 So please, the same question, how do you consider your role in the government? My official role is that of a digital minister. In Taiwan, there is no digital ministry. So because of that, I work with all the different ministries, what we call digital transformation. Digital transformation, in a sense, is doing exactly what the public service is doing, but doing it with the people instead of for the people. Because in the previous era, before the internet, before the social media, it is very difficult to listen to millions of people. It's much easier to speak to millions of people using radio and television. But now, for the first time using the internet, we can co-create and listen to millions of people. And actually, if we don't do that in the public service, people in the civil society do that anyway. And so the people will feel much closer to each other and much more distance with the public sector, right? So the public and the public servants, they used to be of this distance, but now with the digital tools, the people are much closer to each other, and so they feel much more farther away from the public service. But the public service can also use the same digital tools to engage not just with the public, but also among the different ministries so that we form a much better working relationship that responds faster, that listens to more people, and that discuss things in a much wider scale and sharing through transparent things what exactly is the public service doing to engender a better understanding. And so this is the digital transformation that I'm working with all the ministries together. In the government side, it's called Open Government. In the civil society side, it's called Social Innovation. That's the same thing. It's just two sides of the same coin. So you are a fierce supporter of the transparency of information. Yes. How did you impose this culture on the government? So in my original culture, the open-source culture or the open-culture movement, the free-culture movement, transparency is the norm. All the different ideas in the open-source society or in Wikipedia, for example, they are all transparent for everybody to see. And because of this, it gains trust, accountability, and legitimacy. When you look at the government, actually, the parliaments are also working in the same regard. All the parliamentary hearings, parliamentary debates, and all the different commissions, they're not just kept in transcript by Harner and also now being live-strength. And even in the judicial branch, we're now gradually introducing a jury system. And all the courts, all the different proceedings, unless it's on some very confidential or sensitive issues, it's open by default. It's just an administration itself that is not using the same radically transparent ideas, and therefore people feel more distant and people don't actually know how different ministries think about things, which I think is a lost opportunity. If people can know how exactly does the public executive look at each policy issues, they can contribute much more meaningfully. So I basically tell people in the administration, look at the judicial branch, look at the parliamentary end, they have been doing the same things to engender people's trust so we can adopt much of this idea in the administration. To promote exchange with civil society and citizens, you have designed a platform for debates. That's right. Can you explain how it works? Yes. So this platform called the JOIN platform has three functions. First, there is an e-petition function where anyone who amassed about 5,000 signatures and those are done through SMS, it is not tied to the real identity. So anyone who has a mobile phone account can join this petition and they can petition a wide range of things. People petition for redesigning the text file and software or people petition for changing the time zone of Taiwan. So from very practical to very political, anything can be petitioned on this platform. And there is a pro and con conversation happening in real time on this debate platform and we look at the best ideas that are flagged as pro ideas and the best idea that are contra ideas and bring them as well as people who sign the petition into face-to-face conversations twice and once. And so this is the petition part. The second is the regulation part. For all the laws and bills proposed by the administration to the legislation, we announced for 60 days on the same platform for the public to have a debate. So in a sense, this is like people's assembly before the parliament to look at it. People can just propose their ideas and for the parliament to consider it. But we extended not just to the laws and regulations but also for internal policies for things that are not decided by the parliament but actually just by single ministry. Those internal regulations and policies were also announced for 60 days on the same platform. So people who don't have a parliamentarian to speak to them for this kind of regulation issues can nevertheless speak for themselves on the regulation platform. And then finally, as of last month, we announced that thousands, 1,200 of projects maintained by each ministry, they have their own KPIs, they have procurements, they maybe have some spending budgets and so on. They are all tracked within the ministry itself before but now we open this kind of auditing to everybody so they can renew it every three months or every month and everybody sees exactly is this like nine year or eight year project where it's going, how much spending it's done, how much KPIs it achieved and so previously it is only the purview of the auditing agencies to look at but now it's for everybody to look at and anyway can look at one part in the budget and comment on the part that they feel that relevant to them and the public servant will respond immediately without going through the parliament or the ministry immediately. So you took a... What did you do? You have taken a transversal position, transversal action, it means you have maybe shaken the administrative bureaucracy. Government, it's different ministries plays a game on this digital revolution. So I think one of the main things that we brought is the so-called participation officer network or PO network. Every ministry may to assign a team usually maybe two or five or six people and they're engaging the public in general whereas before every ministry only have offices for media like this traditional journalism or with the offices that talk about the MPs, the parliamentary offices but now they also have offices that talks to the general public or the civil society. So the kind of new designs such as the open spending the KPI that I just talked about this gets cleared by all the different participation offices. It is