Yeah, let’s go. I’ve got about 20 questions or so. If you’re happy to do the video with the five standard questions that ask all about interviewees, if you’re happy with that?

Sure.

I’m going to start with where you started out really, dropping out of school at 14, and working in Silicon Valley within five years. When you decided to leave school, what were your aim, your career, and your future? What did you hope to achieve?

I just discovered open access. There was no such name at that time. I discovered arxiv.org, A-R-X-I-V, and turned out that people are publishing their preprint papers on the World Web.

I talked with my principal, and showing her my correspondence through email with the researchers because she keeps telling me that I might need to finish school, get a university degree, get some TOEFL, GRE, whatever before I can work on the cognitive science or artificial intelligence labs that I am interested in.

It turned out that they’re all publishing their research, and when I write to them, they could just wrote back not knowing that I am just 15 years old. After the principal read my email correspondences, she thought very hard for a couple of minutes and said, “Yeah, from tomorrow, you don’t have to go to school anymore,” because the aim was to contribute to the academic community and to start working on the research topic I am interested in.

Nowadays, we’ll call it Internet Sociology, but at that time, there is no such name yet. Social interaction design and so on, these are all very nebulous field back in 1996.

My aim mostly is just to find out why people would trust other so easily over the Internet, but also why such trusts are easily abused, and is there a better mechanism design that can make people feel more safe for Internet communications, even though the early Internet pioneers didn’t design this kind of trust context into the basic protocols.

That’s my burning research question. I’m very fortunate that I get to experiment with a lot of different designs in my startups to get some answer to that question.

Yes, I think great. If you could do, imagine looking back, that you would end up where you’re now is digital minister?

I am always a digital minister, a lowercase minister, as in preaching, [laughs] preaching about digital transformation.

When I was 15 years old, I participated already in the Internet governance communities, with contributions to W3C, at one time to IETF Working Group on a team, and also, of course, Pearl, and many other free software. At that time, there was no name open source yet.

All these are politics really. What we’re doing is essentially ministerial work. It’s about making sure that people can have common values out of different positions. We don’t even have coercive power. The Internet community doesn’t have guns and ships.

We really have to go through this deliberative way, to make sure that people understand that it is for people’s common good to not disconnect from the TCP/IP network.

I’ve been working on that governance for six years before I even get to vote for the first time in representative democracy. At that time, it seems a new culture to me, and my indigenous, my native culture is, of course, this non-coercive collaborative Internet governance.

I wanted to ask you about g0v as well. I guess that was your springboard into government. What were your reasons for getting involved? I suppose you probably answered that in your first couple of questions, the burning questions that you wanted to answer, why you wanted to streak. If you could expand a little bit more about what you hope to do at g0v, that would be great.

I’m more like the springboard for g0v community to work with the government. I’m at this Lagrange point, between movement on one side and government on the other. The great thing about Lagrange point is that I don’t have to spend a lot of effort. The gravity keeps me in this stable orbit.

G0v is a idea from Chia-liang Kao, Ipa Chiu, and their friends. It’s not started by me. I joined in early 2013 when they already had their IRC channels, their hackathons, and so on. My main observation with g0v is that the main innovation is really just its name.

There’s many other attempts around the world to fork the government, so to speak, but there’s no other domain name so far that offer this instant gratification. When you see that you really don’t like the legislative ly.gov.tw.

You can just do ly.g0v.tw and just copy whatever the legislative is doing, but adding an interactive layer, or adding a livestreaming layer, or adding a crowdsourcing layer on it, and then you feel great, because therefore, everybody else, they don’t have to find you through Google AdSense or through Facebook precision targeting.

They can just go to whatever public domain, something.gov.tw, change O to a 0, and get into the shadow government. It’s almost palpable, this kind of gratification of working in government. The early culture, the g0v manifesto that I also contributed to, I will say is that at any given time the government thinks the fork is a good idea, the government can merge it back in.

What we did not anticipate is that because of that, in many hackathons, there are public service people that joined on a pseudonymous condition. They already wanted to effect change from inside, essentially entrepreneurs, but they did not get the political will.

Through forking their own website, forking their own service, they show the popular media, show the social sector a different possibility. Of course, the popular media loves the g0v version, and so their minister will take notice and say, “Hey, how about let’s do this g0v version and merge it back in,” and their career changes.

From very early on, g0v is full of public service people that are participating on pseudonymous basis.

Thank you for talking me through that. When you were first approached about being digital minister without portfolio, how was that role sold to you?

I actually have three portfolios. I usually just introduce myself as digital minister in charge of open government, social innovation, and youth engagement. The thing about without portfolio is without fixed portfolio. This portfolio may at any time change, but at the time, it’s these three that I’m working on.

Every other horizontal minister – we have nine – each one works on different shifting emergent issues. For me, its social innovation, open government, youth engagement.

The digital minister idea has a different feeling in Mandarin, because 數位政委 literally means a minister for plurality. Digital is many, like countably many. It also means several. It also means pluralism. There is a lot of language games that you can play with this.

The usual one is 「數位政委，就是不只一位」, meaning a digital minister means that there is a plurality minister. Everybody gets to be a minister, because I work through radical transparency and so on.

People realized very early on because of my three working conditions, that is to say, I’m voluntary association. I don’t give orders or take orders. That’s one. I’m location independent. Anywhere I’m working, I’m working. That’s another. I’m radically transparent, meaning any meeting that I’m a chair or any conversation with journalists such as this one, or lobbyists, we end up publishing.

These three combined means that I’m working as much for the people as with the people, meaning that I’m not only serving the public, I’m also asking the public to serve the public. That really redefines the minister. I think “Politico” described it as reimagining the minister’s role as a transfer moderator of sorts.

That, I think, is why Taiwan has been able to experiment a lot with not just representative democracy, which is like five bids uploaded every four years, but actually, everyday democracy through petitions, inboxes, participatory budgeting, presidential hackathon, etc.

