"Sunflower technology," right?

Yes, definitely.

This flip of the default is what I mean by radical transparency, but we do take a lot of care to not compromise other, unrelated people’s privacy and confidentiality.

All this conversation is usually at the drafting stage. None of our conversation will immediately become policy. The Freedom of Information Act in Taiwan and elsewhere usually says that these are not to be made public, unless for a clear public benefit. My working condition is that everything that I ...

That’s something that we usually have to just edit away, because that person has not given consent of being revealed in this way. That’s, I think, the number one reason why we do redact things.

What we have done is a protocol, a radical transparency protocol, at visit.pdis.tw that especially highlights the cause of redacting. Usually, it’s about confidentiality. If you mentioned a case of someone who’s not on this table and mentioned their private matters.

Exactly, or just re-framing. With a full transcript that we have both gone over, it’s always contextualizing and very difficult to take it out of context.

Live streaming, there is a lot of extra non-verbal information that may be good for authenticity, but actually, makes it very easy to people just take a small segments of five seconds and then amplify that.

Exactly. Sometimes, there’s typos, there’s in-jokes, or there are contextual information, like you or I will say we want the readers to read before making sense of your sentence. All this, it beats live-streaming.

Yes, that means transparency at the root.

Yeah, mechanism design.

For each e-petition project, you can have pro and contra opinions, but you cannot reply to each other. You can only upvote and downvote.

Without a reply button, there is actually very difficult for trolls to have control. You can just upvote or downvote other people’s opinion and so on. In that, we learn a lot from international friends, like the Better Reykjavik from Iceland has a very similar design.

By default, it doesn’t consume people’s time. Then we just make the constructive part, or the part that share their authentic experiences, part of the conversation. In many of our platforms, there’s no reply button.

Early on in the vTaiwan project, what we have decided to do is just to moderate away those 400 words and keeping those 400 words. They are version-controlled. It’s like Wikipedia. You can still see all the trolls, if you have too much time.

Sure. The core spirit of nonviolent communication is that we don’t accept behaviors that would preclude, exclude, or foreclose other people from participating. Trolling is not welcome. If you, for example, in one of our platforms, write 500 words, 400 of which is trolling, but 100 words is actually genuine ...

Exactly.

That even as a public servant and minister, I can also join international NPOs as a director of the board, as long as it’s not run by foreign government, because then that creates loyalty problem. Then it lets me, for example, just by the virtue of being a director of ...

Because everybody can work under my working conditions, which is location independence, we also get to have interns all over the world. Indeed, I have also joined the international NPOs. That is actually an innovation that was just recently interpreted last October by our Examination Yuan.

Because of this, I actually do have access to plenty of staff, because each delegate brings with them the resource that the ministry has to offer. I don’t think I’m constrained by people. We actually have, I don’t know, 20-something interns every year as well.

We decided early on that each ministry can only send one person, because the idea here is about creating new values and innovations that reconciles seemingly opposite values across ministries. If a ministry sends a lot of people, then it tends to be lopsided.

In any case, most ministries facing the people are actually very eager. We do have a lot of people queued up to join my office. For example, from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, there’s easily a dozen people wanting to join.

I wouldn’t say so, because my office is literally one person from each ministry. Technically, I can have 32 colleagues in my immediate staff. At the time, it’s 22, which means some ministry didn’t send people over, like the Ministry of Defense and the Council for PRC Affairs. Maybe they ...

We go to the legislation as assistance to the Premiere, as moral support, but we don’t have to answer questions.

The people’s election is for the President, the President appoints a Premier, and the Premier then appoints the cabinet. Basically, that makes the cabinet members, especially in the administration itself, the nine so-called "horizontal ministers" -- also known as minister without portfolio -- are remarkably free of party politics, because ...

That’s right, I was her understudy. I think that’s very peculiar about the Taiwanese cabinet, is that we are two times removed from party politics. The draft bills that we prepare is operated in a non-partisan environment, and there are more independent cabinet members than members of any party in ...

Yeah, as a project adviser. At that time, the person in charge of that is Jaclyn Tsai, minister without portfolio. She is not exactly KMT.

All the three groups have something to teach each about it. That has been always the core spirit of g0v, is just to be maximally inclusive.

