 I'm supposed to speak in English for this class, I'll speak slowly and if there's any difficult words or anything that you would like me to explain or at least do go to slido.com 405 and as you can see here's already somebody there and asking that what is my topic today. So just to explain usually I start with a presentation and in this case I start with this slide that I presented with the deputy ministers and the other participation officers in the executive union in the administration just a few days ago and so I will talk a little bit about open government and how we are affecting open government in the administration but my usual habit if you will is to go back to slido whenever there's like my European questions when there's like my questions I will just stop whatever I'm presenting and I'll go back to slido and so in the sense that what I will be talking about the topic that I'll be talking about is collectively determined by you. You don't have to ask questions related to open government although you are welcome to you can ask well anything and so if you see somebody asking a question that you would also like to ask such as this one which has two likes you can simply press like and then you will float to the top and I will answer based on the number of likes that the question asks. Is that okay with you? Okay cool. Let's get started. And so this is my second time in this kind of class the first time was in Taipei and there were people who struggled to ask questions in English so if you really have to you can also ask a question in Chinese and I will translate it back to English as to fit the theme of this talk today. So without further ado let's get started. So as many of you probably already know open government is my primary work as the digital minister so what do we mean by open government and what does it entail in actual practice? So according to OECD and many other international bodies open government is the idea that we can make the government more transparent to everybody involved and by transparent we mean that whenever we're making decisions we try to review as much as possible the evidence the facts the data that we use the rationale that we use for making policies and but why why are we doing this? This is because if the government delays until the latest possible amendment that is to say when effecting the policy and it has to actually assume that everybody who has an idea who has an input who has something to contribute to this policy has already voiced their concerns otherwise if you just you know make decisions by ourselves and then announce it without telling everybody that we are going to do this policy development then people would disagree or people would simply have something to contribute but was not aware that they could contribute would actually let you know either on the street or on the internet so this is somewhat reactive the transparency means we need to let people know not just what we're doing but what we are going to do and why we're going to do this so that people who has something to contribute can actually contribute and the second part participation means that we need to have a way to receive ideas inputs reflections from the civil society from the private sector that is more effective than before before we had public hearings we had environmental evaluations we had a lot of different processes to get people's sounds ideas but the thing is that it does not scale what we mean in scale in computer science is that many people can do it at once for example there is gonna be one microphone here so if I am to ask you what kind of questions you have what kind of suggestions you have on my topic today if I pass the microphone around then by the end of the passing the microphone around and everybody asked me what they want to hear and so on that the time would already have been passed like it would take like one hour or two hours for everybody here to speak one after another using a microphone so which is why a participation framework is important for example today Slido is our participation framework it enables me to continue speaking and you without interrupting me to nevertheless determine what you would like me to talk about so this is what we mean by participation now this actually has many different Chinese translations in English it's called accountability but in Chinese it's variously translated as or whatever right it's a kind of nebulous term and it's not very much used in everyday policymaking language here in Taiwan at the moment in English accountability is linked to its root account to give an account like an accountant accounting means that you keep a record of what you have done and when you have done that and why have you done it so whereas transparency means announcing beforehand what you are going to do accounts accountability means that keeping a record of what we have already done and who have done what so it's a district keeping and the reason why accountability is important is because for many different projects that the government is doing it's like many different puzzle pieces that we're taking together effects a useful policy or a strategy but because it's very complicated it may take many actions from the administration it may take from the regional government may take actions from the civil society from the social sector and from the private sector so accountability is the way that we say we keep a record of whatever everybody's contribution to this larger picture so that people can they won't take credit for what they have not done and on the other hand they can ask us to explain why have we done this so this accountability also means in addition to keeping an account also answering based on the account of the inquiries that people ask us and OECD initially defines open government as just these three transparency participation and accountability and across the world ever since president ex-president Obama announced the open government initiative back in 2011 there's many many countries in the world who have taken open government and these three principles as their fundamental value to regain the trust that the citizens is which is even lower and lower even in advanced democratic countries so it was built as a way back in 2012 or 2013 as a way for government to regain trust people and the idea is that people would not trust the government without the government trusting the people so the government has to first trust the people to see what the government is doing without misjudging it to participate without degenerating into populism to help the government accountable without going into lynching or witch hunting or other things like that so it is an enormous trust and many government did not use to trust people like that but they have found out if they distrust people people distrust back and this is not another relationship so it's like with a romantic relationship somebody has to yield first somebody has to trust more right so it is the government's duty to trust a little bit more of the people maybe the people who trust back and after a few years of practicing open government of the worldwide countries they found out even for the government who has done open government really well it creates a new class it creates a new class that is usually young usually well educated maybe living near the capital they did not care about politics but because of open government they now have agenda setting power meaning that they can tell the government what to think about what to talk about so it is a much more politically active class which is great as far as democracy is concerned but it also means that people who did not have a habit of using the internet for this course people who did not prefer writing or numbers people who prefers to talk face-to-face people prefer to touch things that they they're there or drawing things that they're more interesting and so on usually gets excluded when a country installs a open government framework it privileges people who are good at typing people who are good at numbers people who are good at data and they become a kind of new elite under open government relationships so this is why when we are practicing open government in Taiwan from the very beginning from 2014 or so we added the idea of inclusion into the core three open government idea and inclusion means very simply that we use the technologies not to exclude people meaning that to make people who did not participate even further from participation every single technology that we introduce must be inclusive meaning that it allows people who did not have the means to participate to nevertheless find a way to participate so for example when in Taipei city when the open government workers worked with Mayor Kowinja on a social housing distribution mechanism they by law we have 10% of social housing that is distributed to disadvantaged people who could not afford housing however in Taipei city they added 20 more percent saying that it is allocated to people who can theoretically afford housing but no landlords want to rent to them and who are these people these are single parents these are people living with HIV with immunodeficiency these are people who were you know sleeping on the street these are people who are affected by natural disasters these are people who are aborigines for example or people who suffer from mental or physical handicap and so when the mayor said we want to let these people this advantaged people to collectively determine what is fair to distribute those 20% of social housing that we must do this by the open government principle that he promised during his campaign the problem immediately becomes do we use technology to do this do we use a internet platform to enable people to see the social housing principles do we install a participation framework so people can use their film to ask questions do we put a entire accountability record so people know going into a meeting what has transpired before in the previous meetings now of course if we just set up a website to do this if we very simply say okay everybody can go to this join the GOV.TW to participate it will be a nightmare because these disadvantaged people not many of them have the luxury to use their mobile phones to participate in policy development and if we say okay we just listen to whatever the poll the iPhone saying on the website then it will basically privilege the few people among the disadvantaged people who can't go to the website so we don't do that what we did was we instead of asking people to come to technology we bring technology to people so it's not like we didn't use technology we did use technology but we use technology for a sign language interpretation so that people who are you know having hearing disabilities can nevertheless follow the discussion we have real-time captions that pipes at what everybody says for people who are paralyzed we use live streaming to bring the discussion to them and to hold those kind of face-to-face deliberations in the location that is close to them and before we did not say okay anybody who can go to this website have input them you have to first show that you are one of those disadvantaged people and we do this not by randomly calling people we do this I have a rolling survey the people who worked with the Taipei City Government asked the associations who represent those disadvantaged people not as experts and go to the meeting instead they were we asked to produce a list of people that they know the actual history this family diagrams that their constituents have and then a same survey the same question is then sent sometimes door-to-door to these disadvantaged people asking who else do you know that the city government may have missed and so by these kind of many waves of rolling survey the Taipei City Team were able to reach many disadvantaged people who did not think that they could have a input into the policy making that they did not even know that there is going to be a social housing and then by getting everybody on the same place and have the upper regions listen to the story of the artist the artist listened to the story of paralyzed people and so on they were able to form some consensus instead of you know finding each other to get more percentage they were able to collaboratively design a system that would make it much better for them to live together and so this is the kind of spirit that we want to encourage in the assistive technology in the idea of inclusion so if you don't have a mobile phone and you could not connect to Slido please do feel free to raise your hand or not raise your hand and interrupt me at any time and nevertheless ask your question it is not like by having the Slido system that we ignore people who could not get to it so these are the four principles of open government that we're trying to further now going back to Slido um there's two questions let's take a few seconds right so this is a great question uh Terrence asks what is the difference between open government and e-government and another person said how do government use technology to enhance administration function and effect so as many of you know the national development council has long ago started planning the idea of e-government or a dance in our national development and at the moment it is now the fifth installment of the e-government plan by e-government usually as we heard we're doing electronic it means very simply take what is not electronic paper paperwork and replace it with something that's electronic computers or you know stylus so these are electronic while the system based on paper were not electronic um there are of course very good reasons to use electronic devices our title is much easier but on the other hand paper actually has a very good user experience this means that when i work with paper i know exactly where it is although i could not do full tech search i can do a lot of annotation i can do a lot of binding sealing all sort of different actions that you can make on paper that if on a computer using keyboard and mouse it actually takes longer to do