Sure, but did you find a city to host?

I think that’s another solution. It will take longer, of course. So, deliberation and frequently asked questions with a direct line to ministers, I think are both important.

Only when I dodge your question or I hide behind some official sounding word or become very vague, do rumors have room to grow. If people have a direct relationship with the government, just like friends, then people will not have the room for the rumors to grow.

If you have this relationship with a minister directly, you will not think of the rumors they were saying about me as true or as credible, because at any time you can ask me directly, and I will answer to you.

We can make it very easy to understand, with pictures and so on, so that people can ask a question directly to a minister, and I will respond to it as quick as I see it, maybe within 24 hours.

The other way of working with it is for the government, for everybody, including the journalists and everyone, to make sure that facts spread as easy as rumors. Which means, in our government’s case, to publish the frequently asked questions as one URL per answer, and make the answer very ...

On that particular topic, after a deliberation, even when rumors spread, even when there is propaganda, you will not blindly share it, because you have already built an immune system to it. That’s one way of working with it.

If think of it like an epidemic, like a virus, I think there are two solutions. One is through deliberation. If you have listened to people who have a different idea than you, and you listen to them very carefully and consider their opinions, even though you disagree, you learn ...

I will not say that we will fight rumors the same way people fight people. It’s not in the same category. For this virus of the mind, you cannot really fight virus. It is a different category, because it’s just an idea that spreads.

By the time we finish reading it, the rumor has already spread through the social media. The facts and the fact checkers and the real journalists did not have time to catch up to the rumor. This is true.

On the other hand, on the Internet, as you said, there are many rumors. This is true. The social media makes it very easy to look at just one line or picture without reading in entirety, and just press "share." Then it gets viral. Right?

OK. First, I refuse to use the word "fake news," because it has no definition. You can call rumor fake news. You can call computational propaganda fake news. You can call hoaxes fake news. You can call "real news that your write but I don’t like" fake news. This word ...

This is something that we’re working on. Software is just an enabler. They also learn software as part of this training, but it’s not just for the tools.

Whereas for the young people who was born with Internet, this is a very natural thing, for many public service people, it takes a lot of workshops and lot of experiments, and a lot of experiences to really start to get the idea, that you can really trust a stranger ...

It has a liberating potential for you to work with a stranger, to trust a stranger. It’s what we call a "swift trust" model.

Even when people use the best software tools, if they just use it in isolation, they treat it just like pen and paper. The promise of software tools start to shine when it allows hundreds, thousands of people to work together, and for people to break out of their silos.

I don’t pretend to know whether it is better this way; it was a decision made by the consensus of the educators in Taiwan. At the public service, what I’m trying to do as part of the PDIS’s work, is trying to get all of the public servants firsthand exposure ...

Computational thinking and design thinking and media literacy, of course, are those broad skills that one can use to learn any field. Our focus when designing the new curriculum is not just about mastering software as like a foreign language, but have the design thinking, computational thinking, and media literacy ...

Yeah, in Taiwan we start teaching programming languages at junior high school, not primary school. But we teach computational thinking and design thinking at primary school. This idea is, as I said, software is just one of the many tools to solve a particular issue.

It is an international thing. Taiwan, for me, is just one of the many sites who participate in this undertaking.

The whole point is that we’re treating the process itself as a common, as something we build together and make the process transparent to the people, so that people can change the process, for example for their community, and for the national government to then learn the best practice with ...

This is also why I publish all the workshops, all the meetings that I chair inside the administration as full transcripts, published 10 working days after every meeting, so that our international counterparts can learn from our process to improve their process. Then we can learn their improved process back, ...

The idea is that this is an international movement of people using information technology to further understanding and listening of people who did not get included into the political process. Which is why our website, PDIs.tw, the PDIS website is an English website with machine translation, so that my foreign ...

Very interesting question. As a participant in the open source, free culture movement, "my work" is not just my work. I use a lot of different technologies and cultures that was co-developed, for example, by the Policy Lab and the Government Digital Service in the UK. For example, by the ...

In this cabinet, the Premier declared open government as one of the core, important issues of the government. They hired me back and have me continue doing exactly the same thing, but full-time as a minister, not just a consultant.

A lot of hackers who participated in the Sunflower Movement ended up being teachers, instructors, advisers, consultants to the administration. I started working with the administration at the time, so I was already an understudy.

