There’s me, Audrey. I’m the digital minister, but also in charge of social innovation, youth empowerment, and social innovation and open government. That’s three mandates -- the social innovation, open government, and youth empowerment. As you can see, all ministries are somehow related to those three things, and so I ...
There are, at the moment, three ministers without portfolio that are cross-cutting, in the sense that we don’t have any particular ministry to oversee.
Yes. However, at the moment, there’s six such minister without portfolio who has specific mandates or specific realms that corresponds to ministries.
For example, it’s a tradition that we have a legal minister without portfolio who oversees not just the legal ratification process, but also the enforcement process and the other processes related to law, which means that they will have to talk to the ministers of Justice, of Interior, you name ...
Between many ministers, the ministers without portfolio can have a profile that spans any number of ministries, like three ministries, five ministries, seven ministries, so that they can act as a bridge between the ministers and form a virtual team around particular areas that are cross-ministry, but it’s always very ...
We have 31 ministries, soon 32. The ministers without portfolio used to be 80 percent senior ministers. They were ministers, and then they ascended to the Executive Yuan and still coordinated.
This is constitutionally very interesting, because the President get to, essentially, formulate the cabinet, in conjunction or in collaboration with the Premier. The Ministers don’t actually report to anyone else but the President and the Premier.
Again, just to hyper-summarize a little bit, the Executive Yuan technically exists between the ministries. The ministries are headed by Ministers, of course, with portfolio. The cabinet, the ministers, are nominated by the Premier, but ultimately appointed by the President, just as we are.
However, we are not to make any decisions without explicit authorization from the premier and an explicit confirmation from the general secretary. This is our reporting structure. This is the minister without portfolios.
However, the Executive Yuan itself is technically managed by the general secretary. Above the general secretary, there is a team of pseudo-deputy-premiers that are like deputy premier, but only for very specific items. If the premier delegates parts of his power or her power to a minister without portfolio, then ...
This is very different, which is why I have to draw this chart. The Premier is assisted by our Deputy Premier, who may be delegated Premier power for pretty much anything. That’s the team.
It’s quite different, you see. We have a generally elected President, but she doesn’t head the Executive Yuan directly. She heads the Presidential Office, but she appoints our Premier. The Premier holds the executive power but may be replaced any time by the President.
-ish, yeah.
Let me draw a very quick, not entirely correct, organizational chart. Our administration is called the Executive Yuan, or EY.
They represented their ministry, so they reported directly to the CIO. We don’t put a restriction of how many POs there is in a ministry. For example, the Ministry of Transportation and Communication, they have two POs at the very beginning, one for the PTT, who is younger, and one ...
Meanwhile, there’s many other people joining...
After that, we went to PTT, which is like Reddit -- this wonderful bulletin board system -- and say that we’re forming a participation network team. We asked any netizens who are also public servants to volunteer to become participation officers. The POs are the network then that we asked ...
Then we have the Council of Agriculture and we have the Ministry of Finance. It just so happens that, from the g0v movement, there’s two public servants, one in each, that really want to join my team, and so they volunteered. Again, all this happened within the first month.
The very first cases we deal with are related to finance and agriculture. There’s a dashboard for the price of vegetables and fruits later on, because of typhoon, and the premier wants a dashboard of all the factors of prices.
I then asked the general secretary for whatever case that I work on, I need to have an onsite customer.
I asked each part of the III -- they have six different departments responsible for all the different parts of the technology -- and I asked that one staff, each, join my office. Suddenly, I have six more people.
Then I went to the Institute of Information Industry, the III, which is like 18F, actually, but it was established from many decades ago, like, more than 30 years ago. The III has supported the public workforce by employing people whose pay grade is well above career public servants. They ...
They joined pretty much on the first week. It is interesting, because these three people were the original people who did the vTaiwan platform and the JOIN platform under Minister Jaclyn Tsai. I knew them already as an understudy minister, and so even though they are in NCC and NDC ...
Right. These are all before POs. We have 怡君 from NDC, we have 葉寧 from NCC, the National Communication Commission, who is also one of the primary authors of the Digital Communication Bill, and we have 貢丸, from, now, the Minister of Culture.
The POs haven’t even started. I’m talking about at the very beginning of my work in the office, so, like, October 2016.
Yes.
The original assembly, the "core team" as we like to say, these three are, say, co-founder of PDIS, but very shortly, like, within a week or so, we have 怡君 from NDC, the National Development Council, which is very important...
However, I hacked the system so that it becomes possible for any ministries, career public servants, to join us by way of volunteering. Their salaries are still paid by their original ministries, but they can work on site in my office.
By all means, these are really the only staff that I should have, and most other Ministers without Portfolio only has the staff of three people, three or four people. We have nine such Ministers without Portfolio.
Exactly. Thank you. Right. There’s no voting process. There is a general consensus.
We have Zach, who is the political staff, and we have Shu Yang, who is the design — and community and international liaison and re:architect and many other things — staff.
It’s true for all the heads of ministries. So there’s me. Each politically appointed Minister without Portfolio has a staff of exactly one or two people. I elected for two people, and they are my executive secretaries.
Let’s see. I’m a political appointee. I wasn’t elected.
It depends.
Yeah. Please, go on.
They’re excellent people,and you can see that we have a dress code.
Here are the staff.
As digital minister. That’s the official term.
I learned it from Magic: The Gathering. Yeah.
That’s exactly right.
Again, it’s all gone, [laughs] but like the vocabulary of 10 years old. That’s the fourth language. English is going to be the fifth. I learned that when already an adult and I went back to Taiwan.
Yeah. Right. I’m sure that, with some practice, I can still write, but speaking and listening is not there anymore. Because Saarland is at the border of French, so, when I was 10 and I went there, I also had to learn some very basic Français.
No. Not anymore. I used to be. I can still read just fine, I think. But this...
Then, when I was 10, I went to Germany -- Saarland, to be precise -- when my dad was doing his PhD there, on the Tiananmen incident -- he was doing his field research there -- and so I had to learn Deutsch, and so that’s the third. But because...
Fifth language. I was raised by a lot of people, but primarily by my grandma who speaks Taiwanese Huklo. My grandpa was from Szechwan, and so he speaks, I guess, Mandarin, but with a lot of Szechwan accent and idioms. Of course, when I go to school, I learned Mandarin-Mandarin, ...
Yeah, definitely. I see Colin has joined us. Hi, Colin.
That’s the general blueprint.
It translates the route for broad consensus from the blueprint meetings, and then starts one regional meeting, at least, per county or city. That’s about 20 to 30 regional meetings. Finally, there’s a general assembly-ish meeting that takes the round-trip meetings here, the regional ones, back to the assembly here ...
Then 15 people from this larger assembly, about one-tenth of it, is selected as the drafting team, in which the citizen must not be less than two-thirds. At least 10 people are directly from here. It doesn’t say about indigenous nations. That’s the idea.
The blueprint meeting is to set the scope, the agenda, the process of it. Then the blueprint needs to have this F2F component, as well as an online component. The blueprint meeting is very everyone. There’s several rounds.
