 Well, I will ask you some questions today about familiar topics like digital transformation. But if that's okay with you, I was reading some of your previous interviews and I found some topics quite interesting and I wanted to ask you a bit more about those and some of your experiences. Sure, sure. Ask me anything. If I don't know, I'll just say I don't know. Also, you mentioned that you want to reuse some of those materials. It's all under CC attribution license, so as long as you, you know, give a link to the original URL somehow, it's all free for you to use. That's fantastic. Thank you very much. It's always good to ask so that you know what's being done with the data, I guess. Yes. Okay, so just to start off on familiar ground, I think intelligent automation and digital transformation are becoming increasingly more apparent on the global agenda. A lot of people are talking about it in private companies, the public sector increasingly as you know and also in the social sector. When we look at Taiwan, there seems to be quite a unique way of approaching digital transformation. We see collaboration with the social sector more. As you said as well, there's trust in the public, from the government, in the first instance to start with. And also there's a lot of knowledge when it comes to technology itself through the background that you have and some of the specialists that work with you. Can you tell me a bit more about that and why Taiwan is so unique in a way and its approach? Yeah, sure. So I don't think Taiwan is particularly unique, unique because we also learn from our international counterparts. We learn from the civic tech communities, for example, we collaborate regularly with Code for Japan, which is a GovZero-like community in Japan and also South Korea. The community here have run hackathons in Okinawa, which is the midpoint between the South Korea and Japan and Taiwanese communities being a kind of midpoint island with its own culture and civilization and that. And so I think we're part of this larger ecosystem of civic technologists. I think the unique thing, if any, in Taiwan is that we see democracy itself as a social technology that you can also tinker, that you can also innovate. And I think that's because we don't have a long tradition of democracy. We literally fought for democracy, my parents' generation, grandparents' generation fought for it, so that our generation, we are in our 30s, are the first generation that can grow up with the freedom of expression of the press and so on. So for all of us, this is all very new. And because it's very new, we learned to build democracy when there's already where I went, when there's already internet-based technologies. So we're not limited by the traditional customs or norms around physical, physics technologies, that is to say, the attenuation of sound in a large town hall limits the number of people who can speak and listen at the same time. We start off with the technology that enables millions of people to listen at one another deeply. And that, I think, formed a more participatory culture of everybody who think about how to make democracy better. Can't just contribute and make democracy better. They don't have to wait for a representative to re-present them. OK. And just to sort of set that in time, would that have been round about the 90s when the Wilderly movement happened? That's exactly right. Before which there was still martial law, right? The martial law extended all the way to the late 80s, and we did not have the first presidential election until 1996. And so there was a decade of grassroots movements, communities of practice, the social sector building the legitimacy until the presidential election, where the elections start to come by the president themselves and the premier that they appoint. But always the social sector has had higher legitimacy. And still enjoy higher legitimacy than our administration. OK, I find that quite interesting. So I'm originally from Romania. And Romania had a revolution in 1989 where it switched from a communist regime to democracy. And it's quite interesting because in Romania, the switch was quite sudden in a way, and the technologies that perhaps were in place in Taiwan and developing didn't have an incubation phase, if you will. So for me, as a Romanian national, it's quite interesting to sort of look at the lack of the incubation phase versus having the incubation phase and how that developed in the social sector. In Taiwan, there was no revolution to speak of. It's an evolution. It's a peaceful, calm revolution, if you will, that did not end in bloodshed in any kind. And this is, I think, really informed our, I call it, a transculturalism. That is to say, there's more than 20 national languages in Taiwan and no one dominates the other ones. And people kind of live in a live and let live kind of way because there was no revolutions during our democratization. Yes, I was reading about that a bit. And it seems, as you say, that there was an evolution and that the values that people had towards free speech, culture and the importance of the social sector almost organically fell into place in a way. Even though there were movements proposing changes, there was also a reception for them. There was also an open-mindedness to them. OK, so you agree? OK, OK, I've done my reading. Yeah, that's right, excellent research. And I wanted to ask you, actually, what your opinion is on the form that took as the sunflower movement happened? I found a paragraph from an interview quite interesting where you were describing that technology was actively used to create an intra-network of people being present there. And that seems as though technology had a more significant impact than before. Can you tell me a bit more about that? Definitely, definitely. But first of all, I would say that digital technology was purely a assistive role in the sunflower occupy, mostly