Very much so. There’s I think three indigenous people in the YAG.
Yeah. They’re directly headed by the premier, @eballgogogo.
Very much so.
Yah. [laughs]
Awesome.
Yeah, within walking distance.
Yeah, every Wednesday, I’m here. Feel free to drop by.
Cheers.
Thank you.
So we’re on the record according to the radical transparency protocol.
Not really live... You get to edit it.
Awesome. Where are you based at the moment? Do you have a office here? Oh, do?
You’re a neighbor with a lot, actually, social innovators, and the Gogoro Charging Station. [laughter]
That’s exactly what I mean.
Cool.
That’s right.
Sure.
Is it public? Is there a...
On-chain randomness.
Open source is a national priority. We directly fund, for example, the Taiwan Open Source Software Collaborative thing, twoss.io which mostly showcases two existing ecosystem, why it’s a good idea to have open source contributors, what kind of open source solutions have worked.
Whereas before, only proprietary software has occupied those positions, and how those shiny new technologies, because of accountability requirements, watching governments and so on, almost have to be open source.
That concept has to be explained over and again to existing players, and so on. It is mostly an industry awareness project. You can find the relevant details at twoss.io. The other thing that we focus on is in education.
We make sure that in the basic education -- that’s to say K to 12 -- when the students are exposed to digital technologies for the first time, they own it in a kind of personal computing kind of way. That means that the schools are highly encouraged to use open source solutions.
If the students, after graduation, choose to use proprietary software, that’s their choice, but we’re not going to create vendor lock-in as part of basic education. That covers with the broadband as human right and the national computation platform making.
It’s very easy for the students to experiment on GPU and related technologies. It means that we think it will be a democratizing force, instead of leaving parts of the population behind. That’s the basic education. The new curriculum, embedding these values will be rolling out next August. It’s called [non-English speech], or the 108 curriculum.
You can find all those details, including how we’re moving from a skill set-based education to a character-based education. Because these are being ultimately the way, but these are core to cure humanity.
If we focus on sustainability and things like that, are all part of the new curriculum. You can find that in the K to 12 new curriculum website, at, I think it’s NAER, the website. That’s open source, also plays a large part.
Finally, and more personally, interested in getting the procurement process to be open by default. It is not just open source, but actually the publication of the procurement data, and making sure that the open API, which is a Linux Foundation standard, is embedded to the same degree as the accessibility standards.
So that, for example, now when their government procures a website, it needs to be available, not just to sighted people, but also for people with blindness. Then we say, in the same vein, machines are kind of blind people, too.
If you don’t make it accessible to machines through APIs and make it human only, then the vendor could be disqualified for being unprofessional, or for charging extra to do an API. Basically, API-first procurement through government digital service guidelines.
That’s something I think, longer term, will have an equally if not more impact than open source procurement. If you buy open source, but then it depends on a huge proprietary database, that open source is not very useful.
On the other hand, if you build a large proprietary interface, but then mandate that it has to talk through open APIs, then it makes it very easy for MSMEs, for medium and small businesses, to build around the public API, even though the core may be proprietary. That’s the overview.
We’re using distributed ledgers already on these, but mostly for accountability, for cheap. It’s an easy way to build an append-only audit log, for example the AirBox project.
Which, of course, when integrated with the government data in CI.taiwan.gov.tw, people here worry about the government mutating their data. People in the government worry about people confusing these data sources with more official data sources. It’s a large debate in Taiwan.
Using DLT, people can make sure that nobody goes back to time to modify those data. That makes it easy for people to trust each other. That’s especially true because the computation center is in the National Center for High-Speed Computation, the NCHC.
We have a collective intelligence, ci.taiwan, which will be the TW website that basically shows how we aggregate all the meteorological data, all the air quality, water quality, the disaster recovery. There’s an English version, too. Recently, we just held a competition on how to best make use of these aggregated data.
DLT plays a crucial role, because people have to trust that even with the huge number of GPUs that the NCHC has, it cannot disrupt the validity of the public chain. I think that is crucial. One of the winning teams actually, in this competition, I think makes a very good use of AirBox data.
It’s basically looking at PTT, which is like Reddit. It is a local bulletin board. Whenever people start talking about air quality, it may be old data. It may be a rumor, it may be great news, or whatever. People gather around and talk about it.
They wrote essentially a chat bot, a bot user that just automatically puts in the latest measurement, with beautiful visualization, and phrased in a way that’s not government speak, but actually Chinese speak or netizen speak, and engage.
Of course, everybody knows that it’s a bot, but they can participate in the discussion to steer the discussion into a more evidence-based direction. It’s a really good use, and if people question about the bot’s authenticity, accountability, methodology, then the creators can say it’s all open source.
You can check the evidence trail, and the data you use is also on the DLT, if you really want to check that, and so on. It’s a cheap way to get people to trust each other more. We have many uses for along that lane, but not as cryptocurrency.
I’m a junior high school dropout.
I am that kind of minister, too.
Two years ago, I became the Digital Minister. My first visitor outside of the administration subject to this radical transparency rule is Vitalik.
I really enjoyed the talk. It’s all on YouTube, anyway. We talked, especially around openness. At that point, everybody understand that the broad spectrum of Ethereum is one, [laughs] and how to make governance work.
We talked about liquid democracy. We talked about all sort of different governance possibilities. Of course, with some imminent milestones, it’s easier. People start getting their act together once climate change become very serious.
Right. That’s like imminent existential topic triggers a governance change. That’s essentially what Vitalik and I agreed on two years ago. I saw that you’re also working on governance through your Gnome Validator node system.
That’s good.
It does.