You are a self-described conservative anarchist, a protestor, an autodidact, citizen hacker. How does your perspective and approach fit in with government, or is the point that it doesn’t?

I may demonstrate. I’m not a protestor. There’s a difference. A demonstrator demonstrates, like demo. The whole idea of g0v is to offer a public demo, like showing the public an imagination, realized vision of the alternative to a public service, but always with the hope to merge it back instead of just maintaining the fork indefinitely.

There is this almost dialectic or in design thinking terms, discover only to converge the idea, like the first time into this demonstration culture. It has two preconditions. First is that in Taiwan the social sector almost always have a higher legitimacy compared the public sector. The same cannot be said about many other East Asian jurisdictions.

It’s much more common of course in, for example, UK, especially in Scotland, Highland, the Islands, and so on, with their own social sector traditions. In Taiwan that’s because after lifting of the martial law in ‘80s, it took 10 years for the social sector to build their community building, coops, and so on, until we actually had a presidential election.

They have 10 years of head start compared to the public sector. The public sector actually is very responding to the agenda setting at the social sector is the first one.

The second one is that people here enjoy broadband as a human right. For each digital alternatives there is no usual pushback saying you’re systemically excluding certain area of people, because everywhere in Taiwan it has 10 megabits per second. Those are by definition in the commons instead of just about the elites or just about the municipalities.

In your current role as digital minister, what has been your proudest moment so far?

[laughs] My proudest moment is when we held the Presidential Hackathon this year. We extended the trophy not just to the five winning teams, which gather political will to implement their idea within one year into the public service as the presidential promise, but also that we have 15 teams from all across the world working on exactly the same thing.

The international track of the Presidential Hackathon the two winners are Honduras, which use open procurement data to make sure that in the early planning the eco design can be contributed by the ecology-minded groups and social-minded groups.

That’s one, and Malaysia, which uses public procurement to make sure that cartels are detected in early on. All this is setting an example saying that Taiwan voluntarily discloses all the procurement data, even the raw data, even the RFPs for systemic analysis for this kind of research, and we’re very rare in the WTO system that does that. The other country that did that before is Greece, that’s because they’re Greece. Other than that, we don’t see other countries voluntarily disclose the raw data from to the RFP stage.

It’s very validating that we are now being quoted by the winning teams, like in Honduras where they went back and told the World Bank that this kind of radical transparency is a requirement for their issues to be solved and not just a off-the-shelf solution on open government data.

There must be a collaboration structure with the ecology and social-minded people, and that open data means also consider that they help private sector data and not primarily open government data.

That’s always the Taiwan model of the government supporting but not controlling social sector innovations. It’s very validating to hear this message repeated not only in Honduras about Malaysia, but also every other participating country.

Sounds successful. Is it something that you’re going to do again the Presidential Hackathon?

Yes. We made it a regulation, so we’ll do it every year.

From one of your proudest moments to one of your greatest challenges, what would that be?

One of the main challenge that people are looking at now was that we confused the dates of referendum and the popular election for mayors in the previous election.

That is really very frustrating, because the Referendum Act said that it must be in the same day, but people cannot lobby for their candidates on that voting day. The Referendum Act forgot to write that clause in, so people are free to campaign for referenda. And add to that, there are some mayor candidates who are also leaders of referendums.

You can see how a potentially deliberative setting at the final day became a very polarizing partisan-based divisive issue — we learned from that moment.

Not only that we’re doing elections each every other year and referendum on each every intervening year, making sure that there’s at least one year in between; we are also improving on the deliberative part in the referenda to make sure that it’s no longer hijacked into partisan politics.

We’ve made changes, but that confusion of the same day, one campaign-able and one not, really was quite frustrating.

Yeah, I can imagine. Something that you still want to achieve as digital minister?

That’s the conservative part. I want to conserve, not achieve. Otherwise I’ll be a progressive anarchist.

The conservative part is mostly about not only conserving the voluntary association, location independence, and radical transparency principles, but also conserve the various cultures that will result of it.

For example, the core Internet governance structure is currently being challenged, on one side, with the threat of balkanization by various other state-players, and on the other side, by large multinational companies that are setting up their own governance structure that might be accountable like a supreme court, but certainly not as participatory as the idea for working forces.

I’m not naming specific names, [laughs] because you see this repeated one and again, but basically unless we solve this issue of how to listen at scale, not only among geeks but also among all stakeholders, the existing top-down way of state, or the existing way of corporate management always threatens to destroy what we have always conserved so far.

Which is the freely participatory nature of innovation without permission on the Internet itself as well as the ways to collaboratively look at harms, like spam and things like that, which are largely solved by multi-stakeholder conversations instead of any top-down way or any corporate governance.

All these is the part of this – I would say – indigenous culture [laughs] of the Internet for the past 50 years. I would really like to see it conserved not only on Internet governance but on all sort of collaborative governance for emerging technologies not only in Taiwan, but also across deliberate democracies.

Going back to the government’s early work with you, and with g0v, do you think that sort of pushed the boundaries of what’s possible when governments are open to ideas, and open to ideas outside government? What do you think other countries can learn from that?

As I think listening at scale, is the main thing that we’re contributing. Mostly when government try to listen at scale, it’s very time consuming. They hear a lot of noise, what signal tend to be only repetitive instead of adding on each other. It’s not anything like puzzle making.

We have many OECD countries talking about coproduction or cocreation, because collective intelligence is much easier if you have a kind of roadmap and we’re just implementing something together, but that’s the second diamond. The first diamond, the mapping of issues, the discover of common feelings and so on, it’s very messy.

I think Taiwan’s main contribution is that we’ve figured out with the right amount of artificial intelligence as well as human intelligence, collective intelligence, we can have the crowd moderate each other.

