Once again, thanks very much for seeing me today. I’m really curious, we’ve seen that Taiwan has been very successful in handling the coronavirus pandemic. I’m especially curious about your role in this and the role of technology. Can you just tell us a little bit about when you started to get involved and why?

Sure. As the Digital Minister in charge of social innovation, I have long advocated for the idea of fast, fair, and fun in co-creating with the society. I got involved in the counter-pandemic effort around early February, when the mask rationing policy was still being made.

How did that happen? Was there a crisis situation? I remember that there was some chaos in the beginning around the masks.

Exactly. People would go to like four different stores, only to find all of them has run out of medical masks. Because of that, there was a civic technologist by the name of Howard Wu, Wu Chang Wei, in Tainan City, who developed this visualization and map interactively that shows each store and how much mask they have in stock.

It’s a crowdsourced map, meaning that people can just report how many masks there are. As with any other crowdsourced projects, it only relies on the good will of the citizens and may not be actually that timely nor accurate. I looked at that idea and talked to our Premier, Su Tseng-chang, and said that we need to trust citizens with open data.

Starting early February, all the real-time rationing systems update this mask availability as open data every 30 seconds. People queuing in line can actually participate in the accountability. It’s like a distributed ledger, so that people can see that people queuing before them have actually procured two or three or nine medical masks because the availability will decrease in real-time.

Wow. From the mask problem onward, did you get a formal role in the epidemic management center, or was there any decision in the government that you would help with the use of technology in other fields as well in the pandemic?

Yeah. In addition to the mask rationing, I was also involved in the participation officer system, or the PO system. Just like media officer that talk to journalists or parliamentary officer that talk to the MPs, participation officers talk to hashtags.

Each and every ministry has a team of people that responds to trending rumors and counter those rumors using a playbook that we call “Humor Over Rumor.” For example, the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s participation officer lives with a companion dog, a Shiba Inu with the name Zongchai.

I was part of the people that set up the PO network system so that they can support each other to translate scientific rules, clarifications, and so on, like our physical distancing. When you’re outdoor, you need to keep two Shiba Inu from each other and indoor keep three Shiba Inu away from each other. Why do you wear a mask? Because it protects you from your own unwashed hands.

This humor over rumor idea was not, strictly speaking, for the pandemic only. We used that also before our presidential election, all the way since 2017.

The thing with the dog, that came into being only now with the pandemic.

That’s right. With the pandemic, the PO system.

What that your idea?

No, it was the PO, the Minister of Health and Welfare’s PO’s idea. They literally live with that dog. Their personal space, their house, is very close to the Ministry of Health and Welfare. Any time that the Central Epidemic Command Center rolls out a new policy, they just rush back home and take a new photo of the dog, then we have a new Internet meme.

That system with the POs, that was already in place, right?

That’s right. I was the person who put the PO regulation in place, that set up this kind of participation office in all 32 ministries.

One field where technology has been very important in Taiwan’s counter-epidemic effort has been tracing of contact persons and tracking and so on. This relates to personal data, privacy and so on. When this started to be discussed in Europe, for example, there was a huge debate over privacy. Was that a problem, or was that an issue here in the beginning as well?

We had that debate all the way to the constitutional court in 2004, I believe, right after SARS 1.0 in Taiwan, where we had to lock down an entire hospital unannounced. It was barely, thinly constitutional according to a constitutional court.

The constitutional court charged the legislature to invent new ways that will be more defined, have a better due process, and above all, subject to the oversight from the parliament when SARS 2.0 comes again.

For example, in our digital quarantine, the digital fence, so to speak, people who do not choose to go to a physical quarantine hotel for 14 days when they return to the border of Taiwan, can elect to do so in their home if they have their own bathroom and so on.

Their phone is placed into the digital fence so that if they break out of that place, then of course the automated text message is sent to the local police, and so on. That system basically is deemed constitutional because it doesn’t collect new data.

It is existing triangulation data that your cell phone tower operators are collecting anyway. We use the SMS systems for earthquake advance warning and flood advance warning as well.

