Do you generally know my portfolio or mandate, or should I begin with a five-minute introduction [laughs] of what is my main work?

Why don’t you do a...

Introduction would be great.

...good introduction, a five-minute introduction.

Sure. Then maybe you can quickly, after the five minutes, introduce yourselves and the questions we want to ask, and that will lead our agenda.

That’s great.

Let’s get this machine thing going. Just a second. Just a second, let’s see if I can get the technology to work. Just as they’re working on the visuals, maybe you can look at my screen. It’s easier. [laughs]

This is my actual office. I am only here intermittently in the administration building, but I guess this is considered official visit, so we’re meeting in my more official office. [laughs]

This is where I usually am. This is the Social Innovation Lab in Taiwan, and it’s near the Chien Kuo Flower Market in the Central Tower near the Daan Park. I mention this because I’m working with the government, not for the government.

This is part of my public negotiation in 2016, October, when I joined the Cabinet. There were three conditions of my mandate as a digital minister in charge of social innovation, open government, and youth engagement. The three conditions are, first, that it’s called location independence. I get to work anywhere.

Anywhere I am, it’s my office, and so I prefer to work here, where there’s hundreds of social innovators co-creating the space. Every Wednesday, I’m here from 10:00 A.M. to 10:00 P.M. Everybody can talk to me and book 40 minutes of my time as long as they agree to be on the record.

This is basically the next condition. Oh, they got a projection going. That’s great. [laughs] It’s called radical transparency. My work conditions says that everything that I see can be published online. This is unlike the traditional FOIA laws, where we’re only required to publish after the decision is made.

This is basically publishing before a decision is made, so you can see that I’ve been, after being the digital minister, talking to 4,000 people, around 200,000 speeches, and thousands of meetings.

Each of these meetings, note, is not just a summary. It is actually a full conversation, like who actually said what, where, when, and then you can individually quote on it.

What it makes is a radically transparent environment where the public servants are very free to innovate, because they get the credit if things go right, because all the journalists will find out who is the person that brought the innovation, while I absorb the risk. As far as I know, I’m the only minister in the world doing this.

Even if we decide not to do something, at the end, the social sector can see what we originally planned to do, and then they can carry out the work in the social sector. Even if the government decides that it’s not the wisest use of our budget, the Taiwan social sector actually gets a lot of budget anyway. This is the second thing.

The third thing is called voluntary association. As a "conservative anarchist," my office is basically assemblage of people from all ministries. Taiwan has 32 vertical ministries.

Each has a vertical minister and nine horizontal ministers, meaning that we are in the administrative Yuan, and making sure that the different ministries can coordinate on shared digital transformation projects.

For example, I like self-driving vehicles here. They easily touch five different ministries’ portfolio. My office -- there’s one person dispatched from each ministry. There’s no digital ministry. My office is literally one person at most poached [laughs] from each ministry.

Many ministries want to send more than one person. I think the MOFA, the Foreign Affairs, has a list of maybe five people [laughs] are willing to join, but I had an agreement with the Secretary General that they can join only one at a time. They had a kind of rotation [laughs] in the Foreign Affairs Ministry.

I don’t really have 32 dispatches, because not all ministries have joined my office. For example, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of PRC Affairs -- they never send anyone, for obvious reasons. Maybe they don’t like the transparency...

...that much. The public diplomacy arm of the MOFA, actually, they have a lot of work working with us.

For example, Yin here is dispatched from the National Communication Commission and so on. The ministry that is more outward-facing, like Culture, Education, Interior, Justice, you name it -- these are the ministries that would be more willing to send people here to talk about cross-ministerial projects, like self-driving vehicles and so on.

My office basically practices what we called a continuous democracy or participative democracy in the sense that it’s not about voting. Rather, it is about people setting agenda of what the government’s priorities are. They can do this through e-petitions or participatory budgeting, through sandbox experiments, the Presidential Hackathon.

We design all those everyday participation methodologies that are working complementary to representative voting. I would like to quote Dr. Tsai Ing-wen in her inauguration speech where she said, "Before when we think of democracy in Taiwan, we tend to think about opposition between two opposite parties and values. Now, democracy must become a continuous conversation between the diverse values."

Even if people have different positions, we ask people, "Are there common values after all?" If people have common values after all, then we make sure that we use sandboxes and other means for other people to see, for the first hand, what exactly is it like, for example, to have self-driving vehicles tour around Taiwan, bringing the rural and indigenous places access to all the 12 ministries in the Social Innovation Lab. This is maybe in Hualien, and this is actually in Hualien. [laughs]

When I meet with the local co-ops and multi-stakeholders, social entrepreneurs, NPOs, the 12 ministry that join this program are in the major cities in Taiwan and telecommunicating through telepresence and two-way video conferencing to make sure that they can understand the local people’s need and introduce decision-making that is in real-time response to the local people.

