Like how to transition our energy profile from a linear carbon outputting energy profile to a renewable one, or how do transitional justice across the different cultures including but not unlimited to the indigenous. How to reform our pension fund.

Again, Doctor Tsai, so Doctor Tsai’s government I think succeeded in making not only selected digital economy issues subject to public nationwide debate, but not shying away from debating the most difficult part.

Minister Jaclyn Tsai is actually the previous cabinet, I was her understudy and reverse mentor. That was in 2015, actually late 2014. This government is, again, Doctor Tsai Ing-Wen.

Universities, and because it’s all inclusive, I think we don’t meet with much resistance because it’s just a bare minimum of being honest and accountable for what you’re doing to the sustainability of society and environment.

They collectively become better year over year. Again, we just use these standard reporting on the bare minimum that people can live with. People are free to make higher standards that are a subset of our sustainability reporting. It doesn’t exclude anyone, the corporations can register but also can do ...

If they want to get this “preferential treatment,” all they have to do is declare how bad they are at the moment, and what kind of annual efforts they’re making to integrate into the circular supply chain.

The honesty in reporting, or simply accountability, is what we’re aiming at, so because of this, we actually get a lot of buy-in simply because people now see that they don’t have to get to zero waste, zero carbon, zero plastic overnight, it’s simply impossible for many companies.

In the Western world this is sometimes called not social entrepreneurship, and rightly so it’s called something like a benefit corporation, a B-Corp, or a B-Lab. As you declare your scorecard, you may look actually really bad, but you’re still a B-Corp because you’re willing to disclose how bad you’re ...

My main work is just to make the non-public companies that are maybe just 5 people or 50 people in their employees, to also convince themselves to declare as part of their company charter what they’re trying to do that can help the society, and the environment, and the wider ...

In Taiwan, many of the publicly listed companies have already embraced I think more than any nearby jurisdictions the global reporting standard on sustainability. For the publicly listed companies this is a no-brainer, so to speak, because if they want to get investment from say the pension fund, or whatever, ...

Sure.

We are not even saying that what we’re doing is deliberative. We’re far from that stage. What we’re saying is that we’re just checking the common understanding in the collaboration. It’s easy to get to that point, but that becomes the seed at which to grow the deliberation potential.

If we keep meeting, then at some point, we will reach something that we at least agree to disagree, something that at least both agree is factual. That’s the foundation of conversation.

Because [Mandarin] literally only means common understanding so how fine or rough is this common understanding? It’s something we can work on over time. The important thing simply is to not leave the table.

It’s always easy. Instead of aiming for a consensus, you’re aiming for something that people can live with. The interesting thing is that in Mandarin, we say [Mandarin] , which can be described as a very fine consensus or a very rough consensus that simply we agree to disagree or ...

G0v is based on the idea that each project can potentially be forked into many projects. If you want to impose a deadline, you take whatever work is already there, impost a deadline, and see if you can recruit people to join your vision. That’s how it works. It’s like ...

All with the promise of if you don’t like the direction I’m going, you’re free to take this material and make your own interpretation and indeed, your own journalistic output.

This is not just for software development. We’re seeing it in the development of foundation of mathematics, of text of Wikipedia, of journalism actually. We’re seeing a new generation of journalists that kind of work with groups like Bellingcat and so on to crowdsource the fact-checking part, crowdsource the information ...

Forking and merging used to be a very expensive operation, but because of improvements in the theoretical understanding of the so-called conflict-free replication of data, you can now use like GitHub to provide what we call poor requests, which essentially is a small fork with the intention to be merged.

A lot of innovations in the free software and the open source movement is to make sure that even if you forked a project, it can be merged back into what we call the main line or the trunk if people later on see that this off-shot actually works better.

Finally, you can share the work that you have improved with other people and when you reach the freedom three, that is actually forking meaning that it’s now growing in a different direction.

That’s what the free software is about. Free software means the freedom. First, that you can use it in the way not anticipated by its creator and second, that you can…Based on the way you want to use it, you can just look at how it’s done to improve the ...

Right, so the freestyle of our movement introduced this important idea called forking. Forking means that you have a project and somebody else like your project but don’t like the direction it’s going. They can take whatever you have on your project and make it to grow in a different ...

Correct.

Just by rolling up Pareto improvements that are genuinely new and help the public service, they are now seeing that these new way of working does make the old way obsolete. In a sense, I’m not changing the system. I’m just making new governance possibilities that people everywhere around the ...

For them, it’s risk reduction. For them, it’s also improving their efficiency so they can actually get home earlier and spend more time with family. Also, they get due credit. We don’t always introduce things that improve on all three fronts but we introduce things that improve on one of ...

People generally see that if you use AI to help people to look at each other’s feelings and produce common understanding, it actually results in a much better process than if you have to file the incoming mails by hunt and overwhelm the public service and so on.