That was in place already.

That’s right.

It’s still different if you use it for earthquake warnings and if you use it to identify and track people. Someone with your background, did you have any kind of feeling of apprehension at any point about this kind of use of data?

I think the main emotion that I had is that we need to refrain from collecting new data. If, for example…Sorry, let’s do this part again. At that time, I had some apprehension about some of the proposals.

There’s countless vendors that want to advertise for their bracelets, for their dongles, for their new devices through GPS, through Bluetooth, or through other technologies that will track a finer detail of whereabouts because, or so they claim, that the cell phone tower triangulation is still very imprecise.

Especially in rural areas where there’s no so many cell phone towers, but even if in municipal places, the resolution is just 50 meters in radius, so they say you couldn’t know which room the person is in, or which floor the person is in. You only know the generic whereabouts. To me, that’s a feature.

That is not a book, meaning that if people understand the technology is not like the GPS, and is not going to read through its SMS communication or other apps running on their phone, then people will feel much more comfortable understanding that after the 14 days, there’s no constitutional basis for us to keep using the digital fence system on the people under quarantine, so it voids labeling in effect.

When did you have that kind of discussion?

We had that discussion literally every week in our weekly meeting on the cabinet level, with the CECC officers and the premier. It was like every Monday. My participation starts I think around early February.

Early February, that’s also when this cruise ship incident happened.

At the Diamond Princess.

Yeah. I think they docked at Jilong at the end of January, and then the outbreak came a week later.

Yeah, and we used the same technology as the flood warning. We sent SMS to people who could be affected.

Were you consulted, or did you help on setting up that system for finding or identifying the contact persons at the time?

No, that was the work of the Department of Cyber Security, or Howard Jyan, and the director general. I think he was under a very close relationship with the vice premier at the time, and now Kaohsiung mayor, Chen Chi-mai. They actually wrote and published a paper about it.

I think we’re going to talk about that.

I wasn’t involved back then, because I think they worked on that system before my involvement. If I had been involved, I’d be listed as a co-authors.

Can you discuss a little bit, from your previous work around technology and participation in digital democracy in Taiwan, do you think that somehow prepared Taiwan society, and maybe also Taiwan government, for how to deal with technology in fighting the pandemic?

Yeah, I think the Sunflower Protests that turned into a demonstration, in a demo sense, where half a million people went to the street, many more online, deliberating thoroughly, nonviolently, around the parliamentarian area around the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement.

Arriving, after three weeks of occupy, on four demands, not one less, which got accepted by the head of the parliament, is a kind of boosting of the political culture around listening and open government because, at the end of 2014, all the mayors that supported citizen participation gets elected, sometimes surprisingly, and all the mayor that did not, did not.

Many of the people who were involved in that were quite young, so we’re talking about one generation there.

Yeah, they were in their 20s, or at most, 30s. At the end of 2014, we, the occupiers and facilitators, communicators around the Occupy, were hired essentially as what they called reverse mentors to the cabinet. For example, I personally worked in this office as kind of a understudy, in turn, on one side, but also consultant on the other side with Minister Jaclyn Tsai at the time.

She was in charge of the regulatory reform in responding to, for example, Uber, Airbnb, and such. We devised, using the same technology that powered the Occupy, the listening at scale technology that makes sure the people who gets affected by UberX, for example, can manage to agree on something that we can all live with.

That experience informed my relationship with the career public service, and then maybe they said that the understudy gets promoted into the full-time job. Then I become the digital minister, again in the same office.

For me, this is surprising because sometimes as a resident, it feels in some areas that Taiwan’s civil service can be bureaucratic, and can be quite conservative. It’s surprising that they were enlightened enough to institutionalize a mechanism like this.

That’s right. I think one of the main argument that the occupiers bring into this conversation is that it amortized, saves everybody’s time. Instead of taking a phone call and having to answer for the 100th time each frequently asked question about a trade agreement or about UberX, if you have a real-time deliberation that produces a rough consensus that could then be amplified using memes.

