I think that’s also the general atmosphere. Even before the legalization of gay marriage, people are already very tolerant of LGBT communities, people with different expressions, and things like that.

It’s not quite Silicon Valley level, but that it’s pretty good in Asia, in the sense that if a young person tries something and fails, their friends are like, "OK, this is great. We all learned something from it." Whereas, in most other places in Asia, that would be the ...

I think what Taiwan offers, aside from the obvious advantages of a diverse ecosystem and the fact that any vertical innovation can happen here, because it’s a quite self-sustainable terrain. I think what we also offer is a tolerance, and I would even say an embrace of failure.

If, as I said, the South Asian countries, or, as you mentioned, some North Asian countries are particularly good at some vertical, I think that’s great. That means that talents are more efficiently utilized. If you are into this thing, that’s the place for you.

Great question. I’m a very collaborative, not at all competitive person, mostly because I drop out of junior high school. I don’t even know what it means to win or lose on an examination. I think I’m seeing it with a more collaborative perspective.

We see a lot better inter-generational learning context and social integration context when all generations talk about what to expect to a technology, instead of having the early-adopters dictating what the rest of the people do. That’s the main idea.

All too often, when we talk about inter-generational communication, it’s one part trying to educate the other part or one part trying to lead the other part into innovation, dragging and screaming. With genuinely new experiences, with virtual reality, augmented reality, machine learning, things like that, none of the generations ...

We see a lot of young school children bringing their grandparents. They’re like companions in doing this kind of learning together. That’s because neither generation has seen anything like this before. They’re both new to this thing, so they can learn together.

Really, the elderly have a lot of wisdom. As long as people can communicate in an inter-generational context, that does not privilege any particular generation. I’ll take one example, the arrival of Pokémon GO. If people have played Pokémon GO, it’s this augmented reality game, where people go on the ...

My four grandparents are all still around. The oldest one, my maternal grandpa, is 99 years old. The youngest, my father’s mother, is 85. I still work with them, in a sense, every week through video conferencing, through monthly visiting, and so on.

I can talk for hours.

It’s mostly that our curriculum committee looks at the parts of alternative school that has worked, discarding the ones that hadn’t -- that’s what experimentation means, right? [laughs] -- and take the parts that actually worked into the regular education. I would say, at most, five years ago everybody saw ...

There’s many different schools that bring this kind of autonomy-based, capacity-building way of education to the K-12. There’s hundreds of children already, families already engaged in this kind of education. There is an awareness and a literature about this kind of education that’s been going on for the past decade.

As long as their personal curriculum passes review, they’re free to use any K-12 resources, while keeping their schedule entirely flexible, in the hands of their parents, and so on. As a result of that, there’s a lot of alternative schools in Taiwan, through the Experimental Education Acts.

They’ve had time to prepare. Taiwan, maybe ahead of most Asian countries, have a law about experimental education -- three acts, actually. Anyone who wants to be home-schooled, community-schooled, or alternative-schooled can legally apply to their local CE or county.

I care about that a lot. Mostly I worry about if we don’t do this digital inclusion in education, with this very innovative curriculum, there will be two countries -- one who will successfully adopt this education, and one other that are left behind. We’re trying to pull it ahead.

Where, in the rural areas, we cannot reasonably explain people to adopt this overnight, we developed, over the Internet, courses and a shared AI system. People can experiment with personalized AI and things like that, and make sure that all the schools, everywhere in Taiwan, has equal access to 300 ...

It’s a refocus on STEM, but not just on the skill of STEM, but what we call media literacy. When we were learning all kinds of different educational resource from the Internet, try to be critical thinking, and have the teacher, instead of lecturing, to learn with the students. As ...

The idea is for the new curriculum to build up a generation who just think about their social missions, think about what common good they can bring to the world, or whatever self-fulfillment they want to make, while making others no worse. The idea is that whatever task they learn ...

This is very dangerous in the age of digital transformation, because all of those specific skills are going to be automated by AI, anyway. People would face frustration if they over-identify with any particular task and skill.

Any task along the way that they’re having to master, they will never identify with those particular tasks, compared to the previous education system, where people, if they’re ranked number one at a certain skill, they somehow develop an identification of those kind of skills.

The idea is that we stop predicting the world 12 years in the future, because nobody can do that anymore. We understand that if the child entering primary school learns to learn by themselves, to interact, and to work for the common good, that never gets old.

Now we’re doing away with all this. The new curriculum, which is pretty revolutionary, is focused on what we call literacies or the building of characters. The three main characters are autonomy, interaction, and the common good.

Before that, there was a many-year process where we worked as the developer of a new curriculum, a curriculum that is not anymore capacity-, skill-, or examination-based. The previous curriculum valued students on how well they score, how well they rank, relative to each other. There’s predefined five disciplines or ...

My part-time work, [laughs] before I joined the cabinet, in addition of being a consultant, is partaking the K-12 curriculum committee. There’s a curriculum rewrite that is now being approved by a multi-stakeholder committee deliberative, including the students themselves, which is very democratic, as far as I can see.

