You describe yourself as a civic hacker and a conservative anarchist. Can you tell us what that means and why you identify with these terms?

Yes. A civic hacker is not a cybersecurity hacker. In cybersecurity, we have white hat hackers who will get into the vulnerabilities, security flaws, of the system and tell you how to repair it, or there are black hat hackers that use those flaws for personal gain and benefits.

A civic hacker is not about building or cracking cybersecurity systems. It’s rather looking at social system, the civic system, looking at, for example, democracy as another social technology and try to identify the problems and flaws in democracy.

We’re white hat civic hackers, meaning that we’re not exploiting those loopholes in democracy for personal gain. Rather, we’re about building new tools in democracy that can better reflect the collective will and rough consensus of the entire citizen and entire society. That is what civic hacker means. It means people who participate to create more participatory tools for everybody.

The conservative anarchist. Conservative, for me, means conserving the various different cultures in Taiwan. In Taiwan, we have 20 different national languages, many indigenous people and waves of immigrants and people from all over the world. Taiwan is a very cosmopolitan country.

What we have in Taiwan is instead one culture dominating the other in the name of progress and actually making other culture lose their diversity and inclusion, we have put a lot of emphasis on conserving the views from different cultures.

For example, I studied in the indigenous nations of Atayal when I was 12 years old. I was able to then look at my own upbringing using the cultural metaphors, the culture of that indigenous nation.

That is what we mean by a transcultural conservation. It is not just conserving, like preserving the culture, but rather making sure that everybody can see their own upbringing and culture from the perspective of other cultures in Taiwan. That’s what I mean by conservative.

Anarchism to me means that any social order without a commanding or without a threat of coercive violence and things like that. It’s the basic idea of voluntary association. As the digital minister, I always stress, I’m a lower-case minister – means I preach about digital, but I don’t issue command and I don’t take command from the bureaucracy.

Awesome.

Could you speak again, sorry?

Speak again?

I mean, the same level…

At the same level of sound?

Exactly.

OK, sure. You were interested in programming from a very young age. What sparked this interest, and what is social innovation, and what led you into the area of social innovation?

OK.

Let’s do the next one. Is it OK for you to have the computer?

Because she’s doing shortcuts, like…

Sure, sure, sure, sure.

She’s going to see the hands and the computer.

That’s fine. It’s part of me, right? It’s an extension of me. There’s more of me here.

Next question. You were interested in programming from a very young age. What sparked this interest?

My first foray into programming is to make a pedagogy, to make educational games. It’s a game about teaching fractionals to my brother, who is four years my junior. He was four years old at the time.

To me, it is always about the interaction that programming brings in people rather than the program in itself. To me, programs, it’s like notes made out of logic, and the melody it makes is about the possibility of interaction between people.

For me, it’s like making music, making instruments, making things like that. It’s not the goal in itself. It is to enable new ways of social interaction. That’s what sparked my interest.

What is social innovation and what led you into this particular area?

Social innovation means very simply innovation that is open to the society to participate, and at the same time good for the society. It’s the purpose of the society with participation from the society. Whereas the civic technologist focus on SDG 16, which is about institution and democracy, social innovators can be found in every other sustainable goal as well, from climate change, to zero poverty and hunger, and things like that.

What draws me to social innovation is that it’s a much more inclusive term than this participatory climate action, civic tech for democracy, and so on. These are all good, but it’s actually only through working across silos of innovators can we truly see that a lot of the patterns that we discover, for example crowd funding, crowd sourcing, and things like that, apply to the entire swathe of social innovation scenarios regardless which sector it originates from.

It is this cross-sectoral appeal of the term social innovation that really draws me into it, so that I can talk with people working on the environment, working on the society, working on the economy, and see them all as friends, instead of people who are having tensions to pull into different directions.

Let’s now speak about Taiwan and radical transparency, if you don’t mind.

Yes.

In the 1990s Taiwan remained controlled by martial law, and yet today it sits among Asia’s most progressive and principled democracies. Taiwan boasts one of the region’s most transparent public administrations. What led to this massive shift in paradigm for Taiwan?

Definitely, I will say it is personal computers and then the Internet. Taiwan was one of the main manufacturing place for personal computers. When I was young, everybody have very early access to personal computers, because it’s all made in Taiwan.

Because of that, we have a lot of early innovations into not only business, like spreadsheets and so on, but also into organizational possibilities. For example, my first foray into the World Web is actually campaigning for the first presidential election in Taiwan. That was in 1996. Basically, direct election for the president and the World Web’s mass adoption is in the same year.

There is less legacy. We don’t have like 200 years of Republican tradition and paperwork – literally – to preserve. When we first get democracy, we already see it in a participatory form, in the deliberative form, in the representational form, in all its different forms, enabled by this very inexpensive way for people to peer-to-peer talk to one another.

I would say that in Taiwan, people who innovate on technology and people who innovate on bureaucracy are the same people. We are the first generation of people who can innovate on those both regards. That gives a civic spirit so that people feel that we own democracy, because it is relatively new to us, and it’s just like 30 years old.

We really have generations of time to adapt that democracy into this current landscape with social media, with mobile Internet, and things like that. I think this drive of inspiration and innovation is what led Taiwan to be one of the most radically transparent and also the most progressive country in the whole of Asia.

We have so much to learn from you, really. Taiwan also ranks among the world’s top 10 digital governments using emerging technologies to inspire greater public engagement with government. What key lesson can be drawn from Taiwan government experiments in open, technologically driven governance?

There’s two key lessons. The first is that the government should trust citizens without requiring the citizens to trust back. By saying this, we mean transparency as in making the state transparent to the citizens, but we must never ask citizens to be transparent to the state, because that will be authoritarianism.

We need to be very careful about our use of the words like transparency, and define it always in a way of the government trusting citizens first.

