I was in that role for I think three years or so before joining the cabinet. I still bring a lot of the same work ethics to my current work. I still organize the team in a way that enables remote or at home work.

When I say retired, I’m not saying that I stopped getting payment from those companies. I still get paid a lot. It’s just I become more of an independent consultant, meaning that I don’t work on specific project nine-to-five any more. I more work like a channel between those large ...

I never really visited Cupertino, despite working with Apple for six years. I think this really gives me a perspective of the limits of the state-of-the-art technology, of how far can we go using telepresence, using video streaming, using online collaborative software. I don’t have unfounded imagination of what it ...

The reason is I don’t really like very long meetings, so if I am in Taiwan because of the time zone, when Silicon Valley wakes up, it’s midnight here. It’s just a time -- maybe one hour of meeting them. Then I go to sleep, so I won’t get caught ...

First, I worked with Apple and other companies. I didn’t really work for them. I didn’t take commands. Also, I physically always lived in Taiwan. I traveled to the Valley only for a few weeks at a time, but for most of the time I’m in Taiwan.

Exactly.

There’s a very long period between the August of the previous year and March that people collaborated online on what ICT could do if we do this again. We did not specifically select this occasion, but it’s been in the plans for a very long time.

At that time, we started thinking, and there’s a collaborative document on this, saying, "If we do this again, but with ICT in mind, what would we do? We would have a local network. We would have a repeating screen every 500 meters," and whatever.

There’s a huge number of people, but then they can’t really do much, because while the Internet was saturated, they did not bring any ICT technology into it. One of the people initiating this flash mob is a very, very long-time open source contributor.

I think it was just people on the local chat boards organizing a flash mob, but they did not expect a quarter million people show up for the flash mob. They initially planned just maybe a thousand people or so.

Also, a year before that, August 2013, there is a quarter-million people, not a half-million, a quarter-million people parade on the same place, roughly. But they didn’t do it because there’s a planning by NGOs or anything. There was just an outrage over an attempted so-called cover-up of a murder ...

Because there’s a typhoon, a very bad weather that day, not many people come, but many people wanted to come. Very quickly after we set up the livestream, there was more people connecting than people on the front of the stage, because they all wanted to come. We already had ...

Yes and no. 10 days before this particular Occupy, we had a dress rehearsal at an anti-nuclear plant parade. Specifically, the NGO organizing it asked for g0v people to work on Internet support, wireless for the journalists there and also becoming their own media, because we discovered that we can ...

We even arranged for stenographers, court reporters in the parliament to type everything they hear and then add it to the projector screen here, so you don’t even have to dial up the sound or connect to YouTube. You can just pass by and see the captions of what’s happening ...

Roughly speaking. There’s many different camps. The center are the people who initially opposed the bill, who asked for a more transparent deliberation. Nevertheless, because there’s direct ethernet lines connecting these different sides, whatever happens here is filmed like "The Truman Show" and it’s projected immediately on a projector here. ...

Even before that, we made sure that there is ethernet -- that is to say, local network -- connecting the different sites of the Occupy. Even though the parliament building was occupied and there’s any number of police in the parliament and then the three different streets are each occupied ...

There’s many different forces at play. I think one is that it was completely peaceful. It was kept peaceful, because every corner during the Occupy was filmed and livestreamed and we made sure that I think a week or so into the Occupy there was fiber optic Internet line connecting ...

Converged instead of diverged.

Just by participating in the Occupy or supporting it, they nevertheless then become heads of cities. The capital city here was won by an independent, which nobody would have predicted before the Occupy.

I think one of the comparable result is that right after the Occupy in both countries, the city-level elections were won by Occupiers or Occupy sympathizers who themself did not expect to win the election.

It was a successful Occupy in the sense that its demands were met and people were just evacuated peacefully. It’s one of the very rare Occupies that actually met their demands. It’s been compared to the 15M movement in Spain. Of course, they had a much larger scale.

