Is it OK if I make some notes and maybe record?

Of course. We’re going to do the same. We will embargo the publishing until you do and we both get a chance to coedit.

Will you be publishing something as well? [laughs]

I’ll be publishing all my interviews, actually, on the radical transparency website.

Is that how you do it?

Yeah. This is how I do it. You can see that I’ve met with more than 4,700 people on over 1,000 occasions.

I hope that’s not 4,000 journalists. [laughs]

Essentially, maybe a thousand journalists now.

A lot of it is with members of the public or…

Also, internal meetings. All the internal meetings that I chair, I also publish the entire transcript. I’m kind of a investigative journalist within the administration. [laughs]

It sounds like it. Actually, every word I say is going to be published, is it?

You can coedit. If you mention something anecdotal or whatever, you’re free to edit things out.

Maybe I better be careful [laughs] what I say.

No. It’s fine. It’s coedited before publishing. We always publish after you do.

That’s very kind. In theory, I might be trying to do an article for this for the BBC for a radio program, but that would be for sometime next week.

It’s up to you.

Should I let you approve what I put out?

No, not at all. It’s up to you.

I just want to make sure what the rules are here.

We relinquish all the copyright of every word I say.

[laughs]

Do whatever.

They’re very precious, so it’s very kind of you. [laughs] Thank you so much. I’m sorry. I guess you’ve probably got better things you should be doing.

No.

How much of your time do you actually spend in your office? How much time do you manage to…?

To meet journalists? [laughs]

No, just working in an office as opposed to be outside and doing different things.

This is actually the cabinet office, but this is my real office. This is the Social Innovation Lab, which I will visit after our meeting. This is where I usually work. Every Wednesday…

Where is that?

…everybody can visit me next to the Jian Guo Flower Market, the Da’An Central Park – it’s in No. 99, Section 3, Ren’ai Road – and bring with them their self-driving vehicles or whatever. It’s also a incubator, a sandbox for experimenting all sort of new social and digital technologies.

I’m here only actually every Thursday and Monday, by default. The other days of the week, I’m just touring around Taiwan. I just returned from Pingtung yesterday.

Can I ask you what you were doing in Pingtung…

Sure.

…meeting local people…

That’s right. This is the way I usually work. I go to the local people, meeting with local social entrepreneurs, co-ops, and so on, and focus on the issues that they care about.

It’s not just listening. I’m also facilitating conversation with five municipal offices, including the Social Innovation Lab, where 12 ministries send their section chief or higher to participate in this remote video conference with the local people setting an agenda.

How often do they do that kind of conference?

Every couple of weeks.

Sorry. From 12 ministries and departments?

From 12 ministries involved in the Social Innovation Action Plan. The 12 ministries all have around two reverse mentors, people under 35 years old that points the direction of the ministry.

They can also summon their own local meetings with constituents – I’ll also be there – and similarly connect with the ministries relevant to that particular cause. For example, around education, innovation in performance arts, or in renewable, sustainable…What’s the word? Like clam and oyster farming.

Oh, really? [laughs]

The reverse mentors care about various different things. I just go there and learn from the local peoples with them and connect to the 12 ministries. That’s one of regular work on youth engagement.

With that kind of contact with people, the idea is to feed back the public concerns or suggestions?

That’s one.

For example, since you mentioned this example, clam and oyster farming. What was the issue?

The issue was that they want to coexist with the solar panel. They want to naturally use the waves and the water levels as to reduce the energy use when it regulates the shallowness or deepness of the farming.

They want to not overdraw or draw at all any underground water. They want to promote this idea that if they farm with less density, it actually enables a better ecosystem for the local biosphere rather than over-condensed industrial farming of oysters.

They also want people to learn as part of their lunch, really, in schools about this whole interaction between the ecosystem and climate change, of course, in a holistic way. This alone concerns five ministries.

Yeah. They’re advocates of this way of sustainable farming.

They’re trying to promote it to the government…

Exactly. They want the government to not promote linear, non-sustainable farming. That’s, of course, the advocacy angle. They are also working with educators. Starting this year, in the new curriculum for the 1st, 7th, and 10th grade each school can participate in the creation of their own course materials and indeed design their own course.

They are tapping into this newly freed energy and space of what used to be after-school work or club work by integrating it into the school themselves. They finally also want to share their environmental measurement devices.

For example, the AirBox and the WaterBox that are social sector technologies that measures the environmental pollution level. They have far more people participating than the environment minister’s devices. They want to invite the…

This is schools, you’re saying.

The schools and also people just measuring about air quality on their balconies. If they are farmers in agri-lands, they also have WaterBoxes that measures pollution.

We passed a new act this year that says if you are on a agri-land and you manufacture anything that pollutes the waterways, the minister of economy can cut electricity and water supply to that plant directly without going through the regional or municipal government.

Of course, the industrial workers there would say that actually pollution come from upstream, it’s not us. They’re also encouraged to also get some WaterBoxes, which are really cheap. Using 0G IoT technology, they can just report the numbers from upstream as well.

Sorry. Who are the people? These are just ordinary local people, or these are the school kids?

Yeah, just ordinary local people, including the school kids.

What, you get a box, and do you just put it in the water?

That’s right.

I’m not very good on technology.

It starts measuring like the top three pollutants and upload it to a distributed ledger, like a blockchain, where people cannot modify each other’s numbers after fact.

This was just introduced this year.

Mm-hmm.

Is that having much impact?

I think so. The new act…

Have there been some factories already cut off?

I think so. There’s quite a few investigations already. Because WaterBox is relatively new. It’s this year’s Presidential Hackathon.

I had not heard about it.

But AirBox has quite a few years back.

Sorry. This year’s Presidential Hackathon?

Hackathon, yes.

So that was an idea that came out of this.

Out of the Presidential Hackathon, which every year…

Is that an annual thing?

It’s a annual thing. Every year from April.

This started when?

April. It started last year.

Last year, OK.

Everybody can propose ideas that combines data from various sectors to solve our pertinent social or environmental issue. For example, speed up the detection of water leaks in water pipes from two months to two days in the Keelung area. That’s one of the ideas last year.

Every year, five teams get a trophy from our President. The trophy – there’s no money – it’s a micro-projector. When turned on, it projects the image of the President herself giving the trophy to the team. It’s a self-description trophy.

