 I just have a few follow-up questions, and I can give you a quick update on the article that I'm working on. I'll record too. I know that we'll have the transcript ready, so that's such a big help, such a great resource, I think, for journalists. So the article, I think, when I first got back in touch with Zack, the original plan was that it was going to come out at the end of this month. It could be probably early to mid-April. We're going to have the photos. We're going through edits right now. So I just had a few follow-up questions. But the original thesis that I set out with when we spoke last summer was that I really wanted to take a historical perspective. And I wanted to look at the development of democracy and use that as the starting point to figure out where this trust comes from. And so far, I'm pretty happy with where the piece is. I think I was able to go into that history and bring some bits of the surface. Which I think is new, because, again, Taiwan, even when we talked last, Taiwan was already in the news a lot. And you've been covered that great Wired profile. And I've seen the story of Taiwan featured a lot since. There's actually one idea that I wanted to flesh out with you a little bit more, which is, you know, in a lot of the lectures, there's a lot of the interviews and talks that you've given. You describe very effectively these tools of Taiwan's digital democracy. And there's a link there between these digital democracy tools and I think the Sunflower movement. Where people became more aware of these tools for the first time. Like live streaming, before the Sunflower movement, not many people in Taiwan had an experience in telepresence, let alone a deliberative conversation across telepresence. So live streaming is one example. And I just wonder if, since 2014, when you started as digital minister today, were there other programs or initiatives or tools that you would point to as linkages? Sure. The ePetition platform is a really good linkage because it's literally set up in response to the Sunflower movement. The national forum on economic development and economic and trade development had a consensus item that says to kind of prevent, where they didn't say prevent, so that people can use the network, the internet to highlight the issues that they find wrong or needs change in the administration. The country need to set up a public infrastructure online for such ePetitions. So the idea is that it's a viable alternative to each and every controversial issue resulting in the occupying of the parliament. So there's an outside game. But because of this consensus on national forum, the National Development Council, which was brand new, was just set up as an institution just around that time, set up this join the GOV, the TW platform around the end of 2014. And so that's one of the things that carried over directly from 2014 to today. And today more than one quarter of citizen initiatives on that platform are from people who are not even 18 years old. So you really expanded the idea of citizenship because we call it gongmin, like a voting citizen, which is different from a guongmin, which is somewhat with the nationality of Taiwan. But the joint platform really expanded so that people under 18, people who are new immigrants, people who carry a gold card, for example, who do not have the voting rights, nevertheless can participate in national level agenda setting, much like sunflower movement, minus the physical occupant. So the petition takes a more expansive view of this constituency. So that's the gongmin versus just the gongmin, but rather everyone is gongmin now. Anyone would say internet connection, but we have universal broadband, so that's literally everyone. So that is a really good example from the government side. Like here's this new tool that our goal is to be more inclusive with. I wouldn't say it's purely gov tech because in the joint platform there is an area that shows all the one year or longer mid to long term projects, 2000 or so of all the ministries, including the budget, the visualization, a bubble graph of the kind of expenditure and quarterly or monthly reports and with this public commentary board. And that's a carbon copy of the budget that GZOV, the TW, the inaugural GovZero project of budget visualization. So the point is that in 2012, GovZero kind of forked the national budgeting office into that visualization. But in 2016, that project is no longer maintained then purely by the social sector. Of course the social sector still maintains their imagination, but what worked during 2012 to 2016, starting in 2016 is part of public infrastructure. We also maintain a copy of that with the responses from all the very public service as part of joint GOVTW. So it's like a fork that's been merged back to GovZero. You mentioned 2000, you said the number 2000, was that 2000 budget items? Yeah, 2000 mid to long term projects within the budget. Within the national budget, basically all the ministries that are listed here contribute whatever they file to the national development council. Also here, so around 2000. And you can see, for example, how the budget is being spent. The kind of individual budgets, let me just randomly click one. This is about, oh, the GIS system of administrative interior. Okay, that's a fun one. Maybe we can highlight based on how many people care about it. Long term healthcare, everybody cares about this. And so this is a really long term project because it's a 10 year project. We're now in year three of 10. And it shows quarterly what the budget has been spent upon. The highlights of that particular project, people's public commentary. And then the real time response from the competent authority in response to the people's comments and so on. And so all this was kind of initially imagined by GovZero, but it's now a permanent part of the general platform. That's completely open. When you said let's pick one that people actually care about, was that going off comments? Yeah, I'm just working based on the number of comments. Oh, interesting. So for that one, what was the number of comments? There's 40 comments, I think. And then the quarterly response, for example, pertains to, for example, in running long term healthcare partnership organizations, sometimes they first do the expense and reimbursement from the state subsidy. It takes a long while to wire in because of the paperwork