These are my regional tours. When we want to get the sense of people’s consensus, whether a sandbox experiment or a new innovation is good or not, we usually use a AI-powered conversation called pol.is. This is a open-source software that we also helped develop.

Here, you can see people’s different opinion clusters in different places. The important thing is we’re not counting the number of people. We’re counting the plurality of opinions. People’s friends and families are actually all over the place, so they can see each other as more friends and families instead of nameless trolls on the Internet.

We focus on the facts and then asking people to share feelings. After three or so weeks of sharing feelings, we get the best ideas that are resonating with the most people’s feelings. Then we turn them into decisions.

In terms of interaction, it goes like this. You can see one sentiment from a fellow citizen. You can agree or disagree. As you agree or disagree, your avatar just moves among the people who think more like you.

There is no button that says reply because if there is a reply button, then trolls tend to dominate a conversation where they can make personal attacks and derail the conversation. Here, you can’t really do that because you can only ever disagree and propose your own sentiments for other people to resonate with. I will end on this slide so that you have some time to ask questions.

We always need this picture. This picture I think is the most convincing picture in all of the consultations. If the mainstream media and some social media focus on those five divisive statements, this is not actually what we should focus our calories on.

Contrary to popular belief, people actually have more in common with their neighbors on most of the things, most of the time, as compared to those divisive statements. Usually, we just take those consensus statements that we know are resonating with everybody, even though the popular media may spend less calories on.

We just turn them into regulations very quickly while tabling those divisive statements into further open collaborative meetings. Through AI-powered conversations, through open collaboration meetings, we’ll make sure that people have the same first-hand experience in data, on emerging technologies and emerging social issues, making sure that innovations can get at the people’s rough consensus.

That is to say, people can live with it. Then just making sure that the innovation are delivered to the benefit of everybody, as evidenced by the rough consensus.

That’s the five-minutes pitch. [laughs] If there’s any question that you would like to ask, please ask away. Maybe identify yourself for the sake of the record.

Just a comment. I think this is extremely exciting. If one thinks about normal politics in Taiwan and the discourse that takes place in established institutions, it is actually very divisive.

That’s right.

This country faces a huge challenge. If that challenge is going to be met, it will have to be through fostering consensus on some very complex, difficult issues.

That’s right.

If the institutions drive people apart, who benefits? There’s only one entity that benefits, and it’s 90 miles away.

That’s authoritarianism.

Yes.

Basically, what we’re working toward is making sure that liberal democracy can actually tackle emerging issues in a faster, more efficient, and more polity-affirming way through ideas like overlapping consensus, rough consensus, and things like that, as compared to authoritarianism, so that people won’t look at authoritarianism as the answer of a so-called efficient policy-making.

This is actually efficient policy-making. Questions?

I find it exciting because it has the potential to save the United States maybe.

We probably are the more divisive than Taiwan is right now. I have a question for you. I did find that the statement that the Ministry of Defense did not send a representative is perplexing and disturbing to me in a way. Maybe I’m not understanding all the issues.

From my perspective, this has a lot of potential. Ministry of Defense, the defense industry is trying to tap more into civilian industry. Obviously, it would be in DoD’s interest to have a more robust public discussion out of security needs.

Obviously.

Recruiting the military, the service, a whole range of issues could benefit from this type of discussion. What am I missing and what’s their concern? Why are they not willing to...

That’s a great question. When MOFA first started working with us, they basically sent the people in charge of public diplomacy, that is to say, things that they want as many people to know as possible rather than secret conversations.

We used the technology that I just demoed to run a conversation called digital dialog with IAT talking about the four promotes, the first one being how to promote Taiwan’s role in their global community.

You can very quickly see, through this kind of radical transparency, we both identify the most divisive statements, such as this one, "Every time China closes an international door for Taiwan, the US should try to open one for Taiwan someplace else." Everybody on the right-hand side agrees with it. Everybody on the left-hand side didn’t.

We can identify the polarizing points. The point is that we actually focus more on the so-called group informed consensus, which is how we should actually work on the Indo-Pacific region, how to share our good governance, how to make sure that we can integrate into the Indo-Pacific strategy, and things like that.

These are actually what people always believe regardless of whether they think the US should interfere in Taiwan’s PRC relationships or not. That’s divisive, but these are consensus.

The Ministry of Defense, as far as I understand, at the moment, they don’t yet have this kind of public diplomacy program. In a sense, MOFA works as the public-speaking arm.

