Thank you.

Cool.

That may be true. It can be true.

Maybe you can talk with it a little more. [laughs]

You can open the link in.

I don’t know. Maybe in a couple of days. We’ll send it for a transcription service.

Ning Yeh, he has already done it.

The transcript?

Yeah. We have our weekly meeting starting in 10 minutes. [laughs]

My pleasure.

...working on whistleblowing or working on protecting the human right there and so on. It’s not a coincidence that the headquarter of Reporters Without Border is in Taiwan, because we’re kind of a hub, which we can provide 100 percent freedom of speech to any foreign journalists working on whistleblowing ...

Yeah. There’s many journalists...

Especially in the cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, or other more Pacific-Ocean-facing cities, it’s actually not that hard. Of course, I can’t talk the same about the inland cities. Even the Internet infrastructure are still brittle there, and it’s very difficult. Especially in the coastal cities, it’s ...

Not that hard.

You have to find a friendly civic hacker at the moment, which is not the hard part...

I also give lectures to anyone who’d want to use this kind of intranet democratic systems. There’s free software communities in the PRC also who are very interested in this kind of systems. They’re also using it domestically, and they’re...

For example, Sandstorm.io is one of the systems that I brought into the public service here, and for it to work in a very firewalled, cyber security hardened way, but it’s still a collaborative software. We pay quite a bit to hackers to try to attack it and harden it.

It’s not illegal to operate such networks per se, it’s just the content that’s being censored. Part of our contribution is to make sure that even in a restrictive environment inside an intranet controlled by a corporate or a state, we can still run collaborative technologies securely inside it.

Yeah, but then after you download the first copy from the dark net, you can replicate it very easily.

They can download through what we call the dark net.

They are having this debate as we speak. Maybe it’s not a lost cause... I am not that pessimistic.

What we’re trying to do, again, is just popularize these kind of open innovation ecosystems. Let the people in PRC see that this is not actually this level the way they imagined it. It could be a useful open innovation either for their economic sector. Internally, they’re having this debate ...

Without shutting the whole thing down, yeah. We’re seeing a lot of decentralized technology that’s shaped this way. I don’t think, even technologically speaking, PRC has an upper hand in continuing their censorship regime.

It’s not that easy, though. Especially Ethereum, is becoming one of the clearinghouses even of MasterCard. Other systems are using or trying to use the Ethereum technology. It’s becoming a new generation of Internet protocol. On it, it’s even harder to censor things. You can’t take things off. If they ...

Especially the blockchain related systems, unless they don’t want Ethereum and Bitcoin inside PRC.

It’s becoming more technically challenging, yes. But on the other hand, the VPN technology is also improving. I’m not exactly pessimistic. The current generation of VPNs may be shut down more easily, but there’s more generations.

All the things on GitHub that reveals the past, or some people want to hidden the cultures of the PRC, they are still plainly visible on GitHub and on blockchain systems. I do not think that the PRC now has the absolute dominance on information access. In fact, there are ...

If they cut out GitHub, if they cut out the blockchain systems, even though they may be shielding themselves away from some inharmonious speech, the scientific programs would suffer greatly. At the moment, PRC’s science factions are still winning this battle. They are still allowing access to these international networks.

In PRC, you may think that their great firewall is a lot of power. Still, they cannot shut down the open source collaboration website, GitHub, because they have a scientific community. Their artificial intelligence and other research community, they need connection to the open source world to thrive.

Not overnight, but perhaps in the future. I still have hope.

This is existential proof that information technology can be used in an active way, rather than a passive way. As an existential proof, again, it’s up to people to see that this is a preferable alternative to violence. We are not directly saying that our system must be transplanted to ...

What we’re doing is not directly in opposition to that. What we’re trying to show is that if people voluntarily contribute, instead of being passively scored, it actually results in better collective decisions.

The resilience of the civil society is key, because the resilience is around people who care strongly about social issues. In Taiwan, there’s people who care about our environment very much. There’s people who care about animal rights. There’s people who care about LGBTQ issues. All these are not restricted ...

Yeah, I think so. A little bit of plate conflict and earthquake may not be a bad thing in the end, because Taiwan grows five centimeters every year because of earthquake. What we need to do is work on the infrastructure, the building material of democracy, so that when every ...

Bit by bit, we’re not saying that we’re able to make the blue-green thing go away. Just 5,000 people every time, we were able to change people’s perspectives and find common values.

Together, we shaped the civil society’s expectations on diplomacy without actually changing the time zone. It’s very well received by both sides of the position. 8,000 people on each side is 16,000 people, it’s a lot.

It doesn’t really help the cost in the long run. We were able to say, "This will cost this much money, not too much benefit. This much money may be better spent on promoting Taiwan’s uniqueness overseas." Then, we were able to brainstorm various ways for the Minister of Culture, ...

They were also able to agree, because we checked with all the facts, that it’s not really energy save thing. It may complicate the labor schedule and things like that. At the end, it doesn’t really help because while you may make international news briefly, the PRC can just say, ...

Our collaboration workshop, we’re able to find the petitioners on both sides. The two of them both came to talk with all the different ministries to find our common values. We were able to discover through that collaborative workshop our common value is to make Taiwan more visible, more visible ...

We did already helped with some very concrete cases, like in our e-petition there was a petition with 8,000 people petitioning for Taiwan to change our time zone to the same as Japan and Korea as symbolic moving away from the PRC. There’s also 8,000 people petitioning for us to ...

I think so.

It’s not directly on the referendum or the elections, but we’re creating a environment where prior to any referendum or any voting there’s better understanding.

If the public service trusts the people more, then the people have more power to set agenda. If the public service doesn’t trust the people, the people never really get a say anyway. I would say I’m not working directly with a representative democracy or traditional democracies, but through this ...

Yes, exactly. That’s right, or anywhere.

It is facilitator. Even now, in the role of Digital Minister, I’m still primarily a facilitator. I never give command to ministries or public servants. Usually they come to me.

Not much, because I was kind of an understudy, already, in 2015. I worked, already, with thousands of public servants, but always in the role of a coach. They have something they don’t know how to engage with people. They find me, and then I try to give lectures and...

Not much.

Very much so. I’m enjoying it.

I’m like, "Well, I can give it a try." It was Lin Chuan who, during the redefinition of the Asia Silicon Valley plan that brought me into the discussion, and then asked me to find a minister.

No, it was Premier Lin Chuan’s idea. After this was ratified, it was August 2016. Around the time it was ratified, Lin Chuan was trying to find someone in a role of Jaclyn Tsai in the previous cabinet. Has asked me, and I said I can ask around my friends. ...