What it does is that it’s a sign of the political promise by the President that whatever the team did in the past three months, we will make it into national policy and deploy around the country within the next 12 months.

It’s a quick way to uplift a promising idea from a region into a national scale. For example, last year there was a remote island called Green Island, where the local…

I know. Which used to be a prison, right?

Where the local people didn’t trust the clinics and the nurse there that much. They insist on putting loved ones, when they’re sick or suffering from injury, to the helicopters to fly to the main Taiwan island. At a rainy night, one helicopter crashed.

People just looked into the root cause. The local nurses say that they don’t feel that they have a lot of career there because the local people don’t really trust them. They don’t have any good way to practice into actual diagnosis or the treatment, because it’s always flown into the main Taiwan island to do so.

So they proposed a telemedicine system where they can be supervised and aided by the specialist doctor in the main Taiwan island, as well as the hospital in charge of dispatching the helicopter, in front of the family so that the family can trust them more. And that they can, along with the local general practitioners, operate on the patients with the supervision of the Taiwan main island doctors.

That’s such a good idea that they won one of the five trophies that year. The only problem was that they were against the law. At that time, the law was saying that the nurse can only do such treatments with the doctor physically nearby them and not…

You mean because the nurse is not qualified on her own?

…remote. They has to be in the vicinity, like in the same room. But because the legitimacy for their idea is so high, the MPs passed…

Changed the law?

…the law. The Minister of Health and Minister of Interior worked together very closely on this matter. Again, if they don’t want to talk about it, the team just summon the president and they have to talk about it. Now, we have more than 100 clinics in the indigenous and remote areas all with the bandwidth and the equipment to do such telemedicine.

This is one of the very few Presidential Hackathon winners. But even the non-winners, like the top 20, because they’re chosen and voted in by people, they gain social legitimacy regardless of whether they make it to the top five or not.

The whole thing is voted on by the public?

Exactly, and using a new voting method called quadratic voting.

I was just going to ask how does it work, if it’s not too complicated.

We have a national participation platform called join.gov.tw.

I’ve heard about that.

They have 10 million visitors out of 23 million residents, quite a lot of people. During Presidential Hackathon, we…

That’s 10 million in a year?

10 million in the past couple years.

10 million unique visitors?

Unique visitors, so a large number of people. All of them are invited to participate in the selection from the 132 teams into the top 20 teams in every year’s Presidential Hackathon. Everybody get 99 points, and they can look at one, for example, using computer vision to solve marine debris before they hit the beach, the shore, which sounds like a good idea.

If you like this, you can vote one vote, and that will cost you 1 point out of 99. Two votes will cost you 4 in total. Three votes will cost you 9 in total. The cost for each vote is proportional.

Exponential.

Right, quadratic to the points cost. With 99 points, you can only vote nine votes.

Could you put all your points on one thing?

You can’t because nine votes is 81, and there’s no room for the 10th vote. That person will still have 18 points left, and so they’ll have to look around.

You have to use them up?

Yes, to look around and say, “WaterBox, such a good idea. Maybe I vote four, and I still have 2 points left.” Then I look around, I have 2 more points. I see a way to use machine learning to detect, like Panama Paper, illicit financial flow. That sounds like a good idea, but I only have 2 points.

Can I take a picture with your screen?

Of course. Sometime, people discover natural synergies. Maybe they do a seven and seven instead of nine and four because seven and seven is 49 points, and so on. People can change their mind and look at more.

Your idea is to push people to look at more different things.

To explore rather than just doing binary choice.

For example, last year in the Hackathon, how many members of the public voted in that?

There’s a total of around 200,000 votes, which means around 2,000 people, assuming they use up all their points – I think it’s more people – so thousands of people, that’s for sure.

Dozens of people chose this very balanced, very nuanced top 20. A good result is that almost everybody feel they have won because at least one of the team they supported made it to the top 20 as opposed to other voting methods where half the people will feel they have lost.

How many ideas in total?

This is top 20. Each of the top 20 received the coaching and mentoring so that they become trilingual in the sense that they get at least one public servant, at least one industry private-sector person, and at least one person from the social sector/academia into the team. The feasibility is co-determined. The governance is also co-determined by all the three sectors in the society.

This started last year. What’s happened to some of the people who were involved last year?

All the five teams that won last year see their idea scaled to a national scale as of this year. We got pretty good street credibility for that. [laughs]

Basically, they’ve done it themselves with some mentoring?

That’s right.

It’s not like the government takes it over.

If they want the government to take it over, that’s why we have public servants in the team. Sometimes, like water leak detection, it’s best done by the Taiwan Water Corporation rather than the government.

For example, the telemedicine, at the end of it, it requires a law change, quite a few budget to equip them with bandwidth and sufficient medical infrastructure. That is something government should do.

Based on what we call mutual accountability, like what is best for each sector to do, we settle on the way for them to form a social enterprise maybe or form a task force and things like that. If, at the end, everybody feel the government should do it, then we will heavily take over their project.

Wow. When they’re trying to decide on the way ahead, are you involved?

Of course, I’m the head of the judge panel and also leading the team that incubates them and accelerates them after they won the top 20. The top 5 gets a presidential guarantee, but we track the progress of all 20.

This started last year, but it’s going to be annual?

We have two cohorts now, last year and this year. This year, we also have international track. The winners are Honduras and Malaysia, respectively.

Anyone in the world can enter?

Exactly.

Should the project be related to Taiwan?

They should be related to sustainable infrastructure. Each team has to identify with one or more of the targets of the global goals, which are global. [laughs] Of course, they solve a Taiwan problem, but the solution, for example, the water leak detection, the same team went to New Zealand for three months to co-create a solution for the Wellington Water corporation.

It’s readily transferable. The WaterBox is so interesting the New Zealand people – actually, they just arrive to Taiwan today – go to Taiwan to learn from the WaterBox to see whether they can use the same model to figure out, for example, the dairy farming, which is a issue there, and things like that.

The Taiwanese people who developed this WaterBox went to New Zealand?

Right.

That’s very interesting. That sounds like it could already take up a lot of your time.

Yeah.

There’s also what is called, vTaiwan?

That’s right. It’s also run by the social sector.

That’s separate?

