It’s easy to get to the point where it’s maybe 80 percent of people enjoying broadband. In Taiwan, we made sure that we look at it a couple of years ago, and we have coverage maybe 98 percent. But we focus very hard on those final 2 percent.

Yeah, there are two necessary but not sufficient conditions. The first one is to make sure that you really take broadband as human right.

Some of the work is starting to be done from the Canadian government, but we finished their work so Polis is now really bilingual.

We’re exporting the use of Polis to Philippines, to Thailand, to many different places as well. We also contributed because of the digital dialogue that we’re running with AIT, the de facto embassy of US in Taiwan, we also made sure that Polis have good bilingual capabilities and that everybody ...

We made sure that we hold ourselves to accounts to talk about the top 20 group-informed consensus across those five different aspects. We invite everybody who proposed this idea to resonate with everyone to the face-to-face meeting, which is also livestreamed, to make sure that we collectively build the agenda ...

If we just spend calories on these statements, we will never get the end of it. We made sure that there is what we call group-informed consensus. Meaning that no matter which side you are on, whether you’re for amateur or for professional mountaineering, everybody agrees on those things.

As usual, when we look at any Polis conversation, we see that previously, if you only look institutional media, you tend to see just these divisive statements about, “If you open up the mountains, people will leave a lot of trash, we cannot trust the average tourist,” and so on ...

Yes, we are actively using it. Just a couple days ago, we concluded one of the most participated Polis conversations in Taiwan, actually. It’s the conversation around mountaineering. As you can see, all those five different aspects around mountaineering, whereby we open up the mountains, actually get a lot of ...

We’ve been running this for more than two years now. There’s many teams.

Of course, sure.

This is a very high binding power to all those emerging ideas that sprung out from the youth engagement, from the social innovation, or from the participation officer channels.

If your minister says that it requires cross-minister coordination, you just turn the projector and there will be a cross-minister coordination, because it symbolizes the presidential promise that whatever it is the idea that’s proven in the three months, we are committed to make sure it’s become national policy within ...

If you turn it on, it projects the image of the president handing the trophy to you, which is very useful for public servants. If their director general say, “There’s no budget,” you turn on the projector, there is budget.

Every year, the president gives out five trophies to five teams that proved to the whole society that it’s actually a better way of doing things in public service. There’s no money associated with the prize, but there is a projector.

During the presidential hackathon, spent three months to work across sectors to boot a chatbot that can detect the water leakage so that a new leak takes two days, not two months as before to get detected. The presidential hackathon is by itself also a made-up platform for all those ...

I would also say the social innovation is not limited to organizations, to well-organized charities, companies, or co-ops. It could just be a random assembly of people who are working together to solve one particular issue, like this team called Water Saviour from the Taiwan Water Corporation.

These are just passed very quickly by the prime minister. The prime minister just take those ideas from the understudies/reverse mentors and just bring them into the national discourse. That is the youth engagement part.

He proposed that not only we should just include them into the national day parade, but actually we should work just as we look at the sport athletes and how they fit back into the education system. We should make sure that they integrate well with the education system not ...

All the youth counselors can identify the missing points, the gaps within it. For example, one of the youth counselor recently proposed that we have a delegation to the WorldSkills competition, which is like Olympics but for skilled workers. Unlike athletes which always go on those national day parade, the ...

The idea is that every young person can also have this meeting regionally to talk about the work that they are focusing on. As you can see, there’s a wide variety of topics that they care about. We have an ongoing map of all the different policies currently in place ...

The idea here is that the young people are not only a understudy, they are actually here to lead the ministry into a more forward-looking direction. They have direct access to the head of the council, which is our premier, our prime minister, and helped along by yours truly, but ...

For youth advisory group, we also have another website, the advisory.yta.gov.tw. Here, you can see all the youth counselors who are reverse mentors to ministries. The idea is that each minister can nominate one young person, usually less than 30 and always less than 35, to serve as a reverse ...

It’s just thanks to Taiwan’s broadband as human rights, no matter where they are, they are guaranteed 10 mbps link back to various municipalities where we can bring people together into a listening space. That’s social innovation.

The key difference is that we’re not asking people to come to any particular website. We find people in their vicinity. We bring the tech to the people, for the people in those communities, it’s just a regular town hall meetings.

It’s still radically transparent. It shares the same transcript platform as the other meetings that I’m a chair of. It shares the same SayIt platform.

