Hence the recording. It’s a closed‑door meeting, as you requested, but then we would want the other ministries who are actually in charge of related policy‑making...my role in this government is a channel, so that other ministries who couldn’t participate in our meeting still has this information somewhere.

Otherwise, I’ve been doing more or less the same work as what we call open government.

It’s been more or less the same. I’ve been working as an adviser for the previous cabinet, but also working on open government. For me, it’s mostly just the cabinet telling me to not focus any other time with, let’s say, Apple consulting or Valley companies, and dedicate full time ...

With your permission...here we go now.

Yes, I think so. We’re recording this. Did your people tell you?

Here’s my card. It’s a formality, but...

Did you just arrive today?

Hello.

They were expecting me, you know, to go all the way to get a PhD or something like that. I mean the world has changed around 1996 because of World Wide Web, and because of the way that people can access to knowledge, so it is the material fact; after ...

I mean I was like non-binary when I was already 12, so it’s not much as coming out as saying that you know I don’t really want to be a confined into a specific gender role, so it’s with a very philosophical way in which that I came up with ...

Yes, exactly! If you just google Pleco, then you get this extensional pack. I think now they are building at it into Pleco as one of the plugins.

It’s done already.

Because in our cloud system we’re building for all the Executive Yuan and all the administration, we have a flag in which we can just switch and make this discussion board public, right? So a lot of these are we want to feed into machine learning. We want to feed ...

It is the part of the work of the cyber security office, Howard 簡, who is in charge of this, and this is a new unit after this administration set up specifically to deal with cyber security. Part of my role as digital minister in charge of open government is ...

It’s just whatever is built-in. So on this iPad it’s Siri recognition and my Android phone is you know Google speech recognition.

No, I use speech input most of the time, haha. I mean I type on QWERTY keyboard but nowadays it’s mostly speech input because recognition is good enough.

I think again I’m not the climate scientist and I just feel that in Taiwan the new administration really puts a lot of focus on the clean energy and on the new forms of energy that will not only be more efficient and eventually less expensive, but also much more ...

It’s not really my job to predict this, we just react to the actual realities.

To take a very concrete example, a lot of my policy work centers around preparation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Of course I’m not the negotiation minister that would be minister Deng (鄧振中), but as part of TPP there is a lot of intellectual property harmonization, like the Digital 2 ...

I wasn’t very surprise actually. There was an interview in August in which I said, you know, I think there is a lot of similar dynamics of occupy movement and Trump’s campaign, in the sense that they were both master of social media and the way of using social media ...

It’s not that we’re switching overnight to UBI, but creating climate in which UBI would be possible. Whether UBI is to be introduced I think it’s up to political climate of the day; it probably would require something like a referendum and we both know what the previous referendum of ...

It used to be that people’s work are their job, but more and more we’re seeing people doing very creative work but outside of their day job. We’re more and more seeing because of the opportunity of teleworking, people have a work-life balance that’s different from people before the advent ...

The UBI is basically unconditional basic income or universal basic income; there are many other expressions, but the idea is a basic income for all. UBI is a very complicated policy issue, people in all spectrum of the politics have propose UBI in one form or another. But the first ...

My favorite music which is on a loop for the few months now is Hamilton the musical. But Hamilton the musical is not one specification, right? I mean it has hip pop in it but it also has a lot of other musical genres, even things like Beatles was in ...

I think President Tsai is unique that she includes LGBTQ and in fact marriage equality to be a very concrete part of her agenda or platform during the presidential campaign. And it was very brave for me, that’s one of the reason why I voted for her. That wasn’t the ...

I mean I learn from some of the great feminist like Judith Butler and so on. So I would say that I inherited part of this tradition. But I also inherited many other traditions.

Well, we have a women president. I will not comment on other countries; the idea of feminism in Taiwan has gone through the same waves as other places, right? There is equal right, equal pay and equal treatment, and then it’s about not being defining by specific gender roles, and ...

As an anarchist, I respect the United Nations. I submitted a paper, I couldn’t be there, but it was presented by my co-author at Habitat 3, a conference about the right to the city and make sure the process is where the commons decide the city together and so on. ...

No, so far I think Taiwan really has a very good cloud infrastructure and we are the top of open data index globally. After all, this means that our basic data is open so basically on top of this we are now trying for more international exchange to make sure ...