Yeah, vTaiwan is used whenever people feel that there is a emerging technology that the government doesn’t have a clue about. They experiment in consultation/deliberation techniques. The latest one was e-scooters, which is a global phenomenon, I’m sure. [laughs]

VTaiwan also is a generator of sandboxes, which is a way for people to experiment for a year to convince the society their new regulation is a better idea.

Sandbox is a UK idea. It came from the fintech community. In Taiwan, we use it for pretty much everything.

It’s like an incubator is it?

It is like a incubator, with the aim to get people’s response to emerging technologies. If people respond well, then we can co-create new regulations. vTaiwan first started in late 2014. For example, this was the map that we drew for the UberX with help of a AI-powered conversation system called pol.is that we still use.

I read about that.

This is the UberX map. People feel that, although belong to different feeling clusters, they have much in common as opposed to if you only look at the divisive statements.

When you say it was a map, it’s a map of people’s…

Reflections.

This was the debate about whether to legalize…

To UberX. We asked specifically, “What do you feel about…?”

Was it just about Uber, that one company, or about the whole idea?

We ask a specific case, always. The question we asked in 2015 was, “What do you feel about a person without professional driver’s license driving on their way to work, pick up someone, using an app, that they did not know, a stranger, essentially, that takes a detour to the stranger’s destination, and then resumes to work, and charging them for it?” So like a very specific case.

We asked people, “How do you feel about it?” Somebody feel, for example, passenger liability insurance is very important. You can agree or disagree. Once you do, your avatar moves toward the people who feel like you. At the end of it, we always get this shape. There’s a few ideological differences, but mostly people agree on mostly everything with everybody else.

That’s great.

We took this into the new multi-purpose taxi regulation.

Am I right? Someone was talking to me about it the other day. It hasn’t yet been utilized?

It’s been enforced. No, all the…

Is UberX now legal in Taiwan?

Of course.

Can I take a picture?

All the UberX cars you can call by the Uber app is now taxis. They all get a professional driver’s license because that’s one of the consensus.

They still look like normal Uber cars?

They’re not painted yellow.

Do they get a sticker on the door or something?

Their plate is red.

Ah, we’re starting to do that in the UK where it’s constantly being banned and unbanned, as you may have heard.

That’s right. It’s the same in Taiwan. The large taxi fleets, you can also use their apps, which behave just like Uber with dynamic pricing and all that and to call their taxis, which are not non-yellow as well.

Is the idea then that that helps to prevent it becoming a monopoly by Uber?

Exactly. It’s not about Uber.

You did the research on Uber, but you then spread…

Applied this to what we call multi-purpose taxis.

Were the taxi drivers consulted?

Of course. The main groups were Uber drivers, taxi drivers, Uber passengers, and everybody else. All of them agreed that proper registration, insurance, and bookkeeping is very important. So I think it’s a broad consensus.

Did you have to go out and find the people to take part?

It’s a rolling survey. All the organizers send the same URL. We published that URL to all the stakeholder groups who already participate in more three months of pre-meetings before that consultation online. They shared that with their LINE groups and whatever.

People can brainstorm on more nuanced ideas to convince the other people. We say we only take as agenda any statements that has intergroup consensus, meaning that it doesn’t matter how many people you mobilize to join your group. You still have to propose something that convince everybody else.

Apart from, for example, this question about insurance, what were the other issues or a few examples?

We outlined these on the Pol.is blog. At that time, it’s the largest-scale Pol.is conversation that we did. You can read all…

Pol.is is from where? Pol.is is American?

It’s from Seattle from a few Occupiers. They basically wanted a way to get rough consensus rather than divisiveness online, like prosocial social media rather than antisocial social media.

Is that the term?

The term I prefer to use. These are the four consensuses back in 2015. All of them has been ratified.

I didn’t know that they didn’t have to be yellow anymore.

No, they don’t.

The reason I was asking about who takes part is because I was just wondering. When you’re dealing with taxi drivers, often you’re dealing with older people.

We also meet face to face.

All of this sounds fantastic, but how easy is it to get older people to join in?

The most active participants in our participation platform, for example, this is head of the taxi association in Taipei, are around his age, 65 years old. 65 and 15 are the two most active age groups.

[laughs] Really?

They have more time on their hands.

Either they’re retired or they’re…

Or they’re still in high school. They care both more about…

The 65-year-olds were what? They were older taxi drivers or retired drivers?

That’s right. They care more about the sustainability and the next generations of drivers and less about their personal gain or their personal profit.

Did some of the current drivers take part?

Of course, they also did.

Was it difficult in the beginning? Was there a lot of mutual hostility?

At the beginning, yes. At the beginning, it was two groups that doesn’t overlap.

You did talk to someone from the BBC about this, didn’t you?

Yes, Carl Miller from BBC did a series…

Yeah, it’s called Click. He wrote a large volume…

I read it.

…of a book called “Death of the Gods,” about this.

He wrote a book?

Yeah, and also a “Wired” article recently.

I saw the Wired thing. I don’t want to go over all the same ground, but still, it’s …very interesting. Is that one of the biggest debates you’ve had using this approach?

In terms of participants, it’s one of the larger ones. We also, after that, did quite a few ones that concerns a large swath of people recently about the opening mountains and forests policy, which is a large policy change in Taiwan.

For the longest time, like when I was a child, the mountains are literally forbidden, as are the seas. You have to apply for a special permit to get into most of the mountains.

Why were they forbidden?

I think people were afraid of guerilla warfare or something like that, like rebels in the mountains…

It was for military defense reasons?

It was military. I wish I could say it’s because of respecting of indigenous nations…

That’s what I wondered…

…and territory. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. [laughs] Nowadays, of course, indigenous nations and their sovereignty is very important. It’s also important to make sure that people feel that they’re close to the mountains and the oceans and not trapped in the cities and the concrete forests.

You’ve had a debate on this or you’re doing it now?

We had five debates, five Pol.is conversations on various aspects. For example, there was a aspect of how complex it is. You have to deal with four agencies just to get a permit on a favorite hiking or mountaineering trip. That is really not convenient. And a lot of trails, for no good reason whatsoever, still requires a permit.

The lack of telecommunication facilities was also a issue, especially in the rescue operations.

Just no signal?

We, just this year, set up a 4G tower on the north summit of the Yushan Mountain, the highest mountain in Taiwan. You now have very cheap, €16 per month, unlimited…

That was done because of this debate, was it?