In the social innovation regional tour, I don’t actually wait for people to raise petitions. I use the office hour, which is every Wednesday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., where people can come talk to me, or the biweekly or so tours around Taiwan where I go to the most ...

Making sure that people have immediate access to the partners, as well as people who are doing similar work like telemedicine, circular economy, and so on, and making sure that people have timely access to the ministries involved.

Join and vTaiwan are more about setting up a platform and have the conversation input into the platform. My other two mandates are social innovation and youth engagement, which we use different platforms with those. The social innovation platform, si.taiwan.gov.tw, is less about e-petition, this is more about getting people ...

Another topic I think is about people who think that in the schools, when there’s sexual harassments or other kinds of abuse to the school children, they don’t trust the Minister of Education enough to handle it in a just fashion. They are petitioning for establishing a national-level council to ...

One is about a cultural, religious ritual that compares the weight of pigs and have the pig with the most weight win the competition. That involves during the feeding of those prized pigs, according to the petitioner, unethical treatment of the pigs because they’re too heavy to move. That’s one ...

The topics that we discuss every month, we select two topics to discuss. These are entirely citizen-led, usually through popular petitions. We just decided yesterday actually our topics of this month.

In design thinking terms, they join on the left side of the first time and not on the right side of the second time. This is very important because then that gets people into this idea that people can have different values despite different positions, which is very difficult if ...

Instead of waiting for people to come to the streets or something, we actively, proactively discover the trending issues that people raise on the petition platform, or that people are just raising in general, and talk to people preemptively to make sure that people who care a lot about these ...

I have three main projects. One is the participatory officer, participation officer network, the PO Network. It could be seen on the po.pdis.tw website. The idea is that each ministry have this team of people who are charged to meet people where they are.

Many civic hackers come from Japan side came, but high-level officials from the Japanese cabinet also came.

Ran some bilateral projects with the vTaiwan project in Japan. We held two workshops together. I joined as a participant, certainly not as a digital minister to the workshops and working on, I think it was one about teleworking, one about digital signature and how it works with the existing ...

Code for Japan.

I’ve also attended some g0v international activities. For example, Code for Japan, which is a roughly g0v equivalent in Japan, ran a co-workshop with the vTaiwan project.

I do that for other fact-checkers such as Taiwan Fact-Checking Center as well. It’s not because they are g0v, it’s just because my work also has some synergies with the work they’re doing. That’s about it.

Also, I would also say that other g0v projects such as the CoFacts project, although I don’t have direct connection, as in I don’t attend their meetups, but I also make sure that whenever they make a breakthrough or whether they need some collaboration for underlying platform and so on, ...

The g0v international task force is also one of the teams using the facilities of their startup hub, which is also part of the social innovation lab that I am helping manage. It’s my other office, which I wonder if you have time to go to. It’s like this, a ...

I’m usually having some conversations with some participants in the meetup right before their meetups, buy them dinner, [laughs] or at least to guarantee them a stable working space. That’s one thing.

I wouldn’t say I’m a cofounder, but I’m a very early participant, that’s for sure. Today, I’m still working with g0v projects. The vTaiwan project in particular still takes place every Wednesday evening. I’m no longer participating each and every meetup, but I’m usually around Wednesdays anyway.

I’m an early participant, for sure. To be very pedantic, the g0v movement started in late 2012 and I joined early 2013. There’s definitely a three-month gap between [laughs] the g0v gets founded when I’m just a casual person on IRC helping them along, versus when I attended physically my ...

The g0v movement…

That’s one of the things about Internet rumors is that I have to keep saying that I wasn’t a founder at all. [laughs]

I would say that it’s two roles. One is to work specifically to be accountable to the Internet community, including the large platforms. The other one is to bring the norms that we have been forming in Taiwan and spread it to other nearby, as well as worldwide jurisdictions.

We work pretty closely, I would say, on issues that captures everybody’s attention such as how to manage the sovereign nation and coordinating inauthentic behavior that try to sow discord in liberal democracies. That’s something that people are very interested in and that we work very closely with other likeminded ...

First, on your question, yes, I’ve been working also as a digital ambassador to those semi-sovereign entities, as well as those other digital ambassadors, which is actually not a unique thing from Taiwan. I think many Scandinavian countries, Australia for sure, many countries already have this role of a digital ...

That is what people accept as normal in this what we call cyber norm package, which is the set of passively agreed things that people agree that it’s worth keeping in the values of the Internet.