It’s for a radio program, so we have to record you like this, if it’s OK with you.

Mm-hmm. You’ll hand it to me, and to you.

Yes, exactly.

OK.

Basically, the article, it’s about you, like a portrait. I will also ask a few questions about your position in the government and maybe the elections, if it’s OK for you. Let’s go, just starting. Can you explain us, in what kind of environment did you grow up? Were your parents involved into politics, and how was it?

As a very young child, I was immersed in politics, because both my parents were journalists. They were very much focused on the transitioning into democracy. They were the last generation of journalists working within the martial law era.

After that, it’s like complete freedom of the press. After decades of struggling toward democracy.

I still remember that when the Democratic Progressive Party first got formed, I was like five or six at the time. They were just asking me whether people should support the DPP or the KMT at the time. I would say it’s very early osmosis.

Would you talk about these issues with your parents, with your family? What would they tell you about this?

About this back in 1980s?

Mm-hmm.

My parents, for some background, my dad majored in politics and my mom in law. At that time, they’re very much worried about the human rights, about the environmental deterioration, about all the negative externalities that Taiwan’s economic boon have caused, both on the society and on the environment.

We talked not as much about politics as just elections and so on, but rather what we will nowaday call community building. About how people in a different locality, and so on, which does not yet at that time have any way to say vote for the president, and so on, to nevertheless come to common understanding about their local issues in a kind of self-governing way many of the important issues concerning environment and the local society.

When you started coding and going into the Internet stuff, did you already know that you would go into politics? Was it a way of doing politics already at that time, or…?

I wouldn’t say coding is part of the way to do politics, because I was just eight years old at that time. It’s unclear whether a personal computer can actually make programs that affects the large number of people that will traditionally say politics.

When I was 12, and back to Taiwan after a year in Germany, the Internet become a thing. It becomes something that’s affordable, that I’m happy to develop applications on. For the first time, I discovered the World Wide Web, which was just being invented at the time, and saw the possibility, using hyperlinks, that hundreds of thousands of people who didn’t know each other can do collective actions.

For example, in the protest of the Community Decency Act’s restriction on free speech, which is called the Blue Ribbon Campaign. Because I was involved very early on in the building of the Web and such campaigns, I would say, at that point, it becomes political.

Then the World Wide Web is not just about a couple people sharing their papers or sharing their programs. Rather, it’s more of a social program that enables people to form constellations of actions in a way previously unimaginable.

To be specific, previously, we understand cooperation as a bunch of people who know each other and then decide to do something. Using the World Wide Web, we saw the model of collaboration, which is people deciding to do something despite them not knowing each other at all.

Nowadays, we would say a right hashtag will move hundreds of thousands of people, and who are complete strangers to one another. It’s called swift trust.

Can you talk to us about your experience in the Silicon Valley? How was it at that time? Was it a Utopia around the Internet? How was your experience there?

I’ve been involved in the culture that first started…I wouldn’t say Silicon Valley, actually. The so-called hacker culture, including civic hackers, grew in MIT, in the Chaos Computing Club in Germany, and in many places. It’s not, strictly speaking, a Silicon Valley-only phenomenon.

Of course, Silicon Valley added to that by sharing ways to show the commercial side of software development and how it bridges into this community side of free software movement. I would say, by the time the open-source movement happened – that was ‘97, ‘98 – there’s a clear role for Silicon Valley to play, namely the large software companies, like Netscape at the time, were very seriously considering, and eventually did, open all its code.

Not for purely altruistic or for social movement reasons, but rather to share the development cost to make sure that the accountability is easier to build. They can win the trust from users by treating them not as users, but as co-collaborators, co-developers, and so on.

I was at Silicon Valley at that time, in San Jose to be particular, and worked with the open-source movement to localize the idea of open source in Mandarin, because it’s a new word, and also helped the initial free software communities in Taiwan to build a association that is inclusive of both the freedom of the software development, use, and remix, as well as the commercial reasoning of open source.

I suggested, for example, the naming of the association called Software Liberty Association Taiwan, or SLAT, by focusing on the term “liberty,” that I feel as inclusive of the free side and the open side.

Do you think this dream of an open-source and free Internet in Silicon Valley is still alive nowadays when we see what it became?

Why would you consider that a dream? It’s a very practical thing. When open source first appeared, it was explicitly saying that it does not take place in the future. It takes place now.

Anyone can choose to share part of their work in a way that is relinquishing most of the copyright with a certain reciprocal or attribution restrictions, but otherwise free for other people to remix without asking for your permission first. Again, it’s about cooperation only with people you know transitioning to collaboration with people you don’t know.

This, because it’s very practical and not a dream at all, [laughs] it won support across the industry. Nowadays, the most prominent open-source development platform, GitHub, is actually part of Microsoft. Microsoft did a U-turn, basically embracing open source rather than fighting against it.

