 Again, now we're not in a Star Trek movie. It's not blinking. No. Yeah, I was very much interested in how you communicate and interviews your style of politics using poetry, using song texts, using the Vulcan salute. Is that an important part of your persona? Sure. I think one of the interesting things is that I call myself a poetician, a lower case minister. And all this points to the same thing, which is I'm just a random person on the internet. When I work as a minister, I make sure that I never give order or take order for that matter. And this, again, is something that the early internet, through its end-to-end principle, permissionless innovation, rough consensus, and so on, taught me. Because on the internet, nobody really care about your rank or whatever. People care about the common values and the rough consensus that innovates upon those values. So the way I communicate reflects the early, and I guess continued internet culture. And was it easy to continue with this style when you became a minister? I mean, is this something that Taiwanese people are very happy about? Yeah, definitely. I think after 2014, the sunflower revolution or movement or demonstration, depending, the sunflower event, people generally understand that democracy is not just about voting, not just uploading three bits every four years, but rather about a continuous, high bandwidth communication between people of different positions. Indeed, that's what Dr. Tsai Wen said in her operation speech in 2016, from the showdown between opposing values to the conversation between diverse values. And in order to hold such a space, one need to take all the sides. And when one take all the sides, naturally one becomes more like a chapter moderator, right? Rather than any particular advocate for one particular interest, one need to advocate also for future generations' interest and so on. Okay, interesting. Humor over rumor is one of the slogans I want is using and fighting the pandemic. How fun you can a government get in such serious matters? Is there a limit in how much humor you can use? Yeah, we make things fun, but we don't make fun of other people. So it's always about a situation. It's never about a personal attack, which is actually not fun for the person receiving the attack, right? And so we do have the Q spoke stock. We have the premier making himself quite literally the butt of the joke. And things like that, but they're all in good humor, meaning it never make the fun of someone at the expense of someone or some group of people. That's the limit. Okay, it's very hard to imagine in our political situation here that any fun could be used in fighting the pandemic. It's all very stuffy here at the moment. Yeah, it's very serious. And it is a serious situation, but we use humor over rumor because we must, because we cannot go back to censorship. We even for a hate speech, which of course the German people is okay with private sector censorship with, but even for a hate speech in Taiwan, it's very difficult to invoke censorship because people would say, well, isn't it like going back to the martial law, to the white terror, to the battle days before the 70s and 60s and so on? And because of that, we need to find something that vaccinate people against hate, against discrimination. And the only emotion that travels faster and inoculates against such negative emotion is humor. Okay, very good. Fighting a pandemic necessarily is a collective effort. Taiwan has put a lot of importance in finding creative consensual solution. How have you managed to instigate such collaborations? What were your means to get people into the boat? Yeah, the key here is what we call people public private ownership, meaning that the social sector, the people set the agenda of what to do. So for example, when the mask rationing map gets invented by Haru Wing, Thailand, he didn't have to ask anyone's permission, not our permission certainly, but neither the pharmacies or convenience stores permission. He just went ahead and do it. But in Taiwan, because the social sector holds such legitimacy, the public sector always never beat them and always joined them. So because of that, we can't beat them quite literally. And so because of that, we immediately amplify his idea into an idea that we trust the citizens with. So it's not about making a procurement and inviting Haru as the prefer vendor of a SME procurement or whatever. Instead, we just ask what does he need in terms of the open API? And we just publish every 30 seconds of the mask availability. So not just Haru, but also more than 100 different other people can also make use of this availability to make analysis, visualization, chatbot and things like that. And all in all, when you make sure that everyone gets the access, then people don't just hold the government to account asking whether there's no, I don't know, English or German version or indigenous version. And we can say here is the open API, go ahead and do it. So that's the co-creative spirit. In Germany and Europe, we are facing many, many problems right now in fighting the pandemic. Would you have any advice for us? What could we do better? It's actually funny that I'm using this because we had all these prejudices about Asians just copying or recipes, not putting everything around. It turns out that you've much, much better solution. Well, I wouldn't attribute that purely to Asia or whatever. I will attribute to the fact that we've had this once, right? In 2003, when SARS hit Taiwan, we had exactly the same communication failure. We had the same chaos. So we have people panic buying N95 most. The municipal government were saying very different thing from the