This was done to enable this debate to happen in the first place. People really need accurate connectivity on the mountains to report what they are encountering and feeling in the mountains, and, of course, education and also responsibility.

Because for the longest time, it is the government’s duty, according to law, to rescue and pay for the loss of life if, even during typhoon, you insist to climb. That is unheard of in other jurisdictions. It was seen as a military government property, so, of course, we need to compensate for the damage people encounter in it.

Just last week, the Parliament changed the law. We’re no longer liable for it. People are encouraged to buy insurances. All of these are debated by the Pol.is system. We had five concurrent Pol.is conversations and the face-to-face part.

The online part always only set the agenda. The face-to-face part talk about possible solutions. That was headed by our Secretary General in the cabinet.

You go through…

The agenda is set by people resonating with each other.

You start online?

Yeah, we start online to discover.

How many levels of debate or how much time…

Four levels in the standard design thinking. There’s the discover part like pol.is. There’s the define part, like the face-to-face, open collaboration consultations. There’s, of course, the development part where we invite the stakeholders back into the new system we built for hiking and mountaineering for a series of beta testing.

Finally, there’s the delivery part where we make sure the various responsibility authorities are capable of maintaining this kind of continued dialog going forward.

At what point do you have these face-to-face meetings? Is that at the end or in the middle?

At all points. At the very beginning, these are kickoff meetings. vTaiwan meets every Wednesday just for dinner. Anyone can join and have fun and music together. It’s in the Social Innovation Lab. They discover emerging issues that the government may have no clue about. That’s at the very beginning.

Then, using Pol.is, a discovery phase. Then face-to-face, amplified telecommunicated consultation in the define phase. Once we set on the common “how might we?” question, then we work with the competent authorities on the development phase. Finally, the deliberative phase.

To get the right people, for example, to come to your face-to-face meetings, does that involve a lot of work?

Of course.

Do you have to go and find them?

Of course.

Do you have a team of people?

Of course. My office, which is one delegate from each ministry, at most, is trained – by themself, actually – to discover stakeholders, to find the best place to hold meetings with stakeholders. If it’s about a remote area Medicare, like Hengchun, we literally go to Hengchun. All the seven ministries go to Hengchun together. If it’s about Pescadores Islands, we actually fly to Pescadores Islands.

That’s Penghu, right?

Yeah, that’s Penghu.

In your office, these are people who are permanently in your office now? They’re on secondment to you…?

They are on a rotating basis. For example, the Foreign Service, Joel is the second delegate from the Foreign Service. Once he want to return to the Foreign Service, we’ll have to find somebody else just like…

[laughs]

How long have you been here?

Usually, it will be one year or two years.

A year or so is average. The more people…

Is that one of the main jobs, is to find the right partners for discussion?

Exactly, because the delegates mostly come from the people-facing ministries – the Ministry of Communication, Interior, Education, Finance, Justice, Foreign Service, and so on.

All of them, when YEH Ning, the Commission of Communication, joined, he was director general, I think. Joel was section chief. They all have considerable network within the public service when it comes to stakeholder discussion.

Since you mentioned the example, can I…?

Of course.

What aspect of the foreign industries work is related to what you’re doing?

I’ll say from my perspective and Joel will say from his.

Thank you.

The core idea of our foreign service in the past few years is this idea of Taiwan can help, which is the way of redefining Taiwan’s identity as a force of good [laughs] when it comes to any of the sustainable goals. The 17 sustainable goals are our core mission.

As you can see for Presidential Hackathon, for the social innovation tours, everything has to be indexed by the 17 goals, or even down to the 169 targets. Foreign Service invites a lot of people. For example, this is Zdeněk Hřib. I hope I did him…

That’s the Prague mayor.

Yeah, the Prague pirate. [laughs]

He’s the mayor, right?

That’s right, of Pirate party. [laughs]

I’ve been reading about his…

His favorite animal is Pangolin. [laughs] When he visited, his small cabinet, the various bureau leaders, actually climbed on the Social Innovation Lab in my office. We promoted the sustainable goals together. We shared with each other this way of listening and skill with constituents.

For Foreign Service, this is important because it shows that the relation that Taiwan has with likeminded jurisdictions is not limited to government to government or state to state multilateral relationship, but rather what we call locally 暖實力 or ‘warm power’. [laughs]

Is that right?

Yeah, meaning whatever they’re finding as an issue, as long as they’re in the sustainable development goal agenda, Taiwan can help. We are willing to help. I work with Foreign Service to travel to…I just returned from Berlin and the Netherlands.

Before that, I was in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, in Buenos Aires, in Japan, in Ottawa, and in Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. Our office went to…

In general, when you do these trips, what kind of things are you normally looking at. What are the outcomes?

We hold workshops. The outcome is that, for example, for our disinformation disarming technique which is fun and games humor, we roll out a humorous clarification within two hours.

Disinformation disarming, and that’s the government combating disinformation or…?

The entire civil society.

Is this the thing about fake news?

I don’t use that word, but you’re free to because you’re a journalist. [laughs]

Is it focusing particularly on media, or just online information?

On the competency of, for example, our basic education and lifelong education system so that everybody learns how to be a journalist, because with broadband as a human right, they are not only consumers, viewers, and readers, but they are all YouTubers.

Is this aimed at schools particularly, or it’s teaching people to…?

Yeah, to learn framing.

…discern what is fake, what is real?

Right. Not really discern only, but also produce their own balanced take on things and participate in collaborative fact-checking, which is one of the main ways that people can, every day, just flagging your incoming spam email as spam. The more you flag your incoming email as spam, then less people receive this spam because it’s a public contribution.

For this, for example, this is a civil society project for people to forward whatever, “Do you know your brother is spreading rumors?’ It’s not gender-specific. Every time you refresh, you see a different a value…

This is a way for LINE which is a dominant end-to-end encrypted system to call to their users to flag. Every day, they flag hundreds of thousands of rumors just by long-pressing the message.

That’s LINE in Taiwan.

That’s LINE in Taiwan.

How many rumors every day?

Here is the dashboard. You can check it on factcheck.line.me. Flagging is 147k today. Unique messages, 32k today.

What kind of rumors would they be?

Here are the top 10. [laughs] Here, it shows with the four fact-checking partners.

