They have produced what we call a service design, a user journey, blueprints and other artifacts. Then we take those artifacts, and as the one of the front-end bidders saying whether you can just incorporate it into next year’s design. This part doesn’t really touched the back end at all.

Then we, as the petitioners on the e-petition system, who are themselves user-experienced designers and ordinary people who just want a better tax filing experience to run workshops to redo the flow of the experience. Again, this team is completely unrelated to the other two teams.

This part is contractually separate from the back end so that they can be done by different vendors or even many different vendors because maybe one wants to make one for specific needs. What this means that it opens the gate for many different front ends without worrying about separate ...

Once one of the participation offices brought it to our attention, what we did is that we restructured the procurement so that the original contract only covered the back-end parts. For the HTML5 actual cross-platform part, that is the front-end. It also runs on a cloud like automated Elastic Cloud.

It makes a very bad user experience because you have to skip a lot of security warnings and also downgrade Java and whatever just to get the tax filing system to run while the Windows people can just file it in 10 minutes. It is obviously not digital equality.

Taiwan’s tax-filing software was this kind of monolithic procurement as you said. It was required to be cross-platform so they used Java applet for Mac and Linux, but Java applet is actually deprecated by Oracle.

This means that it is what we call decoupled architecture. For example, one very concrete example is the tax-filing software.

Their APIs need to be produced in a way that conforms to the OpenAPI standard, which means it’s not proprietary. It doesn’t use proprietary extensions. Also, we changed the procurement regulations so that any organizations can demand this at little or zero cost, meaning that the bidder cannot use this ...

This means that during the procurement, all the units, all the organizations, even though they may not know the technical details, they can demand that for all the parts that interfaces with other systems, the back-end developers must offer not just human-readable functions, but for all those functions, it must ...

I think it is important that we can use tools. For example, we just adopted the OpenAPI 3 standard, what we call the OAS, as a national standard.

Yeah, we do have these kind of procurements, but one of the work we’re doing is that we’re separating the backend, which is the function, the self-storage cybersecurity, and the frontend, which is actually the way that it reaches people, like through a website, through a bot, through a app, ...

I think it’s essential that we have this security-hardened platform underneath the individual applications, which all may have security problems. They are mitigated by the underlying platform.

Because the Sandstorm platform is also a security product, it’s not just a productivity product, it also makes it much harder to attack those individual programs. Once the Department of Cyber Security did the audit of the Sandstorm platform itself, it is less worried about a specific application that we ...

You can see that one of the first things that I did was to ask the same people as we mentioned, The Department of Cyber Security, to commission a security revue, a penetration testing of the Sandstorm platform.

Yeah, if it’s pertaining to national security, of course that’s another matter, but because by definition I don’t even touch national security it’s less of a problem, also because we host the core tools, the Sandstorm tools ourselves.

This is a pretty sophisticated offline/online collaboration that we’re practicing every week. That’s how we use RealtimeBoard. We also use virtual reality a little bit, but it’s more experimental. The everyday tools, the process tools are just the three. I think that’s the answer to your question.

There’s a lot of online/offline interaction this way. By the presentation time people just have this idea, development form, which is then, again, Realtime transcribing to online parts for the people who are watching the live stream or the Slido to have input.

You can see that the RealtimeBoard is actually printed out in the handouts so that people can look at the paper and use real Post-It notes to add to the parts that they want to add. We, in Realtime, transcribe it back to the online counterpart.

Every Monday we take it to the Prime Minister and other ministries with our portfolio. Usually, we mix them together so that even though there’s like two people from the same organization, they end up becoming different groups. Every group work on one aspect of the problem.

This is the final form. At the beginning the orange parts are not that many. Basically, we get people into this five-hour meeting every Friday to collaboratively fill in this policy map so we can settle on what’s the best question to ask at this moment and then work on ...

Then we use this RealtimeBoard to separate into the problem statements, the feelings, the suggestions, the factual information, responses so that people can very easily see the policy map, everything that’s related to this.