I would say most of the large industry, Google, for example, they would not exist without the open-source operating system called Linux. Imagine if they have to pay a license for each copy of OS in each of the computer in their data center. There would be no Google.

Just the existence of such deployments and the fact that whatever mobile device you use, it is derived from one of the open-source UNIXs. It’s either Linux as in Android or FreeBSD as in iOS and padOS.

I would say if people think that open source is somehow going away, that is a dream. Open source, definitely, in our part of the world, in the computer science and software engineering world, has won very conclusively.

Still, people would rather use Microsoft or Apple rather than Linux, for example.

It is a branding issue. Microsoft ships its own Linux operating system as part of Windows 10. Microsoft ships its own Chromium, which is a open-source browser started by Google Chrome, but label it branded as the Edge browser.

To many people, the taking of the open-source community project and branding it, showing a different flavor, a different commitment to support, a different direction, this is technically called a fork. For many people, especially people who are not yet versed in programming, the environment that is somehow branded and somehow supported by a large company still offers some psychological safety.

It doesn’t stop them from taking a peek into the inside of these projects and take control, if they want, to develop in a different direction. Previously, for example, if you don’t like Internet Explorer, there really is no way to change its functionality, aside from a few plug-ins here and there.

Now, because Edge is based on the open-source system, it benefits from the entire Chrome ecosystem. People who don’t like Microsoft Edge can very easily change it in various ways. I would say it’s not about taking out the branding – that’s another issue altogether – but rather people committing to offer its contributions back to the ecosystem, which is what the large companies are doing.

Do you think this also works for the Chinese Internet? Do they also rely on open source in the end?

Nowadays, more than ever. For example, in the Android system that we just talked about, there are parts that are open source. It’s called the Android Open Source System. There are parts that are proprietary, for example, Google Map and Google Search, to be very precise. These are offered by Google not only as software packages but rather as services.

The term of the service says that when you’re using these services on the Android operating system, these applications behaves the way that Google wants them to behave. That is to say, Google has control, rather than the rest of the phone, which the community has collaborative ownership.

Nowadays, you see certain Android-based phones coming out of the PRC. They no longer have the Google services as part of them. They have to develop their own services. They do so by looking at the open-source parts and building upon the open-source parts.

That become a key enabler for the PRC platform providers because it’s very difficult to make a mobile operating system without any community support. It’s very, very difficult for Silicon Valley companies and equally difficult for companies in the PRC.

After your experience in Silicon Valley in the US, you moved back to Taiwan. Why was it important for you to come back here?

I moved back here mostly because of the invention of video conferencing. It used to require very expensive environment, but along came Skype, later on, FaceTime, and so on. I always prefer working in an environment where the scheduling is done by myself. I drop out of the institutional education system when I was 15 exactly for this reason.

If I’m physically co-located with my colleagues, then I’ll be dragged into meetings much more easily than if I live in a different time zone and literally only have one hour every night to meet with them in stand-up meetings literally every morning. If they want more of my time, they’ll have to wake up way earlier.

I feel much more effective, both in the fact that this drives all the different departments to produce things that are more self-descriptive. That is to say, it doesn’t require a lot of face-to-face explanation. They become social objects that people can collaborate around in a asynchronous fashion. I prefer this mode of work.

Also, that enable more time for me to spend on, for example, my family, and so on, who are all based in Taiwan.

You already had this idea of serving the country in a way, like working in politics and doing stuff for your country and for its democracy? Or, it was not part of the idea at the beginning when you moved back?

I was always a digital nomad. It’s easy for me. For example, when I was developing an international project called Pugs back in 2005, I traveled to easily more than a dozen jurisdictions across the world, holding two dozen, at least, hackathons a year.

I’m not doing this to serve any particular country. It’s a very strange concept to me. [laughs] I’m doing this to benefit the entire community and the entire ecosystem who may consider ourself a tribe or kinship. I’ve seen these words used, but I don’t think the open-source community refer to the community as a country.

It would be interesting if people starting using the word country this way, but it’s not yet very popular term. The community is mostly what I care about and what I’m working with. The time zone difference, of course, I can work at any jurisdiction within GMT +8 [laughs] and enjoy the same benefits as I just described of time-zone differences.

Why Taiwan? First is that Taiwan does have this idea of broadband as human right. I’m not restricted to the large municipalities. I can work literally in the highest point in Taiwan, the Yushan Mountain, which is almost 4,000 meters, and still enjoy 10-megabits per second at €16 per month, unlimited bandwidth.

The food is, of course, excellent in Taiwan, so I can take a trip to Tainan and enjoy literally the best food [laughs] I have ever tasted, but still enjoy the same broadband access, the safety of the environment, and so on. As a transgender, that’s also important to me.

While any of the Asian jurisdictions can offer the same time-zone advantages, the inclusive society, broadband as human right, and absolute freedom on free speech, assembly, and the press, I don’t think there’s anything near Taiwan that we can point at an area and say it does better than Taiwan in all these regards.

