The UBI is basically unconditional basic income or universal basic income; there are many other expressions, but the idea is a basic income for all. UBI is a very complicated policy issue, people in all spectrum of the politics have propose UBI in one form or another. But the first ...

My favorite music which is on a loop for the few months now is Hamilton the musical. But Hamilton the musical is not one specification, right? I mean it has hip pop in it but it also has a lot of other musical genres, even things like Beatles was in ...

I think President Tsai is unique that she includes LGBTQ and in fact marriage equality to be a very concrete part of her agenda or platform during the presidential campaign. And it was very brave for me, that’s one of the reason why I voted for her. That wasn’t the ...

I mean I learn from some of the great feminist like Judith Butler and so on. So I would say that I inherited part of this tradition. But I also inherited many other traditions.

Well, we have a women president. I will not comment on other countries; the idea of feminism in Taiwan has gone through the same waves as other places, right? There is equal right, equal pay and equal treatment, and then it’s about not being defining by specific gender roles, and ...

As an anarchist, I respect the United Nations. I submitted a paper, I couldn’t be there, but it was presented by my co-author at Habitat 3, a conference about the right to the city and make sure the process is where the commons decide the city together and so on. ...

No, so far I think Taiwan really has a very good cloud infrastructure and we are the top of open data index globally. After all, this means that our basic data is open so basically on top of this we are now trying for more international exchange to make sure ...

In Taiwan of course we have a lot of data on biodiversity. Taiwan has 10% or something of all the marine species, and in Taiwan we also have unique measuring points around all the offshore islands and also on the islands itself for regional climate and regional pollution levels. All ...

Personally I care a lot about climate change; in the past 12 months I spent 4 or 5 of those in Paris. I cared deeply during the time the Paris Agreement on climate change was going on, but I was in my private capacity at the time as an independent ...

The issue of citizenship, permanent residence, and visas in general I think is very high on Minister Chen’s list. And so every week I hear what is being done, what’s left to be done, and so on. I’m sure that a lot of these things will be worked out pretty ...

There are two things. Before I joined the cabinet I was a member of the "K-12 Curriculum Committee" and our main product is a curriculum guideline, which is going to be in effect by 2018. And in the 2018 curriculum, that is the first time that the national curriculum agenda ...

Defining risk, which I already talked about, is one thing. And the other thing is to make it fun--I mean I’m officially a minister who work for fun, right? When the premier asked me why am I aiming to join the cabinet, is it out of duty or out of ...

I’m sure that people here who live here and like the environment in Taiwan are already doing a lot of cultural cross polination of ideas and citizen diplomacy and things like that, so I would say just continuing on whatever they’re here doing and basically bring the same sense of ...

Actually the po.lis system I described is a machine learning product. They use machine learning to learn how people cluster together and so on, but I think equally important is that we can’t really make the decisions that are value judgements through artificial intelligence; what they can do is play ...

I think the major change is not happening from the public sector, but is from the machine learning sector. As of last month the there is been a major breakthrough in the English Mandarin bi-directional translation quality. If you use any of the online automatic translators, there’s been a new ...

Taiwan actually have a pretty friendly teleworking regulation, which the vTaiwan public deliberation project have deliberated last year. So last year when I was still an advisor to the cabinet, we actually talked about exactly how teleworking is going to work in Taiwan for people. Not only that we’re pretty ...

Well, it is actually the purview of the National Development Committee which is headed by the commissioner but also minister with portfolio Dr. Chen Tien-Jy (陳添枝) and so that is his job, but I’m kind of an advisor on anything digital related, so if there’s something digital related I just ...

For these things we don’t have to work too hard or too much to interfere with the public sector, but for the initial point of contact that’s what we can focus on.

Well, this is a very complicated topic that has a different answer to each industry sector, right? I’m not going to, because of time limits, to go to detail of that. But in the upcoming digital national plan, we try make infrastructure such that no matter what the industry that ...

I think it’s a nature part of Taiwan, and as I said already, actually I think the main work that the government should do is to make failing easier. Because if you spend a lot of time and capital to set up a company, a lot of efforts a lot ...

I mean, at the end of every huge media cycle we always get some kind of petition. Not always 5,000 people strong, but some of them are 5,000 strong. A concrete example, there was one right after one typhoon because some cities have this half-day holiday, like this half-day that ...

We’re doing it right now, in the media and on several other places we try. But I think the most important advertisement is really up to each ministry, because once one ministry like the Ministry of Health and Welfare which did really well with the first two petition cases, each ...