the same thing so a lot of e-government work is trying to work with the users and find a way to replace those paperwork with equivalent electronic work that actually makes it saves people's time instead of requiring people to spend even more time just to make it electronic so that was our main challenge in the e-government plan but the e-government plan at least in its first four installments did not emphasize the complete rework of the workflow if you had a approval workflow back in e-government in paper based days even switching to a electronic approval system exactly the same approval logic still applies so even though everybody has an email now people still use it very much like the old mail system you don't see a lot of government people writing an email to everybody in their department even though they can technically do that so it means that the workflow itself was sometimes and usually actually i would say left the same while just the device are upgraded to something that's more convenient that could be searched and so on so in the current installment of e-government plan we're calling it a digital government and by digital government we are doing a rethink of now that we have those digital tools maybe we can change the workflow a little the message flow in the old electronic system still flows only within the same department or the same unit it flows vertically but it is actually now possible to for information to flow horizontally and if i'm not mistaken many of you already do that you just do it using systems outside the normal demonstration systems people use the line app people use facebook they use google apps they use all kind of you know tools that were not designed for administration work for government work they were designed so that you can catch up with your friends or send photos with their families but because they are horizontal and they are scalable meaning that they can reach a lot of people very quickly compared to the electronic or not government system many people did take to use line to use google to use even facebook for their internal communication and if this of course has an advantage it is very liberating i'm sure but it also has this advantage in particular the workflow that was built using those external tools those external social media tools they were not permanent it means that it mostly depends on the idea of one or two key people running the system whether it's a google doc whether it's a line group or something like that so if that's somebody changes their job it is actually very difficult to hand off to their successes using these ad hoc social media tools maybe the next person uses you know joker instead of line maybe the next person uses a different set of communication tools maybe office 365 instead of google apps and so on so it actually creates a lot of headache in terms of information management in the government so this is the state and i'm not saying that it is good or bad this is state that we have today so one of my work as a digital minister is to work with the administration to establish the same kind of information infrastructure for example the line like communication system a collaborative document just like google docs or google spreadsheet and so on that builds with systems with open and free tools inside the government so this is what we have been prototyping and recently it just passed the independent testing of our cybersecurity department so that this system in our what we call pdis gov pw so that this system what we call sunstorm it is actually what i use every day and then you can see the same shared folders the same real-time chats and so on that people can use and it keeps like collaborative spreadsheets and everything just like the google apps and so on so so here is where we invite everybody who is a public servant in so that we can collaborate using these tools to change not only the device that they use but the workflow that they use and it requires very little learning because these three tools are modeled after for example excel for example word so it is actually not difficult to to start using so we're we've just finished the cybersecurity audit that proves that it's safe but nevertheless we will start recording lessons and giving our training classes so it gives the alternative to google tools and to buy and so on for people who are interested in doing this kind of dynamic workflow in the public sense so um on the question of how do we use technology to enhance administration function and effect um so i talked about turning paper into bits into digital records and for archival for example there's a lot of existing paper that we still need to make into a digital workflow so one of the the key um technology that we're using as of this year adopting trine is a machine learning for example i'll use a very concrete case um the administration um when they're they're working on records and sending it to the judicial branch um our administration branch of law the ministry of justice always prepares a lot of paperwork that they call it uh that sends it to the to their counterparts in the judiciary and these are very often just paper there is no uh digital records um even though they were digital inside the ministry they were not digital when it's sent outside of the administration branch and but why is the reason because they're they're by law there is a law that says you have to phone to to seal the the paperwork and to send it out so even if they need a digital record for many important criminal cases they will send out the paper to the judiciary and then for them to start working on it and then load it back and then start scanning so that they have a digital copy they do need a digital copy but because the law focused on paperwork they they thought it's much more important to get a paper there first so there's a lot of limitations here so why why are we you know working with this very inefficient system one of the reason is that the scanner used to take a lot of time if you have a 200 page book and if you have to you know flip it down and scan it page by page it will usually take around 10 to 20 seconds a page for people to scan it so of course if you do this then it will delay the persecution by two days or three days if it's a important case with a lot of paperwork and of course nobody can you know take responsibility for delaying this much which is why they send it out and then go take it back and gradually scan it but this is silly because there are now machines that can very easily scan at you know three seconds a page one second a page that is very trivial it's just like a lamp the scanner is on top and then you put a book or anything here and then you just start flipping and you can flip as fast as you want it just detects where each page is and it's not even very expensive it's just new technology that was productionized maybe a couple years ago but because it was relatively neat it was introduced a couple years ago it's not in our common procurement it's like gong gong gong man so of course when people think about uh how do we solve the scanning problem they would not think about that but you could have saved literally weeks of time for for you know everybody involved and once you have this fast scanning technology you can then work with machine learning to try to recognize the the heritage text or the printed text so that you can do full text searching and once you can do full text searching within those cases then it will increase the quality of the persecution and the quality of lawyers working on it because they will be able to focus on the part of evidence that actually matters and actually in the US and in the UK they are now experimenting not just full text searching but actually interactive questions you can ask a machine learning system AI what what are the relevant precedents for this case and they will search the entire history of their cases and return to you the part that is related to this particular case and once they start doing this the time that the lawyers the time that the judges spend on the case can spend on the part that requires human creativity that requires human judgment they will not need to spend a lot of time just looking up the the names looking up the the actual paragraphs and so on these very repetitive work no matter what kind of people do it you will get the same result and so these kind of redundant work wrong going in Mandarin is of course best delegated to machines but if we don't have a scanner we don't even get to here right so the idea of the digital tools in the government is just not just to solve one single problem in every in every case which is of course still important but to think of a new workflow that could save everybody's time involved another anonymous I love the anonymous system because we get the best questions this way if everybody has to use real name we don't get these kind of interesting questions an anonymous friend asks do you like your job in the executive yeah does it match what I expected before entering the cabinet yes so I am actually not new to the to the administration I've been working with the administration on digital government open government since at least 2014 back in 2014 I was working as an advisor to the national development council's open data advisory committee and also as a dependent expert to minister then ex-minister jacqueline cites and you and then of course the then deputy premier salmon john johnson jen so um so I was kind of understudy if you will who worked with administration at that time because after the sunflower movement after the occupy the the the cabinet at the end of 2014 actually starts saying if you remember proud sourcing and open data and big data as there are three main strategies and these basically means the transparency and participation part of the open government plan so although they were just installing half of the open government plan it is still a step to the right direction which is why I agreed to work with the cabinet back then so um and I was also with an industry of education for the new curriculum so um now this cabinet of course takes a lot more importance in the open government plan that they were willing to take accountability and inclusion also very seriously and human right very seriously but I would say between the two independent prime ministers that is to say premier johnson jen premier ding chen they were both independent they belong to no parties I never belong to anybody and the the idea during the transition the four months of transition many of my friends in the international community they said they've never seen a peaceful transition in taiwan like this they remember taiwan especially if they are like 40 or 50 years old they remember taiwan as a place where you know people in the parliament throw chairs at each other or they remember taiwan as sometimes like very um I would say charged or passionate um discussions between the two parties and so on so they were very surprised um in back in the last year's election that the transition between the two cabinets was completely peaceful and one of the reason was that Simon john asked each ministry to upload what he calls a checkpoint document uh that is to say what the ministry has done why has they done that what are the data that backs these decisions up into the public internet so it is not just one party handing the power to another party it is a independent premier asking his cabinet to provide an account that is part of accountability to the entire world not just Taiwanese people and for the new cabinet including of course premier to download it from the public internet and to resume what they have done and this of course benefits me because I was I wasn't I didn't know that I would be part of the new cabinet but I nevertheless have access to a same checkpoint document as everybody else here does so I also can see which part of the the the national development plan which part of the the national direction actually keeps the same between the two cabinets and what parts actually got changed because new values that was introduced by the new cabinet and this was very helpful to me but I'm sure also helpful to everybody else so um so I know what you expect going into the the new cabinet and so far it's been exactly the same as I expected right so the the next question is also very good what is the benefit for public servants to achieve open government this is a great question because if you ask from anybody else's angle like for example for young people who want to participate in discussion of course it'll give them more things to talk about if you are part of the small or medium enterprise who wants to know what kind of regulation is going to affect you of course open government makes your job much easier and if you're part of the civil society NGO or association they'll want the government to think about the thing that you care about of course open government helps you but what's in it for career public servants well where are the career public servants who are already very much overworked going to put more hours into open government so um although although this is the theoretical slight that I usually show to our participation offices but I usually just show them this single slight saying open government has the two reasons an external reason that is for the people in the society that every everything that I have explained but it also has a internal reason that is despite you know all the benefit that it has to a civil society and to citizens and to private sector for the public sector it has one concrete reason that says career public servants we were well and and I think of myself as a career public servant so we career public servants compared to elected officials to Zheng Wukuan in taiwan's system it has the I usually joke that we have the worst part of the uk system where the public servants are anonymous right the uk system says the career public servants are anonymous but they're professional they were able to tell elected officials that this is a bad idea and you should not install it