When the mainstream media, on the next day, tried to portray this as mobsters, violent gangs, things like that, we do have first-time coverage and experience of showing that it’s actually not the case. Nobody really expected the break-in to happen.

Because I went home and handed off to Venev and Bropheus, and they capture the entire process of breaking in. That proved to be very valuable, because it was posted to YouTube, which was just opening live-stream service at the time, people can see with their own eyes that it ...

I helped putting together the HSPDA, because there was no 4G at the time, a connection for that live stream to happen. Broadly speaking, the g0v movement was the banner under which the civic tech people provided communications support to the protesters. Incidentally, it just happens that when they broke ...

I’m just one small petal in the Sunflower movement. I was there at the night before they broke in, providing connectivity to, for example, Indie DaaDee, who was covering the live-stream of the protest on the street.

It’s directly carried over.

That’s actually part of the Sunflower movement.

It’s an excellent sketch, an excellent brief. I’m also very appreciative that you have this on-the-record/off-the-record choice. Because this is my office hour, we’re always on the record.

Outside, wherever it is.

Of course.

Thank you. Cool. I’ll send you the transcript.

Thank you.

Yeah, but not to the level of the Second World War. [laughs]

"The Downfall of the Occident."

...of the West.

...so I don’t get to read them.

...I would be reading a lot of very depressing texts during the two world wars. They were still copyrighted, though...

Exactly. I don’t get access to anything that’s written during or after the First World War. It was the golden age of the European civilization. People were unbridled optimism. That’s my formative education. If not for that copyright law...

No. In my formative years when I started reading those anarchist texts when I was 12, when I first encountered the Internet, I rely on the Gutenberg Project, which is all public domain texts. Because of copyright, which at the time is lifetime plus 50, it contains everything before the ...

No, it’s fine.

It’s like a virtual government thing that we share the tools that we develop. Taiwan is invited in the online operation group though we’re not very loud about it.

They are an operational-level coalition. This is not ribbon cutting or anything. We are committed to open source the daily working software of our government structure and don’t reinvent the wheel if somebody else in the digital nations network decide to open source something that they already did very well.

The UK started it, and then Estonia, South Korea, Israel, New Zealand, Uruguay, and Canada. That’s the seven.

The Digital 7, let me see if I can recite that...

Especially among the digital nations. It used to be called Digital 5, now Digital 7, now just digital nations.

Yeah, very much so.

Basically, open innovation and social participation together create something that everybody around the world can join without signing a bilateral agreement. They download it off GitHub and build.

Then it can be exported easily to, say, New Zealand and so on where they don’t have to pay that much upfront cost, but by the nature of our open innovation can be co-creators in solving water leakage through machine learning or to do environmental climate change science together.

Warm meaning that we use social innovation methods and use SDG as our common index to solve our economic, environment, and sustainable social development issues, use innovation airboxes, you’ve read the examples that I cite.

"Soft" and "hard"; "sharp" and "warm". [laughs]

Warm. It’s a new word.

Yes. That’s what we call the "warm power" now.

I think this whole-palette collaboration thing is also one of the unique part in Taiwan. Of course that gives more earthquakes and debates and things like that, but it’s part of life.

In Estonia, or in Singapore, or in other countries where there’s maybe one or two strong verticals, you don’t see as much synergy from the different economic, and environment, and social innovations.

"Digital" really is just the thing that gets the data, the partnerships, the innovations together, but you still have to have all these verticals to participate in the digital transformation in order for the forces to combine.

The second is that Taiwan just has more verticals. In the digital transformation, it helps to have all the people working on agriculture, on environment, on sustainable agriculture, on all those different things to participate in digital transformation.

This is not to say that they don’t play a role model kind of way. It could be like that, but actually together, they don’t have to experience either because there is no paper legacy. I think it’s more practical for out digital governance to be exported. That’s the first ...

There’s two main differences. First is that Estonia doesn’t have the paperwork legacy. Our digital transformation includes the recipe of how to migrate from a paper-based system, which makes it actually much more exportable [laughs] to other countries, because there is very few countries that were founded after the Internet, ...

I would say so, definitely.

Yeah. It’s detrimental to social inclusion though. It therefore will never happen in Taiwan — because in Taiwan, unless it’s inclusive, they don’t happen.

...so it qualifies as innovation.

Nobody would think to use the technologies that way...

I’m referring to the cutting-edge use of AI in the jurisdictions you mentioned. They’re very innovative. You have to give them that.

I think we’re on the forefront if you take both open innovation and social inclusion together. There are many other jurisdictions and economies that are better in the innovation front, sometimes on the track that we don’t go, but still very innovative. [laughs]

If we just push out something, that will immediately delegitimize one side of the referendum. That will be political suicide for the legislators. That’s my honest analysis.

I’m saying that the Referendum Act coincides with the Constitutional Court. In the administration, we actually already finished the review of all the relevant rules and regulations, but it’s the first time that people can meaningfully do the right democracy through a Referendum Act.

...I’m totally not saying that. [laughs]

...I’m not saying that...

If the referendum shows that one side has a very clear advantage, then everybody would know how to...

To be perfectly honest, I think everybody is waiting for the referendum result.