The first months after I become the digital minister here I have all the ministries, their CIOs ‑‑ deputy ministers, that is ‑‑ to appoint a senior member in their ministry. They could come from the IT department. They could come from the communication department. They could come from the ...

Instead of saying just one unit or one department, instead we appoint champions to every department, and at least deputy department lead level and buy‑in, so that we can immediately form a learning circle between all the departments, instead of having some being the pilot and others doesn’t even know ...

It’s bought by a larger group called Bedford, PeopleFluent. It’s mostly focused on HR transformation using digital tools. There’s a so‑called Mirror Suite, where they enable cross‑departments to look at each other’s work progress and so‑called working out loud model of cross‑organizational. One of our philosophies when doing this kind ...

So far it’s pretty smooth. I worked with a Silicon Valley firm, a pretty large consulting firm for this kind of integrations, so I used to come up with this kind of slides all the time for Fortune 500 companies.

This is about overcoming inertia, in other words?

This refers to the management of expectations of people’s imaginations, of people’s habits?

If you prefer, we can have the entire conversation in English. I’m more used to it anyway. [laughs] What do you mean by change management being the single largest obstacle?

...shall we speak English instead?

除此之外，當然cybersecurity也很重要，open data是對外、internal data governance是對內，其實網路安全是這一個基礎，這四個是我目前比較關注的，其他也大概都有參與一些。

接下來在無人載具上也會有同樣的概念，所以我們是很有系統去做法規調適的工作。

其他法制方面的調適，因為我們現在的法制很多是監管的思維，像FinTech或者是autonomous vehicles，是當初制定法律的人沒有想到部分，這個是先用沙盒的方式，也就是叫做「創新實驗條例」，先從FinTech開始，讓大家能夠break regulations，看是六個月或者是十二個月，我們再檢討法規看是不是要修正，等於是有系統的違法。

這一個發展方案裡面有分幾個不同的小組，我當然是在最上面協助院長督導，但我自己關注的主要是數位國家分組，也就是政府自己的治理，等於對於政府本身如何應用科技，如何讓公務員少做一些重複的事情，而且可以早一點下班，也就是不要有穀倉效應、跨部會間訊息更同步，這個是我主要的工作。

我們現在有一個「數位國家方案」，裡面我負責的比較是數位治理，所以其實很感興趣各種應用，不管是collaborative software，或者是應用機器學習，或者是應用其他的tool在政府的治理。

Thank you.

It used to be very expensive because people have to prepare them by hand, but now we have sufficient machine learning tools, so that we don’t actually have to prepare them by hand. That’s the idea on that.

With machine learning, as long as we get sufficient raw materials, of course you can adapt interactively to your inquiries or make useful infographics, according to your taste, and so on.

Not at all.

That’s right.

We’re gradually moving this way, as long as we have trust in the collective intelligence.

At some point, when people know how the governance system works, how career public servants work, it’s like the car itself, maybe, will move to semi-autonomous driving, where people can then know how governance itself works, without having someone to make decisions; or you make decisions only when the car ...

Right, I used to use the metaphor where the politicians are, for example, steering a bus, and people are passengers. While, of course, skilled drivers save a lot of time, it would be best if they have GPS systems, and everybody have the same transparency map, where you can see ...

The idea is to make sure that everybody knows, transparently, how government works, and this is the foundation toward a more anarchistic society.

As a conservative anarchist, [laughs] my ultimate vision is for the people who have the kits to run the governance system themselves, but of course it will take more than a lifetime.

Exactly.

That’s exactly right.

Exactly, it’s so last century.

Now even Microsoft have moved to collaborate with the customers, instead of for the customers. I think there’s the whole governance change that is happening just this moment.

Because previously, in the shrink-wrap, proprietary software idea, it’s all about developing for the people. Redmond knows very well what personal computers should do, and people download one version after another every year.

What’s important about this is not just one piece of software, but a fundamental rethink of government services into the startup world’s idea of working "with" the people, not "for" the people.

We’re, actually, now redesigning our tax-filing software because of a petition from a designer, that said Mac can’t really file taxes that well. We’re redesigning it so that we’re including telemetry and user experience research, things like that, so that the designers can have their input while we’re doing the ...

Yes, and in the startup world, even if they’re not open source, they all adopted open governance, where all the customers see what the priorities are, and even participate in a lot of structured feedback.

If you vote, it’s two bits every four years. There’s a lot of asymmetry. You download so much from the government, but you upload only two bits every four years.

We call that scalable listening. I think that’s politics in its forming.

That’s right.

If we can learn this part of the Silicon Valley culture, not the other parts, I think this will also grow Taiwan’s startup scene into something that is even more diverse than currently.

I think we can structure the society and the market so that people don’t see failure matter as much; as people share their postmortems or their lessons learned during their failure, they’re still recognized as part of the community, in good standing.

There’s a curve of people who want to take risk. Social entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs in general, are already people who want to take more risks.

It’s a double-edged sword. It both means that there is a very good supporting SME network, but this also means that for the next unicorn to happen in Taiwan, we really need to get people who want to take more risk into a position where they can take more risk ...

This really reflects something about why people want to start a small or grow into a medium business. It’s because there’s a part of society that care, a part of the social problem they want to solve. There’s also talks about the relative lack of venture capitals on very high-risk ...

There’s a lot more social mission in the Taiwan startup scene than in the Silicon Valley. That’s not surprising, because Silicon Valley is all about [laughs] the next unicorn nowadays.

That’s a great question. A lot of this generation of Taiwanese entrepreneurs, they really start with some social initiatives, with something that they want to solve, with some people they want to enable.

I worked with Apple.

We’re seeing that in software. It’s so natural now. Open source has already won, but in other industries, they’re still learning about this.

You can also see this as a social purpose, to further the understanding of the industry. I think that they are. Even if the game doesn’t sell, even if the company fails, it still has a contribution to the environment and to the society.

One example is in the gaming industry. Of course you know the "id Software" company release as open source all the old games that they did two generations before. I think this is very good for the commons, for the whole ecosystem.

It also changes the investors, because they already see the corporate social responsibility, and things like that, but this actually locks them to a specific vision. They can also endorse this vision, in addition to the startup team.

That’s exactly right.

Exactly, and always, of course, when the next shareholder comes it dilutes, and maybe people who held a small amount of shares want to sue you, or whatever. It’s easier if the governance structure recognized this double bottom line or triple bottom line explicitly. I think that’s what really needs ...

There’s the enabling, the empowerment, the social purpose. It would be good if the company can declare it publicly to investors, so everybody knows what happens going in.

That’s right.