits that come from digitalization, but since Edward Snowden, we all know about the abuse of gathering data, while describing all these communications means. What do reply to how do you make sure that this data collected by the government is not abused?

First, we are getting GDPR adequacy real soon now, because our privacy act is a copy of the pre-GDPR European Union version. Because of that, we’re firmly of the idea that the data that are personal, that’s entrusted to the government, is a fiduciary relationship.

That we must only act in this person’s best interest. Instead of selling them advertisement, the Taiwan government is powered by taxation, not advertisement. Because of that, we are not divided in our loyalty. That’s the first answer.

The second is that all the ministries manage their own personal data entrusted to them. In Taiwan, there is no way for one ministry to copy or to get the raw data concerning identifiers from any other ministries.

All the 32 are, in effect, their own data controllers, their own data stewards, and they don’t exchange private data identifiers. That is actually the secret why Taiwan place so high on the Global Open Data Index.

In that because a ministry, when they want the data from the other ministry, they must ask it only in the form of statistics. The statistics, if you prepare for that ministry, you might as well publish it. That is why we get so high on open data.

We’re improving, for example, with open algorithm, where people can crowdsource the statistics algorithm. There are people in the social sector, for example, manage their own air pollution measurement devices.

These are the AirBoxes that are entirely managed by the social sector and have nothing to do with the government. Because the sheer number, more than 2,000 stations, in balconies, in primary schools as education tools, data competency, they actually paint a more fine-resolution picture than the state environmental measurement devices.

These people form essentially a data coalition, because if you have two numbers, one from your neighbors, with 50 measurement points, and only one from the EPA that is far from you, even though this may be more precise, you’re going to trust your friends.

Because of this social legitimacy, they bargain with the government. We’re like, “We can’t beat them, so we must join them.” They say, for example, they want measurement devices in the industrial parks. Because these are private property, they cannot get into it without being put to jail.

It turns out we own the lands in the industrial parks, so we can use their AirBox to measure the industrial parks, joining their distributed ledger, and having the governance done by the people in this data coalition, instead of by the government alone.

Ideas like distributed ledger make sure that we can keep each other honest without having the possibility of tampering each other’s numbers. My point here is that the personal identifiers, we don’t see them as oil or something.

It’s the worst metaphor ever. It was said that way, because 10 years ago, both are hard to extract. That’s why their similarity end. After deep learning, data is now also very easy to extract wisdoms out of it. There’s no any similarity between data and oil, anyway.

Now that we say we share the wisdom, we don’t share the raw data, and through split learning and many other new mathematical constructions that make sure that people don’t accidentally see their personal data identifier leaked to anywhere else, is like a DOD, I guess.

The statistics that can enrich the public good are shared, but the statistics are never part of the raw data. It’s not even de-identified, because there’s still raw data. It’s just de-identified. We only share the wisdom, the statistics that’s gathered from the personal data. That’s by law and regulation. It’s not just because I’m the digital minister.

A follow-up on the security before we go, we were visiting the ministry of defense, and they were telling us how there are lots of attacks on Mainland China. Do you think this cybersecurity will be big issue in Thailand? Are they capable of protecting the system?

Yes, definitely.

Yes to?

Yes, to what you have said. [laughs] When I become digital minister, I bring with myself a cybersecurity product called Sandstorm. That’s open source. I set it up literally myself. That powers all the communications of the cross-ministerial delegates.

It enabled this idea of citizen developer or, in this case, public servant developer. Anybody can write any application on it. We make sure that it is safe. It’s protected in a cybersecurity fashion. How do we know that it is safe?

One of the very popular application is the order lunchbox together. We take pictures of all the bento lunchbox vendors. It remembers that I prefer shrimps and it remembers my name. It’s very useful because then every time we just order lunchboxes together in a very efficient fashion. [laughs] In any case, this can also be used to plan trips together and so on.

My point is that the young public servant that wrote this didn’t have to do anything about cybersecurity. They just wrote the JavaScript application, because running on a sandbox system called Sandstorm, that ensures the underlying security sandbox.

It’s attacked. I invited two teams, one of which went to win this year’s DEFCON CTF. They’re second place, second only to the US team, the world’s top team to attack this system for six months.

After attacking, they are paid, of course. The six months, they filed three CVEs, three vulnerabilities. They concluded this is the most secure government system they have ever seen. Only after that, we roll it out to everybody that works for the government and in government service.