These are more like news-type stories. It’s not personal debates.

No, it’s not personal. A lot of it is about food safety. Like if you ate persimmons, don’t drink yogurt. Otherwise, you’ll get poisoned.

It’s like random information that’s not true.

Because food safety, somebody care about it, they will share it with their family, and these go viral. Sometimes these are not disinformation, they’re more like malinformation in a sense that it is actually true. It happened, but it’s framed in a bad way.

If LINE is flagging the rumors, does someone have to be there editing and checking if it’s true…?

Yeah, so they could collaborate with the International Fact-Checking Network, which has the Taiwan chapter called Taiwan Fact-Checking Center. Sometimes…

That’s an NGO or…?

It’s an NGO. It’s crowdfunded. It doesn’t accept any political party funding, and only accepts more donations and run by esteemed journalists. These are our main way really. If there’s some rumor that says, “In Hong Kong, they are paying 13 years olds, to 20 million people, to murder police.” This is actually a propaganda, actually from 「中央政法委长安剑」, the central commission of politics and law.

Really?

Yes.

You actually found the source?

The source was from their Weibo account.

How was it found?

The Taiwan Fact-Check Center really shared exactly how they found it. You can read all about it. Also, the fake poster they had, purporting to be from Hong Kong, but with wrong spelling and using Hanyu Pinyin which they will never actually use.

Were these things mainly circulating in Taiwan or in Hong Kong? Not in the mainland…

I don’t know about Hong Kong, but the Taiwan Fact-Check Center looks at all the trending rumors in Taiwan. Once they classify publicly something is wrong as a rumor, as false, Facebook stops showing these on the news feed by default. It’s not taken down. It’s buried. It’s just like moving an email to the spam folder.

That’s an agreement with Facebook in Taiwan or internationally?

That’s right, in Taiwan. They signed on a sub-regulate agreement.

The government is not directly involved with this process.

We’re not doing any of this. No, because we don’t want…

But you’re promoting education. Can I just ask you just very quickly what kind of education? How does that work?

Sure. A lot of it is interactive. I personally translated quite a few games that teaches about miscommunication about the segregation effect, where people reinforce their own biases and things like that. They’re all used as additional materials for even the primary schoolers to learn about media framing and about the small world effect.

Can I just ask you, what is segregation effect in Chinese?

謝林隔離模型 probably. My translation is called 別讓圖形不開心.

You’re getting some games.

That’s right.

They’re in English and you’re putting them in Chinese.

That’s right.

What’s 圖形 here?

Polygons. Don’t make polygons unhappy. [laughs] Basically, this polygon is unhappy because they’re among too many squares. If you drag it here, they become happy. The rule is that if there’s less than one-third of my neighbors that look like me, I would like to move. So you can then see…

This is aimed at kids, really?

This is aimed at kids. Then you can very easily see that people segregate automatically.

Are you getting schools to let the kids use these games?

Yeah, to play this game with the kids.

Then we say, what about like many people in the panels now, if the panel is entirely of a single gender, they refuse to participate in that panel. Then we start saying if you start with segregated communities, but everybody says, “One of our eight neighbors, there’s at least one that looks different than me, I want diversity,” then very quickly, you can restore a more inclusive society and so on. This is the, of course, Thomas Schelling’s Nobel Prize winning “Dynamic Model of Segregation.”

How does that relate to the misinformation or disinformation?

What we are sharing here is that the echo chamber effect is reinforced by people who would not tolerate even a little bit of dissent and subjectively wrong information on their social network. If we seek such information even in small doses, they are weak, so actually it restores the sense of polity. That is the lesson of that.

Another of my translation which went slightly more viral is called the evolution of trust. This used the prisoner’s dilemma to teach about various different collaboration and cooperation strategies. This is…

Sorry, what’s the prisoner’s dilemma? What’s the concept?

This is you, this is somebody else. You can put in a coin. If you put in a coin, the other side gets three coins, and vice versa. You can decide to collaborate by putting one coin and expecting three in return, or you can defect saying you won’t put in any coins.

If you put in a coin, and then you will actually see. Actually, it’s easier with the sound effect on. If you collaborate, and then both sides get three coins back, and they’re happy obviously. You’ll be faced with people then of various inclinations instead of somebody who collaborates all the time.

Then the lesson here is how to accommodate for these people. If you start collaborating, actually they took advantage of you. What do you do now? Maybe you won’t do anything and things like that. This is called tit for tat.

These types of ideas, games, and this kind of approach, this is the sort of thing that you talk to people about when you go abroad as well?

Yes, and the miscommunications as well.

For example, can I just ask you, you mentioned was it Addis Ababa you went? What were you doing there, just out of interest?

Sure. When I was in Addis, I went with social entrepreneurs from Taiwan that developed a way to detect tuberculosis using AI-based computer vision. It used to be that it took $7 to $10 per check in the WHO recommended expert system, which is prohibitively expensive for many African countries.

Using contributions from Yilan and other rural areas, there’s a Kaohsiung company that developed an AI system that can reduce the cost to less than $1 per check, and so massively reducing the cost for TB detection. We’re there to say Taiwan can help on the medical regard.

I personally share the idea which I talked to you already about reverse mentorship, where the minister of labor has two very young, 20-something, reverse mentors. One of them brought to the minister of labor to Russia to see the WorldSkills Competition, which is like the Olympic for skilled people and skilled students.

They won I think the third place worldwide this year. This is our champion of car spraying, also champions of steel work, and also champion of cloud data center deployment, various skills. The reverse mentor proposed two things.

First, that they go on the national parade just like the athletes. The second is that they need to integrate back into the education system so they can revamp the schools with the children, so those children know that the applicable skills is for community building and they have somebody to look up to, to aspire to, not just people who study very well or play sports really well.

This is a way to get vocational education’s social status higher. They point the direction the minister of labor actually went. They crowdfunded a video, played it in a cabinet meeting, they get the Premier accepting it. So starting this year and in all the years afterwards, these skilled people will be… is already part of the National Day Parade, and this one reverse mentorship.

The definition of reverse mentorship is bringing someone…

Younger.

…from the grassroots into the system.

As a kind of intern, but they are actually pointing to the direction. Hard to translate. I translated that as 見習顧問, as an intern consultant.

This is something they really want to imitate.

