We’re doing well. The approval rating of our administration is at a historic high. We have a new prime minister, that’s the main reason, but he was selected and the hand-off was coordinated by the previous prime minister, so again, a very peaceful handoff.

That’s fine.

So first, to organize using the same tools internally; second, to trust people externally. That’s I think the two messages.

Once civil servants adopt this posture, they will be seen as authentic allies in this project to make everybody trust each other more, not as faceless people serving in the civil service.

I think just this posture of trusting is already making the public service much closer to the people, because the NGO’s designer and developers know this kind of condition-less trust. We’ve been working that on the open internet culture for decades now.

Whether it’s through radical transparency, or whether it’s through open data, or through open policymaking, or through this kind of imagined scenarios of foresight, all this is basically saying, "We trust you to not be mobs, to not disrupt the public administration, but actually bring something that we have not ...

It doesn’t work the other way around. We cannot say, "We should do nothing and have the citizen trust us." That would be fascism. I think what we really need is to conditionlessly trust the public.

The second thing is that because trust is bidirectional, if we can let the NGOs and the individual contributors see that we are willing to trust people first, then eventually they will trust back, because that’s just how human nature works.

The first is that the civil servants can also use the same kind of tools to build solidarity across ministries, in the administration itself, and basically cultivate a digitized solidarity, to demand the national government to offer working conditions that doesn’t treat them as machines or paper-pushers, but actually improve ...

I have two message to say here.

Once this kind of feeling permeate, it suddenly feels like the distance between the civil servants and the citizens are very large, a large distance. We see that all over the world, but it actually has not changed at all. It’s just the people have a different way to organize ...

Once people are this close -- sometimes I think unhealthily so because the emotions and subconscious also overlap -- but in any case, they feel really close to each other.

For example, the NGOs or the designer developers, they can get gatherings like the GitHub, the other Meetups, everything, that the new generation of technology really brings people really, really close together.

I think there is every reason for the citizen to mistrust the government. I think it’s mostly not because the government has done anything wrong, but because of the social media and a new generation of digital technologies that makes the civil society much closer to each other.

Sure. I think the work all of us are doing now is essentially rebuilding trust among people, among all the different sectors. Trust as we know is a relational concept, meaning that it doesn’t really exist only on one end or the other. It really takes a reciprocal relationship.

That means that human beings are now listening and are now making value judgments. These things cannot really be replaced. I think simplifying work is a really good driving value if you’re having the frugal angle because nobody will argue for complicating civil service.

Of course, by this year, people are asking, "Is the minister trying to use AI to make us jobless, to take civil servants out of the loop?" I always say, "No, what I’m trying to do is to improve your working condition." Basically, anything that can be replaced by a ...

To introduce digital design, they really have the potential to not just simplify the user experience but also eliminate redundant or unneeded work from the civil servants themselves or even automate them away.

I think "simplifying work" is a really powerful strategy to introduce digital, because it means something that’s worth learning. Because if it actually increases their work, it’s not worth learning from their perspective. Even if it increases citizen satisfaction, there is nothing in it for the civil servants themselves.

I think digitalization has a promise to really simplify the working environment of public servant. I think that’s the core message of why I call myself a public servant of public servant, because instead of telling public servants what they need to do, I always ask, "How can I help ...

I think in the end, digitalization of administration should not just be five different agencies and each replacing the paper or face to face workflow with online counterparts, because that means if the user want to access the service, she or he also have to visit five different websites. It’s ...

Anyway, I think frugal is a really good angle, because in Taiwan of course, we also say things like circular economy or sustainable design. I think it’s a very good angle to focus people’s energy on the digital, because too many times when people think about digital, they think about ...

We’re not too far in the future. We’re just a few hours in the future. [laughs]

I see that too.

Yeah, like shoestring budget?

Sure. Of course.

It’s, as you can see, very organic and loosely coupled. So far, it’s been working pretty well.

Usually, we also play the supporting role of if one of the POs say, "You know, I want to run a participation tax filing software, but we don’t have designers here," one of the designers from PDIS will just randomly join the Ministry of Finance on that team for a ...

The PDIS team mostly just work on whatever they want to work on. It’s entirely anarchistic within PDIS.

Usually, when there’s some issues that requires timely resolution, you don’t really have a contract. This is like an in-house coding team that can very quickly, within one day or two days, code up a system from scratch just to solve some issue that really needs to be solved. It’s ...

The people in the PO Network, anyone can raise any issue as agenda for us to talk about. We meet with POs deputy ministers every quarter to review how the open government thing is doing. III people here serve as a kind of hit team to solve any information issues.

It is about 20 people here, about 6 people here, about 50 people now here. Basically, we just run weekly lunches together.

Throw in some filmmakers and random occupiers, [laughs] and artists, and designers. That’s how the PDIS looks like.

The POs, they join a chat room. They joined a Sandstorm collaboration platform just like the other PDIS people. We add to it five people, six now, one from each of the institutes in the III, in the Information Industry Institute. They are mostly people who can actually write software, ...

They select, one, two, three or more people who directly report to their CIOs. Our CIOs are either secretary general or deputy ministers of that ministry.

It’s very interesting because around this time, I asked all the different ministries to form a participation office in their work. The PO Network, now we are going to have a regulation about it, is that in each of the 32 ministries, like a lot. I can’t draw that many.

Then we are joined by a lot of additional people from the National Development Council, one of the more respected, previously a director of Information Department, and many other people as well from the III -- the Institute for Information Industry.

For example, our core legal person is actually from the National Communication Commission. We also have staff from the Ministry of Culture, the Council of Agriculture, and the Ministry of Finance. These are the initial team.

Yes. That’s right. We have two different networks. The PDIS team itself is actually already very dynamic. I’m an anarchist, as everybody knows, I don’t give commands. Everybody who work with me are actually volunteers. Aside from me and the two assistants that came with me, everybody else are actually ...

Right. We are...

That’s the basic idea. It’s not so much as telling all the ministry that you have to do this but to make two or three really prominent cases visible and make very transparent what are the decisions involved, and the provide templates to every step. That’s the basic idea.

Again, this is done in the open, meaning that the data providers from the agricultural agency, from the local markets, from the weather bureau, and so on, they become aware of the possibility of doing this kind of things. They can write their own proposals saying, "OK, we want do ...

Another case is, again with a decoupled architecture, a data-driven architecture, is the national dashboard on the vegetable and fruit prices because people will speculate on those prices after a typhoon or something. Now we try to make it entirely transparent whether to import, export. Reserve levels and things like ...

For example, we integrated the two national disaster response agencies. One has a map view, and one has a lot of data into this shared map-based view. This is entirely transparent. The order meeting logs and everything is online so people can know exactly how we made decisions and when ...

We also make very public the cases that we actually did as PDIS for the general public so that once the general public knows about it, it’s possible for the public servant as part of the general public, to go back to their units saying, "Can we do something like ...

For example, this is the Agile RfP template. Then we have provided links that corresponds it to the part that actually have used Agile RfP, so they can compare whether this suits their need or not.

That’s a great question. Mostly, we provide suggestions. We don’t issue orders. Suggestions take the form of templates. The idea is that the public doesn’t really need to know anything, but if they know that for example, they want to involve early stage user participation, then we provide them with ...

Right, decoupled.

Each one has a different development methodology that can involve the user from the very beginning while the back end one doesn’t really need to change or to rewriting so much.

What I’m saying is that maybe it’s not possible to completely make the organization aware of all the different disciplines involved, but using OpenAPI and other service-defined methods, we were able to decouple them into smaller contracts.