First of all, I’m so honored to meet you.
That’s fine.
[laughs] I sent you the pre-questions.
Yes, I saw.
I will get into the interview right away.
I will provide short answers, but if you want to elaborate more, just let me know. You don’t have to follow the outline. If any question occur to you, you can just ask.
First of all, congratulations on your election results.
Thank you.
I’m just a South Korean, but still I could feel the victory in the air as saw a lot of articles on it. Do you have any plans for a new year and new regime?
Yes. This year, we will publish the National Open Government Action Plan. We aim to publish it by the end of May, which is the beginning of the second term of President Tsai. The National Action Plan will be four years.
Unlike other OGP members which run two-year plans, we want this NAP to be exactly the same amount of time as the second term of President Tsai. It will be basically her vision for open government for her term. We hope to show a new model.
In other OGP countries, sometime they have a two-year plan, but there’s a cabinet change in the second year, and it create a lot of problem about accountability. In our model, there is no problem about accountability. This is, I think, our innovation. If it works well, we’re happy to share this new methodology with other OGP members.
I will type it maybe.
We will send you the transcript, as well.
Thanks.
(pause)
Actually, the first question was civic tech before I have the news that you have a big victory with the election, I wanted to ask about civic tech for the very beginning because I, myself, participated in global FTO meetup, it was mainly organized by g0v people in technology hub…
Yes, Facing the Ocean.
Yeah, Facing the Ocean and other Code for Japan people, too. I participated in there, and I personally am so impressed by what civic tech is. I ask the question to everybody there, and I got some answers. I also wanted to get it from you yourself.
To me, civic technology is technology created with citizens that enhances the power of citizens in civic domains, including but not limited to politics decision-making, but also governance of all kinds.
Can you describe a little bit more of civic domain?
For example, democratic voting in a Parliament, like voting for a legislator, this is a civic tech. It’s an old civic tech, but that is a technology developed with citizens, in particular, people in the French and American revolution.
They code this technology and decide on the ways, for example, the Robert’s way to convene a meeting. These are all technologies that are developed with citizens, not the king. Applying these technology improves citizens’ power in everyday civic domain.
In the Robert’s meeting, that is about making collective decisions. In the voting and representation in the Parliament, that is about a balance of power between the people’s voice and the administration.
All of these ideas can only be realized if everyday citizen know how to participate. The voting procedure, the Robert’s meeting protocol, and so on, are civic technologies, but they are, of course, very old now. We have new civic technology of this century, but we must not think civic technology is something that’s only in this century.
There’s civic technologies since very long ago. In ancient Greece, there was a civic tech in display. If you look at the museum in Greece, you can see a voting machine. They used stone tools to vote to public proposals and things like that.
This is very important because that shows that civic technologies is coevolving with the entire human civilization. This is what I’m referring to. This is also civic technology. This is used in ancient Greece to vote.
If you have proposal, then you put it here.
It’s a stone voting technology.
Wow, I’ve never seen it before, and I only know that they will gather in the agora, and they will present like that.
That is what they call a kleroterion .
This is how they make sortition, like choosing juries, like drawing, in a fair fashion, which part of the population to participate the jury that makes up the decision-making of the court. This drawing machine called kleroterion is a civic technology because everybody know how to build it. If everybody use it, it increase everybody’s decision-making power.
That answer, I think, includes the second question as well. I wonder, if there is a voting machine and other civic techs, we code and make it as a social promise. Still, I think some people are not interested in political serious issues.
They are not interested in or they couldn’t be educated. Then how can you make them more participating in the civic tech system?
A good technologist bring technology to people instead of asking people to come to technology. If we build a system that nobody want to use, it is not the citizen’s problem. It is a technologist’s problem. That is a fundamental idea.
For example, before we have the idea of personal computing, people have to use a terminal to connect to a mainframe. Operating a mainframe is a very tedious and dedicated skill that very few people want to learn.
One of my mentor and my friend, Dan Bricklin, invented a system called spreadsheet, or VisiCalc, that was his invention. His vision was that people don’t need to learn programming. They just write some numbers and then write some formula. That formula automatically update itself when the number update.