There’s two main tricks. One is taking out the reply button, so the trolls have no way to play, and the second is to have a rolling agenda setting so that people are not constrained by the initial seed questions.

Any space if designed with those two criteria in mind, and reward people for their contribution every five minutes or so, ends up actually showing a picture that shows people that we have much more in common than we originally thought, that divisive points are maybe only 3 or 4 points out of 100, and the other 90 points or so, most people agree on most things most of the time, which are not yet, so why don’t we use these first.

This kind of incremental governance instead of pure referendum that leaves half of people feel they have lost, or in certain referenda, everybody feel they have lost, maybe. [laughs] That may be a much better alternative.

Just thinking about Brexit there, obviously. vTaiwan, does that sort of take on those principles, that is the idea of the tool that people can respond to policy ideas, and it’s there, and everyone is heard?

That’s right. vTaiwan is also just a community of people enjoying each other’s presence every Wednesday evening. I think just like in Wikipedia, even though we says there is no cabal, but there are of course cabals. [laughs]

Just not single cabal, it’s just each regional meet up, each city, each museum lovers, art lovers, and so on, they naturally form autocracies that just use Wikipedia as an excuse, really, to have fun together. I think this kind of generative culture or recursive public, depending, is at the core of vTaiwan.

It means that anyone who have discovered a new tool, a new mechanism, a new instrument, a new facilitation method, they are free to pick and choose their own experiments if they want to talk about e-scooters, they talk about e-scooters. If they want to talk about revenge porn, they talk about revenge porn.

Each issue warrants, of course, different design, and there’s just this very large canvas. As the Digital Minister, my only job is to make sure that the public service is there at a right point of time to contribute their views with me absorbing all the risk, and also make sure that public sector is not there when the community doesn’t want them in yet.

I wanted to ask you about collaboration between countries, and between governments as well. How important do you think that is, and how can that be fostered and maintained?

You’re right. It’s three level, one is at a tools level, that’s easiest. Our petition platform with its pro and con, upvote, downvote, no reply button design, that’s straight from Better Reykjavik that’s straight from Iceland.

The pol.is system used by vTaiwan is straight from Seattle, now relocated to New York. The quadratic voting that we use in the Presidential Hackathon, I don’t know Glen Weyl and Posner, so RadicalxChange.

We use the social innovations that are already, I wouldn’t say established, but well-respected in the blockchain community, in the free software community, Internet governance community, and so on.

All our Gov Tech is based on Civic Tech, and we make sure that our GovTech are open source and open API as well, so it can contribute back to Civic Tech. I think the underlying Civic Tech layer is something people can naturally share without worrying about jurisdictional differences, so that’s the first one.

The second one I would argue equally importantly. For example, two years ago Taiwan adopted OpenAPI 3 that’s a Linux Foundation standard to specify machine to machine communication as our national standard. We do the translation, we did the regulation, we did the procurement policy and so on, and we made all of it open.

I wrote about it in the “New Zealand Consultation of Digital Service,” I wrote about it in the GDS, that’s the UK issue board as a kind of challenge, and just this year, GDS did accept that, and adopted, and looking into Taiwan as a kind of lab, and showing that we achieve pretty good results.

Again, because of broadband as human right, it’s easier for us to roll this out in a country-wide basis. Not unlike Estonia, but slightly larger scale.

In any case, what I’m trying to drive at, is those island or small land-locked countries often can serve as labs for each other, and so those policies are not copied straight out, but lessons learned is very easily shared, and better practices – we don’t call it best practices – are easily shared as well.

Of course, the hardest one is the kind of country to country data sharing relationship, GDPR, the data shield privacy laws harmonization, and so on, but I think the underlying sharing of the tools and policies help these kind of lower level treaties to take place, because then different countries will already have established the similar social norms around which is easier to argue.

Then so data is not oil, data is not extractive asset, data is more about building relationships and things like that. Once those norm layers are done, the law layer is much easier, but starting from law level it almost never works.

What could the kind of outcome be if many more countries were to adopt this kind of open source ethos?

I’m sorry, this what?

The open source ethos.

The open source ethos really, well, I’m not sure open source has a ethos, but the free software movement had an ethos, yes. The four freedoms, the freedom to run for any purpose in particular. Freedom zero.

I think that is the main thing that all the open movements have in common, be it open access, open hardware, open culture, open source, and so on, is that the creator has no privilege to restrict the purpose that the creation, how to be used.

Everything else is kind of adaptation to the copyright, trademark, patent, whatever system that’s in place. The fundamental thing is about freedom to use for any purpose whatsoever. I think that specifically is a good thing in the public service, because the public service should serve everybody, meaning, the public. Given the resource constraints, we can’t serve everybody equally.

What better than saying OK, if you’re speaking an indigenous language and you feel like you’re not served well by our current hiking service, here are the open APIs if you just hook into one of the automatic translations, you can have the entire website, all the interactive parts the human can use, the machines also can use.

You can display it in your indigenous culture, using the ways that you’re always being doing, maybe through virtual reality and things like that. Basically, by opening up citizen developer and elevating them through strong cybersecurity infrastructure to the same place as so-called well-known system integrators.

It means that everybody participate in the innovation ecosystem according to their own need in solving issues in open source we say scratch one’s own itch, I think that’s the open source ethos, right? [laughs]

Scratching one’s own itch quickly became a social movement, because the great invention called hashtag, if you got the right hashtag, scratching one’s own itch very quickly became hashtag, I don’t know, #ClimateStrike or something like that. Because of that then it creates it’s own legitimacy theory.

My main point is that if the public service still wants to monopolize on the purpose of public service, they usually are rendered obsolete very quickly. If we say we’re just making the ground for open innovation, and just fork as however you want, usually they stay relevant for far longer than the top-down designs.

