No, it inspired my friends. I wasn’t part of the g0v movement till 2013. That’s three months after the movement started. What they decide to do essentially is just to register a domain name “g0v.tw” and systemically look at all the bad-taste, authoritarian government services and websites and redo them ...

…blindly.

We need to redo anything?

Can we move?

The civic hackers at the time, four of them, imagined that it’s not because we’re dumb, but it’s because it’s not made in accessible way. They went up and did a interactive visualization of the national budget just to show that people can actually collectively understand budget very well.

It’s the first advertisement on the Internet that’s flagged as spam by citizens, from the central administration, so a complete flop. What it represents is the kind of elitist mindset that thinks the public, the “commoners,” have no way of understanding something as comprehensive as a multi-year budget.

The Economic Power-Up Plan was a interesting plan that tried to motivate the economy, but it’s “too complicated to explain” at the time. The government at the time, in 2012, tried to film something that basically have a voice-over that says, “The Power Plan is great but too complicated for ...

It’s all social-sector governance or local-level governance, instead of just electing the president, which took place in 1996.

They all very much cared about the democratization and, indeed, joined and founded many social-sector organizations. It’s in the family. Everybody really cares about the empowerment of social sector. Remember that was years, a decade or more before we even have our first presidential election.

From the very beginning, when I was four or five years old, is when Taiwan started relaxing its one-party rule. The Democratic Progressive Party was just born at that time. I remembered all the conversations in my household, plus my parents are journalists, one studying politics, the other law.

OK. Do I have to say that again?

The governance works in a purely voluntary fashion. It doesn’t have the army, it doesn’t have a navy to maintain some kind of sovereign of Internet governance. We just earn legitimately through other means. People earn it through radical transparency, poly-participation, and the emphasis on rough consensus.

In any case, the difference was, as I said, the absence of coercive power. You really could not coerce somebody to not speak over the Internet like that.

You cannot punch anyone over the Internet. Even though there were latitudes and longitude and we jokingly call them ICBM addresses, but there was no real ICBMs ever flown because of those addresses.

That is my first foray into Internet governance, just by way of participating in CPAN.

All this is basically people building a library of reusable software components and trying to make sure, in a way, that people can trust each other, even complete strangers, to reuse parts of our code in your code and vice versa.

My first foray, if we can call it, into Internet governance is just to set up USENET groups for what we call Perl-mongers, which are people who are trying to spread the Perl language. I also participated in the transition between Perl 4 to Perl 5, the forming of CPAN, ...

I first got an Internet account through the NTU network by way of a friend when I was 12. That was 1993. There was no graphic browsers then. As I remember, those days we had Archie and Gopher and probably it makes no sense to use those words now, but ...

Sure.

Thank you.

See you around.

Excellent.

OK. Every other month, there will be a large event in your vicinity, the g0v Hackathon, so please just drop by and you’ll see the social innovation in action.

I read about that, but I don’t realize that it’s permanent…

Oh, you are? That’s great.

Are you staying in Academia Sinica for a while?

I’m sure that Joel will take you up on your offer. He’s our MOFA delegate. He’s in the foreign service, I’m just facilitating the space.

For the sustainable goals. That’s the 17 colors. I’m just saying Taiwan Can Help. This is lowercase digital minister meaning that I preach about digital transformation. All in all, this is an anarchist card signifying I’m working with, not for, the government.

I just printed a set of new cards. Feel free to have several because they also double as communication material. It’s interesting, because my name card is designed so that I’m not representing anyone.

Yeah, because the MPs were on strike. The occupiers were just doing their job for them.

Yeah, the Sunflower movement.

We occupied the Parliament for 22 days.

Then, we really want to figure it out. That’s my main research interest, figuring out this.

I quit that company and joined the Free Software movement, later on also advocated for Open Source, which now rejoined the Free Software Movement, and then it’s just social entrepreneurship after that. When I worked on my first startup, it’s not just computational linguistics, but also just social interaction design ...

That’s right. My main research topic is social interaction design. That’s basically building the first system like my startup back in ‘96 did the first B2C auction site in Taiwan, the first meta search engine, et cetera.

I’m trained on Project Gutenberg and Arxiv.org.

I dropped out of junior high, so I’m self-educated.

That’s right, yeah. We want people to be also Taiwanese. We’re not saying that you need to convert to our nationality.

In any case, the idea is that you can continue to participate in the global ecosystem but having a separate place to live. That’s the idea. Then, once you renew your Gold Card for another term on the fifth year, you can become also Taiwanese. You don’t have to drop ...

But that’s the idea, right?

We do. That’s why our Gold Card, unlike the Singapore one, is renewable. We want to attract as much digital nomads who are into hiking or surfing. I don’t care what attracts you. It could be food. You have property as a human right, so even if you hike to ...

We’re trying to attract digital nomads for precisely this reason because they can earn a global salary, but they spend living expenses in Taiwan. That basically makes them twice as rich or thrice, actually.

The living expense is equally low though. If you translate to PPP, we’re doing very well.

The what thing?

For example, in the DPP primary, William Lai’s platform was that like the President of Taiwan did great on open government, but he will be even more open.

I started working with the public service end of 2014, and then as reverse mentor to Minister Jaclyn Tsai who’s the horizontal minister in charge of law. This is not a new thing in Taiwan and people actually competed on being more open.

Yeah.

Certainly. I worked with the previous government, too.

It turns out that so far, we’re using the AI software called Pol.is for this kind of conversation, very recently got this kind of bilingual capability sponsored by the Canadian government because of French, English. Then, we contribute on top of that. We’re already sharing the technical level AI components, ...