We don’t have a spokesdog back then, but we have a lot of very funny memes, and that will actually make any sort of citizen assembly, any deliberation, sortation and whatever, much more effective because the participant will be able then to amplify this process of arriving to a common understanding back to their communities. That’s exactly what the Sunflower Movement have done.

That technology on one side has exported to Hong Kong for the Umbrella Movement, but also incorporated into the public service. [laughs]

How large a part of Taiwan society do you think is on board or involved with that now? Clearly, Sunflower Movement was young people or a group of young people, but here, we have an aging society, actually, a rapidly aging society. What about the rest of the people?

Definitely. I think a lot of work was done during the referenda at the ‘18 that was around same marriage equality, where the older people think that marriage is really a relationship between two families, and the two newlyweds are representatives for their families.

We call it 姻親, or the in-law relationships, and there’s like eight different words for aunts and uncles. You know all about it, of course. For the younger people, of course it’s between individuals and not at all about representing their families, and so it’s different cultures.

When we have this direct democracy, when we have this referenda, the participation rate from both sides are very high. [laughs] People literally went to the streets, get into this fierce debate and deliberation, and finally, we settled on what we call a hyperlink act that legalized for same sex couples all the by-law relationships, but none of the in-law relationships.

In Mandarin we call it 結婚不結姻, which very clearly solved the problem for both sides because they respect the family values that’s respected on both generations. I think the referenda really mobilized the elderly people.

That’s really interesting. Now, you have called this whole complex a digital democracy. Can you explain, for the uninitiated, what that means? What’s the definition of that? What does it mean to you personally?

Certainly. In traditional, before digital technologies, we have maybe radio and television. With these, one person can speak to thousands of people, but there was no way for one person to listen at scale from thousands of people. There was no way for thousands of people to listen to one another. Now, with the digital technology, we can.

Instead of uploading just three bits per four years – that’s called voting, by the way – we can upload much more bits when it comes to public policy through presidential hackathons, sandboxes, e-petitions, participatory budgets, you name it. For me, personally, as a digital minister, I always say that this is not the same as the IT minister, because people in Japan often confuse the two. [laughs]

I often share the job description, which describes the difference between information technology on one side, and digital for digital democracy on the other. My job description, very short, goes like this. When we see the Internet of things, let’s make it the Internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let’s make it a shared reality.

When we see machine learning, let’s make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let’s make it about human experience. Whenever we hear the singularity is near, let us always remember that plurality is here.

I’ve heard you say that on stage before. [laughs] Now, can you maybe give a concrete example of one project or one of your areas of work where you have implemented that in the past couple of years?

Definitely. We just talked about the pandemic, but as I mentioned, the infodemic is actually much more serious before the pandemic. It affects not only our referenda, where disinformation was everywhere, but also the subsequent presidential election as well.

In the two years’ time between the mayoral and the presidential election, digital democracy coalition is made from collaborative fact-checkers, including the civic technology movement called gov zero, or g0v, that came up with this brilliant idea called Cofacts, collaborative fact-checking, where people on this end-to-end encrypted chat channel like WhatsApp, it’s called LINE here.

Whenever they see something that may be disinformation, they can long-press and forward it to this bot, which then do the fact-checking back. This then, just like flagging your email as spam, creates a trending rumor dashboard where the International Fact-Check Center members, for example, the Taiwan FactCheck Center, will then look into it.

There is also MyGoPen and other IFCN members, and collectively just collect the newest information and do a public attribution when there was actually a disinformation campaign from, say, foreign sources.

This is important, because instead of an administrative take-down, which would deprive people of the chance to learn about maybe our competence, this actually encourage everybody to learn about journalism, the importance of source checking and things like that, so that people can collectively make the reality check so that we stay in the same reality, in the same polity.

This also extends to, for example, honest advertisements, treating them as campaign donations from social media companies, banning foreign-sponsored propaganda on social media, and so on and so forth.

You talked about the infodemic. I think the reality of widespread disinformation campaigns in Western countries, this only became a mainstream issue after the last US presidential election and all the talk about Russia and so on. When did you identify this problem here for the first time?

