This is clearly not authorized by the law, so now we are systematically, every week, reviewing these kind of interpretations and making them obsolete if the law doesn’t authorize it. Again, this makes the government a co-creator with the startups, not the regulator.

For people who want to telecommunicate with their patient, like remote consultation, the act doesn’t say anything, but the Minister of Health and Welfare made an interpretation. Essentially said, "Maybe not the best idea."

The law doesn’t say you can’t do this, but interpretation says you can’t do this. Case in point, in our Psychotherapists Act there is a thing that says that psychotherapists need to work in a specific clinic, but it doesn’t say whether the patient, the client, need to be on ...

This, coupled with the new NDC, the National Development Council’s point that any startup or any innovative company who can identify a interpretation of the law that’s blocking their business model while not explicitly contradicting the law.

It shifts the government’s role from someone who regulates to someone who co-creates. We’re going to do this for driverless cars, also, and even for general Public Sandbox Act.

If it succeeds, if the society think it’s a good idea, then it falls on the regulatory body to change their regulation. They now have an easier time doing so because the society have experience and know that it’s a good thing.

The act says, "OK, it’s good, and you can break those regulations for 6 months or 12 months." For this period you need to, of course, still keep consumer protection, cyber security, etc., in mind, but, most importantly, if this fails you need to write a post-mortem and have the ...

I will take another example. For example, this week we’re going to pass the FinTech Sandbox Act. The act is designed so that people say, "OK we’re going to have a financial instrument that’s not quite banking, not quite insurance, not quite whatever, but we’re going to break some regulations."

Many of those incentives are what the private sector needs. Previously the regulations, the regulatory body was seen as something that’s not helping, that’s blocking these market forces.

Also, a law passed last week. We incentivized angel investors so that for every year for three million NT dollars a private VC can enjoy tax deductions when they involve their money in early-stage startup companies.

It’s very new. Taiwan has never done anything like this that says, "OK, we want to be a friendly place." Of course, this is something only government can do. The private sector can’t do this.

Last week, actually, we passed the Foreign Talent Act, where we give foreign talents a lot of incentives of staying in Taiwan. Not necessarily working for one particular job, but giving lectures, having digital nomad lifestyle, and things like that.

It’s too general to answer this way. I would say that there are things that only government can do, such as, for example, laws and regulations.

The Foundation?

What we’re encouraging is this kind of cross-discipline, cross-domain startups. We’re not, essentially, saying, "OK, a pure software development vertical is going to be incubated from Taiwan." We’re not saying this.

Because that’s the beauty of the current generation of software is that it’s not a specialized vertical anymore. You can add some AI as automation to pretty much any field.

I don’t think Taiwan is suddenly becoming the software-only or software, even, as a prime sector, but we are, of course, encouraging young people who specialize in software or in AI to work within existing...not necessarily hardware. It could be agriculture. It could be manufacturing. It could be any kind ...

It’s always been Taiwan’s roadmap, since the PC days. The idea is that, for example, people buy a personal computer because they want to run VisiCalc or Lotus 1-2-3 on it. It’s important to have software, but on the other hand the software is there to advance this new form ...

There’s plenty of software people there. They work within a hardware ecosystem. Their software is meant to further the possibility of hardware.

Not necessarily. In Taiwan there’s a lot of software talent that works in tandem with hardware. For example, recently Google just built its largest mixed hardware/software team base anywhere right in Taiwan by, essentially, acquiring a huge team from HTC. That team has been working with Google for 10 years.

Yes.

If the petition was about a rural area, like HengChun or PengHu, we actually go there and have a town hall meeting.

It’s not ideas. It’s clarification of facts. If it’s people who express their sentiments, I, of course, accept their sentiments. On the other hand, if they get 5,000 people on the e-petition site, then it’s binding for the ministry to reply it point by point and meet in their neighborhood ...

It’s most out of necessity that someone has to carry on the project and all of the political will to build a open government, open policymaking, and also the will of the crowd who want to see this experiment taken to its logical conclusion and see what happens.

It’s a better way for me to say, "OK, I’m just a channel. I’m not speaking for any particular NGO, or whatever, but people want to see a different way of doing policymaking. I’m willing to experiment." That’s my mandate.

A lot of the principles, such as my telecommuting, my not involving confidential meetings, radical transparency, all this wasn’t entirely my idea. It’s essentially what the crowd would like to see me do.

