Then, of course, it’s still one-way. Then comes the participation, the participation being building consultations methods, empowering each ministry to make more efforts to include more stakeholders in early-stage processes, and then also have a public platform where all the regulation changes must be published 60 days before it’s in ...

That’s not really transparency, actually. Post-2014 in Taiwan, we don’t say that it’s transparency anymore. To qualify even as basic standards of transparency requires an in-the-flow part of the process, with a transparent process, which isn’t redacted. That’s the transparency part.

Right. This has a background in Taiwan, of course, because after the Sunflower Movement, people say that if you’re selectively transparent, like in many countries where we have a FOIA request process, still you redact most of the things, because it’s ex post facto transparency.

Yeah, but that’s our understanding.

That’s also in the transparency part.

That’s the transparency part.

Concretely speaking, we’re working to implement the open government principles: Transparency, Participation and Accountability.

Sure. Of course, that’s actually a very good question. You’ve seen our website? It’s PDIS.tw. Our mission’s pretty clear. We say it here in the form of a movie, that we incubate and facilitate the public digital innovation and service. There’s the main vision, if not the mission.

Right. That’s the reason I’m here.

It’s up to them, basically. If people don’t like the projects they’re doing here, I’m not their employer. The next day, they just return to whatever the organization with it that they came from.

A couple of reasons. So we have around six public servants who have volunteered to join this space. We have one-to-three participation officers from each ministry, so about 50 people now, who participate in this online space and then monthly we gather together for a lunch meeting, which is now ...

Because in this space, we’re working in the g0v style, I don’t give commands. They end up doing whatever they like to do. In this way, we have five people from the institute of the information ministries. We have three military service folks who prefer to work on this instead ...

Technically, their salaries and benefits are still being paid by their original ministries. They’re more like on-site customers. You understand this idea, right?

There’s just this space. But then they’re like, "No, as the minister without portfolio, you can send a memorandum that says, ’I would like such-and-such ministry station one or two personnel in this space.’"

Then we had a lot of different ministries of people who randomly email me, saying, "I would like to work on the Digital Ministry stuff." I’m like, "There’s no Digital Ministry."

Right. When we say space, we mean people who frequent the space. People who do participate in weekly meetups. At the moment it’s about 20 people now. We have me, of course, being three days a week here, two days a week elsewhere, and then my two executive secretaries who ...

That’s the structure. On our own time, we have weekly, we have monthly, we have quarterly, and then we have daily, which is mostly online chat, and standups and whatever. Then we have the usual supporting structure, a Slack-like (Rocket.Chat) room, a Kanban (Wekan), a Dropbox-like shared folder (Davros). The ...

We have a lot of online spaces, we have chat boards, message rooms. Then we have weekly meetings at the Ministry of Finance multipurpose conference center, and we have a monthly meetup just nearby, that’s the next building. We have quarterly meetings with deputy ministers.

While at PDIS, which is Public Digital Innovation Space, we’re not even an organizational unit. There’s no permanent staff in PDIS. PDIS is weird in this sense that it is not an organ of the government. It is literally a space. By space, we mean this space we’re in. We ...

But still, they are considered public servants, and they are considered working in a public service for an organizational unit. 18F is very well-known. They had this contractual relationship with other governmental units, so that they are basically an internal startup. That’s how they position themselves.

They are organizational units either reporting to the prime minister or the president or the cabinet, somebody really high up saying, that’s OK, we need to have this office, we need to have this 100 people, 50 people, whatever. With this amount of people — of course they relax the ...

First of all, we’re not really a public service unit. The thing with the Singapore model or the UK cabinet office model. Actually, we can also add to it USDS, which reports directly to the president’s office.

It’s a fair question.

Right. How do we compare with 18F, GDS, or PolicyLabs?

Exactly.

It’s great. You’ve been working with the OCF?

Yeah. We get a lot of loud speakers, it’s background music for us.

Oh, there’s another thing. It’s about the AIT expanding their office, which is neutral, but the Marines are coming to station as guards to the new AIT building, whilst before the AIT people were mostly diplomats. Marines is very symbolic.

That’s the basic idea.

Yeah, the pension reform is about to touch on the army, the soldiers’ pensions. A lot of them were unhappy about that.

I think it’s about the pension reform.

All right, anything I can help you with?

Looking forward to...

I think it’s recorded, right? We will make a transcript, I will send it to all of you so that you can correct typos and whatever, and then after 10 days we’ll just publish a copy of this.

Yeah, sure. It is [email protected]. That’s my official email. Feel free to ask me anything. I’ll answer publicly.

It is very enjoyable to work on this topic, which was one of my main research subject anyway, so it is good that the Taiwan people pay me to work full‑time with the government. [laughs] I will continue to do this same work regardless of whether I hold a official ...

In this humanistic conservation, kind of conservative way is also why I do want to work as a public servant with the public, to make sure that the civilization as we know it still continues. I do this not out of some public duty or whatever, but because it’s fun.

It is my thought that if together we can listen to each other as each technology comes, blockchain, whatever, we can know what to ask of the technology and as a society to step forward, instead of just a few people stepping forward and excluding other people, eventually render the ...

If you render the previous civilization void, because it would be a new species rising of robots or whatever. Instead of the technological singularity happening, as many fear, many friends of mine in Silicon Valley actually believe that this is happening, that the future doesn’t need humans or whatever.

The other answer is the conservatism in a more traditional sense, and the idea of there’s a long tradition of civilization. Instead of introducing a disruptive change that will render previous history meaningless, like the so‑called technological singularity for one, or some even more unlikely scenarios.

We do have something to conserve ‑‑ an anarchistic tradition that defines the early Internet and the constitution of the early Internet. If I can work with Taiwan to further the conservation of the recursive public, well, that’s what I do. That’s one of the answers.

Conservative means two things. First, that I do want to conserve the recursive public that’s already working. The IETF ‑‑ the Internet Engineering Task Force, the ICANN ‑‑ all those are anarchistic organizations of multi‑stakeholder approach that exist independent of states but still runs the Internet and runs how Internet ...

Well, I’m a conservative anarchist.

Are there any more questions?

Some parties adapt faster, some slower. But they all need to adapt, more or less. I don’t have any specific recommendations, but I do think parties need to be more fun parties, where everyone [laughs] get to speak and everyone gets listened to, and instead of traditional parties, where they ...

But how to listen to millions of people, how to get millions of people to listen to each other, it is something that especially Leninist parties are not particularly good at, because information flows in one direction only.

My advice is always the same. Just by speak less and listen more. It’s common sense, but how to listen at scale is something that traditional parties are not very good at. They are very good at speaking at scale. To reach millions of people ‑‑ that’s your specialty.

Yeah, that’s my PDF talk. There’s also a panel which we’ll publish later. I did talk with all the parties’ MPs or spokespersons and whatever.

This is me, my talk in New York, saying I’m literally from the future, which is 12 hours from the other side of this planet, time‑zone‑speaking. This is where I introduced...