It’s actually already done, done as in it’s already passed as a regulation for all the system providers to start changing their code, but as of when you can get the first, like your original ARC replaced with a newly-numbered card with your old number written on it, so that ...

Because of that, it needs a little bit of time, like 10 years’ time, before we can include English into one of our national or at least official languages.

The idea is that if we concentrate on K-12 now, then 10 years later, we’ll be at a point where most of the adult or at least new adult population is comfortable with English. At the moment, we have more than 20 national languages, most of them indigenous. We can’t ...

I think many of them, if you are talking about graduate level, many of their classes are already in English. I think the Bilingual Nation plan mostly focused on the everyday living experience of non-Mandarin speakers in Taiwan, and also looks at the kindergarten or very early K-12 education, making ...

There are strong arguments for the digital organization to do both. Truth be told, this is more like a council, and this is more like a ministry. We’ll see how the legislature…The KMT people and the DPP people both are for it, but whether it will end up being more ...

That depends on whether legislature declares as the mandate of the digital organization. There are some subtle differences from the KMT, that Simon Chang’s plan, which is more inward looking, it’s a digital transformer of existing ministries, and President Tsai’s plan, which is more outward looking, like speeding up next ...

All of these things I think are just small steps, but in the end, you would get much more people interested in Taiwan, not because they want to learn Mandarin or teach English, but rather they want to, I don’t know, learn Python and teach JavaScript, and things like that. ...

Making sure that people can work with all the digital services that the government and the economic sector provides, without people accidentally forgetting that they are someone who have the second digit not be a digital ledger.

The NDC in the Bilingual Nation project actually allocated quite a few projects, including something in the forward-looking infrastructure plan 2.0 to make the bilingual environment much better. Also starting next year I think, we’ll also have the Resident Certificates to make sure that the digits are the same logic ...

He finds that most people here, even if they work in a non-digital industry, actually understand a thing or two about cloud deployment. There’s a much stronger digital entrepreneurship spirit in Taiwan. He finds here more home-like, I guess, for digital nomads. We will continue to do so.

There is also someone I just met from OpenStack community that’s also a recent Gold Card advocate, a strong advocate, who said that from Australia, even though it’s a comparable number of small and medium businesses, most of the SMEs there isn’t focused on OpenStack.

Yes. We designed the Gold Card for that, for digital nomads, for people who don’t necessarily want to find employment here, who are perfectly capable to work anywhere in the world, but because the broadband, the food, I’m sure also hiking is a thing. I’m missing a few things. Anyway, ...

They have a club now, taiwangoldcard.com.

The entire experience is made much smoother, whether you end up calling a Q-Taxi fleet taxi, or you call one of its competitors. Everybody gets much more flexible space to play, because the regulation gets changed, is reformed, answering Uber’s innovations.

All of this made the experience of taking a taxi in Taiwan much more smooth. After Uber registered their own fleet, it also made the Crown Taxi, I think, other taxi fleets that collaborate with Uber also gets the upgrade when it comes to getting new customers from mobile phones ...

TonyQ then worked with Taiwan Taxi for quite a few years to rebuild the Uber model in the Taiwan Taxi fleet, including the so-called Multi-Purpose diversified taxi, like not necessarily having to paint it yellow, and able to charge a price multiplier, and things like that.

Of course, it prompted, for example, in our UberX conversation in the vTaiwan platform, I think that’s when the Taiwan Taxi CEO met TonyQ Wang, previously reverse mentor to Minister Jaclyn Tsai.

Even though he speeded up to a month, for that month, it’s still very unsure for not only Uber but everybody involved. An institutionalized way to have a more transparent conversation that builds upon the MOTC’s existing, already very good technological evaluation capability, I think that’s something the digital organization ...

The Investment Evaluation Board really fast tracked the entire process so that for the Uber drivers, there is no point in time where their livelihood is put into any uncertainty. Minister Lin Chia-lung really handled that really well. What’s important is to make sure that all these ratification process is ...

I think it’s really to Minister Lin Chia-lung’s credit that he really speeded up this process so that Uber is like Q-Taxi, the fleet that they registered as and also the Uber Eats company that’s a separate company.

The process of which the Uber conversation had, although it did have this crowdsourcing part, that’s the vTaiwan part, the ratification within each ministry is the churn, that really took many months. That’s for sure.

Yeah, exactly. What we agreed on Uber in the end is a pretty good win-win-win situation for both the public, social, and economic sectors. The main complaint was that we took too long to get to this point.

Mm-hmm. Uber is now a Taiwan company, actually three companies. I use it every day, almost.