actually a collective decision by a PO network. So we did not impose it to the ministry as much as we proposed it as a good idea a year ago and the POs tell us maybe the administration itself should try the administration managed projects first. So we tried a small pilot projects and for a year they see that it really increased the quality of discussion and also reduces the time burden of the public servants because they don't have to answer for the one by one inquiries anymore they can just answer once public and it could be found by search engines. And so after a year of pilot they finally feel comfortable enough to introduce this to the ministry itself so actually we have the champions that is the participation offices within each ministry so that this kind of new design can be cleared and approved by all the ministries. How does civil society welcome your action? Well, initially they think that it is of course an extra way for people to petition, for people to have a meaningful conversation. At the beginning only the ministries issues that pertains to one single ministry get a meaningful response. And the civil society does this and see that all the cross ministry issues they only get an explanation they don't get a response that's because no ministry would want to cross the line to talk about other ministries per view and so any ministry who stick their necks out so to speak have to absorb all the risk if it's outside of their per view so for the first two years or so of the e-petition platform we see single ministry issue resolved with no explanation, no solutions. So that is also the dual purpose of participation officer. It's not just talking to the state of the civil society but also making it clear what is being stuck in a cross ministry communication and to make sure because we have a regulation that if ministry A think this is ministry B's business they're just supporting B think it's C's business B is just supporting and C think it's A's business that's just supporting it's everybody's business. In the south of Taiwan they petition for a helicopter to be stationed there as ambulance because their distance to a large hospital is too long so the ambulance helicopter is ministry of interior but they think it's maybe ministry of health and welfare business and the welfare people think maybe it's transportation business because all they need is a faster road and they think maybe it's ministry of defense business and so on but all the different ministries go to Hengchun and we have succeeded in having a cross ministry team about 30 people to talk about this from all the different angles and with local stakeholders and finally we converge on setting a larger hospital there as the final solution so basically the PO network also steps as an internal liaison with the different cross ministries and after a few cases like that the civil society learns that it is now possible to talk about cross ministry issues. Now I would admit that again we are not as efficient to deal with cross ministry issues as single ministries once necessarily but we are improving on that. The question about democracy the democratic model is already an example for Asia do you think it could be improved on power? Yes, so I think one of the great thing about talent democracy is that we are the first generation that can actually use it people who are older than me still remember the martial law where there is no democracy to speak of there is no freedom of speech freedom of assembly, freedom of the press but now people younger than me they don't remember the martial law anymore so we are kind of the first generation that have access to personal computer internet and democracy that also means that we don't have some legacy to respect, to honour people can always invent new democratic ideas so it's not like 200 years of representative democracy it's 20 years of everything so people can experiment with participatory budgets they can experiment with referendums they can experiment with all those different participative ideas without having the package of 200 years of representative democracy and so every year we see new democratic inventions being introduced and rapidly adopted by especially local governments and us in the central government take the part of the experiment that worked really well and amplified to a national scale a question about your background yes so you left school at 12 well 14 but yes to devote yourself to programming it's a very non-typical course in the society that puts a lot of pressure on educational children so can you just comment about your course well I'm of course an autodidact you said the question as if it's not very typical but in Taiwan now up to 10% of students can be self-educated Taiwan has Asia's leading law for not just homeschooling but experimental schools of all the different clients so up to 10% of all the student population can enter up to college level a way that is alternative school to the typical school system and next year we're rolling out a new curriculum for K-12 education that takes the best part of the experiment schools and merge it into the actual curriculum of all the different basic education so things like curiosity or autonomous initiative and communication instead of doctrine based education achieving common good instead of for one particular skill all these things sprung out of alternative education but now we're merging it back into the K-12 curriculum I was part of the curriculum committee and so I think the experiment for alternative education in Taiwan is a very inspiring example to show that not all the experiments succeed of course but the part that actually results in better education are being considered and merged back into the curriculum so that if in Taiwan now someone says every time homeschool since when I was 14 it will not raise the eyebrow because it's pretty typical that's your love how many lives just a question can you tell us about your entrepreneurial career on your healthcare background okay of course so I started a so I co-founded an internet company called the Inforion Company it was a one of the highlights of Taiwan's dot com bubble and it starts as just a printing press I was not involved back then it was reformed into a software company I was entered as one of the three main co-founders and we did Taiwan's first ebay like auction website it's called Hupit and we did one of Taiwan's first social media website and I wrote one of the first meta search that is to say search across all the search engines but also your files on your disk and so on and so it was pretty successful we won some awards but then I got interested in this open source movement so I sold my shares in the company but later on they got invested by Intel and become very high