And everybody else. I only work with volunteers, so if people come to me voluntarily and say, "Let’s do something." If it’s something that I like, they will form a syndicate, or something.

If I have this kind of view I would be progressive.

That’s my main assessment, is that she’s willing to take the time.

To undo those psychological issues requires not only the de‑authoritarian mind process of everybody in the Cabinet and President, but also by demonstration, once they’re in, that we’re willing to engage in dialogue, even with people who don’t trust us, can we earn the trust back. That takes time.

Taiwan was a authoritarian system during the martial law for the longest period in the world. It’s literally generations of authoritarian rule.

Once the citizens get used to the idea and the practice of the government actually trusting their input, maybe some of the citizens will trust back, but this takes time.

Trust is something that can’t be commanded. The government need to trust the citizens, whereas before, the government doesn’t trust at all, saying it would be populism, or something.

However, open government isn’t something that a government can do by itself. It requires trust between the public sector, the private sector, and civil society.

She’s not afraid to tackle huge controversial issues. That’s what distinguished her with pretty much every other President so far in Taiwanese history, by this willingness to communicate and learning.

Go ahead.

Not at all, until it’s ready. When it’s ready, it will happen naturally.

That’s pretty progressive.

It’s entirely personal. If I’m a progressive anarchist, I will want to inflict my values on you. I’m conservative, meaning that I know this way works, but I harbor no ambition to inflict it to other people.

But it is. Anarchy means that I don’t issue commands ‑‑ I ask for your permission before pressing the record button ‑‑ and then I don’t take commands.

That’s what "conservative" means.

The current one is pretty good.

Because, by definition, these kind of crowdsourcing is ineffective inside the hierarchical organization. If you expect the state to do that, the state will do that, but in a ineffective way. At these kind of times, where the civil society is actually better, but they may have not realized it ...

Because there are certain things that a civil society does that’s much more effective if the civil society look at available tools and then gather around those tools in the Wikipedia kind of way, instead of waiting for a hierarchical system to do that.

It ceased to be a useful illusion. When you say, for example, "I want to collect environmental pollution information, and I want the state to do that for you."

It’s a useful illusion when you want the state to do something for you. You can say, "I want universal healthcare, and I want the state system to do that for you," for example.

Not necessarily.

She is pretty radical, actually, by Asian politicians’ standards. Slightly progressive by European standards. The idea is that she’s not waiting for her party to be ready for these values. She put those values very clearly on her presidential campaign, and actually, the campaign four years before that.

We’re on the same page. President Tsai is pretty unique in that her values around, for example, marriage equality or aborigine rights and so on, she adopted these views before her party took that as majority views.

Yeah, but when you sign a treaty, it better be in the public sphere.

It doesn’t mean elimination of private sphere. That’s not possible.

Right. Unconditional publishing, I think, is a bug. It’s turned into something that wasn’t ready for the public, and published it to the public. The whole idea of open government is saying that we only do binding decisions in the public sphere, not in the private sphere, where a lot ...

Not at all. It’s being worked on, actually, but it would still requires a press of button. It’s not like thoughts is being published all the time against my will. It’s just I would like to probably, in a few years, have a much more direct way to publish my ...

You can have your private moments where you sketch your thoughts and so on, but only when you’re ready, we engage in some kind of dialog, and keep this on the record so that people who are not here in the room, but they are stakeholders, anyway, can participate in ...

It’s only a counter value if your private thoughts or your private moments are being published against your will, but before I turned the recording on, you clearly consented to it. It’s not at all a counter value. The whole idea of radical transparency is to make account of things. ...

No.

It’s iterative in a way, as opposed to month‑long journal cycle. It’s iterated by the minute. It evolves much more quickly than the original scientific community based on paper publishing. Otherwise, I would say it’s just the same peer review science, open sharing attitude, which is now being fed back ...

It’s just part of science. With the personal computer, suddenly everybody is a "scientist" in the sense that we can replicate people’s experiments, and make additions and publish what you see.

In Taiwan, there is also a few early pioneers around this radical transparency, and we would say the intellectual commons, like Chu Bong‑Foo, the inventor of the Cangjie input method, and so on.

Most people trace it back to the Railroad Club in the MIT, which is not part of Silicon Valley. In Europe, it’s traced back to the original hacker spaces in Vienna and in the Chaos Computing Club.

Fortunately, with Wikipedia, the entry barrier is much lower. If you just spend a month being a Wikipedia editor, a lot of these will suddenly make sense without having to go through canonical text. Maybe the Wikipedia beginners manual, I guess, is a pretty good text.

All these are distillations of decades of culture. I don’t think any text can capture the immersiveness of...No matter how anthropologically inclined are the hacker themselves, I don’t think these accounts make sense unless you have participated in this kind of community.

There’s one document called "The Tao of IETF." That’s a very good read. The thing is that there’s, of course, the canonical text around hyperculture. There’s the Jargon file. There’s the anthropologic observations from Larry Wall, from Eric Raymond, from Linus Torvalds himself with Pekka Himanen and Manuel Castells, and ...

That’s the inter part in Internet. Everybody can set up a network, but taking networks into an Internet requires collaboration between people who have barely met each other.

You can look all these up. These are the earlier pioneers of the Internet and the open Web. I don’t think any one person defined how this works. This is entirely a consensus‑making mechanism borne out of the necessity of operators of very heterogeneous telecoms and technologies who has to ...

First of all, I learned this idea from IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force. Later on, it also influenced ICANN unit inside Internet government. There’s no one or two person. There’s Clark. There’s Vint Cerf. There’s Tim Berners‑Lee.

Radical transparency.

They both worked there and participated during the initial wave of democratization of the lifting of the martial law, press freedom, and everything. Then my dad, after participating in that demonstration, decided to pursue further his studies to do a PhD around the student movement.

In graduate studies my father majored in political science, and my mom in law. Then they both went to the same news publisher. It’s called "China Times", Zhōngguó Shíbào. That was before the martial law was lifted. There was no press freedom, so there’s only three newspapers or so.

Puli ‑‑ which is part of Nantou, the only inland county, that is to say it’s not nearby any of the shores ‑‑ that is where my mom’s born.

That was in Taichung. Dadu ‑‑ That was where my father’s born.

They were both born in mid‑Taiwan. They went to the same university, married while they were graduate students there, and settled down near the National Chengchi University, which is where I grew up.

Yes, based on its utilitarian values on the society as a whole.

And on the mechanism. For example, Snowden claims that he went through all the materials to make sure that it doesn’t harm innocent parties, and so on. I haven’t checked that myself, so I couldn’t really validate his claim or invalidate his claim. At least thinking about this or doing ...

I don’t think there’s a blanket way to answer that question. It always depends case by case on what exactly is being leaked.

That is a question about journalism, isn’t it? There’s always leaks or stories that you would not like to indicate or confirm in journalism. You have to balance it with this wider impact on the society, versus whether it’s a temporary causing people to lose face, or if the upside ...