His original vision was many people can fill in the number by their own, but the formula can automatically calculate the summation, the average, and so on, and make everybody who input a number see the tally, the statistics in real-time. Nowadays with EtherCalc and Google Spreadsheet, his vision is a reality. In the very beginning, he can only implement it on personal computer.
That application, VisiCalc, and later Lotus 1-2-3, and later Excel, made it possible for people who don’t know programming to buy a, what they call, personal computer, and bring the technology that was only in the mainframe into everybody’s home, because they find a real use of computer and they want to use it in everybody in a very different way.
You can make a spreadsheet to keep your daily expense. Somebody else can make a spreadsheet to track the score of their students. There is no one single vision of how to use it. Rather, it is democratized to bring close to the people however they want to use it.
This is what we call open innovation, meaning that the inventor do not determine the use of the technology. It is general purpose. Meaning, it fits any purpose. If your technology, civic tech or other tech, doesn’t have active users, maybe you’re not being general purpose enough. Maybe you’re not democratizing your technology to make your users co-creators as Dan Bricklin did with the spreadsheet.
Do you think that tech should be in the ordinary life and without any determined purpose before it’s spread?
It’s happening as well. I heard some presentations from fellows in IF, as well. They are making some digital tools for education or for game purpose and so on to educate. They are worried about some people who don’t have computers or who don’t have Internet connections and so on.
If technologists want to make this kind of Excel or spreadsheet, like Dan Bricklin, but what if there are someones who are not getting benefit for many reasons. You don’t have all of the solutions but I just wondsered. There are some people like that, for sure.
All of the UN members, nations, agreed that by this year, there should be universal access to information and communication technology, specifically to computation devices like mobile phone, and communication infrastructure such as mobile wireless, fiber optics, or cable, whatever, satellite.
Everybody agree on that as a global goal target 9.c, because it is now a human right to participate in online sharing of knowledge. If people only have books to read but they cannot share their note to other people reading the same book, they cannot form an informed consensus or any informed opinion on the community around this book.
Bidirectional communication, instead of single direction like a book, is the foundation of modern society now. If anywhere in Taiwan, you don’t have mobile access or at least cable access to the Internet, it is my fault. It is a human right in Taiwan to have broadband connection.
Just like if any place don’t have running water, clean water, or any place that does not have electricity, that is a failure of government.
Politicians in Taiwan, or citizens in Taiwan, are agreeing on that?
Yes. Internet as a human right is a platform promised by Dr. Tsai Ing-wen four years ago when she was running for the president in her first term. By now, in the top of the Yu Shan Mountain, the highest mountain, almost 4,000 meter, you always have 4G Internet at just 15 euros per month, 10 megabits per second.
Even in the southmost Pacific island of Taiping and Dongshan, through satellite, you’ll also have 10 megabits per second, again, a flat price, just 15 euros per month. Anyone can start live streaming what’s happening to them without paying extra cost in the bills.
This is what we call broadband as a human right. It is not just connecting to the Internet. It is connecting to the Internet with at least 10 megabits per second. When we do democratic innovation based on Internet, we worry less about people who don’t have Internet connectivity, because we know nowadays only two percent of areas in Taiwan don’t have broadband.
They’re almost all 3,000 meters or higher. Even for those remaining two percent, we’re now also using helicopters to make sure that there are stations to complete the final two percent.
Broadband is human right. I’m surprised that [laughs] …I haven’t thought about it like that. I always have Internet. I always have mobile phone. I also know that some people don’t have it. I didn’t think about it as a human right. I will pass to second question.
In 2016, you were asked as a digital minister. I wondered, what was the reason for the government to appoint you? In your point of view, what was the reason for accepting it?
At that point, the cabinet needed someone who can translate between the culture of the startup, social entrepreneur community, and the language of the policymakers, because previously, a lot of Taiwan’s economic success is based on large semiconductor related supply chain.
Just like the people who work in Taiwan Semiconductor Company, MediaTek, or those large companies, they have a very hardware-based view on economy, which is great. For the social entrepreneur and for the software-based startup, they talk to, for example, Silicon Valley investors with a very different value proposition.
They talk less about ideas of manufacturing. They talk about how to satisfy a societal need. They talk about how to use software to define, for example, transportation as a service, but not as a product. This language disconnection between the service view of economy and the product view of economy is a large gap that threatens to make new policies difficult to communicate.