I think Taiwan is a perfect environment for civic hackers who are often producing things that are threatening [laughs] to existing institutional structures. The Taiwan institutions always take a “we can’t beat them, we must join them” attitude when it comes to civil society movements. I think you can’t say that in many Asian jurisdictions. That’s, ultimately, why I remain in Taiwan.

Can you explain this, why you participate in the Sunflower Movement? Why was it important for you? What was it about for you, this movement?

We were talking about large-scale civil society movements, and Sunflower Movement is one of them. At that point, it’s attractive to me because it was one of the major cases of the Occupy Movement, where the core occupiers are Internet digital natives. They’re digital-savvy.

The first batches of people who went into the Parliament immediately started live-streaming, started producing very high-quality journalistic outputs. That enabled people who care about this movement from afar to virtually feel that they can influence the direction of the movement by contributing online.

I worked mostly to coordinate the messages in a shared folder in a shared system that can take on the assaults of the distributed denial of service on the Internet and can still get the messages across. The 20 or so NGOs who helped coordinating the Occupy, each have a different aspect of ideas.

It is the first time that was half a million people on the street and many more online that people can deliberate about a public issue, the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement from those 20 different perspectives and still listen at scale at what other people are deliberating, and gradually come to a rough consensus.

This is the kind of political system called Internet governance that I’m the most comfortable with. This is the first time that I’ve seen the multi-stakeholderism of the Internet governance being realized in the physical world in such a mass scale in a way down that we would say it’s not centralized.

Of course, at that time, it’s not quite leaderless. That will have to wait five more years.

Do you think since then the Taiwan society has reached a rough consensus on the cross-strait relationship issue?

Well, five years later, thanks in no small part to another larger scale movement, the #antiELAB, it really affected how the people in Taiwan view their relationship.

I don’t think Hong Kong is, strictly speaking, in a cross-strait relationship with the PRC. [laughs] It may be a cross-bridge relationship…

But people are generally understanding that PRC is trying to further a different norm, both on the cyberspace, but also on the international space.

At the time, one of the core argument in the Sunflower Movement is by opening the service and trade across the board and especially around telecommunication.

The norms of the 4G deployment will be – at that time, 4G is not yet widely deployed – will be co-determined by PRC forces, which may look like market forces, but is very easily become de facto no-market forces, by, for example, the Communist Party branches within private sector corporations, using non-market ways of forcing the leadership of the so-called private sector within the PRC to change, and so on.

It’s seen as a systemic risk to over, really, rely on the so-called market layers within PRC in the core 4G infrastructure at the time.

We decided, the rough consensus that is, at a time that’s accepted by the government, that no part of PRC component can participate in the 4G infrastructure core or periphery. That has played out much to people’s expectation, actually, of what PRC will behave in the subsequent years.

We do see that leaders of the corporate world being replaced by state force. We do see that they have much more interest now in taking more enterprises that started in the private sector, but eventually become de facto state controlled.

We do see that they’re trying to normalize these kind of norm of so-called harmony within the cyberspace, even trying to export it outside of the PRC Great Firewall, and so on.

I would say that the anti-ELAB showed these in action in a much more closer proximity, because during the Sunflower, we were speculating, like, what would happen. But in the anti-ELAB movement, it did happen. I would say that there is a much less rough but a finer consensus that this really is a different norm, both in cyberspace and international space.

In Taiwan, so you think now there’s kind of a consensus in Taiwan regarding the way Taiwan should interact with the Chinese?

The English word consensus is actually different from the Mandarin word that we use to say, which is [Chinese] . The Mandarin word [Chinese] means literally only common understanding.

It’s not as fine as the word consensus in English, which is something you can put your name on, like signing a memorandum of understanding, or even signing a contract, that’s where the word consensus in English conjures up.

But in Taiwan, when we say common understanding, we mean, really, just common understanding, like people come to a rough consensus on the objective facts and people agree to share each other’s feelings. But that’s that. There’s nothing beyond that.

I would say yes, on the common understanding level, people came to a common understanding that the PRC is developing in a very different norm, a authoritarian norm, a nationalistic norm on cyberspace, which is different from the norm that we see, the cyberspace, which is fundamentally about the freedom to innovate, freedom of speech, of assembly, and so on.

This difference, I will say, is a common understanding here. But feelings, of course, differ, and ideas and opinions, of course, differ even more. Because if that layer is uniform, then we are not a democracy anymore, right? [laughs]

The point of being a liberal democracy is that people can draw different opinions and different conclusions, different actions based on a common shared factual understanding. I was just referring to the factual understanding part.

Can you explain what was your precise role as a minister here without portfolio, what were your missions, your team?

