Thank you. Thanks so much for making time. I’m really excited to chat with you. I have lots of questions.

Okay.

It’s now been five years since the Sunflower Movement. Could you tell me what was most significant about that moment from your perspective and what you think the legacy of that moment has been?

From my perspective, the Sunflower Movement is the first time that people have seen with their own eyes, with half a million people on the street and many more online, that it is possible, actually, for the 20 or so NGOs to converge over time.

They occupy the environment, rather than diverge, as many other occupies did. A focused conversation is possible. That is an existential proof that collectively raised imagination of democracy merges as a citizen assembly, or people have to say, but rather we can actually converge into something actionable with professional facilitating and civic technology.

I think that’s the main thing. The main legacy is of course that in Taiwan many people now expect to participate in democratic affairs between elections.

People’s imagination has been opened. Other mayors, like some who are following the Sunflower Movement, who did not have an open government plan lose their platforms. People who do have an open government plan or who participate in the Occupy find themselves mayors sometimes without expecting it.

There was this very fervent moment, this fertile moment of disruption after the 2008 crisis around Occupy Movement and then, in places like Spain, with Podemos. So many of those moments faded out and they lost their energy. How has the Sunflower Movement and its legacy maintained the engagement and energy around participation?

That is because in Taiwan we’re relatively new to democracy. You see it to a lesser degree in Spain and to many like Estonia, who found it after the Internet. For people who don’t have a legacy system, there’s less inertia because there’s no 500 years, 200 years of republican tradition to honor.

We’re literally the first generation that can actually do democracy because it was illegal in our parents’ age. Because of that, there’s a lot more room to innovate. There’s a lot less inertia to fight. The public service generally sees the Internet and digital technology as something that can potentially take away the risks and improve their efficiency and share the credit.

Whereas, if you have a system that just honor cross-generations, like five generations, then it’s actually very difficult to challenge, as we’re building a new system, to be complementary. It will already have a well-understood norm in the society. We don’t have that norm.

It’s interesting that you say that. Another one of my questions was how you’ve ensured that the bureaucracy and establishment are supportive of rather than oppositional to the idea of forking the government.

Even in my own experience, there is a resistance to new forms of input. Systems are the way they are. Governments are designed to counter against risk, they’re very risk averse. How have you been able to communicate to the public service that public participation actually reduces risks for proposition?

Basically, the idea is that we offer a net reduction of risk. There are three main motivations as far as bureaucracy is concerned. One is, as you said, management and reduction of risk. One, of course, is still very important is the efficiency and, indeed, certainty of service. That is also very important.

The other thing of course is due credit. If a public servant innovates, then they want to be recognized, not having the ministry taking all the credit and only absorbing the blame when things go wrong. All these is three credit attribution efficiency, that is to say effective allocation of resources and risk reduction.

These three, they’re not fungible. Meaning that too much forking the government ideals somehow trade one for the other. These are not fungible. All our offices’ improvements and projects are Pareto improvements in the sense that we don’t trade one for another.

We make some advance, a little bit, on one of the three but without actually causing more trouble on the other two. Because my office is literally horizontal, like one person poached from each ministry, and so because I don’t give them orders.

I don’t take orders from them, I just ask people to work out loud. That’s the only ask that I have. Because of that, any project that rose out of my office is by definition a re-constellation of many different values across ministries.

That is how we make sure that our bureaucracy is OK with it, because our office is over 50 percent bureaucracy. We don’t have one dominant ministry and neither one dominant value. It is a cross-cutting, cross-silo organization.

I find that interesting because one of the ways that we’ve seen the public service treated traditionally is as an anonymous entity where people didn’t get individual recognition or credit for their contributions. That seems to be counter to the way that you’re approaching it where you’re empowering public servants.

That’s right, and honoring them as heroes, basically.

That’s great. I noticed that Taiwanese public servants are using Apolitical, the platform. How has that been useful in your observation?

