The original assembly, the "core team" as we like to say, these three are, say, co-founder of PDIS, but very shortly, like, within a week or so, we have 怡君 from NDC, the National Development Council, which is very important...
Yes.
The POs haven’t even started. I’m talking about at the very beginning of my work in the office, so, like, October 2016.
Right. These are all before POs. We have 怡君 from NDC, we have 葉寧 from NCC, the National Communication Commission, who is also one of the primary authors of the Digital Communication Bill, and we have 貢丸, from, now, the Minister of Culture.
They joined pretty much on the first week. It is interesting, because these three people were the original people who did the vTaiwan platform and the JOIN platform under Minister Jaclyn Tsai. I knew them already as an understudy minister, and so even though they are in NCC and NDC and MoC, to some degree, they just joined us within a week.
Then I went to the Institute of Information Industry, the III, which is like 18F, actually, but it was established from many decades ago, like, more than 30 years ago. The III has supported the public workforce by employing people whose pay grade is well above career public servants. They are a NPO, but they have a very strong government backing.
I asked each part of the III -- they have six different departments responsible for all the different parts of the technology -- and I asked that one staff, each, join my office. Suddenly, I have six more people.
I then asked the general secretary for whatever case that I work on, I need to have an onsite customer.
The very first cases we deal with are related to finance and agriculture. There’s a dashboard for the price of vegetables and fruits later on, because of typhoon, and the premier wants a dashboard of all the factors of prices.
Then we have the Council of Agriculture and we have the Ministry of Finance. It just so happens that, from the g0v movement, there’s two public servants, one in each, that really want to join my team, and so they volunteered. Again, all this happened within the first month.
After that, we went to PTT, which is like Reddit -- this wonderful bulletin board system -- and say that we’re forming a participation network team. We asked any netizens who are also public servants to volunteer to become participation officers. The POs are the network then that we asked the participation, literally from the Internet, so they’re also netizens. This is the PO Network.
Meanwhile, there’s many other people joining...
They represented their ministry, so they reported directly to the CIO. We don’t put a restriction of how many POs there is in a ministry. For example, the Ministry of Transportation and Communication, they have two POs at the very beginning, one for the PTT, who is younger, and one is a much more senior executive.
Let me draw a very quick, not entirely correct, organizational chart. Our administration is called the Executive Yuan, or EY.
-ish, yeah.
It’s quite different, you see. We have a generally elected President, but she doesn’t head the Executive Yuan directly. She heads the Presidential Office, but she appoints our Premier. The Premier holds the executive power but may be replaced any time by the President.
This is very different, which is why I have to draw this chart. The Premier is assisted by our Deputy Premier, who may be delegated Premier power for pretty much anything. That’s the team.
However, the Executive Yuan itself is technically managed by the general secretary. Above the general secretary, there is a team of pseudo-deputy-premiers that are like deputy premier, but only for very specific items. If the premier delegates parts of his power or her power to a minister without portfolio, then we may act in the capacity of premier in those particular parts.
However, we are not to make any decisions without explicit authorization from the premier and an explicit confirmation from the general secretary. This is our reporting structure. This is the minister without portfolios.
Again, just to hyper-summarize a little bit, the Executive Yuan technically exists between the ministries. The ministries are headed by Ministers, of course, with portfolio. The cabinet, the ministers, are nominated by the Premier, but ultimately appointed by the President, just as we are.
This is constitutionally very interesting, because the President get to, essentially, formulate the cabinet, in conjunction or in collaboration with the Premier. The Ministers don’t actually report to anyone else but the President and the Premier.
We have 31 ministries, soon 32. The ministers without portfolio used to be 80 percent senior ministers. They were ministers, and then they ascended to the Executive Yuan and still coordinated.
Between many ministers, the ministers without portfolio can have a profile that spans any number of ministries, like three ministries, five ministries, seven ministries, so that they can act as a bridge between the ministers and form a virtual team around particular areas that are cross-ministry, but it’s always very focused.
For example, it’s a tradition that we have a legal minister without portfolio who oversees not just the legal ratification process, but also the enforcement process and the other processes related to law, which means that they will have to talk to the ministers of Justice, of Interior, you name it.