as a one so they keep elected officials in check but they remain anonymous whereas in other european systems career public servants are they they can just defend the the policies that they make but they don't have they have to listen to the elected officials on the overall direction but taiwan's like the the worst of these two the career public servants are anonymous meaning that if we see something wrong we we can't uh you know just point it out it's wrong because it's explicitly forbidden in gong ren and fu in the in the public service law and on the other hand if we want to to whistle blow or to keep the elected officials in check we we we can't do that uh in the in the public information of all uh it explicitly says that if you have a policy in the mankind it's not done you you should not release it to the public otherwise while you're violating the public information law but it has a clause that says if you can prove that it is for the public interest then you can actually open the data uh before you finalize your decisions and to ask people not just elected officials to check elected officials ideas but you have to prove that it's necessary for public interest and if you combine that with gong ren and fu fang it's a civil servant law which says if uh if a higher up civil servant think it's not for public interest then the down the lower level public servant have to agree with jang wuan's uh interpretation then it creates a a a a very risk of us environment because even if you think that it is for the public interest if any of your bosses think it's not well it's not and you're not supposed to talk about it before the policy is made so the combining these two things means that career public servants often work very hard to solve a lot of very concrete problems and propose some very good ideas but if these ideas are thought as you know bad or you know the the elected officials change their mind or somebody higher up changed their mind well these are silence forever and the public never knows about it and then you end up doing a lot of you know redundant but again uh on the new direction another new direction is the one so so this just creates a kind of meaningless job because you keep doing a lot of very creative work for for essentially nothing um and then of course it means that career public servants are often critiqued by the outside by external stakeholders as uh reacting too slowly as uh not being responsive enough but they did not know that there's these legal frameworks that prevents us from responding in a timely fashion it needs approval all the way to the ministry before you know you can use to answer anything so which means that the esteem of public servants both internally and also externally the public perception are pretty bad but but it's not like we didn't do our job professionally it's just the existing communication framework prevents career public servants from directly answering and even being held accountable by the public they had to go to the intermediary of the ministers of elected officials and of MPs of legislators and so on and the media of course before it reaches the people so whatever the career public servants does is misinterpreted or abstracted or whatever misdirected for five different steps before it reaches the people and when the people find something that they want to contribute and the career public servants sometimes actually agrees with the people on the street they could not directly communicate and so based on the experiments that Mayor Ko and Jet did in Taipei City during participatory budgeting the civil society the GovZero movement helped to build a participatory budgeting website before the PB actually starts in Taipei it shows if you go to budget.taipei it shows a interactive picture of Taipei's annual budget and what this does is that it makes it fun to look at the Taipei City budget and then if you care about one particular part of it for example the ministry of the Bureau of Transportation well it has this amount of budget which translates to some amount of lunchboxes and you can look at the details and why it's added why it's removed and you can do a full-time search and so on and then and it's useful because not many people care about the total city budget many people only care about the one part of the budget that they care about and so when we first put it on next to each of those items in this bubble graph or industry graph there is a discussion board so that people can't talk about any kind of budget that they want and as you can see there's a commentary board here so what this does is that it allows people to talk exactly about one part of budget that they talked about and this is what we call a social object it used to just be page 200 in a 500 PDF file right 500 page PDF file but now it has its own web link that you can share to your line your facebook friends and then ask people to to come here and have a discussion on this particular round of budget now when this platform first went online people asked a lot of questions had a lot of discussion among themselves but much to their supplies three weeks after the platform opens every single question was answered by every single bureau in Taipei City and not by elected officials by career public servants so the career public servants went here and then with the blessing of their mayor answered every single question one by one and of course the department of information technology the DOIT in Taipei City did work with all the burials and instructed them how to answer to those people's questions on the internet so what they did was essentially they bypassed their directors the mayor the city council and had a direct link between the career public servants and people who have questions that they want to ask about the budget with the career public servants and it's not a general discussion it's a discussion sometimes very professionally about one particular part of the budget and so and so the people who asked questions found that the city officials the career public servants are actually very professional they were able to answer the questions not just timely but in a very sympathetic and a very helpful fashion and when people asked okay you promised to build a stadium here was seven not here and so on they actually received very considerate answers and for the career public servants it's better than answering the mailbox of the mayor not because that they have to type as the mayor and not themselves although that also is a difference is that their their responses are public so the next person who has the same question would not need to ask twice and their time is saved because they can bookmark this link and then share it whenever anybody else has the same question so also save their time but much more importantly it allows the career public servants to be seen as professionals and the people will ask questions eventually builds a good relationship with the career public servants who have participated and so far this is the main difference between the type is the installation of the visualization of the city budget versus the other six or seven different counties and cities will also install the same system but did not let their career public servants answering it so you see a very very different feel the the other cities and counties the career public servant did not think that this system has much to do with their job by in Taipei City during those three weeks and the weeks that followed people think that oh this is something that actually improves what the society thinks of us so that's my my answer um well a lot more questions um let's see right so um this question is about something about my team how do I work together and how do we discuss issues sure properly um I don't know if we have sound here but there is a movie that we made uh our teammate rather rather team if we go to PDIS that's Taiwan which is our team's website it's a government website um you can translate it to to chinese here and it talks about the work that we did for participation transparency and accountability and this here says terrific responsible but if you click chinese translation it will translate to something funny um now the team foods or something like that so uh right so and then um here we we have a movie but uh looks like I need to disable my 80 block just a second hello to that I will just show you some photos right so um our team is around uh 15 people in the administration and um we work in a very transparent fashion meaning that every single meeting that I hold every visits every interview everything um is public so all the meetings that I hold all the talks and everything is kept here and so um you can just click on any of those transcripts and see exactly what has transpired in all the meetings that I held and if you go to the accountability mark of the website it also shows that the policies that I'm involved in as QR code for example the e-sport and then it shows the policy context of the formation of the e-sport policies and the important thing here is that this is not done after the fact this website was already there during the the negotiations and um talk so whereas in the normal meeting my news you will only see Zhu Xi's high shit right you will only see the decisions from the chair which is this part here you see also but everybody's contributions before how exactly did we arrive to the um decisions and so and it also links to the next meeting and so if you click the next meeting it then goes to the following meeting and so the idea here the the work principle here is that for everybody who enters my office for meeting or anything like that I asked them to accept the fact that everything every single thing they said will be turned into a transcript like this sometimes we record it and type it afterwards sometimes we work with a very fast pipist who can type around 350 Chinese characters per minute so she types faster than I speak right so we work with the the transcripts in this way not like livestream you know we make the transcript we send usually a day or two after the meeting to everybody in the same room and then we ask them to edit collaboratively this document this has two benefits first in many meetings if you're uh itching to say something sometimes you don't hear other people's arguments that well and if you go back a day or two afterwards after having a good night's sleep sometimes when you're reviewing the transcript you see very good arguments that was made and you you kind of just skipped during the meeting and second it holds everybody accountable if one of the deputy directors or a deputy ministry event go to the meeting and promise that okay we will do this and that in in 10 days but if she or he then goes back until their staff okay we're going to deliver this and that there's sometimes differences between what they promised in the meeting and what they told the ministry to do and we never find out until the next meeting and they they produce something else entirely but now because we we can very easily forward their staff and their staff's staff the entire transcript they can check their directors their deputy ministries what and see it in context see why did she or he promise that and why is this you know promised and whether this promise is actually against physical or whether it's impossible then they will be able to find a much more useful alternative instead of just you know biting the bullet and and doing actually the wrong thing so we found out this is not just for transparency for transparency's sake this actually improves people's behavior because they will not promise something that they know the equipment deliver if they know that this transcript is going to be public and their staff is then much more empowered because they know exactly the context in which this decision is made and this is actually even much more useful in in things like eSport because it was not a purview of any single ministry the the tax deduction and everything that is part of ministry of education and alternate service is part of the ministry of culture and is again the ministry of education but it also requires help from the ministry of economy affairs and some more and of course the alternate service also requires help from the ministry of interior and then because this is about tax deduction also needs input from minister of finance so it actually involves many ministries and if they only get one fragment of their decisions their first response would be saying this is not my business and actually the eSport case was for six years was like this it's in a limbo it's in a nobody's zone all the ministry says eSport is not my business right because this really requires five or so ministries each claiming one small part of responsibility but they could not do it collaboratively if they know that afterwards anybody is free to to just throw away whatever they said in the meetings right and so people who want to take some responsibility will then end up take all the responsibility that they could not deliver and we see that a lot in the public service so the style that we work as a team is to make sure that everything is published 10 workdays after each meeting usually two weeks and within those two weeks every participant collaboratively edit not just to to soften the words and so on but to sink deeply together what their roles are in this kind of collaborative environment so my team the public digital team the PDIS team the public digital innovation space in the administration basically just provides a space for people in any ministry who are interested in this kind of collaborative policy making to join because as a minister with a portfolio uh then the additional minister I don't have additional ministry right so uh all I have as permanent staff is just two executive assistants um but because I say okay here is the space and I welcome everybody who volunteer uh to join this space they could just email me and I didn't even know them and and they said okay please just ask me to to uh work onsite like to do your office and then so so like