A surrogate.

[laughs] Exactly. Actually, if you look at Minister Joseph Wu’s Twitter, he also served somewhat as a PRC Council’s arm for public diplomacy [laughs] to comment on PRC affairs. This is kind of a surrogate where we talk about the four promotes.

The one that we’re going to launch is about US-Taiwan relationship on free trade agreements and commercial integrations, the so-called no-rent supply chain. That’s a very exciting conversation I’m looking forward to having.

The next one after the June-July conversation would be actually security cooperation. What I’m saying is that the MOFA delegate here, right here, [laughs] serves as the delegate of the arm of what the Defense and PRC councils can talk about publicly.

Do you have any comments about the Japan-Taiwan relationship?

I would love to [laughs] host a similar conversation. I did actually visit Tokyo quite a few times and even on my Twitter timeline shared a video of me eating the persimmons from Fukushima...

...on the anniversary day of the earthquake.

Good for you.

Really, in Taiwan, we do understand the earthquakes and how hard it is for some place that suffer from earthquake to regrow its culture and its agricultural products after such a disaster. I’m always very happy to help to promote this. I did talk with the MOFA counterparts in Japan about possibility of just sharing our knowledges and so on.

At the moment, we have, because of diplomatic relationships, work through my other hat, which is a participant in the g0v movement, the social sector. We did actually host joint workshops with people in Tokyo. Even people from the cabinet office did attend, but we have to phrase it as a knowledge exchange between civil societies.

You mean you contacted with Japanese MOFA, but they...

They didn’t say no, but currently our workshops are conducted in the second track, in the sense that we run such workshops in Tokyo, but they are organized independently by the Code For Japan community as a civil society community in Japan, on one hand, and the g0v movement that I’m also a part in, also civil society, on the other hand.

I’m participating as a "community participant." Cabinet office members there are also participating as "civil society supporters" or "participants." That’s just a reality we’re working on.

In our workshops, we do tackle with important e-governance issues, for example, how to replace or augment the seal system with a more digital system, which is controversial in Japan actually. We solved that controversy using this methodology a few years ago, so we do have experience to share of how to move from analog identification into a more digital way of identification.

We also worked on teleworking initiatives. In many places, in more rural places of Japan, they really want teleworking because that can keep the young people still staying there while they work jobs in Tokyo. They don’t have to move to Tokyo.

This is, again, because broadband as human right. In 2015, we also used this methodology to work on the teleworking initiatives. We also worked closely with Japan on that, but always under the umbrella of the g0v civil society exchange.

To make a point, this g0v organization is making great strides in making the Taiwan government more transparent to the public...

That’s right.

...giving access, sometimes in real time.

To budgets and all the parts. Just one minute of context. G0v is a idea that all the government services and websites are hosted in websites that ends in .g0v.tw. Sometimes, people don’t like the way that the budget is presented as 500 pages of PDF files or whatever.

For all government services -- to date, there is over 200 government services -- that the civil society don’t like, they don’t have to protest on the street. They just register the same domain, exactly the same as the government, but change the O to a zero. You just go to a government website, change O to a zero, and you get into the shadow government where it is more interactive, more open, and more fun.

The budget, for example, become a interactive map that you can have a real-time conversation around. This was originally in 2012. Two years later, in 2014, it was adopted then by the Taiwan City mayor, Ko Wen-je, as the system for the participatory budgeting in Taipei.

It spread to other municipalities and cities, and after I became the digital minister in 2016, we then merged this back into the e-participation platform that has 5 million visitors out of 23 million people in Taiwan, so one-quarter of population.

Now, in join.g0v.tw, you can actually very easily see all the different arms and branches of the government, all the different ministries, about 2,000 projects, and how they’re working the long-term health care, sanitation, social housing, and so on. See all the procurements, all the KPIs, all the deliverables every quarter.

Everybody can just leave comments for the public service to answer in real time. Every quarter or so, they say, "Oh, we have simplified our reimbursement policies because of your input here." This is basically everyday democracy that you don’t have to go through a representation. You can just re-present yourself in this kind of online platform.

They always stay on topic because each budget, basically, becomes a discussion board. Off-topic conversations are very rare. It actually saves public servants time because they don’t have to answer the same thing 15 times.

This is proactive. It is not FOIA requests. This is actually the government presenting the discussion boards. This is pioneered by the g0v, but now universally adopted by the municipal and the central government here in Taiwan. That’s just one example out of a hundred or so.

Thanks for explaining.

Do you have data of how many people in Taiwan often access...?

