We never replace face-to-face interactions, we augment them. That is the crucial difference. Instead of asking people to forget about town halls and come to this website, we make sure people still help town halls.
Just by promoting the idea of sustainable development in poetry or in graphics, that brings people to a dimension where people are much more ready to listen to one another than if we focused on specific technologies.
It’s very rare that anyone would find that their goals are missing from the palette. Back in 2015, one criticism of the SDGs was there are no goals left behind. [laughs] All the goals are here. You will be bound to find something that is according to your view of ...
This images, this very beautiful icons, thanks the UNDP for that, is very useful to, not only categorize the large picture which is by the triple bottom line, but also about each of the specific projects that we’re promoting. People can see instinctively which project correspond to which sustainable development ...
In that, we use technology to enhance availability of reliable data, that we build partnerships out of those reliable data, and that we offer such open innovations always in a co-creative way instead of a colonizing way for our international partners.
It’s poetic in a sense that it brings people’s false projections about technology into something that’s obviously shared no matter which technological cap you’re on. For people who are more graphically minded, we also have the SDG icons that explains the same idea.
"When we see machine learning, let’s make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let’s make it about human experience. Whenever we hear that a singularity is near, let us always remember that plurality is here."
The job description goes like this, "When we see the Internet of Things, let’s make it an Internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let’s make it a shared reality.
That’s the first time that I sat down and started seriously thinking how to not talk about technology in technologist terms. I’ll read you my job description. [laughs]
The first one as digital minister is when the HR here asked me for a job description. Taiwan didn’t have a digital minister before. They asked for a job description to put somewhere on the website to explain what the post is really about.
I call myself a poetician because I don’t give or take orders. What I do is I write poetry. That’s my main work.
The point is not to focus on technology. If we’re talking in technologist terms like Internet of Things, or machine learning, virtual reality, or whatever, these are instruments where people project their own fears, uncertainty, and doubt in psychological projections on these tools.
In addition to the traditional theory of overlapping consensuses of being very specific in your ideas and use cases, I would say also increase the planning horizon and then keep talking about these things. You would find that across party lines you will have more alliances than you previously thought.
The stakeholders are literally not born yet. [laughs] We’re planning for the next generation. When preplanning horizon is 10 years, 20 years, people have a lot more in common than they would have thought. If we are talking about next quarter, then it’s a lost cause.
We framed the discussion to say, how might we change in our society so that the newborns to such families can enjoy equal inclusivity in a society 10 years down the line? Once you reframe the conversation like that, these different so-called camps discovered they have much in common.
We talked about the e-petition case. The question was about whether to allow reproductive rights, artificial insemination, for women who are single. That could be a very controversial topic to talk about.
The 護家盟, Family Guardian Coalition, as well as 伴侶盟, Taiwan Alliance to Promote Civil Partnership Rights, they are both famous here in Taiwan.
If there’s still hope, if you can talk about things of a longer planning horizon...The election rhetoric is usually about the next four years or five, but if you start talking about things that are in the next 10 years like, I don’t know, sustainable long goals but many other ...
The main problem is that people would imagine that there is half a population that’s not going to listen to my point no matter what the point is. That is the problem. I would encourage everybody in that kind of setting, it’s especially difficult in the months leading up to ...
If it’s populism that appeals to all the people, to everybody, populism that doesn’t exclude but rather include, then I don’t have a problem with populism. It’s like classical populism. People who feel excluded from political process can be encouraged to express their authentic selves and being listened to, enjoy ...
It’s a much-reduced form of expression even if you have very nuanced idea, very resonating idea, those ideas are not given the space to surface as we’ve seen in Polis, in e-petition, in sandboxes here. I don’t think populism is the root of the problem. I think it’s populist tribalism.
People usually attribute this kind of disempowerment to the rise of Internet-enabled populism. Then people’s ideas are being reduced to soundbites or clip bites. [laughs]
In the US as well as in the UK after the referendum...I just had a long conversation with people from BBC who is here for four days to cover my work and the democratic innovations from Taiwan.
It’s not something that requires anything external to certify or to assure. As long as you’re fulfilling your own intrinsic motivation and sharing that joy -- fun, when shared, is joy -- with people, then I think it’s success.
Optimizing for fun is the main thing that let me continue to have very difficult conversations with people to feel strongly about one another’s positions. I drive this conversation because I derive enjoyment from getting to know people better. That is success.