During August and September last year I had this public Ask Me Anything on ask.pdis.tw. All the journalists, everybody who want me to do anything, I will be engaged in this month-long process of online interaction of what people would like Audrey Tang to do.

Then the prime minister at the time, Lin Chuan, asked me to find someone who would essentially serve minister Jaclyn Tsai’s role in the new cabinet. I asked around, and generally people don’t think it’s worth it to abandon their jobs to join the public service, and so on, but ...

Of course, it’s not just appointed people. The career public servant force must also be capable of communicating. It’s not sufficient to be willing to communicate. One has to be capable of communicate.

Afterwards, there was a election. Tsai Ing-wen got elected, and she also campaigned on the idea of open government, and also...what was the slogan? "The government most capable of communicating." That was her platform.

They very much agree this kind of tech-oriented, or even AI-mediated discussion. We made many cases. I, along with other occupiers, we basically put training camps and taught thousands of public servants of this way of doing consultations, essentially.

She works closely with the deputy prime minister, and then afterwards prime minister Simon Chang, who was in Google as regional director of hardware. They speak the same language as the civic tech people, obviously, coming from multinationals.

At the time I was this independent consultant or adviser to the cyberspace minister. At the time, Minister Jaclyn Tsai, who worked in IBM Asia as head of Asian legal department.

The occupiers, the civic tech people who supported them, were then invited as mentors and advisers to the public administration. From that point on I, as a consultant, or as a adviser, handled many cases, such as the Uber case, the Airbnb case, the closely-held companies, Internet liquor sales, many ...

All the people who didn’t say transparency in their campaign lost the election in the mayoral election. Because of this, the prime minister at the time, Jiang Yi-huah, resigned. There’s a new prime minister, Mao Chi-kuo at the time, that said, "OK, from now in crowdsourcing and open data are ...

At the end of that year, at end of 2014, there was a peaceful revolution. At the end of 2014 many occupiers, or pro-occupiers, get elected mayors. There’s several mayors who people didn’t expect them to be mayors, but they were, nevertheless, elected.

My role here is mostly to make sure that people in the civic tech, civic technology community, people in the NGO, in the activist community, people working in media and journalists share the same vocabulary, the same space, the same tools. I’m not actively involved in those specific project, but ...

This underlines the participatory budget, or any other related effort, because if people don’t have the whole picture they tend to propose something that’s already done by the government, but if the government’s working is very intimately known by the citizens they tend to propose creative solutions.

For three weeks every questions that was asked on individual parts of the city budget, the career public servants went on here and answered it. It’s a demo of some direct democracy where the City Council was essentially bypassed, and people directly answered their questions that the citizens asked.

When Taipei City -- if you go to budget.Taipei -- adopted this system. Instead of just having the forum of people discussing specific budget items, they also brought the career public servants of all the departments and bureaus.

One of the point here is that it’s interactive. People can press like or unlike on budget items. More importantly, they can ask questions.

In end of 2012 there was this idea of people not able to understand the national budget. The government even made a advertisement about that, and then this was shown as a demonstration that, actually, people can understand it.

We see this happening for a lot of websites. This is the first website before I joined gov-zero in 2012.

Because we relinquish most of our copyright, so when the next procurement cycle comes, and if the government think it’s a good idea, the government takes it in as the official website.

You can very easily discover it. Go to the government website, change a O to a zero, and you get into the shadow government.

The movement that I participated at the time is called g0v.tw, embodies this on the Internet. For any websites that end in gov.tw, which are government websites, that the people don’t like, they build a counterpart, a shadow government website, if you will, that is the same name, but ends ...

One of the way to explain this mentality is what we call "Fork the Government," meaning that if the government is doing something that people don’t like, instead of blocking it or protesting it, you can, like a fork in the road, go some other way.

It was a victory, actually. They accepted it, and it was retreated peacefully.

People generally converge on consensus, instead of diverging. In many other Occupy we see a lot of divergence. They eventually lose their agenda, but in this particular Occupy, after 22 days they actually converged on the set of very coherent consensus, and so the head of parliament really has no ...

The Occupy teaches us one thing, is that people with very diverse agenda, the Labors, the Greens, the Separatists, when you involve enough people, when you keep everything in transparency, when you put everything in record, when you ensure no violence, because everything is being filmed, except for one day, ...