I’m the digital minister in charge of open government, social innovation, and youth engagement. The word without portfolio is actually a relic from the previous name of this role, which I think the republic citizen’s government here have changed long ago. [laughs]

It used to be saying that the horizontal ministers are ministers without ministries, like [Chinese] . That’s the Mandarin. But we’ve dropped that part already, so it’s now just [Chinese] in our everyday role, meaning that we don’t have a fixed portfolio. But it doesn’t mean that we don’t have a portfolio. That’s a clarification.

Open government is my main work, and it’s about trusting the citizens without requiring the citizen to trust back. This is about publishing all our budgets, regulatory pre-announcements, everything for people to see on a day-to-day basis.

Work with the citizens, the e-petitions, on the participatory budget, on the sandbox applications, on presidential hackathon, all of the different ways for people to participate in democracy in a day-to-day fashion and not only once every two years or four years fashion. It’s both about transparency and about participation.

It’s also about inclusive accountability, meaning that people who are not that versed in numbers or statistics, and so on, can nevertheless enter into direct conversations, either face-to-face or live-streamed with the career public service, so that they can build the trust.

I mean, the career public service can build the trust, not only to the people, but also with each other across ministries. That’s also very important.

That is my core work. At that role, I’m working only with the government and not for the government. My role is like a channel that makes both sides or various sides around one particular issue to come to a shared value despite their different positions.

Can you give us an example of one that’s a reform that has been designed using e-democracy and digital democracy? Do you have one good example in the last four years?

Well, there’s many good examples, and like too many to count. It’s like asking a parent, who is your favorite child.

I would say that one of the most visible examples is the adoption of sandboxes in the continental law system. Taiwan is the first jurisdiction using the continental law system that carves out the ways for people to break regulations and some laws within a year, showing the society that it’s a good idea or bad.

If it’s a good idea, for example, in the fintech sandbox, people experimented various ways of, the people who are 18 years old and so on who didn’t have a credit history with the bank to, based on their telecoms bills’ history, to open a bank account and apply for loans or any kind of financial instruments without having to go to a counter in a bank.

But rather can just open such accounts directly on their phone, because the KYC was done initially when they applied to the phone number.

This is basically putting a risky uncalculatable behavior into a sandbox, which is saying that it’s OK that we break existing regulations on the risk, but actually, we must, with the proper protection of privacy and cyber security calculate such a risk along with anybody who volunteer to try this out.

They just tried this out for a year and calculated the risk factor very precisely. Very recently, they came out of the sandbox and become a legal operation and all the different banks can now do this legally.

The Enabling Act, the financial sandbox act, was deliberated by the vTaiwan process, which is operated by the civil society, part of the g0v, one of the g0v projects with all the stakeholders in the rolling survey and so on.

The same process have enabled, for example, the sandbox around self-driving vehicles also. They just deliberated on the e-scooter case, which is now being tried out in the National Taiwan University.

I think the social enterprises, that is to say, the business operations that exist for a purpose and not just for the profit, is also deliberated and written into the company act by the vTaiwan system. I would say it’s a generative system, like it generates more laws and regulations that enable this kind of collaborative participatory democracy, any specific issue, emergent issue that a government has no idea how to do and enable in much early on participation with the people.

Now the general regulatory sandbox idea have been applied to something like, for example, the 5G experimental spectrum allocation, platform economy such as Uber, and various other places as well. I would say it’s a change on the way that public service operates. It’s not just one or two cases that it enables.

Do you think Taiwan has a leading role on the use of this e-democracy technology or do you know other countries that also do a lot on this issue to have a…?

Well, if we talk about the deliberative culture and direct democracy, of course, Switzerland has a longer history and a very well-designed mechanism and culture around that. If your question is mostly about direct democracy, then I would say Taiwan still has a lot to learn from Switzerland. I wouldn’t claim that we’re leading the world in any way on that. [laughs]

However, if you look at the cyberspace amplification of participatory democracy without excluding people, without widening the digital gap, then I would say that Taiwan’s experience is, indeed, cutting edge.

In Taiwan, for people above 12 years old, around 90 percent use Internet regularly. Internet coverage, of course, is higher than that. Even in the most remote, rural, indigenous, offshore places, we still have 98 percent coverage on broadband as a human right, very affordable.

Of the 20 million people that is on the Internet, we have 10 million visitors of the national participation platform. Just over half of the online population joined the g0v.tw, which is our government-operated participation portal of both municipal and National Auditing Office and administrative cross-ministerial platform.

By having a single platform and 10 million visitors, we can say with some confidence that we’re not systemically excluding people by having this cyberspace part of the participatory democracy. Of course, it only amplifies the face-to-face conversations. We’re not using it to replace any face-to-face conversations.

It does enable me to, for example, tour around Taiwan to the remote places, join their town halls by using video conferences to connect the 12 ministries and the five municipalities into the same virtual room to talk about another municipality’s issues or a rural area’s, indigenous area’s, issues.