Well, since very long ago, actually. I was one of the civic technologist teams that translated the original break-Great-Firewall software called Freenet. It goes way back, like in the early 2000s, when the Great Firewall was first being built, where the PRC shielded their citizenry from the open Internet, but then pushes out propaganda to the open Internet.

I became aware of that I think for the past 20 years. Collectively as a society, I think for example, when the PRC spread a message that Taiwan doesn’t need an observer status at the World Health Organization or World Health Assembly, because the PRC can take care of the health of the people in the Taiwan jurisdiction, and so on. That is, of course, false, and really a disinformation.

We’ve been encountering that for the past few years already.

We’ve still seen over the last two years, well, maybe since in the run-up to the last local elections, we’ve still seen the government here sometimes being a bit helpless in the face of a disinformation campaign. How do I square that with all the work you’ve been doing?

The humor over rumor playbook…Sorry, let’s do this again. I think that humor over rumor playbook really differs from ministry to ministry. For example, the Ministry of Health and Welfare, with their spokesdog, of course, is the shining example, so is the Ocean Affairs Council, and things like that.

Of course, if the ministry is less people-facing, or if there’s a local level government, sometimes they do not yet have the budgetary or the talent that’s required to follow that triple two principle, that is whenever there is a trending rumor, pushes out a humor within the two hours, in two pictures, at less than 200 characters each.

I think we meet these goals when [non-English speech] become our spokesperson, right after the local-level election, but yeah, of course, this is still a work in progress.

Judging from what you’ve seen since the Sunflower Movement and Taiwan society embracing all this stuff, what is your expectation, like how long it will take to change that, all of Taiwan government, to make them more capable in terms of digital technology and responding to these things in a better way?

A lot of it is removing the fear, uncertainty, and doubt when it comes to digital transformation.

If the public service think, oh, the digital is just one more inbox, one more thing to tick, one more extra hour to put in every day, and so on, that will not gain any acceptance, which is why, in the Presidential Hackathon, where our president hands out a trophy to five teams every year, most of those teams are collaborations or even initiated by the trenches, people in the front-line career public service.

They may innovate, for example, one of the recent winners is a Pokémon Go-like game where it prompts people to go to water refill stations to refill their bottles instead of buying new plastic bottles. By completing these missions, they can visit tea shops, things like that.

This is brilliant way to advocate for a more circular economy, more eco-friendly lifestyle, and is fully endorsed by the Environmental Protection Agency. When it reduces their time, when it saves their risk, and also much more importantly, when the EPA is given full credit for the work that they do working with the social sector, then it transforms that particular agency.

I wouldn’t say that there’s a linear process. It all depends on where the social sector cares enough to fork the government – important pronunciation, fork – by taking the existing government policies and make a more creative alternative, and then we merge it back with the public sector.

For some agencies, it’s already a given, and for some agencies – like we never had secondment from the National Defense Ministry, for some reason – I don’t know how long it will take. [laughs]

That would be a challenge in any country probably. [laughs] For example, the Presidential Hackathon, how was that developed or how did that start?

It started with a very simple idea called g0v Grant. It initially prototyped in the social in the social, where the people who have a good idea gets into a peer-reviewed process.

Instead of just reviewing and giving scores and so on, there’s some matchmaking to make sure that each team have what we have trilingual expertise, that is to say, experts from both the public sector and the private sector, of course initiated by the social sector.

This is important, because only then it will become a feasible and sustainable data collaborative, instead of having the social entrepreneurs carry all the cost. The same applies to the mask availability map, actually. By looking at the data for social good, that’s another initiative starting in the civil society and the g0v grants, we decide to elevate it to the presidential office.

Dr. Tsai personally work with our investor-at-large, [non-English speech] , to design the system. I’m merely the convener of the jury. I don’t give scores, but I make sure that the trilingual communication is a smooth as possible by essentially doing cultural translation between the three expertise.

If you had to explain to someone who is really not in these circles at all, like, I don’t know, someone who is much older and is not…

Like my grandma, 87 years old.

