Not really. [laughs] It was easily funded from the private sectors. We did not think about looking to government, because when I was a startup entrepreneur, it was assumed by us, cofounders, that the government really don’t understand software. We don’t even think about looking to them or something.

Of ASVDA. I’m also part of the steering committee for the Digital Nation Plan, which is the more infrastructure or educational plan. ASVDA is about application. The Digital Nation, DIGI⁺, is about infrastructure. I’m part of steering committee for those.

For ASVDA, I’m one of the three steering-committee ministers. I’m part of the steering committee.

No, I am not.

Through this journey, because of the Silicon Valley’s embracing of open source and the Hacker’s Way, I ended up having pretty good relationship with the major Silicon Valley companies, and gave lectures, mentored their teams, and whatever. That’s the idea.

Mostly, I just work on open source, those tech-for-good or civic technology on free software.

I travel around the world since 2005. My life story is complicated. [laughs]

I’m always based in Taiwan. I telecommuted.

Then I toured around the world, and beaome mentor to many Silicon Valley company teams, and retired around 33. It’s a previous life.

Afterwards, I also visited Silicon Valley, started a company there. Also visited Suzhou, China, to work with the BenQ -- then still called Acer Peripheral Group -- and then started another company around 2001 in Taiwan, working on open source and other technologies.

I became a co-founder of a company. There were other co-founders as well. It’s a software company, later invested by Intel and so on. It’s a really early startup, about 1996. That was in the early dot-com days.

I started a company. I was a software entrepreneur.

Uh-huh.

Well, I had three kindergartens, six primary schools, and dropped out on the second year of junior high.

I grew up in Taiwan. Most of my life is in Taiwan. Aside from one year in Germany, I didn’t really stay in any other place than Taiwan for more than six months, so always here.

Sure.

You can call me Digital Minister, or Minister without Portfolio, or Digital Minister without Portfolio.

I’m technically Digital Minister without Portfolio.

Right.

It’s happening with Taiwania, but it’s too soon to tell how large it becomes at this point.

That’s exactly right.

We’re seeing some of that yet, but I don’t think we’re all the way there yet, so it’s a challenge also to bring more investment from the private sector, from the existing investors to convince them that instead of just relatively risk-free investments, these new more software-oriented ones are also ...

As you can see, I don’t think the thing is money. I think this is the ecosystem. The money is meant to bring out a new ecosystem of VCs that work collaboratively with the government.

Mm-hmm.

That’s right. I think it came from the DPP think tanks.

At that time, I was not involved with DPP at all, so I really don’t know the story.

The ASVDA is a collective project embarked by the leading DPP think tanks.

Of course. All of these funds — the new purpose of existing angel fund and the two new funds were set up during Tsai Ing-wen’s presidency.

The Director of NDC did that. It was Dr. Chen Tain-Jy before, and now it’s Dr. Chen Mei-Ling.

National Development Council.

Uh-huh.

They had years to plan this out, and it was put to action by Dr. Kung Ming-hsin, now Deputy Minister of Economy Affairs. He was Deputy Counselor of NDC, and that was mostly his idea.

The NDC funds? Yeah. That’s the brainchild of DPP’s think tanks before the election.

Anyone who campaigns on a top-down approach lost their mayoral elections. [laughs] That was the watershed year. Of course, Tsai Ing-wen during her campaign, there’s many shared messages, many of the same PR team people, actually, as was the 2014 election, so doctors have brought it on the national level.

That was during the regional election where there were many upset winners, like 鄭文燦 and 柯文哲 and so on. They run on a platform of open government, meaning that the government should listen to many different sides instead of doing a purely top-down approach.

There’s many different levels, the idea of an open government that came about most prominently during 2014, three years ago. That was when the Sunflower Occupy happened.

It takes time. We have a workshop every Friday, and to work with an e-petition case that’s countersigned by 5,000 people or more and meet them face to face. Still, it’s a new way for public servants to work.

This kind of, what we call massive listening, or scalable listening, is now the primary thing that I am working with the public servants to do, for everyone to form a policy map on a new technology, and to collaboratively determine on what to do with it.

On the other hand, it’s way past the time where policy can be made only with a few heads of associations, and a few heads of representatives from the labor union. Everybody who are innovators have something to say that cannot be said by any other people.

They do, actually. [laughs]

The public service as a platform need to listen to all the different sides. If they do that, it’s not like...Traditionally, they only need to listen to mainstream media, like you, and to legislators. [laughs] That’s the two main points.

The point is that they are not doing it alone anymore. They’re doing it in the open. In a test project, in a pilot project like this, the whole community, the whole society is collaboratively discussing, "How should we integrate this new technology into our lives?"

Exactly. They need to work with the local government to do the test pilot drive. Of course, they worry a lot about insurance, about how to integrate with the local community and so on.

If they’re now experimenting with the private sector, they actually have to have firsthand experience before collaboratively making any decisions about this. If you were driven by curiosity, as I do, then this is great because it makes public service more interesting. If you’re driven by risk-averse behavior then it ...

Sure. On the other hand, it also means that they need to step out of their comfort zone and learn about things that they may have no firsthand experience of. All those self-driving vehicles, all those new innovations, traditionally, if they’re just regulators, they just need to work with concepts.

Now the curriculum says you can’t do that anymore, and they’re like, "Um, how am I supposed to teach then?" It’s just the same kind of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

That brings a lot of fear, just like a teacher who used to force their student to do rote memorization.

What we’re saying is that the public service must now be done in a different way.

No, for how to do their jobs. It’s not like we’re taking public servants away.

I’m sorry?