If it actually works, then they get the credit. What we are seeing is a lot of the same dynamics as when similar programs were adopted by private enterprises or large NGOs, is that people become much more innovative and much more willing to engage in risk-taking behavior now that ...

The idea is that what we are seeing now is that people become very innovative. They raise points and propose plans that maybe only has 20 percent of working instead 99 percent, because they know that the blame gets absorbed by PDIS, and especially by Audrey.

When things go right -- and they did go right -- people, the journalists, and so on go back to the transcripts and see that this is actually the director-general’s idea, or a very low level career public servant’s idea. They get the credit.

In a radically transparent environment, it’s the other way around. This is an entirely new idea of policymaking, open policymaking. If anything goes wrong, it’s of course Audrey’s fault, because this is a whole new system of making things.

In traditional public administration theory, a non-career public servant, an appointed politician, is supposed to be credit-seeking and blame-avoiding, meaning that if things go right, it’s the minister’s credit. If things go wrong, the media or the people has a way to pinpoint the contractor or the career public servant ...

Once I do that, there is a side effect that I did not anticipate. It makes me a very rare kind of politician that is blame-seeking and credit-avoiding.

As far as I know, there is no other national ministry-level people doing this. The results really surprised me. I did it to show accountability, and also to show that there really isn’t that much to it, and there’s nothing to fear. There’s no need for uncertainty or doubt around ...

I run this process explicitly to reduce the fear, uncertainty, and doubt. I run the idea of radical transparency, which basically means all the meetings that I convene, even internal meetings, we make a full transcript, and have all the participants on the all the ministries or whatever edit for ...

This is more like a -- I wouldn’t say decentralized at the point -- multi-central thinking of governance model. It’s not simply abolition of state; it’s having people who are much better to run this multi-stakeholder process to design and run the process than just the state itself doing it. ...

It is the idea that people can participate in governance, whatever their sector is. Now, the government, the state still runs a lot of governance stuff. But we’re not saying we’re the one with exclusive right on running governance stuff.

I mean the government maybe can be distributed. For example, if you are one of those crypto-currency believers, it doesn’t mean the end of currency. It means the end of hierarchical, top-down central banks, which is why we wrote "governance" instead of "government" in DIGI⁺.

My work as an anarchist is just to dispel the myths that all this process require a government apparatus to happen, because the process itself is also free software. It’s open sources and in the commons. Anyone in any level can just take our toolkit and run it, which means ...

Anarchism just means doing away with any top-down, bottom-up, any hierarchical things. It also means doing away with the idea of representation. Anarchism is the idea that people should re-present themselves directly to each other, instead of representationally having somebody speak for anyone else.

I’m not directly involved in the innovation or inclusion part, per se, but I’m also just working on the process to ensure that the multi-stakeholder model happens. This is the digital enablement part, and then of course, there was also all those e-petition and open government participation stuff that I’m ...

We try to use social innovation methods and social enterprise on the civil society to deliver government services. The government focuses on improving the governance model iteratively. My role is both to oversee this whole paradigm shift, and also to take care of this very specific small part of how ...

Through empowerment for accessibility needs of people, they encourage the whole society to co-create stuff. This is much better than the model where the government simply contracts a few inspectors, because they may not have the firsthand experience to speak with the stakeholders.

For example, instead of just providing accessibility services to the disabled people, there are social enterprises in Taiwan that trains the disabled people, empower them into urban designers, and who sell their service to the places that actually needs accessibility design.

Then the other part of my work is I’m also the minister in charge for social innovation, social enterprise. The idea is that for the last mile delivery of the inclusion, we also say, actually the local civil society, the co-ops, the NGOs, the social enterprises know better than the ...

"Bottom-up" or "top-down" really only makes sense when you’re in a military or highly bureaucratic organizations. When it comes to cross sectoral collaboration, there’s no bottom-up or top-down. Those words doesn’t even make sense.

Just this week, the parliament is working on a FinTech Sandbox Act. We’ll at the end of year do a Driverless Car Sandbox Act. Then will be many sandbox acts like that, basically saying for a limited time, a limited place, let’s co-create a regulation, for that private sector to ...

Otherwise, we’re just going to improve our own government model to co-creation and stuff like that. Now, for the innovation, we are asking the private sector to show us what regulations to change through sandboxes, through co-creation processes.

There is an eight-year plan called DIGI⁺. I did the cover of that plan, which I’m trying to bring up here. The idea is this. Previously, the government would take care of all the different parts of the plan, but we now explicitly say, "We take care of disabled infrastructure," ...

My role in the government is called digital minister without portfolio, meaning that I don’t oversee any particular ministry, but I work cross ministry communications, mostly. My role is pretty varied.

That’s a very good summary.