5 million out of 23 million. The same website is also our regulatory commentary website. It’s also our e-petition website. We have also the age, demographics of people who spend the most time on the platform to make e-petitions. They tend to be around 15 years old and 65 years old, so hardly people who engage in representative democracy.

15 years old doesn’t even have the voting rights. Actually, these two age groups care the most about public welfare instead of private matters. They have the most time on their hands, so they organize very well.

The most impactful e-petitions that we have received, for example, the one that caused the banning of the plastic straw for indoor bubble tea drinking, [laughs] is actually petitioned by a 15 years old. When asked, "Why are you petitioning this?" it’s like the Friday Strikes in Europe, why they can organize so well, they say, "Oh, it’s a assignment from the civics class of the senior high school."

That’s great.

The teacher just wanted the student to find something to petition, [laughs] and it just struck what people really want, and discover that, "Oh, it really resonates with everybody." This is not the traditional NPO or NGO organizers that you were thinking about. It’s, rather, just a 15-year-old student.

Recently we handled a petition, I think from a 16-years-old, about changing our referendum act so that it cannot interfere with any human right conventions because they are designed to protect minorities. If they’re put to referendum, by definition, the majority will overwhelm the minorities, so they should get protected.

In our original referendum act, they only protect the indigenous people. Now, they want to extend that to any human right convention members. That actually get adopted also by our administration. That’s, again, from a 16-years-old.

Petition is one way in which feedback is aggregated, how it works.

You get 5,000 people joining you, and then you can summon me.

Presumably, there’s some other ways to aggregate. For example, with the budget, it’d be difficult to answer five million people’s suggestions. Is some of this automated software?

They are, through the design of crowd moderation. For each petition, we have two columns, one supporting, one against or other opinions. Each column is crowd voted. You can down-vote or up-vote each other’s opinions. Again, there’s no reply button because if there is a reply button, trolls just dominate the discussion.

Then we can look at what is up-voted the most and start answering based on the people’s collective attention. I’ll just use one example. The shirt I’m wearing is called Presidential Hackathon. It’s another way of aggregating what people want.

Basically, anyone can propose how to use digital means to improve the public service in a way that it differs from the business as usual in the public service. Every year, we select five winning teams, and they all have to be trilingual in the sense that they have a technology expert, a domain expert, and a public servant, at least three roles in it.

These teams, after they deliver a proof of concept over three months that actually works better than the current public service, they get a trophy from the president. There’s no money, just trophy. The trophy is a projector. If you turn it on, it projects the image of the president handing the trophy to you.

This is like you can summon the presidential will at any time. It’s very useful in internal negotiations.

What it signifies is that after you win the Presidential Hackathon, five teams every year, we take the next year to make sure that whatever you propose become public service by the next fiscal year. This is the presidential guarantee.

Last year, one of the winners used machine learning to reduce the time it takes to detect leaks in the water pipes. They proved to be very popular. Because we use the Sustainable Development Goals to index those -- New Zealand just solved this -- we have a solution for target 6.4. Interesting number.

In any case, what they have seen is that it’s a common challenge. Because of climate change, they are now also facing water shortage for the first time. They invited the winning team to Wellington and shared their water pressure, water flow data to co-create solutions to detect water leakage more quickly. We formed a data collaborative this way.

This is yet another way without going through petition. There is still voting around because every year, we receive more than 100 cases, so which 20 teams to coach? Which 20 teams to focus our energy on is a matter of public vote.

Also on the e-petition platform, people can log in and get to vote on the Presidential Hackathon teams. Everybody has 99 points. You look at 100 or so teams. For each team you like, you can spend 1 point to cast one vote. If you want to cast two votes, that’s going to cost 4 points. Three votes would cost 9 points, and four points would cost 16 points.

The idea is that you then won’t just cast 99 points on a single issue. Rather, it only can cost 9 points, and you have something left. People would actually look at the synergies between the projects and strategically express their true preferences based on this way of so-called quadratic voting.

We have a much more wide swath of selection of the cohort of 20 teams. Then we coach them for three months, and then five of them receive the award from the president. That’s yet another way of public engagement.

Could you talk about fake news, deliberate misinformation? How much is this a problem internal to Taiwan, different groups in Taiwan using fake news to attack each other? How much of it is a PRC problem? What are your innovative ways to...

Very quickly, in Taiwan, both news and journalism translates to the same word, 新聞. We try not to use the word "fake news" in Mandarin because then it alienates journalists. Both my parents are journalists. Filial piety dictates that I don’t use these words. I always say "disinformation" or "information manipulation."

