Cheers, bye.

OK, looking forward to the recording. I’ll try to get a transcript done for you if...

I’m not that active in the coding scene anymore or things like these. I think Johnson Liang or Ronny Wang, that’s the NewsHelper person, will have much better recommendations of their co-practitioners in the same field.

Exactly. I call myself "public servant of public servants." 公僕的公僕.

I don’t have any objectives of my own. My objective is to facilitate the team’s agenda. That also applies to the 40 or so people in the Participation Officers network. That’s pretty much it. There’s no paradox because I refuse to issue commands.

It is this ad hoc group with standard consensus making mechanisms, business or economy, combines stand up meetings, scrum board, and make sure that everybody lists their own objectives in a classic OKR management fashion.

Of the 15 people who volunteer to work with me, most of their salaries are being paid by other ministries. They just want to work with me. They’re volunteers, essentially. They can leave any time.

I would still prefer the term anarchism. As for the apparent paradox, never issuing commands in my current role. Plenty of people want me to issue commands. I have resisted all the demands so far. It’s a pretty unique position in that I am a minister but I don’t have ...

There’s a communal co-ownership of facts, of production tools, and the diversity an inclusion of all kinds of different people. This willingness to work with non-specific people is, I think, the key to anarchism. If you just say direct democracy, it looks like just referendum everything, which leaves out to ...

Of course, I can choose the much more acceptable way and say I’m a practitioner of direct democracy, but I think direct democracy differs from anarchism a little bit. Direct democracy is, of course, one part of it, but if you read the original anarchist text, it’s much more.

The thing with anarchism is that I don’t take direct commands, nor do I issue commands. That’s the tenet of anarchists.

My contribution so far is to make sure that the data itself is tied to a context, to a narrative, to its role in policy-making, and making sure that early-stage discussions between stakeholders are produced on this data. There’s no data, no evidence, then the ministry steering the hackathon are ...

It’s a very umbrella mandate that basically means everything is open data, which is why Taiwan raised on index this quickly, because it’s built on the existing FOIA law implementation pipeline. We just changed the license. That’s Simon’s contribution.

Not just readable, but also remixable, and there’s a threshold of any ICT system that builds below this amount of budget, like NT$50 million in the past three years must open data by default, except for of course privacy, national security, trial secret.

That’s the additions that Simon Cheng brought to the table by essentially introducing regulations. Not revising the FOIA law, but interpreting FOIA law as saying it must be published in a way that’s not just human-readable, but mission-readable.

The main idea of transparency now is that we want data to have its social value. Taiwan passed our FOIA law around 2005, which means it’s a relatively modern FOIA law. It doesn’t say much about whether the information must be released in a way that’s mission-readable or licensed under ...

It’s the idea of forking, merging, and sending patches to the public sector. That’s the main vision. But how exactly to effect that concrete mission, it differs from project to project.

If g0v people release their ideas, their source code, and their creations under Creative Commons, then on the next procurement cycle, the government can tell it’s vendor is to incorporate these additions in. Then it becomes the official governmental website.

It’s a private typing service for the public service. The idea is that you can fork, meaning that you take any government website existing service and make it better, and publish it under the g0v domain.

Well g0v is a space, so there is no mission. Everybody brings their own mission. There is a vision, though. The vision is essentially the domain name. [laughs] The domain name means a promise, a commitment of something that says if you see a government service, and you’re not satisfied ...

That’s pretty useful for all the rumors around food, around public health, around all sorts of weird things going on. It serves as a last-mile delivery to your Line account. That’s one of their concrete cases.

Even if it’s counterfeit, it doesn’t mean that it’s censored or anything. It just shows a disputed content and a clarification from the other side. It’s possible for two piece of news to be each other’s clarification, but at least it shows you both sides of the discussion.

If you limit to chat bots on social media, for example, there is a civil society idea of a Line bot that tells fake news or rumors. Whenever you share a rumor article with that bot, it can respond and let you know whether it’s counterfeit or not.

As with all automation, is to save people from doing work that are repetitive and that one does not learn anything from. The promise of automation is to make humans do human things instead of emulating machines. That’s the main promise.

We did already make some new internal policies this way using this new kind of discussion format.

