We are able to work on some very difficult issues, such as how many holidays to have in Taiwan, between the labor unions and the capitalists.

We basically acculturate them into the Internet culture of rapid responses, and not afraid of facing people. Now, after a petition is signed, the POs -- the participation officers -- actually vote on things that they want to collaborate on, and then invite the petitioners on a face-to-face deliberation.

To solve this issue, when I become the digital minister, I invited at least one senior bureaucrat from every ministry in Taiwan, to form a virtual team called the participation officers. We are on the same Slack channel, we use all the same Internet tools.

The reason is that people often get a very formal, very bureaucratic written response from one of the ministries, while what they’re actually petitioning is very reasonable. It’s just because it touches multiple different ministries, so they don’t get a satisfactory response from the one ministry that was designated to ...

Before I entered the cabinet, we had a e-petition platform, just like "We the People" in the US, but it was not very popular. It was, again, also like "We the People," have been described like a ghost town.

The end result is that...

After meeting the petition threshold, instead of just a written response from a random minister, the petitioners and countersignature people, like six of them, is actually invited to the national government to have a face-to-face deliberation with people from all the relevant ministries.

This slide is about how we enlisted all the different ministries -- all 32 of them -- to send us one career public servant as participation officer. The end result is that, for all the e-petitions, for all people’s petitions above, say, 5,000 countersignatures...It’s like in the US, you have ...

The end result is that, because it runs on what we call the Sandstorm platform, which is now certified by our department of cyber security, people can very easily add their free software contributions to be part of the Taiwan public service, or where anywhere is public service, and not ...

This slide is where I appeal to the free software folks in the audience, saying that the first thing that I did as digital minister is to recompile the Linux kernel, which is operating system, to run all those softwares that people love in the free software world.

It was able to bring several different disagreeing sides, such as Uber and taxis, to a rough consensus, to agreement, because of the style of working.

This radical transparency, designed to promote innovation in the bureaucracy, actually worked. It also kept lobbying to a minimum. It’s not that I don’t meet with lobbyists -- for example, this is David Plouffe, from Uber -- it’s that all the lobbyists is actually adding to something, because they know ...

All right. For example, the Occupy, the idea was that the parliament needs to really treat Beijing as just another diplomatic entity, and pass treaties the same way as we pass treaty to, for example, New Zealand. That demand got met, so the students retreated peacefully.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and got the demands met.

To be perfectly transparent, I’m sitting on my bed... The rocking was just me adjusting the position of the pillows and everything.

Sure, of course.

Yes. This is the slide, actually, where I’m showing this thing.

Yes.

That’s right, yes.

If this innovative problem goes wrong, because nobody did policy making this way anyway, Audrey gets all the blame. Under this situation, people are much more innovative than they previously was, because I am not claiming the credit, and I don’t issue commands. Instead, they just brainstorm.

Yeah, because this digital ministry is blame-seeking and credit-avoiding. If everything goes right, people just check the original transcript, and discover who is the previously anonymous career public servant who came out with this great idea. They get the credit.

Publishing this transcript reversed, flipped this situation.

The effect is twofold. First, it made -- somewhat surprisingly -- the public servants very much willing to innovate. The career public servants have this dilemma. If they do something right, it’s always the ministry’s credit. If they do something wrong, the press has a way to find who actually ...

After the 10 days, or 10 working days editing, it’s all published verbatim online. There’s millions of words of hundreds of meetings that I’ve convened after entering the cabinet a year ago.

Everyone knows that after a meeting with Audrey, the digital minister will send a Etherpad link to all the participants, and they can all edit for 10 days to take out where it may sound too bad when it comes to press, or whatever.

For example, I publish, publicly, all the meetings that I hold -- even internal meetings -- all the meetings with journalists and everything. This is actually very radical, because nobody, to my knowledge, in any national movement, ever did that.

What else? As Taiwan’s digital minister, I can say I’m the first one that introduced this idea of radical transparency, rough consensus, or all these things that the crowd identifies with. The previous ministers, they come from a very what we say establishment class, and doesn’t actually put radical transparency ...

Yes and no. Taiwan didn’t have a digital minister, but there is a tradition of having people who worked in international companies to work in the cabinet. My predecessor was from IBM Asia. Her predecessor was from Google, and I worked with Apple for six years. It’s kind of a ...

Right. I’m responsible for pushing Taiwan’s open government agenda, for social enterprise, and for youth affairs, although the last two probably doesn’t enter the presentation.

That’s right.

That’s correct.

My main work is to lower the fear, uncertainty, and doubt of the public servants on concepts such as civic participation, open government, radical transparency, and all that. The idea is mainstreaming participation.

That’s not how I phrased it. I said there’s three stories that I have in this presentation. Occupy is something that already happened. My full-time job is just Taiwan’s digital minister, member of the cabinet, and all that.

Oh, yeah.

We solved the discoverability problem. You just look at the government website, change the O to a zero, and get to the shadow government, with open data and everything.

This community is very interesting, because our call to action is to fork the government. By forking the government, it means that we look at all the government websites that we don’t like, which all end in gov.tw, and build shadow websites that end in g0v.tw.

This is facilitated by professional facilitators and co-organized by 20 NGOs, the greens, the labors, the separatists, all the peoples, and were supported by the g0v civic tech community, which I belong to.

The occupiers, far from just protesting, did a demonstration in the demo scene sense, meaning that we took the Parliament. Instead of protesting, we deliberated the trade service agreement with half a million people on the street, and showed how is it possible to do efficient deliberations, even with this ...

Back in the time, it was called the Sunflower Movement. The MPs at the time refused to deliberate a trade service agreement with Beijing, because they think, constitutionally, Beijing is part of Taiwan. It’s a domestic agreement, so it doesn’t need parliamentary debate, or something like that. In any case, ...

Everywhere.

For 22 days.

I think we can take some credit for having this to the Occupy that’s completely peaceful. Nobody went dead or missing. And, the occupiers actually got a consensus from half a million street, and the head of Parliament consented to that consensus, and so it was a victorious Occupy.

I’m the first person to offer the students, who run to this Parliament, Internet support. I think I’m one of the first civic tech supporters. We’re seen as neutrals in that scheme. We provide equal Internet access to the medics, to the lawyers, to the protesters on both sides.

Back in...

Yes.

This is 2014.

The occupiers. A bunch of students.

There’s three stories in my presentation. I think it helps if I actually show my presentation. Just a second. It’s somewhere. It’s here. The first story is about how we occupied the Taiwan Parliament for 22 days.

What do I do?