Are the responsibilities under Minister Tang something new in Taiwan or had they been promoted before?

Korea’s digital technology is pretty good, so it wasn’t hard to promote the e-government idea. Using digital capabilities to improve service quality is a lower priority, but more important is promoting concepts like openness, sharing, communication and collaboration. The standards and norms for strategic decision-making have changed, so this is ...

In that situation, the participants will think of a way to convince the non-participants, some of whom will oppose it, and some will be indifferent altogether. There are many examples in foreign countries. In the U.S., during the Obama administration, he hoped for more citizen participation. The government first set ...

Government 3.0 represents the third stage, or “service design.” In the first stage, the government simply made all the decisions without inviting citizen participation; this was how things were done during the developmental era. The second stage was about making government information public, and sometimes collecting public feedback. In the ...

Here is a good example. The Ministry of the Interior has a concept called the “civilian design corps.” It’s not government-led; it’s promoted by the public themselves. For every project, somewhere between eight and 15 people form a group, including government officials, citizens, experts and designers. So average citizens participate ...

But the most important thing is: What does the public think about these changes? How do they feel? The biggest concern is how the public feels. How should they be informed about the change? Most citizens simply aren’t concerned about the technology the government uses. What they are really concerned ...

The way this came about was “top-down.” For the government, it became a policy, which was subsequently promoted by individual agencies. It’s more of an information and communication technology issue, and essentially technical, so it’s being promoted as a technology. If the head of the nation decided to implement the ...

Using AI to retrieve data is already part of the Government 3.0 plan. Using AI to read documents is also being promoted, but it will take more time. While promoting these ideas over the past two or three years, we found the biggest question has been whether AI can read ...

Getting the approval of another government agency to disclose information isn’t that easy, and the person responsible for the case is also under considerable pressure. But for the benefit of the public and the nation, and to protect the public’s right to know, the government is now actively promoting disclosure.

In Korea, some of that information can be made public, and some disclosure information is more detailed, and the government is now allowing various government organs to move in that direction.

In Korea, the central government, local governments, and education are the three main pillars of public finance. In 2015, figures for all three were made public. Last year, there was some thought to consolidating the funding utilization figures. Expenditures by local governments and the educational sector are released immediately, and ...

Does the website publicize information on the overall projects, or does it publicize the individual items as well?

As for work assignments, either the chairpersons will assign the work from the top down, or the agencies will propose work objectives from the bottom up to the committee. The committee will also reward and recognize successful cases.

There’s no penalty. We look at whether the goals are achieved. If there is a delay, we’ll press them to pick up the pace.

As for contact windows, the government agencies send their representatives directly. The committee will also set important goals for the agencies while the agencies set their own goals as well, and all of these efforts are regularly supervised.

Committee meetings are held once every three months among the chairpersons and government officials at the deputy minister level. However, chairpersons from the private sector who want to discuss new concepts or ideas can call a meeting at any time. Meetings with the Blue House are basically held once every ...

It was quite difficult to get government agencies to coordinate with each other, provide information, share information, and provide new services, so we used the private-sector approach and convened individual agencies for coordination meetings. If the agencies couldn’t coordinate the work, the committee would step in, and if the committee ...

At the time, we wanted to bring private-sector thinking into the civil servant work model, so we used this concept to set up the committee and invited experts from the private sector. Now we have six chairpersons to help promote various aspects of this task.

The Government 3.0 Committee was established in July 2013. Prior to 2013, work relating to Government 3.0 was carried out by our Ministry of the Interior. We discovered it wasn’t easy to bring about change because open government is not only about open data, but about how civil servants work, ...

Open data can be implemented in a very short time, but data-driven policy will take longer and depends on the abilities of civil servants. So we’d rather continue promoting these ideas in existing projects than start new projects.

Korea takes examples from many countries like the U.S. and the U.K., especially regarding open data. Unlike Taiwan, we do not engage outside experts, but we do maintain frequent contact and experiencial exchanges with other countries.

The Government 3.0 committee is not responsible for selecting or hiring civil servants. These abilities are relevant but not required for civil servants, and they can learn on the job after entering government work.

All of our official documents are now maintained on electronic systems, so releasing them is not difficult. In Seoul, for instance, every stage of the architectural or construction license application process is open, from the point of submission through the approval process. The Electronic Government Act requires administrative agencies to ...

Korea also does not disclose documents that have not yet been approved, and we don’t release the official document itself but a kind of summary report. The government system has an “official documents” section for agencies to refer to, and documents created on computers are stored in a cloud system. ...

As for enabling civil servants to release data at the same time that they’re working, we are not at that point yet. But at least we can release the original official documents, and a lot of the documents have already been released under “right-to-know” open government data initiatives. So as ...

The U.N. has ranked Korea No. 1 for e-government, but the International Monetary Fund and the WEF have not ranked our government efficiency as high—around No. 23 or so. One of the goals of Gov 3.0, therefore, is public service reform: to promote transparent government and open data while getting ...