people refer their friends and so on so I ended up detailing like 12 people and so this their their salaries and everything are still being paid by their original ministries or their original institutes but they work onsite and the best thing about this arrangement is that when we're designing new systems for their ministries they will be able to evaluate based on the perspective as a career public servants if I have hired 15 contractors they will not have between them like hundreds of years of public service expertise to evaluate whether these work will actually improve the quality of life of career public servants so this is the how the PDIS team uh is formed so uh our next question our next question is about is there any generational gap between me and my colleague in the cabinet since I'm the youngest and a lot younger than other ministers that's a fair question um so yeah there's a popular rumor it says I'm the youngest minister ever um in in this government but it is not uh when minister journey dream became uh part of the cabinet having the youth council uh back when she was first entering the cabinet many years ago she was one year younger than me so I'm not the youngest uh but but I'm the youngest in the current cabinet though um so no actually because um this is something that I observed uh when I worked with my my grandma my two grandmas um my father's mother and my mother's mother they they were uh both um very active on the internet and uh they had some issues typing on keyboards although they were very willing to learn but once ipad gets invented that they were like extremely fluent in using the the touch gestures and everything and they do have a lot of stories to share and they they have a lot of uh active footprint on the on the internet they have a lot more free time also so the the idea here it's not about age it's about willingness to to engage with people who are different than you to to be open in your mind and if there are uh some technical difficulties in for example using the mouse or using the keyboard well that is a problem of us of us designers of us information technology workers we need to design our interface so that it's more natural uh and so when I brought my grandma one of those virtual reality tourism toolkit she requires no learning because in virtual reality you just use your hands to move around or fly around or something it is something that everybody have been learning since we were little little babies right it is much easier than than typing than using a mouse all these we learned uh afterwards seven years old or something or five years old but you know to to walk to to point to things and so while we learned since we were like one year or something so there's our job as designers to make it very easy to include more people and I don't think it is a generational gap here if we make it easy enough and easy to learn enough for people to engage um right so under a so-called open government how can we pretend to classify data the confidential information national secrets of course there needs to be national secrets and confidential information uh actually we will have a law that that defines exactly how classified information should be handled and so when I know that I'm going to enter this cabinet working on the open government I made a deal with Premier Li Chen I said um you can let me work on open government I'm very happy to work on open government but because I will essentially turn everything I hear into text into data and have machines learning from the data doing analysis the national uh confidential law uh what does it mean by defines that if you have a system and you have many input to the system if any of those input is classified data the output is classified data and I can't do open government anymore because well some classified data went in so I asked the premier never let me see confidential information uh anything any document that was marked me done or something like that I don't even open the envelope um there is a consular there's attention in my office who is cleared for confidential stuff like that so he handles all the confidential document I don't even see it so this is the way that I can automate my work my everyday work because by definition anything that I can see is subject to the freedom of information law in Taiwan of course a lot of it is pre- decisional draft work that says you know only open them if you find it necessary for public interest but well because my work is open government it's always necessary for the public interest because it's my job and because you know I only have one boss and he agrees with me so I don't have to get approval um so anything that passes my way my default gets opened so this is my work principle so we protect by have a separate workflow system a air gap if you will between me and confidential data and this is how you should be all the confidential data need to be handled by explicitly marking them as confidential and released after say 10 years 20 years 30 years and so there is a temptation uh working in the government to uh horde to protect every every single thing and it just opens selectively but this doesn't work because if you only open up certain data or certain documents on public pressure like they ask you to release data and then you release it they never know whether you change the data or you selectively just publish things to to calm people down but on the other hand if you open up everything except for the classified things then people usually trust you because it's for example we released the the pricing data of the vegetables and so on starting uh a few months from now but we do it before a typhoon hits because if we start releasing the pricing of vegetables when typhoon hits everybody would say okay we do it our response to to people's accusation of vegetable warms or something like that right but if we start publishing it well before the typhoon hits people build a trust into the system we use for publication because while we do it every day it's more like we do it in response to typhoon and this is the the way that i know of to to regain public trust it's just to open and publish things by default so um another question says is open government mainly about forming policy procedure um yes i know um as we see in the conceptual diagram the policy procedure is part of it but the other important thing is to enable collaboration not between government and people but between different units in the government which is sometimes even more difficult than between government and people the many units that i uh approached said that they they're very much willing to work with people but they don't want to work with this ministry or that unit for some reason so this is very interesting because uh in the national government i don't know that much about regional government in the national government we're very good at division of labor anything that that appears on the news you can see a very very quick uh like tree walking uh schedule that just the ministry saying okay it's that ministry's business and the ministry is okay it's this furious business and then there's this unit's business and so on and so finally it finds the chanban the person responsible for for this kind of thing but we're so good at division of labor that we're we're not very good at collaboration so if something really happens that really requires input from many units and many offices and so on at least it is one of those very very important policies those vip's that we have a weight ball for that otherwise if we ask people who are involved okay so you're responsible for maybe one third of it what's so what was the other 66 percent who are the people you think that we should talk to and they're like i don't know so so this is very very interesting that we're very good at handling the division of labor but not that at collaboration so this actually for me is the first priority before we work with people we need to work with our colleagues and then of course once we are able to work with colleagues we can then work with people during the policy formation and finally maybe instead of saying okay i have an idea i ask people to to improve my idea maybe for some topics we can say i have no idea and then people tell me what to do for new experimental policies for example one of the new policies that we're working on at the moment a copy for example your health record right so these kind of personal data this kind of privacy related data should not be able to by default and we're very clear on this and then the the second thing is the drafts when the policy is still forming of course if people are asking for a live streaming of all the meetings that everybody has in the administration it will cause a lot of difficulty in everyday policy making because the current generation of live streaming puts a lot of power to the person holding the camera if you're looking into the camera your your context your number expression your hands your face and so on gets a lot more attention but people who are not in the middle of the video basically get sidelined even though you know they also have important contributions and they are much more prone to be taken out of context so which is why we we use a more fair at least i think method of textual transcript that is collaboratively edited by everybody first because we need to make a meeting minute anyway right we need to make a meeting record anyway so why not let everybody check the chair instead of just letting the chair design and second because of this delay people can think much more thoroughly of what happened if everybody has to review a three hour video of every meeting we'll spend our days reviewing our yesterday's meetings and we don't have to do anything else right then it will just everybody's time so although in theory people can ask him to be opened in practice we need to open it in a way that actually saves the time of the people producing it the people processing it and the people using it if we increase the cost too much in any of the three parties and even maybe make the other two parties life easier it will not last long because then people don't have an incentive of participating in the government so we try to design a word that it saves the time or at least keep the same time expense as before for people who originate who make the data or people who process the data and for people who use the data how would the idea of open governance solve the values conflict issue for example same-sex marriage issue listen to no mutual trust can be found within these conflicts I agree well the thing here is I think well personally I don't care about marriage but people who who care about marriage be they gay people or straight people I think they have more income between themselves than with me because I don't care about marriage and they do care and then if they care about the you know sanctity of marriage the seriousness of marriage because people get divorced a lot here in Taiwan if if people care about the marriage that means something that's one part of people and if people care about equality of marriage like that they want to enjoy some sort of you know long-term relationship that may or may not become marriage right I think these two kinds of people have a lot more in common they share essentially the same value it's just the value was implemented differently or maybe in an exclusive way so I actually agree with with President Tsai and saying that some common ground may be found maybe after talking to each other we would discover that it's just one side don't want the other side's marriage to be called marriage but some sometimes they are fine if it's called gay marriage okay maybe we call it gay marriage but the important thing is that equality that they must enjoy the more or less the same right as as each other and this is what these kind of people care about and many people in the Catholic or Christian faith didn't actually oppose to that as long as not called marriage my grandma's Catholic so in any case the fact that we were able to talk on these specific terms speak to the political idea called overlapping consensus the political idea of overlapping consensus means that if you talk about abstract things sharing economy human right then it just like like religion people will fight very bitterly because the same word means very different things to different camps but if you talk about one very very narrow practical issue for example if you are a private driver and you want to you know earn some money by driving strangers around on your way back home but you don't have a professional driver's license should you get a professional driver's license and insurance so instead of talking sharing economy we talked about one very specific policy aspect and then magically you find people who shouted at each other start having rational discussions because no matter what their values were they were able to agree on the practicalities like this is more practical than the other solutions and so on but if you expand talking too much so that it becomes abstract then of course people don't manage to agree because none of us can hold these huge issues in our mind so we just take one small part of it and start fighting over each other so it doesn't work of course if you try to phrase it as a you know value contest but if you just talk about very specific parts and aspects of the policies we usually can actually find a common understanding so well we should change the mental attitude there well I would just say open to change and that's it the idea is just listening when I listen I basically say that I'm willing to be changed in in Mandarin with a Qingming's tilting like I'm willing to be put off balance but by what I heard from you and if I put off balance I'm aware that I'm being put off balance I try to merge the ideas that I heard from you and ideas I already have and then I try to restore balance somehow and then I share with you how exactly I was called off balance and what I changed insight is taking your input into account so this kind of Qing