That kind of bringing technology to people rather than asking people to come to technology, I think, is the decisive factor of why Taiwan people see Internet as something that attracts more people into the democratic process rather than distracts people from the democratic process as we have seen in many parts in the world.

How is it for you to go from the private sector to the public and into the government? Do you think you can have a bigger social impact working for the government than working for a private company?

I’m not working for the government.

I mean working in the public sector rather than in the private sector.

I’m working with the government. I’m working with not just the Taiwan government as well as the international civic tech community. My first loyalty is always to the international open-source community. Now I have been expanded to open access, open hardware, open culture, and so on.

The global open community is my first loyalty. I’m working with the government here to bring some of the ideas that people have prototyped in the open community to realize in, say, the Presidential Hackathon, which is a good example.

Every year, the president here takes a look at, literally, hundreds of proposals that use social innovation to further sustainable development and choose five teams out of the hundreds to give the presidential trophy, which carries no prize money but, rather, is the presidential promise.

When you turn on the micro projector embedded within the trophy, it shows a short image, a video, of the president handing the trophy to the team. It’s very useful for internal negotiations.

Whether they have prototyped, for example, video conferencing for telemedicine for people in remote islands or whether they have prototyped a machine learning system to help fix water leaks by detecting it early, this presidential trophy enabled all the regulatory personnel and budget changes required to enact this civic technology into national policy within 12 months.

We’ve delivered five out of five in the previous year’s winners. This year’s five winners is of a even more fierce competition, so we introduced a new voting system, called quadratic voting, or QV, that came out of the radical exchange movement, which is an international movement that I’m also on the board as a board member of the foundation of RadicalxChange, which informed our Presidential Hackathon process.

There’s many other jurisdictions, like the Colorado state budget, is now also determined by the quadratic voting. I’m working with all these governments in an international role. I’m not only working for any particular jurisdiction. My loyalty, again, is to the civic tech and the open community.

Let me put this another way. Between the role of the private and public sector, for example, in France, we had this Gilets jaunes. I’m sure you know about it. They use a lot of social networks to gather, to organize but the thing is, at some point, they realized that they had some issues because some infos were not going on Facebook because of Facebook algorithm.

Do you think this is one of the role of the state should be to design this platform for digital democracy, for e-democracy?

VTaiwan doesn’t have Facebook as its component and the Join platform also doesn’t have Facebook as its main component. Facebook is, now, I think more properly treated as a new governor. Our relationship with Facebook, I’m more like a semi-ambassador to a semi-sovereign or a proto-sovereign entity that has not yet issued their own currency but is now establishing its own court system.

All the usual diplomatic terms apply. [laughs] I would certainly not rely on another governor to build the democratic process of a democratic institution. That would be very interesting, both in a legitimacy theory sense, as well as political theory sense, to run part of your democracy outsourced to another semi-sovereign governor.

This technology should be founded publicly? If it’s not a private company, who should design this technology that could be used for e-democracy?

It’s like the Internet. This is like asking who should design the Internet.

Or where the money should come from, because in the end…

Or where the money should come from to design the Internet. The Internet has, as its core, a permission-less innovation system where anybody who wants to spend some time or some money to improve part of the Internet can do so without any approval, right? They can just do something. Then, convince other Internet operators to adopt this new way of doing things.

It’s called a new protocol. Once they connect, there’s nobody else within the large Internet that can interfere with them trying out this new protocol. This is called the end-to-end principle. That is to say, the principle that only both ends of the communication can decide which protocol to use and not any of the hops in between.

I think the open-source movement works on the same philosophy. Saying that if anyone who looks at one key part of our communication architecture wants to fork – that is to say, change – it in whichever way they want, they can freely do so. That is how, for example, the Mozilla browser became Firebird, which became Phoenix, which became, now, Firefox.

It’s just by people forking the projects all the time. The money at each successive stage comes from different sources. At some point, it came from crowdfunding. At some point, it comes from a collective of people who feel strongly about this technology.

When it grows larger and more commercially adopted, it comes from all the different enterprises, maybe as part of their corporate social responsibility, maybe as part of their sustainability strategy, and nowadays, more increasingly, as part of their core strategy, to sponsor the development of the shared infrastructure that they all use.

Finally, of course, we also see some liberal democracies allocating state funding, as with the prototype fund in Germany or the Presidential Hackathon is actually a great example to fund such productions because it’s very useful to the public sector as well, but the public sector supports without any control to the open-source nature of these, and diverse.

The money can come from anywhere, but the point is that giving the money to the project does not restrict further innovations. That is the core difference between the open innovation models with all the previous models.

Still, even if the architecture is open source, etc., if you have a big actor – the biggest example is China, of course, but also the GAFA – that comes with a lot of money and try to interfere in this process. Then how can we compete with that? How is it possible to deal with that, even if the architecture is free and open-source, etc.?