You’ve written that Taiwan is crowdsourcing democracy, and to create a more responsive government, and it’s healing rifts and creating consensus along the way. You’ve explained some of the reasons why, but what is the first step towards government and civil servants getting into the thinking of doing that?

I actually now slowly but surely shifting away from the word consensus. I initially used that in the context of the IETF ethos, namely rough consensus and running code. Quickly, I discovered that our humming kind of rough consensus isn’t at all what public service felt when they hear the word consensus.

For the public service consensus means something that every participant can sign their name on, that’s consensus. What we are saying in the Internet community, the rough consensus for them is just common understanding, which is, “OK, I can live with that,” and that’s it.

Consensus is strong thing, that I can sign my name on, but a common understanding is an acknowledgment, like I won’t kill myself over this. It’s a very different level of play, and especially among people on the Internet, it’s impossible to achieve a fine consensus the way public service defines it.

If you try, people with the most time on their hand win the argument, because nobody else has that much time to fight with the trolls. In any case, that’s a lost cause. Nowadays when we’re saying we’re seeking gòngshì, which is the Mandarin for consensus, we use its literal meaning, “gòng” meaning common, “shì” meaning understanding. We’re just establishing common understanding, we’re just mapping out people’s experience and feelings, nothing more, nothing less.

With this, a kind of empathy-based ethos, the public service is much better accepting it, because everybody in the public service want to actually understand what people are feeling when they’re encountering the public services. They don’t necessarily want to be the person with the most time on their hands to enforce consensus.

I think it massively lowered their politic risk, and also lowered their administrative burden. With that, if you add some public credibility to it, like in Presidential Hackathon, then that’s the winning ticket, because as a public service, those three are the public servants care about. It’s just too much Civic Tech focused on improving one, but sometime adding cost of the other two.

When we make only little improvements in terms of those three dimensions, the public service much easier to accepting this.

Going back to what you were talking about, I guess vTaiwan here is applicable as well, this whole thing about the interaction between government systems being a dialog and not a monolog. How should governments be working with citizens on shaping the digital agenda around their needs, where they aren’t currently doing so?

I think one of the best way that I’ve encountered so far is just touring around all the rural indigenous and remote places, because these are the places that look at my emerging technology, for example self-driving vehicles, and apply it in a way that the designers in the lab would never think about, or never think of.

It could be shopping carts that follows the elderly around, or they could be self-driving drones, but instead of doing anything like delivery, they’re mostly just equipped with 360 cameras that does routine inspections, because there’s simply no sufficient amount of repairs people around in that vicinity anymore, and so on, and so forth.

Those are I think traditionally they’re called appropriative technologies, but nowadays because of open source, open hardware, they’re more like appropriated technologies. Like they’re designed for one person, but the local people with their ingenuity just do an off-label use of those common technologies.

When we go there, and discover these issues, just like the sustainable development goals idea of major groups across every country, people who are having their habitat at risk because of climate change face very similar challenges, but in their country, they’re in minority sometimes, unless they’re small island nations.

In any case, what I’m trying to get at is then through distributed ledgers, through GitHub and other social creation platforms, we can then share the solution to people around the world who are encountering similar issues, and therefore build what we call a scaling out, and scaling deeply instead of scaling up way of innovation, social not industrial innovation.

I think that’s the government’s job as well to make sure that everybody feels that they’re not alone in tackling this problem. They may be alone in their county or city, they may even be alone in Taiwan, but they’re not alone when viewed from a sustainable development scale.

We actually bring these innovators, I just returned from Addis Ababa, to share a AI-based TB, tuberculosis detections, that costs less than one US dollars per filter. I think the WHO standard is $7 or $10 at the moment.

People in Africa love this idea, but the entire training, missing, model and things like that can be federated, meaning we don’t control the technology in a colonizing way, we’re happy to do, I don’t know, split learning, federated learning, and build a kind of confederation of mission models across all the clinical workers.

That’s just one example, but it shows perfectly how we’re approaching this from a social innovation model.

Very, very interesting. You mentioned, for example, trollies following older people around, they don’t have to push them. One of my other questions was about how you implemented digital agenda without making people who aren’t digitally savvy, perhaps older people, feel alienated. How do you do that?

As I said, I go to people. I don’t ask them to come to technology, I bring technology to people. That’s fundamentally different, right? For them, it’s just another town hall-ish meeting, for them it’s just another meeting between elders in their indigenous nations.

For them it’s just a gathering around a city hall. I bring with me a broadband interface, all I require is a blank wall for projection, and some place to set up 360 cameras, but that’s all. Given that broadband is a human right with no time they can see a connection with five municipalities and 12 different ministries, and all section chief level or higher.

They see that the fellow public service are people too, and we build 20 percent of trust just by looking eye to eye, while in a projection, but still the idea is that that then, the public service don’t have to work with the rural people, the indigenous people, and the elderly as abstract numbers and text, which always privileged the people who are good at rhetorics, good at writing.

This is before digital, democracy is always kind of won by people with good oratory power. This then, makes sure that people are gathering in the places that they’re used to gathering in, it’s just with the kind of stand-by help by all the relevant ministries to clarify issue, to provide assistance, and so on, but they set the agenda.

They set the question they want to ask, they set the social norms they want to further. I think that is, again, the other part of conservative in conservative anarchism, is to conserve the cultural lineages instead of destroying them when we’re doing digital transformation.

All of that interaction and openness, is that really helping to build public trust?

Very much so, so it shows the public how much the government trusts them, right? For each seemingly random question from a rural place, 12 different ministries are listening intently. That shows how much trust we’re putting, and it’s actually if you’re a legislator, that’s the most you can get anyway.

Basically, we’re treating each social innovator as a legislator. Even better, because I actually live mostly for one night or two nights before that town hall meeting, and to do an ethnographic or really just hanging out with the local people. Again, that also helps to build solidarities.

It’s not about citizen trusting the government more, that’s side effect. It’s about government trusting the citizen more, and also citizen trust each other more.