it's social technology. That is to say, for example, the daily broadcasted readings of previous days, consensus, and political responses from all the stakeholder groups in the occupied parliament by the student leaders. That's like a ritual that they do every morning. Or the physical placement of the 20 or so NGOs around the occupied parliament, including the three neutrals, the people who are there to protect the human rights, the pro bono lawyers, and the people who are there, the pro bono medical staff to protect everybody's health, as well as the communication experts, including but not limited to the e-forum or the dub zero and so on, that are there to protect everybody's right to communication. And these are the kind of fabric that weaves a open space in which that people can freely deliberate all the different aspects of the cross-strait service-trade agreement or the CSSTA. Unlike many other occupiers, we're like a single focal point. The sunflower is very focused on the CSSTA and its social impact. So after three weeks, there was a set of very firm consensus for demand, not one less. And the head of the MP eventually agreed on those four demands so the occupied was a success. And it was a demonstration that shows people that it is possible with the recommendation of social technology facilitation and deliberation for half a million people on the street and many more online to agree in a rough consensus about a very large CSSTA agreement as scope. And so I think that's why the cabinet then decided to learn this art of facilitated listening to skill rather than seeing the protesters as purely protesters. They see it as a demo, people who demonstrate a newer way of policymaking. OK, so what I'm hearing is that there wasn't the othering that you see happening with so many other. Exactly, yeah. Excellent interpretation. Yes. Thank you. With so many other movements. Also, when you were mentioning the fact that there were 20 NGOs involved and different stakeholders, that sounds like there was quite a complex approach there. Did this evolve from the previous events? Yes, so it was informed by many other events. The wild strawberry, the wild lily, is always wild something. I wonder why it's not called wild sunflower. Maybe too many syllables. But anyway, so well, some flowers are already wild anyway. So what I'm trying to get at is that it's a network of practice communities that each of those NGOs all have, as I said, in the since the late 80s when they started building legitimacy. So each of them have their own network of people who care about such aspects. So to talk about the impact of CSSTA on cybersecurity, on human rights violations, on labor conditions, on environmental protection, on the freedom of the press, and so on. Each have its own NGO to take care of that particular aspect. And so yes, it is a larger network of communications. And for sunflower movement, it's just that it, like a rolling snowball, gets much more people who are just part-time involvement, not full-time dedicated social movement people, to get into the habit of listening to those different NGOs. But the root of the solidarity is already there. OK. When would you say that the root of solidarity became part of Taiwanese culture? Is it thousands of years old? Can you tell, can you identify something that's related to it? Yeah, sure. Well, if you want to go way back, of course, the Out of Taiwan hypothesis says that the whole Polynesian-Australian culture was from the Taiwanese indigenous people. And indeed, many of those cultures are still around. And even people who are from New Zealand, like the Mali, still visit Taiwan to celebrate their shared cultural identity. And so that part has always been part of Taiwan. And because Taiwan is layers upon layers of cultures, of waves, of waves, of immigrations, it's by necessity that people rely on social sector instead of a large federal government of sorts, because we're a bunch of islands and any nearest continent is actually quite far away with no advanced seafaring technology. And so people relied on each other much more. There's already many prototypes of co-op-like movement in Taiwan. So even after the end of the Japanese colonial rule, there's still a lot of social fabric that connects those co-op-like structures together. And although many of them did get suppressed during the Junkhead Shack Nationalist rule, it was still, I would say, that the credit union movements, the co-op movement, the other movement still have a very firm share of mind for like a better sum in the ordinary Taiwanese citizens who do not, frankly speaking, trust that much any bureaucratic structure. Okay, so there are some technology theorists that state that technology amplifies some of the social values and norms of the people creating the technology and designing that technology. Can you tell me a bit more about your thoughts on that? Sure. In Taiwan, we insist that broadband access is a human right. And behind that was the decades of policy that basically says that whenever we roll out new communication infrastructure, we need to begin in the lowest resource places. That is to say, there's a very strong, egalitarian approach when it comes to healthcare, which is single payer and universal coverage and education. These two areas Taiwanese people believe in the not only equal opportunity, but actually all the newest ideas are to be prototyped in the places that are suffering the most, empowering people closest to the pain. And this is, I think, a very long tradition, certainly before I was born, that people have already considered this way of thinking. Partly that was because the constitution of the current governments in Taiwan came from Dr. Sanya Sen, who is a student of thought leaders like Henry George, who is a social thinker that is neither left or right. The George's School believes in using the market in a pro-social manner, so that while