This iterative process itself rebuilds trust, rather than particular wise decision at any given point. That’s the main idea of rough consensus, is just try something out, go back, and then iteratively refine it.

All this idea is about "release early, release often." It’s OK to have some rough policy out, and we co-create, or we have a sandbox. Then we experiment together for six months. Then after six months, we promise to go back and look at the data, look at the evidence, ...

Central to this idea is the idea of iterations, or iterative development. The idea is that like in Wikipedia, you publish, and then you edit. It was the other way around. In many crowdfunding sites, you first get paid, and then you do the work. It was the other way ...

The argument is not worth winning anymore, because people have already left. They run out of patience. The idea of rough consensus is that it’s better to be roughly right than be precisely wrong. As long as people roughly agrees, "OK, this is more or less the case," then it’s ...

The idea of rough consensus is that, because most of the discussion happens with people with very diverse backgrounds, and especially when it’s online, if you seek fine consensus, what will happen is that first, it draws out the process very long. Also, people with the most free time, leisure ...

Sure. This is one of the tenets of Internet policymaking. It’s written in an RFC, the Tao of the IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force. In a sense, that’s the political system that I was raised in. I’m bringing this tribal innovation into the larger scheme of things.

We do a lot of assisted civic technology to try to make it much more inclusive for people with different cognitive modes than purely textual and PowerPoint.

Now, that’s actually a cognitive mode. That’s the argument, instead of a network access argument. For this, which is why we adopted ARBR. We adopted a real time board that posted notes, which is why we adopted this ambient computing idea, where we take all this reporting environment into a ...

People who want broadband access get broadband access. Our current president campaign was Internet is human right. There’s less excuse of we don’t have Internet access. Now, of course, it’s possible that they have Internet access, but they don’t prefer the textual way of engagement.

If there’s no city, like urban/rural difference. The reason is, this is unfair, because Taiwan is a small island. On the WEF network readiness in terms of broadband accessibility, we’re tied for the first or something.

Of course. We actually checked the distribution of citizen population, and the distribution of people who participated in this online process. We’re happy to report they correspond almost exactly right.

It really passed unchanged to the parliament. It just took a few months, like seven months or so.

During the four month transition, nothing could happen. We only ratify it after the transition to the new cabinet, which took another three months or so, but it’s essentially the same version. It really did not change, because whether it’s the KMT or the DPP, it’s not the party making ...

It took some time. To be perfectly honest, it took, because of the transition period... After the consultation, they finished the first draft, I think, by the end of that year, but then the election happened.

Instead of working against each other, after the deliberation, they now work with each other in order to bring their relevant parts into the regulatory wording. Now, the wording is, of course, sent to the parliament for ratification.

There is actually internal dissent as well, but after this process, they were like, "OK, so this is what people want." Now, the texting, the insurance, the professional driver license, they all have something to do.

The point here is that for each of the commitments, the ministry now, knowing that it’s their business...Because one of the core issues in the Uber case was that administrative transport of economy, of finance actually have very different idea at the beginning on how to approach Uber.

They only apply to professional driver licenses, and also the existing texting company get to make their Uber alternatives. They are now competing on the same legal framework and so on. It’s a happy ending, I guess. That’s the story.

All the stakeholders get to see every other stakeholder’s points, even if they come to visit me personally. This increases trust over time instead of decreases trust over time. By the end of it, Uber agree to play by the new rules.

They can’t really take back their words. Then it was ratified knowing that everybody would be onboard. Everybody is onboard and Uber’s good with that. A large part of this is that we are OK with lobbying, but all this is radically transparent and even 360 recorded.

So everybody shows up. Everybody looks like heroes then, because they all agree with what the sentiments have agreed over the course of three weeks, and they’re very nuanced as well. Now, after we get everybody’s commitment, we can now say, "OK, now we ratify this commitment into legalese as ...

Of the seven or so rough consensus, we also get the people to commit and support. They know that by not showing up, they will be seen as essentially villains in this in this story.

Then we run in live consultation, live-streaming and transcribing in real-time, that have the stakeholder basically checking in with people’s consensus. Like, "A majority of people professional driver’s license is required. What do you think about it?" and so on.

One of the reasons is because we say if you convince a super-majority of people, 80 percent or more, we agree to use that collective sentiment as a way to negotiate with Uber on their ideation stage, so people competes for higher score that resonates with more people across the ...

The other thing is that the positions can change, because after answering a few questions, maybe you want to chime in, and your sentiment becomes other people’s voting methods, their topics. As people deliberate on each other’s opinions, we see that they cluster to the center by proposing more and ...

They also see their Facebook and Twitter friends all on the same map. It removes the antagonism because they see although people initially have just clustered in the corners -- literally, like four different sides -- still in each corner, there is friends of yours. They’re not really faceless enemies. ...