and I think is key to open government because essentially it means trusting strangers trusting people who you have never met to never at least have some contribution to the way that you're working on and this requires of course a lot of practice but also a lot of dialogue and a lot of communication so that is the main mental attitude change the other question is like what kind of topic or issue should be discussed or not that's a fair question and I will make some examples so as part of our monthly meeting the 32 different ministries or commissions in the administration each has one or three participation officers responsible for delivering the open government plan within their own ministry and they're kind of our seats who starts collaborating in this kind of regular way and every month we meet and we report what we have done in the past months about open government and then we also talk about things that should be talked about so what kind of policies are good for open government the things are good if they are not yet analyzed into specific problems that is to say if they lack consensus if there is already very clear consensus that this thing really requires during and the only thing to fight is what kind of implementation technique is good or what color is better and that's the only thing at stake of course it's not good for open government because people would spend hours to read through everything that happened and discover that the only thing they can suggest is the color of the building of course it will feel like cheating inside and if you would not like to participate so the earlier in the policymaking cycle the better and the best one are the one that's of government the Korean public servants have no idea what to do so for these kind of cases if we use the ordinary waterfall method of policymaking we would then select just one part of the view out of many of the views essentially ignore the rest usually because the elected officials didn't have friends with these stakeholders and then design a workflow by Korean public servants and then the contractors or the Changpan design a system and then it goes right into the maintenance the legitimization pod and then maybe it gets passed as a regulation and then the other stakeholders then discover it because it's already regulation affects everybody and they were taken by surprise and sometimes go to the streets but if we become aware that there is very little consensus and then we don't try to force this through then we move the users from step six all the way to step one and then we try to involve people saying okay we really have no idea so let's let's get some ideas and then because the users manage to get some consensus we design services not systems based on this consensus and then start piloting start testing so for example in our initial meeting back in February we had some consensus camps and we used a very interesting case that the government at that point back in January kind of ran through without asking all the stakeholders some of you may already know that it is a case of the national travel card the national travel card is a credit card that all the public servants have or more or less right it enables you to to have up to 16 thousand NT dollars per year to be spent while traveling but also other things but last December the rule was changed so that one half of the 16 thousand NT dollars must now only be spent on group travel on buses or whatever right and while you can keep the other part the other half for you know solo travel but while people were very unhappy about this back when the national travel plan was announced and so back in January we had to do a U-turn that says okay okay maybe it's a bad idea now now you can just spend the other eight thousand also on solo travel sorry about that but this kind of U-turn and it's not good for the morale of the public servant and so the participation offices in our open government team did a brainstorm to analyze the problems of the national travel card the insides and the challenges and then a lot of very good points gets raised for example the name national travel card is very misleading and then in any case um five out of eight groups in the participation offices highlighted the lack of internal participation as the key reason of why the national travel card was the plan was so unpopular and some of these were the post-it notes that our participation offices uh have uh came about for the national travel card case so of course we're not just criticizing as people working on open government we always collaborate meaning okay so if we're now doing it again how can we do better and then using these idea development techniques we ended up saying okay how can we introduce a more innovative open culture and with blessing from the elected officials to help all the public servants to share a public and transparent way of discussion to have a thorough discussion and a lot of back and forth to reach consensus and to improve the quality of decision that affects all the public service service people such as the national travel card so once you phrase the the issues this way it is not about national travel card anymore it is about a a general problem that the communications within the internal government that people have and so we did a lot of idea development with drawings and everything but but then we refined these ideas into a design for a system that needs to protect people's privacy people need to be able to post pseudonymously and then it allowed people to talk about things that affect their rights and then this is the back end the front end requirements of such a system and if for example 300 people 300 public servants petition to to get something discussed it should be responded verified within three days and then gets into a feasibility evaluation and then we need to talk about how to consolidate this similar asking and then how to ensure that it gets a real discussion within a month and then how it need to involve the professionals and also the people who proposed and that people who did propose good ideas in this platforms need to be rewarded somehow so all this is done in an afternoon between the participation officers in a this agiation workshop and so it's translated into a regulation as of last month the national development council took the pictures that we generated in the brainstorming and then we took it to Crimea because I meet the Crimea and other ministries with that portfolio every Monday every Friday we will have one discussion on open government on one policy and the topics that we discuss is voted on by the participation officers in other ministries so it's not that I care about something I choose and people do a petition for example on national travel card and then the participation offices vote on the things that they think requires their most attention and then we work on the things that they voted on every Friday and then every Friday we produce that kind of design documents and I brief the premier the following Monday and then if the premier says okay go for it then it becomes something like this that gets translated into regulations and so for example but this particular case the internal participation system the national development council translated the design into a concrete case and it is in the process of being implemented we're just working on the RFPs at the moment so that in a few months there will be a system that is prototyping that we will use to allow participation not just from general public but internally from the civil service people working on their rights and their welfare so this is to answer the question this is to design a mechanism to decide the kind of topic that should be discussed so this is during our voting as you can see the union of public servants are considered the most important case where participation offices are back in our first monthly meeting and we did actually work on it so the next question there are many procedures administration now dominant do you think public servants are limited too much by too much law well this is a fair question I think it is like this if a law is predictable in the sense that you always know what is you know allowed and what is not allowed then it doesn't take that much time of you to think through it the a lot of problem that I encounter as a first-aid advisor and now as a minister is that there's many laws such as the freedom of information law that requires some kind of value judgment like but this burden of proof is not very clearly delineated it's not very clearly defined so that people have to actually work it on a case-by-case method using their best judgment now this is actually a good thing because people should use their judgment but because of the culture I would say not the law when people are trying to use their own judgment to to deal with cases that previously were unheard of in public service the first thing that they think of is that okay whether they're HR there and whether they're you know corrective units the Zheng Feng or whether they're they will get approval from their Zhu Ji from their accounting and so on because it's new it's not happened before so they will think that they need a very secure position and between all the you know checks and balances before this you know they they were even raised the idea but when when I actually talk to to the Renxin Zhu Ji and Zhenfeng people they were like well it sounds like a good idea I know nobody ever mentioned it to them though so so so this is a cultural thing people actively self-censor worrying that there might be a risk of getting you know taken out of hand getting sealed out getting you know punished for something that they did not do so this is I think more of a culture not a law thing that limits people from from proposing you know the ideas or to do cross unit communication so a lot of the work the team building that I'm doing administration is really about culture I think even within the current framework of law we can do a lot of collaboration a lot of very innovative policy making if we let it to trust each other and not just trusting the people okay so we take 10 minutes right let's do this so so this is 25 now so let's go back in 35 the TW the question here is what which website do I serve do I think in open information it's true it's two questions so one of the website that I very much frequent is join the GOV that TW and it is the kind of public participation portal of the the government at the moment if you go to join GOV TW you see that there's now the administration and then the the auditing ministry and also regional governments in a few months I'm told that the legislative year will also open its portal based on joining the GOV that TW so it's very interesting because it now has the coverage of four fifths that our constitutional system so just in the administration branch the executive branch you can see three parts the first part called purpose is the proposal from people for us to think about if you go to the proposal for example and look at the thing that has already been responded to you'll see some very good ideas here actually for example you see here that the government should cancel the national travel card and it was counter-assigned by 7,535 people and so the rule of the petition platform is that any petition topic that gets 5,000 counter signatures must be responded within 60 days by the administration so as you can see there is actually a very nuanced response so the first response saying we thank the proposer we got your counter signatures and the very next day Audrey that's me worked with a lot of different ministries to try to get a hold of who is responsible for this case and who should help and then we promise that we will contact the proposer we will collect relevant information and data and open it and then we will meet with people who hold this petition to get their concrete ideas and then within two months we'll respond with what we have done and the next says that okay we have emailed the person bringing up the petition and they have replied and their reply saying the main thing the fourth thing that he asks for is these things and so we have clarified the concrete demands but we want the other 7,000 people to know and then three days later we published the previously hidden reports of the previous yes national travel card and the internal surveys and gatherings that was formed the basis of the decision making around the national travel card it was not published to the press release back in december although i think they should but at least during the petition these documents are now sent to the 7,000 people now armed with factual information everybody have read through what what has happened before the next announcement again sent to the mailbox of 7,000 people says okay audrey is now holding a workshop on february 22 and then we ask the petitioner and at most five counter-signature people the five supporters into this face-to-face meeting so that we can collaboratively design what to do with the petition because this is the first over-government workshop people don't have a reason to trust us so at the end only two people came the the next one was better three people came and then the next one five people came so it's a improvement so two of the 7,000 petitioners did come and then we had a very long discussion and a collaborative ideation we found that the petitioner was very angry when they heard that the national travel card costs government money that is a reward and if we take it off the government will save a lot of money so we actually did a factual telling and then announced officially that actually the national travel card is for the administration to save on the on the extra time expenses because in exchange for a national travel card you now have to actually you know go out of vacation 14 days a year if you don't get anything in return but the idea is that it's a exchange it's not a reward so the exchange actually the administration saves a lot of money by initiating this exchange so at least it addressed the part that