The other lesson I would like to share is that we’re always bringing technology to people, rather than asking people to come to technology.

For example, I tour around Taiwan to the most rural, indigenous offshore island places, and wherever I am, I can have a broadband access back to the Social Innovation Labs in the large municipalities simply because we have broadband as a human right.

Any place in Taiwan, more than 98 percent of our territory, you have 10 megabits per second at 15 Euros, unlimited connections, and if you don’t, it’s my fault.

Because of that, we always can bring the entire cabinets, all the 12 different ministries related to social innovation, to such local town halls, so the local people don’t need to learn to type or anything like that. For them, it’s just another town hall, but it’s joined by the large municipalities who respond to them in the agenda that they set here and now.

Through this way, people are getting more included into a democratic process instead of just forcing the people to speak the language of bureaucracy, or maybe traveling to Taipei to deliver maybe five minutes of speech in a public hearing. That way actually excludes more and more people if you’re asking people to come to technology.

How important it’s that private and public sector innovate together?

In Taiwan, we say that the social sector has the most legitimacy. We try not to say “third sector,” because it’s somehow things that they’re kind of bronze medal or something like that, so we say social sector.

The fact is that between the lifting of the martial law in the ‘80s and the direct election of the president in the ‘90s, there’s a decade of action by the social sector. The social sector who work on human right, work on disaster relief, who work on all sort of different social works, actually have a higher legitimacy in the Taiwanese population than any minister.

Because of this social configuration, whenever we see people, for example, worrying about the air quality being 2.5, for example, and setting very cheap AirBoxes to measure the air quality by themselves in the balconies, in the primary schools and so on, at less than 100 Euros each, we see a swath of thousands of reporting stations that share a public ledger.

Based on this public ledger, the government cannot beat them, so the government must join them. We work with them saying, “OK. We will work on calibrating your numbers,” and they, because they have coalition, they can negotiate. They say, “OK. The government, if you use our numbers, we ask you to contribute by asking the industrial parks to also report their air quality numbers.”

It turns out we own the lamp in the industrial parks so that we work with, then, the private sector to install such AirBoxes so that everybody have a complete picture of what the air quality is all around Taiwan.

This simple story says that the private sector has plenty of room to innovate, for example, to make more precise measurements, to have better transaction rates on the blockchain technology that underlies this shared ledger. The private sector always conform to the social norm, just as the public sector does, and when we conform both to the social norm, we naturally are partners.

There is less of this public-private tension between the state own something and the private sector own something, because whatever we do, we’re doing this for the common goals that we share.

You are one of the more recent players in the Taiwan Government’s emergence as an eGov leader - and yet you were once one if its biggest critics. Can you tell us about your journey to get to where you are now?

Yeah. Back in 2014, yes, indeed, I was a demonstrator, and we occupied the Parliament for 22 days for a lack of transparency and accountability for the passing of the Cross-Strait Services Trade Agreement or CSSTA.

Our idea of demonstration is never about protesting or blocking a process. Our idea of demonstration is always about demo. Demo means that to show something new, a part of future that comes to the present through a participation of the citizens.

In the Occupy the Parliament, we actually do what the MPs were elected to do, which is to deliberate the CSSTA with half a million people on the street and many more online.

It is through this way of what we call listening-at-scale technologies do the people in Taiwan suddenly see it is actually possible to listen to half a million people at once. You just need to make participatory design part of your idea. The people who settled on the four demands, not one less, back in 2014, eventually get all their demands accepted by the Head of the Parliament.

There’s also the political will that responds to the Occupiers, to the Parliamentarians. People, it’s just people doing this crowdsourced discover and definition of the problem with the Parliamentarians. The MPs don’t see the demonstrators as threatening, rather they see them as collaborators in the governing process.

I think the role of critiques of investigative journalism and so on is very, very important, because they all help us discover the problem and define the problem. I’m working with the government, I’m not working for the government.

That’s part of the covenant, when I entered the cabinet, so that I’m still working in a kind of Lagrange point between the movement and the government to make sure that people can protest also, can demonstrate also, but on the latest version of the regulations, the latest version of the drafts so that their ideas and their critiques and so on can get into the problem-definition phase, instead of just randomly saying ideological things that polarize the society without offering a co-construction.

You were appointed as Taiwan’s Digital Minister in 2016. What has been the biggest challenge so far?

Back in 2016, people are talking about the weaponization of social media everywhere around the world including certain elections in 2016. People discovered that it is actually possible to use precision targeting and the same technologies that people develop for advertisement purposes, for political campaigning.

Even more worrying, it can spread intentional harmful information to parts of the electorate so that the citizens who are affected with such disinformation will stop to recognize other political ideas as valid or even other groups as people. It will drive people to be much more polarized and more violent to each other so that it becomes a antisocial media and not a social media.

The threats of weaponization of social media as well as election interference based on precision hypertargeting goals have been a lot of what the liberal democracies seen as the kind of populism that excludes certain people from even thinking about political things, because whenever they think about it, they think of the online bullying, they think of online hate, and things like that, so a toxic environment that drives people away from public conversation.

For the past couple of years, what we’ve been doing is researching vaccines and inoculations against such a toxic virus of the mind. We develop it through humor, through rapid responses, through a collaborative journalism and fact-checking and so on.

By our past presidential election, we see that less that 16 minutes after each harmful disinformation gets spread, instead of going to censorship or take down or encroaching on the media platform, we do none of these things.

The citizens organize themselves to put out clarifications in real time attaching it to the public notice, attributing the sources of such interferences. The ministries in charge all roll out hilarious funny mimetic pictures within an hour for people to get into a more humorous mindset, which is a natural inoculation against hate.

Your guiding principle of ‘radical transparency’ seeks to inspire greater democratic participation and empowerment of citizens through digital infrastructure – to inform, collaborate, and humanise interactions between the government and its people. Are governments and cities ready for greater input from citizens?