profile and so I guess it is part of the dot com cycle that everybody put a lot of help in such kind of internet e-commerce and things like that of course the dot com also went bust and the company has voted but I think people still remember it with some fondness because it was one of the first purely companies for Taiwan's dot com era the other being the yam company and so on open find and so on can you tell us about the gov the movement on the rolling place in the Taiwanese society yes the gov zero movement started by a few hackers they call themselves the hacker 15 that was in late 2012 and they started in a hackathon because at that time there was an advertisement by the administration that talks about the economic boosting plan that is the 4 or 80 year plan that is very complicated and the advertisement is literally people who are actors acting as citizens look at all the budget and items and so on and feeling very confused and their voice over says the economic boosting plan is very complicated it's very difficult to explain so we're not explaining let's just trust the government and start doing it of course it's taken as an insult for people's intelligence and so it's one of the first youtube advertisement the administration posted back in 2012 and so it got flagged as spam very quickly and taken out of youtube but instead of just protesting I think the hacker 15 people the original 4 hackers they thought that maybe the problem of people not understanding the budget or the plan is not the people's problem but actually the budget not being visualized in a way that could very easily exist by people maybe it's not inclusive enough so they wrote the visualization platform the budget.g0b.tw website to visualize the national budget so people can track individual items managed by different ministries which by the way is the system we installed last month allies so the GOV0 one of the first project now become a central government project right but the GOV0 idea is always like this is what we call forking the government taking the existing data and the plans by the government but re-presenting it in a way that people can understand, can relate to and can interact with and all the different websites in Taiwan that ends in GOV.twr government websites so the same website that changes the O to a 0 gets you into the shadow government you don't have to search for it you just change one letter in the URL and so once the shadow government has proven as really working better as an alternative because we relinquish most of our copyright so on the next procurement cycle the government can just merge back the civil society contributions and they become official government websites it's happening for the Taipei participation budget and the budget visualization has been adopted by seven different cities and as well as many other projects such as the environmental air quality visualization or the visualization of the labor law calculator and things like that there's many individual subjects that are tackled by the civil society and then merge back to the government you still play a key role in the government in the GOV 0 yes so every Wednesday we have a mini one of the GOV 0 projects called vTaiwan and it's happening in the social innovation lab and I take care of the place where it happens what happens in this social innovation lab and you are meeting some founders of Starter yeah I meet with anyone who has any idea about social innovation defined as innovation that has a positive impact to the whole society not just the founder right so anyone who I have something idea for the public good I have an office hour from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. so anyone can talk to me and there's a booking system as well and it's not just in Taipei in the social innovation lab every other Tuesday I also tour around Taiwan to talk with the local social innovators but using video conferencing connect to 12 different ministries in the social innovation lab Taipei so that people can feel they're in the same room even though they're in different corners in Taiwan so through this way we let the central government be mobile in the sense that they could see actually how their policies being implemented in the real role in the indigenous areas and for the people there to really meet the central government people as people instead of like abstract like emails and whatever right so in this way we increase the empathy of people and also amplify any local idea that could work on a national or regional level we amplify it very quickly to the central government people the question about your background during the sunflower movement you have created some tools to promote the release of speech my question is has this moment played a crucial role in your sunflower movement well I wouldn't say I created it because it is just a tool that the GovZero movement has been always using for two years then right but it's just GovZero was a relatively low-profile bunch of people but now with the sunflower movement everybody half a million people on the street get to have access to the same collaborative tools that GovZero movement is using the hack folder which is a share bookmark hackpad which is the share typing of what's going on the live streaming platform logistics and everything so these were already the tools that we've been using for two years by that time it's just a sunflower movement to amplify it so that people become generally aware of it and how these tools can make people converge on common values instead of like many other occupies where they just diverge or whatever hmm what message did prime minister reach for a gift to the society by working with you well the premier asked me to recruit a digital minister they didn't really recruit me I was kind of the liaison to talk to the community it's just people who I talked to all have other things to do and finally I have to try this so I think one of the key messages the premier is sending out by recruiting someone from the civil society is by saying the government is working with the people now it's not working for the people only right so the down authoritarian government which is very popular the last century kind of poses the government as a like all knowing role where the civil society needs the government to settle disputes to organize whatever but now with the social media internet tools everybody knows that anyone who has a hashtag can organize them on people and settle on common values they don't need government anymore so the government role I think today is that providing an accountable a transparent way for people to participate and so to let people find common values and find solution that work for everybody without the government coming up with all those ideas and