Yeah. It’s huge. Unlike many Occupies around the world, where you get the tribes being more divergent and eventually losing any concrete consensus altogether, this Occupy, in particular, ended up giving a very clear and strong demand, which are then agreed by the head of the parliament.

It’s in the March of 2014. It was about 22 days of occupy. The parliament was occupied. It was non-violent during the parliament region. At one point had a million people who were on the street.

Yeah, it’s called the Sunflower Movement.

I’m working on the logistics, but I’m not alone in doing this. We have hundreds of volunteers during the occupy that did this.

That was the occupiers’ words, not my word. I was one of the people who supported the occupiers to further this process to make sure that everything gets transcripted, and broadcasted, and so on.

Which is why the students occupied the parliament, because they want to express their ideas around one particular bill that the parliament refused to deliberate on. It’s like the MPs went out on a strike, but the occupiers says, "No, if you do it the right way, even with half ...

We can never be sure that the MPs are reflecting correctly the people who elected them. Many of them do, and do very successfully, but there is no systematic way to guarantee that the imagined ideas between the two voting election cycles are reflected properly into the policymaking process.

The later of two categories of technologies, the listening and deliberation, respectively, technology are the ones that are often missing during a policymaking process. Instead, we have the parliament doing a smaller scale of this kind of debate.

The process they were demonstrating is what we’d call a scalable listening process. The government, of course, is very good at using radio or television to talk to millions of people, but it’s less good at listening to millions of people. It’s especially not good at getting millions of people ...

It’s not just me. It’s a whole generation of people who occupied the parliament, and not to protest, but to demonstrate a better way of policymaking. The occupiers were protesters that demonstrates, in the sense not just blocking or boycotting, but demonstrating in a demo kind of way, of saying, ...

That’s right.

That’s my main mandate. It’s broadly called open government, but it actually encompasses many different aspects.

As the Digital Minister, I mostly oversee a refocus on service design, a refocus on what we call human experience -- I try not to use the word user experience -- and the way that collaboration, both between ministries and between sectors, can improve the experience of people interacting with ...

It’s been electronic. The e-government work in Taiwan has been done really well, but it doesn’t really change, fundamentally, how things get done. It just changed the device on which things get done.

Their reporting structure, the communications structure still mimics when there were still only telephones and papers. For example, whereas before to register for a company you have to run to five different ministries’ offices to work on the names, the trading, the tax, and whatever, respectively, now you have to ...

My work here as Digital Minister is to work as a channel between the civil society and our international friends, who work on various innovations that improves their work conditions, their living conditions, the planet really, and the government which still in many cases, work in a non-digital way.

Instead of in many older democracies where there are people working on the dominance and people working on innovation, and they don’t really consider them as the same tribe, here in Taiwan I’ve seen a bunch of people doing democratic innovations and ICT innovations. I think that’s kind of special ...

Interestingly, they were the first generation to direct election of the president of Taiwan, and also the first generation to do interconnectivity, to do ICT-based development because the World Wide Woeb came in ’96. It was also the year where we had our first presidential election.

My generation is the first generation to enjoy freedom of speech, freedom of assembly. My parents’ generation, they can’t really do this. When they were university students there was still martial law going on. We’re really new to this democracy thing.

Oh, OK. Awesome. I think Taiwan is really interesting because we’re a very young democracy. We only got democracy 30 years ago. 30 years ago, there was lifting of the martial law.

Mele-Ane. Yeah. My dad is from Tonga.

Oh, really?

Taiwan was around for a very long time before human beings, giving rise to a very diverse ecology. Also, the oldest people who live in Taiwan are now widely considered to be the origins of all the indigenous people in the Pacific Ocean of the people who traveled from here, ...

We are in Taiwan. Taiwan is an island that’s been around for four million years. It’s at the intersection of two plates on earth, and we’re raising five centimeters every year here, which is why there are so many earthquakes.

Without a ministry.

This is my office.

Yeah, that’s just fine.

OK. I’ll turn off the projector. [laughs]

Which means that we don’t need a presentation...?