A few things, they share our story and they help us discover people doing more or less the same work. We also engage with many other platforms, like the GovLab in NYU. They also have the CrowdLaw platform, the data collaborative platform, and things like that.

We’re given a lot of autonomy to freely join our international counterparts, that OneTeamGov from the UK, another great example. All these great examples are people, as you said, highlighting their individual contributions in a way that is not afraid for the public to learn from mistakes as well

Anything that is culturally similar to ours, we naturally found that very useful in the sense of building a platform for solidarity and reminding us that we’re not in this alone. Rather, we’re part of this global movement.

It’s interesting because what you say also accords with the economist Mariana Mazzucato, recently been talking about elevating and celebrating the public service and the way that public service has been hollowed out over the years and de-skilled. So much of their work and skill base has been moved to the private sector. Is that something that you’re trying to counter in Taiwan?

Certainly. I think in Taiwan we have excellent public service, like a single-payer, very reasonable, top-notch healthcare system. We just started our tax filing season. Tomorrow is the first tax filing day.

Again, this is all cross-platform, very useful, like a full user journey designed by people who petitioned to make it better and things like that, co-created tax filing experience. A lot of things that in other jurisdictions would be private sector "competitions," in Taiwan are "co-creations" from the citizens.

It has long been a part of Taiwanese public sector culture to make sure that if there are services that the citizens just cannot opt out, healthcare and tax filing being two prime examples, then actually, we should approach it as a co-creative process rather than a private sector competition.

In normal service design, in normal private sector, the client can always say no and switch to a competitor. The fact is you cannot say no and refuse to file tax or refuse to apply to Medicare. You can, but it won’t get you very far. In these circumstances, it makes far more sense to absorb the creative energy rather than to disperse them into the public sector.

I have to pick something up, just 20 seconds.

No problem.

All right, thank you, that’s some drinks.

Oh, nice. [laughs] I’ve been talking to a lot of people who are working on deliberative democracy and participatory budgeting and/or distributed forms of engagement, so people in Iceland, in Brazil, in Belgium, and hopefully, soon in Spain, once their election’s over.

That’s right.

The challenges I see, one of the big challenges that’s hardest to overcome, I think, is communicating how much time we need to take for citizens to have a participatory and ongoing relationship with their politics rather than a sort of set and forget, vote once, delegation approach.

How have you overcome that in Taiwan? What motivates people to have a more participatory role in their democracy?

Right. I think, first of all, Taiwan is really having a couple unfair advantages. One is that we offer broadband as a human right because of our geography. Anywhere in Taiwan, even remote islands, if you don’t have 10 megabits per second, it’s personally my fault. You can talk to me.

If anyone want unlimited 4G access plan, to deliver such broadband, it is less than $20 US per month from all major telecom operators.

This is really unfair, right? [laughs] Because of that, when we build participatory platforms, we don’t have to limit ourselves as in other jurisdictions, like some of them use participatory budgeting, but are afraid that people won’t have the bandwidth, so they have to use automated teller machines in order to collect those and display things like that. That was actually considered in Portugal.

I mean, that’s very creative, but it is actually very limiting, because if you want to go to BPB, you first have to know about us and you have to walk to a nearby bank, and then you have to operate this ATM, which really isn’t designed as a voting machine, and things like that. But that’s like the last mile solution that I have.

Now with more social media accounts than citizen population and free broadband, not really free, but almost free broadband access as a human right, I think that enables us to basically provide a full context of policy-making, so that anyone who want to know any bit of the budget can just drill down to the budget item and have a real time conversation with public service on that particular budget item for all thousands of our national budgets, for example.

There is this context, not saying, that makes it more attractive. Because people usually are just curious how is my neighborhood doing, and things like that. It is just an informative piece just like Google Map, that people would like to explore.

If something occurred to them at that time, then of course they just leave it on the platform or they start an e-petition or things like that. It’s all part of the flow. They don’t have to specifically go to a town hall in the specific Sunday to do something specific. It’s all kind of an ongoing process, just part of the exploration.