OK, yeah. If you had to explain to her or someone uninitiated how your future work agenda is formulated, is that…does it always come bottom-up and from the social sector, or do you sometimes also make some plan and set some priorities? How do you plan that on what to do next?

It’s entirely crowdsourced, that is to say, people-powered, but my definition of people is a little bit broader. I will say this to my grandma. Grandma, nowadays, only people over 20 years old in Taiwan get to have a vote. We’re working on lowering it to 18 years old.

My work, the citizens’ initiative since Presidential Hackathon, has plenty of people who are just 16 years old, 15 years old, proposing circular economy designs to ban the use of plastic straws from national identity drinks such as bubble tea, and things like that. It give a voice and participation initiative voice to people who were previously disenfranchised. It doesn’t stop there.

We also have people who are experts in environment that can talk on behalf of mountains, rivers, and future generations, who doesn’t traditionally have a vote in traditional representative systems. This work is just to “enfranchise these disenfranchised people,” and I put that in airy quotes.

This is kind of off-topic, but now that you’ve mentioned the straws and national identity drink, banning the straws, that was in the news a long time ago, that that had been decided.

That’s right, and it was initiated by a 16-years-old.

Yeah. When do you think it’s really going to work out? I don’t see people…

For indoor drinking, it’s already banned. For take outs, usually they use a more decomposable or even carbon-neutral materials for that. During the pandemic, for a few months, we relaxed that ban, because people were wary of washable utensils and so on, but as of last month, I think we put that ban back again.

I see. Sometimes, if you walk around in the outdoors, and at the beach, or in nature, you might want to despair…

That’s why we need a Pokémon Go game.

Can we take a big step back, and can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and how it all started? I understand that you decided to discontinue or drop out of school very early. Maybe let’s go back a little even further. Where does your passion for digital technology come from? When you were growing up, when you were a kid, when did you and how did you first encounter that?

Sure. I encountered a programming book. I think it was GW-BASIC or something.

Where did that come from?

I think it was just on the bookshelf, because one of my uncles – actually, two of my uncles – work in the information industry. It’s natural that they have programming books in our house, and I just read it.

Because I was very interested in mathematics at the time, but I’m very bad at math, that is to say, manual calculation, so this is like a super calculator that can take of all the calculation for me, where I can then focus on the higher concepts of mathematics, so that’s really good.

The only problem was that we don’t have a personal computer at home. I started to draw on an A4 paper the QWERTY keyboard and just type on that paper, and write what the computer was saying back to me. To me, computational thinking doesn’t require a computer. Of course, after a while, my parents relented and got me a personal computer. [laughs]

What year are we talking about?

That was 1989.

Oh, wow. OK, yes.

I was eight years old.

When did you get that personal computer?

It was maybe like three weeks or so after I start drawing on paper.

When you were drawing on paper and typing on that paper keyboard, how would you have computational thinking? Because I’m not a technology person, I find that just really hard to grasp.

It’s actually quite simple. On the book that I read, it says that if you type for example, CLS enter, that you will clear the screen. CLS stands for clear screen. I will just erase whatever, because I write using a pencil, not a pen. [laughs] I would just, with an eraser, do what the computer would do, which is to clear the screen.

Or if you type in print “Hello World” with the Hello World in quotes, then I would just type this on the paper keyboard and write Hello World, which is what the computer will print. You’ll see that’s very simple.

It’s very labor-intensive.

It is very labor-intensive. It’s actually very difficult to go beyond certain chapters in the book, which is why my parents relented and got me a personal computer. Then I would just go to the Guanghua market, which was a popular market in Taipei at the time selling computer games and things like that.

Instead of buying those games, I would just play the games a little bit in the market and go back home and, as an exercise, recreate those games using the personal computer. One of my earliest games I coded was teaching the concept of fractionals, so that between zero and one, there will be some colored balloons and you can guess where the balloons are.

Maybe you guess three divided by five, and then a line goes in here and then miss narrowly the balloon. Maybe you will try something more like 6 divided by 10 and you will see the line goes into exactly the same place and so on. Basically, it’s an educational game. My younger brother loves it.