They need a communicator that can translate between the two cultures of product and service-based economy. They asked me to find someone who can do the job. I asked many friend, but they all have their own enterprise to run. They didn’t agree. Finally, I say, “I can give it a try,” but because I was still working with Apple at that time, I say, “You have to wait one month.”
During that month, I set up a public consultation. Everybody can ask me about how they want to know about my background and give me suggestion of how I should do my job. After one month of consultation, there is three consensus items. I used those three consensus items to negotiate my working condition.
The three items are, first, people want me to share all meetings that I chair. People want to know how the cabinet works. My working condition is radical transparency. Second, people want me to be able to visit them, whether they are in the Silicon Valley, in Korea, in Paris, or in many counties and indigenous nations in Taiwan.
People want me to not sit in Taipei and do policy for the whole of Taiwan. People want me to go places. I talked to the HR department about location independence. Anywhere I’m working, I’m working. I’m not confined to the office.
Finally, people want me to work with as many ministries as possible. I started the idea of voluntary association that any ministry can send a delegate to my office. My office has a dozen or more delegates, each from a different ministry. It’s a horizontal team, not just a vertical team.
These three conditions, radical transparency, location independence, voluntary association, become my working condition. This is how I see I can accept this role, because with the three condition, I’m not working for the government. I’m just working with the government.
Can I ask you the last values, what was that, the words?
Location independence, then voluntary association, and then radical transparency.
You are working with government, not for the government. You didn’t have any condition, you were accepted as just a minister without any conditions, but now I know that there are three legit conditions.
I totally understand why you are not working for government, but with government. I wonder what was has been changed from then politically, in service of you, and maybe your personal view if you can give me the answer.
First, Taiwan become a popular destination for social sector organizations focused on human right and focused on freedom of the press. Previously, many international organizations was based in Hong Kong or in Bangkok when they work on these matters in Asia.
Now, more and more of them move to Taiwan because of our freedom of speech, press, and assembly has grown while the civic space in Bangkok and Hong Kong have reduced. The Reporter Without Borders is headquartered in Taiwan, the Oslo Freedom Forum, or the Open Tech Fund.
Many, many human-rights-related and democracy-related organizations see Taiwan as the hub in Asia. Of course, Seoul would be a good choice, but Seoul is farther away from the South Asia.
(laughter)
I think so.
We’re closer to the ASEAN.
I want Korea to be closer.
It’s just physically.
(laughter)
On the other hand, the private sector multinationals, such as Google, which set up the largest R&D center in Asia, in Taiwan, by essentially taking HTC to be Google.
(laughter)
Microsoft also set up 100, actually they expanded to 1,000 now, AI research center in Taiwan, because of our emphasis on AI with the society, what we call assistive intelligence, which agrees with the Microsoft view on AI. Everybody else – Facebook, Amazon – the usual suspects, they all set up similar centers in Taiwan.
Both for the social sector multinationals, like Amnesty International and so on. The private sector internationals, they all see Taiwan as a more connected hub as compared to four years ago. That’s the main change.
Have you personally changed as well when you compare to you before four years?
I think it is very surprising for me to find that career public service is very innovative. Four years ago, if you asked me, I would think, of course, it is the civic hackers and the private sector companies are more innovative, and certainly not the people in the public service.
When I go into the bureaucracy, actually, I find the people, the data scientists, the designers, the storytellers, the lawmakers in the public service is as innovative as their private and social sector counterparts. It’s just they were excluded from the public view, because they don’t have the same freedom of expression as the social and private sectors. They are required to be anonymous.
Most of the credit go to their minister, not to them. We don’t see the innovation in the civil service. A lot of my work is changed because we see it’s easier actually to have something like g0v, where people can pitch ideas and co-create solutions within the bureaucracy, within the cabinet settings. That really changed my theory of change.
Previously, I thought that bureaucracy is very risk-averse. They don’t want to take risk. They need to work more with the sectors that can take risk. It turns out the public service is willing to take risk if a minister, like me, is accountable for the risk.
A lot of my work have, since then, shifted to replicate the innovation community, but within the public sector.
I also think that, because I don’t work for public sector and just outside. They won’t say anything.
That’s right.