There’s also another kind of model that we’re following, is that we bring the technology to the space of people rather than asking the people to come to the space of technology.

Once there are an e-petition with 5,000 counter signatures, for example, then we make sure that if it’s a local matter, all the relevant ministries are summoned into that locality and to have a real face to face conversation that is still amplified through 360 live streaming and so on.

Because of that, for everybody, all these decoders involved, they can minimize the personal cost to them to participate in this process. They’re always met with at least an equal kind of contextualizing benefit that make sure that if they put in one hour of time, it can save at least one hour of reading, because people are contextualizing for each other.

I think just making it a learning experience rather than something like a jury duty convinces a lot more people because it’s more fun, really.

Oh, that’s fantastic. Let me just jump on that one point. You talked about optimizing for fun before.

That’s right.

Can you explain what that means in an open democracy, and particularly in a youth participation context? How do you define it?

A few things, right. It’s instant gratification, so just making sure that if people put in just five seconds to get a rush thinking, that they’re contributing meaningfully to the democracy. It can just be one upvote or one downvote, or it could just be one posted note in a user journey, and things like that.

Always just provide a real time feedback of how their single action mattered. I think that is very important.

The second part is that once there is really a fighting power to the consultative or co-creative process, always make sure that if they’re willing to spend more than five minutes of time. If they want to spend 40 minutes of time, for example, then they can just, like you did, email me and book my 40 minutes of my time on the record.

Because it’s on the record, then it also saves everybody else time. Because then you read my previous interviews, right? It’s like people build on each other. Just being part of something larger is also part of the fun.

Instant gratification, a way to just convert a small commitment into a larger commitment and some way to make the larger commitment to transcend individuals. I think these three together makes these optimised for fun to be optimal.

Yeah, absolutely. Tell me about your, when you have those consulting hours, and very long hours, by the way, 12 hours.

That’s right.

Sitting and waiting and anyone can book in to see you. What do people bring to you? What typically happens when you’re at the Social Innovation Lab?

Well, quite a few things. I mean, just let me look at tomorrow’s schedule, because tomorrow appears to be a Wednesday, right? It’s Labor Day, but in Taiwan public service is still working on Labor Day. Let’s see, my first booking is from the BLab. They’re making a ’let’s be the change together’, business for good, social innovation competition.

They’re asking me if I can maybe hold a starting ceremony or be one of the judges and indeed connect that to our APSIPA, Asia Pacific Social Innovation Partnership Award, which is our way to promote SDGs, the sustained development goals. That’s one thing.

The next meeting is from Crossroads, which is a local organization intending to make foreign people understand Taiwan more. Also making sure that Taiwan’s uniqueness, like our work in human rights, our work in democracy, innovation and things like that is also translated into a foreign context, because too much of this information is still just in Mandarin Chinese. They really want to make sure that they’re bilingually sound.

Afterwards, there’s also a mix, like innovation, design for social change annual summit. I think I’m going to connect social innovation to fintech as in working on fintech inclusion. That’s the main topic to talk.

There’s been a team using AI to analyze biometrics to make sure that for long-term care circumstances, the elderly can automatically notify their clinics and their doctors if they have something that is an accident waiting to happen.

They probably want some support in the new telemedicine and telediagnosis law. If the regulations don’t fit, maybe they’ll ask for a one-year sandbox in which we agree to not fine them for violating the regulation exchange for innovation and so on. I can go on, but you get the basic idea of my office hours.

Yeah. It sounds like when you’re in your office and having those consulting hours, you’re acting as a connector between these different parts of government and civil society, commercial/government entities or individuals and then linking efforts to broader missions -- whether it’s a sustainable development goal, Taiwan’s focus on expanding it’s cultural diversity or recognizing cultural diversity.

Would you define your role then as a connector?

Really, a catalyst. Because they connect, there’s something to connect to. Rather I just facilitate the contextualizing process and post our conversation publicly to the Internet as Creative Commons Zero transcripts and/or YouTube videos.