At the time.

At the time.

How much younger than you?

Four years younger. He was like four or five.

That’s ideal. How understanding were your parents of that? Were they technology literate? You said your uncles were.

My uncles were working at Acer, later at Acer Peripheral, later at BenQ, so of course, a technologist. My parents were both professional journalists. They, of course, learned to type because at that time, digital transformation, [laughs] the first wave was taking place in the journalism business. They were not mathematicians or people who specialized in technologies.

Although my dad really liked philosophy. The earlier education that he gave me, which is this Socrates-like thinking, which is that he never teaches me anything as a doctrine, but rather whenever I think of something, then I think it’s really true. He would just question me which precondition is it true. This philosophical logic training really stuck with me.

My first science fair project, coding with a computer that won the top prize in the junior high school science fair, was just teaching computer to do reasoning. Nowadays, we will call it artificial intelligence.

What made you decide then later to leave school?

Because I won the science fair, it gives me a free ticket into a prestigious senior high school. I really don’t have to attend classes anymore. I have much more time to spend on the very new thing at the time called the World Wide Web, and that was 1996. I was 15 years old.

I discovered that the future of human knowledge is being published for free on this Cornell University website called arXiv or archive. The cutting edge papers even before the journals publication were all there. When I write to the authors, they write back because they didn’t know I was just 15 years old. We started working together. All my textbooks feel so out of date.

I told myself teachers, “I want to quit school and start my education on Wide Web.” They told me that, “You better talk to the head of the school, the principal.” I briefed the principal. She thought about it for a minute and said, “OK, from tomorrow, you don’t have to go to school anymore and I will cover for you.” That’s the beginning of my optimism about career in public service innovation.

That’s amazing. That was extremely unusual at the time.

Afterwards, Taiwan would then pass that experimental education act. Nowadays, up to 10 percent of Taiwanese students can choose their own curriculum much as I did at the time. At this time, of course, it was illegal. [laughs] If the principal turned me in, I will be fined literally every day.

At the time, wouldn’t you have been required to participate in exams? There must have been records of which students need to participate in if you’re not there.

My principal basically faked the records. Now, of course, the prosecution period is over so I can talk about it.

That’s been very helpful for your development. I can see that.

That’s public sector innovation.

In past speeches and stuff, you’ve talked about the importance of radical transparency and civil participation. There was particularly one TED Talk where you spoke about that. Can you explain what those terms mean and why they are so important to society?

Sure. Radical transparency means transparency at the root. Meaning that we publish not only the what of the policies already made, but the why of the policies being made. All the lobbying, all the interviews that I give, including this very one, I put an extra recorder next to the journalist’s one and we publish the full transcript.

We, of course, can embargo after you publish as a journalistic privilege. For lobbyists, we always publish after, at most, 10 days of co-editing. That ensures that the lobbyists can only lobby from the standpoint of public interest.

This is very important because people would be able then, like completing a puzzle together, to add on the societal, the environmental, the economic values on one emerging technology without distracting each away from the name calling or whatever adversarial comment they may make, if not for radical transparency.

Transparency at a root to get people into the idea of a minister’s office is very important because in mentoring digital minister, Chih-Wei, also means a plurality of ministers, many, many ministers. Anyone who just look at my radical transparency website can see exactly how many meetings that I have held, 1,400 or so

I talked to 5,000 people since I’ve become Digital Minister in almost 300,000 paragraphs. Everybody can with a full text search to see why the policy is being made, what arguments are being made and, therefore, either protest or contribute with a full context instead of a partial context. This is a basis of civic participation for meaningful participation.

We’ve talked about the infodemic before, information operations, and disinformation, all this stuff. Do you ever worry that this very open structure and wide participation, that it could somehow get turned against democracy?

If I’m your friend and we meet, nowadays, the CECC press conference is every week, so we don’t meet every day, but every week. All the phone calls, that’s the 1922 toll-free number, I always pick up. If you hear something that is a rumor, that is disinformation against me, your instinct will be, “Oh, I’ll check with Audrey” on the next time we meet.

