Exactly, of the term "open."

It’s the name of the standard now. [laughs]

It’s a dilution.

It’s still an API, because it’s conforming to the OAI format. But it’s not open data, because it’s then not open accessible.

That’s right. Then the question they will invariably ask is, "So, this OpenAPI format, does this mean that it’s world readable? Because our servers are not ready to be world readable?" I always tell them that, "No, you don’t have to. You can just spread to the two ministries around ...

Then they care about the data quality, because then it’s part of the daily work pipeline. If this breaks, their job is at stake.

The approach that I was explaining was that if we use an API‑based, API‑first approach, my current thinking ‑‑ which may change ‑‑ is I tell those people in the government that you can first forget about the access part. Then you start working only on format, which is government‑to‑government ...

Right, so: License, Format, Access.

"Accessible," that’s the word.

Like you can click to download it, instead of filing a form and waiting for 17 days.

No, I mean accessible, to non‑specific people.

I thought it must also provide access to people. (Seciton 1.2 of Open Definition)

Or, you can have a free license, fitting the open definition, but with terrible structure. None of these would be called "open data," because it has to satisfy those three criteria.

Switching to the API side, what we’ve been doing is that, because open data is "format, license, and access", these three are actually orthogonal. You can have the best structured data, but under a non‑free license.

I can argue both ways.

That’s exactly right.

Right, because services are just read and write interfaces to this data store.

One route is saying you have things in relational databases, usually SQL databases ‑‑ and then we provide those automated tools, so that they are published automatically as a package, and so on.

No, but we’re using JSON Schema. [laughs] After I become the Digital Minister for numeric data, what we’ve been doing here is to standardize GraphQL, OData, and the OpenAPI standard from the OAI. It’s a different route to get to frictionless data.

One of the things that we’ve been doing here is...

Numbers?

Exactly. One of the things that I did is to standardize on the Akoma Ntoso format for the transcripts.

As a natural language processing geek, these are actually useful. I wouldn’t say it’s not data, but it’s not in a data format that’s very easy to consume, because from one meeting to another, the markup is different.

ODTs are technically XMLs, so they are two‑stars or even three‑star open data [laughs], published on the open data platform.

It used to be, in the previous administration, the previous Vice Premier Simon Chang issued this open data mandate and everything. After I become a Digital Minister, because I was understudy to the previous ministers, I was aware that there were a lot of problem about chasing the sheer quantity ...

I’ve seen this one.

Mm‑hmm.

What we’re doing is, essentially, taking these from those relational databases and saying, "Now they must be CSVs on the data.gov.tw platform." Once this goes here, then the Join platform consumes, every day, those open data, and then turns this into thousands of topic for public discussion.

Because they’re now merged together, they do have data for both sides of the things, on the planning stage and the execution stage. These are already structured data, and it’s already managed in a way that’s entirely paperless, so it’s very easy to say, "Since everything unrelated to private data, ...

The fortunate part is that the National Development Council is a merge of two previous councils. One is for the audit projects, the Office of Research and Development. The other one is the Council for Economic Planning And Development, including presidential promises.

That’s right. We took a lot of time on doing this. This is called the GPMNet, which is used to monitor government projects.

That’s right.

What we’re saying is that they have to provide context, the narrative, the lead, and then everything, in order to get people the whole context, because people see one random sentence and then... So we give them journalism training as part of this plan.

It’s on getting the public servants to see this as a important engagement tool, but, also, now they must essentially become their own investigative journalists. They need to respond in a way that people hold them to the same standard as media, which is not a very high standard, anyway. ...

The National Development Council is in charge of doing this. The majority of the budget is actually not spending on programming, which is off the shelf nowadays, but is on training.

That’s the main platform.

The main innovation here is to have each budget item be a discussion area, and then have the public servant carrying this to go here. They respond directly, instead of through an intermediary, which may have any kind of distortions.

This is the classical open spending visualization. Then you can drill down to each of those details. Then this corresponds to the original projects, desciring how the plan came from, and then it goes back to a discussion forum.

Budget.Taipei is this whole new thing.

Then there’s umbrella projects, like the Asia Silicon Valley as well as other major presidential promises. On the presidential promises, you can then see its budget drilldown. Have you seen Budget.Taipei before?

Anybody can then share their ideas, or discussion, or their five‑star rating. I’m not quite sure what the five‑star ratings are for. Anyway, this section at least assigns a single URL for each of those projects.

Then it shows two charts of both the KPIs, the Key Performance Indexes, how it’s accomplished, and the budgets that it has spent, and then whether it’s updated quarterly or monthly. Then the details, like all these dates corresponds to the procurements that they did to accomplish this project. This ...

I randomly click on it, and then you can see very easily that it’s a four‑year project, and that we are on the year one of four. It’s expected to be completed somewhere over here.

In any case, every project here is allocated a multi‑year, or single‑year fund, which gets a visualization here. For example, this plan is about preservation of historical sites.

In addition to petitions and consultations for every regulation, we also have a "Supervision" part. This part has not seen anything quite at the scale of the previous two sections, but we are going to post 1,000s of government projects here soon. Oh, the first one is the open data ...

We can see the Ministry of Interior here, and the National Development Council, and so on. Each ministry has those participation officers, who then faciliates reflection on people’s input, and draw a consensus, and so on. This the consultative section.

For example, the NDC is planning to have a Foreign Talent Act to encourage more foreign contributors. We post in both languages, the consultations, and then we get a lot of feedback, both in English and Chinese, as of how this should be implemented.

The "Talk" section is similar to regulations.gov in the US, where all the regulations, before its announcement, there has to be at least 60 days of public commentary period. Instead of posting just, say, a notice with an email address or telephone number, we now post every single one of ...

Let’s give it a look. We also do a lot of telerobotics and virtual reality, but it’s not the current subject. The Join platform has four different sections. The first one is the "Petition" section, which is like "We the People" and it has a threshold of 5,000 countersignatures, and ...

The first topic, which was this Friday, was around "internal join platform". We already have an external join.g0v.tw platform. Have you seen this website?