Because of that I don’t really know who I’m connecting them with. It’s usually people who discover those transcripts, people who look at the Taiwan social innovation platform, who discover they share common goals and energies.

They don’t even need me, right? They can just form synergies naturally together. Sometimes just by occurring in the Social Innovation Lab, they’re waiting for my office hours, they see any of our events. Any event that has one or more global goals as a focus can freely use the Social Innovation Lab, so a lot of spontaneous connections happen.

I’m more of a catalyst. Of course, sometimes I intentionally connect, but that’s maybe one in three cases.

I’d love to ask you about the vTaiwan process. I read your paper and found the four steps fascinating and where that you’re using existing technology. It’s not needing to build anything new, really.

That’s right. It’s all off the shelf.

All off the shelf. The success that you had through that process in reframing the debate about ride-sharing. Are there any other examples that you can share that show that method in practice?

Of course. There’s 26 cases, and they’re all on vtaiwan.tw. I think there’s quite a few cases that shines because they couldn’t be done in the other ways of consultation. Of course, people talk about ride-sharing and Airbnb because that’s something that internationally, everybody is facing a similar concern.

Truths to be told, they could also be handled by regular consultation because there are unions and associations after all. I think where this shines is that for example, when we’re talking about teleworking, there is no union of teleworkers because we’re all in different industries.

When we’re talking about how to move Taiwan companies who register from Cayman Islands back into being registered in Taiwan by introducing special voting stocks and closely held corporations, maybe company with English names and maybe company with a purpose-driven, like benefit corporations and so on.

Again, there are no clear cut existing associations of all the Taiwanese company that register in Cayman Islands. [laughs] It’s just a tax device or a governance device. In cases in which there are no obvious top-down hierarchical organizations, that’s where the vTaiwan approach shines.

It enables people who don’t have a voice because they don’t have a organized presence that has a protocol dealing with the governance. It enables them to discover each other, form a kind of ad hoc stakeholder coalition, and even maintain that relationship afterwards.

I think vTaiwan has generating the fintech sandbox like the self-driving vehicle sandbox, indeed, the platform economy sandbox. All those sandboxes are basically ways for people who engage in open innovation to discover their own coalition. vTaiwan is not just a consultation process. It’s a meta-process that generates more consultative processes.

I think that’s interesting. Is that process, and I understand it’s...What is it? The bonded coalition model? I haven’t that quite right. Let me have a look. The coherent blended volition model. This idea that it’s people who weren’t a coalition before but find themselves with shared values.

I think it’s incredibly appealing. If you’re providing advice on how a city might take up a structure or a method like this, what advice would you provide?

I’ll repeat what the co-creators of Social Innovation Lab has prioritized, their consensus. The first thing is to have a kitchen and a cafe and a resident chef. The second thing is for the place to be open until at least 11:00 every night because the retail and weekly meet-up is from 7:00 to 11:00 every Wednesday evening. I usually stay until 10:00.

Then, the third thing is to make sure that anyone who participates records fully either through telepresence or regular Google Docs or HackMD as we use, making sure that people can discover what people are working on from afar.

I think with these three elements, that is to say, excellent food, a relaxed atmosphere with no deadlines and timing, and a recurrent record-keeping culture, anything can happen. I think that are the off-line ingredient of the online vTaiwan process that people often overlook. I am very grateful to Tom Atlee who discovered this and wrote it in excellent logs.

That’s interesting. I think we’ve become so seduced by the idea of tech tools that we don’t realize the importance of people being in a space.

These are also social technologies.

I don’t think it was immediately clear to me what the relationship was between g0v and your role in the Social Innovation Lab. Can you explain to me how?

G0v is just a meme, really. The meme says whenever you see any government service or website and think, "Why is nobody making this improvement," just omitting that "nobody" and do the same service but with the O replaced to a 0. It’s a meme.

The g0v.it is from Italy. They show also the Italian budget with all the drilldown like in our g0v.tw topic. They don’t ask for license or patent or authorization or anything. It is literally a meme.