After participating on the Occupy, at the end of 2014, the new Premier declared that from this point on open data, crowdsourcing, the hackers’ idea of democracy, must become the national agenda.

Hackers play a very important role in that movement by facilitating communication, both for the Occupy, and also against the Occupy, with all the different sides, and keeping a record, so that people can, over many days, converge into something that everybody can live with.

The Occupiers did a demo, but it’s a demonstration, meaning that they tried to deliberate in a way that is effective and has everybody who participate, half a million people, to provide input into a consensus that then people can say, "OK, this is our feeling about the trade service ...

Back in 2014, when we had the Sunflower Occupy, of which students occupied the Parliament for 22 days, it was not just a protest. It is because the parliamentarians, the legislators refused to deliberate on a trade service agreement.

One of the oldest definition of hacker, before it becomes a cybersecurity term, is the hobbyist use of the term hacker, back in the MIT or the Chaos Computing Club. Back at that time hacker means somebody who can make their own tools when there are no existing tools to ...

Yes, we focusing on having local talents, and develop our cybersecurity market and countermeasures, we do hope that we can have local, not only entrepreneurs, but existing information technology companies to participate more in the cybersecurity community, and make sure that all the parts of cybersecurity -- penetration testing, forensics, ...

People really need to know the detail of what the white hat hackers are doing, in order for them to be a valuable part of public service. We put, really, a lot of emphasis on this, having a new department of cybersecurity as part of this new administration.

I introduced them to our administration people, saying that only by having people who attempt penetration testing can we know for sure how secure it is, and not just led to be felt secure by security features introduced by vendors.

When I become the digital minister, the first thing I did was to recompile the Linux kernel to add secure computing of my day-to-day computer systems. The next thing I did was to invite white hat hackers to do penetration testing on the system that I set up.

If we get white hat hackers who point out those loopholes without using it for their benefit, we need to give them a sufficient amount of recognition, of integrating into society, of having the society think that they make useful contribution.

Security researchers are people who are motivated primarily by curiosity. A hacker is somebody who learns a system so that they know the entire system down to the details, including the loopholes.

The National Academy of Education Research.

Not something that you can take four of five hours a week, or anything, but require that all the curriculum and textbook makers to integrate this into every single discipline, so that they learn the discipline in a way that makes use of information technology while keeping critical thinking and ...

It is very important that they learn how to learn, and learn how to collaborate, not only with other human being, but also with artificial intelligences as they are learning. We’re designing information technology and media literacy as one of the core concerns. Not as a class.

In one of those core concerns of the new curriculum, we put students’ autonomy as the most important thing. This is important because in future high-tech, if people are going to school when they’re seven years old, we cannot predict the technology when they become senior high school students.

As for your second question, before I become the digital minister, I was involved in the National Academy of Educational Research to design the curriculum for next year. For the next year we’re going to switch to a new curriculum that puts learning first, and not teaching first. It is ...

Second, it gets a due processing, so that it becomes no longer private data, before it can be transmitted across agencies. Third, to have an independent panel of at least one-third of external experts to audit our national policy on open data for each and every ministry so that they ...

What we, in Taiwan, is doing is instilling -- inspired by the European Union’s way of data protection -- a way in the national administration to handle the policy of private data. Make sure that, first, when we collect private data, we minimize the collection.

A lot of information is kept by the government for our governmental purposes, but we don’t need, actually, to take hold of this much information. For many different use cases we can ask for people’s consent or to ask people to provide it again, instead of saying we keep all ...

In Taiwan we put a lot of emphasis, both on cybersecurity, and on PETs, what we call privacy-enhancing technologies. Privacy-enhancing technologies are technologies that protects people’s privacy at the moment of collecting it.

The role of government changes from the one who set the rules to the one to make sure everybody understands where everybody else is standing on, and getting some consensus where everybody can live with.

For us, instead of having a bureaucracy deciding the next plan for four years, for eight years, what we’re now learning is this multi-stakeholder model, which from the very beginning have all the stakeholders, people who’ll get impacted by the technology, to input their experience, their feelings, their will, their ...

This is a very different way from the patriarchal way of policymaking, like a parent knows best and decide the rules for children. Because the private sector and the civil society are no longer children now. They all have their own, very adult, organizational methods.

As for your second question, what is the most important issue when working on open government, especially around IT policymaking? It is a change in mentality. Instead of saying "we know everything and we have a plan for the private sector," the public servants are now learning to say "we ...