It’s just like a traveling virus of the mind. Whenever some part of our team goes on a conference, and so on, other digital systems counterparts in other governments, here are some of the tools and methods we are using, and then just work it into their team’s culture. There ...

Whenever I talk about this to our international friends, they get very inspired. Part of this is already making its way to the Madrid City Council, of all places. What I’m saying, when I’m talking about the meme, it doesn’t have to be a local thing.

I wouldn’t say it’s something that we would be seeing, it’s rippling out in a few months’ time. If you give it four years, five years, then I’m sure that the new generation of digital natives who enter public service would then prefer to work with the same kind of ...

Second, it has to be a cultural change from the department itself. It doesn’t work if we command people to not obey commands. It doesn’t work like this. They have to be a voluntary culture change.

What we are not doing is to directly order any other administrative agencies to adopt this because, first, we’re still experimenting. We’re not sure, 100 percent, it’s a good idea yet.

All these are the demonstrations that I’m doing in the administration. I wouldn’t say it’s the science fiction of culture, because we’re living it right now.

Sometimes it is really a good idea to engage machine learning and some artificial intelligence to help you to transcribe your audios, or to schedule your meetings, or to help you in whatever other way, and leave the valuable work to human beings, instead of having the human beings repeat ...

This is how we’re trying to get this, maybe a meme, a virus of the mind, to spread, that sometimes it is more efficient if you work in a transparent way. Sometimes, it is more useful if you trust the collective intelligence to provide input to your work.

If and when they voluntarily, because I don’t give commands, find those tools and this collaborative culture interesting, then they can take it and use it with no cost whatsoever.

What we are trying to do here is to have other ministries to look at the tools that we’re using. They were going to be certified in the government cloud, so unlike Dropbox, or Google Drive, or whatever other external tools, these are safe tools that are open source and ...

What is different, perhaps, is that there is now a room in the national administration for this kind of governance structure to happen. What we do is that we share the rules, the playbooks, the tools that we use to make this happen on our website, pdis.tw. PDIS for Public ...

This is almost a collaborative syndicate way to run a team. This is not that unusual in the Silicon Valley startups. Many startups started this way. GitHub started this way. Valve, in many ways, is still running in this way.

In my office, it doesn’t work like that. It is a collaborative space where anybody is free to propose, to pitch some idea that they see needs doing, and then to call for collaborative help from any of those, 15 now, collaborators, and soon the be joined by the Principal ...

This is a radial change of the governance because, previously, in many government structures, it is the boss who dictates the key performance metrics, and it is the underling who delivers those results, and so on.

It is on this ground that I can live this autonomous team‑building, that everybody in my team is not really listening to my commands. They decide their own objective, their own key results, and things like this.

This is interesting, because during the negotiations that I have with the Premier, I entered the cabinet as a bridge between the civil society, and the private sector, and the government. Meaning that I do not look at confidential information, I do not look at national secrets, so anything that ...

The best way to predict the future is to invent it. I’m going to list some of the concrete ways that I’m living the change, so to speak. As an anarchist, there’s no dilemma for me. What I mean by anarchism is to not obey commands, nor do I give ...

It just so happens that those VR environments are primarily at the moment from Silicon Valley. From having firsthand access to the technologies behind those virtual reality tools, and so on, yes, I think it is a very important part of the skill‑building to know not only the effects of ...

I’m saying that cultivating this kind of remote collaboration habits, whether it’s through virtual reality or not, is going to be very important for Taiwanese people to learn in the environment where they can draw directly from the wisdoms and the collective intelligence of people around the world, not necessarily ...

When he is assigning homeworks and so on, those six persons get to virtually collaborate in this virtual classroom.

If you put on a VR goggle, and start to see Benson speak, and assigned in one of those six person rooms, virtual rooms, out of 6,000 participants...It’s not packed in one 6,000 person auditorium, but rather just six randomly assigned students in one room, watching the same virtual Benson ...

This not only lets us to convene classes in a much more economic way ‑‑ even for people in remote islands to enjoy this kind of participation ‑‑ but also, it makes the lectures much more convincing. When people are looking at screens, they get distracted by their phones, by ...

In the virtual reality, we can already have photo‑realistic models of motorcycles and of you and me to bring our hands and everything basically that we care about into the virtual reality space where we can construct a social circle around a virtual motorcycle in which you can still teach ...

Some of those knowledge, especially in the mission maintenance or interpersonal relationships and things like that, does require a kind of face‑to‑face or hand‑to‑device connection. This is where virtual reality comes in.