This is the most similar to "We The People" at the White House, right? It was a presidential order that says all ministries has to respond. I think the average response time of "We The People" is around a hundred and twenty days. Within 4 months or so they will ...

There are two main platforms: there is the vTaiwan, the experimental platform that the g0v and other civil society communities are carrying. The agenda setting, the process even, it’s collaborative defined, with the civil society and with the top private sector. But for normal, everyday regulations we have the "join" ...

At the moment it’s already at the end, so we’re trying to spread it gradually toward upstream at the beginning.

I think the most important thing is that people are risk-averse because they really don’t know what will happen when they fail. This is the same as startups: if the cost of starting a company is very high, then it means the cost of failure is also very high. In ...

So these are your friends, it’s just on public policy you haven’t deliberated over dinner, and now you know. And then the next thing is that it shows it’s possible to converge. At the beginning of each interaction, often you see people clustering in four corners with very little overlap ...

Basically, the idea is what we call in mathematics the principle of component analysis. The idea is that if you propose some very radical opinions, a lot of people would vote "Yes" but also a lot of people would vote "No", right? It’s divisive. People who vote similarly, like in ...

Yes. Basically, by the end we have thousands of people participating with hundreds of ideas, so nobody could really read them all, right? So we ranked them by consensus, like if you manage to convince people who are similar to you, then the highest-ranked group opinion gets visibility, and then ...

We use a combination of strategies. One is that we used this tool called Polis (pol.is), which is a two-dimensional representation of everybody’s feelings on a particular topic. And the idea is that you go to this website, and it shows you one sentiment of the public policy where you ...

So what I’ve been doing concretely is to make sure that, for example, all the regulations before this cabinet were announced maybe 7 to 14 days before its passing. 7 to 14 days is very difficult for people to have a good understanding and dialogue with policy makers. So most ...

My new role has open government as my main duty. And open government, in my view, includes three parts. One is transparency, making what everything that the government is doing as transparent as possible and make it so that everybody can view it as early as possible. And the other ...

Well, I think the Sunflower Movement showed that it’s possible, right? But then the end of year election showed that it’s desirable. It’s like people have a will to elect the people who respect this kind of bottom-up agenda setting. So of course the prime example is Mayor Dr. 柯文哲 ...

Well, I think working as a kind of understudy minister, as a intern minister, for the previous minister Jaclyn Tsai (蔡玉玲) for almost two years now, was basically a collaborative method following the end of 2014. There is a new nation agenda about the cabinet at the time. The new ...

Exactly. I mean traditional values in the sense of traditional values of the internet, because when the internet was invented, it was also a very top-down organization with DARPA of the U.S. Department of Defense. But they quickly saw that its actual value lies in the cross interaction between academia, ...

Certainly! An anarchist is basically someone who believes that people work better if nobody forces anyone to do anything; if people work upon their own volition. I think the long years between 1989 and 1996 basically means that instead of jumping to a direct presidential election and jumping to a ...

Sure! so between 1989 which is freedom of the press, and 1996 which is the first presidential election, Taiwan’s democratization worked slowly but surely. The idea is that instead of a sudden revolution, instead of a sudden change like in many other countries in the Third Wave of democratization, the ...

Sure. I started computer programming when I was 8, because I was born with a heart defect (that was fixed when I was 12) but I couldn’t really do sports. So most of my interests are indoor interests. So when I was 8 I encountered this "programming" thing. I found ...

Thank you, very happy to be here.

Take care.

Thank you, and it’s great. Thank you too.

[Laughter] Exactly!

And network. So as soon as I entered the Cabinet, I got this internet forum link from the World Economic Forum, which is the private sector part. And it’s very interesting between Dubai-Davos-Dubai-Davos, they have this what they call “TopLink,” an internet platform that links all the agendas together so ...

And New Zealand has a very good civic-tech scene around Wellington and Auckland to actually support ICT infrastructures to make that happen. And I know a lot of people there who would be very willing to join such a cause. So I think I’ll just do this today and keep ...

Yes, that would be great.

So make it like the process that’s in common that we can all add in.

So that’s before and after.

One concrete action I can do is write the Ākina Foundation and find out what kind of after-event, post-event, like online forums or other kind of continuation of next year’s SEWF they have in mind, and what kind of ICT technology or what kind of process innovations that I can ...

Right, exactly.

So for all the cases like the Company Act rewrite, of closely-held corporation that I mentioned, I told all the professors working on that to basically keep a recording, taping every single public meeting that they have, and then we work with, there’s a lot of machine speech recognition technology ...