The point here is that we must maintain very healthy relationship with these white hat hackers. We make sure that five percent to seven percent of all new government initiative budget goes to cybersecurity. That’s separate from the ICT budget. It’s a huge amount of money.

That bootstraps not only the cybersecurity industry, making sure they are well paid, but actually the sense of honor that they are there protecting the infrastructures and that they meet with their president or the digital minister every once in a while so they can be proud in their work and don’t fall into the dark side, which has more cookies.

Hence, that’s the basic idea. It’s based on the defense in-depth, proactive threat hunting by capable people that are white hat hackers.

I have a question about Wikipedia. There’s basically an editing war on articles about China.

It’s fun, isn’t it? [laughs]

Is that an issue for you, and to what extent?

I think the governance of Wikipedia depends strongly on the language communities. If you have a vibrant language community, then they can very efficiently ward off any of these issues. Because all the Mandarin-speaking communities share the same Wikipedia, naturally, there will be ideological differences even with the legendary NPOV blockchain.

It’s just that the same words mean different things in a Chinese continental context and in a…What’s the counterpart? Islandic Taiwan context. Basically, there’s no easy solution to this because, for all I know, the editors there are just furthering whatever they see as a neutral point of view. Of course, it’s seen as very biased by the other side.

There’s many proposals. For example, splitting the Chinese Wikipedia into two, but I don’t think that has happened.

There is some other ideas of simply showing two versions depending on the language that you are in. In traditional Chinese, you will see a version, and in simplified Chinese, another. There is technical ways in Wikipedia to do that, but at some point then, it’s almost like splitting the Wikipedia.

I think they are taking that into account in the more politically controversial articles, but for the non-politically controversial articles, maybe all the sides can still work together. There’s only a finite set of articles that really need this kind of careful balance between the different versions. It’s a fascinating case in Internet governance.

But Audrey, just a follow-up question on how dangerous would you say is China for the Net democracy? China is so much bigger with so much more people, and so much more people who are also involved nowadays into…

Into their intranet, yes.

…Internet, and social media, and stuff. Don’t you think it is a danger? How dangerous is China?

I don’t think most of their people are on the global Internet, though. They’re mostly working their intranet, behind a Great Firewall. In fact, they have to commit a crime now to get into the global Internet.

Yeah, but still, what the government’s people are already doing in the overseas Chinese community. Maybe…

Oh, yeah, the PRC. That’s another matter altogether, yes.

Also, worldwide, just saying how dangerous is China or the Communist Party, the Chinese government just for Taiwan in the Internet, but how dangerous is also China for the rest of the world.

There is two parts in that question. There’s the question of the Taiwan model of what we call transparency is making the state transparent to the people, but somewhere else, there is another norm that says transparency means making citizens transparent to the state. This is actually in direct opposition as far as norm is concerned.

When we say co-creation, it means the social innovators breaking some regulations, we don’t fine them for it, and after a while, after a sandbox proves that the society really likes the idea, we take their idea as regulations, as our new laws and regulations.

The same words, co-creation, there means installing a party branch in all the large enterprises and co-create from the party the large enterprises agenda and so on.

As I said, the same word means different things to different jurisdictions. The first part of your question is whether these norms can deviate toward that definition in the jurisdiction of Taiwan, or whether our norms can somehow influence them to deviate back or forward, depending, to these liberal democracies.

What I have seen now is that both norms are really reinforcing each other. It’s like what we call generative adversarial network, or GANs. The Great Firewall didn’t used to be that great. I was there when it first gets constructed. It was ridiculously easy to bypass, but the Great Firewall only becomes great because of people like me at the time working on the tools that circumvent it.

Of course, they also have coders, and they reinforce their algorithms and working more upward on the application layer. Of course, we are also working very diligently, so we reinforce each other’s competencies, so the Great Firewall becomes truly great and circumvention tools become very sophisticated.

If you’re saying at some time the Great Firewall will just say, “Oh, it’s a lost cause. We will never improve any more. We’ll just tear the Great Firewall down,” that’s so far not happening.

On the other hand, the people who reinforce the circumvention tools and work with journalists, and whistleblowers, and so on, we’re also reinforcing our ideas to support liberal democracies and activists.

For them, it’s not like having work with the Great Firewall, looking into the firewall, the firewall looks back to you, and I become a firewall, no? That’s not happening.

What I’m saying is that both sides are very firm in this, and they maybe mutually define one another, and that’s the answer to the first part.