Something a lot of governments could learn from. I’ve been writing a feature about data management and public trust. I’ve spoken to a few sort of heads of digital and data of various governments, and academics, and think tanks, and it seems to be something a lot of governments are struggling with this kind of trust issue, with regards to data and otherwise.

I don’t see myself as chief officer of any kind. If you get my name card, the digital minister is lower case, meaning I preach about digital, that’s all I do.

Obviously governments are struggling with public trust, and they’re also struggling to implement their digital agendas, and push innovation whether that’s because of lack of capability, because they’ve got legacy IT systems, because they’re risk averse.

What is your key piece of advice to those in government and in civil services, who are struggling to get to grips with this?

That depends on their level. If their fellow ministers which are more about political accountability, I would say that people who complain, who oppose you, the opposition party are the best cocreators, just invite them in.

We do have ways to design the space so that nobody can flip the table, so to speak. That’s my advice to fellow ministers, who can each send one delegate to my office. Taiwan has 32 vertical ministries, I have many 20 or so ministers who have sent delegates, so some ministries haven’t bought into this yet.

The Ministry of Defense never send anyone, I wonder why. [laughs] Other than those more sensitive national security-related ministries, most people-facing ones are actually just like NPOs, they’re really just like large charities. They have a yearly mission.

They really want something to happen, health, welfare, and so on. They’re looking for partners, they’re not looking for minions, really, they’re looking for social innovators that are doing the same job and sometimes better.

For their ministers it’s actually very easy case to make. The main issue is actually in the senior career public service. The senior public service usually are in a pretty bad place when it comes to innovation. Usually, it’s the section chiefs or people lower in rank that does the real innovation.

If they endorse innovation and it fails, they absorb all the blame from their ministers. If they embrace it and it works, all the credit goes to the ministers. They’re in a kind of no-win place when they’re innovation going on.

All my mechanism design in the public sector is designed, so that people in the career public service, especially the senior level, can always say Audrey made me do it when it fails. I just present their case all sort of international conferences in my slides, and just tell their story, give them a lot of credibility, bring them to UNGA if it works.

They get the credibility, not their ministers, not me. If it fails, I absorb the risk, not their ministers. When designed his way, they’re much more willing to have junior officers to start driving the innovation agenda.

For the junior officers, it’s mostly that they’re lonely. They are innovative, they see some issues, some solutions, but because of, I don’t know whether you have this in your government, but we have this idea of public service anonymity. Lower level, junior public servants are not even allowed to speak publicly about issues concerning their work.

They have to do it through the official spokesperson channels. Because of that, they’re very lonely, especially everybody else is using hashtags. What I have done with them is that we create platforms where they can express their ideas using pseudonyms.

They can claim that this idea was their own, when it finally became policy and remain under pseudonymous identity before it actually gets endorsed. This kind of atmosphere also promotes the kind of natural organization among young public servants.

I learned that from the g0v community, because pretty much all the participating public servants are junior level, and all of them require pseudonyms.

Do you think most governments, they undervalue the fresh blood that is coming into the public service, civil service?

I wouldn’t say so, because many of them have good systems when it comes to like leadership training, when it comes to digital enablement, reverse mentoring, youth council, these are not even innovative any more, it’s just something our governments do.

The thing it’s not about undervaluing or overvaluing, I think it’s about it’s as important to have young, fresh blood as you said, working on horizontal kind of landscape and exercise scanning new horizons as the senior people taking the responsibility to implement vertically the support structures needed.

When I was in Japan, I was in Osaka, not too long ago, their journalists asked me what do I feel when the popular and of social media in Japan compare me to their very senior IT minister. I’m like it’s not a fair comparison, because Taiwan’s science and technology minister, and Board of Science and Technology, are all headed by people who are older than my father, they’re my father’s age or older.

We enjoy very good cross-generational solidarity, because we realize that I’m really good at horizontal power, but they’re really good at vertical power. Without a combination of those two, no work actually gets done.

To scale out, and up, and deeply, you require this kind of cross-generational solidarity and also the work of the public, career public service as kind of the glue in it. I think this structure is what we’re working on, it’s not about undervaluing one to overvalue the other, it’s about finding our common values and promote this kind of cross-generational structures.

Going back to what you were saying about collaboration between departments and ministries, and inviting people from other ministries to come and meet you and share ideas. How important is that, and do you think it’s a barrier, it can be a barrier when you don’t have that buy-in from departments?

It’s voluntary. If a department don’t send people to my office, it’s their loss. [laughs] Basically, I’m only working with the part of the government that are willing to engage people directly.

Because it’s kind of my working condition, that’s why I call myself a Lagrange point, between movement and government, there really is no resistance about that. Conversely, I don’t know anything about ministries of defense. I think it’s only fair.

It means that there are still parts of the governance issue that not everything is collaboratively governed at the moment. On the other hand, far more things could be collaborative government while they’re currently not.

There’s plenty of lower hanging fruits that are not picked yet, is my main point. I wouldn’t say that we’ll just drastically change everything, I would just say that we change everything that is ripe for change.

Do you think that there is a tendency for governments, going back to their digital agendas, to design those digital agendas around the wrong objectives?

The smaller the jurisdiction, like if you’re a township, if you’re a town chief, there really is no risk of designing for the wrong thing, because you know all your stakeholders kind of face to face. If you get anything wrong, they’ll tell you in town halls.

In smaller jurisdictions, I wouldn’t say there’s much of a risk, it’s more about how to make the most of the more limited resources of the jurisdiction. Anything that’s above say a million people, that became very difficult because then numbers law says that we can’t really listen to one another without at least two levels of intermediaries. Each one have the principal agent dilemma that they may not represent well.

That become, then, a public administration theoretical problem, that it’s very easy for people to only setting agendas that are around the people they have the most connection with, but it’s impossible even mathematically for them to connect well to the actual constituents.

