Right, right, right. I can get my laser‑cut keyboard, 3D printer, some virtual avatar or something. I’ll be happy to make a cameo appearance.

Exactly.

We’re very happy to help in whichever way, in making a video or anything, it would be great.

There’s also of course, Taiwan’s position in the next conference. For that, they really need some kind of local government to stand as sponsor. It’s not our place in the national government to point to the city and say, "You’ve got to do it." We’re not that kind of democracy.

Yeah, so anything I can help you with. Previously the FabLab Taiwan people asked me to ask the Premier to sign a letter of intent much like the Canadian example. I agreed. I said, "Just give me a draft and then we will forward it to the Premier. If the ...

Oh, that’s right. That’s right.

I think it’s a great place to really bring people together, even for me I don’t really have any hardware experience. But I was able to find the hardware geeks at that corner. Of course, I’m very happy to help in any way.

Before I became the minister, I used to do some open hardware with a friend, Jesse Vincent, on a a stenographic keyboard, a chording keyboard for Chinese input. We did the hardware design and fabrication.

No, but my friends did. They went there for the CNDP deliberation. They were going to construct a new train, something, and the Center of National Debate Public did a deliberation there. They wrote a very detailed account back, so it’s excellent.

It brings me back.

It’s a great video, and I miss Paris a lot. Before I was made minister, I used to visit very often, like five times a year or something last year. There’s some overlapping of communities like the OuiShare community, like the Start‑ups Corner of the bitcoin’s community, and so on, ...

I saw it.

It’s about a pledge from a city.

That would be great.

Taipei will be the city, then?

Sure, but did you find a city to host?

I think that’s another solution. It will take longer, of course. So, deliberation and frequently asked questions with a direct line to ministers, I think are both important.

Only when I dodge your question or I hide behind some official sounding word or become very vague, do rumors have room to grow. If people have a direct relationship with the government, just like friends, then people will not have the room for the rumors to grow.

If you have this relationship with a minister directly, you will not think of the rumors they were saying about me as true or as credible, because at any time you can ask me directly, and I will answer to you.

We can make it very easy to understand, with pictures and so on, so that people can ask a question directly to a minister, and I will respond to it as quick as I see it, maybe within 24 hours.

The other way of working with it is for the government, for everybody, including the journalists and everyone, to make sure that facts spread as easy as rumors. Which means, in our government’s case, to publish the frequently asked questions as one URL per answer, and make the answer very ...

On that particular topic, after a deliberation, even when rumors spread, even when there is propaganda, you will not blindly share it, because you have already built an immune system to it. That’s one way of working with it.

If think of it like an epidemic, like a virus, I think there are two solutions. One is through deliberation. If you have listened to people who have a different idea than you, and you listen to them very carefully and consider their opinions, even though you disagree, you learn ...

I will not say that we will fight rumors the same way people fight people. It’s not in the same category. For this virus of the mind, you cannot really fight virus. It is a different category, because it’s just an idea that spreads.

By the time we finish reading it, the rumor has already spread through the social media. The facts and the fact checkers and the real journalists did not have time to catch up to the rumor. This is true.

On the other hand, on the Internet, as you said, there are many rumors. This is true. The social media makes it very easy to look at just one line or picture without reading in entirety, and just press "share." Then it gets viral. Right?

OK. First, I refuse to use the word "fake news," because it has no definition. You can call rumor fake news. You can call computational propaganda fake news. You can call hoaxes fake news. You can call "real news that your write but I don’t like" fake news. This word ...

This is something that we’re working on. Software is just an enabler. They also learn software as part of this training, but it’s not just for the tools.

Whereas for the young people who was born with Internet, this is a very natural thing, for many public service people, it takes a lot of workshops and lot of experiments, and a lot of experiences to really start to get the idea, that you can really trust a stranger ...

It has a liberating potential for you to work with a stranger, to trust a stranger. It’s what we call a "swift trust" model.

Even when people use the best software tools, if they just use it in isolation, they treat it just like pen and paper. The promise of software tools start to shine when it allows hundreds, thousands of people to work together, and for people to break out of their silos.

I don’t pretend to know whether it is better this way; it was a decision made by the consensus of the educators in Taiwan. At the public service, what I’m trying to do as part of the PDIS’s work, is trying to get all of the public servants firsthand exposure ...

Computational thinking and design thinking and media literacy, of course, are those broad skills that one can use to learn any field. Our focus when designing the new curriculum is not just about mastering software as like a foreign language, but have the design thinking, computational thinking, and media literacy ...

Yeah, in Taiwan we start teaching programming languages at junior high school, not primary school. But we teach computational thinking and design thinking at primary school. This idea is, as I said, software is just one of the many tools to solve a particular issue.

It is an international thing. Taiwan, for me, is just one of the many sites who participate in this undertaking.

The whole point is that we’re treating the process itself as a common, as something we build together and make the process transparent to the people, so that people can change the process, for example for their community, and for the national government to then learn the best practice with ...

This is also why I publish all the workshops, all the meetings that I chair inside the administration as full transcripts, published 10 working days after every meeting, so that our international counterparts can learn from our process to improve their process. Then we can learn their improved process back, ...

The idea is that this is an international movement of people using information technology to further understanding and listening of people who did not get included into the political process. Which is why our website, PDIs.tw, the PDIS website is an English website with machine translation, so that my foreign ...

Very interesting question. As a participant in the open source, free culture movement, "my work" is not just my work. I use a lot of different technologies and cultures that was co-developed, for example, by the Policy Lab and the Government Digital Service in the UK. For example, by the ...

In this cabinet, the Premier declared open government as one of the core, important issues of the government. They hired me back and have me continue doing exactly the same thing, but full-time as a minister, not just a consultant.

A lot of hackers who participated in the Sunflower Movement ended up being teachers, instructors, advisers, consultants to the administration. I started working with the administration at the time, so I was already an understudy.

After participating on the Occupy, at the end of 2014, the new Premier declared that from this point on open data, crowdsourcing, the hackers’ idea of democracy, must become the national agenda.

Hackers play a very important role in that movement by facilitating communication, both for the Occupy, and also against the Occupy, with all the different sides, and keeping a record, so that people can, over many days, converge into something that everybody can live with.

The Occupiers did a demo, but it’s a demonstration, meaning that they tried to deliberate in a way that is effective and has everybody who participate, half a million people, to provide input into a consensus that then people can say, "OK, this is our feeling about the trade service ...

Back in 2014, when we had the Sunflower Occupy, of which students occupied the Parliament for 22 days, it was not just a protest. It is because the parliamentarians, the legislators refused to deliberate on a trade service agreement.

One of the oldest definition of hacker, before it becomes a cybersecurity term, is the hobbyist use of the term hacker, back in the MIT or the Chaos Computing Club. Back at that time hacker means somebody who can make their own tools when there are no existing tools to ...

Yes, we focusing on having local talents, and develop our cybersecurity market and countermeasures, we do hope that we can have local, not only entrepreneurs, but existing information technology companies to participate more in the cybersecurity community, and make sure that all the parts of cybersecurity -- penetration testing, forensics, ...

People really need to know the detail of what the white hat hackers are doing, in order for them to be a valuable part of public service. We put, really, a lot of emphasis on this, having a new department of cybersecurity as part of this new administration.

I introduced them to our administration people, saying that only by having people who attempt penetration testing can we know for sure how secure it is, and not just led to be felt secure by security features introduced by vendors.

When I become the digital minister, the first thing I did was to recompile the Linux kernel to add secure computing of my day-to-day computer systems. The next thing I did was to invite white hat hackers to do penetration testing on the system that I set up.