required. There's no streamline and so on. And so in 2018, when someone just uploaded this feedback, this comment, they basically just said, okay, let's simplify this. So instead of waiting for 10 years or for a fiscal year in order to change it, this allows for this real time response. And the competent authority public servant doesn't have to answer for the phone causation of knowing someone else has already made the same call, right? So they can just do a public response once and rely on the search engine optimization to show their response to everybody involved. Okay. Earlier, you also mentioned the stat that a quarter of the, is it e-petitions? Yeah, for the e-petition side. So this is the budget visualization side. But the joint platform also have regulatory announcement side, like regulation.gov, right? And also an e-petition side. So it's different sections. And more than one quarter is from people in basic education. That is to say, younger than 18. Right. So they submitted these proposals. That's right. Ballpark, how many proposals are on the platform? Right. So at the moment, I don't need ballpark. I can just read it. Okay. Okay. So at the moment, currently there is 265 under the counter-signature process. Okay. And currently there's 238 that reach the 5,000 signature threshold. Okay. Right. And I think, yeah, a lot of these are actually quite impactful. For example, someone petitioned successfully to ban the plastic straws and take out drinks like the bubble tea. Yeah. And when we meet at someone, but she's just 16 years old, and we're like, why are you petitioning this? It's because of the expensive linemen. Yeah. It's a lot of plastic saved every time I walk by a bubble tea shop. That's right. That's where the crowd is. Exactly. So that's a really good example of something that I'd like to hear your perspective more on, which is since Sunflower and since there were these concerted efforts to create a digital democracy from these positions of power, are there other expressions of engagement that you've seen from the people, from the public? I think the presidential hackathon is also a really good example because the sustainable goals has now become a vocabulary across all sectors in order to not sacrificing future generations, kind of the theme of that book. Right? And so, for example, in the past year's presidential hackathon, the five winning teams all relate to climate change in some way. And there's one, for example, that builds a data collaborative by people who check the barcode in their grocery store when you scan the barcode. Usually it shows the price, right? A box of cookies or something. But if you use the app, it's called Tomei and Zuji. If you use their app to scan the same barcode, it shows not the price, but rather the environmental value. Like how much pollution, for example, this box of cookie cost. How much arable land they're destroying. So the inexpensiveness may actually be just externalizing those costs to the environment and so on. But people were not aware of that because it's not mandated in food ingredients. But by cross-referencing the ministries of economic affairs of the Environmental Protection Authority, the Council of Agriculture and so on, an entirely donation-based crowdsourcing and crowdfunding civic sector built this tool. And they won the presidential hackathon, one of the five winning teams. So they got this presidential mandate for the Ministry of Economic Affairs to publish the longitude and latitude of all the kind of penalties to the industrial plants on the arable lands and so on. So this is just one example. But this is, I think, the kind of data collaborative that we see that starts from the social sector and then gets by in from the public sector. That's really cool. That's something that I'd love to check out just individually. Okay, so moving on to a more specific question. I've read some past news reports of where you talked about certain data privacy concerns that have come from these greater enforcement, greater measures during the pandemic. There was mention of a data privacy council. And when I talked to Zach a few weeks ago, he said that it was still very much in the preliminary stages. So he said that right now, so I guess this was about a month ago, it was at the stage where a special task force had been created. It's part of the Personal Data Protection Office within the National Development Council. And the NDC does a pretty good job in making sure that the interpretations of the Personal Data Protection Act is consistent across all the ministries. But the NDC is also in charge of national development in the more commercial sense or economic sense. And so there's cause from the Civil Society for more independence in that office. So that the NDC, for example, would not directly appoint the head of that office. So it could, for example, get GDPR adequacy. Is that still on the table? I think the NDC as part of their Open Government National Action Plan commitment is committed to, within the term of the President's size term, second term to resolve the situation and get a GDPR adequacy. So you can check the National Action Plan. It's actually within the, I think, 18 or 19 commitments. I think the third or something is that commitment. So it's kind of a longer, multi-year. It's a multi-year project, mainly because the NDC itself is now also working on a transfer of some core functions to the to be set up digital ministry. And so, for example, the Open Data, or the Data GOV-TW, or actually join the GOV-TW, these may actually be one of the items that gets transferred from NDC to the MODA, to the Ministry of Digital Affairs. When the MODA is, of course, passed by the legislature into existence. And so this is, by necessity, a multi-year effort because the MODA doesn't exist yet. Okay. Okay. Thanks for that update. The last question that I have, the story is, you know, there's the broader implication for all of this, right? Which is that there is a lot of focus. COVID has caused a lot of focus on different governance models. And I think the context in which my story appears is that, unfortunately, a lot of the broader discussion has slipped into this binary between the U.S. and China. And, you know, and this, the argument that my story tries to make, and I think really what seems to have been one of your missions in the past year has been exactly. Well, I mean, publicly, you