For the more inward‑facing ministries, they don’t really have kind of this training, or even recognition for this kind of engagement. What we’re doing is building a learning circle, where we meet every week to discuss one topic pertaining to one particular ministry’s participation officer’s duties, then we get other ...

For the largest ministries ‑‑ Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Health and Welfare, and so on ‑‑ they already have these kinds of systems in place, where they have facilitators and people who use data visualization, and other engagement tools.

Engagement mostly starts online of course, because it’s easier to engage non‑specific people online. But, it also includes offline modes, like public hearings and other notes of consultation, and eventually collaboration.

That means, in addition to volunteers, every single ministry in the national government need to assign one to three people to work as officers to drive engagement with non‑specific people.

So we’ve been experimenting with the 15 people team. Two, three designers now, about nine coders, and legal experts, and so on. It’s been good. Then, we were scaling this up as of this week, to this wider network, to what we call our "participation officers". It’s similar to "engagement ...

We do all our system designs in this co‑design kind of way, so that we know for sure that their original colleagues will be up to this kind of design.

If we are doing e‑government planning, what’s better than having those on‑site customers evaluating on behalf of their colleagues, that the system would actually work, or these open data infrastructures actually reduce their workload instead of increasing their workload, and so on?

Exactly. For as long as I’m the Digital Minister, I have this temporary staff. This is very interesting, because in Agile software development, we have this concept of a on‑site customer.

Then, I sign a letter of intent, saying that this person now works in the office.

Because the PDIS is not a officially ordained unit yet, we’re not at a stage as in Singapore where they have hundreds of people working at the Singapore GDS. Some PDIS members are career public servants in different ministries, who tell their ministers or deputy ministers that they want to ...

But because they’re interested in this work, so they sign up for what we call the PDIS, which is roughly modeled after the Policy Lab or GDS, whatever.

There’s my anarchist principles: I don’t take commands. I don’t give commands. I only work with volunteers, so all my staff here are volunteers. Which means that aside from two executive secretaries, everybody else of the 15‑people or 16‑people team were originally working with different ministries.

I’ve been here for four months or so. I’m the first so‑called anarchist minister, which is kind of an oxymoron. But really, what we mean is that I bring what we do in the open‑source communities ‑‑ which is a volunteer in the cat‑herding organization, kind of organization style ‑‑ ...

Hopes and fears. [laughs]

Challenges.

Anything I can help you with?

That’s awesome.

很開心。

All right, 那就今天先這樣。

是個 Open space 啊，你可以決定每天來。

真的！那回來之後歡迎來 PDIS 玩。

歡迎隨時回來。

What’s your general impressions of not just g0v but the whole visit?

When do you go back?

That’s right.

By staying with decouple architecture and decouple procurement, and forcing all the communication to go through API or open data, which must be listed publicly, we also say that each module, because they have a well-defined input and output, can be independently reinvented by not just g0v, but also small ...

We’re trying to discourage people from procuring these as one thing, because then you get some integrators who are not particularly good at any of this, or they are very good at backend, but very bad at adapting to RWDs.

By decoupled, we mean very simply that the storage part, the elastic part, the backend part must provide a API, and then the display part — be it website, or handheld app, or VR, whatever — these are separate procurements.

For Taiwan’s current procurement strategy, I work on this decoupled architecture, and also decoupled procurement. This is less radical compared to the UK GDS, which says that it has to be less than one million pounds. No IT procurement must be over that amount. The civil society got a equal ...

It’s also German. What I mean is I think the only trick you need is to get the people who write the procurement criteria to consider this kind of early-stage prototypes, what we call micro-grant, micro-purchase, and things like that.

That’s a very Taiwan thing. But I think it’s also German. [laughs]

In Taiwan, I think mostly because the government itself procures most of the information systems anyway. The government IT personnel are good at selecting proposals, writing RfPs, but not actually at building things themselves.

It is. But it’s also because if you undertake a prototype fund to do exactly that sort of prototype, but a connection between the prototypes and the systemic procurement of German government services, as I understand it, it’s not very clear. There’s no formal vetting process.

That’s right.

The g0v is really just focused on the fork, and then a patch of governmental services. For the cabinet, this is a godsend. People are doing all the POCs for free. [laughs]

Yes. It is. Because at the next year’s procurement cycle, if we do things really well, we are trying to get the Gov counterpart to take this into their system, and they did. They took it very well. The Gov takes g0v seriously, because g0v doesn’t engage in traditional activism’s ...

I think for all the domain names that g0v hands out, people are compelled to take it seriously.

But if you call your website "Legislative Yuan dot g0v dot Taiwan," there is implicitly the promise that you must do something that’s as serious as the actual Legislative Yen.

I think the domain name works as a hypnotic reminder that self-governance is not just possible, but it’s desired. If you set up a website that says — no offense to our French counterparts — "Citizens’ Parliament," then it doesn’t connote the same binding notion of "You must take it ...

That’s a very good question. The most special thing is the domain name, g0v.tw.

Anything else you’d like to chat? There’s 10 more minutes.

We also say that it must at least conform to the bulk export/import open API, so that when there’s a open-source vendor who wants to take over this procurement next year, they can at least do a bulk export using compatible APIs and import it into the open-source package, and ...

That’s a start. I’m not a dogmatic Free Software person. If the proprietary vendor agrees to provide its free to charge software in those elastic parts, we also take it.

We’re actually helped by the software as service movement, saying for any elastic part of procurement it has to be licensed cost-free, if not Open Source. In that case, we’re helping a lot. When the government shifts into this direction, they will start demanding at least freeware.

If we you procure in a subscription kind of way, of course you will want to save cost on the basic foundation of the stack. Then if you have a thousandfold of people join suddenly, when you have to make a thousand virtual machines, now if it’s running proprietary software ...

In this, we’re helped by this international trend to turn more software into services, instead of packaged with an appliance or hardware.

That’s something we can concretely do. We can harmonize our regulation if not have exclusive preferential treatment, at least not disadvantage open-source procurement.

Of course. We have a procurement reorganization plan. Our current procurement is only compatible with MIT license, the permissive license, and it has some conflict with AGPL — it doesn’t work with AGPL in our current procurement rules. It’s an artifact, because when the rules were being written, nobody had ...

Then we don’t have to argue anything, because you write with pens, they still do signatures, they do whatever, but they’re now digitally capable. I think most resistance comes from the public servants who actually see paper as having a better user experience, which we can’t argue with. Paper does ...

Then maybe in a couple years, we’ll have rollable display, which solves another thing about glass. Then maybe after a couple more years, we’ll have e-ink that is as responsive under normal light, instead of just blinking into everybody’s eyes. At that time, it’s just paper.