Yeah. I think all governments are ready for more input. What they are not ready for is more noise. If you have the social signals for the decision makers, they, of course, welcome all useful signals. The main thing that people worry about is that if you open a comment board, then the astroturfers and trolls will dominate the day and all you get is noise and you get no signal from it.

For me, it is more of a communication and interaction design. For example, we know if you have a reply button, and if you attach a photo to a statement, you always get trolls that attack the person instead of ideating about the statement. You either remove the avatar or you take away the reply button. That is just one of the very simple heuristics that we discovered when designing for interaction.

What I’m trying to say is that as antisocial media have taught us, a lot of decision of the design, if you don’t do it with the society or the best intentions of moderation tools or whatever, can basically make a toxic society unintentionally, but if you design with the intention of pro-social conversations that looks to reflect people’s true feelings and true, authentic social preferences rather than positions or ideologies, then you can get useful signal just by cross moderating and assistive intelligence.

Taiwan has been working with a lot of such tools such as Polis and so on, so that wherever we feel the need to get the input from the society, we know that we run this conversation for three weeks. There’s no need to worry about cybersecurity or moderation, and you always only get the signal rather than the noise.

Why is open-source data so important?

Open-source means that we share the way that the algorithms work so that people can not only get the effect of the algorithm, but they can also empower themselves to change the algorithm. Without open-source, people get sued for copyright infringement or patent infringement whenever they try to want to change, for example, how the self-driving vehicle works for their personal assistance and things like that.

With open-source, it’s for the first time that we can benefit from all the existing co-creations, and only modify maybe one percent or two percent for our own purposes. This is exactly how, for example, Wikipedia and the preprint open access movement is transforming knowledge production. We do this through open-source tools.

Now, open data, which is a derived idea from open-source, apply the same idea of no copyright restrictions but through data, so that people can understand just like we are the software programmers that produce source code, the AirBox teams that I just mentioned, the primary schools that measure air quality are producers of data.

When all the primary schoolers get into this mindset that we are producers of data, and that we are stewards also of data, then they don’t see themselves merely as consumers or as users, because that way, all the data that they produce may be unintentionally used, and they will less be aware of the data portability rights, the self-sovereign data rights and data collisions, all the different configurations around data sharing that is possible.

If we start their education knowing that they are producers of data, they’re producers of code, they’re producers of media, then everybody can be a little bit of a journalist, a little bit of a data scientist, and a little bit of a software programmer. That way, we make a far more informed society than one that is relying on a top elite to determine the rule that we live on, which is algorithmic governance.

How successful have you been in inspiring other government leaders or ministers to embrace the ‘radical transparency’ philosophy?

It’s very successful. Taiwan, we have 32 ministries, and each one with a vertical minister. One of the nine horizontal ministers that oversee cross-ministerial issues. My office has delegates from all ministries. So far, we’ve had like 20 different delegates from different ministries.

Although it’s not all 32 – for example, the ministry of defense never sends anyone to my office – we did eventually convince, for example, the ministry of foreign affairs to talk about public diplomacy through radical transparency.

That is really a change from the traditional diplomatic corps, which more focus on the ambassadorial and ministerial relationships between the sovereign entities. It’s called multilateralism. People now see that for all the topics that we care about, for example, public health, or climate action, or things like that, or data governance, which we just talked about, there really is no natural representative of people’s interests and incentives.

Everybody needs to represent themselves instead of asking one person to represent for everybody who is affected by climate change is very difficult, actually. Because of that, a lot of diplomacy has shifted to emphasize on dialogue between peoples and peoples to go together and find out how as peoples, we can share some values despite our cultural and ideological differences.

We’ve been applying the same radical transparency and participatory tools to set the diplomatic agenda between the US and Taiwan through four digital dialogues, and we get people’s top consensus of the US people and Taiwanese people, and how we should move forward in terms of security collaboration, economic collaboration, people-to-people ties, and making Taiwan seen as more unique in the world.

There’s a very successful experiment in public democracy empowered by digital tools.

Let’s now speak a bit about emerging technology and cybersecurity, if you don’t mind. What is Taiwan currently doing to foster innovation and technology?

In Taiwan, what we are doing is making sure that everybody has access to the innovation and technology. We put a lot of emphasis on the education, and we just rolled out a new curriculum last year that focuses on the digital competence rather than literacy.

Literacy is more like if you are a reader or a viewer of media, of digital works. If you’re talking about competency, there’s a value as a producer of data, a producer of digital content.

When we empower all the different schools in Taiwan, a lot of people ask me, what about people in rural places, in places without a lot of teachers that are specialized in such skills. The answer is that we make use of what we call co-teaching. We have a rural teacher that takes care of the learning incentive, the inspiring of those teachers-student relationships in a day-to-day fashion.

They may not be experts in, for example, digital rights or things like that, but they can connect them to a larger municipal classroom, and so the two classes sit virtually in the same room through wall-sized projections and immersive reality.

They can even have food or dance together, and they build a lot of mutual support for both the municipal students who look at firsthand how the rural places work, and how they can help, for example, designing some drones that help the farmers to automate even more parts of their farming.

That is something that’s very important, because they have a shrinking working-age population in the agric areas, whereas the local agric areas, students can identify with more skills that takes care of their community.

Instead of going to university and never to return to their community, they can network with the large universities who then participate in the regional revitalization ideas within their communities, so they can become the community organizers while networking with the international community.

This network of innovation, I think, it’s the most important to keep the social fabric and to make sure that people are included rather than divided because of 5G and other new technologies.

5G connectivity, AI and Blockchain will create huge opportunities worldwide. What are the biggest social and environmental challenges that can be solved by data, connectivity and emerging technology?

I think it is social distrust. As I said, the previous generation of antisocial media really created different silos in the society that tend to reinforce existing ideologies that exclude certain people. We are dealing with a more fragmented global society now. Most people are holding very different views across different countries, or even within a country across different cultures.

