That’s the 10-minutes gist [laughs] of my work, but feel free to just delve into any one of it.

That is also part of my job, to coach various different ministries in the art of packaging their contextualized information in a way that’s much more attractive to the public and enabling this much closer conversation across different people with different positions.

This then became our main strategy to combat disinformation. We want to get this kind of contextualized information to be more viral, and packaged in a more mimetic, virulent way than the one-sided disinformation and harmful propaganda.

Then this whole conversation became a public, social object that people can quote, but not out of context. They can take it within the context, so that the investigative reporters have a better starting ground to compare to the tabloids and so on, so that dialogue actually converges into similar ...

This basically asks a different set of questions. We’re now asking, so people have all those different positions, but they can talk to me one-on-one in private meetings. However, our conversations then become the agenda for subsequent conversations. For example, there was David Plouffe, working for Uber at the time, ...

Everybody. Literally, everybody. There are people who claim to have invented perpetual motion machines; they’re also welcome to talk for 40 minutes at a time. Everybody can see that conversation. After I became the Digital Minister, I have talked with thousands of people—4,000, to be exact, during around 1,000 meetings, ...

The only requirement is that I will record myself and publish my answers online so that—

That’s my office in the Social Innovation Lab. This is the formal meeting space that, every Wednesday—that’s today, right after this meeting—I will be here. From 10:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., everybody can talk to me for 40 minutes.

Traditionally, there are ministers in charge of these different values. The career public servants are the anonymous rope in between values, trying not to break. With the new, emergent, hashtag-based activities, there really is no way for us to set up a new task force or a new agency whenever ...

The overarching idea is that we can’t really, in the digital economy, we can’t really rely on existing vertical structures to regulate between, for example, the economic and environmental interests or the scientific innovation and social justice interests.

Lo and behold, the US did send someone to participate in the Presidential Hackathon, working on circular economy.

It’s a really good idea for the public sector to listen to this social sector and build together. We also want to extend it internationally — which explains the consensus in the digital dialog with AIT: “The US should regularly participate in Taiwan’s Presidential Hackathon and share data in order ...

The trophy represents a presidential promise that whatever the recipients tried, piloted, and gained popular support for in the past three months, then the government are committed, within the next 12 months, to make it into a national policy and essentially to maintain it forever, no matter which regulatory budget ...

So what is the Presidential Hackathon? It’s the idea that the civil society and public sector can prototype something for three months. Our president gives out a trophy every year to five teams. The trophy, there’s no money, but there is a projector. When turned on, it shows the president ...

Actually, most people agree on most of the things, most of the time, with most of their neighbors. We would then just work with AIT to go through the opinions one by one. Some ideas, like that AIT should send somebody to our Presidential Hackathon, are realized very quickly.

Our first agenda is to make Taiwan seen as more unique in the world. Predictably, there are some divisive statements that divide the participants neatly into two halves. The media, of course, loves this kind of sound bite, but actually, if we look at the breakdown, there’s only one divisive ...

Using high-bandwidth telepresence, we can build maybe 20 percent trust. We track all those different ideas and feed them into this AI-powered conversation, which we also use with the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT)—which is the de facto embassy here—to collaboratively build agendas that work for both sites.

We also have our Greta petitioning for the banning of plastic straws and things like that, to be carbon-neutral and so on, and these petitions are met with really good face-to-face conversations as well as social innovation tours. I tour around the most indigenous, rural, and offshore places and have ...

That has been the main idea as well as in our K–12 education, to build this civil participation and media literacy into the K–12 curriculum. Many of our most impactful petitions are in fact done by people who are 15 or 16 years old, because they cannot vote. This is ...

Anywhere, if you don’t have broadband yet, it’s my fault, and we can make sure [laughs] that everybody has the tablets, the devices, and the digital literacy to connect to the systems so that democracy moves forward as a polity, not just as some pocketed municipalities.

A popular challenge during 2014 was: do we actually only empower the people who are digital elites who can connect to these kinds of Internet deliberation spaces? Dr. Tsai Ing-wen has in her presidential agenda the idea of broadband as a human right, which basically empowers the people in the ...

In any case, it’s these three different systems rolled into one. People can participate throughout the lifecycle of every single policy, and there are around 10 million unique visitors, which is almost half of Taiwan’s population.

Because of that, we’re now focusing our efforts, for example, on the Join platform, which is three different platforms rolled into one. It’s a petition platform just like the We the People, it’s the regulatory pre-announcement like regulations.gov, and it’s also participatory budgeting on a national and municipal level, for ...

We were hired as reverse mentors — understudies that help setting directions — to their cabinet. For example, I worked with Minister Jaclyn Tsai, theoretically as a understudy, but actually as a reverse mentor. I was tackling how to build these kinds of listening experiences into all the levels of ...