central government. We had to barricade lockdown in the entire hospital unannounced indefinitely and things like that. So the constitutional court called it barely constitutional. And so we had all that, right? So I think the difference is that we had institutionalized our collective memory of the very painful and traumatic 2003 SARS into the Central Epidemic Command Center. The communication like humor over rumor, the tophi number and things like that all codified into the communicable disease control act, the CDCA of 2004. That is to say, the legislature took the time and the budget to make sure that when SARS comes again, SARS 2.0, which is actually literally what COVID-19 is called, right? SARS COV2, that's SARS 2.0. And we will simply play the SARS playbook without having to declare an emergency situation. And in that case then, we would then rely only on the proven like health IC cards and so on, proven data collection points. We don't invent new data collection points during the pandemic. So people understand the cybersecurity and the privacy guarantees and so on. So my suggestion to other jurisdiction who encounter COVID-19 as their first exposure to SARS is to after vaccination, of course, do exactly what we did in 2004, which is make sure that all these emergency responses gets codified into pre-approved by the legislature response cycles and make sure that you run yearly drills so that when the next time comes, people will still remember very vividly that masks are there to protect you against your own unwashed hands and so on. Okay. Which now I guess I'm changing the order of my questions because I'm almost automatically the next questions. In many interviews, you have stressed that making mistakes is part of, it's a natural part of governing. How transparent should it be? Are there limits in transparency? For example, I'm recording this interview and without your image, but with your sound because otherwise whatever I say wouldn't make sense. But it's up to you whether you prefer this to be released as a transcript because you also write a text, right? Or as a video of me, but with the audio of you. So it's about respect. This is about getting the consent of all the people. And for example, if you're asking a question and you quote, you think about an anecdote from your friend. But that friend have not clear it for publication. Then you have all the rights to say when editing and publishing, we just make this part mute because my friend has not clear it. It's there, privacy concern. So I think the consent is the most important whether it's about privacy, about trade secret, whether it's about national secret or whatever, but it must be radically transparent meaning. I have a network problem here. Somehow it's not working. Well, you have the full recording. Anyway, after that, that's what the full recording helps. You don't hear me anymore? No? Oops. So is myself still going through or? I guess not. It's okay, I'm back. In my back? Yes. Because somehow I got stuck. We have so many internet problems these days because there are so many people working in home office. You're using a Wi-Fi maybe? Yes. Okay, well, that must be it. I told everybody around me to stop using the internet so I could actually not get stuck. I'm sorry for that. It's fine. So yes, I was saying if you have a friend that have not cleared their private details for this interview, then of course, you have all the right to ask me to mute for that particular segment. The same apply not just for privacy but for trade secret, national secret or things like that. But the point is that radical transparency means transparency at a root. So by default, if you do nothing, then everything is published. But you have to tell me which part it's not okay to publish. That's what I care. Okay. And about the first question, making mistakes as a part of governing, that is something that people, you'll find probably very strange to admit into mistakes, to that it's a natural part. It's not even bad to make mistakes. I really liked that about your question. Well, I think it's how you phrase it, right? If you say, I try my best, but I couldn't get it to work. Now anyone has a good idea or not, then that's a very natural thing, right? I think the easiest way actually to ask questions and get good answers on the internet is not to ask good questions, but ask a question and give a stupid answer and a mistake, that is to say. And then people of all professions will then jump on this mistaken solution and say, you've got it wrong and this is right away to solve it. But if you do not have this initial mistake that's shared with people, then people have other thing to do. They will move on to other questions, right? So I think this idea of turning mistakes into an invitation of co-creation, this is what is must in the internet era because you don't know most of the people who have good answer to your questions. So if you're not transparent, nobody can help you. Very good. As a digital minister, you put a lot of importance in the design of government websites. Interface design is not just an add-on, it's at the core of Taiwanese democracy. I like that very much because it's actually the design idea of Bauhaus, for example, the design is much more than just aesthetics. And could you explain this a little bit to me, how your idea of interface design and democracy went together? How this happened? Certainly. So basically we treat each mis-designed or not that useful or not that accessible government website as an invitation for co-creation. The GovZero movement literally came out of this by looking at a budget website, saying that a lot of PDFs to download, nobody can understand