A trans-cultural vision of the society where people understand how they can step into other cultural shoes and describe their own upbringing using these cultural languages rather than writing them off, I think that is one of the main societal challenges.

We can see it, for example, whenever there is an emergency that happens that takes the society and makes the society panic or fear about a certain thing. For example, just recently, early February this year in Taiwan, there is a massive speculation on the price of surgical masks.

We’re not alone. Everywhere in East Asia from Hong Kong, through Singapore, through Japan, there is a lot of the social norm where people, because they don’t want to infect their community, puts on surgical masks just on the slightest flu-like symptoms.

It’s a different social norm compared to European cities, but it is true in Asian society. In Taiwan, there’s a lot of uncertainty and doubt about the accessibility of the surgical mask. Within 48 hours, our team of national health insurers designed – and I personally helped civic hackers in the g0v community to code – a mask map.

Everybody can see where the nearby pharmacies are or the stock level is, and refresh every 30 seconds, so that you can go into a pharmacy, present your NHI card, and get a pair of masks immediately, and you can refresh your phone. There is more than 100 different applications based on this real-time open data, and you see its stock deplete by two.

You trust the pharmacists more, because you know that they’re tapping into the right shared open data pool. The pharmacists trust the government more, because they know that the distribution is fair and equal. The government trusts the citizens more, because then there is no way to speculate if you know that there is going to be more masks supplied at lower prices as the days goes on.

There’s very little speculation and no panic when it comes to masks distribution in Taiwan. That shows the power of the connectivity and the radical transparency that people can really reflect on the current real set of data that describes the society and what the society cares about.

Instead of accusing each other to pollute the data stream through speculation and things like that, people devote their energy into making this commonsense of the sensing of the current fear, uncertainty, and doubt, into a creative energy. This is just one of the recent examples of how a social fear can be mitigated through radical transparency and open data.

What are the prerequisites that governments need for the adoption of these technologies?

I think the idea of a norm-first approach, meaning that the government stays behind the social norm that emerge from those technologies and allow for free experimentation, but within that boundary of risk – it’s called sandboxing – is very important.

We at the moment have a lot sandboxes around platform economy, around 5G, like millimeter wave testing fields, around self-driving vehicles, around fintech, and so on. At any given time, there is like 100 small experiments running all across Taiwan. Most of them will pivot, meaning that they will fail to find social acceptance, but it’s OK, because then people learn that it’s not a good idea.

We think the investors who are putting in the money so that everybody learns, it’s like a lottery in reverse. Whenever there is a real good idea accepted by the society emerging out of a sandbox, we then agree within a year to adopt their idea as our new regulation.

The same with the Presidential Hackathon. We allow for three months at a time experimentation on a pseudonymous fashion from the civil society and the social sector, as well as with the public sector and the private sector. All the top 20 teams that’s voted in through quadratic voting – it’s a new voting method – get set as the national priority, and then the 5 out of the top 20 accept a trophy from the president.

There is no money. There is only a projector. If you turn it on, it shows the president presenting the trophy to the team, promising whatever they did in the past three months will become national policy within the next 12 months. Again, it is a way of the political will to embrace the social norm of the technology by staying behind, but a constant fixed length behind the emerging technologies.

It’s not before, because that’s like top-down authoritarianism. It’s not during, because it is the swarm of the technology will overwhelm the regulation technologies. It is behind, but not behind too much. It’s a fixed length behind. It’s like a car following another car in a superhighway.

How can policymakers ensure that they offer an advantage to all citizens?

I think the most important point is to have what we call reverse mentorship. In all the 12 ministries related to social innovation, each minister has two social innovators who are always under 35 years old that lead the direction for that particular ministry.

We call them reverse mentors because in a sense, they’re mentoring the ministers and educating them, whether their policies are having a positive effect on all of population. On the other hand, it’s in reverse because they were not trained in public policy.

For example, our reverse mentor for economy minister is Impact Hub Taipei’s co-founder. Our ministry of labor’s reverse mentor is someone who participates in the WorldSkills competition in Russia, where Taiwan got the third place last year.

His idea is for the National Day parade to feature not only Olympic athletes, but also WorldSkills champions, so that people can understand that the new skills that’s needed by the society is something to look up with and not just a secondary choice if you cannot succeed in an academic career.

It may be your first choice, because then the skilled WorldSkills champions get distributed by their own volition into the K-12 schools to rebuild the school communities through hardware, through design, through gardening, and things like that, together with the students.

This way of transforming how the education works can be proposed by a reverse mentor due to what they hear from the society very quickly within two months into a ministerial agenda, and within four months into the prime minister’s agenda, because all the meetings are headed by the prime minister himself. Just like that, it became the national policy.

Have a good bidirectional or omnidirectional listening experience like that through reverse mentorship, it’s really, really important if people want to make sure that all the citizens benefit, rather than just a few people who have a good connection to the ministries.

As governments around the world expand their digital resources, they also inevitably become bigger targets for hackers. How can honest governments stay ahead of the ‘bad guys’ and preserve public trust?

You need to pay the white hat hackers really well and make sure that they have dinner with the president or the minister once in a while, so they become a very not only lucrative, but place with honor for people to go into the white hat cybersecurity expertise.

In Taiwan, for example, all our new initiative by any ministerial agenda allocates three percent to five percent to just cybersecurity. Making sure that they’re very well paid, and that all the different digital infrastructure that we roll out, we allocate a lot of fund for the penetration testing of it to the cybersecurity design of it to have a defense of depth, and also making sure that this threat hunting is proactive by employing a lot of those white hat hackers.

Even if they don’t work with the government on a day-to-day basis, we also have challenges and grand challenges and prizes, so that if they can uncover the vulnerability before anybody does, they get also paid handsomely, even though they are in the private sector.