They actually is a global threat, as you noted. The more society is open, the more harmful it becomes because it basically abuse the freedom of expression to sow discord. We actually have a legal definition of disinformation in Taiwan, not just a layperson’s definition.

It’s called intentional harmful untruth. Here, the harm is to the general public, to the democratic process, not to a minister’s image. That’s just good journalism. Harmful to the public, not to the government. These are like spam, like junk mail, like things that waste people’s attention on.

We look at it through a metaphor of epidemics of how we can vaccinate and inoculate people so that they don’t waste attention on these things. Taiwan is unique in nearby jurisdictions to take this approach. Many our neighboring jurisdictions -- I would not name names -- use disinformation as an excuse to basically do state censorship and encroach the freedom of journalism.

Democratic overseers, I’m not naming names. [laughs] In any case, what we are doing is...

It is very worrying trends in our nearby jurisdictions. What we are doing is the opposite. We basically make sure that people become more immune to disinformation by getting our piece of the puzzle, real-time clarifications out to people.

Whenever we detect there is a disinformation that is raising in popularity, within one hour, on average, we publish a more funny video, film, or things like that. Our president goes on a stand-up comedy show. Our premier post a very funny photo of himself when he was young and have hair to clarify a rumor regarding hairdress companies.

Our deputy premier goes to live stream and play video games and things like that. [laughs] They all use very engaging memes to make sure that the clarification actually gets shared more and reach more people than the rumors and the disinformation.

What we have witnessed is that if we can produce such videos, films, or graphics within 60 minutes, then it actually reaches more people first than the rumor. People become inoculated already, thinking, "Oh, actually, it’s a popular rumor. And it’s not what it may seem like," so the rumor stop provoking outrage.

Of course, we don’t have the entirety of truth. Maybe the rumors do have some sliver of truth in it. People can have a rational debate. We’re not taking this down. We still allow a reasonable debate, but the outrage, the provocation part of the rumor is taken out.

We’re working specifically, just like in junk mail and spam, back in early 2000. Around the turn of the century, people thought that email is over, because people receive more junk mail than actual mail. People see that people from a random country -- I will not name countries -- they have a prince, they have $10 million, and they want your account for safe deposit.

Or things like, you just won a lottery, and things like that. This tend to clutter the inbox. A fix is in not in Taiwan passing any laws to allow the state to look into people’s emails, because that will actually encroach freedom of expression and secure communication.

What we have done instead is working with all the email providers so that they add a button called "flag as spam" to their interface. If you receive a junk mail, you can donate that mail out into a public repository, so everybody can see.

If sufficient people flag something as junk mail, then that system looks at the signature of the sender. By the next time the sender want to send to somebody else, that goes into a special folder called junk mail.

It’s not censorship, per se, because it’s still delivered. We’re not infringing on the communication, but it by definition goes into a place where people spend less time on. If you have too much time, of course, you can look into your spam folder.

By definition, it doesn’t really worth your attention in general. That’s the system that we’re working on also for countering disinformation. It’s called notice and public notice. We have strong support from the leading end-to-end messenger system called Line here.

It’s like WhatsApp. It’s encrypted, and so we don’t look into the messages. Line works very closely with civil society -- actually, g0v teams -- to make sure that anyone can very quickly flag something as possible disinformation.

Then the civil society has a public repository where you can very quickly -- it’s called Cofacts -- and it’s looks like a government website, but it’s not. You can see it’s cofacts.g0v.tw. You can very quickly see what are the trending rumors, and whether they are clarified as true or not.

It’s fact-checking, but it’s crowdsourced fact-checking. People can very easily join the fact-checking effort to make sure that they provide useful service to their fellow citizens. We also have independent journalists to do fact-checking in a way that is fully conformant to the international fact-checking standards.

They just make sure that they look at one trending rumor, and they, for example...Our new curriculum has removed the five lines in teaching music and whatever it is. Then before it reaches more people, it can actually get clarified very quickly as false.

Then Line agrees by July to have real-time publication of these clarifications in a dedicated area in their app. People again see the clarifications before they see those spreading rumors. We have observed that Facebook is also working with the international fact-checking network.

So that when it’s fact-checked as false, then they stopped sharing this to people’s walls. If you have only one friend, of course, they still have to share it, but if you have other friends, then you see other people’s posts instead of this particular one.

It’s not, again, takedown, because if you look at it, it’s still there. It’s just with a public notice here saying, "Oh, it’s been fact-checked." We’re looking forward very soon to partner with also Facebook, basically reducing the virality of the fact-checked as false information, so that it reaches less people.

The international figures say that it would be reduced to under 20 percent of the population, while our clarification messages then reaches more people. As you can see, we look at it in a very epidemic kind of view.

