Great question. I don’t think I’m working for Taiwan. [laughs] I’m working with Taiwan. The idea is that all the tools that we develop, all the systems that we use, most of them didn’t originate from Taiwan. The visualization tool that we use to gather people’s feelings about Uber to ...

There’s quite a few area, such as AR, VR, IoT, cybersecurity, autonomous cars, and things like that that are the focus of such test projects at the moment.

Basically, if we’re going to serve as test beds and for the National Development Council in charge of the Asia-SV plan to then connect these test results to the Silicon Valley or other innovation center counterparts. We both make sure that the entrepreneurial ecosystem can ship from here into accelerators ...

The primary vehicle of Internet of Everything, having robotics, autonomous cars, and things like that, we try to select a few of those topics and work with the regional governments, the city governments here or elsewhere in Asia and to set up test fields that has relaxed regulatory requirements, that ...

Yeah, the Asia-SV plan has two main parts. Well, it’s Asia and SV. It’s self-evident, [laughs] but it has two main parts. One is the regional integration of Taiwan’s mostly hardware, but now also AI and software and design, people and into what we call a virtual national team to ...

I think we learned a lot from India and India’s previous experiences in working with Silicon Valley and with other regional centers.

Taiwan, as many of you well know, was known for semiconductors, peripherals and all kind of hardware manufacturing. But we are now also changing in our own value chain, driven by technologies such as AI on the edge, IoT, and stuff like that, which all require us to move closer ...

I think Taiwan can learn a lot from India in how we should collaborate internationally, both in the easier movement of talents, both to and from. and also about how we redefine ourselves as a design-first or a software-first place.

That’s a great question. In my previous life, last year, [laughs] I was a software engineer and designer. I worked with Apple for six years before joining the Cabinet. That was my previous job. As you well imagine, in Silicon Valley, there’s a lot of bi-directional communication with India, both ...

As long as we can have a way to consistently get signal out of dissent, the more vibrant the social media scene is, the better. And...sorry.

There’s no reason for a citizen to blindly trust the government without a reciprocal trust. That would be fascism. I think the basic idea is that I see all the self-media as useful, as long as we have a way to demodulate. It’s a technical term. It means that it ...

If they don’t feel comfortable engaging through real name, we accept pseudonyms. If they don’t feel comfortable enough to show up in person, we accept people who type in stuff through livestreaming, in any way they would organize. If the government trusts the civil society, the citizens enough, eventually they ...

It’s great. [laughs] I joined with a agenda to empower the civil society to fully understand how the government system works. This is what radical transparency means. In contrast to some other country -- I won’t name names -- who want to control the use of social media through a ...

The question was in the sense of massive self-communication, everybody’s the media. Do I find this a challenge?

Mm-hmm.

I’m a very interesting blame-seeking, credit-avoiding [laughs] minister, in the sense that this is a whole new way of working, so if it fails, it’s all my fault, but if anyone gets the credit, because there’s the full accountability, the public servants get all the credit. So far they’ve been ...

The other thing is that they take away the more irrational parts, the more violent parts of the discussion. When presented to the public, the public sees the civil servants as professional, as civilized, and as being expert. It collectively improves their credit, whether this plan actually works or not.

Then I ask everybody who participated in the meeting to review for 10 working days and edit as they see fit. That has two outcomes. First, people actually see the other side’s arguments. In many meetings people just speak without listening, so they have to go over and listen.

What I try to introduce is a kind of radical transparency. That includes this kind of meeting. It’s not just with you media folks. Even any internal meeting that I am the chairperson of, I make a full record, but I don’t publish it. I make a textual transcript.

To explain, in a hierarchical organization, often if that I’m a Minister and I issue orders and the people under me do some decisions and make something, if everything works perfectly, then I get the credit. But if things fail, the media has a way to find which public servant ...

Originally, before I entered, I thought the challenges would be that the civil servants would be risk-averse and not risk-taking enough to try these new tools and new processes, with horizontal integration and so on. But when I actually joined, because I deployed a few very particular anarchistic way of ...

That’s my main goal. I also oversee a few other plans, such as the Connecting Asia to Silicon Valley plan, the ASVDA plan, and also the Digital Nation plan, which is about building infrastructures. That’s about my role.