If I respond only every quarter and only in very difficult-to-understand legalese language, then, of course, you would tend to believe those disinformation and rumors. Humor over rumor talks about the packaging.

Radical transparency actually provides the context that makes sure that everybody can, if they put in some hours, they can become amateur epidemiologists and amateur policymakers that can then share the context to other people as well.

You have a very quick brain. You have the bandwidth to do this, but many people don’t. In modern society and with the modern politics and in today’s world, it’s so complicated with the mere body of knowledge that is there that you could potentially try to acquire. It just exceeds any single individual’s bandwidth.

I’m not talking about a jury system, although we are introducing something like that in Taiwan now. What I’m talking about is citizens’ initiatives. People who care about banning plastic straws will learn whatever there is to learn about the plastic policy.

Of course, they will not then cross over to become epidemiologists, but at least they will build a mutual trust with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Ministry of Health and Welfare. When the next time the spokesdog says something, they know who to reach. Not necessarily because they share the same topic, but they share this mutual trust.

If we try to get back to something slightly more concrete again, can you share some thoughts on whether there are lessons to draw for other democratic societies on how to use technology for government or to improve government services and to improve the relationship between government and society in other countries?

Definitely. The main lesson I would advise is to bring technology to where people are, instead of asking people to come to the technology. When a technology is appropriate technology, it could be appropriated by the citizens.

The idea, very simply put, is that all the reference implementations to say the digital services that the government makes is almost always open API and open data, in a sense that people would want to make a different language version of it. People would want to interact with it not as a website but as a chat bot or a virtual reality.

People who have seen difficulties who would prefer voice assistant and so on, if they say, “Why don’t you think of us?” we can always say, “Hey, the data, the API, the source code is here, so make it the way that you want.” This open innovation is the key to your procurement rules in your jurisdiction.

If your procurements does not have a rule, as we have put in, that says for each and every human-interactable part, there needs to be a equivalent machine-interactable API, a machine-readable and writable part. Otherwise, the vendor could be disqualified for discriminating against robots. We don’t quite say that, but that’s the idea. [laughs]

That will open up, unlock the potentials of digital service. If you instead say, “Oh, we will just sue people who make alternate versions of our government digital services,” then, of course, you will have no solidarity with the social sector and civic technologists.

To what extent do these things work in parts of society and politics that are more traditional? I’m thinking of the soft underbelly of talent politics. If you go to some more rural areas in the south, there’s still very, very strong and deep-rooted networks with corruption and people just like…It’s all banking in favors.

How do you create or bring this kind of radical transparency to those structures? I don’t see how that can work.

Indeed, the campaign donation and finance is now published as raw open data for all the parliamentarians. It’s a great norm that Facebook also adhere to in their advertisement library and things like that. If you look at some county councils, they don’t have that rule. They don’t publish as transparently as the Legislative Yuan, which is, I believe, the culture that you were alluding to.

I don’t have a good answer, because we see participation offices, these kind of networks in, for example, Tainan City. That’s because Mayor Lai Ching-te, back in 2014, that was his campaign promise, so is Dr. Ko Wen-je in Tapei City. Nowadays, Cheng Wen-tsan in Taoyuan City also exclusively says that is the goal of that municipality.

For the six municipalities, it’s easier mostly because they have a better resource for this cross-agency collaboration similar to the system that we have built on the central government level. For the counties that do not have these resources, I really don’t have an idea. In the longer term, we will see that people who are educated under the new K-12 curriculum take more matters to their hearts.

When the people who are senior high school students nowadays, knowing that they can start initiative and determine even the curriculum in their school with student participation and so on become public servants and become the majority of the electorate in the county level, then maybe we will see a cultural change there, too.

As you probably can see with the aging society, that will take anywhere from 15 to 20 years.

That’s a long time. Maybe wrapping up, if you look at other countries in Asia like neighboring countries, which one would resemble Taiwan most or closest when it comes to digital democracy?