To counter that, of course there’s two ways. One is as we did in pol.is in vTaiwan, and now in the joint platform, to make sure people concentrate on issues or budget, but not people. Instead of elections, participatory budgeting, petition, and so on. Focus on one specific issue at a time.

There is actually a lot of good ways for a million people or so to come to common understanding. That’s one solution. The other solution, of course, is just to devolve, I think devolution, to just give more power.

Like in regional revitalization plan, 10 percent of all top-down regional revitalization budget is determined by township level. If they can get a modest stakeholder gathering, they can actually just require budget from the national government, no strings attached.

This kind of participatory budgeting from the township level is another structural way to solve this issue, because they probably know what they’re talking about. I think these two are approximations. They’re definitely not perfect, but if they come together, they can solve maybe 70 percent or so of governance issues that we encounter day to day.

What can getting it right mean for public policy goals, and the quality of public services?

Getting it right means two things. First, that there will be less reliance on bureaucracy. It’s great even for the bureaucrats, because not bureaucrats enjoy doing routine work. They also enjoy doing value judgment work.

A good judge makes excellent arguments if you use their time only on mechanized drunk driving, like any other person would do the same judgment, you’re basically squandering the judges time. The same goes for any regulator.

If the regulator spends time mostly doing machine-automatable work, in computer science it’s called trivial, it doesn’t mean it’s unimportant, it means its structure is simple. It’s simple-structured work I think are prime candidates for this kind of trust first relationship to then take away from the regulator’s burden.

The regulator can then become more like facilitators to those emerging issues, and spend far more time doing quality work on thinking creatively to merge different values together and create new values for society.

Essentially doing creative public administration work. That’s the first benefit, is that it frees up time for doing more creative work. The second thing, as I said, is that it lowers the risk for everybody involved.

It’s like just mechanism is not right, instead of two person pulling a rope to know which part of the rope that they want, one can flip a coin and you divide a cake, the other one choose the cake, each one thinking that they got a better deal.

Simple mechanism like this can make everybody feel that they have much less risk, and so everybody’s more or less a winner, or at least can live with it more at the end of the day.

I wanted to ask you a bit more about your opinion on the civil service and its sort of culture, its organizational structures and its systems. What do you think it does well, and what do you think it does badly?

You mean Taiwan, or in general?

Both, maybe if you start with Taiwan, and then maybe speak about more generally.

I think the Taiwan public service is great at being nimble within their bylaw mandates. Basically, Taiwan has long used the KPI management in a way that only care about the endpoint.

The premier, for example, set the endpoint, but there is plenty of creativity within each agency and so on to deliver it however they want. That’s definitely a shiny example. I saw many very creative people in the public service. That’s definitely a good thing.

The not-so-good thing, again, I think mostly is about public service anonymity. Before last year, there wasn’t even legal for a public servant to work on the side for a social innovation organization internationally aligned with the same sustainable goal as their day job.

That is something that is very common in the Commonwealth. I have many friends, that just goes from the UK, to Canada, to New Zealand, and so on, and just sharing their digital transformation and skill sets as they go, and as contractors and so on.

There really is no such flexibility in Taiwan, maybe because we’re not part of Commonwealth. In any case, that wasn’t even designed in. Last year we got the civil service ministry to do a new interpretation that now allows this. I’m now also on the board of radical exchange of digital future society, thank to that new ruling.

It’s not just me. Any public servant can now do that. The culture of doing a side job that enable you to connect more with the social sector, that then empower your main day job work by bringing new fresh perspective, that needs time to grow. That culture is not yet the norm in Taiwan.

What do you think it will take to get there?

10 years. [laughs] It’s just like designing a K-12 curriculum. You have to wait for 12 years, for that to take effect. It’s like art. There’s no speeding up.

How about civil services in other countries? More broadly, what do you think of how they…?

My experience in Taiwan, 30 years ago, Taiwan was still under semi dictatorship. The Martial Law was still lifted, being lifted, and so on. We went through this whole decade of gradually having more freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, and things like that.

A lot of people, especially senior people, still have this tendency of trusting the authority to make all the, not just decisions, but also agenda setting and problem definition.

It is the norm around our part of the world in the East Asian context. People care a lot more about social harmony than individualized expression. Taiwan is somewhat weird in the sense that we keep this common understanding culture, but still managed to legalize marriage equality and so on.

That’s only by figuring out a way together that legalized the bylaws but not the in-laws. We really have to walk a very fine balance between the different generational expectations, even more so for other jurisdictions around us.

My main observation is the public service there, even when they want to innovate, they are burdened by the social expectations for them to act essentially as arbiters and not as facilitators. That is an extra burden on them that is very difficult to shake off. That’s my observation. That’s the drawback part.

The good part, of course, is now public service nowadays really understood that there are things, for example, truly cross-border issues like disinformation, social media abuse, but also public health issues, and also, of course, climate.

Those are things that the governments really cannot take a local arbiter’s role any more. They have to at least give in somewhat to collaborative governance. Maybe the best thing is these global problems, because without those, it’s almost impossible to install a collaborative governance culture into highly authoritarian societies.

Now some part of them at least have to start shifting their culture this way. That may be a silver lining. I’m not saying climate change is a good thing. I’m saying it’s having good effect on many governance systems.

Yeah. On that point about civil servants and what needs to change, in terms of capabilities, is a shakeup in government and the civil required? Do they need more people like you who are radical and have outside experience are now system focused?

I think there’s plenty of public servants that are system-focused. When it’s actually kind of a criteria if you want to get into senior leadership, you have to be a structural systems thinker, because in a senior leadership position all you deal with day to day are wicked problems. If you’re not a systems thinker you don’t survive for very long, so that’s the thing.