so this values of creation was always the core idea of the open source and the open government movement and so the premier by setting one minister dedicated for open government and social innovation I think is sending a message that the cabinet is willing to work with the public service to learn the art of co-creating and working with people rather than just for the people how were you welcomed into the government how? like with applause with fireworks so I had a public one month of Q&A which is in September 2016 before I actually got into office which is the first of October and during this period it's very interesting because I don't give exclusive interviews all the media and in fact everybody need to ask me on this platform where I only answer publicly and so this very interestingly provides a kind of crowdsourcing of people's idea about my mandate so I can take this consensus and talk to the premier saying okay so I have three conditions going in first I don't look at any top secret or national secret confidential information but in exchange all the information that I look I say it's worthy to be publicized and to be released to the public so it's radical transparency the second thing is that I work in an anarchistic way or a Dallas way which is I guess less controversial but in any case it's the same thing in that I don't pick command nor will I command my fellow ministers or anyone in the public service so people don't see me as superior in the facilitative role they come to me if they want to engage the public but if they don't come to me I don't force them to and so this is I think the voluntary basis is also very important and the third thing is that I get to work anywhere I don't have to work in this office so that means that I get to practice this mobile office and also helps digitizing the whole government apparatus so that they find it's easier to connect with me online than actually handing me a piece of paper and it would become very difficult to introduce digital work spaces but because I say I can work anywhere and also my colleagues can also work anywhere but we're able to engage with like 35 interns over Taiwan, crowdsourced efforts that works to the benefit of everyone instead of just people who happen to live around Taipei so through this innovative way of working with people I think I was welcomed not by the merit of me being an issue in good commands or you know being a good superior or things like that but in a purely facilitative role that doesn't hurt anyone's business but comes to me if they think that I can help resolve some issues so in a very dousy way I think I was welcomed in a very kind of calm and peaceful fashion What do you think about Zhong Tu? Zhong Tu You said when there are obstacles that there are opportunities in addition can you elaborate Yes of course so for example last May we have a designer who using the e-petition platform that says our income tax filing software is explosively difficult to use now that is a conflict it's not even an actionable idea it is just a sentiment basically tax filing max sucks and it's a thought of what we call negative energy in the e-petition forum but all of this changed after 48 hours when our participation office and network huddled among ourselves in a Minister of Finance P.L. Yang Xinhe replied publicly saying all the people who complain about the tax filing software are cordially invited to attend our co-creation workshop this week in May this Friday and then anyone who has any ally we promise to incorporate your online opinion in our redesign of the tax filing software and just by saying that overnight the sentiment change 80% of people become very positive and constructive and only less than 20% of people are still trolling or still venting their negative emotions and so by basically inviting people who complain into the kitchen to cook together we were able to flip the social expectation of the government have to know everything but instead of bringing in the expertise from the civil society and the private sector into the co-creation process so now this year we actually have a very good experience for Mike and Linux and tablet users to file taxes so I think all the opportunities arise because we recognize people who complain people who raise the conflict there is a potential that they complain because they know more than the government and just by inviting people publicly from the civil society instead of have the government have to keep explaining but not solving problems Pakistan just passed law to guarantee transgender rights I think it was two days ago do you see yourself to inspire Taiwanese society in this direction this year? Taiwan I think is one of the places where the LGBTQ right is the highest in Asia at least and it's not just the Supreme Court recognized marriage equality but actually we have a very progressive guideline called the gender equality guidelines that informs all the different aspects so that when every regulation and every law instead of being separately evaluated all the ministries in charge of those regulation laws to file a gender impact assessment and so I think this is very enlightened and actually made it possible for a lot of different ideas about gender or transgender and so on to be mainstream in a way to be just one of the factors to consider and not something that to make a fuss of this is the idea of what we call intersectionality in the sense that everybody have some part of them that are in minority but other parts are in the majority and it's a part that our own experience when we are in the minority to feel that it is necessary to consider people of different predictions and that's when we're back to the place where we are in the majority we can still consider with much more empathy and social responsibility in mind and so this intersectional way of going forward I think is one of the strengths in Taiwan because we have a plurality of ethnicities, languages, cultures and things like that and we have to work out a way to get it forward and just I think last week there's also another lobbying past the National Languages Act so now instead of one official language Taiwan now has 16 or 20 or more than 2 dozen national languages in any in any counties where there's more than majority speaking the Taiwanese Hakka or one of the indigenous languages like Banzai and so on that become official language where the official documents can be written in that language of course we will need a lot of artificial intelligence help to do automatic translation but it shows that we're really going where the intersectional plural world view is defining the democracy values in Taiwan military you have an interest in the field of LGBT rights law so what will this vote for us what can we say about