maximizing people's individual preferences, it also enabled the social technologies to design mechanism that furthers everybody else's maximal welfare. And this mechanism design, school of thought, is written in the constitution and it specifically said that co-op structures are to be encouraged in a mechanism design. Thinking need to be applied to, for example, collective ownership of land and things like that to maximize its use by market mechanism while feedbacking the social preferences to how people allocate their thoughts and things like that, their votes and things like that. And so we introduced novel ways of decision-making almost as part of our culture when there's a new voting system like quadratic voting which is applied directly to our presidential hackathon. And you can see the same with participatory budgeting and many other people's democracy, new thoughts and new mechanisms. Okay, that's very interesting. So there are some views on technology as being let's say critical realist where technology is objective and we have our own personal experience that shapes how we see technology. And there are also some emerging trends in the West that look at post-humanist technology, if you will, where the individual is no longer the center of the discussion. And so some of the questions arising from that are over time how does technology shape the individual, if you will. So with the context you've just described, how do you think that happens? Well, soap is a technology, right? And that is what we rely on nowadays. And as I mentioned, voting is a technology while writing systems are technologies. So the human civilization has been defined by technologies and it's not a new thing. What is a new thing is that the human condition is now increasingly being shaped by those technologies that represent ourselves, that we are essentially avatars. I mean, I'm not really talking to you in the flesh, I'm talking to a two-dimensional representation of you. And this really makes it much harder for each individual to have a good kind of bargaining power or even a sense of bargaining power. This is like on the cusp of the industrialization where individual workers have no way to negotiate with the capitalist on the working conditions because individually they have much less political power and financial power and other mobilization power. It's not until the invention of cooperatives and unions do the workers now have a way, both legally and part of the social norm, to negotiate as a social sector. And so what we are now seeing very similar things happening in controllership over data, in personal data protection, in privacy, in getting accountable reading of the decision that affects us and things like that. And the more that people insist on the social sector norms, the more the technologies like us will develop in a pro-social way. And the less people are insisting on those norms and then of course the surveillance state or the surveillance capitalism will then just harvest people's data if not other parts. Okay, so there are a few elements in there and I'm trying to think of which one to start with. Yes. So for example, what comes to mind as I listened to you is the difference in between some of the approaches we've seen in Taiwan where we have trust from the government first into citizens and working from the low level first to the immediate experience we have now in parts of the West, where we have the concept of digital participation and bringing that from governments, from public sector authorities to citizens. It seems as though there is more of an evolution towards participation and the social sector as well but it can take a while to actually get there. Do you see a bridge or steps that can be taken to bridge that gap? Definitely, I mean, the rapid responses that we're now seeing because of coronavirus of the daily press briefings, that's a really good start. If you add a daily press briefing through live stream and working with the journalists with the hotline that everybody can call if they have something new idea to contribute. That's using just very ancient technology. That's just radio, television and telephone. But with that, you can build a rapid response system that makes the trust to the citizens apparent that any new idea just become a policy that gets amplified to the society. And we see many, because of coronavirus, many jurisdictions start taking this really into account and expanding their core centers as well as nationalizing some parts of the broadcasting channels for those sort of communications. And this is just a social innovation that's very old using very old technology but that demonstratively adds people's willingness to participate in the counter coronavirus ways. Of course, we see masks for all where people are shown how to reuse their t-shirts and things like that to weave their own mask and to remind themselves not to touch their face and wash their hands properly. Again, that's social technology. And so all of this, I think because of coronavirus, are seeing a renewed interest in how to get the science out, get the ideas of how to protect ourselves and also the basic epidemiology findings out in a way that's maximally funny in how we call it humor over rumor. If we can make humorous way to deliver these things and everybody can think of even more humorous ways to remind each other to keep physical distance and wash hands properly and so on. And so I think this is not just Taiwan. Everybody is now well-motivated to reduce the R-node number of the virus while increasing the R-number of the social innovations of basic transmission rate of ideas. I also found it quite interesting when you were discussing about the role of the public sector servant and some of the changes you've noticed in the policy change, allowing junior and younger public sector workers to express their ideas more freely, especially when using a pseudonym and in