Thank you very much.

I don’t have any other questions. It’s been incredibly interesting. Thank you very much for taking the time. Thanks for being so thorough with the answers and everything. It’s great. Really useful, thank you.

From reading, I think it might have been the Medium post which accompanied this. One of the sentences that stood out, which was about trying to reduce the level of fear that public servants have when they go about their job. Is that a challenge that you’re yet to overcome?

Is just an understanding of the way that people communicate, particularly online, that you’ve built up through being part of these communities online over the space of time?

All of this seems to be built on this incredibly subtle understanding of the way that people communicate and think with each other. Is that something that just comes intuitively, or is it based on research and focus groups?

Coupled with that, I suppose, is how do you engage people who have a low level of technological literacy, who maybe don’t turn a computer on every day, or feel alienated by it? I realize that in Taiwan, there’s a lot of emphasis put on going out into communities and ...

Just thinking about scale, because you mentioned that Taiwan is a very concentrated geography. Does this approach become more difficult the larger the landmass, the larger the number of people?

Sorry, I’m going to steal one more.

I don’t want to keep you all day, so finally, I just wanted to ask, what’s next on the agenda? What’s your plan for the immediate future?

Comparing now to your own experience of the education system, does it come from an idea then that the education system, when you were growing, was lacking or failed in a particular way?

Empathy is something you mentioned earlier as well. I find really interesting as well this idea that, especially because it seems that the Internet has become a breeding ground for a lack of empathy, especially in United States. It seems that it can be a tool for people you would ...

Is it something that you think about often? Does it come off in your work or be found up in any obstacles as a result of that?

You’re Taiwan’s first transgender minister?

I hope you don’t mind me asking a personal question, but...

Is that problem solved in the design then? Do you need the commitment to the democratic process from the beginning then in order to make sure that you aren’t taking power away from people who ultimately are using the service and are benefiting from it?

At the same time, if you take this approach to the design work, whereby you make it as...You’re almost limiting yourself in the way that you’re able to exercise that power that you have. I think that’s interesting, especially when, like you were saying earlier on, about how there is ...

One thing I found really interesting in this is where power sits in this new way of doing things. With you being with the people who are build systems and services and things like that, you would think that the power lies in the hands of the people who are ...

That’s very good.

...a bad poet.

Yep. When did you decide to make radical transparency your approach to your work? Was it straightforward from the beginning or did you find there were difficulties that you had to overcome?

When you entered government, did you see the public service as prepared for the reforms you wanted to do, or is this a decade-long project that you’re having to work? Are you finding the average public servant easy to work with? Are they open to the changes that you want ...

One thing I was interested about was, why has this happened in Taiwan? What is particular to Taiwan that has enabled this to emerge in such a strong way?

Has that been the project from the beginning, then? Being able to think to try and think about technology not as an-add to politics, not as an app that you can just stick on the end of a government service, but something that from the very beginning is going to ...

It seems that for your work, and through the work of public servants in Taiwan, there’s this constant commitment to making sure, to thinking about what democracy means in the current era, how technology will interact with democracy, and how you can help it to fulfill its promise through that.

This is interesting. There’s a quote I remember that seems to be particularly relevant, is that, and I think it’s what some of the public digital was saying from the very beginning. That’s, "Software is politics now," and it probably has been for much longer than people realize.

Did you feel that the potential danger of technology back end when the movement was creating the vTaiwan platform then? Did you see the potential for online spaces to be potentially damaging to debate?

Meanwhile, you build a network or a system that allows people to make collective decision making in a collaborative way, which negates all of that, and takes out the conflict, and the reduction of debate.

I see. That’s interesting, because it seems over the past two years, at least, the threats from technology have come to the fore far more than the potential benefits. I’m thinking of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the weaponization of Facebook and other social networks.

If you could expand on that a little, about what that means in terms of the practicalities of governing.

I wanted to ask about that, actually, with the g0v link. I was reading some of your earlier interviews before I came out here. There was a point you made, I think, about it’s having technologists work with government and not for them.

Did you have any idea when you first went along to those protests in 2014 that it would lead to this point now, with a cabinet position, being able to implement some of the ideas that the movement was thinking at that time? Did you imagine back then that this ...

Yeah.

You begin this process of working out how to transfer that movement into politics itself, and how you can bring some of those reforms.

When Sean mentioned that he was meeting you and were arranging a webinar, I jumped on the chance to talk to you about your own work, and the history of your work. It’s fascinating. It would be great to dig into some of that. Just so I’m sure, in 2014, ...

Then write them up in a way that means that your average public servant can get a grasp of the issues that are behind things, and work out how they may be able to approach them themselves.

That’s based on what people who are working in roles like yours should be reading about and should know about. That’s my role for Apolitical, in that I cover our digital government side of the things. I have, for the past year, been trying to get my head around things ...

Perfect. To give you a bit of background into what it is I do, we have the network function as part of what we do, but we also try to publish journalism about policy, the policymakers, and how people are working.

Sure.

We’ll consider. That’s really interesting. It was good to hear that High Speed Two has traveled over to Taiwan.

I’m afraid that would not be possible.

A lot of our system isn’t electrified yet. There’s a history to it, which I think has been ignored up until this point. It’s a really interesting topic.

It’s such a huge amount of money. As in, it could have been spent doing lots more basic things on the northern railways, maybe, and just making sure...There are still diesel trains that run up north, rather than electric.

That’s where the growth opportunity is. London can only grow so big. Dragging more people into London [inaudible 16:54] , it’s going to have a limit, I think. That’s what a lot of people are questioning, I think, with the investment itself.

Especially because a lot of people are questioning why we were building this in the first place. It connects towns to London, but then a lot of people are arguing that it’s not about connecting places to London. It’s about connecting places in the north of the country to each ...

Exactly, which is a bad sign, isn’t it?

That is definitely an interesting thing. We could look into that.

Especially because it’s such a huge investment as well. There’s so much political investment in it now that people’s careers are on the line if they backtrack, or if it goes dramatically over budget. I think as a result of that, the consultation has been going badly.

It’s still seen as a thing 10 years down the line, even though they are starting to build it now. Certainly, these communities that are on the line itself which are being affected, which people care about, which is difficult.

It’s badly managed, the whole thing. There’s so many towns on the route which are going to be flattened in order to drive it through those. I think the consultation has been limited to non-existent for the entire time. It will be an interesting thing to get into. We could ...

Oh, OK, yeah.