This is not just lobbyists and interviews but also internal meetings. Anything that I am a chair that results in a decision, we also capture the entire context, except it’s 10 working days, but otherwise the same.
The greatest thing about this is that it’s quotable in a sense that it’s not just one fragment or the other after the meeting for people to interview. Rather, people who work on investigative journalism, for example, can understand the full context of the conversation, but also when and where this kind of conversation appears.
I would encourage you to maybe...our website is SayIt, S-A-Y-I-T. You can find it in sayit.pdis.nat.gov.tw, but if you just google for SayIt, and with any keyword, then you can have immediate access to the context of me talking about that particular thing.
Thank you for your contribution to the comments, because this conversation will be part of that radical transparency.
As a beginning I would like to just take, maybe, three minutes or so to briefly sketch what the digital minister’s role is about, and then we’ll just open for each of you to ask questions and until two hours has passed, if that’s OK with you.
In Taiwan, we have 32 ministries. Each one has a minister. That’s called a vertical minister. Above the 32, there are 9 horizontal ministers, also known as minister without portfolio, or MWOPs, interesting acronym, but anyway, horizontal ministers.
We are kind of pseudo-ministries, because each of us have an office, but office isn’t the same as a ministry as dictated by law. Each of the horizontal ministers can shape our office however we like.
My office is literally one person poached from each vertical ministry. Theoretically, that gives me 32 colleagues, but at the moment there’s only 22 colleagues, meaning that some ministries never send anyone to my office.
Like the Ministry of Defense, I wonder why? [laughs] The people who join my office still report to their minister, but I ask them to do two things. First, that everybody must work out loud.
Meaning that we must be always prepared to show the Wekan board, that’s our Kanban board, that each and every ministry’s delegate is working on and this is entirely public. Everybody can see who among those delegates are [laughs] online, and who are not online, and then what projects they are working on.
If you work in agile teams, this is a standard, so we have a shared communication facility. That’s the first thing. The second thing, aside from working out aloud, is that they are voluntary association members.
Meaning I don’t give them scores, I don’t rank them. I don’t determine their salary. They have to score and rank themselves. They have to be responsible of what projects to do.
When they want resources, this is just a platform to which they can ask other ministries’ delegates here in order to work out something to their mutual interest.
For example, a recent case is the Ministry of Transportation and communication, the Ministry of Economy, and, to some extent, Ministry of Culture all working on these self-driving tricycles. The Social Innovation Lab is like a sandbox where people can experiment how is it like to have your vicinity a lot of those self-driving vehicles rolling around.
They’re very slow so they won’t hurt people. They are open-source, open-code, and open-data so that everybody can tinker it.
Through a year or so, people just tinker for it to have two eyes, not one eye, to have an express number of expressions, to figure out the norm of having these self-driving tricycles integrating with the society, a process that we call co-domestication.
Rather than having the code decide the law, decides the market, decides people’s norms, we’re entirely the other way around. We ask people to figure out the norms that informs the market policies, that informs the regulations. Finally, we turn them into law. Norms-first approach is what we’re saying.
The governance, nowadays in the UN, they call it co-gov or co-governance. I think President Tsai put it best. She said, "Before when we think of democracy, we think of a position between two values."
It could be economic development on one side and environmental sustainability on the other. It could be disruptive innovations on one side and social justice on the other.
Each knot is like a vertical minister, and the rope here is the anonymous career public servants that absorb all the tension and gets none of the credit. [laughs] That is the bad old days.
As we realize that we cannot invent an agency whenever there is a trending hashtag, so people’s organization and mobilization has really changed.
For each emergent issue, there’s no way to have a emergent agency to look at it, so we should ask a different question. The old way is about asking, "Who are the representatives, and how do I make a fair arbitration between them?"
Now we ask a different set of question, ask if people have different positions, and we don’t know what to do. Despite different positions, are there common values? Given the common values that people discover, is there innovations that can deliver on those values without leaving anybody worse off?
That is the main thing about co-gov. We have lot of ways. We have sandboxes where people with a disruptive idea can ask for a year to break existing regulations, other than money-laundering and funding terrorism. Those two, we know what would happen, no need to experiment.
Everything else is fair game. [laughs] You’re given one year to show the people that your idea of a self-driving hybrid vehicle or whatever is a good idea.
After that year, it may be scaled out or scaled up. At any time, the MPs can say, "OK, we want a new law about it, and we are going to deliberate for three or four years."