I’m talking about liberal democracies, of course. [laughs] In any case, what I’m getting at is I think it’s not a lack of systems thinking, I think it’s the lack of time for the outside, for the social sector, and small, medium MSMEs.

Everybody but the largest lobbyists and journalists to have a access of the context, the why of policymaking. I think that’s the main thing that’s lacking, because if you only give out done policies for the public, of course all they can do is to organize protests.

If you share the entire policymaking context, then everybody can become a cocreator, even if they’re unhappy with you. If they don’t want to cooperate with you, at least they can collaborate with what you have done.

That kind of culture change, this kind of open innovation, is what every government can already do just by adopting a creative commons license, an open government data license, it’s as simple as that.

It’s a good idea even in authoritarian societies, like with the branding of social innovation. Nobody is against that. I think then it creates a circle of what we call working groups, or special interest groups around any particular sustainable goal that can then serve as collaborators to the collaborative governance system.

I don’t think it’s a good idea to hire them all into the government proper, it may be a good idea to kind of invite fellows to try for a while, or to send interns into each other’s camps, and so on. Some kind of circulation is good, but permanent employment by the government for all the social innovators, I think that again, destroys the diversity.

Now we’re nearly out of time, I’ve got three or four more questions, and then we can go on to the videos, is that OK for you?

Just go ahead.

All right. If you’re happy to speak about it, I wanted to ask you about your experience as a transgender woman, and your perspective on diversity and equality within government and the civil service.

What are the particular issues for transgender people in this sphere, and how should governments go about attractive, recruiting, and promoting a more diverse pool of employees that sort of mirror society?

The best thing of my work as a transgender in the cabinet, is that I didn’t receive special treatment, it’s all the same. That I think is the best I can say about Taiwan’s public service, is that people simply don’t care much. That’s also my experience in the early Internet community.

When I entered Internet community in 1993, was 12 years old, I didn’t specifically mention any gender, and Internet community is fine with it. The computer, the algorithm, your compilers, don’t are about your gender. [laughs]

What they care is your volunteer contributions, what are common values, not stereotypes or labels, those don’t even make any sense in the early Internet. There’s simply no bandwidth to transmit these kind of things.

Therefore, because I kind of spend my adolescence on the Internet, I never felt that I must choose between being only boy, and only a girl. Physically I have gone through two puberties, I can empathize with peoples’ experience more.

That’s one level, but on the expression level, it just gives me a wider range instead of saying that I must choose between stereotypes. That’s the same in Internet culture as the culture in the Taiwan public service.

That’s all I want to say about it, I think it’s very symbolic that we pass marriage equality on the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, Biphobia, because then gender inclusivity, it’s not just about marriage equality, but it’s about diversity and equality in all walks of life.

Can I check, as well, what is your preferred pronoun, so I make sure I can get it right?

If you go to my Twitter, I said asterisk/asterisk, as in whatever/whatever. It’s a very techie humor, because when you are making a download request from a browser to a server, the browser sends, “Accept what and what?” Some browser accept JavaScript. Some browser accept other computer languages.

The header called “Accept: / “ means that anything I can work with. What’s important here is not which pronouns you use, but the experience that we have discussed about those pronouns.

I met a Hebrew journalist that found it really, really difficult because it’s impossible in Hebrew to avoid the use of gender. They don’t only have gendered nouns, but also gendered verbs for everything. When they finally wrote about me, they alternated he and she every other pronoun, which creates an interesting cadence in Hebrew that I very much enjoyed.

I’m not just non-binary. I’m really whatever, so do whatever.

On the wider point about diversity and equality in government and civil service so that those people reflect society and can therefore serve their interests better. Can you tell me a bit about that?

In addition to those law changes, of course, in Taiwan we just had our very large LGBTIQ+ Pride, but also a transgender parade the day before. Our cabinet-level youth council also proposed about a gender-inclusive bathroom program.

All those things gets rolled out really quickly, partly because all the 12 ministries in the Social Innovation plan now has two or so social entrepreneurs as their reverse mentors.

We have the younger people, who are much more at ease with designing new cultural norms, informing their mentees, that’s ministers, like a minister of education, saying that if we design this way it will not divide the society, everybody will think that people who have different needs can use it more, and things like that.

Basically, once the young people figure the norms out the elderly people, as I have stressed again, should look at the visibility criteria and implement it well, because that’s what the young people don’t have experience about.

Within a year, now more than half of the colleges and universities in Taiwan have then implemented the gender-inclusive bathroom guidelines by the minister of internal affairs, with the guidance of their reverse mentor, as well.

This cabinet-level youth council is a really good design for not only transgender, but also anything intersectional, indigenous, and so on. All the marginalized people can find their voice within the youth council and then have the premier say, “OK, these are good directions, so why don’t the reverse mentees of that minister just go ahead and implement it?”

Thank you for that. Two more questions. Some have said that people in governments and in government departments are looking to you, what you’re doing, and what you advocate to see what the future holds. What do you think of that?

It’s one future. Each of us brings a version of future through us to the present, but the idea of plurality means there’s many possible futures.

I have no illusions about digital as a force of good. It’s a force of amplification. If you start with plurality, it amplify plurality. If you start with singularity, it is amplifying singularity. If you start with liberal democracy, it emphasizes liberalism, but if it is about surveillance capitalism or surveillance state it amplify those, as well.

I wouldn’t say that this is the only future. All the different futures are being amplified equally. The main point here is that which starting direction you want to go, instead of being caught in arbitrary linear metrics like the short-term GDP.

I’m fine with “20 years down the road” GDP. That usually aligns with all the social and environmental incentives, but if you are measuring GDP by the month or by the quarter, then it actually creates a kind of perverse short-term gain versus long-term commons issue, which is what got us into climate change in the first place.

In any case, that’s the kind of point I want to make.

What do you think governments’ progress on digital could be like in, say, 10, 15, or 20 years’ time globally? Many differences from today?