For the world, I think that the norms in the Internet, for example the Great Firewall, has not blocked the GitHub, which is the largest open-source social network maintained by Microsoft now. The reason why is that they don’t want to cut themselves off the cutting edge AI research and the other scientific researchers.

They did turn, for example, the Great Firewall into the Great Fire Canon that attacks GitHub whenever GitHub publishes something that they don’t want to see that really happened, but again not very effective.

Because of that, I think there are still links in the global internetwork into the most balkanized intranets, because they don’t want to be left out of the global scientific regime. That is so far the case, and maybe will continue to this thin thread between the scientific community on this side and the scientific on the other end.

Insofar as they do that, I don’t think they’re really changing the norms of the scientific community.

Just to sum up, they are really powerful, the mainland China’s…

The PRC, yes.

…but in comparison to the rest of the world, it’s like this?

Yeah. If they know that they will accelerate in scientific and research endeavors without connecting to the Internet, then maybe will have done so.

The very fact that they are still connected to GitHub and many other similar websites means that they must bear the risk of reverse propaganda from the liberal democracies in exchange of participating in the science and research community. I think that’s the most neutral way I can put it.

You said you had consultations with people, social movements before you joined the government?

Yes.

What do people say now? What kind of feedback do you get? Are people happy with your work in government or are some people disappointed maybe?

Let’s look at the social media, I guess.

Let’s see what are the sentiments. I think the sentiments are pretty good. I think it’s widely acclaimed. This is my translation of the DW Business interview with nice subtitles and so on.

I just wanted to show you that.

People seem to really like that. My point is that first of all, I think people generally think this is the right direction, that this defines Taiwan not in terms of the PRC but just as in Taiwan. Also, people like the fact that they understand more of the policy-making context.

We are rolling out the National Action Plan on Open Government starting next year. The feedback we have got from the civil society is that this is the right direction. They just wish that I would have moved faster, I guess instead of spending my time working on countering disinformation or something like that. In reality, I only spend maybe 10 percent of my time on the disinformation part.

Each part of the CSO, of course, wish that I will spend more priority on it, but in effect, my priority is set by the balanced landscape of all the CSOs, all the social entrepreneurs, the youth councilors, and the delegates from the ministry. I don’t have my personal agenda.

There are, of course, some different ideas as to what is more important, but the general direction of sustainability and liberal democracy, I think everybody is for it.

Will you work with a KMT government?

I’m sorry?

Will you work with a…?

I worked with the KMT government. That was when I was the understudy minister. [non-English speech] was working with [non-English speech] , and both are KMT, I believe.

Yeah. You want to continue your work after the election?

I don’t care. I continue my work either as an uppercase Minister or a lowercase minister. A lowercase minister means I preach about things. None of this design that I did is dependent on my position. All of these designs, I can continue to meet people in the social innovation lab with or without the ministerial portfolio.

When I was the understudy minister for a while, I don’t even have an official title and still, the delegates from all the ministries met me and figure out consultation forms together. You can say that Digital Minister is an honorary title, that I’m designing myself in a way that’s at a Lagrange point between the movement and the government.

I work with everyone. It’s not like I work for any particular party, except for the Very Happy Party, but they’re pausing right now. There was a party from a few YouTubers and I gave them a basket of catnips a few weeks ago when they started this new party. It’s literally called [non-English speech] or Can’t Stop This Party, or just the Unstoppable Happy Party.

It’s a very happy party from a few YouTubers that together have like three million or something viewership. It’s a parody party just like the Best Party or things like that. Only because piracy is a high crime in Taiwan and you cannot have Pirate Party in Taiwan, because it violates the regulation that says you cannot have a high crime be your party name.

In any case, the Very Happy Party is my main affiliation, even though I’m not a party member. The honorary head of the party is a duck, by the way. It’s a very interesting party. Other than that, I don’t have party affiliations.

In the age of 23, you decided not to work anymore, just stopped working until, I don’t know, just…

Acting, in a Hannah Arendt sense.

What was the reason to go back to work and to say no…?

No, I’m not working. I’m acting, in the sense of both posing for the camera and also being an actor. The Arendt idea of acting versus working is that working is self-actualization, but acting is actualizing other people. It’s creating a public sphere where people can actualize themselves. That’s my work.

As you can see, I’m way past the self-actualization stage. I don’t really care about myself anymore. I care about how people with different positions can agree on common values.