Is that something that you promoted?

Yes, of course.

Did you start this whole system?

Yeah. I was reverse mentor of the previous cabinet…

I heard that.

…when I was 35, and that was still young. The Foreign Service really likes this story because then we have a catalog in the social innovation platform of over 400 social innovation organizations like this, all indexed through the SDGs and ready to share, whether it’s TB detection or whatever else with people.

When you mentioned this Kaohsiung organization who…

I brought them to Addis Ababa.

They’re a social enterprise?

They’re what we call a social innovation organization.

Are they a company?

A company with a social purpose.

They’re a private company? They’re a for-profit company?

Right. They’re a with-profit company. The B Corps movement is very much taking steam in Taiwan. We have a B Corps that is also a publicly listed bank. You don’t find it [laughs] elsewhere, the o-Bank.

For those purpose-led organizations, we’re now calling them social innovation organizations instead of social enterprise because we also have the universities joining. The university won’t call themselves enterprise.

I guess my question is, really there’s no conflict of interest that you’re just promoting one private company.

There used to be, but we change the company act. Now, every company can declare their social and environmental purpose as part of constitutive papers, their company charter. They can also declare how much reinvestment they are willing to do to further their purpose.

Like Muhammad Yunus say, the shareholders must only get back the share they put in, and every other dime this company earn must be toward a social mission that’s called a social business. It used to be questionably legal. As of 2017, it’s now entirely legal.

There’s less of a concern of promoting private companies when they’re already declaring their social purpose and indexed by the SDGs. The Foreign Service is also shaping this kind of public dialog.

You said there are 400 of these organizations?

Of these social innovation organizations.

In other words, they’re on a list. If people somewhere in the world are interested, you can find the right people.

You just find the right people here, and their case studies, and so on.

Can I ask you, did you go on these trips as well?

It’s time for Joel to answer. [laughs]

The reason why I’m here?

Yeah. Did you go…?

Go to our international workshops and so on.

Do you help to find these enterprises or to take them abroad?

Yes. You mentioned about the workshop. Actually, I’m going to attend the programs from Harvard Kennedy School, that, really, we call it Digital Transformation in Government. The title will be innovating public policy, that I’m going to attend.

That’s one of the programs that I’m going to share, like my minister mentioned about using the digital method to how to make our policy more engaged in ways. They’re one of the works I’m going to attend as well because of my minister’s recommendations.

I think it’s now called public entrepreneurship, or public sector entrepreneurship. This buzzword is catching up.

Just one of the things, going back to the thing you mentioned about the mountains and the forests, can I just check the beginning of that whole debate. How did that become one of your topics? Was it…?

Usually, it’s because people complain about it really loud.

They complain about it and you hear about it, or do they come to you? Did the government decide we got to do something about this? I just wonder how the process begins. Is it totally bottom-up or is it top-down? [laughs]

It’s not that top-down. Anyone who get 5,000 signatures can collect a point-by-point response from any ministry, as long as it’s within the administration’s purview. That’s the usual…

On any topic.

On any topic, as long as it’s administrative purview.

Was that always the case, or is that something you introduced?

Yeah, it’s something that the Occupiers, when we occupied the parliament in 2014, that’s one of the five demands and not one less. Of course, all of these got accepted by the head of parliament back then.

That was Wang Jin-pyng.

Right. That was Wang Jin-pyng. There was a national forum, which was one of the five demands. The forum basically said that we need to institutionalize early-stage engagement in terms of e-petition so that we don’t occupy the parliament…

[laughs]

…to signify our dissent on everything. That was set up around 2015. The 2015 system only said that each ministry need to respond. At that time, there was no horizontal coordination between the ministries.

My main contribution is to set up what we call the PO, Participation Officer, system, which you can find in po.pdis.tw, which talks about how the various ministries work together literally every month, working on preparation of each other’s collaborative meetings so that all the cross-ministerial issues brought by the petition system can be handled in a way that is conducive to lower the risk, include and increase the efficiency, and also lessen the chores of the public service.

These are institutionalized into national regulations. We have around 100 participation officers, the POs.

What was the name of the platform you just mentioned, the website?

Po.pdis.tw.

That’s publicly…?

That’s publicly visible. You can read all about it. A lot of workshops, we just also transfer the training material of our participation officers, which are now required training for new people entering public service as well. Anyway.

So… the mountaineering. In most of cases it was because there was an announcement of a single-entry portal to apply to a mountain trip permits, but what the entry portal did earlier this year was simply to figure out which website you need to open, and then ask you to open those four websites.

You still needed four separate documents…?

Yeah, it’s not very useful. The reason why is the agencies had no horizontal coordination, and so a lot of hiking enthusiasts complained really loudly about that. The participation officers of I think Ministry of Interior and Agriculture noticed this issue, and then we had a conversation with also the Secretary General, actually all the way to the Premier to say that we need a properly structured…

The Secretary General?

The Secretary General, or 祕書長, of the cabinet. Whenever there is any cross-ministerial issues, the idea is that the head of the cabinet is in charge of coordinating. At the moment it is Secretary General Li Meng-yen.

You set up lots of debates.

Collaborations, but yes. The difference between a debate…

The officers you mentioned in each ministry, sorry, what did you say they were called?

The participation officers. The POs. There’s more than 100 of these people.

When did that job start?

We institutionalized that a couple years back, but I brought this idea in when I become digital minister three years back.

Is there something like that in ministries in other countries?

Italy, I think, specifically want to copy this model with their Ministry of Direct Democracy but I don’t know how well…

You didn’t copy it from somewhere else, this is your…

No.

Was this your own sort of…?

Because I’m a horizontal, I’m a horizontal minister. Above the 32 vertical ministries each with a vertical minister. The 9 horizontal ministers are already using this way of cross ministerial coordination anyway, they only difference is that I’m making this public, this process public.

The participation officers, their role is to get public participation, to respond…

Exactly, just like the media officers responding to journalists, and the parliamentary officers responding to MPs. They are responding to people who are about to occupy the parliament.

Is there one for every ministry?

Yes. Literally, at least one in every ministry. In many ministries there are agency-level POs as well.

Do you feel that the system is working as well as it could do?

It’s working pretty well. No. Of course we have a lot of room for improvement. At the municipal level…

Is it evolving?