In this way, we make sure that our best and brightest work, for example, in Trend Micro, our flagship cybersecurity company that takes care not only about virus and stuff, but also about countering disinformation, and about countering scam, and things like that, so that they can expand their reach and they can also make a positive impact to the society, and make sure the society really reward them so they don’t fall into the dark side, which always have more cookies.

It is with this solidarity with the white hat community can we truly ensure that there is a general population that have awareness of cybersecurity, instead of over-concentrating on just a few people.

Can we repeat this answer? Would it be OK?

Sure.

OK. Thank you.

As governments around the world expand their digital resources, they also inevitably become bigger targets for hackers. How can honest governments stay ahead of the ‘bad guys’ and preserve public trust?

I think the most important thing is to make sure that the white hat hackers become a preferred career for people interested in cybersecurity.

In Taiwan, we allocate three percent to five percent of all new government ministerial initiatives on cybersecurity alone, penetration testing, advanced cyber threat hunting, designing for the cybersecurity defense in depth, and things like that, to make sure that people who are interested in cybersecurity always have dinner with the president or with the prime minister once in a while, and that if they decide to work with the government, they get paid handsomely.

Even if they don’t, they can also participate in the grand challenges and the prizes where we just open this, like a self-driving vehicle testing field, for people to find vulnerabilities way before it actually opens for business.

It is this culture of cherishing the white hat hacker and making sure that it is a career choice that people feel proud entering into, can we truly empower the general citizenry to have awareness on cybersecurity, rather than over-relying on a handful of experts.

These cybersecurity experts who are white hat hackers can also then learn not just about cybersecurity, but for example, through joining Trend Micro, our flagship private sector cybersecurity company, also about countering disinformation during elections and during epidemics, and also making sure that they invest their career into understanding more about the society and having more visibility with the society, so they don’t fall into the dark side, which always have more cookies.

Let’s move on now into education.

Mm-hmm.

You’re a self-taught engineer that has lived the stigmas that this involves, especially in your role as a minister. Do you think this will change any soon?

Yes, definitely. We’re seeing more and more people that having this idea of self-taught education, even within the curriculum in Taiwan. In fact, the new curriculum that we introduced last year deliberately blurs the line between home schooling and institutional schooling. You can actually choose to be educated in the community by participating directly in community affairs if your local school is on board with that.

What used to be social sector volunteer work and things like that actually become the everyday, problem-based learning in the K-12 curricula, so that as I said, people in the rural community, the farmlands and so on, can understand that the newest technologies can directly apply to the community issues that they are facing, instead of them going into the college, working on very abstract things, and, therefore, not returning to the community because they’ve lost touch of what their community wants.

This kind of what we call autonomous in education is one of the three pillars in our new curriculum, along with interaction and this common good. Autonomous interaction and the common good become our vision for lifelong learning. Instead of the teacher holding the standardized answer, it’s now the teacher just learning with the student to solve a real economic, or environmental, or societal problems as part of their lifelong learning process.

We will very quickly see that people who are 20 years old, 22 years old, they already zigzag through different majors, different educational programs, different entrepreneurship or voluntary programs, and so on, that altogether become their lifelong learning experience journey, rather than being fixated on a single major like a single constellation from the sky.

That is actually becoming a stigma in Taiwan, and cross-disciplinary, interdisciplinary way of learning is becoming the mainstream.

How do you feel education will transform worldwide with the rise of digital learning?

I think mainly, digital learning enables us to see the different cultures as collaborators, rather than as others or aliens. If all you learn is with people with a very similar cultural upbringing. It’s very easy to develop us versus them behavior or thinking that talks about the social needs internally but care less about these global phenomena.

Most of our challenges now, as I said, on global health, and global climate, and so on, are actually detrimental if you solve it in this us versus them way, because then, all the different actors from different societies, if they don’t talk to each other or if they consider each other as others, then they will tend to cancel each other in their work.

It’s only through establishing global norms about transparency, about accountability, about access to data, and things like that can we truly solve global-scale issues.

Digital learning, I think, makes everybody who learns more cosmopolitan, because you can see very quickly that in any of the online courses now through automated translation, you can see that there is 20 or more languages offered on a single curriculum. If you look at the real-time interaction, you can see people from different societies chiming in.

Altogether, I think this makes a more digital culture that is shared among all the digital natives, no matter which original culture they came from. That in turn makes a much more collaborative nature of the younger citizenry, so they’re more prepared to network with their very different cultural counterparts across different time zones to tackle global challenges.

How do you think your background in self-learning affects your standards regarding critical thinking and the ability to state one’s opinions, and how do you think digital education could promote this more?

I think autonomous learning, as I prefer to call it, because it’s not learning really from myself. I don’t learn by meditating on myself alone. I learn by joining what we called working groups or interest groups on the Internet governance picture.

When I first tapped into this open access ecosystem, that was the preprint server from Cornell University, the arXiv.org. Now we’re seeing that instead of just on a few sciences, all the different sciences from biology to law are setting up their own preprint communities so that people, instead of just relying on peer review of people who they already know in the academic community, they are now actually relying more on public review.

This is to say strangers that they don’t have any idea is, but with just an email address, and who can comment on their work in progress before it goes into the academic peer review.

I still remember when I was 14 years old, I just look up all the arXiv preprints around artificial intelligence, because I was doing science fair on that particular project. Instead of learning from myself, I learned from the cutting-edge researchers, and they just wrote them with an email. They don’t know I’m just 14 years old.

To me, they’re just peers, and to them, I’m just another researcher, and so we start doing social production of papers and so on very quickly, without having to climb this academic ladder to earn your place in the peer review community in the academia.

Of course, I understand that I’m privileged, because artificial intelligence is one of very few fields that doesn’t need special equipment like a Large Hadron Collider or things like that. There is a spectrum of disciplines that can be learned this way.