Because of that, the Ma Ying-jeou administration, at the end of 2014, after Premier Jiang Yi-huah resigned and Premier Mao Chi-kuo took place as the Premier, embraced this kind of crowdsourcing and open government as their national agenda.

After that, in the mayoral election of 2014, all the mayors that embraced this open government platform for their campaign were elected—and some of them without preparing inauguration speeches. The people who did not support this kind of citizen participation lost their mayoral bids.

There are only maybe five divisive ideological points, but most people see that there actually is a broad consensus around the terms of CSSTA. That was the country’s first experience with this kind of massive, scalable listening.

The great thing is that, by the end of the Occupy, we had a strong idea of a polity, meaning that people could actually see that, mostly, people agreed on the things that most people thought that they wouldn’t agree on.

I helped the occupiers to build the ICT systems that enable half a million people on the street, and many more online, to collaborate with 20 or so occupying NGOs, each focusing on one aspect of the CSSTA to converge on a state of consensus over the course of the ...

Because of that, the legitimate theory was that the MPs were on strike. They refused to deliberate CSSTA substantially, and so the people occupied their Parliament and demonstrated. The demonstration was not in the form of a protest, but rather as a demo, as a showing of what’s possible.

Broadly speaking, my contributions started during the 2014 Occupy Parliament, when people were protesting against the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement (CSSTA), which was fast-tracked through the Parliament without any substantial deliberation.

Welcome to Taiwan. Is there anything you would like me to provide some background on? Are there any questions?

Very much so. Let’s keep in touch. Thank you and have a good local time.

Thank you for the very frank exchange, and feel free to email me anytime.

For me to personally participate, it really has to be a multi-sectoral approach that do something together.

I’m aware of that. I’m aware of that. Our petition website is built by folks over the UDM Group. What I’m saying is that if you just want to have a technological component widget level sharing, I would not personally participate, but I can, of course, introduce you to the ...

I’m happy to work with the Uruguay chair or the Israeli chair if your community can find some synergy between how the Digital 9 is going to work toward social innovation regarding democracy.

If there are some real cases in the Digital 9, Taiwan is always very happy to participate as a partner instead of a member. Taiwan literally is a territory, a disputed territory at that. We usually build ourselves as partners instead of member states. We have actually worked…I personally have ...

Now there are nine members, and their next meeting I think is Montevideo in Uruguay in November 4, and so on. I don’t know whether you’re involved in any way, with your government’s community. Within the ministry of the Digital 9 engagement, I think is the Ministry of Economic Affairs ...

Your country actually hosted something like that back in 2015. The Digital 5 Ministerial Summit of Digital Trust and Service Design, which both are very much related to this social innovation for democracy that we just talked about. At the time it was five members, in the Digital 5.

If, for example, one of your cities run a joint conversation with one of our municipalities, or on the state level, that works too, then it gives us the perfect excuse, so to speak, to join the community powering this conversation.

They did not even know the technology, and we did not know their preferred technology, so we have to work toward a common solution. In this case, the technologies that we eventually chose to use would be then involved in the discussion because we need to extend and contribute back ...

This is not saying that I’m not going to subscribe your medium posts or things like that. [laughs] It’s just that we really need a case. For example, we work with the de facto American Embassy in Taiwan, AIT, to launch a digital dialog around how to improve the US-Taiwan ...

If we don’t have a real use case, then we would usually just suggest our civil society friends to participate in my stead.

My office contributed, and I personally contributed for example to the HackMD technology, and the pol.is technology, and the Sandstorm technology, etc., because we used it in at least one day-to-day activity or at least one of the activity that my counterparts, the digital ministers of other countries that I ...

We don’t say “e-“ anymore because broadband is a human right in my jurisdiction, and so is in yours, and so the “e-“ I think is not needed. To return to your original question, I would say that if there is a real case that would require the use of ...

If I’m starting a participation initiative, we just launch one today, we just say, “Go to our participation platform.” If we run what we call a crowd survey or crowd law initiative, we just say, “Hey, here is our crowd survey,” or things like that.

It used to be that email is spelled with E, dash, mail, but nobody do that anymore. Everybody dropped the dash, and in Taiwan, we now just say, “I’ll mail you,” because it’s assumed that it’s a email. We would say postal mail if it’s not electronic. Do you see ...

I would also remind the communities that maybe it doesn’t work anymore to call it…and this is not a critique to your copy, but rather my personal view in Taiwan. For example, you call yourself a e-decision platform, but it’s like saying that, “Let’s send each other e-messages, or e-telegrams, ...