We already did quite a bit of cases. The case with Uber, the case with closely-held company law, and so on, are all organized in this cross-sectoral, multi-stakeholder kind of way of discussion. People are now generally aware of this motive. It’s not yet unknown, but at least I don’t ...

Yeah, it’s very useful. We got buy-in from all the ministries which all recommended one to three people as administration officer, and there is some real policies already being made this way. I’ve been doing this for many years now. Even with the Taiwan administration since late 2014, it’s two ...

Technology is what they call a recursive public or something like that.

The basic ideas are more or less the same. It’s just this newer organizational structure and the technology that informs it, which then shapes the generation of organization, which then shapes the next-generation.

For me, there’s no real difference. I think the main difference is to base participation is not much higher. You don’t have to own expensive computer, modem, or anything like that, anyone can just use this piece of glass to participate, expanse the base.

I don’t think there’s necessarily a difference between my role as a political worker, and my role as a citizen. For me, since I work on free software, free speech, and whatever movements, the original blue ribbon campaign. That was 1995 or something. It was always the same idea of ...

These kind of self-organized mobilization groups across departmental breaking out of silo kind of ways. That’s why we do weekly hackathons. I was just back from one. It was a very lively discussion.

One of kernel machines so that I can install Sandstorm and Docker clusters, and introduce the open-source collaboartion tools, all sorts of collaboration tools into the intranet so that people can collaborate in a way that they know are protected by our cybersecurity team, but nevertheless regain some organizational features.

As a political worker, what I’ve been doing is introducing career public servants to this kind of self-organization and horizontal communication structures. The first thing I did as digital minister, literally, is to recompile the Linux kernel.

The instrumental use at this became a lot of interest, both on the actual tools, like Hackfoldr and so on, that was used during the Sunflower Movement, and also the kind of organization, the multi-centered organization, the people want to start studying or even emulate.

Not just through social media, but also through ad hoc programmed networks that connects diverse groups together using a collaboration, rough consensus-like protocol. That’s been studied extensively, so I will not repeat the results.

I would say that the 2014, and the Sunflower Movement before that and 洪仲丘 Movement before that, demonstrates that the speed of communication and transmission is based on the idea of outrage, motivates people to communicate and form communication structures that are far more effective, at least, regarding their issue ...

We could say that originally, 網軍 had some meaning, and as I said, a security state style of hacker kind of meaning. But then because of its use in election, subsequently lose any meaning whatsoever, and then people just say 網軍 to mean anything, in a way.

It sounds like 網軍, but it also sounds like a person’s name. 婉君 is used sometime mockingly, and Wikipedia list astroturf as the first use of 婉君, but they’re clearly not politically motivated. They’re marketing people.

The idea of one, if look at Wikipedia’s 網軍 term, they actually redirects to 網路特工. That means government hired. There is also 婉君, which I don’t even know how state this in English.

This term currently doesn’t have any definite meaning.

During 2014, because, as you mentioned, Sean Lien and Ko Wen-je both accused each other of additional propaganda, they brought up this term in 網軍. Then afterwards, it lose any meaning whatsoever. Normal astroturfing are sometimes described as 網軍 as well.

Before the 2014 election, it’s mostly used as cyber-arming, which means people who disrupt security infrastructures and so on, which is much more serious. It’s like the cyber-arming kind of stuff.

All they have to do is crafting some memetic device, and then the viral nature of social media will take care of the rest. The people who then spread those news are incidentally 網軍, but they are largely unpaid.

On the other hand, if you classify it based on it must be politically motivated and paid by a certain politician to further their purpose, of course that reduces the amount of people. As I said, it doesn’t have to be a lot of people at the core.

Sure, but even unpaid 網軍 is commonplace. It’s difficult to characterize the nature of the practice, because if you say only people who use automated tools are 網軍, then anyone who even install a plugin is 網軍, right?

Yes.

I’m familiar with that research.

That became their main aim after a lot of back and forth. Because half a million people went to the street, there’s tremendous social support. Eventually, that demand is met, and cases like these are now tried in the civil court. So-called original discoveries that was posted during that time ...

I think there’s a lot of rumors, but there’s a factual basis, which is there is no clarifications and no room for clarifications and for due process if this kind of case is being court martialed instead of tried on the civil court. Eventually, the protesters solidified their ideas, and ...