It is evolving. We change our voting methods, our allocation methods, or whatever, literally every quarter.

The voting method is what, between the different ministerial people?

Every month now, we look at all the petitions, regulatory pre-announcement, emerging issues. Any ministry can propose that up for public deliberation. We vote two subjects every month for cross-ministerial collaboration. The rest are done by single ministries.

You vote for the ones which you think are the most important?

For cross-ministerial participation.

Is that usually easy to get agreement?

Yeah, sure. They’re all career public servants and all with really good connection to the public anyway. We learn a lot from each other. The participation officer from unrelated ministries each month participate in the facilitation. They can be seen as both speaking the public sector language but also speaking purely as a stakeholder.

Like I’m the PO of the Ministry of, for example, Ocean. A concept of ocean, the hiking have nothing to do with me, obviously, but I know a lot about environment issues. I am a hiker myself. Then I can facilitate in a way that I’m more balanced to all the stakeholders.

Anyone with relevant knowledge can be part of it.

Yeah, can be part of it.

Just on this forest and mountain thing, is that now resolved? Is it finished?

It’s now resolved. There’s 18 consensus points. We respond to them all one by one. It can be found at pdis.tw/hike.

Is that the same one? No, that’s a different website.

It’s a joint website. This one join.gov.tw. This is two ministries talking about mountaineering. These are the five pol.is topics. These are the 18 consensus points. We respond to them all one by one and invite everybody who participate in the online part also on the face-to-face meeting with Secretary-General.

Has that happened already, or that’s going to happen?

It’s happened already. It’s happened. It’s livestreamed.

The whole thing is still being debated basically.

The whole thing is still being refined, but all the 18 things they ask for is actually, the single-entry application of mountaineering, all of this is online.

There is now already a simpler system, is there?

Yeah, that’s right. The face-to-face meeting is at a day before the beta test begins, to just make sure that we did answer and are accounting for all the suggestion they have raised.

You can still update the beta test approach.

Yeah. Now it’s still beta testing, actually.

Roughly when do you think the whole thing will be resolved or…

As long as there’s active civil society, it’s just a co-creation way. The main difference between our way of thinking and traditional design thinking is that traditional design thinking ends on the part of delivery. Once you discover, define, develop, and deliver, it’s done.

But now, because in Taiwan we use open API as a national standard, meaning that whatever function you see on the hiking service you can actually take it and amplify again using your own app, using VR, translating it to indigenous languages, or whatever.

Because it’s open API, everybody can build upon whatever we have built instead of having to do it from scratch. This remix stage, which is not part of design thinking, it’s very important because then it enable people who care about this to not compete but rather build upon the governmental work.

This is on an open platform?

Yeah, of course.

Which is provided by the government?

Yeah, of course. And maintained by the government.

People will be refining it by adding information?

They can also build their own website and then close the API, which like a connector point…

Say that you make a basic change, like you make it much simpler to get this permit. Is that basically finished, or is there still the potential for further revision of the rules?

For more permit revision. Of course, but it’s always in the direction of more open.

I’m afraid I’m not an expert on these ideas.

It’s fine. The next part is we’re also doing the same with the ocean, with sea sports and other access. That’s the next…

Because there used to be a lot of restrictions?

Yeah, it used to be very difficult actually to do any ocean activities without an official permit.

That’s to do again with sort of defense issues?

Exactly, yeah.

You mentioned like occupying the parliament in 2014, but also was this building also occupied, am I right? As part of the executive yuan?

There was a night they tried to storm the executive yuan, but it was not very successful, and it was cleared away, I think, within a night. The parliament was thoroughly non-violent, and set up by 20 or so NGOs, each deliberating about one aspect of the CSSTA.

Were you actually inside?

Sure.

For the whole time.

The whole time. I was there before they broke in, and providing Internet connectivity.

You had come back from the US at the time?

Not exactly. I told the US companies that I’m working with that I’m taking a leave, basically a democratic leave. I’m based in Taiwan, I was telecommuting.

Oh, I see. Maybe I read that somewhere and it was not accurate.

The Wired got it wrong the first time, and I wrote a correction and they fixed the language.

Maybe I read the old version. In general, do you feel that most of the ideals of that movement have now been implemented by the government?

It is on the right direction, but many of the occupiers of course say that we’re not yet open enough, or that we’re… actually that’s what all the presidential candidates are now saying. Like Willian Lai, during the primary with Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, was saying Dr. Tsai is very open, but I will be even more open, and Simon Cheng of course say I will be even more open, and so on. I think is the general direction we’re heading. There’s no turning back.

What are the areas where things could still become more open?

Campaign finance was one of the main thing that we work with, because it’s not the administration’s, it’s the control branch. As of last election, the control branch agreed to have all the campaign finance for independent analysis, the raw data.

Is the control branch the election commission, or…?

No, the control yuan is a separate branch. It’s the control yuan. And that is actually one significant victory for the occupiers, and another one concerns the idea of referendums. Referendum of course, when tied with elections is subject to partisan capture, but starting next year, we’re doing referendum on alternate years. So we’ll have one year for election, and one year for deliberation, and one year for election, one year for deliberation. That hopefully moves us towards the Swiss style.

Before, it was always with the same day as the election.

Together, so it won’t be now, it will be separate.

It won’t be now, the law has changed. It’s much more room for real deliberation.

Yeah, because otherwise it just became politicized?

Exactly. That’s one of the direction where the open government work can really further people’s understanding of the public issues. Open procurement, that is with beneficial ownership and all the international movement.

As you can see, one of the five winner in this year’s Presidential Hackathon, is essentially automated detection of Panama Papers-style, that is a hot topic, and a lot of countries are looking at open…

Has that already been changed here, or is that something still being worked on?

The opening of procurements just happened a couple months ago.

That’s government procurement?

Of course, but including the RFPs, like the whole lifecycle of procurement. At the moment, only for academic purposes. I think that’s…

There’s still many areas that need to be reformed.

There’s still many areas that need to be expanded, like the National Palace Museum is sharing as kind of free of copyright or restrictions, Creative Commons, all their pictures and photos, but only around 300 dpi, meaning that it’s good for the monitor, but not so good if you’re printing it out. For that you still have to ask for a license fee?

Do you want that changed?

Uh-huh.

That’s your mission, or that’s the…

When I went in, they were not opening anything.