Yes. However, at the moment, there’s six such minister without portfolio who has specific mandates or specific realms that corresponds to ministries.
There are, at the moment, three ministers without portfolio that are cross-cutting, in the sense that we don’t have any particular ministry to oversee.
There’s me, Audrey. I’m the digital minister, but also in charge of social innovation, youth empowerment, and social innovation and open government. That’s three mandates -- the social innovation, open government, and youth empowerment. As you can see, all ministries are somehow related to those three things, and so I don’t have a specific realm.
There’s also Minister without Portfolio Deng, who used to be the minister of economic affairs. He is responsible for trade diplomacy, all the trade service pacts, the Southbound Policy, and the new US/China trade situation. It’s all his mandate. Again, this cross-cuts into pretty much all the ministries.
We also have, and this is a new invention, Minister without Portfolio Hsu Kuo-yung, who is also the spokesperson of the Executive Yuan. This is a new invention. The spokesperson, generally speaking, is reporting to the general secretary, and he speaks on behalf of the administration, but it’s as purely communication officer staff.
However, because he is also minister without portfolio, when he goes to, for example, regional touring-around meetings to explain the policies, he has now the power to pretty much call any ministry and any agency to go along with him. So this role is a superpowered spokesperson.
Those are the three cross-cutting ones, and here are the six more traditional ones.
None of those people in EY are from the Parliament. It is not like in some countries, where the ministers are also MPs. None of us has a constituency.
That’s exactly right, which is why we call premier "premier." To even more complicate things, it is a custom for the President to be also the head of the ruling party. That’s been true for quite some time now. President Tsai Ing-wen is also the head of the Democratic Progressive Party.
Not a requirement. The previous president, Ma Ying-jeou, was also head of the Nationalist, the Kuomintang Party.
That’s right, and that’s very important. At the end of the Ma Ying-jeou presidency, the premier was independent, Simon Chang. At the beginning of Tsai’s presidency, for a year or so, the premier was also independent, Premier Lin Chuan.
At the moment, in the cabinet, ever since the beginning of President Tsai Ing-wen’s original cabinet, there’s more independent ministers, parts of that cabinet, than members of any party. The ratio is around 40 percent independent, 30 percent DPP, and 20-something percent KMT.
It’s a very balanced cabinet...
Please do.
You can share this link. What I’m saying is that the Pol.is system doesn’t have a component that really determine how wise is any statement. However, it does list the statements that achieve broad consensus not just in the final report, but throughout the game.
The whole idea is, of course, we almost always see those general, general consensus items, but as time goes by, it will be repetitive if people see a majority opinion that is not exactly surprising. It very gradually goes into more wise suggestions if you let the game play long enough.
There’s this brilliant link that Colin just pasted called "Testing Tech for Consensus in a Purple Town" that goes into the play-by-play.
That’s right, yes.
OK, cheers.
Just logistics, for the day that we’re supposed to meet face to face, I have selected a place. It’s TECO, Seattle. TECO is a consulate setting, and the meeting room should be large enough. We have booked half past 10:00, all the way to 7:00 PM. You, Tom, have a preference of very long meetings, so we’ve maximized the meeting time, but there is no obligation for you to stay there the whole way.
No, I literally delayed my flight because of this. I go back to Taiwan one day later, so there’s no meeting scheduled for that day.
The structure would be, in the half past 10:00 to noon -- because we also have deputy minister of science and technology, as well as other people from Taiwan delegate -- we start with a brief overview of the past, the current applications of Pol.is, especially the ones that are just recently being summarized, such as the ones Colin surfaced here.
There’s lots of English material that wasn’t produced, because the crowd just wasn’t large enough for this kind of material to surface. I think it would be great to go over those materials with the Taiwan delegate, as well, in a very large show-and-tell, question-and-answer format.
Starting from lunch, we delve into much deeper topics of governance in the future. If you’re OK with that, you’re, of course, welcome to join at any particular point.
It’s a draft that I came up 15 minutes ago.