I think we’re prototyping a future way of learning which is inclusive of all ages, and people are not discriminated just because of their age or their different cultures, and they can all be included into this kind of community that produces content and knowledge together. I think digital learning and digital education further makes this the norm.

At my time back in 1995, for a highschooler to do that is not the norm, but now, people as young as seven years old start learning coding from scratch. I mean literally from the Scratch community. The Scratch community never codes from scratch. They remix each other’s games. They remix each other’s projects. For the people who learn coding from Scratch, they actually understand that nothing is from scratch, and everything is remixes of each other.

That sets a new social norm around collaborative knowledge sharing instead of owning the production of the knowledge. The people who are educated this way will attribute less to the idea of intellectual property or owning the things. They will instead focus on sharing and problem solving. I think that’s where the digital learning environment can help.

Some people say that one of the main reasons why you were assigned your current role in the Taiwanese cabinet is because you could “bridge the gap between the older and younger generations.” How has this worked so far? What are the main challenges in promoting digital literacy to an older generation? What could younger generations learn from the older ones?

I’m a digital migrant myself. As I said, I get access to the Internet in 1993 when I was 12 years old, and I get to publish on the arXiv and the open-source community when I was 14. That was 1995. It’s like I’m an immigrant, although a younger immigrant, to the digital culture. It’s been like 23 years so far.

What I’m trying to say is that the younger and older generation are relative. One person may be old in age but that person may only be seven years old when coming to the digital culture. Someone maybe just 14 years old but they’ve spent their entire 14 years old in the digital culture, which makes them more senior than the people who only have six years of digital culture exposure.

What we are trying to say here is that instead of treating people based on their age, we’re treating people based on their digital competency. The digital competency is like a ladder, so that you always see someone who is further above the ladder that can translate the more expert language, the more specialized language upper in the ladder like algorithm, and code, and so on, into interactive experience like Scratch, that you can understand.

This applies to the entirety of the society in the lifelong learning, not just the K-12, not just the university. That’s why we work with the community colleges. We work with the long-term healthcare and elderly care situations where people just go there and build a community around maybe board game, around disinformation and spotting disinformation.

The elderly people, a lot of their social connectivity is through online chat rooms with their grandchildren, and they also want to correct their grandchildren’s misconceptions. They don’t want to be corrected all the time, so they also want to learn a lot about how to spot disinformation and how to look up information sources and things like that.

That is the way that we shape this intergenerational learning facility so that people can understand that there is no single perspective that is right. Rather, everybody contributes the part of the world that they understand.

We can also bring it with augmented reality. For example, in Taiwan, Pokémon Go is very popular. We see a lot of the elderly, like grandparents, working with their grandchildren on catching the Pocket Monsters all around Taiwan.

Because it’s new for both generations, they can share, for example, the elderly can share that you can catch a fish here, because it used to be a pond here, and so on, and share their historical memories about the culture, and the younger generation can share about this two-dimensional culture, the ACG culture that led to the Pocket Monsters. They all have stories to tell.

Telling stories together and defining the cultural identity together is one of the most powerful ways that the generations can work together. We have this idea of a national memory repository based on this idea of cross-generational storytelling and capturing what they’ve told each other as stories. That is how the younger generation and the older generations can work across generations.

The other thing is, of course, sharing food together. In those storytelling events, you don’t have to tell a really historically important story. All that is important is that you bring food to the table or you share the food on the table.

Even in the Social Innovation Lab, which is my office, we have a kitchen that opens until like 11:00 PM every midnight. Anyone who have any social activities around Social Innovation Lab eventually have late dinner together.

That, again, brings the older generation more pertinent to the community building, because frankly speaking, they have access to better recipes, and they can also feel that they are part of this community building exercise, so that no matter whether we’re talking about 5G, or universal basic income, or whatever new concept, people will remember that innovators associate with the community feeling.

The innovators will not feel secluded from the society when they’re sharing their latest social innovations, and they will remember to show up for the meetup next week, even if they have forgotten anything that people have shared in the concept stage, because they remember the food. The food is good, so they will again show up.

Let’s now speak about gender and the Internet…

Let’s speak about gender and the Internet. Is the Internet inherently racist or sexist?

Yeah. I think the Internet is an interoperable layer of existing networks. That’s what the Internet means. Whereas the existing social networks may be racist, or sexist, or discriminatory in regards of that, depending on who they internetwork with, you can either counterbalance these biases by deliberately internetworking two different approaches together, or that you can reinforce such biases and discriminations, but only internetworking with people who share the same biases and the same discriminations. Internet is powerful in both amplifying and mitigating stereotypes and discrimination, based on how people use it.

What can governments do to create a fairer, more inclusive internet?

I think online safety is the main promise that the government needs to make to the society so that people can feel safe sharing whatever they feel like on the Internet.

This is very inherently linked to the idea of what we call negative freedoms, in the Isaiah Berlin sense, in a sense that freedom from surveillance, freedom from censorship, freedom from cyber bullying is as important as freedom to express, freedom to assemble, freedom to organize, and things like that.

This negative freedom can only be ensured if we have a pretty good norm around the code of conduct that how is socially acceptable use of the social media, of the Internet, of emails, and things like that. It used to be called netiquette. It’s a very old word, now.

I still think this idea of etiquette in the Internet is not old. It is still as relevant as ever. That informs the co-governance, which is the large platforms.

For example, in Taiwan, the largest Reddit-like platform, online Internet forum, the PTT, is actually built by students in National Taiwan University and still operates out of the National Taiwan University’s facility.

That ensure that they don’t have to cave in to demands from advertisers or demands from their shareholders, because it is, essentially, academia exercise in making sure that a public forum works well.

They evolved, through the past decades, a very intrinsic governance structure with something that look very much like a common-law system with the court of appeals, with the presidents, with the judges, the juries, and things like that out of its own regulatory system.