know, binary, yes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, just let's, you know, down with the binary, basically. And look at us, look at what we've been doing here. And so, to a certain extent, it's been codified as the Taiwan model, and, you know, the hashtag, Taiwan can help. And I wonder how much traction you've seen that. I mean, there's been a lot of interest, right, from around the world, I think, but beyond, beyond kind of the speaking engagements and these conversations that you're having with world health experts, global leaders, have you seen anywhere in the world? Yeah, I think Japan has adopted a lot of our ideas. Okay. I personally, along with P-Bank of Zero contributed to the Tokyo Metropolitan areas, stock COVID dashboard, and that's a code for Japan, the COVID FGM Zero project. And then the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Government just gave them a domain name. That's the official government's domain. So just like join GOVTW, join GZOVTW relationship. Yeah. And then the person, the person in charge of COVID Japan and that work, actually, I think it's recruited into this cabinet office in preparation as the deputy CIO, I think, in preparation for the upcoming digital ministry. In their case, it's digital agency. And their digital agency also, like our moda draft, they also include this clause that says they can actually recruit up to 100 people from the civil society and the civic tech into the national level governments in order to build a better people public pilot partnership and so on. So all this, I think, has been accelerated because of the ongoing conversation between the top level civic hackers and government officials, like special advisor to the cabinet and so on, and well yours truly, but also GZOVTW and other civic tech people here. So at least in Japan, there's a tangible change. Okay. Yeah. Have there been any other, and it doesn't have to, you know, in Japan that parallel is actually very striking, but I wonder if in your interactions with any other stakeholders from other parts of the world, just interactions that may have stood out to you that you feel like they're especially promising? Yeah, I talked with a few MPs and also social innovators in Canada. And it looks like they are introducing a public consultation around the infrastructure bill and about kind of redefining that infrastructure, much as what we did in 2016 where we classified, for example, the minister of coaches, like virtual photogrammetry, videogrammetry of historical buildings and heritage sites, the digital double of those cultural spaces, like the online version of a national museum or national park as infrastructure bill. And that was very difficult back then because the national budgeting office didn't recognize anything that's intangible as infrastructure. Infrastructure is something concrete, like literally made out of concrete. And something that's made out of bits, didn't qualify as infrastructure. But thanks to the Premier Li and Chen and Tai and Minister Zheng Li, Chen and, well, yours truly, we managed to classify the digital part in the infrastructure bill even on intangible things as infrastructure. Classifying it as digital public infrastructure. And now it seems like this idea has been maybe because we shared the story about the PDT, about how Dr. Li would announce message, travel to the PDT. But because the PDT is subsidized entirely by the National University, which is a state-run university. So it doesn't have to answer to, say, advertisers or shareholders or anything like that. The signal cuts through the noise. And that's what enabled Dr. Li's message to reach the CCC and then enable us to start just 24 hours afterwards health inspections coming from Wuhan to Taiwan. Now, of course, Dr. Li's message didn't reach the people in Wuhan because of their harmonization issues. But on the other hand, it probably gets copied in other social media too. But then it's lost in the noise and didn't translate. Into the kind of crowdsourcing chiangsheng that takes place in a public infrastructure digitally. So this idea, I think, has also called home. And Canada, in particular, I think, is considering this kind of infrastructure, but in the digital realm. OK, so that's the inspiration that they've taken because you also said that they're moving towards a public consultation. That's right. You know, is that another facet of... Yeah, they actually, the Canadian federal government contributed the automated translation part of POLIS, which we use now as an infrastructure. POLIS in Taiwan is now POLIS.gov.tw, which means it's a kind of permanent part of the state considering it's just a random open source project. It's saying a lot, actually. But when we run the POLIS conversations, if you are of a different language setting than the person who posed the statement, you can click automated translation and see a translation. And that function is contributed by the Canadian government because they have to be bilingual, like French English, in federal level consultations. So there's also a lot of code level collaborations. And speaking of which, just a couple of weeks ago, I personally translated this information campaign website, this info that quite often say that FR is a digital and visitation of the French government. And the way it does is that it shows, for example, the kind of statement of privacy, of usage, and of the major social media platforms, and making sure that, for example, the identification of the fake or impostery news sites or automated profiles, fake online posts and so on are highlighted and people learn about the media competence about it. And so there's a lot of tools and a lot of open terms archive that shows the terms of use and how it evolves across the time in the major social media platforms and bot detection and things like that. And you can see a gente-jong one here, right? And if you click that, you get into the gente-jong one side of it. And then it translates in power to zone full, which is a signature translation. I don't think anybody else translated this way. But this is entirely me acting as a GitHub contributor, sending a request and the digital investors team, just click much and then it's muched. So that's very much like how I contributed with the GoZero folks, the translation of this stuff, stop COVID, token metropolitan dashboard. We did that as civic tactics, not as a