First of all, I do not think that the GAFA, in particular, is trying to proprietorize [laughs] all the open-source systems that they are using without giving back. In selected cases, they’re actually pretty good stewards of the open-source ecosystem. I’m not saying all of them but, certainly, for example, the React framework from Facebook, the Swift language from Apple, as well as Linux, which is shared by all of GAFA.

I think the governance part is quite well done. If you look at the Linux Foundation’s work, for example, the open API standard, spedix standard, which we have adopted actually. Open API is the national standard here, too. Our interaction with them on the Linux Foundation have been quite civilized. I wouldn’t say that they’re trying to pollute the standard or specification in any way untoward.

Of course, you’re probably not referring to these specific technological components. You’re probably referring to people’s attention, which is a very different layer of things. It is true that people’s attention are being absorbed by many of the products that came out of GAFA.

Of course, for different parts of the world, by products came out of the PRC that may distract them from contribution to open source or from contribution to open and liberal democracy.

I wouldn’t say this is about an open-source movement, which is fundamentally about the community around shared intellectual “properties,” or intellectual commons but, rather, more about how people interact with one another and what people’s expectation of the Internet is.

Previously, people’s expectation of the Internet is, literally, an internetwork, that is to say bringing different networks together. Nowadays, we do see a recentralization of the usage pattern, that is to say people over concentrate their time on Internet on maybe just four different websites or apps. That is, maybe, the core issue we’re tackling today and not whether those apps are open-source or not.

It could be open-source, but the entire centralization makes it something that has an effect on the society as a whole and not just on the people working on information sciences and software engineering.

Just a question, it’s very basic. I’m sorry but I want to explain this to a French audience, because we don’t read Mandarin, how the Chinese Internet looks like. Is there room for free initiatives on the Chinese Internet or is it all blocked? How would you explain that…?

Within the PRC, for a long time, the idea of a Great Firewall, where people cannot connect to non-state approved websites. Most of the websites that we’re familiar with is inaccessible from within the PRC.

For the websites that they cannot afford to block, in particular, GitHub, because it powers so much of the science and technology development including artificial intelligence, if they block GitHub, the science and technology community within the PRC will deteriorate. They cannot afford to block it. When GitHub hosts some content that they don’t like to see, they can turn the Great Firewall into a great cannon.

That would say, DDOS, which is a way to make all the browsers connecting to popular websites within the PRC to launch a concerted attack to bring GitHub down or to bring parts of the GitHub down, which is what they have done a few years back. Just recently, last month, actually, they mounted a very similar attack against LIHKG, which is the main website of the anti-e-lab movement’s coordination.

I’m saying this just to say that it’s not only that the freedom to post anything, the freedom of looking at a website without state surveillance is crippled within the PRC. Anyone can become a collaborator, unwittingly, in the state-coordinated action against a state considered adversary to damage or destruct other parts of the Internet as well. It has both a blocking side but also an offensive side of the Great Firewall system.

Add to that, of course, is the recent laws that, for example, bans the use of cryptographic technologies, such as blockchain, using cryptographic algorithms not approved by the state for the behaviors that may be detrimental to state interests. That is just a new law that’s just passed.

Not only using a VPN to access the real Internet is now legally wrong. They have also passed new laws that makes even the basic fundamental structure of the Internet, which is called cryptography, that protects secure communication subject to state control.

Of course, it’s a new law so we don’t have, yet, the evidence of them trying to install state backdoors, or whatever, into cryptosystems but this law gives them the authority to do so. Whether they do this or not, of course, we’ll have to wait and see.

Just a few words about the elections. What do we know, precisely, about what China is doing, actually, to try to interfere in the elections on the social networks stuff and digital?

We have the Taiwan fact-checking center publishing the fact-checked reports. Sometimes, they do pretty good attribution work to look at the source of the disinformation. For example, there was a disinformation that says, “The teenage protestors in Hong Kong are being paid $20 million for murdering police.”

This is a very serious allegation. We see a lot of remixes, like pictures and so on, to support this narrative. The Taiwan fact-check center, which is a civil society social sector group, independently funded, trace it to Zhongyang Zhengfawei, which is the main political and law unit within the PRC leadership. It has a very popular Weibo account. That narrative came from there.

It’s translated into traditional Chinese characters is, then, a lot of illustrations, or whatever, to try to support this core arguments. That is where it came from.

It is very clear when the state – I would say propaganda unit, but they would probably dispute that term – a state’s main communication unit rolls out such disinformation packages in trying to establish a counterfactual argument against the Hong Kong protestors.

Before that has a chance to go really viral on the social media here, of course, the Taiwan fact-check center steps in, did an attribution work, and that really dialed down its virality. Just in the past couple of days, another civic media – again, independently funded – called “Taiwan Reporter,” or TW Reporter, did pretty good attribution work on many more disinformation campaigns that are sponsored by PRC or PRC-aligned people.