people mistake the national travel card as a reward it's not it's an unsaving device and then people started asking what are the impacts then we came up with raw figures and then people asked about the name itself which is a pretty inaccurate name and so we said okay once we have the internal joint system the internal participation system we can use the system to ask around and what kind of the better name people think should be for the national travel card and so we did not actually say yes to everything notably we did not cancel the national travel card but it is not a zero sum game it is not something that they win and we lose or something we all learned something when during this kind of evidence-based discussion people would stop saying the government spends you know bashing on national travel card nor would they say the government saves bashing on national travel card both sides were arguing from not exactly factual things last December so at least we have some coming around we know exactly what the national travel card is about what its effects are maybe it's not the best design but we can improve it or if we have to cancel it well we now know the cost of canceling it and so on so although this is so I would reiterate the petition platform is not about meeting the demand every single demand of people who muster 5000 counter signature it is for people who spend a lot of time thinking about the government should do and the government have missed we promised to spend at least equal amount of time to understand what they're talking about to come up with some reasonable explanation to come up with factual data that everybody can enjoy and even more importantly asking people who have different ideas from these petitioners and still come to something that is consensus that everybody can agree with so this is the real thing this is not a substitute for voting we don't vote in the petition part but this is a general setting it means that the government need to think about these things well maybe they have missed so this is a proposed part and then the next part is the top part it is a announcement of every single regulation 60 days before its announcement goes here so the idea very simply but is that people would not be taken by surprise every single regulation before it takes effect must wait for 60 days here for people to to put their input their questions their inquiries everything about it and it's not always so we couldn't predict which kind of acts will get hot or get people's interest but we would just publish every single thing so let me show you some examples so this is a long tail thing right the most response we get was on the gay marriage stuff and the EID stuff and the criminalization of a daughter smoking and so on but even if not that controversial for example the NDC was planning a foreign talent act to encourage more foreign professional talent to work and live in Taiwan and this keeps to today's lessons topic because this is the only one English so basically the NDC circulates and draft of their act and you do actually see a lot of foreign talents they may work as teachers as professionals as all kind of workers and you can see at the clients that everybody agrees about the second part that the relaxation of the law relating to foreign professional spouses and children it's like everybody is for it and they're generally for the other relaxations but there's many people who think the definition of what construed as special professional foreign professional is too vague to ambiguous and so the NDC therefore renewed their definitions based on the sometimes very good suggestions here as you can see people would write a lot and the Ministry of Interior would write even more so there's a lot of real discussions happening with the foreign talents and here and in the administration and again we see the same dynamic as in the Taipei city open budget case the career civil servants who participate in this discussion feel that their work is being appreciated and the foreign talents communities online and offline see this as something that they've never thought that Taiwanese government would do they would actually provide input and people would actually take their input and then make it into a policy so this this actually is a very good public relationship even between the NDC and the other participating ministries and the foreign talents of course there's news housing and there's many other things to copyright law and so on so this is the second part so the first part is people setting the agenda of government and the second part is the government asking people's ideas of future policies the third part the supervised part this is a budget visualization and again the same code as the Taipei city budget and but this is not all the ministries at the moment it is only the ministries who have participated in the important administration level policies so these are the things that we care the most about even though they only need to update their progress every quarter every three months but these actually we we keep a very close eye we will review every couple weeks on many items here so you see the open data and the digital inclusion the every coach and everything here so long-term care long-term care underground water so if you go to for example the underground water part then you can see it's the money that it has spent the ghost the KPI has fulfilled what kind of project it is the abstract of the project the key work for this season for this quarter and what kind of contracts and so on they have handed out that this is actually a six-year plan it's on the study and then you too can provide your input the part of the plan that you care about so we don't expect people to just jump in and provide us with a lot of feedback this was just online for a week now but this provides a very convenient address for each of those long-running projects so people who do care about this can just press watch or bookmark and receive all the quarterly updates of these projects and if you happen to care a lot about any of these part of things well now you have a direct line to the public servant in charge of this particular project so again this is about the ongoing projects so the ideation part the regulation announcement part and finally after regulation actually becomes a national project we have the supervision part so these covers most of the life cycle of the public policy so this is this is the website that I serve the most because most of our innovations in our dialogue is the one and so going on to that website so do I think open information is always true now but open information is there it is open meaning that you're free to circulate it that if I post something into the public I cannot take it down anymore and I promise not to sue you because it's part of the open license and the idea is not just you can read it but you can also adapt it a lot of the pretty pictures that we see during the budget visualization and so on are actually just data these are just numbers kept by the auditing committees and so on but because it's open data people don't just read it as part of a page or a print out instead people who are into programming can just take those numbers and make pretty pictures it's not just join that you read the TW anybody can take the same open data and make pretty pictures and make much more easy to understand the applications so it's not about true or false it's about the maximum utility of data and if you look at it and you see something wrong well you can talk with the person in charge of that project and asking them to correct the number whereas before it may be buried in the you know the 300 page of a 500 page PDF document and nobody will never notice it so it's just getting data much more uh flexibility uber is a co-sharing traffic concept that is actually not true uber pool has never uh run in taiwan whereas in in france and in other uh regions it is possible for you to call a uber and go onto a uber con and find somebody else is already there it's called carpooling shares in multiple people in the same car uber has never introduced carpooling in taiwan so i wouldn't say uber in taiwan a co-sharing traffic concept i would say it's a efficient kind of dispatch system so um but the question was so called open government cannot accept it how to explain well um first first of all we we did not not accept it we accepted it for a due process of discussion so this is a platform that i worked on um before joined tw this just went up first it's called v taiwan dot tw join is built by the national development council and maintained by the national development council v taiwan was not and is never maintained just by the administration it's maintained by the gov zero community by a lot of volunteers so v taiwan is collaboratively maintained by the civil society by the private sector and by the public sector and here we talk about futuristic things things that are related to digital economy and so on so um one of the historical cases that we did talk about was uber so we talked about that oh we also talked about airbnb so during the airbnb and also during the uber uh discussion what we did was we invited all the stakeholders to view the slides collaboratively prepared by um well pretty much everybody and again the reason why we talk about uber or about airbnb is because um the participants voted for it and so let me see if i can maximize this so people want to talk about uber and we did talk about uber and so we start briefing everybody uber's legality and the time around the world that was back in um august 2015 and then we show a timeline to everybody of uber taiwan's development and then we send people to this uh website called polispll.is where people can see their avatar and they'll see one yes or no question proposed by a ministry or by their friends and you can click yes or no if you click yes or no you move toward one of these groups of your twitter and your facebook friends so what this does is that it shows you the spectrum of opinions of your facebook and twitter friends and if you start venting you will walk literally here toward the people who share your opinion on uber and this is very interesting because first it shows that people are not enemies these are all your facebook friends it's just you didn't talk about uber over dinner so so these are not anonymous enemies these are just just your friends who happen to have different opinions and the second thing is that because i like a questionnaire all these yes or no questions are user contributed so if you voted for like nine times and decided that okay none of this describes my opinion you can propose your own feeling here for other people to vote about and then the system highlights the thing that has the most consensus and we invite people to analyze independently and we say we will take as agenda to negotiate with uber and taiwan taxi and and association of um taxis uh in taipei because at that time uber was only in taipei and somewhere the fuzheng um of anything if you manage to convince 80 percent of people about it so in the very beginning people split into two groups on their picture with a very wide gap between two groups group one says that uber's license need to be cancelled immediately and group two says if i see taxi wishing before me i would still call uber so as you can see these are two very different kinds of people but none of them manage of course to convince each other and if you multiply 75 by 45 percent you get into the low 20s and we need 8 percent for it to become the agenda so after a week every group come up with a more a collective more nuanced idea for example the group one came up with the idea that okay it's not about uber it's about analyzed car fleets and administrative of transport and communication need to take care of these kind of things their duty now there's more people supporting and then the group two came up with something that says okay i think one taxing need to be able to join in multiple fleets and currently the fleets are restricting the union power and uber stresses the union power and it managed to convince most people in group two then just by proposing that group two gained two percent of people because some taxidermic gets convinced but but if you multiply 56 percent by 93 percent it's still in the low 50s it's still not 80 percent so you still need to convince more people so by the end of second week or so we get some very vague ideas this this idea says okay i think it's a era of technology regulations need to change of course anyone here disagree so people generally agree that regulation do need to change and then another person said okay i think safeguarding you know the credibility the certificate is important the passengers protection's importance the drivers ride is also important but safety is the most important and everybody agrees with that even though they disagree on everything else so by the third week we have some really good ideas for example irish himself i think the government should pass a regulation that's just like uber that let the passenger and driver rate each other that let us enjoy a better quality of fleet service and you know have uber conform with this new regulation and once i've been posted even the uber drivers agrees with him and once he posted it the original this idea that says we don't negotiate with criminals that this goes down and people think okay we still need to talk with uber somehow so by the end of the three and a half week period we did get some overall consensus about fair regulation about the taxation about prominent display of this new kind of e-fleet that it should still be the purview of the ministry of transport and communication that if you go to one and go back and right here maybe you shouldn't be taxed because it's just two times a day but if you go to work and go home 50 times a day well it is actually just taxi and you should be taxed like a taxi and once all this is urban it says okay existing taxi drivers should be allowed to still pick up people on the street but also join one of those