Globally, that means that instead of guessing your micro expressions, I could be looking at your micro expressions. [laughs] Instead of guessing and using psychological projection to feel out each other’s theory of mind.

With 5G and 10 gigabit backbone it’s then approaching what our brain is actually receiving from our sensorimotor systems, which is roughly 10 gigabits per second, which is the bandwidth of Neo’s “Matrix’ connection. [laughs]

With that, then we can view co-presence. Nowadays it’s not only because two-dimensionality, but mostly because the lack of bandwidth we understand this is a simulacra of what your true state is. That creates all sort of issues, not the least manufactured addiction representations on social media, but many other things, as well.

With 10 years down the line most of the countries that rolled out 10 gigabit and 5G backbones will enjoy true proximity, meaning that they will feel socially close, not just in transferring movies, but also in real-time interactions, more directly following each other’s gaze, and so on.

This kind of psychological proximity, back to the talking and listening part, instead of a simulated, asynchronous, or pseudo-asynchronous part, will redefine communication as we know, because currently it’s still segregated between F2F and non-F2F modes. 10 years down the line these two modes will merge.

That was my last question before we get to the video. Is there anything that you’d like to add? Anything that I haven’t asked that you think is particularly important that you want to get across?

Let me just quote again Leonard Cohen, “There’s a crack in everything and that’s how the light gets in.” The crack, that is for example the subpar quality we’re having in this video conference, is what motivates our infrastructure work, what motivates our social innovation work.

As long as there are still gaps in communication, I think there’s a reason for public sector to continue to exist to innovate with the people, not for the people, with the people, and that’s how the light gets in.

Great way to end. I’m just going to start the video, I’m using some software that will record the screen, so let me just set that up for a moment.

OK.

Should be good to go, so I’ll just start recording now.

Mm-hmm.

Can you name one lesson or idea from abroad that’s helped you or your colleagues?

A day abroad?

I’ll start again, hold on.

Sorry, but did you send that in the outline?

I said can you name one lesson or idea from abroad that’s helped you or your colleagues.

Oh, from abroad.

Yes, yeah.

Let’s do this again. Sorry.

Yeah, no worries. That’s my pronunciation probably, sorry about that.

Since you’re recording for video, let’s change the lighting a little bit, I guess, because I do have a studio here.

All right. I think it’s much better light here.

Good to go. Can you name one lesson or idea from abroad that’s helped you or your colleagues?

Yes, in the Presidential Hackathon we used a new voting method called quadratic voting. This idea instead of one person one vote, one person 99 points, which can be spent on the various project, one vote, one point. Two votes, four points. Three votes, nine points, and so on, drastically changed the dynamics so people are more willing to reveal their true preferences.

Are there any projects or innovations from Taiwan that might be valuable to your peers overseas?

The idea of Presidential Hackathon, which is like a prototype fund that we expect people to fail loudly and publicly, but every year the five pilots that worked in the smaller scale over three months gets a trophy from Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, our President, but if you turn on the projector that’s the trophy, it shows Dr. Tsai Ing-wen handing the trophy to you, so it’s very meta.

It symbolizes the presidential promise to make your idea a national reality within the next 12 months, so your director general after seeing the presidential hologram will give it a budget. Your ministries after seeing you project the president will give you regulatory changes, and so on and so forth.

How could the ways in which senior public servants work with and learn from their colleagues overseas be improved?

First of all, I would suggest that people share food together. Even if it’s overseas, you can figure out what people like in common, and make sure that because there’s so many chain stores now, to procure the exactly the same food, or the same, I don’t know if you’re in a drinking culture, but not me, wine or beer, or whatever, and just have real gatherings. Theoretically, it can be done through small Skype screens.

What I have discovered that work really well, is just to dedicated large walls as projections or large LCD/OLED screens, to make sure that people can see into this wall and find people if across the world, in another city, and see into another wall and see people in another city.

It’s like people are in a large 2x2 or 3x3 room, but enjoying work and enjoying food together, and sometimes we dance together.

How interesting. What are the biggest global challenges in digital government in the next few years?

One of the challenge is whether we can keep the core of the Internet a commons, basically making sure that whatever state actors want to further their state agenda, at least the materialized, the core Internet infrastructure, instead of Balkanizing the Internet, or making the Internet fragmented under various corporate governances, the core idea of permissionless innovation and end-to-end principle must be kept.

This is why I’m a conservative when it comes to the Internet culture. I think people 50 years ago got it just right on this particular part. Of course, we can increase our trust on context, but we shouldn’t forget about why the Internet starts with an “inter” which means that it allows now works of different policies, different philosophies, different cultures to still interconnect.

Finally, what is your favorite book or book you’ve read recently that you’ve particularly enjoyed?

My favorite book is Finnegan’s Wake, I translated parts of it. I’m nowhere near done with the translation yet, I doubt I can do that within a lifetime, but fortunately that could be crowdsourced. If you’re interested in that, there’s various wikis in the Finnegan’s Wake culture, but be aware that it’s very time consuming.

Great. That’s the video done. Yeah. Thank you so much for your time, that’s been really fascinating. I’m very much looking forward to writing up the interview. If I have any questions after I’ve transcribed the tape, then I’ll get in touch with Zach. Also, I wonder if you could send me a few photos of you that we can use?

The great thing of creative commons, is that you can just use my Pixabay photos without asking for permission. Again, permissionless innovation, and I think there’s also quite a few on Flickr, they’re all really one search away but I’ll just paste you the link to the Pixabay which is free of any copyright restrictions, and you can use it without credit.

Thank you so much for that.

You make a full transcript? Because we’re going to do this in the next 24 hours anyway, so I can also just paste you the transcription and we can…

Oh, that would be brilliant. Yeah.

OK, cool.

Excellent. Once again, thank you so much, really appreciate it, and have a good evening.

Thank you, have a good local time.

Thank you. Bye.