In Taiwan of course we have a lot of data on biodiversity. Taiwan has 10% or something of all the marine species, and in Taiwan we also have unique measuring points around all the offshore islands and also on the islands itself for regional climate and regional pollution levels. All ...

Personally I care a lot about climate change; in the past 12 months I spent 4 or 5 of those in Paris. I cared deeply during the time the Paris Agreement on climate change was going on, but I was in my private capacity at the time as an independent ...

The issue of citizenship, permanent residence, and visas in general I think is very high on Minister Chen’s list. And so every week I hear what is being done, what’s left to be done, and so on. I’m sure that a lot of these things will be worked out pretty ...

There are two things. Before I joined the cabinet I was a member of the "K-12 Curriculum Committee" and our main product is a curriculum guideline, which is going to be in effect by 2018. And in the 2018 curriculum, that is the first time that the national curriculum agenda ...

Defining risk, which I already talked about, is one thing. And the other thing is to make it fun--I mean I’m officially a minister who work for fun, right? When the premier asked me why am I aiming to join the cabinet, is it out of duty or out of ...

I’m sure that people here who live here and like the environment in Taiwan are already doing a lot of cultural cross polination of ideas and citizen diplomacy and things like that, so I would say just continuing on whatever they’re here doing and basically bring the same sense of ...

Actually the po.lis system I described is a machine learning product. They use machine learning to learn how people cluster together and so on, but I think equally important is that we can’t really make the decisions that are value judgements through artificial intelligence; what they can do is play ...

I think the major change is not happening from the public sector, but is from the machine learning sector. As of last month the there is been a major breakthrough in the English Mandarin bi-directional translation quality. If you use any of the online automatic translators, there’s been a new ...

Taiwan actually have a pretty friendly teleworking regulation, which the vTaiwan public deliberation project have deliberated last year. So last year when I was still an advisor to the cabinet, we actually talked about exactly how teleworking is going to work in Taiwan for people. Not only that we’re pretty ...

Well, it is actually the purview of the National Development Committee which is headed by the commissioner but also minister with portfolio Dr. Chen Tien-Jy (陳添枝) and so that is his job, but I’m kind of an advisor on anything digital related, so if there’s something digital related I just ...

For these things we don’t have to work too hard or too much to interfere with the public sector, but for the initial point of contact that’s what we can focus on.

Well, this is a very complicated topic that has a different answer to each industry sector, right? I’m not going to, because of time limits, to go to detail of that. But in the upcoming digital national plan, we try make infrastructure such that no matter what the industry that ...

I think it’s a nature part of Taiwan, and as I said already, actually I think the main work that the government should do is to make failing easier. Because if you spend a lot of time and capital to set up a company, a lot of efforts a lot ...

I mean, at the end of every huge media cycle we always get some kind of petition. Not always 5,000 people strong, but some of them are 5,000 strong. A concrete example, there was one right after one typhoon because some cities have this half-day holiday, like this half-day that ...

We’re doing it right now, in the media and on several other places we try. But I think the most important advertisement is really up to each ministry, because once one ministry like the Ministry of Health and Welfare which did really well with the first two petition cases, each ...

This is the most similar to "We The People" at the White House, right? It was a presidential order that says all ministries has to respond. I think the average response time of "We The People" is around a hundred and twenty days. Within 4 months or so they will ...

There are two main platforms: there is the vTaiwan, the experimental platform that the g0v and other civil society communities are carrying. The agenda setting, the process even, it’s collaborative defined, with the civil society and with the top private sector. But for normal, everyday regulations we have the "join" ...

At the moment it’s already at the end, so we’re trying to spread it gradually toward upstream at the beginning.

I think the most important thing is that people are risk-averse because they really don’t know what will happen when they fail. This is the same as startups: if the cost of starting a company is very high, then it means the cost of failure is also very high. In ...

So these are your friends, it’s just on public policy you haven’t deliberated over dinner, and now you know. And then the next thing is that it shows it’s possible to converge. At the beginning of each interaction, often you see people clustering in four corners with very little overlap ...

Basically, the idea is what we call in mathematics the principle of component analysis. The idea is that if you propose some very radical opinions, a lot of people would vote "Yes" but also a lot of people would vote "No", right? It’s divisive. People who vote similarly, like in ...