That’s in normal days, but in elections, there’s a different set of law. The campaign finance law in Taiwan basically says the Corrective Yuan as a separate branch publishes the individual records of campaign donations. It’s very transparent.

We see people actually circumventing that by throwing money at precision targeting, advertisements, and all sort of public relationship firms. We’re now introducing the equivalent of the US Honest Advertisement Act, and we will get it passed faster than the US...

...to make sure that all the advertisement during elections, or any message bought in any medium, is to be treated the same as campaign donation. They can only be spent by nationals in Taiwan.

They must disclose each transaction, and they have to, like money laundering, disclose who is the actual person behind that’s paying it. If we can track the money to anything that is outside Taiwan, including Hong Kong, Macau, PRC, and other foreign nations, then it’s actually a crime.

We make sure that money will not unduly influence elections, but that is a special act just for the election period. In the normal times, we use the notice and public notice system to make sure that people actually get more immune over time. This is the metaphor that we’re working with.

That’s, like, my five-minute pitch.

It’s a very good one.

Thank you.

That’s good.

Can you provide any examples of the kind of corrective messaging that is sent out? You said sometimes, a leader will post a funny picture with a message tag. I’d love to see some examples.

You can just go on Twitter. This is our premier. This is mine. You can very quickly see this one. There’s not an English translation here, but basically, the top four characters says that there’s a popular rumor that says after a week, if you dye your hair, or to perm your hair, you will get fined a million NT dollars.

The red balloon says false. Then the premiers who, with his younger self, says that, "Even I don’t have hairs now, I will not punish the people with hair because of it."

The smaller text says what we have actually passed is a FDA-like labeling requirement of the producer of the chemicals that dye their hair. It’s not about people who do the perming. It actually takes effect two years afterwards.

You have two years to start correctly labeling the chemicals, the products, of the perming products. They are not fining people who do the perming, or receive the perming. Then the premier also says, "If you keep perming your hair across a week..." If you perm your hair this week and next, actually, you will hurt your hair. Your hair will end up looking like him.

How fast did it take you to do this very clever response once you realized you had a problem?

It’s a joke.

Within an hour.

Wow. That’s amazing.

Right. Basically, there is a scoreboard, actually. It’s not a scoreboard for payment of salaries of public servants, but all the ministries see how fast other ministries are in responding to rumors. There is a friendly competition going on.

On average, it’s 60 minutes. You can see it’s liked by 2,000 people, amazing reach. More people see this before they see the popular rumor. This is very funny.

For this kind of strategy to be effective among the public, there needs to be a baseline level of trust in political leaders, which is something that, at least in some other countries, may be a bit lacking. What are the countermeasures for that, or is that just...?

I think the point here is just to make sure that we’re very easily reachable. If you comment on the premier’s Twitter or Facebook, the team actually respond to you very quickly. You can always see through livestream, real-time virtual town halls, and so on, people just interacting in real time.

Like every Wednesday, you can find me in my office. Every other Tuesday, I just tour around Taiwan to meet the people. I think it’s just, trust is something that you just share experience in a short interval. You have a friend where you meet every week for a movie, basketball, or whatever.

Then if you hear a disinformation about a friend, you will check with that friend, and will trust their response. If the friend only respond to you after six months and in cryptic Latin, or something like that, then, of course, you tend to lose trust.

This is all about reducing the interval between having a popular message, and having the people seeing the honest conversation coming from the leaders. Again, time is key. It’s not the content. It’s not the format. It’s not how funny it is. It is the fact that it is pushed out within an hour.

I imagine the people who do this sort of work in each ministry are not my age?

Some of them are your age.

They’re probably... [laughs]

It is a cross-functional team, actually. We need political advisors in that team to make sure that it doesn’t backfire. [laughs] We also, of course, have people who are professionals in visual communication, in animation, and things like that, of course.

Also, a sense of what the younger public will...

The meme is.

...respond to.

That’s right, the memetic landscape. This has a side effect of making democracy seems fun. It makes democracy seem something you can engage in your leisure. You can only look at the policies, but they’re no longer abstract. They’re beautiful comics and things like that. Let me find another example, like this one.

This is from May the 4th, where they look at the execution rate of the advanced infrastructure project, which is over 100 percent. The force is definitely strong with that one. This is about our wind plant. This is about how much of the Taiwan investment overseas, actually mostly in PRC, actually return to Taiwan, to investment, because of the supply chain changes like that.

This is actually very funny because this is like a Russian doll of three messages. Every week, they renew the number of the investment. [laughs] It’s outdated, it’s outdated, it’s outdated because every week we receive more investment back.

