That’s right. It must not only be machine translation because it lost the nuances, right?

I think that is something that we should actually have more conversations about because when our conversation with AIT came, they care very much about the ex-pats being able to type their suggestions in English but also understanding the Mandarin speaking community’s voices.

The Perimeter, yeah. I didn’t visit there. There’s quite a few AI startups being brought both ways between the two jurisdictions. I think one of the challenges also is bilingual AI in the public service for Canadians.

Yeah, on some issues, but I didn’t visit, what is it, the Direct Institute.

I worked with Apple on Siri for six years, so I help on that regard, but law making, that is the Ministry of Culture and the National Development Council respectively.

On this part is kind of a multi-ethnicity nation being built. On the other hand, there is English from the kindergarten level that’s being taught. Those are two strategies. I’m paying a lot of attention to enable them without wasting too much time on repetitive work, so mission translation and ...

There’s the bilingual, meaning that everything concerning foreign people need to be presented in also English. There’s also the National Languages Act, which means that for the different populations, if they want to learn physics or something, they can do it through materials in indigenous languages. Taiwan’s curriculum also takes ...

More broadly we consider Academia Sinica the incubator of Taiwan’s open source movement, and it’s home to many important infrastructure projects.

Yes. Actually, we think of Academia Sinica as an important incubator of the g0v movement. The information science, the computer science department is where the bi-monthly hackathon happens. All the initiatives I mentioned actually have their prototype there. The previous head of the information science, computer science is now also ...

Trade was the previous one. The next one is people do people, to be followed by AmCham’s consultation on talent circulation, I think. All this becomes kind of the norm for diplomacy to be public for everybody to participate meaningfully.

We worked with AIT a digital dialogue that invited both sites to communicate. Currently, our topic is security collaboration. There’s a lot of innovations in this field. Their first dialogue was how to promote Taiwan in the world. We came up with like the Presidential Hackathon and AIT should someone ...

We also work with the National Palace Museum – which is part of the cabinet because of an interesting history that goes back to the Qing Dynasty [laughs] – to co-design their ticketing systems. Their visitors may be 70 years old, may be 17 years old, and it’s a challenge ...

One of it is co-creation of the important digital services that touches everybody like the tax filing experience, as well as mobile authentication to the universal healthcare system. The learnings from that effort will inform our plans next year to introduce a New eID.

I think the importance here is that we are in the kind of neutral zone where the party politics are kind of at arm’s length. Then, we can consult meaningfully with people without as much party politics as they have in the legislation. Of course, they are free to act ...

Yes. I think so because our design here is that the administration can propose draft bills; you don’t have to go through MPs to propose draft bills. The draft bills are of course subject to partisan fights among the amendments, but the skeleton of most bills are written and drafted ...

Indeed.

I’m not partisan either. That’s not an anomaly, though. In the cabinet, there’s more independent ministers than ministers belonging to any party.

No.

I don’t have fixed constituents. My constituent is anyone who has an email account.

So appointed by the president and confirmed by the premier.

I’m appointed.

I’m working with the government. I’m not working for the government. I report to the Internet community.

Right. I think Ning Yeh was Director-general, and so on. They all have their own network so to speak, yeah.

Right. Basically, the staff, each of them when they join…I think you were a section chief?

We always have, for example, horizontal ministers in charge of law because each minister may pass their own laws and regulations, but someone needs to keep them coherent.

It’s a new position, yeah. We always have horizontal ministers. It’s just a horizontal minister in charge of digital, that’s the new one.

That’s the basic idea.

Previously, it’s always the minister’s credit but it’s always the public servant’s fault. In a horizontal way, it’s the other way around. It’s readily transparent. It’s always their credit, and if things go wrong, it’s me that gets beaten by the local population because you cannot hit someone across the ...

In Taiwan, we say meeting someone face to face builds 30 percent of trust, and so meeting through high-bandwidth tele presence may be 20 percent of trust. The importance here is that it’s entirely horizontal. They don’t need their minister’s approval to figure out solutions together.

That’s right. My work is that of, I don’t know, philosophical work. I think everybody’s sides. I visit the rural indigenous areas. I live with people here, and then make their listening scalable and also make sure that the 12 different ministries also listen to them through tele presence while ...

We do this through e-petition. That’s a common source. Each ministry now also have a team called participation officers in charge of tackling emerging issues. They can also raise issues to my office. That’s the second one. Also, our youth counselors, which are reverse mentors to each minister, they can ...

Then, we make sure that we work out loud meaning that whatever project they’re working on, they do separate themselves. I don’t score or rank them. I don’t give assignments. If they have incompatible values, for example, the environmental one and the economic one, that’s the common one or the ...

One volunteer to my office…Then, my office represents different values because every ministry is, by its nature, a different value. We don’t allow two or more people from one ministry at the same time. I hear the MOVAQ is maybe a dozen people now, right?

Hence, my office is one delegate from each ministry. We have 32 vertical ministers, and they can each send one volunteer. Joel here is from MOFA, the foreign service delegate.

As for digital transformation, that is not a job of any single ministry, right?

I’m the digital minister in charge of social innovation, open government, and youth engagement.

A lot of solutions is common between the two societies. We should really build that social relationship aside from the existing trade, economic, and ecological ones.

We also have mining rights with indigenous lines and how to meaningfully consult with the indigenous nations. It turns out, you’re having the same problem, sorry, same challenge.

I do see that we share many common values in that we seem to not be so acutely aware that we share some very common values. That is the part that I would really like to introduce because in Taiwan, nowadays, like with President Tsai’s agenda of not just marriage ...

Yeah, I went and visited, I think, let’s see, Vancouver and Toronto and also I think Ottawa for two times already. That’s in the past year alone.

Yeah, it goes both ways.

That’s right.

Sure.

Sure, already done. Yeah, have a good local time.

All right.

Soon as you upload it, we’ll put it to the YouTube channel.

I’ve already published the conversation of Shu Yang and you and I from the previous call, but we haven’t got around to make a transcript of that yet.

Yeah. I just recorded the voice, so I still rely on your side of recording for the screen and everything.

You mean the recording?

That’s great.