This keeps me motivated every day because, unlike passion which leads to burnout, fun is something that you can have every day.
I’m like, “No, I joined the cabinet for fun. I’m just enjoying this experience of listening to people and taking all the sides.”
When I joined the cabinet and worked with, not for, the government, the premier at the time, Lin Chuan asked, "Do you join the cabinet out of a sense of duty, a sense of social impact, of maximizing whatever purpose?" so on and so forth.
Being able to take all the sides is why I think empathy is very important in this kind of facilitative governance. A successful career is just something that you follow your own sense of intrinsic motivation.
If one can only empathize with half of the sides, of the stakeholders, and just naturally consider the other stakeholders as enemies or as others, then they’re not a very good facilitator, and it’s almost guaranteed that you will get nothing very productive out of this meeting.
Empathy, for me, is the capability of taking all the sides. In a 20-sided conversation, if a facilitator can argue from each of the 20 sides authentically, then they have a much better chance of getting people to see past their differences and positions and build a common value together.
It looked like this, then you see some balloons, and you can enter one half. Then you see something like this, and then you have to keep guessing, and then just build up the fractions. It’s on Scratch, actually. Nowadays, there are still primary school people using that for their ...
Yeah, that’s right.
This is a concrete response to you in the sense that people don’t really need an abstract case. Whenever they come here, every two weeks, there’s an actual case like this coming in, and people just take up whatever position needed to address that.
All the bandwidth and CPU cost is squandered when we do the old rental. Now you can charge by hour or at least by days, quite elastic computing. Once we switch to that kind of payment, it saves a tremendous amount of budget, and we use a fraction of that ...
It’s really good, and the net budget for this is negative, because in one of the workshops, somebody -- an IT engineer -- observed that we’re paying the same CPU and bandwidth cost throughout the entire month of filing our personal tax, but actually, people file mostly on the first ...
After that, then they deliver collectively a new tax filing experience that has 96 percent approval rating last year. I heard that it’s 99 or so this year.
After that, then people who complain the most, that’s these people, and the people who they are most toxic toward, that’s these people, meet face-to-face in full workshops. It’s very difficult to spew the same toxic words once you’re co-designing.
If the tax filing interface is so baroque so that it confuses the hell out of people, we can take out all the exclamation marks, but the words need to stay here.
The continent China calls it the harmonious transformation of online comments to make more harmony, but then you lose solidarity if you don’t report people’s comments as is. We need to reign in our instinct to make harmonious words.
That become on-the-job learning for everybody involved. The only thing that I need to remind my colleagues is that whenever there is people online saying that it’s explosively wordy, public service, sometimes just instinctively, when they’re writing the Post-it note, even without any awareness, writes this that maybe it’s a ...
The greatest thing is that even thought at that time, there’s easily thousands of commentaries online, if you have this kind of structure, what we call service design structure, actually, people who post the same thing 500 times, it’s just one Post-it note on this graph. It lets people see ...
We livestreamed the conversation, and he really helped mapping what we call the user journey of everybody receiving the tax filing advertisements to enter the tax filing system to finish filing their tax. What their actions, needs, problems, emotions, feelings, and solutions to make them feel better.
It turns everybody who complain into chefs that participate in the kitchen, so to speak. We meet the presenter of the petition, and it turns out he is a professional interactive designer. He cares the most and so suffers the most.
Even before it reaches 5,000 people of the mandatory response threshold, he just posted publicly saying, "Thank you for all your criticism. Everybody who complained about Ministry of Finance is now cordially invited to the Ministry of Finance for a collaboration meeting to design next year’s tax filing experience."
I promised to give due credit, so 楊金亨 here, at the time the Ministry of Finance participation officer, just look at this e-petition.
Everything else is a learning organization. We don’t really have a curriculum, so to speak. Instead, every month, we have at least two collaboration meetings among people’s e-petitions. For example, whenever people start a new petition about how -- there was two years ago -- the tax filing experience is ...
The second is that they must be at least as much a giver as they are a taker. It’s OK to build your own personal career, but one must stand ready to help each other in their careers as well. That’s really the only two things that I’m looking for.
It could be anything. It could be making coffee. I’m not joking. [laughs] It could making visualizations, illustrations, real-time interpretation. It could be anything. They have something to teach.
The second thing is the delegates sending to my office. I only have two HR criteria. First is that the person dispatched here needs to have at least one competency or skill that is above the existing members.