People who are in the g0v community, roughly speaking, agrees to work out in the open using open-source and Creative Common licenses for the public good and in a radically participative way because it’s implied by the license.

It allows people who are even not of the same nationality to contribute because there’s no domestic open-source. Basically, it’s participation from everybody to the benefit of the public service and not just public servants, but to the public service.

I think this creates a culture of people pressuring the government without anything negative. That’s what "fork" means. "Fork" doesn’t mean destroy what’s there. It means taking what’s there, bringing into a different direction with the hope that some day, the mainland merges back or the mainland disappears and you become the mainland.

That is the forking the government meme. I think I cultivate this meme. I consider myself a g0v contributor, nothing more, nothing less.

The Social Innovation Lab is one of the physical places that we’re experimenting with open-space technology, with focused conversation methodologies to make sure that the g0v culture seeps out from a digital sphere and into a more day-to-day like all the other sustainable development goals, not just goals 16 and 17.

That’s interesting. Just to clarify, does that mean that actually this practice, g0v in Italy, the practice of forking or making a parallel...

That’s right. There’s a sub-reddit created just two days ago called "g0v." Again, it’s randomly started by somebody, and people coalesce around it. There is no any formal connection, recognition or any numbering system that controls who can use G-0-V, and who cannot.

All the important brandings and trademarks and so on are all open-source licensed anyway. Anyone who thinks that they fit with the g0v badge gets to use the g0v badge.

It’s interesting, because it’s become so identified with Taiwan.

It starts from Taiwan. It became internationally known after the Sunflower Movement. That’s already more than two years after its inception. Of course, it’s associated with Taiwan because most g0v people learned it from Taiwan.

On the other hand, there’s also many Taiwanese people all over the world, like g0v in Washington, DC or g0v in UK and Europe and so on. They also participate in the main g0v Slack channel, which is also a telebrand channel and an IRC channel.

They report from all over the world trying to do pretty much the same thing. They identify as g0v contributor and less like Taiwanese. I think there’s a kind of overlapping identity.

I’ve read in your interviews before that you’ve said that your introduction to democracy and politics and social organizing was online for years before you got the right to vote. Interestingly, the Citizens Foundation in Iceland also talk about upgrading democracy in the operating system.

That’s true.

What are the characteristics or principles of the digital world that most need to be put in this reboot of democracy?

The idea of forking is really core, and even for software programmers like the original domain in which fork is used is not until the invention of the Centralized Version Control Systems, and with it the conflict-free resolution data types that it makes merging, really, almost effortless.

It used to be the case, when I first participated in the Free Software community, that forking was taken very seriously, because it’s very difficult to merge things back. If you fork something, it’s forked for good.

But now with Git and all the different equivalents of Git in, for example, co-creation of documents, co-creation of spreadsheets, all those collaborative editors and so on, suddenly it becomes very easy to fork anything, and still with the pretty good hope of merging it back.

I think that is a really great metaphor of governance. This is what we intentionally incorporate, as I said, as the sandbox regulations. A lot of sandboxes just fork regulations for a year and merge it back, or at the Presidential Hackathon, where people take a proof of concept in delivering a public service in a different way.

Every year, we pick five cases and the President say, "OK, so by next year, all these five winning cases will become public policy." It’s all an encouragement of a little bit of deviation, a little bit of forking, but with the promise or at least with a high chance of it being merged back.

On the President’s Hackathon, are core participants all civil servants?

No, we insist on building a trilingual team every year. Every year, we select and indeed curate 20 teams.

By trilingual we mean that each team have to have at least one technical expert on data or AI, and so on, one domain expert, whatever social issue they’re trying to solve, and very importantly, one expert on public service, on regulation, on RegTech essentially. That is more often a public servant.

Almost by definition it is cross-sectoral. We found that it makes more sense for each teams if they don’t have one of the three or two of the three trilingual roles to form these coalitions before they actually try to develop the first prototype.