it, but it's not the fault of the citizens for not looking at a budget. It's the fault of the design so that the budget is not good to look at. So people registered G0V.tw and for all the government website that ends in GOV.tw, there's could be an alternate open source shadow government G0V.tw that builds the same thing except in a way that's more accessible. But the ethos of GOV.Zero is it's always open source meaning that the copyright is always relinquished for government reuse. So if their fork, that is to say alternate, makes more sense, then the government doesn't need a procurement order or a tender. They can just merge it back and say, hey, this person did a budget visualization so well, we're going to use it for join the GOV.tw to visualize all the 2000 or so national budget items from all the ministries, which is exactly what happens. And so the initial fork of G0V.Zero became well, the new joint website, part of the new joint website, which then gets forked again into join the G0V.tw and the thing goes on. So what I'm trying to get at is that when we unlock the potential for the citizens to work on government digital services, it turns complaints and protests and demonstrations into a different kind of demonstration as in demo, as in showing the government how people can deal with it better. So I think this empowers anyone who work on a more inclusive content and service delivery, because instead of protesting, they could actually just make things better. Fantastic. But it also means that you need a lot of talent within the population. You need a lot of coders, a lot of hackers. Definitely. Is there something which is very particular about Taiwan? Yes. I think that's because starting 2019, we flipped over the curriculum in basic education. Previously, we talked about data literacy, media literacy, digital literacy. But after 2019, we don't say that anymore. We say media competence, digital and data competence. Literacy is when you're reading a newspaper. When you're watching a TV, that's literacy. It's critical thinking, but you're still in the consumer's role. But if you're teaching data competence, really the only way is make sure the children curate their own data, produce their own media, become a narrator and therefore learn important things like checking the sources, balancing the narratives and things like that, the media framing effect and so on. And with that in mind, they become active participants even before they are 18 years old. Indeed, on the joint platform that I mentioned, which also runs petitions, more than one quarter of citizen initiatives like banning plastic straws from bubble tea or whatever are started by people who are not 18 years old. So they feel like a citizen. They are a citizen even before they have the right to vote. That's where we get so many people joining because literally that's their civics class assignment or their environment class assignment to measure equality and so on. Beautiful. You seem to define democracy as something which is not simply fixed and finished. It's rather something organic that has to be renegotiated all the time. Could you please describe this concept a little bit to us? Certainly. My idea is very simple. Democracy is a type of technology. Social science is science. So social technology are naturally technology. In particular, we can think about open space technology which is a way for like 50 or 100 people in a room, in a large room to get something useful done. Nonviolent communication does the technology too. So there are many, many technologies that makes sure that as people, as human beings, we listen to one another well. And if we understand those technology, we can always find common feelings and rough consensus. Now, digital democracy take this idea of deliberative or participatory democracy and scale it out. Previously, maybe a good nonviolent communication facilitator can facilitate it to 100 people. But now by using assistive intelligence designs, we can facilitate it to 100,000 people. And that's something beyond the capacity of any single human facilitator, right? So to me, the digital is always in an assistive role and a democracy is always based on this face-to-face participatory deliberative setting, but the digital scales it out so that they become listening at scale. Is that why broadband accessibility in Taiwan is the right? Definitely. If you don't have 10 megabits per second, that's my fault, like literally my fault. It's very affordable, 16 euros per month, unlimited data. And we really go to a very high place like the top of Taiwan, almost 4,000 meters, and still there has 10 megabits per second. And so what we're doing here is making sure we're not accidentally excluding people outside of the democratic expression because if only some people have broadband and other people only have television and radio, essentially these people become citizen and these people become just residents because there's no way for them to participate fully online. So that's why in addition to digital competence in the curriculum, broadband as human is the other important pillar. Okay. Optimism is the overall theme of the next issue of our magazine. So it seems optimism has a lot to do with trust. And how does this reflect on your work and accessibility as a politician and how does it shape your contact with your fellow citizens? Yeah, I have a pioneer this idea in free software community called optimizing for fun. So my optimism is by making sure everyone participating in a co-creation have the appropriate amount of fun. Meaning that it's not about a mobilization for a time. It's not about a short term passion. This is about something that we