a sort of private forum, if you will. Well, not private, the go forum. It's recognized when the idea turns into reality. It's just they remain pseudonymous during this incubation period to absorb the risk. Oh, I see, yes. So you were saying you were demonstrating it and you would sort of take the risk as the demonstrator but they could then express the idea and then perhaps take credit later on. I know that there was the discussion that it's not something that is potentially such a problem in the West. I do find it quite rare still to see in the West public sector workers like myself that openly work in the public service but also get involved in other projects. So for example, as I'm working for the university, maybe I'm doing a teaching assistant job. I'm speaking to you and things like that but it's not, I don't see a lot of overt activity from junior public service workers. Why do you think they're such a difference? I think in older democracies and republics, the people who are interested in public service need to understand the context of the public service and they need to dedicate a lot of years to learn the proper kind of tradition in order to function well. And that's as opposed to people who are interested in design thinking in agile technologies and making a lot of novel ideas in a very rapid iteration cycle that tend to be a different sort of people majoring in different things in the universities. But in Taiwan, there's no legacy to speak of and so the same generation of people are essentially all slushies, right? We need to figure out how democracy works while we're also figuring out how to make personal computers work or how the web works or how social media works. And so it tend to be the same bunch of people. And in 2014, the sunflower movement also showed that if you major in the humanities, if you are a social worker, basically all works a lot of life can offer their personal experiences and that's very meaningful to add to the quality of the deliberation. And then it attracts people who are even of even softer skills to join the public service. So like in 2013, a year before sunflower movement, if you ask a random person majoring in social work or majoring in other people care skills, like what are your prospects of your participating public policymaking? They will also tell you like it's not like business, but after 2014 became very cool to share what they have to say. And I think the political climate really changed because of the Occupy movement. Okay, and you also said very cool. So I'm changing the direction of the discussion a little bit. Sometimes when events happen and when cultures change, we start to see changes in various places in that society. We have the zeitgeist, if you will, of what's happening there. And sometimes that manifests itself in art and in other media. In preparing for this conversation, I discussed with someone close to me actually, and we thought that perhaps when something becomes profound enough and important enough to a person, that person is able to express it creatively and in an art form like you do with your manifesto, for example. Do you see versions of these changes in other places in society, such as in art or spirituality or other media? Definitely, definitely. I'll share with you something that just went online yesterday. It's a hip hop group called, so here, where they just took one of my interviews with Japanese media and remixed it as what they call the civil rap science. So you can pursue this later, but basically, it's just taking the words that I've been sharing with you, some of the words that I've also shared with other press. And so this is their lyrics translated to English and they basically reuse parts of my conversation with the journalists, like location independence, like social sector, the civic sector. We should own the data, building data collation and data collaboratives. And Henry George, there's Republic of Citizens and we're not transforming into digital. We're amplifying the analog process so it reaches more people. And these are some of the core ideas and they just wrote a rap, a hip hop to it and with experimental visuals using a, I think, machine learning to generate meaningful patterns based on those words and so on. And it was a hit, I think, a lot of people joined in the premiere, including me. And so it is really helping, I guess, the side guys to just experiment of how the traditional art and traditional art forms can help inform the social innovation processes and even the thing that I wear, as you can see with my Facebook avatar photo, is actually from the National Palace Museum, one of the most ancient Song Dynasty paintings. And that was then given new meanings and new forms as a sign for social innovation. This is my thank you note for Team Taiwan because everybody through a online data collaborative has dedicated a lot of medical masks to the international people in need and people can see in real time after every day who are the people who dedicated their uncollected facial mask quota into the world. And because we publish it as open data, so you can then see it's being amplified in other even more meaningful art forms like this is from a professional designer, Aaron Ye, that says, who can help? And then Taiwan, like walking out of a door providing safety and solidarity and that combines our previous Vice President and generous crash course on coronavirus on the timelines on the specific technologies that we're helping. And then you can see this humanitarian assistance which is reusing the data. And this is not government work. This is entirely crowdfunded by a bunch of artists and YouTubers and things like that. So I think definitely this is getting into a popular culture and it's very hip to contributing whichever art form you can to the public welfare as you see here. I'm just checking. Was it only 40 minutes that we have? So do we have five minutes