Imagine if the government says that they have to report everything to the court for the court to decide. It actually makes it impossible for this kind of community governance to evolve.

Also now imagine that if they sell out, meaning that they become a company and be controlled by shareholding entities, then these entities will be at attention to maximize their value in order to get the community order to play with the customers’ or advertisers’ benefit.

Just by resisting the authoritarian pressure and resisting the surveillance capitalism pressure can we truly get a social sector that works out what is the best or at least better practices for governing the speech and governing the expression on the etiquette of those different boards.

What we think is important for the government is to ensure that we support but do not own, do not control, this kind of regulatory environments, and so that this kind of decentralized governance-making can truly happen with the input of every users and so that we probably don’t call them “users” anymore. We just call them fellow citizens.

Do you think the digital gender divide is likely to disappear over the next few years or do you see it widening?

It will disappear in some places, and it will widen in other places. As I said, technology is just an amplifier. In Taiwan, for example, our newest parliament election, there’s more than 40 percent women in the Parliament.

Dr. Tsai Ing-wen is our president not because she is the wife or the daughter of some politician. She earned the entire merit-based democracy, so much so that it becomes a norm in Taiwan that we care more about the inclusiveness across the different cultures and so on.

We’ve already moved on from gender balance and actually, because we translate programming as program design rather than software engineering, which – engineering, you tend to attract boys, and design, you tend to attract girls.

We have more girls who code, and now we’re having a recruitment problem for boys. We have to make coding more interesting for boys. It’s a good problem to have.

In any case, what I’m trying to say is that in some corners of the world with a good balance and a good mechanism design, that is participatory, we will see more and more divides just dissipate without people even caring about the particular mechanism that enabled it to happen, because it will be just the social norm. This is what Taiwan is.

In other places where the gender divides are widening, it is not because of the Internet. Rather, it is because Internet served as an amplifier to propagate the social norm that women are only fit for something or the men are only fit for something.

Again, it can be a great amplifier on social media to reinforce such stereotypes. I think what’s important is just to check that intrinsic mechanism that, for example, how the parliament is constituted, how the education system is constituted, whether you call programming, designing, or engineering, very fundamental things like that, before you can then get into the Internet or the digital part, which by that part is already too late.

You probably have to start in a more inclusive and equal fashion in your philosophy, in your language, in your mechanism design, and the Internet amplified that part.

You once said, “I’ve been shutting reality off and lived almost exclusively on the net for many years, because my brain knows for sure that I am a woman, but the social expectations demand otherwise”. In what ways did the net provide a safe haven for you? To what extent do you think the internet has helped us grow as a society, to become more open and understanding, particularly when it comes to gender and identity?

One of the core promise of the Internet is that there is no minority on the Internet. There is only communities. In the traditional cultural thinking, we would call them subcultures, as if they are somehow smaller parts of the society. On the Internet, those subcultures are actually the core of the Internet communities. There really is no mainstream culture of the Internet. What does that even mean?

What I’m trying to say is that these subcultures, to me, is actually my native tribe. I go into the Internet, I identify with the people who are wondering about the same thing that I’m wondering, who are curious about same thing that I’m curious, and we naturally form a tribe without a lot of prejudice around gender, around expressions, around culture, around language, and things like that.

It is just, as I said in another tweet, that I would like to know you by your values, not by your classes, or by your types, or by your roles. Internet enables people who share the same value to discover each other and form a tribe along those value lines, and then internetwork with people who share these similar values but the same concern over maybe some practical matter.

This kind of value-based community reinforces the idea that we are people that can contribute to the society, as opposed to a society that says you can contribute but only if you’re dressed in some way, or if you speak in some way, or things like that. It’s less about contribution. It’s more about social conformity in the face-to-face reality.

Of course, nowadays, the digital culture is taking over. What we are now seeing is that the digital natives do not actually need to worry too much about the social acceptance. Our prime minister is virtually a YouTuber now, and our deputy prime minister live-streams playing Steam games all the time, and so on.

Our culture is now the mainstream when it comes to politics, because the top politicians demonstrate their use of Internet memes, and cat pictures, and things like that. It’s like a gradual coming out of the subcultures. The subcultures can say, oh, no, we are the mainstream.

That really flips the social expectation so that people now say, oh, you know a subculture. You know how to do Internet memes, then maybe you can serve as mentors to our ministers, our reverse mentorship.

That then places the subcultures on a kind of leading the future, piloting the future position in a society, rather than subwatcher, subterrain, subculture like below the fold. I think this is one of the most radical changes that we see in the Taiwanese politics in the past decade.

It’s really awesome to speak about this subject I swear. When you mentioned netiquette, I had a flashback from so many years ago, like the early years of Reddit, and Fortune, and all of this.

That’s right.

It was a complete mess, but I don’t know.

Usenet was also a complete mess.

We’ve been here before.

Yeah, totally. That’s how things happen, in a way. Those things help in a way, but it’s been fun times, anyways.

Yeah, it’s been very much fun.

Everything increase exponentially except for battery technology…

Now, there’s supposed to be some advances with, how do you say, graphite or something like that, that they’re supposed to implement graphite into battery technology.

Yes, exactly. Hopefully, you will get exponential. That will solve the energy part of the climate crisis.

One thing that I should have mentioned, since these are raw files that are very handy, I don’t know if you have space.

Yeah, of course, I have space.

I mean for the ones that they’re shooting…

I know. I can either copy the SD card directly from you…

Yes, that would be maybe the quickest way.

That’s the quickest way.

Yeah. Do you have the adapter for the iPad?

Or for my phone, really.

Oh, OK.

I have 500 gigabytes in this phone. Unless we are recording 8K…

I’m still used to phones with 16 gigabytes, and that’s it. This one has 256, but I’m still with that idea that we still, we have very low capacity. When you mentioned that, I was like: “Oh, right.”