I don’t think they have a specific proposal yet, but I think they wouldn’t say no to a dedicated digital organization. We’ll see.

Of course, the TMD or the NPP has their own priority, whether it’s high or low priority. I think the two major parties both agree that it’s of priority. From what I heard about, at least they are happy to see that there is some clarity in this matter.

I don’t really know about Han Kuo-yu, but the other three people in that particular race committed to a dedicated digital organization as part of their either primary or presidential platforms. There is broad consensus on that.

No, not at all. It was the main presidential campaign item of not only Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, but also in primary of now VP, William Lai. Also, in another primary of the then VP candidate, Simon Chang, used to be Premier Chang, so all these three people.

We the three ministers, that’s me, the post minister, and the NDC minister need to convene very regularly just to make sure that we are on the same copy when it comes to digital issues. It causes a lot of internal churn, so to speak. The digital organization is just ...

Making sure that they have a consistent worldview so that each ministry, when they want to propose something, sometime have to write like three different versions for three different horizontal ministries, part of the DIGI+ plan.

There is also the part that Digital Nation group within the Board of Science and Technology that takes care of the policy-making when it comes to the digital strategies across ministries, but they don’t always, because they report to different horizontal ministries. One is the post, one is the NDC. ...

The same would also go on for, for example, the Information Management department within the NDC is actually in charge of National Participation Platform, a data platform. That is already far expanding, stretching the idea of information management, which it would be like traditional MIS. It’s not inward looking anymore. ...

The main mandate is just to make sure that what’s fragmented, all the different ministries, at the moment, cyber security, it’s actually in triple I for not the best of reasons. [laughs] It’s on the cabinet, the Executive Yuan itself, as the Department of Cyber Security, with the backup of ...

Even if we go the way of the council, like the National Digital Council, the NCC, instead of being a subordinate council should also still be an independent council next to it, similar to the Data Protection Council.

No. I think for the independent authority that they have on content evaluation and moderation and so on, the independence of the NCC is very important. I think the NCC need to maintain its independence on these regards.

I don’t think so.

It’s a little bit like the Aviation Safety Council, now the Transportation Safety Council, because the minister of transportation doesn’t name the head councilor. We’ll probably have that as well so that the digital ministry or council doesn’t control the budget or the personnel of this independent organ that is ...

The ministries by law, by our privacy law, actually gets to run their own data protection instead of delegating it to the MOJ or to the NDC. These two are very disconnected. In order to get GDPR adequacy, GDPR would really like any GDPR-adequate country to have an independent organ ...

Previously, in the National Development Council, there’s currently the GDPR negotiation office that also doubles as the data protection authority when it comes to interpretation, but it doesn’t have any teeth in the sense of even ministries doesn’t obey the rules set by the NDC Regulatory Reform Center, which I ...

Yeah. The founding acts of the digital agency will be proposed to the parliament. I also hope that in addition to that, we will also have an independent data protection authority that will be then also part of this batch of these founding acts.

We are committed, because it’s presidential promise. We’re committed to bring a draft out before the end of the year. On the other hand, when the legislation passes, I don’t know.

Either way, we will have some put some clauses that defines this ministry/council as something that is also something like council/ministry, which is I think museum is the better, because then it would not pry on people’s thoughts on particular silos.

Then, of course, in addition to being a council, we’ll also say, “But, by the way, when running these kind of things, like cybersecurity or whatever, this council also acts as a ministry.”

On the flip side, of course, building a national digital council would give it, of course, the oversight and strategic making power as the National Development Council, but then it will be weak on the budget itself. Then NDC doesn’t have much budget to itself.

On the other hand, a ministry is bigger when it comes to work with other ministers, because it’s just on par with any other minister. We will have to then put in the ministry’s founding act for specific issues that ministry has the same budgeting and coordination power as, for ...

The museum is the best, I just talked about it. The ministry, the good thing is that for a ministerial budgeting, it’s easier for a ministry to assume other existing agencies’ budgets in order to, instead of having to draw the budget from scratch, you can have a continuous operating ...

It sounds of a higher rank than anyone.

We’ll maybe call it [non-English speech] , the National Digital Museum, the NDM, and next to the NPM. That’s because then the head of that museum could be called a chief curator, which in Taiwan Mandarin is called [non-English speech].

My favorite is museum.

In addition to, yes.

Maybe not museum, [laughs] but anyway, a dedicated agency that’s on par with any other ministry or council. That is to say, in addition to the horizontal digital minister role, we will also be able to call digital ministry, counsel or museum that accompanies the role…