I just participated in a UK Committee of the House of Lords. I’m one of their witness. The other one was from New Zealand. [laughs]

Obviously, New Zealand is the closest because in terms of the human rights watchdog group, CIVICUS Monitor, only Taiwan and New Zealand in the whole Asia-Pacific are the society with a completely open civic freedoms of the press, of the assembly, of speech, and so on. We’re the closest when it comes to civic participation with New Zealand.

There are other societies in Asia that are highly technology literate or where digital technologies are omnipresent, thinking of South Korea, for example.

When we introduced the mask availability map in February, I believe that they immediately, the civic technologists there, said that, “If Taiwan can do this, why can’t Korea?” Within a month, they adopted. The first map that worked there was actually also from Tainan City from Feng Jiang Qiao. The counterpart there was just 14 years old. I just met them over a video conference last week.

They don’t speak Mandarin. Feng Jiang Qiao doesn’t speak Korean, but it’s fine. They both speak JavaScript. There’s very good collaboration between the Taiwanese civic tech group and Japan, and so is Korea. We even had a hackathon together at Okinawa, which was the midpoint between the three before the pandemic.

What about Western societies, either the US or in Europe? Do you see similar structures as well?

Definitely. Our participatory budget system owes a lot to the consult system developed in Madrid and later on improved in Barcelona. That’s after the 15-M Movement. Our e-petition system is a blatant adaptation of Better Reykjavik from Iceland, the Icelandic Pirates and the best party there.

Estonia, of course, informs a lot of our conversations around the balancing between the societal and the economic agenda when it comes to digital transformation. The list goes on. One of my first co-creator of the public digital innovation space here is a professional designer trained in the CIID in Copenhagen. The designers also came from Policy Lab in UK and so on.

I will say that we are just this projection, almost like an ambassador from this digital world that is already well-versed in multi-stakeholder governance and projecting what we have learned all the way from IETF to Ethereum to traditional politics.

In Taiwan, you said it’s a projection. Do you think it’s more present or it’s more dominant in policy making because of your role?

I think of a Buckminster Fuller quote. This is a paraphrase. If you don’t like a old system, don’t fight with it, instead, invent a new system that will render the old system obsolete. I wouldn’t say that everybody in Taiwan thinks digital democracy has made traditional politics obsolete, as was the local level council dynamic that we just talked about.

It doesn’t have to be everybody. If the municipal participate offices, if the reverse mentors are still very active as the Youth Advisory Group and so on, belief in this system, really see the old system’s weaknesses, but instead of just fighting against the old system, enrich the new system as we see during the pandemic everywhere where the CECC is.

Even on the most rural places, the convenience store staff acted as essentially frontline support unit to make sure that the very elderly people and migrant workers who don’t have a SIM card to their name can still use their National Health Insurance card to get medical masks from the kiosk in the convenience store. That’s digital service, too.

Later on, they will also learn to file their income tax using that system. Slowly, bit by bit, people do see that a newer system saves time, reduces risk, and improve mutual trust.

Whether the R value is very high, meaning that we will get into the state of digital democracy in just a few years, or if the R value of this new idea we’re spreading is slightly lower, which means that it will take a decade or so, I don’t really know because that depends on each and every social innovator.

I could go on like this for another hour.

I know. Another day, maybe. [laughs]

It’s really fascinating. I just said to wrap up, sorry, can I ask you one last question?

Sure.

Is there somebody or a particular piece of art, literature, an idea, or whatever that is your source of inspiration?

Definitely. I always quote Leonard Cohen in the song “Anthem,” which goes like this. “Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, the crack in everything, and that’s how the light gets in.”

If the government insists to be perfect, then there’s no way for citizen technologists to contribute. If we admit our failures quickly, then people with better ideas can supplement the democracy and eventually make democracy truly with the people.

That’s beautiful. Thanks very much.

Thank you.

It’s been a pleasure. I think you probably met one of my colleagues. We had a guy who’s now in South Korea. He’s called Edward White. He was based here before.

Thank you.

Thanks very much for…