Yeah, our phones have more SSD than our computers.

Yeah, totally.

And more memory, actually.

It’s really incredible what happened in such a short time as we’re…

Very much so.

We’re having this post-production you mentioned. It will take months, and before it gets published?

Yeah, normally, it takes a month or two.

Sure, that’s fine.

With color correction and editing.

I can either publish it raw, but I can also hold it until you publish. It’s fine. Both ways work.

OK, perfect. I know, because I understand, you have a policy that you publish everything.

Yes, exactly.

It would be better if you can hold it.

Yeah, I can embargo it. I just need a date, like by April 1st, or something like that. Maybe not April 1st.

I don’t know if you know some of other material that we have done. Actually, in the entrance, there is a short bit. The idea is that it’s like, it’s not as a conversation, as we are doing it right now, but more like extracts of the main subjects and stuff like that.

The idea is to develop a capsule of five minutes or something like that in a video material, and not the full.

Yeah, I know.

That’s why it normally takes a month or two or so.

It’s more the curational work than editing. I see.

Next question is what is collective intelligence, and how can it be applied and help to improve societies?

Collective intelligence is the emergence of new understanding and new decision-making when people work in a collaborative setting. Of course, that depends on what you mean by people. We also see collective intelligence in animals and in many other phenomenas in nature.

For democracy, collective intelligence usually means that people, instead of relying on a central intelligence unit of their state or whatever, they just sense what is going on in the environment, and then share it with people who share similar values through crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, and other ways to express their social signals to make better decisions together, and also make better understanding together.

Let’s speak now about the future, if you don’t mind. What emerging technology do you predict will be the most significant disruptor of digital government within the next decade?

I want to answer the part about help improving societies through a collective intelligence, but these two are related.

One of the most important disruptions will be the people realizing that collective intelligence is not only good for discovering and defining social problems, but also for developing and delivering solutions as well.

In traditional thinking, it’s the brainstorming sessions, the ideation sessions, the focus groups, and so on. Of course, people say that these are great for collective intelligences so that people can have a voice and things like that.

Actually for the production, for the actual delivery of the public services very few people rely on collective intelligence. They rather rely more traditionally on private-public sector partnership, BOT structures, and things like that.

With the democratization of the materials as well as the knowhow of building, and also a renewed understanding about circular economy – meaning that you can get your resources from other people who actually see these as byproducts or waste of their work, but actually can become very good resources like biomass and so on – people are equipped then to join the production process without relying on a central, massive, scalable factory of conversation with the existing private sector.

They can do essentially a kind of wiki-making of their neighborhoods, of production tools, and things like that. That will fundamentally change how we distribute resources, because previously we all say that we have to find the captains of the industry, and make sure that they have the investment resource they need, because they then can make at scale that take care of a lot of our population.

If we only empower the small and median enterprises, we’ll never get sufficient goods that feeds everybody in the citizenry. That is going to change because of democratization and access to the knowhow and the change from a linear economy mindset into a circular economy mindset.

How can society continue to evolve alongside tech in a way that is fair, equitable and beneficial to everyone?

This idea of technologists working with – not for – the society, and the society appropriates whatever is appropriate in the technology for the social need is very important.

For example, when we talk about data, there’s two competing metaphors about data. There’s the technologist’s first idea of data as barrels of oil that are raw that need to be refined that are kept in custody, and that transfers between industrial interests and its collects – it’s like we are the dinosaurs that the captain of the industry collects those data for the refinement and better prediction of our social behavior and things like that. It’s oil metaphor of things.

On the other hand, we’ve also seen the data with a very different metaphor. For example, we have the data as trust, as the currency of trust. People are increasingly saying that as infrastructure of people trusting their psychiatrists, their doctors, their accountants, and things like that, we provide more of our data to those people we trust, because we know they’re acting on our best interest.

We provide some personal data to our assistants, but we expect them to keep that private, and also keep it accountable, meaning that if they make decisions on our behalf, we want to know the why of those decisions. Otherwise, we will fire those secretary or assistants.

This idea of a fiduciary relationship – data as relationship, not data as transaction – highlights the idea of the social sphere, of the social-sector-first data approach. I think this is playing out not only on data, but many other aspects around technology.

You can always see a more technologists-oriented view that wanted to capitalize on resources and then a more relational view that puts these ideas of technologies as a relationship-building material, a infrastructure for relationships rather than infrastructure for transactions.

This relation-versus-transaction view is going to continue. This debate is going to continue for the next decade, but I’m firmly in the relational view when it comes to technology. I think that is how the society can make the technologies evolve better to fit the need of the society.

And to close, what one piece of advice would you give to young people starting a career in innovation communication technology today?

I would say, to quote Leonard Cohen, he said, “There is a crack in everything, and that is how the light gets in.”

Basically, be imperfect. Publish your drafts, making sure there is plenty of typo, because Ward Cunningham once observed that if you deliver something, it’s perfect…If you ask a question, and the question is so meticulously worded, nobody will answer you. If you provide a draft of a bad answer, all the experts come out and correct your mistake.

That means that the currency of collaboration is actually mistakes, is the cracks in everything.

If you dare to make mistakes, if you publish all your immature thoughts, and have a taste of getting people who complain about it, who correct you, and start networking with them as best friends, then you can make the innovation network work with your contribution in no time.

If you want to spend years to perfect your contribution, not only it risk getting outdated by the time you’re ready for it, it actually prevents other people from participating in your creative work.

The earlier in a creative work that you can start a network of drafts, the better. The later, the more perfectionist you are, the less the innovation community can do with you.

That would be with the questions that we prepared, but if you would like to share a particular insight or something with us, feel free to do so.

I think I’m done, and I think this is a really good set of questions, very comprehensive. Thank you.

Thank you.