Not “nonprofit organizations,” not “non-government entities,” not “charities,” not “civic hackers,” but a social sector that includes everyone and see it in themselves their purpose to innovate for the society, with the society, before the government think about those issues.

If they don’t, it’s my fault. You can talk to me. That is one of the preconditions. That was a challenge, but now, we’ve tackled that challenge. The second challenge, around voluntary association, is that we must have a strong social sector.

If I go to the Pacific island of Dongsha, and there’s no 10 Megabits per second, I cannot talk about the coral reef there. Then they have broadband there. Anywhere in Taiwan, 98 percent or more, the rural indigenous places, they have 10 Megabits per second.

If I go to the top of the Jade Mountain, almost 4,000 meters high, and there’s no broadband there, I cannot really work there. Now, they have 10 Megabits per second, even on the top of the Yu Shan Mountain.

There’s three preconditions for my three conditions to work. First, we in Taiwan have broadband as human right. If we don’t have broadband as human right, location independence doesn’t mean much.

With this title or not, anyone adopting the three principles can start what I call a conservative anarchist intervention to their polity that’s focused not on against the government or support the government, but on transforming the government. That’s what I’ve been doing all along, digital minister or not.

Actually, I did that since the end of 2014 to 2015, all the way to early 2016. I wasn’t having any position at the time. I’m untitled. I’m adviser to a horizontal minister, at most. Still, using that civilian capacity, using exactly the same principles, I facilitated exactly the same ...

Finally, radical transparency. Everything, including this conversation, every meeting I chair, even internally is made completely publicly under Creative Commons. Because of those three principle, digital minister or not, I can do exactly the same work.

This is more an honorary title, actually. My three working condition, as I shared, first, I can work anywhere, location independence. Second, I don’t give order to my colleagues. I don’t take orders from my colleagues, voluntary association.

Because they are technically different events. In this event, you’re only allowed to talk about facts. Everything else is kept on the record, but they are not even informed the next stage. On the next stage, we only ask about feelings and things like that.

That’s the entire method called the Focused Conversation Method.

Finally, the last part of the double diamond is to ratify those people’s idea into a new tax filing system, into a new healthcare system, into a new system that does what people have wanted all along. They just didn’t know everybody else also wanted, because they were busy getting ...

In design thinking, this is called a common “how might we” question. Then we enter the second diamond, and we ideate about the ways to deliver on the common feelings. The best idea are the one that take care of the most people’s feelings.

Then, after we discover the common understanding, after three weeks or so, we move to the third stage. After the fact and the feeling, we move to idea. This time, we can ideate based on the common understanding.

The social and institutional media will amplify the difference, because that attracts attention and sell advertisement. Actually, mostly, people feel the same around the same things at the same time. Those are called common sense or common understanding.

Once we confirm the base reality, then people can share their feelings freely, and there is no right or wrong. Then we use AI to make sure that people see each other’s feelings. Actually, people have much more in common than they have in difference.

Too much time, the online consultation develop into an argument, because I feel happy about something. You feel angry about something else, but we confuse those two facts with each other. We seem to be arguing, but we’re not really arguing, because our reality is different.

Based on that, we can talk about feelings. The same data, you can feel pretty good, pretty fine. Another person may feel that we have room to improve. Another person may be downright angry. There is no right or wrong about feelings, as long as they are about the same ...

We do that before we do anything else. After we have a common dataset – for example, around the civil IoT, which I just shared a website address here – we have then a common dataset about the air quality, water quality, disaster, and other earthquake prevention, and so on.

Then we put them into a top 20, I think, supercomputer, the National Computing Center of High-Speed Computing. Then let people upload code to calculate on the same data to make predictions and so on. The data argument, fact argument, is always the first step.

We mean open data from citizen science, open data from the private sector, open data from the academia, and finally, open data from the public sector. We use distributed ledgers, blockchains, to make sure we can hold each other accountable, that we don’t have the capability to change each other’s ...

I think argue is just fine. I don’t have anything against arguing, but you have to argue in a structured way. First, you need to argue about the facts. That’s why in Taiwan, when we say open data, we never mean open government data only.

They still have a receipt, actually, maybe printed with gold, that they get to keep and share with their family.

There is no queue anymore, because the collection of receipt is after the queue. They can spend a lot of time, spending more time, with the art and the creativity in the museum, rather than spending time waiting in the queue.

Once they walk in, using the same mobile phone or their watch, they can claim a receipt that’s more beautiful, more well-printed, and has a seal ink on it that they can take home as a receipt of using that mobile entering experience.