This makes democracy seem fun. If you ask questions on the public participation website, you tend to get substantial answers because people have the same facts in their minds already. That’s the idea.

In this image, unless I’m missing it, you’re not including a citation or a footnote that provides a source, perhaps a longer study that provides the factual basis for this claim. That even makes it more important that the public trust their officials.

Exactly. If you look at the ministry of projects, like their Facebook pages, they do do provide their ministerial links to the actual numbers. The premier is actually just relying on the visual communication because people generally trust him.

Could tell us a little bit about the origins of your position, how the post was created, why it was created, and why you were selected to fill it?

Long story short, I helped people occupy the Parliament for 22 days. [laughs] That was the origin, actually. It’s the Sunflower Movement. The basic idea, very simply put, is that, at the time -- that is, 2014 -- the administration thought that the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement is something that is regulatory level instead of a law-level thing.

Because of that, the Parliament doesn’t need to have the same level of oversight as they have on other more law-level agreements, treaties, or things like that. That’s part of a larger so-called ECFA framework. The people generally doesn’t buy this idea. People also generally doesn’t buy the idea that Beijing is a domestic city of Taiwan, which is another contention point at that time.

In any case, when the MPs, people said that they were on strike because the administration didn’t think they warrants a legislative debate, people just occupy the Parliament, do the MPs’ work for them on the CSSTA. That’s the legitimacy theory anyway.

During that 22 days, around 20 different NGOs deliberated one aspect of the CSSTA. You had people debating the human right, people debating the labor, environment, and different sets -- education, cybersecurity, all those different aspects.

Our contribution, as the g0v movement, is just to provide a neutral communication facility so that anything that happens around the occupied Parliament become live stream, translated, transcribed, broadcasted so that it can reach the maximum amount of people, and so it makes consensus possible.

After three weeks of non-violent occupy, they condensed to five consensus points. Then the head of Parliament, MP Wang Jin-pyng, actually agreed on them, so the Occupy was a success.

At the time, what people have seen is that the civic hackers, the people who basically contribute to democracy, organized this demonstration not as a protest, but as a demo, as demonstrating that this kind of conversation can reach half a million people on the street and many more online, but still manage to come up with consensus.

At the end of that year, there was a election. Everybody who supported the Sunflower gets elected, sometime to their surprise. People who did not, who are more authoritarian, lost their mayoral positions. It’s like something that happened in Spain in the 15-M.

Then the central government started hiring people who facilitated this kind of conversation during Sunflower into the central government. The English is the reverse mentorship, understudies, younger people that work with ministers to reverse-mentor the ministers while receiving mentorship from the ministers as understudy on the matters.

At the time, I was working with Minister Without Portfolio Jaclyn Tsai, who is in charge of legal affairs in IBM Asia before joining the cabinet. We are very fortunate to have at that time a transitional cabinet led by mostly independent, non-partisan people, and focusing on just enhancing the capability of public service in having engagement with the public.

After serving as understudy since 2015, for a year or so, then Dr. Tsai Ing-wen became president. Then they decided that they need a digital minister, so I was just then re-recruited back from the understudy minister position to the digital minister position. My office here is physically the same office as Minister Jaclyn Tsai, and we worked together on projects related to g0v.

Thank you.

Your digital platform is a website, or is it part of an established platform online?

No, we have our own platform. It’s called Join platform, join.gov.tw. It’s not just the administration. You can also see the auditing. Ministry of the Corrective Yuan is also there.

It’s an ordinary website, right?

Yeah, right.

Anyone can access it?

All the different cities, as well. It’s not an app or anything. It’s just a website.

Do you ever speak at international conferences where officials from governments of other countries are present to share with them your experience? Maybe there’s opportunities for cooperation, exchanging best practices.

We work very closely with our civic tech allies. Code For Japan is a large part of it. I think it’s better to work sometimes with municipals because it’s faster turnaround, and participatory budgeting is easier in the municipal rather than the federal level, for obvious reasons.

The scale of communication is similar. In Taiwan, we’re really just a large municipality, geography-wise. From north to south is just an hour and a half by high-speed rails. We’re more similar in scope and geography as compared to these folks, rather than more central or federal areas.

Actually, we didn’t develop those technologies in a vacuum or in-house. Many of the participatory platforms we took from the Decide, from Madrid, for example. The pol.is system that I just show you is actually from Seattle. The e-petition platform, the pro and con, call-ins, and so on, that’s from Reykjavik, from Iceland.

We have a coalition going on. It’s just one of the manifestations of this global coalition.