Do people still use CrowdLaw and pol.is?
Crowd law is an idea, and pol.is is one technology to do crowd law. People still do crowd law in Taiwan. Our national participation platform, join.gov.tw, has more than 10 million visitors out of 23 million people in Taiwan, so it’s still very popular.
We still use pol.is not only for domestic issues such as how to open up the mountains to mountaineering and hiking people. We use pol.is conversation, five of them, to determine the strategy to open up the mountains.
We also use pol.is for diplomacy. We run four pol.is conversation with the AIT, which is the de facto embassy of the USA in Taiwan, to talk about how US and Taiwan can make Taiwan more unique in the world and make contribution. That’s the first.
How to make more economic cooperation is the second, how to ensure security, cybersecurity and military defense, in the third, and, finally, the last conversation of pol.is, how to improve people-to-people relationship.
These are large topics previously not embarked using CrowdLaw technologies. This is, in our understanding, the first time pol.is has been used in a cross-national, cross-country setting.
It’s opening up more to more countries. It’s spreading.
Yes, and pol.is has been made bilingual. You can type in English and translate to Mandarin or vice versa. That technology, we contributed to it, but most of it is developed by the Canadian government because, for the federal government of Canada, everything has to be French and English.
What is the most important thing that you did as the minister in your sense of the technology and data for the citizen?
There is one design that I’m very happy with. It’s the president office idea, but I helped realizing it. It is called a Presidential Hackathon. The hackathon usually is two-day or three-day, but Presidential Hackathon is three months, a very long hackathon. More than 100 people propose ideas every year.
For example, they can say, “Instead of listening to water pipe for leaking, which on average take two months from a leak for it to be noticed, why don’t we build a chatbot that can automatically tell the repair people what are the more likely leaking points?” This is a water company problem, but the solution comes from, for example, HTC or the NCCU, from across all sectors.
For example, people who see the remote island, when people get sick, they always require helicopter to take them to the main Taiwan island for treatment, but it may be dangerous. There was a helicopter crash, so people didn’t feel safe, but then they don’t trust the local nurse either. It’s a social problem.
A team propose, “What if we use high-definition video link to make sure that helicopter dispatchers and the specialized doctor and the local nurse can have a three-way video communication in front of the family of the people who is sick, and to make a decision to do local treatment with the supervision of the specialized doctor?”
They don’t need to fly the patients to the Taiwan mainland, and the local nurse gets more trust and gets more experience. That was not legal, actually. There was no telemedicine law for a nurse to be supervised by a doctor in the remote. They can do it if this doctor is by their side, but not over video link.
The Presidential Hackathon is like a sandbox to try this out for three months, so every year, the president give five trophy to five winning team. The trophy has no money, but the trophy is a projector.
If you turn on a projector, it shows Dr. Tsai Ing-wen’s image handing the trophy to the team and promise whatever you prototype in the three months, across three sectors, she commit to make it into a national policy in the next 12 months.
The social innovation become public policy by a presidential mandate. We change law for the telemedicine. We allocate extra budget for the water leak repair. We allocate extra personnel, and so do everything it takes to make those idea reality, and for the entire country, not just one sandbox or one pilot site.
Many countries have hackathon, but nobody else in our understanding offer a presidential promise as the prize. I think this is a good social innovation to make sure that innovators can focus on experiment and research. The best idea that convince three sectors become public policy without waiting for anyone. It just happens within a year.
Trophy, you can see the, for example, video? Is that that simple, or does that really have the video that makes…
You just turn on the projection.
Then you see the award ceremony.
[laughs] Wow. It’s a projector, trophy is?
The trophy is a projector. If your director general says, “We don’t have budget,” you just summon the president, and the DG will say, “Oh, we have budget.”
[laughs]
If the minister says, “This ministry of health is not in charge of helicopter. That’s Minister of Interior,” you just summon the president, and the two minister will have to talk.
Wow, I have to ask this question. It’s the era of AI, artificial intelligence. Data is the most valuable thing in the world right now. Many people see it as useful, but some people will see it could be a dangerous kind of thing to get rid of our labor. Or, there could be bias in the algorithm itself. To me, it’s pros and cons. I wonder what do you think of it?
