Sure. Let me close the doors though, so our recording has sound quality. All right.

No, not at all.

OK, is there anything I can help you with?

OK, cheers.

Yeah, my 3D printer is right here.

Mm‑hmm.

OK, cool.

Uber just finally caved in to this consensus and agreed to operate under these terms. Yeah, this is where it gets decided.

[laughs] Oh, really? These folks collectively determined the agenda, thousands of people really, that we used to negotiate with Uber. Because a lot of them here are actually Uber drivers...it’s just my friends, so you have overlapping friends. A lot of them are Uber drivers. Even Uber drivers themselves actually ...

Right, exactly, the day they started. Everything has a time line. We started with a Pol.is sentiment‑gathering platform, so that we’d get everybody’s disagreements, but also agreements. Then we started review stuff ‑‑ passenger protection, driving interests.

That’s where we’re working with civil society on what people want from the procedure point of view. This is where the Uber case, the Airbnb case, crowdfunding, and teleworking has been worked on.

No, you will find something, or you can take a picture. [laughs] It’s easier that way.

Actual case of running it is actually becoming every Wednesday, and not here, on some civil society gathering place. If you’re interested, also you can come to our every Wednesday, 2:00 PM, vTaiwan meeting.

We’re using the vTaiwan platform to work with other ministries to convince them of this way of policy‑making. So far, there’s quite a few ministries which agreed to work with us. The funny thing with vTaiwan is that it’s not government‑sponsored. It’s a private sector, g0v project, and the government ...

One of those expert, anonymous netizen would just write an email to me saying, "This has been solved by basketball players a few years ago." [laughs] I’ll just channel them to the next meeting. This is an actually pretty good way to do this policy‑making.

The external benefit is that, because we publish not at the end of it, but during every month, so that people on the PTT, on the Reddit‑like discussion boards, they also saw this discussion and found out, "OK, we’re trying to find a solution to this and none of us ...

The person doing this doesn’t have the context of discussion. They just saw the meeting’s conclusion, so they did something wrong, then got public flack for it, and so on. But with real‑time transcripts, they have access to the full context.

Right, exactly, because that solves two problems. It solves the problem, first, internally, because sometimes you get one official come to a meeting and commit to something, but then they go back and tell their staffs a different version of things. Maybe not out of malice, it’s just they didn’t ...

Because East Port doesn’t really have a ministry to look after them, we worked with three different ministries, each doing one different thing, one about academic, one about conscription, and one about regulations of subsidies of investments. We convinced those ministries to do policy making in this radically transparent, before‑decision ...

Yeah. The whole idea here is to build an accountability trail. We started working with the e-Sport case just as a demo. This is, unfortunately, in Chinese, but let me translate this.

Right. Also, our conversation, after a few days of you editing the transcript, appears on the tracks system, because all the meetings that I’ve held as minister, all the visits and everything, is published data.

Public Digital Innovation Space. We try to list everything that we do here. It also links to Join In and so on.

But you can start with our website, with is pdis.tw, which, for once, is an English website.

Because it’s all in Chinese.

This is a pretty good platform that we’re trying to get more popular. Propose ideas, review the soon‑to‑take‑effect regulations, or to oversee the long‑term projects, these are the three functions of this web page.

Yeah, they’re doing it, so it’s pretty good. All the schools will say, "Without a ministry’s blessing, we wouldn’t want to do something. Even though technically we can, we don’t really want." Now the Ministry of Education says, "Oh, yeah. It’s a good idea, and every school can implement it ...

They did get some expert hearings, and finally they agreed. They set up this recommendation to all the high schools, so that each high school can actually delay the come‑to‑school time for their senior high school students.

The key to just to have a really good OG image, and then it will get viral. Of course, they provide the arguments. Then you see the ministry of education will work with the proposal and the counter‑signers to make sure that everybody understand what’s going on, and so on.

For example, there is one. At present, Taiwan high school students generally lack of sleep, the go‑to‑school‑time should be late. [laughs] This is not really about regulation, per se, but just pointing out a social problem, but it did get a lot of people countersigning it, 6,000 people.

Not necessarily legislation. It could just be an idea. Sometimes it is legislation, like public servants can legally form unions. Of course that is one thing, but sometimes there is just pointing out an issue and asking the government to take a hard look at the issues.

There’s also an e‑petition part in this same website, where if there’s 5,000 people countersigning anything, then our ministries must respond within 60 days. Nowadays, I’m personally supervising the discussion.

This is not just open data or digital‑related. If we look at e‑plans, there’s pretty much everything ‑‑ industry, operating, every cultural, ultra‑high definition television, or whatever. Feel free to let us know how we’re doing.

For example, there’s one around the collaboration with civil society on an open data plan. That’s the first topic. If you click "supervised," you can see the road map, and then let us know how we’re doing and where you want to see it going.

For people who can work with machine translation, you can go to join.gov.tw and look at the public consultations and let us know how we’re doing. If your work pertains to one of the major projects, there’s also the supervised part, which also starts as a g0v project, and now ...

There’s quite a few ways to help. We have this join.gov.tw platform, where we try to put all the regulations 60 days before its announcement online. As you can see, the Foreign Recruitment Employment Act is actually bilingual for the consultation. We did get a lot of very good opinions ...

Sure.

The digital part is the least controversial part, but there’s also four other parts that are more controversial. But I think, all in all, they’re probably going to get passed somewhere this session, in which case we expect to have the budget to start running these projects this September, if ...

The administration says we’re doing this, and then we allocated some amount of money, 880 billion NT dollars. But the legislation, because there’s a special budget, are now running six public hearings to make sure that this actually makes sense.

That’s the main view ‑‑ cyber security, equality of access, open content, common API‑based services, and then collaboration between different schools, but also between human and machines, are the main ideas.

This, of course, includes very basic things, like all the high schools have sufficient computer facilities to use this kind of GPU‑based learning. These are the more hardware investment‑related parts within the Digital Nation eight‑year plan that we try to speed up, so we complete it in three or four ...

This includes having a common GPU computation platform available for all the schools to use, also integrating robotics and AI into all kinds of different fields, so that the curriculum gets boosted to redesign, so the students learn with the machines.

The fifth is about machine learning. This is an interesting plan that hopes to reshape the senior high school and upper level of education to incorporate more machine learning into it.

We also have other local governments propose similar ideas based on open data and open API, so that they can work their local entrepreneurs on their city services. Government would sponsor all or part of the project money for it. That’s the fourth pillar.

The whole idea is to have this free, scalable infrastructure, in which we can just post up pretty much everything related to disaster and recovery online, and then build the ecosystem out of it. That includes pretty much everything that’s related to the environment, so this is about services.

The NCDR also works with g0v people for crowd‑sourced disaster reports, and also the air pollution part. There’s a g0v project called AirBox that expands its reach.

A couple years.

We already have a prototype here in the form of NCDR, the National Science and Technology Center for Disaster Reduction, where they aggregate all the geo data at the moment, and then display it, such as rainfall, such as air quality, such as volcanoes, for what it’s worth, and typhoons, ...

In part four, we’re repurposing a lot of existing systems and adapting them into this OAS standard, an open API ‑‑ it used to be Swagger ‑‑ standard, so that they can handle high‑volume throughput and display such data in a common platform.

If you want data out, then they sometimes burn you a CD‑ROM, and there’s really no high‑velocity way to exchange these data, partly because they were just using PC‑era software.

The fourth part is about building a common API‑based economy for government services. Whereas before, each part, like the weather bureau or the ministry in charge of interior of firefighting, of all sorts of geographic data, disaster recovery data, and so on, each one would keep them in the data ...