If there’s one thing Taiwan needs to learn from South Asian countries is this kind of respect for diversity and the respect for different worldviews from different cultures. I think we can still do a lot. We do this just by integrating these overseas mentors into the society through programs ...

The idea is that people with a certain kind of talent, the leaders in your country and other South Asian countries can be free lecturer here, without seeking any particular employment, but getting paid very high and being valued by the society as people who bring these ideas and these ...

We do this not only through trading. The traditional focus is trading, but now it is more about the culture of the educational. We are seeking to increase people’s stay in Taiwan. We’re issuing, if the legislative let us pass the law, that will enable, in the next session, people ...

In Taiwan, in all of the verticals, there’s probably some parts of Taiwan to compare with the best in Southeast Asia. I won’t name names. The idea is that we learn from the parts of Southeast Asia that does better than Taiwan in a certain vertical, and then we build ...

What we like particularly about Southeast Asia, the countries, is that each country has its strong verticals and that they link together in ways that are beneficial to everybody who linked. I think this is actually a very interesting model that’s unlike how the United States, the states, link together, ...

I think it just requires an open mind. Of course, linguistic skills help, but I think it doesn’t particularly require any life experience.

Because of the radical transparency, all the transcripts that are left, anyone who picks up this digital minister role can pick up exactly where I left. The idea is not that I’m particularly keen on making decisions on behalf of anyone, but rather making sure that everyone sees what everybody ...

Yeah, I think there’s plenty of people who are qualified for this position. All it requires is just a willingness to be a channel, a translator, between different worlds. What we call cross-sectoral is actually different worldviews. What I do is mostly translating those worldviews into the views that other ...

It’s just what you expect from incubators or accelerators. The social innovators reside there for six months and work with the social innovations team. I’m just one of the mentors. My office hour’s every Wednesday, and people can go and talk to me on social innovation. We rely on them ...

So we work with social entrepreneurs literally every week starting October. Every Wednesday is my office hours. I’m in the Taiwan Air Force park. It used to be an air force military zone, but now it’s being transformed into a social innovation lab.

If they are for the betterment of the society or to fulfill their social mission, Taiwan is the perfect place because people are very acceptable of innovations as long as it delivers a social value.

I think the idea of entrepreneurial spirit that most of the young people here in Taiwan that I see who become entrepreneurs, if they are just after the for-profit money, most of them are not in Taiwan anymore. There is, frankly speaking, better capital markets.

The same goes to autonomous vehicles. In some areas, maybe people want to integrate with electronic tricycles first. Maybe in some places people would want to a minivan to work with the schools. Again, this requires social entrepreneurs to identify local problems and further their social missions by solving these ...

But it works much better if they talk in the local context, if the script is collaboratively created by that township or that region. It works better if they speak the accent of Taiwanese Hoklo or Hakka that was spoken in the region. All this needs social entrepreneurs in that ...

I see the last mile of digital transformation always fitting the needs of people. Say the government develops a long-term healthcare application that lets elders track their health needs and get whatever personal care. On the last mile, there’s going to be an app or some virtual voice talking to ...

They’re everything. [laughs] I think here we make a distinction between purely for-profit entrepreneurs, which is well outside my purview actually, and social innovators, social entrepreneurs, which are my main focus.

In our international collaboration, chat rooms and so on, you see people in all sorts of legislative or administrative positions, all over the world. I wouldn’t single out any countries, but it’s at least 20 or more countries. We’re just chatting every day about the things that we do. Most ...

I do learn from a lot of the experiments that was done on a smaller scale, and also larger scale like the participatory budgeting folks. They’re also developing their own methodologies, and that has a very interesting relationship with the representational democracy, but there is a lot of systems and ...

Quite a few I would say. In the regional government, because it’s, as a rule, easier to innovate on process when the scale is smaller. If you just have a community of maybe 5,000 people or 500 people, it’s trivial to introduce these kind of things.

Who are my counterparts? [laughs]

I think it’s not specific to Taiwan. It should work on any country that is democratic. It isn’t picky about the democratic system. It could be representational. It could be centralized. It could be delegated. It could be liquid.

Now, after we settle and worked on something good, we can hold events like Civic Tech Fest, as part of the WCIT, and then get other countries, practitioners like the Etalab from France or US Digital Service into the place and compare notes and try to spread this methodology.

That ties into the test bed idea that’s common to the Asia SV, in the sense that we can deploy these systems because these people really want it, especially after the Occupy in 2014.

It is a international collaboration that tries to make democracy more transparent and also more accountable. I see this as a international movement that is not specific to any country, but Taiwan is in a pretty, I would say, privileged position because our citizens demand this of politicians and is ...

The e-petition system, that originated in the US. Many of the collaboration platforms that we did originated from Iceland or from the Occupy in Spain or from New Zealand. There’s also a lot of South American participants as well in the transcription system that we’re using and things like this.