If you say you don’t really care about yourself anymore, I’m interested in…I feel like…

I still shower, but…

I feel like I have different kinds of perceptions, because like listening to the way that you talk, you say that you’re just a facilitator and you don’t have an agenda.

That’s right.

I feel like from the outside, and I guess that’s also a perception that many other countries or people from other countries have, because all of the things that you’ve implemented seem so striking to us.

It looks like your very individual and specific skills have been super important to bring all of this forward.

Yeah, there’s the halo effect.

Finally, how replaceable are you in the system?

Super replaceable. Linus Torvalds often says in addition to doing this for fun as I do, that he’s been taking credit for all the things that he didn’t do himself. He maintains the Linux kernel, of course, but most of the work in Linux is not done by Linus Torvalds. It just so happens that the name is called Linux and so everybody thinks of Linus Torvalds.

That’s the norm in the open-source community. You have a person that symbolizes the project, but the day-to-day operation is really not done by Linus Torvalds. It’s the Linux Foundation and all the different organizations that join the Linux Foundation.

Linus’s individual judgement may still be important from time to time, but that’s more on the philosophical level. As of his particular skill as a coder, that was very important back when Linux was first created, but less and less important now that there are equally capable coders around that can work on the Linux kernel.

We are at a stage in the Taiwan democracy that there is many equally capable facilitators that can facilitate, and in all honesty, our collaboration meetings and so on, I’m not even the main facilitator anymore.

There is maybe one primary facilitator or two from our office, and maybe five or three co-facilitators from the ministries. We make sure they rotate so that each ministry can facilitate the cases by the other ministries as well, and they perform exceedingly well.

Because they do that, my main role is just to appear at the end of collaboration meeting, and read a prepared statement, and thank everybody. Very ceremonial.

Of course, initially, I am personally facilitating this, demonstrating what’s possible, designing the infrastructure, and so on. Gradually, these are taken over by far more capable volunteers. They are still public servants, just voluntarily work here.

I’m at a point where I can say I visit some other country for two weeks, running a workshop three weeks a month, and everything here still works very well.

Maybe if Taiwan is already at that level, you could consider going to Germany and become our digital minister.

I heard you already have five digital ministers?

One last question.

Thank you very much for your time and participating…

There is more. We still have 20 minutes or something. We don’t?

We have…

Just one hour, so 10 o’clock.

Sure, why not?

To have one last question, it’s fine.

Of course.

Following up on something I asked before. Why did you decide to give yourself up? Why did you decide to put yourself back or don’t take yourself serious anymore? Was there a special event in your…?

There was no special event. It’s fun. I was raised in a Taoist tradition with Taoist, what they call 丹道文化 or something like that, for survival actually.

I was born with congenital heart disease that makes that my main artery system maybe contain 50 percent more CO2 than the normal level, meaning that I’m like always on the Himalayas in my body. I can’t get upset physically. If I get upset or if my heart beats too fast, I just faint, when I was a child. Because of that, I learned the art of Taoist meditation very early on as a survival skill.

Of course, I got a surgery when I was 12 years old and I was cured, so I can experience more active joy by seeking more fun activities, but I have not sought, for example, a lot of anger. I have not experienced intense anger or hatred in my life.

Because of that, I am always very laid back in the sense there’s really nothing serious about it. What’s serious, of course, is the sustainability of the entire ecosystem. I do see human beings as just a steward of this ecosystem.

All of this works well with this current thought of democracy, with climate change and so on. People are focusing their energy on designing democracy so that future generations, people who are young or very young, or animals, or rivers, or mountains can have representation.

If not representation in the democratic systems, it aligns with my philosophy and it’s a personal joy to work with democratic systems this way. At the end, it’s not about me. It is just about laying back and having fun.

Thank you very much. We have to go now.

Oh, yeah, you have another…

You said that you have your Social Lab on Wednesday?

Yeah. It opens until 11:00 PM every day.

11:00 PM?

Whenever you have some time, feel free to give the Social Innovation Lab a visit. The basement is also a lot of fun.

11:00 PM or AM?

PM.

11:00 PM?

Yeah. There is also chef specializing in molecular gastronomy, and so if you come to the right time, you can have a lot of very good food, and maybe see some self-driving vehicles, although I think they took it elsewhere. In any case, it’s a fun place.

What’s the easiest way to get in touch with you?

Just email me directly, or Twitter. I’m very discoverable.

Thank you.

OK, cheers.

Thank you very much.