How did you get the ministries here in Taipei to buy into this? Maybe you can explain this puzzle to me. On the one hand, I’m very impressed, because even before you joined the government, Taiwan was already pretty active on open government and open data, and has a very ...

Wow.

...to serve areas that are not very densely-populated, because you wouldn’t have many customers there.

They have a big debate in this, because we have an auction now in Germany on bandwidth that’s good for...It’s supposed to be used for 5G technology. Actually, the telecommunication companies are suing the government against the requirements to also, because they say it’s not economically for them to go ...

Some remote areas, it’s very costly. Your telecommunications company is probably private. Is that private infrastructure?

For telework, you need quite good connections.

You have fiber in the ground to reach all these communities, right?

Your role in this is also to organize the engagements with the local population, with this model that you have developed?

Yes, I think that’s right. That’s why I just want to make sure that I understand right.

This is not the DPP? The Green Party is separate.

With what kind of organizations?

Have you had any interactions with the green movement in Germany on these issues?

You need to put the policy in place to support them. Is there also some funding that the government gives for this?

Actually, the indigenous communities are leading this in Taiwan?

It’s how do we get people involved in shaping the policies we need for that, and pushing the government to adopt them, I see as a very big challenge.

The German system on a regulatory level, we are not there yet. There’s still very old industry, coal interests in Germany, and nuclear interests, like you have here in Taiwan, that are pushing back on this, too. We think that this peer-focused, decentralized systems are really important in solving some ...

Give people -- we call it prosumers in Germany -- give people directly the ability, who have a solar system or wind system, and they’re able to directly trade, and directly feed in energy. There is now a low transaction cost of digital platforms as a way to implement this.

Yeah, and we don’t even think you need a smart grid anymore. The smart grid idea from 20 years ago was a centralized idea, that you have some centralized authority that manages the grid. What we really think is that you need a decentralized smart grid.

The problem is that, with renewable energy, you have a decentralized system, where you don’t control the feed in. When the sun is shining, the wind blows, you have lots of energy, but not necessarily when people want it.

It’s also an interesting question, what role technology can play in this. We have also an energy problem, where we look at...Germany has done a lot of investing in renewable energy. We are trying to get out of nuclear.

I’m hoping more people will wake up and do more about it.

I can really feel the climate not being normal.

That’s right. You’re warmer, but often, there’s a lot of rain. It feels cold here, because of the humidity, and there’s no heating. This, now, I’m actually quite concerned. This year feels so weird. We had such a hot summer in Germany. There’s no winter. It’s not really cold. I ...

Yeah, basically, because there was Christmas, New Year’s, so it’s holidays in Germany. I know it’s not the best time of the year to visit Taiwan.

I was really interested in meeting you, hearing from your perspective, learning, and also asking you, so far, have you had any engagements with counterparts in Germany? How you see that, and maybe if there’s any opportunities to facilitate that?

Thought we also have some overlapping interests in how we work, and I think your approach also, in trying to reach out, and bring civil society in a collaborative way, to find solutions. It’s exactly our philosophy, that we need to find collaborative solutions.

From her, and also from other people, I heard about the work that you’re doing. People told me you’re very open, so I just tried to contact you through Twitter, as you saw.

I’ve been coming to Taiwan every year for more than 10 years. She’s a big supporter of the equal marriage and other social issues. She has been following those campaigns, and has been very disappointed by the outcome of the referendum.

How you manage to get in? I’m really interested in this perspective. Maybe just personal background, what brought me here. I’m married to a Taiwanese. I met her in the United States. I got my PhD in political science in the United States. We met there.

I would imagine that you don’t sit within a single ministry, so you’re also sometimes seen...I don’t know if you’re perceived as an outsider.

There’s a question how the digital council that was just created, how they can have impact, because of they’re a separate orbit from what happens in the ministries. I’m very interested in your experience, how you get buy-in from ministries, and how you create positive relationships with them.

Yes, but to get to the top, you have to go through a lot of layers underneath. German government is structured very formalistic, hierarchical.

They don’t control the outcomes of the workshops, of the thinking, of the discussions. There are some people in government open to that, but often, they are lower in the hierarchy, in my experience. The higher you go in the hierarchies, the harder it is to get people interested in ...

We have also seen that we are constantly also in some tension with government, because we are pushing the ideas. They often have some ideas of what they want to do. If you bring in all these different stakeholders, they don’t control the agenda.

This is one, some of the things that I’m really interested in your perspective. What we have is, I think, actually, that we are also doing, we’re providing a service to different communities that we bring together. Especially to the government. It’s really hard to figure this out.

We have found some people who think it’s important to have an independent organization doing this. Sometimes, we collaborate with government, and government will support some of our work.

Yeah, so that makes it hard to convince them...

We have some money from the corporate side, but it’s very difficult for us to get, because we don’t do corporate sponsorships. We cannot compromise our independence. They have to make a donation to the institution, and they don’t get branding visibility or influence on our...

Yes, I’m very familiar with that kind of work, and our office like that, too. A lot of posters, lots of sticky notes, lots of brainstorming happening there. Our funding comes mostly from foundations, like 70 percent.

Hackers, independent experts. They’re really important for us to bring the public interest perspective on this. With them, in the research sprint, we try to frame the problem, lay out hypotheses on how we think about it. Then we use a lot of these design thinking methodologies in terms of ...

We also have very strong relationships to civil society organizations and NGOs who really, or independent academics, or people engaged or working with organization’s like the Chaos Computer Club you may have heard about in Germany.

We invite the business and tech community because they develop these new technologies. Often, they come from them. We need to understand what they are doing, so we need to make them part of the conversation.

We try to invite people from all different sectors. We actually call it intersectoral. We try to invite government people, because we want to inform the government in exchange for collaboration, and we want them to take up the ideas.

Then we do workshops, where we test our ideas. The workshops, because as a nonprofit, it’s very important for us that our problem analysis, and also the solution we propose, are public interest-based.

The policymakers are asking very quickly, “What can we do about this?” Often, the technology companies are much faster than the understanding in the broader public, and also in the politics. What we do in our organizations is research sprints, like sprints you would do in agile development.

We’ve found that, especially in these new technologies, it takes very long for academics to write papers about it. There’s peer review process. It takes quite some time until their expertise is out. You need expertise very quickly.

What are the problems with new technologies, what are the potentials? Actually, from the way we work, it’s very similar...Not similar, but has some similarities to your thinking about how policy should be done. We talk a lot about our methodology, because we have been asking ourselves, what is differentiates ...

We are a team of about 20 people, and we work mostly on issues of new technologies, digital technologies from cyber security to open government, to what can we do with AI, and how do we need to regulate it?

Thank you. Let me first maybe tell you a little bit about myself. I’m Stefan. I’m from Berlin in Germany. I’m there with a think tank - "Stiftung Neue Verantwortung". It’s a nonprofit organization. We are not affiliated with any political party, so we are independent.

I have to see if, our events are mostly in German. Can I take a screenshot of this?