So that even though they may not agree on each other’s ideologies, they can nevertheless share tools and things like that. For us, the free software people, of course, it teaches us about not just sharing in the commons for our practitioners in information technology, but also to care more ...

Making sure that this hands-on experience is combined with civic media, who often points out problems but without obvious solutions. This alliance is very important. Also, it let individually-siloed social activists, organizations in the social sector get access to open-source spirits and Creative Commons.

It’s a way to basically get the spirit of a hands-on experience, which is what makers and free software enthusiasts is always about, and infuse it into the civil society, so that people who complain can just look at the slogan, "Ask not why nobody is doing this; you are ...

Sometimes, the people who initiate this idea no longer have time to carry it over. Some other social entrepreneurs or other innovations and so on just look at this idea and then carry it over in the next hackathon and so on.

Basically, a lot of ideas in g0v, because they are always open source, they are always demoed in a bimonthly hackathon, which has been going on for many years now, almost seven years now. Each hackathon usually demonstrates some working prototype.

Again, it’s a domain hack at the beginning, because the domain name edu.tw applies to educational institutions. Initially, the project’s called 3du, again, just changing the E to a 3. Then it’s more known as MoeDict. That’s a project I personally found.

I wasn’t part of g0v back then. I joined in early 2013, doing pretty much the same thing, but on dictionaries of Taiwanese Mandarin, Taiwanese Hoklo, Taiwanese Hakka. There’s indigenous languages, English, French, and Deutsche, and built this multilingual dictionary experience that we call MoeDict, or Ministry of Education Dictionary.

The inaugural project was a visualization of the national budget, enabling people to have a real-time conversation around individual budget items and in a way that is very quickly turning each item in a 500-page PDF file into a social object around which people can have a real-time conversation.

Of course, you see g0v.it, or Canada, or whatever. It’s a simple idea. It’s not patented or anything. It’s just a domain hack, if you will. Initially, g0v back in late 2012 focused on information transparency and accessibility.

Therefore, all the government services that people don’t like, they don’t have to protest in the street. They can just deliver an alternative by having the same website, but changing the O to a 0. Just by changing one letter in the URL, you get into the shadow government.

It’s that all the government websites and services around the world is something.gov.something. For example, in Taiwan, all the government websites, something.gov.tw. The civic hackers back in late 2012 registered a domain name, g0v.tw.

g0v is a movement, just like the open source movement. It is not actually bound in Taiwan, because it’s a simple idea.

Usually, we say gov-zero, but it’s spelled g0v, however g-zero-v is very hard to pronounce.

The g0v movement was classified as the three neutrals in the Occupy. There were pro bono lawyers who provide legal support; there were pro bono doctors and nurses providing healthcare support. Then the g0v communication team providing the right to communication, whether you’re in an enclosed area in the parliament, ...

Those were the support that we’d extend, regardless, actually, of the NGO or factions or even a counter-protest protests, the so-called White Justice. We also supported them with live coverage, with instructions on setting up live-streams, as well as making sure that there was a fair coverage for all the ...

For example, there was a civic tech project that just allows you to type in the company ID or the trade that you’re doing and shows exactly how you will be affected by CSSTA in a very neutral and factual manner.

Because there’s around twenty different NGOs supporting the Occupy’s agenda, each of them had booths to deliberate one particular aspect of the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement (CSSTA). Our service at the time ensured that live-streaming and stenographic support extend to the site of the parliament, where all the different ...

People can see through the walls, so to speak, by just walking through the side of the occupied street. You can very easily see how the Occupy is happening and thereby making truths spread faster than disinformation.

Because people on the street really needed a real-time view, so we also set up projectors on the street to display first-hand both the typed stenographic report as well as the live-stream from Occupy the Parliament.

After setting up the live-streaming, we quickly found that nobody had the time to view the live-stream. We also used Hackpad to organize court reporters, stenographers, typists, to type down everything that really happened in the Occupied Parliament.

I personally brought Ethernet cables. There’s many people from the open-source movement logistics team, the so-called CPR -- Cable, Power, and Radio team -- under the banner of g0v to support the people who are occupying the parliament to make sure that everything that happens inside is live-streamed.

Then after they set up the live-streaming from within the Legislative Yuan, we also very quickly found that they don’t have sufficient bandwidth from within the legislation. We really need to get sufficient bandwidth into the occupied Parliament.