That makes a lot of sense. I want to talk about your super ministry again and how that functions in practice. I read that you have too many volunteers, and now you’ve got at least a representative, that the goal is to have one representative from each ministry.

How does that function in practice in terms of achieving outcomes? Are they self-selecting in that they have an agenda or a burning issue when they come to you? Are there set political issues that are introduced or from civil society? How do they determine what they want to act on?

It differs for each ministry. The minister of foreign affairs, of course, have a agenda of pushing the idea of “Taiwan Can Help” on the global goals. That is just the value of our foreign ministry.

Then, of course, they are dispatched to our office, reconcile the work we’re doing within the framework of SDG and making sure that we approach foreign ministries or foreign organizations or foreign CSOs in a appropriate platform that is conforming to the UN SDG, so that’s what they bring to the table.

There’s many other examples. The people from the ministry of culture, for example, cares about youth engagement a lot and takes care of engaging with our youth counselors to make sure that they all have agenda-setting power.

Not just on things young people care about, but really across all the different ministries and with a very accountable way of showing how each youth counselor have achieved not just in its agenda-setting power but actually in the delivery.

Because there are almost always co-creators of some kind of public service, and so build a rapport between the young people and the ministries. That’s what our dispatch foreign minister of culture bring to the table.

Each one, when they join our office, what I look for is that they bring a complementary skill or value set, and then they’re more of a giver than a taker, and that’s really the only to-hiring condition that I make. Other than that it is just pure horizontal, and people just chat among themselves to find interesting thing to do.

You’ve actually answered another question that maybe you can clarify. I’ve noticed you using the hashtag "taiwancanhelp." Is that something that is directed from Taiwan, the idea that Taiwan can help on the SDG specifically? Is that where that comes from?

Yes. It starts from not all the SDGs. I think it starts from our bid to the World Health Organization. Because of political reasons, Taiwan was denied entry to the Annual Summit of the WHO for quite a few years now.

But Taiwan really is excellent when it comes to all sorts of just disease prevention and healthcare, good health and well-being and so on. Just for SDG 3, as part of the minister of foreign affair and minster of health and welfare, the WHA bid, they developed this taiwancanhelp hashtag.

Then we discovered that actually Taiwan can help on pretty much everything in the Sustainable Development Framework, and so we gradually just expanded that to include all the SDGs.

As others are learning from you, who are you learning from at the moment? Who are you modeling in terms of open government and participation?

In open government summits, I think that’s one of the main venues that the open government community got us, and I think I learn from the cutting edge thinking of various communities, like this year the host country is Canada.

Canada has a lot emphasis on indigenous inclusion, for example. That is something that Taiwan is also grappling with. Our President, herself part-indigenous, just formally apologized for the indigenous nations’ different treatments and things like that just a couple of years ago.

We’re really early on into this truth and reconciliation process, and a lot of our e-participation methodologies really is designed with a Han ethnic norm, for lack of a better term, and that makes the indigenous populations’ participation not as active as other people.

We did excellent age groups. The 65 years old participate as much our 15 years old, so we did that really well in terms of inclusion, but not so when it comes to indigenous.

We learn from the Canadians and the way that they approach indigenous honoring the tradition, making sure the truth and reconciliation is indigenous-driven, and we make sure we learn from them.

We, for example, translate our open government manuals and so on into indigenous languages, and that’s a direct learning from them. I can keep saying a lot like concrete small things, but what I mean is that really inclusion, there is no end to inclusion.

Just by making sure of paying attention to what every other culture is doing in terms of intersectionality often reveals the kind of hidden, excluded communities that we, nevertheless, have not yet considered in our open government presence.

Fantastic. Thank you so much, Audrey. This has been really, really helpful. Thank you so much for you time. This is fascinating work, so thank you so much for sharing it.

Thank you, and thank you for contributing to the Creative Commons.

Absolutely.

...and I’ll upload it to you, too.

Great. Thanks so much, Audrey. Thank you. Have a great evening.

You too.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

Bye.