Exactly. We drew a lot of inspiration from Benson’s work, but two dimensional screens has its limits. You cannot really teach the art of motorcycle repairing over a two dimensional screen because, obviously, there’s no motorcycle for you to repair.

As you know, there’s already some massively online courses where people teaching maybe physics, mathematics, or philosophy, even history are recording the best speeches they have given and have people who are like me, drop out of high school, to still have some sort of high education by just watching ...

The second thing is that there’s one part in “Asia · Silicon Valley” plan related to me. That is what we call a virtual reality academy.

What this does is essentially people in a township or in a city can come up with the demands they want to ask of the technology instead of having technology vendors dictate what is to happen in the city. Having this way to negotiate with technology vendors is very important ...

This has two benefits. One is that a different vendor can look at the lexicons that this product is speaking, independently improve this communication, so it makes the entire ecosystem more vendor‑neutral and less tied to one particular vendor.

API meaning the application programming interface, meaning that there’s a basic mission readable language for those things to talk to each other. Those languages, they need to come with their dictionaries, with their lexicons.

Of course, there’s many different standards and there’s many different cities who are working with different vendors on these kind of technologies. One of my contributions is to what we call open API.

They know where they are situated in this space, so you don’t have to keep talking to your GPS navigation where you are and where you’re going to. It’s going to know. It’s more or less a very good thing if it’s personal computing, meaning that you know exactly what’s ...

Everything is going to be connected to the Internet, and then share whatever they have on the environment. Of course, this has benefits, because then all the computers and all the devices that we carry have what we call contextual information.

What’s left for me, it’s mostly two things. One is what we call standard building, because a lot of this connection for the “Asia · Silicon Valley” plan is going to be centered around what we call the Internet of things, meaning that we’re going to have those tiny, tiny ...

These are not, strictly speaking, making a Silicon Valley clone. It is the bare necessities that are needed for this kind of connection to happen internationally.

The other minister with the portfolio is managing the development parts of this. The parts that require some physical constructions to further our, for example, a national exhibition center, or things like that.

Those parts are not strictly under my purview. There’s two other ministers with the portfolio who are in charge respectively, for the national investments, and also NGO around investments of the Taiwan, and Asia, and Silicon Valley funds. I’m not managing that.

The dot in the Asia.SV, I usually read as “connect”. What we’re looking at is a connection that enables more flow, so to speak, of knowledge, of talent, of those regulatory innovations, and also, of course, of capital between the various parts of Asia, and between Taiwan and Silicon Valley.

They could do, but they could really use some of the wisdom and resources that the older generations have. What I’m trying to do here is more as a channel or as a bridge between those two generations.

They didn’t have the same connection to the market as the older generation. What I am trying to do is as a bridge of sorts, who speaks both the language of the older generation, because I was born and I remember the martial law era, but then also connecting to ...

They’re good governors in their respective trades, but what we need to do is to take some of those wisdoms, some of those early, even prescient, reading of the global market, and so on, and share it as open knowledge to the younger generation who thinks very democratically and very ...

What I’m trying to do here is to listen to the wisdom of the previous generation, who worked on the authoritarian regime before, and who has come up with a lot of wisdom on how to run a country very efficiently, and do their industry and their trades, especially like ...

There’s maximal payoff to do and work with the system, and follow whatever that has been in the place before you, because that’s the safest and the least risky to your life, perhaps, way of doing things.

Basically, everybody who was born before me remember how it’s like before Taiwan was a democracy. This, more than access to Internet or to personal computers, which is roughly the same year, shapes people’s habit, as you just described, because if you are brought up in a regime that’s not ...

My role is this, I’m actually a pretty good listener. I work with many people who are born before Taiwan’s democratization.

This is what we call agile governance. We look at what happens, and then we change our governance structure to try to make things easier for the new startup that then sprouts because of our earlier work. We change our governance structures around the actual ecosystem, change is brought up ...

Before we get there, we still need to get the cost of staring a startup and hiring some expert foreign workers much easier, before we can get to this inclusive culture. This is also why this is a multi‑year plan. We are not looking at a culture change overnight. We ...

What Taiwan does previously is more of a "do one thing and do it well" kind of industry building, There’s less respect for this kind of integration between the diverse cultures and diverse background of hardware, and software, and kind of humanities, even, and so on, and try to make ...

They go to Silicon Valley and pursue something that they would look, and amplify, and change the world, essentially.

Even with this kind of culture setup, we also need to work on inclusion and diversity, because one of the primary strengths of Silicon Valley is that it’s very inclusive. It’s not hostile to any new contributions from the Asian communities, from different communities, from input of all the different ...