Meanwhile, the experiment, including the business model, is still legal. This is limited-time monopoly in exchange of open innovation by sharing the data and all the things that we learned if it fails. If it works, of course, it become part of the regulation.
The other example is that I personally travel every other Tuesday or so to the rural places who are least likely to participate in Taipei policymaking. I go to where people are with technology. Instead of asking people to come to technology, we bring technology to the people.
The local co-ops, social entrepreneurs, charities, and activists just gather in this kind of facilitated conversation. I’m the main the facilitator. People in this kind of setting they have to speak about public benefit.
If it’s one-to-one, it’s often about private benefit. Because it’s radically transparent, people talk about things in public benefit ways.
The different municipalities, Taipei, Taichung, Kaohsiung, Taoyuan, and now Hualien and Taitung have all joined through telepresence. Whenever anybody’s talking about a local issue, all the municipalities learns about it in real time.
In Mandarin, we say 見面三分情, you get 30 percent of trust just by meeting face-to-face. Through high-bandwidth connectivity, we get maybe 20 percent of trust versus face-to-face.
A great thing is that whenever it’s cross-ministry, all the career public service don’t have to copy each other on A4 papers. They can be just sitting next to each other.
Instead of saying, "We’ll have to copy the Ministry of Interior on that," minister of interior is literally sitting next to them. They have to really brainstorm something out in order to respond to the people’s emergent real social needs.
The greatest thing about radical transparency is that they get all the credit if things get resolved. If they have names on the public transcript, when the journalist interviews me, I make sure that they are fairly represented, that I actually let the journalist know who is the actual person that came out with the social innovation so they get all the credit.
If things go wrong, if people start flipping tables -- it’s not actually very easy, because you’re across screens -- but if there are controversies, I absorb all the risk. In this kind of environment, the public service become very innovative.
We introduce such new ideas in exhibition cities like that Shalun Smart Energy Science City just outside of Hainan High-Speed Rail Station, which is also part of the Taiwan autonomous car lab.
Finally, just one last example, whenever there’s thousands of people caring very much about an emergent social issue, we use AI-powered conversation to review the fact that they actually have much more in common about this than we previously thought.
We publish all the open data, which in Taiwan means open government, but also social, private-sector data, and we allocate three or more weeks for people to reflect, to share their feelings. That’s what often went missing in previous generations of democratic social designs, is that there’s no sufficient time allocated for feelings around the same facts.
I may feel happy. She may feel angry. It’s all OK. It’s only after the feelings resonate with each other that we ask about brainstorming ideas. The best ideas are the ones that take care of most people’s feelings that we can turn into discussion.
In practice, it looks like this. You see an avatar that represents you. You see fellow citizens’ statements. You can agree or you can disagree. As you agree or disagree, your avatar moves toward the cluster of people sharing the same feeling with you.
There is no reply button, because we discovered that if there is a reply button, people with the most time wins the argument automatically, because they have more time to troll [laughs] people. If you take away the reply button, there’s no way for a troll to grow, and instead of just trolling each other, people start sharing their authentic feelings for other people to resonate.
I will end on this slide, because this is the most important slide. Every time that we run such an open conversation, people discover that what the mainstream media and the social media shows is just 5 divisive statements out of 200 that we would have thought that it is what drives us apart. Actually, most people agree with most of their neighbors on most of the issues most of the time.
That is often forgotten by the popular discourse, and each conversation then drives those rough consensuses that we agree would bind ourselves to hold as agenda, meaning that we talk face-to-face on these and only these consensus statements.
That’s how we work to regulate issues that requires a people’s common understanding of the norms, and we just trend those norms into implementable ideas. We have run this with many partnering organizations, such as Columbia University in Bowling Greens USA, Alternativet in Denmark, in the UK, in Madrid, in many other municipalities and cities.
They invariably all report the same, that people thought they were divided, but they were actually not. After each process such as this, people’s trust with each other, as well, as the public service trust to the people, increases.
That is the main thing that we’re designing toward. It is a way for the government to trust the people. People sometimes trust back. Sometimes they don’t, but people grow to trust each other more.
That concludes my seven-minute opening. Feel free to ask any questions.
I’m not really working in or for the government. I’m working with the government. I’m kind of at a Lagrange point between the movement and government.
That’s still a very good question. I actually wouldn’t consider my career particularly fast. It’s just I started early. My first startup was when I was 15 years old, in 1996. Like everybody else, it took me 20 years or something like that to reach retirement.