I say assistive intelligence. I refuse the term artificial intelligence. To me, AI only assists the society. They do not actually make the society conform to new norms. AI, it could be self-driving vehicles or anything that makes decision on their own, must make decisions only when they conform to the social norm.
They are like our assistants. If you have an assistant, like your secretary, make decision on behalf of you, and you ask why, and they don’t answer why, you fire that assistant.
(laughter)
It’s the same of AI. If AI cannot explain to you why they automate away some decisions, maybe it says, “Oh, you always do the same anyway.”
When listening to the water pipe leak, the repair people only make a decision whether it’s leaking or not. The assistant, if it’s a human assistant, can say, “Well, whenever you have a water flow like this, you always say it’s leaking, so I’m automating this for you, but how to solve the leak is still up to you.” Then you will say, “OK, it’s a good apprentice, a good understudy.”
If they make decisions without accountability, without saying why, without explaining the bias, then you cannot trust that assistant. Anything you can trust a human understudy, anything you ask, must be answered by AI, too. If the AI can answer that, then it’s assistive technology. If the AI cannot, then you should not trust it. It’s that simple. That’s the first answer.
I think trust is more valuable than data. You can have a lot of data about the environment, about pollution, about climate change, but if you don’t trust the source of that data, it does not change how you think.
You see that with climate change. [laughs] There is a lot of data about climate emergency, but if you don’t trust the scientists that produce the data, the data is not valuable. There’s no value in those climate data.
Even though it’s true?
Even though it’s true, there is no social value if the society distrust the producer of the data. The value of data is built on the value of trust. Without the value of trust, data is not valuable at all. That’s the answer to your second question.
If I, as a citizen, want to use the political tool based on AI, then I should see who made it and how did they make it and so on?
It’s best if you are the producer of the data. It’s just like spreadsheet. If you type in the number yourself, of course, you trust yourself.
(laughter)
Right.
In Taiwan, many people measure air quality by themself. Many people now measure water quality by themself. They use the idea called AirBox to collect the data from schools. Even school children learn to collect environmental data, like this is air quality, as part of their class.
Because of that, they learn how to be a data operator. They learn how to curate high-quality data. Instead of accepting data from other people’s station, they can produce their own data to correlate with other people’s data.
They also join a coalition of data. For example, the LASS, L-A-S-S, e-community that use distributed ledgers to make sure people who put data in cannot change the data afterward, so that people can trust that if people say there is air pollution now, they cannot change the number the day before election.
Then they can bargain with the minister of the environment. The minister of the environment only had 87 station, but the citizen have 2,000 station. People trust the citizen more than the minister. The minister cannot beat the citizen, so the minister must join the citizen.
The citizens say, “We allow you to join our network and call it civil IoT.” If you search for civil IoT, you will see the system. “But we ask something in return. We say you must use our AirBox design and measure those gaps.”
Those are some white spot, and those are industrial area, industrial park, that people suspect them of polluting, but it’s private property. You cannot break and enter and install. It turn out the government owned the land in the industrial park, the lamplight. We just endorsed the AirBox design and start to install them on the lamp.
The government become a supporter to the data coalition, forming what we call a data collaborative, that is to say, many data coalitions agreeing to work with each other on a shared API. The data collaborative is co-governed by the private, the social, and the public sector. The government support but do not control the governance.
This is how the citizen can build trust with each other without blindly trusting the government. That is how the government can trust the citizens more. I think the only data that you can trust really is the data that you participate in creating.
Sorry, but can I take a picture here?
Of course. This whole slide is online. I can send you the link.
Please. You opened that, too?
Of course. [laughs]
Can I take of you as well for my interview?
Of course.
I’m sorry, I’m in the middle of… [laughs]
Of course, it’s fine.
(pause)
Just one more.
Still, I could ask everything. [laughs] Simply, what is the goal for you as all three or just one?
My goal is three of the 169 Sustainable Development Goals, as my name card shows. The global goals is the common goal, the SDGs. In particular, three targets, to enhance reliable data – we talk about this – to encourage cross-sectoral and international partnership, and then to share open innovation.
These three targets, 17.18, 17.17, and 17.6, to me, is the goal that unites all the other goals together. That is why I choose it as my personal goal, as well.
We’re good?
Yeah, we’re good. Thank you.
Thank you.