dynamic e-fleets and these points in addition with irons one formed the basis of the uh taxed diversification regulation of the do you understand the thing that the ministry of transport pushed is literally a translation of those consensus points into regulation because the ministry of transport knows that even uber drivers are good with these of course we compared with some international laws and so on and then we invited everybody like uber and all the associations into discussion and they if you look at the timeline they actually agreed to the demands of the people here we see uber's lawyer sheeshui we see the Taiwan taxi we see the association we see a lot of professors and so on so and all this is is on the record and then we can see a lot of promises that the uber company did about insurance about keeping records of their taxis and much more importantly helping the existing drivers to get professional driver's license as long as they can solve the car obtain the problem and so on so this is a very nuanced dialogue that then the ministry of transport took into the regulation and so when uber actually did a about phase a u-turn one year afterwards in the new administration this was back in the original in the previous discussion it was under minister gently inside so when uber argued that they no longer want to work with the drivers to help them to get professional driver's license we can say to uber this thing but last year you said you would so this is something that that we we repeatedly referred back when we negotiated with uber even in this administration because there was a public promise and they promised in front of thousands of people that this is not saying that this procedure is perfect in particular because uber was just operating in Taipei in the greater Taipei city and some part of Taoyuan at that moment we did not include the associations of Kaohsiung of Taijong and other cities that uber would then later go to so a lot of the taxi associations and so on in southern cities felt that they were excluded in this open government policymaking procedure before and so they they went to the streets and so on and then saying you know it's an unfair representation and so yeah we really need to to do it better next time if we're still tackling this but it was the first literally the first case that i participated using this technique using real-time transcript and everything so there's a lot of room for improvement but uber was the first case that we tried this kind of policy development so we have half an hour so i will now maybe speak faster all right the next question pertains to the apps that are frequently used can i share my most frequently used five apps about my work right so as i explained Sunstorm is the system that we use for everyday work in pdis it contains a chattering cloud storage like drawbox a task management collaborative document editing and spreadsheets and more and we have set up because this is free software and very secure at that we set up a copy ourselves inside the the administration and then provides it to all the public servants so if you happen to have a gov.tw email address you can actually go to e y that pdis that national government that's that one and then you can register and then just start using the tools and next month we will be recording a set of video courses about how to use these tools how to set it up and so on but for the time being you can go to talk that pdis is the tw which is our forum and see the handbooks that we have prepared for our participation offices so that's the second most used app that i use it's called this course it's a discussion forum so if you go to talk pdis time one you will see not only the track records and all the questions that the reporters ask me and so on but you will also see the open government frequently ask questions and our introductory handbooks for for the sandstorm environment and for pdis and it will list exactly who are pdis at the moment in the administration you're welcome to join me and it will also show if you happen to be a participation officer in the ministry it provides you with some instructions of how to become a participation officer in your unit and so yeah there's a lot of things there so take your time but but if you ever got stuck or something feel free to ask us questions and we'll try to answer very quickly on the forum so sandstorm and the the forum are the two most frequent apps that i use otherwise i'm pretty much just like everybody i use goodnotes mac and ipad to do this kind of presentation and real-time note-taking and things like that that's three the fourth is called only focus pt1 on the lower right corner it's a task management system that i use and then finally i use firefox focus which is a web browser that not only blocks all the advertisements and blocks what pretty much virus and trojan and everything but also you raise the history the the time i you know close this tab so i can share this tablet with everybody in pdis without you know leaking my browsing history and things like that so that's answer to your question um what else how do you think it was said on my customer service and all government agencies um there's a very interesting question um well first of all not all customer well not all government agencies um are customer facing uh for example juzichu has a very different customer profile than the ministry of interior health minister uh of health and welfare and things like that so i'm not sure that online customer service is always the most uh useful if your customer are not usually online but if your customers are usually online then yes it can be useful and this is actually one of the last parts of join the jv.tw that we have not yet uh redesigned it's called job show in a moment it just goes to all the ministries email boxes so whereas you can you know write to the ministry of labor of health and welfare and so on usually it just goes back to the same person answering the phone calls and uh you know the emails and online csm and whatever so if you um you know improve the system so that it makes it easier for people to to write customer service you will basically just you'll basically just make that person or that team go to uh work earlier and go home later because essentially just increase the workload so um one of the ideas that we uh we are we're entertaining is to um get all the ministries that who wants uh participation some kind of frequently asked questions so that people don't have to answer the same question uh twice and so a lot of those questions that I personally answer is the digital minister people ask if I'm afraid of ghosts that's what kind of toothbrush that I use uh what and so on but but no matter how fantastic is the question um I answer them nevertheless but I answer them only once which means if you you post another question whether I use electronic toothbrush or a regular toothbrush um that the system will will show that hey this question somebody asked before and the minister actually has ministered uh has answered this before they should have used both it's normal toothbrushes so um so it saves everybody's time because I only have to to answer it once you can share the the links of my answer and if you ask the same question or even just a very similar question the system will ask you whether you know you mean the same that has been answered before so I save time overall so um I'm trying to to see how many other ministries is interested in this kind of uh FAQ of course when people ask questions sometimes they reveal their personal details and of course we need to remove them when we publish it so it requires some workflow but more often than not somebody else will want to ask a similar question as well so it basically saves up everybody's time if we um do a engagement system a online customer service this way so as I um want to stress again if a system like this saves the time for the data producers data processors and data users it has a real chance of being adopted but if you make life easy for the users or for the processors but you increase workload of the producers or vice versa then this will get no adoption um to make a white public policy we need to have a correct database do I think our current government makes good use of data civil service collect in making policy uh this is a great question I think it's case by case if if the data is strictly vertical if the collection is for example by professionals working professional health care in the ministry of health health and welfare and then if it's shared only vertically to the analysis people in the NHS and the national health care service and for people to make like observations like epidemics and so on but actually I think they're very professional capable people they have made very good predictions and analysis of public health problems and so on if it's entirely vertical but if they somehow require input of data across different ministries across different databases across you know even across the legislation and administration or the judiciary they know I think currently there are no very good way for unrelated ministries unrelated units to suddenly start collaborating and this is partly because much of those information systems are designed for the for the general for the bosses to look at and when people think about bosses they think about vertical users not often do people procure a system for unrelated people in other ministries to look at so this is one of the reasons why I try to spread the idea of what we call a decoupled architecture in a sense that we collect the data put it into a backend database but we don't restrict the kind of uses that it could use on the front end some people want to do the website some people want to build a chat box some people want to build data analytics some people want to feed it into some other system and it's all good uses their offers class uses so we try to procure the front and the back end separately and so the national development council will working with the the join platform we have consulted people for 60 days what they want to see this kind of new procurement laws for API systems and so maybe in a few months we will publish a new guideline for people to procure in a way that allows the data to be safely and protecting policy shared between different ministries that's one of the things that I care very much about and is becoming policy I speak English very well how do I practice it well well I was saying rap if that counts and I do a lot of discussion with my friends so for between 2008 and maybe 2013 that's five years I work mostly with with Silicon Valley companies and but I physically am in Taiwan and this is because I don't like meetings at all so I usually you know go to go online and meet my colleagues through FaceTime or through Skype for an hour and I said you know it's midnight here I really need to sleep and so people tend to get very efficient if they know that that I only have one hour to talk and so they usually send me a lot of information beforehand and make the moves at that hour and then I go to sleep and then one day and by the time I wake up I usually have you know some products that's built by my staff and then I can just you know carry out their work and do some analysis and my leisure and they will not feel micromanaged by their manager because then they you know get off work and then do whatever they like and I spent the day here trying to go through their work and tell them what to do so I think the idea here is that if we only have some time together and most of the time at our own temple people generally make much better use of each other's time in the time that we collaboratively share on the other hand if people meet every day and the most efficient way is just to have me an envelope of paper and so on then people never learn to use electronic communication methods to make their message easily understood because well face to face is too convenient but it means that it's not convenient for people who are not in their room so what we are trying to do essentially is to keep a balance between face to face time and asynchronous time so that people can take care of their families and so on while still getting work done so this is how I practice it because I essentially work US jobs for many years before retirement so there's a saying that says that I'm in charge of combating the so-called fake news is it true or is it bad well I wouldn't use the word fake news the word fake news is invented to offend the journalism people it is a war between a certain president and certain crisis and it's not in Taiwan and I don't think we should get into that particular war in the US so I wouldn't use the word fake news rumors on the internet are not news many of them are not even purporting to be news they're just rumors or maybe it's just a cat picture or a people's picture with some captions or so on one one particular example is the after the Fukushima event there is a picture from the the US multiple agency I think of the Pacific Ocean and then you see from Japan a lot of colors so for example I don't have that here right now but the basic idea is that you have the the world here in Japan's here and then use you have a lot of like lines here and then a lot of distribution of lines here and so on and then slightly smaller or greener lines around here right so and then people will put a caption that says it's the radioactive sea out of the nuclear incident from Japan but it's not the picture originally is about the height of waves of tsunami of the after the the Fukushima event so the thing is that the this is not news this is just geographic data and the caption itself while it misleads people to think about it's about radiation that's not even purple to be news this is what we call in memory it's a virus of the mind if you look at it and you get impacted and you you are get affected infected you will want to share it with your friends saying oh radiation it's very like horrific or something and so it spreads among people and mutates just like any other virus and