When they do work, like the e-participation platforms, the collaborative meetings, and so on, it takes root in the public service itself, so it doesn’t take me personally to run it. People genuinely think that if you invite more stakeholders earlier in the stage, it actually produces higher quality output.

Buckminster Fuller said it best, “Instead of fighting against an old system, make a new one that makes the old one obsolete.” That’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m making a new space for experiments on alternative governance systems that may or may not work.

What we’re doing is making the state radically transparent to the citizens. What they’re doing is making the citizens radically transparent to the state, so I guess they’re both transparency [laughs] but working in completely opposite directions, almost like mirror images of each other, that’s what I would say.

I think many governments were unable to do that perhaps because they have less of a mutual trust relationship with the social sector or perhaps, they were wary of empowering the social sector too much. These, too, I think, are the main psychological fear, uncertainty, and doubt but based on ...

This philosophical struggle, we see it in every other nearby jurisdiction in the Indo-Pacific. My mission is just to say that the Taiwan model is not only cheaper amortized but also cheaper up-front. It actually takes less energy if you can work with the social sector, who are very much ...

I was just in Thailand and I talked with the Thai people. They’re struggling between the Singaporean model and the Taiwan model because the Singaporean model does have a kind of allure. You can, at the cost of not empowering your general citizenship, easily take down or, at least, correct ...

The result, of course, is a less informed citizenry, what some jurisdictions consider is a worthwhile trade-off to make. I’m not just talking about the states that are police states or authoritarian states in the beginning. I’m talking about the fellow Indonesian governments that struggle really hard against that impulse ...

There’s always a faster way out is to give up becoming a liberal democracy. You can always impose draconian take-down rules on the online platforms. You can strategically disable the Internet. You can install firewalls and censorship machines. All of them are actually faster, easier, cheap, compared to the counter-narrative ...

You said other countries. You didn’t say other liberal democracies.

If we have real-time, ready-to-use narratives, and indeed, transcripts of all the policymaking context, then investigative journalists can actually be faster than the content forums in their initial fact-checking and things like that. I think it really motivates more transparency work within a ministry exactly because there’s an adversary that ...

We’re not saying take-downs. We’re saying once you see the disinformation, you’re already equipped with the literacy to tell it from the sourced inputs from each ministry and from the press. Also, to make investigative journalism easier to make. If an investigative journalist spends most of their time to get ...

If we have each ministry capable of producing this in real-time, we are working with the platform providers to make our clarification messages reach more people and faster than the disinformation. Only then, people become vaccinated so that when the disinformation reaches them, they can at least think in a ...

In Taiwan, what we’re saying is that within an hour, we’re guaranteed to produce something that’s less than 20 words in title, less than 200 words in this body, and at least two images and all of them will fit a portrait mode on a mobile phone.

It makes transparency more urgent. If you see a disinformation campaign and you do not transparently address that within an hour, then it’s lost. The memetic coverage of the disinformation would prime the population so that no matter how detailed the response is a week after, it’s simply irrelevant.

Once you have that buy-in, then it becomes possible to do things in Taiwan. That’s why we always aim for the cultural change in the public service. The career public servants, not the ministers. I spent far more time with the career public servants than the ministers.

I think that’s what Indy Johar calls the silent revolution or the boring revolution. I think he calls it the boring revolution, is that just to make public servants understand that it’s actually for their benefit also.

In any case, what I’m getting at is there needs to be a corresponding sense of urgency from the career public service. It’s not only for the advocacy. It’s just also for the people who are running the political apparatus to fear that is simply business as usual simply cannot ...

We would, of course, like to see more buy-in but it really took an occupy of the parliament in Taiwan to create a political atmosphere. I’m not saying that you should occupy your parliament or that people should go to the street to rebel for extinction events, although I do ...

That is to say, we have teams in each and every ministry. Not just a few ministries that decide to try a few cases but every single ministry has a team that is crowdsourcing this collaborative policymaking. I think most people join PDIS, join my office, for impact and not ...

Our office actually recruited people from Policy Lab UK from IDO actually, and so on, from the top design firms because they’re attracted to PDIS. Not because we have more budget. We probably don’t have more budget than Policy Lab and definitely a fraction of IDO but the social impact ...

For example, in the UK, there’s the Policy Lab, which uses very advanced methodologies of design thinking, ethnography, beta, and so on, to help policymaking. Again, they have a limited throughput of only handling a few cases every year.

For many different crowd law initiatives, people pick and choose which regulations to go through this process. In Taiwan, it’s all the regulations, no exceptions is up for public commentary for 60 days.

What I am getting at is that I think Taiwan is unique not in any particular technological contributions but on how we can operate it not on the fringe of the governance apparatus but actually at the core of the governance apparatus.