really enjoy doing. And when people enjoy doing democracy, they will get more people into the co-creation process that defines democracy. So for example, I trust the citizens to talk about the global goals, the common good. And instead of lobbying me with something that only benefit them but to the detriment of everyone else. So I say anyone can lobby me but the only thing I do is I publish everywhere I said. And in practice, by applying radical transparency, nobody really lobby me on something selfish because it will look very bad when it's published. And so because of that, people tend to only talk about the public good next generation, seven generations down the line, anything's like that. But without this optimism about people's nature of not abusing the office hours and the time that I offer, then we wouldn't even have the first step. So before asking trust from citizens, the government need to first trust the citizens. Okay. Your kind of using of data, your digitalization is the total opposite of what mainland China does, which is almost an Orwellian kind of way of handling their citizens. How important is the protection of privacy even now in pandemic times? How important is that to the Taiwanese government? Privacy is all about norms and the expectations that people place. So the same action in one setting may feel private but the same action in another setting with 5,000 more people watching may not feel private anymore. That's the nature of privacy. It changes with the context. The issue with privacy is that too often we see that as one end of trade-off like privacy or human rights in general on one side and counter-pandemic on the other or privacy on one side and controlling his speech on the other. But there's many like this kind of zero some false dilemmas that's posed not just by the pandemic but also by the infodemic around the world. And I think Taiwan's value is not to say the lockdown is not useful or take down is not useful. We know that it has its uses. But what we're saying is that it breaks the social norm. It makes people having even less agency than they already had before. And that's why you alluded to in terms of state capitalist control over the surveillance and many other things in the PRC. So I think Taiwan's value is to show that we can counter the pandemic with no lockdown and counter the infodemic with no take down by making sure that people understand the epidemiology behind both the pandemic and infodemic and contribute however they can because people in the field always understand things more. That's the core of the collective intelligence. So without the collective intelligence without the social sector, the Taiwan model would not work but the collective intelligence will simply fail to work if the state starts to take things down to censor their actions and movement and speech to break things up and so on. In that case, there will be no social sector to speak of. So it's almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you trust a citizen like Pygmalion Effect, sit them become trustworthy. There is a social sector. If you distrust a citizen, citizens will break the rules and they become, I guess, not trustworthy by the authoritarian government's point of view. And so both sides are self-reinforcing. Okay. You embody a style of politics totally opposed to the top dog way of doing things. Is this kind of leadership and governance something that helps us out of the political disenchantment? Could this be a solution? Yeah, I think I don't fight any particular old system, representative democracy, political disenchantment and so on. I simply make sure the new system is fun. And eventually people see that it's enjoyable to share, you know, Shiba Inu dog memes or whatever. And then they start sharing it more. And at that point, this is democracy for sure because people still join together and co-create something that's worthwhile for everyone to do. However, I wouldn't call it traditional politics anymore because people see that this is like an environmental issue, a social issue, economic issue based on the per issue basis, not on a per person basis. A lot of the energy that people spend on political investment of energy and then later on disillusionment and disenchantment is because people focus a lot of time on specific people about the top dog, right? If you get so enamored with any particular top dog, then when they become non-top dog, you feel disillusioned as a nature of things. And in any election, maybe 49% of people feel disillusioned. But if you work on co-creation under here and now, well, everybody feels that they have won or at least not lost. There's always another round of conversation when people focus on the matter at hand, not on particular people. So I would say that disfacing the issues, not facing particular candidates, politics is on a different dimension to representative democracy. And I don't even think about the representatives that much. Okay. You stand for the power of diversity, which is also a principle which is very dear to the German Green Party. How do you manage to turn what some people might call vulnerability imperfection into strength? Yeah, how does that work? I think, and I'll quote again, Lena Cohen, there's a crack in everything and that's how the light gets in. The idea of diversity is not just diversity, it's also intersectionality, meaning that my vulnerability has something in common with your vulnerability, even though we're vulnerable in very different ways. So by making sure that, for example, I would say I've went through the male puberty in 93 when I was 12, but just a little bit. And then I went through the female puberty when I was 