The solution is you can have maybe a Line chatbot, maybe any ways for the elderly people to get the entry ticket. When they wait in the queue, they don’t have to wait. They just beep their phone to the sensor, and they walk in.

People who run tourist agencies, people who sell tickets online, people who specialize in printing, and things like that. We figure out a solution together. The solution is very simple, actually, if you think about it.

They tried to introduce kiosk, but they are not very friendly. Frankly speaking, it’s impossible to design a kiosk that’s equally friendly to a 70-year-old as an 18-year-old. It’s just impossible. The PO from the NPM brought this idea to us, and then we run a collaboration meeting with all ...

They don’t want to wait in the queue. The elderly people, they want a physical stamp, a physical ticket, as something, like a memoir, that they can bring back to their children. They also don’t like the long queue. The elderly people really don’t like to wait for very long.

When I say 32 ministries, the National Palace Museum is one of the cabinet meeting members. The NPM faces a dilemma. The young people want to use QR code, want to use NFC, want to use their phone to quickly enter the museum and to navigate the museum.

Many people feel, if they have a piece of paper with the ink of a wooden seal on it, it means a lot to them psychologically. The PO of the National Palace Museum, which you may have heard is a very large museum in Taiwan, and they are also a ...

As I mentioned, e-petition is one source. Tax filing system, plastic straw, all these are from e-petition. There also are some cases brought by the PO themselves. For example, I don’t know how much of a culture of wooden seal on a physical paper is important to your culture, but ...

She would not feel that, “Oh, it’s the large businesses against me.” Actually, the business owners are socially-minded. They just don’t have the ingredients. That’s something we can co-create. Solidarity across sectors is the main motivation for the civilian experts to enter.

They joined this industry for a social purpose. Now, hepatitis B is essentially gone. It’s very easily cured. They’re also looking at new social purposes. The 16 years old feel that, “Oh, then we can use plastic straws, but reshape them from the sugarcane waste to do a zero” – ...

They were also social enterprises 20 years or 30 years before. At that time in Taiwan, there’s a lot of hepatitis B. The virus was a serious threat to the Taiwanese health. Because of that, they started their company making the plastic utensils, because they want to prevent hepatitis B ...

Using e-petition, she can find 5,000 people who think exactly, care exactly like her, and form a community. The best thing is that she then learns that people who make those plastic utensils, they are not just for profit.

Maybe the petitioner that raised the gradual banning of plastic straw, who was only 16-year-old at the time, a senior high school student, she may be the only one in her class caring about carbon reduction and the plastic waste in the sea.

The main motivation is that they no longer feel alone. It’s the solidarity. Before, people may be alone in their community, caring so much about one small thing.

That is our way to work with civilian experts, always in their space, providing them with space, and providing them with trust, instead asking them to come to the government.

We are joining them in their local habitat, so to speak, but using IT technology, including telepresence, video conference, 360 live stream, to amplify their voices to the world, corresponding to the Sustainable Development Goals.

What I’m getting at is that we’re bringing the IT to the civilian expert to amplify their voices. We’re not asking them to come all the way to our meetings to give a 10-minute speech.

Because of that, they are much more willing to share new ideas. If you share new ideas in a formal setting, nobody want to listen. If you just share it with excellent food, next week, you will return, even if you don’t remember a thing they said, because the food ...

That is how we can then spend time dining with them here. We open until midnight, until 11:00 PM. We have a chef. We have very good cuisine. We have various different social innovation groups that just hosts here.

The government expect nothing in return. This is the first, in principle. The second principle with civilian experts is that they already have their gatherings. They already have communities. As I mentioned, on Wednesday, we offer our venue, the Social Innovation Lab, for free for them to host their events.

By making all the regulations, no exceptions, up for two months of online public debate, people anticipate what is going to change, and can even call a stop if the regulation doesn’t fit people’s needs. All these three, combined together, makes the people feel that they are trusted by the ...

By making the national budget visualizable and publicly commentable to the Join platform, everybody learns how their tax is being spent and can laser-focus on the one that they care the most, like long-term healthcare and so on, and social housing.

The second is that we must bring IT to where people already are, instead of bringing people to information technology. Those two are the key ideas of digital transformation. By making the conversation under Creative Commons, even before making a decision, everybody learns the why of policymaking, not just the ...

The idea, there are two ideas. One idea, and they are very important. Everything else is detail. The first one is that the government need to trust people and not expect people to trust the government. That’s the first principle.

We did a, what we call, Government Digital Service Guidelines, in our National Development Council, to transfer the learnings to the municipal governments and townships.

After that pilot case, we then apply it to our universal healthcare. How do we make mobile computing part of it? The National Palace Museum and many, many other public services then are developed in this methodology.