left? Something like that, but because we started late, so if you don't mind me eating at the same time, we have maybe 10 minutes. Okay, I don't mind that at all. I had a chicken and egg question, although we've kind of approached it, but more for the enjoyment of the question itself. Is technology disruptive or are people disruptive? Definitely, I think it's people who disrupt. But people can use technology to be more disruptive. Technology is an amplifier. If you choose to disrupt, the technology can make you more disruptive or if you choose to create, to nurture, then the technology can also make it more nurturing. And so there is no technology that are neutral. You tend to gravitate to a technology that agree with your philosophy and this is the same with the society, with the social norms. Okay, and something that I noticed in these conversations is that we don't really hear so much about bias or bias reports when we get to the technology that's been used in the social sector. Can you tell me why that is? Yes, for example, the mass creationing map, one of the most celebrated piece of civic technology during the Taiwan response to the pandemic is a good example because it starts quite biased. The choose choice of map as a visualization to show you which pharmacy near you still have the mask. And once you get there, you purchase the mask in mind every two weeks, if you're an adult, 10, if you're a child and you can see it decrease in real time so that people hold each other accountable. This is obviously biased because people who don't have sight, who people with blindness cannot make use of this map that well. And the reason why the bias is not so much discussed is because this is open innovation. Anyone can take this and build a chatbot. And so people did that, actually on the very first day, noticing that people with blindness cannot feel the mask map. They just build a chatbot using the line system. Later on, people in Trent Micro, one of the leading antivirus company would contribute the voice assistant plugin and eventually Apple's theory team joined in. And so if you ask theory, where are the masks? They will just refer you to these voice enabled parts of the more than 100 tools. So if you begin with the idea of open innovation and the first movers do not preclude further possibilities from happening, then you don't need to worry that much about bias because people who are suffering from a disadvantage viewpoint can always find people who sympathize with them and then complete their piece of the puzzle without taking down anything before them. But if you do not have an open innovation, if you rely on traditional procurement rules, then of course you have to be very wary of bias because you cannot correct that course until one year later in the procurement cycle. Okay, yes. And the procurement cycle is always more complex and requires a slower moving ecosystem than perhaps collaboration. So innovation is social sector defining the spec and we in the public sector deliver our support. So there's a reverse procurement and it doesn't suffer from the same problem as the traditional way of PPP. Okay, and just finally, there was a question at some point about how you see things changing in the future. And one part of the answer you gave was related to how psychological proximity would be enhanced by the technologies we're using at the moment. Can you tell me a bit more about that in the context we've been discussing? Well, this is evident, right? If you are also, you know, having food as I'm having food now with more proximity than compared to if we meet face to face but each have to wear a mask and therefore cannot read each other's expressions. Here you go. So what we're trying to say is that the coronavirus not only let us see the possibility of a more environmental friendly lifestyle as everybody has been pointing out nowadays but also shows how social solidarity can be built by people in very different time zones with very different time life experiences. But we still enjoy, you know, warm water, I assume, or cold water and good food and also music like the rap I just shared you and also just the care that we put into the global health community. And those solidarity are from what we traditionally call a swift trust, right? We just trust each other to care about the same things and so we hop on Skype and have an interview and we agree to even record it and publish to YouTube or publish to say it as a transcript. And all this shows that we care about other people. We care not only about our own selfish interests but actually about the future generations including anyone who happened to read this transcript. And so this basically is a more sustainable way of looking at personal relationship with we join mostly communities of practice instead of communities of physical proximity then we bring the better part of ourselves out in more of our day-to-day communications. And I make an example of working in a public park, right? So if you see out of the window, you see those people playing basketball, holding press conferences around protecting birds while erecting the wind power plants, offshore wind power panels and things like that. So I feel people care about the society environment much more if I work in the open rather than if I work in isolated cubicles in a ministry or office. Okay. I think that pretty much answers all my questions and hopefully gives you a couple more minutes of eating without interruption as well. That's great, that's great. So would you prefer a transcript or a video published? I would be fine with both. To be honest, I will leave that decision. I'll just publish the video to YouTube and YouTube will make a caption for us. And if you see something wrong with the caption you can always contribute as a YouTube community member. Okay, certainly. Let's do that. Okay, cheers. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Bye-bye.