then it reaches this disinformation reaches a lot of people trying to change their affect their feelings about particular things but it's not news and it's not fake news it's just rumors that are viral and we we see a lot of these things here so no i'm not in charge of combating the so-called fake news there's a lot of rumors there's a lot of such memes in the internet it's not a government's job to you know combat it because combat is between people right one fighter fights another fighter you can't fight a virus the virus does not stand into a boxing ring and fight with you right it's not even the same category you don't negotiate with virus you don't you know talk with virus they're not human these are just fragments virus of the mind that are spreading an environment that lets them spread so just as with all kinds of virus what we really need to do is about inoculation about vaccination well and inoculation vaccination in in mimetic in means means that we talk over things we listen to each other listening and there's scientific proof for it listening to each other's ideas about uber about labor law about same-sex marriage about whatever if many people in different science listen to each other's points even if they don't agree for just three hours four hours they become immune to the virus of the mind of that kind of that topic so basically inoculate people because they have considered each other's positions and no amount of virus or propaganda or means we'll be able to affect people to to share them they will just look at this as but it's not it's a caricature it's a strong that it's not something that the others are the people even if i don't agree with use so i think the government should just encourage deliberations encourage listening and maybe provide factual data whenever the government can provide factual data but it's not about combatting the virus because they're not in the same category they're not fighters they're just non-conscious entities that's great how about people who can't use the internet how do they express their opinion in the platform as i explained for the socially disadvantaged people back in the taipei city case it is the social workers who bring the recorders to the socially disadvantaged people it is the technical assistant from the top zero movement who brought the cameras to the socially disadvantaged people it's not asking them to go to the internet services is to go to them listen to them and transcribe whatever they have said into our records so other people can make use of their input the most important thing about internet in its role of communication is that unlike radio and television internet is not just for speaking for broadcasting if we all we have is radio and television all we can make is for millions of people to listen to one or two people to speak but internet is bi-directional all the high-speed internet that we put is bi-directional which means that it's not just for watching movies it's also for broadcasting your ideas and everybody's ideas so if we deploy our technology well it becomes a technology that enables not just for one or two people to speak to million people but for one or two people to listen to millions of people and for millions people to listen to one another and so this is how we express our opinions not to ask representatives but to bring the internet to them um what else can i define open government you know i think i kind of did right open government to me at least into the oecd countries and people in the ojp in the overdone partnership it means um using digital tools to open up a collaboration inside the government to make open the policy development process and ask for participation and if we do these approaches well we achieve first a transparent um a transparent data and transparent information during policy making we get more people more interested in policy making and contribute to policy making and then we get better accountability meaning that when people ask what is being done what's next we can answer much more efficiently and truthfully and then for people to take our answers and trust these answers maybe it's good news maybe it's bad news it's not you know rumors and finally when doing these open government work we also try to include more people than before instead of just practicing and then gradually exclude people i think to me this is the most important goal the other three are just kind of part of the journey but the end goal is much more inclusivity in the government functioning so that's the definition of news it seems the idea of open government is based on the presumption that humanity can be trusted however in case of humanity cannot be trusted will the arbitrary decision trap other discussion this is a very good question um one of the philosophers that i like very much said that to um to give no trust is to get no trust right the idea is that trust is a bi-directional relationship if you start saying that humanity cannot be trusted well you don't trust strangers then if you don't trust strangers strangers have no reason to trust you and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy of course there is no trust because well you start with this this position and it's so fulfilling i would not say that you're wrong you're right but that's because you start with your destination on the other hand if we say that we trust even bad people if we trust even people with malicious intent if we trust people who don't deserve to be trusted then maybe just maybe some of them will see will start to see that it pays to actually you know contribute because destructive actions just waste their time without wasting our time because we have you know good electronic systems and before wikipedia not many people other than we programmers will think that this is a better model but after wikipedia people start to think okay maybe in some cases allow open contribution where while having very good system in hand to you know result destructive behavior actually result in something that's creative so i think this is not about blindly trusting or blindly distrusting this is about starting with the most degree of trust that you can master without harming yourself without degrading your life's quality and see what happens because after all but what was to lose the alternative is a code uncaring world um do i think our government is willing to listen to the public when making policies but i really do believe uh when when president said that our government is the most willing to listen but the most willing is not the most capable it's too very different thing um right so maybe maybe this administration is more capable at listening than the previous administrations but it's not saying much we're still very early when it comes to trusting people when it comes to actual listen to listen to many sides at once instead of just one at a time which was the previous model so i would not over promise and say we're already good at but at least we're willing to experiment and we're whether it's good or not like with the uber case it's not all good at the end but at least we documented very well and for the world actually to see and so many other countries are actually taking our experience with uber a or bnb and doing a better job than we do but starting with the process that we discussed and it's international collaboration three more minutes how do i think of my work so far i think it is meaningful i don't think it's tiring and i do i i say this because other than you know going to taijong and giving a speech usually when i work in taipei i go to work around you know eight 45 or something and i always leave work before six p.m so it because one of the public service culture is that if i don't leave the office none of the staff leaves the office for some reason i don't really know it wasn't like that in silicon valley so in any case i discovered that if i don't go to home like at five p.m on sign none of my staff will do so so i always even if i have something that i'm doing you know but i will just put it down and then go back and because i've set up the workspace in such a way that i can work from anywhere really i usually just still work on the car back home and then back home and then start working again but the thing here is that this is back to the tempo that i'm most used to which is to determine the workflow in the speed that i want to so it never gets tiring because if i get tired well i just go to sleep because it's not like that i have to work overtime and because my staff also don't work overtime well except like today where it's the way came with me and had to work overtime we don't usually work overtime so usually we have a really good morale and not tiring at all it's possible ruling party open particular information is that particular information is confidential document in purpose benefit from that yes of course but at the point here is the the ruling party is at the moment independent because if you look at the cabinet and our ministers you'll discover that 40 percent of the cabinet members are actually dependents and 30 percent dpp and 30 percent kmt or so so politics wise we have a very interesting cabinet at the moment the largest faction is the independent faction and not dpp or the kmt and including the premier and me and i think that that creates a much more collaborative um atmosphere especially in our cabinet meetings we really don't um see that it is a ruling party that tries to keep other party uh out of um the public information instead we see that the evidence or the data information we share are actually useful to to the the world in general now i can't say the same of course with the other branches of the the national government i say this just for the administration branch but well it's the branch that are working um people in taiwan tend to take off instead of sharing with others do they think open government can improve to change the situation yeah of course um so this is basically scarcity versus abundance scarcity means zero sum if i take something well the pie is smaller and you get less right it's a zero sum game but for a lot of economy and taiwan has transitioned to a knowledge economy a knowledge economy if you take something you improve it actually the pie gets larger the more you take actually the pie gets larger in knowledge economy the only scarcity is artificial scarcity that is to say if you restrict the copies and i have practiced so far uh a complete renouncement of copyright so every single work that i do all the programs that i wrote all the articles i wrote all the speech that i gave is in the public domain meaning that if you take it and use that you wrote it i will not sue you i don't really care i care about the the act of creation i care about people using the work or are benefiting from the work but i don't care about copyright about ownership because for me there is no no ownership when it comes to the knowledge economy and so yes i do think working in the collaborative way like that changes people so that they can see in many situations it is possible for all the parties to win or at least not lose of course it's not applicable if you have a very short timeframe and you have to decide in a day what to do then sometimes there will be casualties and then problems like that which is why we're trying to start a policy discussion well before the deadline two more questions what will the future public seven union to be applied to the current laws yeah that's that's a very fair question and it is actually part of my slides we kind of just ignore the slides so basically the the idea is that every other country has some sort of union rights but how it doesn't have any of it um but other than France people don't usually allow public seven go on strike so it's not exactly the same as the union and so what we have done is to start with these rights and then improve the existing associations while also not disallowing future revision of labor law to apply to the public servants and so this is one of the idea developments that our participation office is through it's like okay we have a perfect circle representing the full rights of unions but our current association rights are kind of very restrictive we can only negotiate our workspace environments and so on so we need to make compromises and we think that existing framework to extend the thing that could be collectively negotiated whereas also allowing the legislative branch to propose the labor law to to apply to public servants so administration will not actively block the legislation from introducing labor law to public service if they want to but we at least we work with the uh culture union the union of examination uh on improving the association law so people can also enjoy more um more rights so these are the consensus items that we managed to agree on so the final question it seems not many people know join the jov.tw how do we collect ideas well we we spread to stakeholders um that the idea of all these platforms is not to ask 23 million people to come and have a meaningful discussion if we had to do that it would be like holding a referendum for every policy and it's not practical using current technology of course you can try to randomly draw 100 people or 1 000 people and have some discussion but even that is not a habit here because we don't have a jury system or we don't have this kind of habit but maybe we'll introduce a jury system as part of the the reformation right so in any case before we have this kind of jury duty idea all we can do on this kind of online platform is to ask stakeholders ask people who will be affected by the policy to come and have a discussion this is much easier because if you let them know beforehand they will want to participate because they get affected but for people who are not affected in any particular case we're not asking people to just come and give share with those ideas because at the moment Taiwan doesn't have a very active jury culture so that's all my responses for tonight and thanks for spending the time with me and thank you very much