This is new.

We’ve made many improvements, but what I’m trying to say is it depends on the social norm, what the social norm feels is good enough, it is hard to push further. But when the social norm increases after experiencing the benefit of open data and open information, then of course people would demand more.

The rationale for opening up the huge sort of stock of the National Palace Museum by Creative Commons is what?

It’s contribute to culture. It enables creators to source materials from the cultural lineages, the various lineages as hosted in the museum. Again, this what other museums are doing. British ones are leading, actually.

The idea is basically you’ve got all this repository of Chinese culture in the…

Also, of the prehistoric Taiwan as well.

You mentioned this, the occupiers, as a phrase: are those people who were together five years ago, are they still really a group?

Are they still working? Yeah, I would say so.

Are they still like a pressure group, trying to push the government as it were?

I would say so as well. Yes, definitely.

You’re still connected with them?

Yeah, of course.

Are those the kind of people you work with in your other office…?

In my office, of course there’s quite a few occupiers, that just went directly to my office.

Who are working for you.

Two of them are right here. [laughs] Working with me, not for me.

What do they do?

One S.T. Pung, was the main journalist, she was a student back then of the NTU eForum, and they were kind of the most trusted reporters of what’s happening in the occupy scene for those three weeks, the eForum folks.

She’s now working to, basically work as an investigative journalist of the work that we do, and we co-write most of my opinion pieces, like with the “New York Times,” “The Economist,” all sort of these articles I co-write with S.T.

When you say investigative journalist, you mean researching topics?

Researching, like whenever people petition for something. Like they really want to, for example, ban the use of plastic straws, and two years ago out was a popular petition, with pseudonym, because we allow pseudonyms, of “I love elephant and elephant loves me.” We know nothing about this person, except they can get 5,000 signatures in no time.

The Ministry of Economy and Environment were worried. [laughs] We met them face-to-face in a collaboration meeting, because they were voted in by the monthly… The proposer. And she’s 16 years old. That’s her civics class assignment, like our Greta.

The story ends differently, because we did invite people who make single use utensils. They said they were social entrepreneurs. They were there 30 years ago to solve Hepatitis B, which was a real problem in Taiwan back then. Now it’s cured. They are now looking at more environmental friendly way to design, anyway.

We brainstorm on upcycling, like coffee beans, or whatever, leaves of coffee bean plants, and whatever.

Did that produce a result?

Yeah, it does. Starting this July for indoor drinking even for bubble tea, plastic straws are banned, period. Even for bubble tea. National identity drink.

How do you drink your bubble tea. Is there like a bamboo straw, or a…?

Exactly. Actually, bamboo straws are very popular. [laughs] Also, literally straws, and reinforced, glass also, and stainless steel, and many other manufacturing.

Somehow, you had to mediate between the manufacturers and environmentally conscious kids?.

Who are also looking at possibility of higher margins, because their original social purpose has been fulfilled.

Were they happy with the outcome?

Of course.

That did end up with a change in the law?

Yeah, in the regulation.

It was something that the companies could accept?

Of course. At least the company that showed up to the meeting could accept. I don’t know about other companies, [laughs] but the company who showed up brainstorm on solutions.

The point of the investigative reporting is that before we meet face-to-face, we need to meet one-by-one to do journalistic fact checking, and cross-checking of the sources, to make sure that people’s perceptions are actually on the same page.

We prepare really a volume, but booklet of information we’ve collected, to all the people entering the deliberation, so they can be informed, regardless of whatever rhetoric all the sides say, on the common, basic facts.

You made the point earlier… You talked about the Uber debates that there were a lot of younger people, and then the older people. In general, is it more likely that young people will participate in…

No.

…this type of debate? No?

Retired people participate a lot. The younger people, like 15 years old, set the direction, but the 65-years has the wisdom to make it happen in a feasible way.

I see, there are lot of say…I don’t know, retired people in Taiwan, who…

Oh, yeah. Very much so.

…who now became active participants?

Again, as a way of what we call “intergenerational solidarity.”

Is that quite significant, that you’re trying to…

It is.

…mobilize the wisdom of the older people…?

The elderly, yeah, and inviting them to the social innovation lab.

Politically, we could say that Taiwan is, in some way, still quite a divided society.

I wouldn’t say so.

You wouldn’t? OK. Let me put my question and you can please tell me what you think. My question would be, I would say there are certainly lots of divisions within Taiwan on certain issues, particularly maybe attitudes to mainland China, or…

I don’t think it’s like that after Hong Kong.

OK, tell me more about that. Is it sometimes hard to bring people together? Is this still like a real work in progress? In the past, people often would disagree with each other on many things. Is the culture of debate and consensus-building, was that something hard to create?

I don’t think so. In Taiwan, the active word is 共識, common understanding. We use that word differently from the English word “consensus,” which is something you can sign your name on, like strong consensus. Common understanding means only we can live with it.

共識, OK.

Including the 1992 meeting.

The very fact that it could be described as a common understanding, like agree to disagree, signifies how weak the “common understanding” word actually means.

Of course, as we said, there are certain divisive statements, but there’s far more things that people can live with. Our approach is to act on these, while putting into practice… Yeah, I always say to people that, “Blue and green are just two colors in the 17 of the sustainable goals.”

We all roughly agree that we’re in the ocean, beautiful islands. We’re trans-cultural republic citizens, and that is something can get behind.

What does “trans-cultural” mean?

Trans-cultural means having the liberty, the freedom to look at your own culture from the perspective of a different culture. It’s like freedom to migrate countries. In Taiwan, it is among the various indigenous, Hakka, Tâi-gí, or Mandarin speaking culture.

Just quickly, because you were talking about the referendum situation. Obviously, we saw the…

The impact.

…the result of that, in terms of the law on same sex marriage. Different people obviously had different views on the way…

That’s great. That’s why we’re trans-cultural, yeah.

Do you feel that law went far enough?

We legalized the order by-laws, but none of the in-laws; I call that 結婚不結姻. I think that’s marriage equality with Asia characteristics. When I talk with people in Thailand…

When you say the in-laws [laughs] can you define that?

I mean, specifically, the part of civil code that we had at least 10 words to describe what the English describe as uncle and aunt. [laughs] At least 10 words, maybe more. All this, of course, has to change if you introduce same-sex marriage to form kinships.