24, 25 in 2005. I'm of course talking about some vulnerability, but it also means that I'm more able to empathize with people no matter which puberty you went through. Well, I'm on your side. So I'm on everyone's side in a sense. And my community, homo sapiens, then is a larger community. And then I can also empathize with non-human beings or future generations more because I'm not trapped into this binary thinking of half of the population different from me, half of the population farther away from me and things like that. So I think transculturalism, more than transgender, is very important if one needs to turn vulnerability into co-creation into strengths by essentially saying, I understand each participating citizen have some blind spot, have some uniqueness. But that's exactly what unifies us together because we all have blind spots and only by contributing our particular unique point of view. Can we actually get a pose of uses together? Fantastic. Very good. According to you, citizens do not need to agree on everything in order to live and work together. The concept of rough consensus. How can you describe this for us? It's something which I really found fascinating how you include this in your concept of democracy. Sure, rough consensus simply put is something I can live with, right? Consensus means something stronger, something I prefer seeing happen. That's consensus. But if I can live with an idea, then that means that I can entertain more ideas if I insist everyone have to strongly agree with me, especially over the internet. At the end, only people with too much time on their hand wins the argument. Everybody else just go on and do other things, right? So the nature of internet governance simply because nobody can force anyone to do anything turns out rough consensus is the most we can achieve, the most we can reach for. That is to say, okay, we can live with it. We wouldn't kill ourselves over this idea being implemented. So then we go and do useful things. This is called rough consensus and running code when we have a roughly speaking common value that enables diversity because everyone can explore different solution space. It's actually like the global goals, the 17 goals. That's a rough consensus because it never says anything about how to reach the goals. If it says about the particular path to reach the goals, that's a consensus. But the vague idea like these 17 things are good things, that's rough consensus. Fantastic, thank you. I have one more private quiz. Sure, of course. Leonard Cohen, you always quote the same quotation of Leonard Cohen, which is one of the most beautiful ones. I love it. What other songs and quotes of Leonard Cohen do you like? Ah, sure. I'm such a big fan. I'm also a big fan, yes. I actually quoted other verses too, but bearer. For example, I would quote Hallelujah. I quoted Hallelujah in a conversation with European political scientists saying that, and we're talking about the liberty of democracy. And I said, and I quote, your face was strong, but you needed proof. And so I think what's important is that Leonard has a way to phrase things so that it has universal appeal. Another thing that I often quote is this idea that longing of the arteries to purify the blood. So that's, I think, very beautiful. I think it's followed from longing of the branches to lift a little bird and longing of the artery to purify the blood. And that says something about the life of plant and something about the life of animal. But Leonard phrases such a way that it's universal, even on moss, these two sentences will still evoke the feeling of the plant life and the animal life. I like that so much. It's from Comhealing that I translated the entire song in Mandarin. Oh, okay. Do you do that a lot? Is this like a hobby or? Yeah, yeah, I really like translating poetry. And so I translate poetry all the time. So if you like to look at a Mandarin translation my rendition of Comhealing is in the description. I'm afraid I would not be able to judge the translation. Okay. I'm, the editors asked me for two things. They found some photos of you on Twitter which they would like to use by Kai Chang, I think. Yeah, of course. They're in creative commons. I think the Kai Chang photos are not clear for commercial use though because it's a non-commercial creative commons license. But there are many creative commons license that do permit commercial use. And you can also just write Kai Chang to make sure that he's okay to license the photo. But there's many other selections. I'm pasting you these albums. And each album is tagged with the creative commons license that you can use freely. Fantastic. And also they were asking me if there were some graphs or some pictures, explanatory pictures for the concept of democracy that we could use. Do you have something that you could send us also? Yeah, we have this standard slide deck that talks about all the ideas about rough consensus and so on that I just talked about. And I'm pasting this here. Actually scrolling to the page that shows the rough consensus. Also on the chat here and you can download the PDF. Fantastic. How am I gonna be able to access to this video? Yes. So what I would do is I will upload this video on YouTube marking it as unlisted. And you can access that during your writing. And you can let me know after you publish or now if you already have an answer whether by the time you publish it's okay for us to publish the video or you prefer a transcript. Oh, it's okay to use. Excellent. All right. Of course. Okay. Thank you so much. Well, so I just paste a link to Skype then. Okay. All right. Thank you so much. All right. Live fully in Prosper. Bye. Bye-bye.