I would encourage people to look at those reports. I don’t know whether they will all be translated to French, but nowadays, machine translation is pretty good. I still think that with the right keywords, you can see the full attribution work that’s done by a professional journalist.

Because most of these work to sow discord is trying to undermine people’s trust in institutional journalism and on institutional media, in general, and institutional democracy, of course, and not particularly about any particular election or any particular social issue.

They mostly want to create a chaotic environment where people have decimated trust any journalistic work and would not do the journalistic work themselves, for example, fact-checking, and so on. By making people distrustful of journalistic work, not just journalists or media, but I’m aware that they can also do some journalistic work.

This may be the most insidious attack on democracy, which relies on people doing something like journalistic work whenever there’s a public decision to be made.

Do you think Taiwan is more targeted than in other countries? In France, we also have Russian media, Russian websites, that try to push for fake news. Do you think that Taiwan is really the most targeted country, as some reports say, for fake news and interference?

We need not confuse the two layers. Many reports say that, for example, for our cyber security attacks, Taiwan is literally on the front line, just like, say, Estonia and Israel, and many other jurisdictions known for cybersecurity industry, because they are literally on the front line. [laughs]

That is less disputed. This is not controversial that Taiwan’s cybersecurity attacks is like just scrolling day-by-day. Of the cyber security attacks that the Department of Cyber Security can trace the origin, easily over half are from the PRC side. This is not disputed, not even by the PRC side.

Of course, when you talk about disinformation, this can be seen in many different lenses. This could be seen by, for example, people who remix content to sow discord. It is true that many people who remix the content are probably domestic, because that gives them more access to the local Internet culture.

Then we also have state-sponsored propaganda. I’ll just use that term. For example, on the Zhongyang Zhengfawei case that I just pointed out, that is, of course, nothing domestic. It’s not even about a domestic issue. Still, we see a wave of disinformation from that source into the Taiwan social media landscape.

It’s difficult to quantify. That’s what I’m saying. Because the quantification depends on the criteria that you use.

You can use the criteria of inauthentic behavior. You can use the criteria of what we used to use about spams and scams on the Internet, by people voluntarily flagging it. You can use the criteria of paid sponsorships, and so on. Each criteria would yield a different picture.

I would say that Taiwan is, of course, facing a serious challenge on each of these domains. But whether “the world’s top” in each of these domain’s, I would not say so that Taiwan’s necessarily always the world’s top on each of these issues all the time.

Especially during other countries’ election season, and if Taiwan doesn’t have a referendum or an election going on at the same time, probably the hotspot is not around Taiwan.

Yes, true. Can you tell us how would you describe your political stance?

My political stance is, I guess, Daoism, but it’s also known as conservative anarchism.

Which is?

Which is, conservative means to respect the traditional lineages of various cultures from the Austronesian cultures to the newer immigrations here in Taiwan. Taiwan now have around 20 national languages. A lot of different cultures and ethnicities.

Yet, we take a transcultural view that conserves all those different cultural lineages and forge a new transculture republic out of the respect of those different lineages, including the more ecological view of the indigenous nations, including the various different religions and different social bonds of the various different culture groups of waves of immigrations and so on. That’s what I call a transculture republic of citizens.

That’s the conservative part. That also conserves the Internet culture, because that kind of democracy also starts in the ‘80s, with the Internet Engineering Task Force, and so on, that is also one of the cultures that co-evolves with Taiwan’s progress in democracy after lifting of the martial law. Again, that is part of the culture in Taiwan to be conserved.

The anarchism part is, of course, not about progressive anarchism, which can be violent at times, because it’s situation changing. Conservative anarchism means that the work that I do is based on voluntary association. I never give orders. I never take orders.

All the people who work in this office, join here voluntarily. At most, one delegate from each ministry can participate, but they do their own work. All I’m asking is that they work out loud, so that people who care about their work can join in collaboration. That is, again, a very Daoist philosophy.

Just something about Taiwanese politics, would you say that you’re an independentist, and how would you describe it to a French audience? What does that mean?

I don’t even know what a independentist… [laughs] This is the first time I’ve heard of this term, actually.

Of course, the independentist would argue that the less that Taiwan is dependent on other governing sovereignties, or other governing institutions, the better. That the liberal democracy, if it’s more self-sufficient, including but not limited to referenda and the presidential elections, and so on, the better. That’s how I understand this term.

In that sense, I’m non-partisan, so you can also say that I’m a independent political worker, but this is probably not what you mean by the word “independentist.” It’s usually in foreign media. What you are probably alluding to is called the pro-Taiwan independent.

The pro-Taiwan independents are just pro-independent parties. That is to say, there’s certain political parties that strongly argue for a de jure independence of Taiwan. They have a lot of political theories about why Taiwan is not yet independent and why Taiwan must someday become independent, and things like that. I am less affiliated with this group of people.