It’s also more time saving, because otherwise we would be replying to them one by one, and through distortion of whatever. Through public forums, online deliberations, and online-to-offline meetings and things like that, we try to get everybody onboard before a policy is developed.

The thing is we’re working on a more systematic way for the career public servants to view these people’s voices over the Internet as something that we call "dissent as data," meaning that it is something that both lowers the risk of the political communication, if the public servants discuss ...

As part of digital transformation, people’s voices and the way that we network together, through self-communication, through social media and whatever, brings people to a sense of being closer to each other and feeling both empowered, in the sense that people can very easily find people with similar ideas, and ...

They network together and build a virtual task force, with shared chat rooms, shared comment boards, shared tasks that we meet monthly, weekly, and quarterly. What we do is we try to work with the career public servants, not politically appointed ones, and lower their fear, uncertainty, and doubt toward ...

As the digital minister, I mostly help all the different ministries. I don’t have a dedicated digital ministry, because all the ministries are supposed to be digitally transformed. We formed what we call a participation officer network work, in which there is maybe one to three people from each ministry.

Roles and challenges, sure. As you can see in this very cute name card I just received today, [laughs] my official role is called digital minister without portfolio.

Yeah, until 5:00pm. Welcome to Taiwan and just fire away, anything you would like to ask.

Welcome. We have an hour and 20 minutes, something like that?

I’ll make a semi-automatic transcript, post it, and everyone can review it starting tomorrow, for 10 days before I publish it. I hope that’s already communicated.

I wouldn’t attribute that to any particular agent. Whatever they call it is just fine, but I do feel this kind of spiritual experience very easily.

I wouldn’t say I practice any traditional discipline, but I really do enjoying just being with the practitioners of whatever discipline that they are practicing. My grandparents on the father’s side also are devout Catholics, and they could also in their prayer trance very easily enter a very calm, peaceful ...

I used to, when I was a child, maybe seven or eight, learn the Daoist meditation methods. I think that’s still with me. Then, I also went to Tibet, I went to Nepal, and to India, to the Osho Center, and actually many other places as well.

As a channel, as I described my life in this kind of mindset, it’s very for me to enter one of those more spiritual state of mind, where there really is no "myself," but only relationship with the environment or with the ecosystem, the ecology.

I believe in beliefs. I have faith in faith. I don’t really need an object to believe in. It’s like praying to a prayer, right? [laughs]

Yeah. Where do we begin?

Hmm, a lot. [laughs]

That’s OK.

It gives a much more direct resonance of my actual state of being as an animal, not as an abstract thinker of something. I think that really gives me joy in that I was able to maintain a stable relationship for a decade or so with individuals, but on a ...

There’s also the joy of feeling, the care of animals. I lived with seven cats and two dogs. They constantly remind me that the abstractions, the concepts really doesn’t matter much. [laughs] Whatever I read about animals doesn’t change the animals. [laughs]

Now that they officially say that the only entry ticket to this community is that you know how to be good to other people, or that you want to learn how to be good to other people, and everything else, the community takes care of you. It’s one of the ...

It was before Wikipedia was really popular, so we had to really radically trust our contributors, and they have an understanding. Even though I moved away from the community to other projects, the community still builds the Perl 6 language very successfully, and always keeping a very inclusive way.

It takes radical trust, because it was before Wikipedia was very popular. Now that Wikipedia is really popular, people can point at Wikipedia as saying, "You know, we know random edits doesn’t destroy an encyclopedia."

Exactly, because then they start complaining, then they might as well fix it, themselves.

At that time, it was very radical, by saying anyone who complains automatically gets citizenship. [laughs] It is a radical idea. Nowadays, it’s becoming more common. [laughs]

They come to complain, or come to something, and then I welcomed them, I hugged them, and basically saying, "Your complaint is valid and you’re given the right to build this thing, this computer programming language called Perl 6."

This kind of community building gives a lasting impression, because many people say even to this day, that they learned how to work with these open source communities because they randomly go to one of the chat rooms, one of the channels that is set up.

Basically, just engaging people who were disagreeing online by paying them visits in person, and bringing them together so that they work together.

Whenever I traveled around the world when I was 24 or 25, as part of the transition, I was also working internationally to build a new community over in the computer programing language. It’s bringing people in. I think, that year I had excess of maybe 20 countries. [laughs]