minister, but I think it's noticed by the city councilor and then by the mayor of Tokyo. So it looks like a diplomatic collaboration, but it's actually civic tech. Yeah, cool. Is that a relatively new thing, these digital ambassadorships? Yeah, I think it's a relatively new thing and I think it's a great idea because when we are talking to, for example, these multinational platforms, it does feel like they are co-governors. Yeah. I remember you mentioning in a past interview that you also did some translation work for the writings of Manuel Castells. That's right. And do you see some of those principles as relevant to this exercise during COVID? Yeah, definitely. One of the key insight of Manuel Castells in communication power is that power is not just about this kind of relative position within a hierarchy, within a network. It's also the power to make new networks, to join existing networks and make sure that people who are connected through these self-programmed networks can translate the insights from one network, say from the scientists and epidemiologists through the network of, say, comedians and turn them into more useful messages, memes that can improve the public life and people which voluntarily share and take the remixing to their own hands instead of waiting for the government to do kind of top-down fines if you're not wearing a mask or something, instead a cute dog that says, you know, wear a mask to protect yourself against your own unwashed hands. That travels much faster and enables the creativity of the people to contribute to something like truly pro-social, which is appealing to the self-interest of not shadowed Shishoushou, right? So instead of saying that very sternly, respect your elderly or respect frontline medical workers, which doesn't quite spread, that those messages don't go viral. But these messages that appeal to rational self-interest, like protecting your own face against your hands, that's very intuitive and people would then remix it in various different messages towards their own communities and networks and therefore enjoy this programming power together to connect the previously kind of distant communities like professional epidemiologists with their local communities. I'm trying to connect that, maybe I'm forcing this connection and that's okay too, or you know, you can talk me down from it, but I'm trying to connect what you just said and especially that as a counter-example to a very top-down structure like what you might have in China, right? And like, how is it exactly that power gets distributed in these two different models, right? It seemed like that's also what we're talking about here. Definitely. I think when we talk about the power to make new networks, implicit in that is the freedom of assembly, the freedom to associate freely to form new networks. And the harmonization impulses in the PRC basically each time a harmonization happens, it decimates the agency of each individual actor so that they couldn't form new connections between their groups and other groups and other communities, like literally cutting it down by 10%, right? So that's what decimating means. So anytime that there's a takedown, a censorship, something like that, one less possibility is, yeah, from the table of the possible solutions. And when the state keep doing that, then maybe the top level of the state didn't even know what's really happening in Wuhan. Because if there's no channels or networks or the grapevines, that could review what's actually happening. There really is literally no way for definitely one now to reach to the top of the PRC leadership. But everybody in Taiwan already saw it on the PDT, so it's very different messaging orders. Wow, right, right, okay. I really appreciate you spelling it out for me because it made a lot more sense to me that time around. That's all I have for you. I really appreciate it. I'm just curious, what are some of your main goals for this year? The National Action Plan on Open Government, which was just ratified, I think is very exciting, especially around empowering people who are not 18 years old. So we are looking to even more improve the reverse mentorship institution that we have than National User Advisor Council, and to extend it to, for example, the municipal level, the local level, and making sure that the user advisors can actually start their own, like, collaboration meetings across the sectors. So they will get even more agency as the future generations that lead the way, and we just empower them. So that really is quite exciting. And of course, there's an upcoming constitution change that aims to give the voting power to people of 18 years old, and a legal change to give the full-leg civil code adult status to 18-year-old, I think will take effect around a couple years from now. So hopefully by that time, not only is 18-years-old fully an adult, but also people who are not 18-years-old can also get a taste of what it feels like to participate actively in the democracy instead of being chosen as a way to answer your own adult. Cool. I think they already have many more of those channels than they would, for example, in the US, but that's really cool. Do you feel like a bigger proportion of your day-to-day or some of these projects you're involved in has to do with, you know, I think you've been such an effective spokesperson for what's happening here in Taiwan to the rest of the world? Yeah. Has that factored into a shifting role for you? Like a fashion model as in fashion models? Yeah, sort of. You're fashioning, you know, a lot of these new instruments and tools and ideas. Yeah. My day-to-day sleep pattern changed because I now have to wake quite early up because my first engagement is usually around 7 a.m. because that's the time that East Coast is awake, right, in both Canada and the US and South America. And I usually end my day around 7 p.m. with the European and African people. So, like, every day I travel across three or more continents. It's quite an interesting feeling. You wake up this part of the world, you know, and then move slowly, right, to cross the globe and end up in Europe. That's crazy. Wow. That's really cool. Well, I'm, you know, I'll certainly share more updates on the article and I'm really excited for you to read it and to get your feedback when it does come out. Okay, excellent. Thank you. Okay, thank you so much, guys. Cheers. Thank you.