this law well we can't say much about the legislation there's many people who want to add on extra clauses to the Supreme Court ruling the Supreme Court ruling basically says the gender equality especially around marriage need to be rectified by the legislation within two years so it's one year and a few months in the future if we don't rectify it in the legislation then automatically people with all the genders automatically enjoy the same right as the heterogeneous couples in a marriage at the moment there are many people who propose many versions of that things but because it is charged by the Supreme Court through the legislation so at the end it will be for the legislators to debate and personally I think there's a lot more in common for people who are valuing marriage the sacredness of marriage they don't want divorce and things like that and people who are for marriage equality than them to me because I don't really care for marriage I don't really want to be married I think there's much more room for those very conservative and very progressive people those cherished marriage to achieve some consensus than me achieving any consensus with them but I'm committed to maintain of course this public dialogue space and the ephetician space so that people who have any part that they want to amend or change or part of the referendum and so on they can do it in a fair and accountable fashion but personally I don't have a stake in the marriage equality law last question we are not trans gender but post gender post gender can I tell you what does it mean so to be post gender is basically said that I'm not really being defined by any gender role or any performance and I think I value people based on their values non-managed monetary value their core values that they live by and so I wrote a tweet about it many years ago I said that I would like to know you by your values and not by your types your roles or your classes and that means basically that I cherish relationships built by people valuing important things and other people valuing different important things but we find common values that can unite these things together but I think gender or class or type or role it's not part of this it may inform people's different perception about the world and that is very important but when we talk about the values themselves it really shouldn't be about particular categories of people but about how those values can be applied universally if there is a value that cannot be applied universally and can only apply to one gender or one race then I think it's not universal enough and that's my basic idea sorry what do you think are the roles that are most effective in terms of gender or gender? I don't think it's interesting I think that if you think your world is more efficient in the government or outside the government oh okay yes I think my role is best if I am seen as being equally in distance with the public service, with the private sector and with the civil society because most structural problems that we see in today's world be from climate change to all the different ecological issues and things like that there are so called wicked problems meaning that they are structural and they cannot be solved by one actor acting alone it must be solved by all the different stakeholders doing their commitments and then finally doing the action together so that we can solve the coordination problem with just one single actor absorbing all the risk that's never going to work it only works if people commit just like crowdfunding, they commit to some and some amount but only if everybody commits does this project enter fruition so if I am seen as being biased toward one party or one sector then I cannot be of this facilitative role to get the society to commit on change it is only if I am equally distant to all the different sectors on different parties and different stakeholders can I find this neutral ground for people to commit on action and once they get a commitment publicly they have to act and once they act we solve the coordination problem together in the last week exactly it's good because in the last week you said something, I will just go to your side since you are interested you said internet web is closed in China but you told me that you are able to get to recover some data from China through the dark web there is the dark web and there is also things like github and also things like the blockchain that is currently blocked by China because if PRC blocks them it hampers their scientific progress so it means you have some very precise and very good information about what is going on in China about constraints about everything but you have comments from people there so you have very good information from I would say that most of the people who work in the GovZero movement they have basic ideas about cyber security and about how to use these kind of cryptographic tools and there are people who work in Hong Kong who work in the various different cities in the PRC they are very willing to engage the GovZero network and to get their messages across and they don't always use the dark net that is kind of the last resort sometimes they just use the public github sometimes using the public blockchain In fact, to Hong Kong myself we would like to do a story about what is going on that is happening I think there is a society that is already shrinking if I send an email maybe a couple of weeks or months can you hand me to maybe to meet some hackers if you go to the GovZero network there is a website called join.g0v join.g0v join.g0v if you enter your email you will get an invitation to the Slack channel of all the GovZero people and there you can see plenty of Hong Kong people announcing their ideas join.g0v GovZero yeah but you are free to send me emails because I want to do something in favor of democracy I am not sure about what is happening there but because in the Samplower days our technologies they are all public so during the umbrella movement they also use many of our technologies so there is a close relationship between the Hong Kong activists and the Taiwan civil civic activists so I am going to walk outside do you have some pictures? do you have to talk about it? you have to talk about it how long do you like to talk about it? maybe one hour maybe one hour keep rolling so do you know what do you do when you grow up? do you read books? no, most of the time I just accept interviews I feel like there is another interview I am going to talk about something else I don't believe you are the last one if you want to try the front one there are four interviews there are four interviews this morning it was Bloomberg it was Ursula that's right this is the best interview so I can have a short walk yes, I can have a short walk