Yeah, I am already in, as I explained, many of the working groups. When I look at a new community, the decision of whether to participate personally, or do I just refer it to my other friends in the communities, is mostly whether I can find a real case, either ...

Yes.

We implicitly include the e-democracy workers who are working on the goals 16 and 17, where we also include people that are working on more basic sustainable goals such as climate change, which affects everyone of us, and so it gets us more allies and less distance from traditional social ...

My current thought is that by saying that we’re working toward all the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, led by the social sector and the private sector to form social innovation initiatives.

Saying social innovation is maximally inclusive because it includes both parties, and they do have a lot to learn from each other.

When we say civic tech, these efforts usually do not get involved that much because they started with a social organization innovation instead of a applied science or applied nature science angle.

There are many people working on those furthering the cooperative spirit in the digital age, for example, the so-called platform cooperativism, platform coops, which is essentially Uber, but run in a way that is democratically decided by the drivers.

That is a technology because it combines the democratic principle with a profit-sharing model, so cooperatives could be seen as a social technology, but it has nothing to do with our traditional way of digital technology. It’s mostly a new form of organization.

For example, a important social innovation before our time, actually, is the idea of cooperatives, which is people sharing the benefit of their joint work by share, which is just like a company, but they decide in a democratic manner just like in public sector, one person, one vote.

That’s the extent of imagination most people hear when they hear the term technology, but innovation doesn’t have to be technological in nature.

Why social innovation is my preferred term now is that it doesn’t have to be…Because when you hear tech, people mostly think about digital technology, communication technology, hardware, software, firmware technology, or at most, maybe material science or agriculture, sustainable circular economy technology.

Yes. First of all, I think the term civic technology is good for building a new sector. To get more buy-in, especially from cooperatives as well as other social entrepreneurs who have been organizing in non-digital manner for a very long time, in Taiwan, we call it now social innovation.

I see.

I didn’t get an entire paragraph. [laughs] Would you like to resume?

Another one which is started by governments but by technologists, is the Code for All network, which g0v is also a part of, but I don’t see a Estonian chapter on that Web page. Those are the two that we very regularly work with, and by we, I mean my ...

That’s their work, to make sure that people like you are invited to the policy-making worldwide, not just in Estonia. That’s a existing community internationally, exactly just for your purpose.

What I’m saying is that for those two particular needs, there exist existing international communities dedicated for exactly that, and I wonder if you have considered just working with them. The obvious choice for example is, in your country, Ott Karulin from the Adviser of the Government Office, is currently ...

Yes. I hear two things. It’s about sharing of the best practices, more on a technology and policy level. The second is to share learnings from more of a governance level, and especially governance issues that are pertaining to a global nature instead of only a local nature.

In any case, we’re far away in terms of light speed, so it’s understandable. You were saying that you reviewed Loomio, HackMD, and so on, and find a lot of similarity of the work they are doing and you were doing.

In Taiwan, we also have broadband as a human right. I think that’s something that both jurisdictions have in common, and unlike our nearby jurisdictions, so that sets us apart.

We have good relationships with Enspiral, or with mySociety, or with The Governance Lab or the usual suspects, Omidyar, now Luminate, that works with these technologies.

For a while, people used Loomio quite a bit, and then we discovered pol.is, and so a lot of people start now working on pol.is instead of Loomio. Of course, all those tools have their places depending on the size and the use of the teams, so we’re not wed ...

We work with both teams, to ensure a good transition from g0v.hackpad to g0v.hackmd. This is just one of the many examples. It used to be that people in g0v was very interested in liquid feedback, the liquid feedback, which is a very early prototype of the thing that you ...

In the beginning, the g0v movement mostly run on Hackpad, which is a system that’s already written by a startup. Hackpad gets acquired by Dropbox. Because of open source, then we switched mostly to a team called HackMD. HackMD, MD for markdown, is now a preferred form of collaboration over ...

Gov zero is just a model that promotes people initiating innovations that are alternatives to public service, that can then be adopted by the governments that service, to become a collaborative governance system. We actually don’t write code, unless there’s an absolute need to do so.

I would describe it as more of a meme than anything. It’s just a mind virus that does. You can find people working with the same gov zero ethos in the US, in both coasts, in Canada, in Italy as I described, in France, and so on. The branding itself ...

There if you type g0v.it for Italy, you will see Italian. Gov zero is just an idea. It’s just a domain hack. There is no membership per se. People in Italy, if they want to start doing something like that in Italy, they don’t have to ask anybody in Taiwan. ...

Physically, it’s taking something, that gov, and change the O to a zero. Say, gov zero represent this physical transformation to digital transformation. It’s gov zero, and it’s easier to pronounce, too.

It’s pronounced “gov-zero.”

Cheers.

I’m really happy about that. Thank you for contributing to the Commons.

We get to publish this under Creative Commons attribution. This very seldom happens. I usually have to convince my interviewer of the importance of Creative Commons, but you’re…

Thank you for the great questions, and thank you for your contribution to the Commons.

Everybody flied the same distance and have the hackathon together. I’m sure that we can repeat that experience, too, if you’re interested in co-organizing.

Yes, of course. We’re very close to each other anyway. Last time, the g0v movement, the social sector, organized a hackathon in Okinawa.

At that time, if any of your OGP community – I’m sure Creative Commons Korea is part of your Open Government community – is interested, we’re very happy to do bilateral or mini-lateral gatherings in South Korea, and I will love to come.

We did have a regional meeting with pretty much all my deputies came to Seoul to learn from the OGP process and the IRN process. We will kick off our National Action Plan really quickly, maybe a month from now. Then starting next January, we will begin the co-creation process ...

I believe our Open Government partnership National Action Plan, which because of political reasons is now just called the Open Government National Action Plan – we dropped the P from it – it is very kindly supported by the Korea government, the OGP liaison.

Yeah. I did visit Seoul, actually. That was I think for a cyber-security conference. I’m more than happy to come to Seoul.

Mm-hmm.

I have very optimistic prospects about the innovation capacity of the public sector, of the career public servants, because of my encounter with my head of the school when I was 14 years old.

At the time, it’s mandatory education, so if I don’t go to the school, my parent will be fined. There will be a penalty. My principal, the head of the school, says, “No, it’s OK. I will just fake the record to the ministry of education so you can pursue ...

I sent this material of my email correspondence to the principal, the head of my junior high school, and she, after considering it for a couple of minutes, said, “OK, tomorrow, you don’t go to school anymore. You just work with the scholars, and I will cover for you.”

Because of the World Wide Web and the open access community back then, we were able to start collaborating even I’m just a 14 years old who speaks very little English. This is how my education began.

Without an open platform, without the digital platform, this is impossible. I would have to take maybe an airplane to visit their lab and work maybe 15 years to become their postdoc before we can collaborate like this.

When I write the collaborators about cognitive science, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, they treat me like a fellow researcher. They don’t know I’m just 14 years old. We’re just solving problems together in an academic community.

I encountered the archive community when I was 14 years old. That was 1995. I see people just posting papers even before they publish to the journal. I was just a junior high school student. I don’t have the money to pay for the academic journals, but I get to ...

My first encounter with the open access community is with the archive community at Arxiv. I think Cornell University maintains it. Even today, my papers are published under Creative Commons in the social archive.

That is the critical difference between the uppercase Minister and the lowercase minister. I consider myself always a lowercase minister, whether it’s uppercase or not.

I will show you my name card. This name card, if you can see it, says digital minister, but in lowercase. It doesn’t say actually which country I’m working for. It only say Taiwan can help. What this signifies is that I’m not working for the Taiwan government. I’m working ...