Can I ask you a question that maybe Adam was hinting at? I could be wrong about that, so I apologize if I am. This doesn’t apply to the whole package that you just described, for example, the projects that people vote on and things like that.

As far as the defense against disinformation that you described, if you’re a KMT supporter and you’re looking at this, the government, which is now controlled by the DPP, has this very sophisticated information operation. It runs. It’s got a budget. It responds in an hour. It churns out information.

I come back to the trust issue and whether there’s criticism that this is not 1984, but it’s very high-tech information propagation. How do you ensure that it’s inclusive of everyone’s...?

We participate on the content level. The Twitter account is nothing special. It’s just a Twitter account. The Facebook page is nothing special. It’s just a Facebook page. We’re not saying that we take control of the infrastructure layer, all the communication layer of the stack.

What we’re doing is basically just working on the content layer or the application layer. That means that we’re not the arbiter of truth.

If you look at the Taiwan FactCheck Center, which is totally nonpartisan, and actually they rely on crowdfunding -- they refuse any funding from political parties and governments and things like that -- they’re not actually always in favor of the DPP, or the administration for matter.

What we’re basically saying is that we are a source that can very reliably, if the fact-checkers ask us, give them something in an hour. We don’t have a exclusive right or privilege on that.

To win trust, any actor, KMT or not, can also commit to get them this kind of information within this time frame. The TFCC, again, just shows through investigative reporting, what exactly is, is like.

For example, here is a "not false, but maybe misleading" fact-check report that says, "’The New York Times’ has announced the world’s most corrupt leaders, and President Chen Shui-bian is the second most corrupt."

The clarification is that there is indeed such a report, but President Chen Shui-bian is mentioned in the second paragraph... It’s not a ranking. [laughs]

It’s just, the first paragraph says someone. The second paragraph says someone else. The third paragraph says someone else. He is mentioned the second. It doesn’t mean that he is the second-most corrupt.

On the other hand, this is not whitewashing the fact that President Chen is on the list. This is basically just making sure that people can actually know what the New York Times is saying.

You can see very clearly that the GFCC is not a party propaganda machine, because if it is, then it would not say this, actually. [laughs] You won’t find the DPP spokesperson [laughs] saying this.

Looking forward, whatever happens on January 11th next year, both in terms of the presidential election and the legislative election, it seems to me that it’s very important that this new function of government be institutionalized enough so that it can carry on whoever.

Very much so.

Are you working on that?

Yes. By me, I mean Yeh Ning here. [laughs] He’s the principal architect of turning all our best, better, or just everyday practices into regulation.

For example, the participation officer network, where we introduce one person in each ministry at first as seed. A seed then began to grow, and so now, we have almost 100 people in each ministries, just in charge of bringing topics that they feel need to engage with the public. That’s the PO network. If you’re interested, there’s a website for that, po.pdis.tw, that introduces this -- it’s also in English -- of the entire communication.

I think there is an English version, anyway. Yes. As you can see, you can see...Oh, we haven’t translated that page, have we? We should fix that. In any case, there is a regulation, adminsitration-level central government regulation on the participation officer network that we held our collaboration meeting on.

There is a directive also on the e-participation platform. There is an administrative regulation, or a policy on Presidential Hackathon, how to hold a Presidential Hackathon, and how to merge the five winning teams into the national policy.

There is directives of how to select participation meetings, and there are regulations for sandbox and so on. Councilor Yeh’s work here is basically just coding our practices, and making sure that whomever become the next digital minister in charge of open governments can just work on the existing infrastructure that we have built.

We focus very much on designing ourselves out. We may provide technical or facilitative guidance, but we’re not here to issue command -- or take command, for that matter -- to any public service functions.

You’ve been very generous with your time, and even more generous with the education you’ve provided to us. I think this is really impressive. It gives one a whole new sense of what politics can be if you have the right resources and institutional design and so on. I dearly hope that you have institutionalized this enough so that it has to continue.

It has to continue. I think nobody would commit to abolish this as their platform. That would be suicide.

No, they wouldn’t campaign to abolish it, but they would win and then they would abolish it.

I really don’t [laughs] think so.

Why not?

Because all the municipal winners of the previous election, and many of them from the KMT, are actually doubling down on social entrepreneurship and on open government, because they want to be seen as even more responsive than the DPP. I think this is a very good direction to go.

I think so far, even the mayors who cause more emotions in people still didn’t do it in a way that is tribalism or overly divisive. I think that is really good, because then it signals that people generally have a common understanding, of open government is about reaching rough consensus rather than dividing people.

I think we are very blessed to have a political environment that both DPP and KMT are converging on this particular regard, not something else, but on this particular regard.

Good.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Terrific.