We don’t have that kind of law here. Currently it’s mostly individual contracts that covers only 30 days of warranty. It’s worded poorly and so on. First, we gather the stakeholders, including the Ministries of Economy and Transport, Consumer Protection, as well as the private sector, as well as inviting ...

Great. This is a typical meeting where we have a 5,000 people petition and then the participation offices or ministries agree to work on it. This particular one is called Lemon Cars, which is cars that was manufactured poorly but it was not discovered until a few weeks into driving ...

OK, like this?

I can show you some examples, just a second. It’s all in Chinese, but I think it’s still possible to see the general form of it. OK, let’s see if this screen sharing works. Can you see my browser window?

We use it specifically to do service design, in the sense that we get people’s ideas in through, for example, e-petition. Then we have designed a form to make those e-petition sentiments into de facto, the filling and suggestion part, but then we draw a tree that makes the RealtimeBoard ...

Right. That’s what was used during the talk, yes. We also use RealtimeBoard, which is, again, not open source. This system is really key, because it puts the note taking, the Post-It notes, into somewhere that many people can collaborate online. It’s like a smart whiteboard.

If I answer one of them, because it’s sorted by order, I answer, essentially, a hundred people’s questions. It’s a much better use of people’s time when you do things this way.

Usually, when there is thousands of people, when people hoards the microphone forever, it really diminishes people’s ability to talk. Now, using Slido, we were able to see, for example, one question or one statement that has hundreds of likes.

We introduced GoodNotes as a way to promote facilitation, collaborative note taking, more focused discussion during meetings, and things like that. That’s one. During meetings and large town halls, we also use Slido -- which is, again, not open source -- a way for people to enter Q&A, enter questions ...

It is not open source, by any means, but we don’t have very good open source alternatives, and because we are not modifying and distributing it, anyway, we see smaller motivation to innovate on the software part of this.

For the process, we also use process-specific tools. Here, we don’t necessarily use only open source. For example, we very heavily use GoodNotes, which is this app that I’m using now to communicate with you.

Because of that, it doesn’t really require special training. We also don’t meet much resistance, because we designed so that they look like their desktop counterparts, or their online SaaS counterparts. That’s one part of it.

Because of that, it requires very little training to use the collaborative lunchbox ordering tool. You just have to use Typeform or Google Forms before, because the UI is exactly the same. The same goes for collaborative writing, spreadsheets, chatrooms, and whatever.

You see, it’s very practical tools that we are introducing as the software collaboration. It’s meant to be what we call in the flow of work, meaning people don’t use these tools to fulfill some other process. It’s designed so they fit into the existing process as a smarter alternative ...

We also wrote, I think it’s called Biandang or something. It’s a way for people to order lunch together. The main advantage of that over the QuickSurvey form or whatever, is that it provides tallying, and also a place to upload the photo of the menu of the restaurant that’s ...

Because it’s open source, the PDIS team -- P-D-I-S, that’s my office -- also wrote our own apps on top of this Sandstorm platform, such as the Hackfoldr, which is a collaborative bookmarking tool.

It’s a combination of a Slack clone, a Cielo clone, a Google Dot clone, a Google Spreadsheet clone, like everything, [laughs] that one can use during team collaboration. It’s a productivity suite that everybody can just add to it.

On PDIS website, we have a page just for the tools. We refer to tools, both software tools and also process tools, and it’s quite different, the two of it. The software tools, we use mostly the open source suite called Sandstorm.io, and Sandstorm is this secure, self-hosted, completely open ...

No, it’s fine.

You can see my whiteboard, right? It’s good?

Yeah, it’s only half-automated. It’s castingwords.com. Yeah?

It’s actually not software. It’s a Web service. It’s called CastingWords.

Yes.

This conversation will be on the record, and at your preference, we can publish either the text transcript as you have read, or the video, or both. I think we can decide after the conversation if it’s OK with you.

We’ll see.

Wow. That’s great.

I was asked to be on the advisory committee actually for the new Civic Hall, but I cannot really travel to Paris, I had to say no. I know the plan. When are you moving?

Me too.

Much better. Hi.