How would you describe what are these common elections are about, once again, to a French audience? Is it authoritarianism against democracy? Is it Taiwan versus Republic of China? What is it about, these elections?

The upcoming presidential election, if you look at what the three candidates are saying to Hong Kong, for example, all of them say, I think Dr. Tsai said it first, but everybody also now say that they support popular election in Hong Kong, that they support the real election in Hong Kong, that they support the democratic process that makes Hong Kong’s democratic system more akin to Taiwan, rather than to PRC.

I would not frame it as something that is democracy against counter-democracy, because after all, running in a presidential election and affirming that Hong Kong people really deserve what they’re fighting for, the five demands – especially the last demand, and not one less – is now a common platform of all of the presidential candidates. I wouldn’t frame it this way.

I would, however, frame it as something that is more about the culture and less about the continued debate on Hong Kong, which, by and large, there is no debate on Hong Kong now in the presidential race. I think the cultural differences between the candidates are more pronounced.

Dr. Tsai is advocating for opening up even more public decisions to the people. For example, more use participation.

The Taiwan Constitution – which, according to the pro-independentists, have not been written yet – but I mean the Constitution that’s currently taking effect in Taiwan. It currently says in the Constitution, that in order to vote, you must be 20 years old.

Because constitutional change is very difficult, it doesn’t compare very well [laughs] with pretty much every other jurisdiction that allows for 18 years, or even younger, to participate in elections.

Dr. Tsai has long been running on a more universal human rights campaign, by, for example, in her previous campaign to promote broadband as a human right, which is a new application of the word “human rights” to many people. And, of course, marriage equality and inclusion of indigenous people in the indigenous decisions, and so on and so forth.

Including more people, including the people who don’t yet have the right to vote into the democratic process, inclusive democracy, not just representative democracy, I think has been the core campaign platform of Dr. Tsai Ing-wen.

That is less pronounced in, for example, James Soong’s platform. You don’t see a lot of promises around this kind of inclusive democratic processes in Dr. Soong’s promises in his campaign.

Mayor Han, of course, is a mayor, and also have his promises to account for to people in Kaohsiung. But we mostly see a cultural campaign, for example, more economic development and more emphasis on cross-strait, what he calls “harmony,” across the strait and so on, and less about including more people into the democratic process.

But, recently, after the previous Premier, Chang San-cheng, became Mayor Han’s running mate, they’re now also saying that the national participation platform is a good thing, that 5,000 people to form a threshold to have the petition answered by the ministers, they want to lower it to 3,000 people and so on.

After Chang San-cheng joins, you’re now also seeing inclusive democracy and open government as their candidate’s campaign. But before Chang San-cheng joined, I would say that part is missing from Mayor Han’s campaign.

Are you going to vote?

I don’t know, but probably, yes.

OK. [laughs] What are your plans after the elections? Do you know? Do you already know?

Uh-uh. Well, I’m traveling the day after the election to Seoul, to Korea, to work with the Social Innovation Lab there as a faculty to coach the civic tech people in Korea to build a similar system that enables fosters, this kind of cross-sectoral collaboration. I’ll probably bring some cases from the Presidential Hackathon and see if we can do something like Presidential Hackathon in Korea.

Do you continue working here if we offer you this opportunity?

You mean literally here, in the cabinet office? [laughs]

In this space. [laughs]

Well, it’s a pretty nice place, but the truth to be told, I spend most of my time in the Social Innovation Lab and very rarely come here, maybe twice a week. If the office space is offered to me, it’s a nice space, and the broadband connection really good, and we have virtual reality equipment already set up, and so it’s a convenient place to work in. I’ll probably accept, yes.

And the real answer?

No, that’s the real answer.

But about the fact of working here for the government, with the government? Would you continue doing…

No, I mean, I am already working with multiple governments.

With this position of…

Having the position of a Digital Minister, you can look at my name card, actually. Let’s see if I have my name card on the table. You can see that there really is no country name on my name card. The “minister” is lower case, meaning that I preach about digital. [laughs]

I’m fine with, of course, the government here if they want to offer me a upper-case minister’s role. But I’m performing in this role exactly what I would do otherwise without the upper-case minister role. I’m always seeing myself as a lower-case minister, [laughs] and not a upper-case minister.

The work that I’m enabling is mostly about the cross-sectoral dialog, which can be done in any sector. I’m happy to work in this office, physically, which enables more meetings with the career public service, but I would also say that I’m doing this to establish some experience. That I’m still publishing papers on the social archives, open-access website.

For example, the Canadian government, who cited the paper and continued working with me, and so on. I’m always happy to work with any government and any institutions, not necessarily governments, that want to trust citizens more.

That is my core mission and I would say yes if I can keep working on this condition of voluntary association, of radical transparency, of location independence, which is a different kind of independence as a minister.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

I just want to take a picture if it’s OK.

Sure, of course.