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.
That’s right.
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.
Sure. We’re doing our part by handing out PKIs to foreigners as well. There’s [Chinese]. There’s this combo card with IC and NFC interfaces that we can currently use to file taxes and whatever.
Just last year, we started handing it out for foreign people as well. People told us that the digits don’t look the same, because the national ID here has the digital as the second letters, the letters as the second letter for foreigners. That’s going to change, too.
It’s all going to be unified with numbers. Foreign people becomes like A7, or 8, or 9, where we are like A1 or 2, or 0. I’ll be using the zero.
I think it all speaks to a much more, as you said, a more digitally aware way of the building blocks of democracy.
Wow. [laughs]
First of all, I am not a crystal ball. [laughs]
I tend to think that the future is already here, just not evenly distributed. We see a lot of potential futures. In Taiwan, what I can say for sure is that 20 years from now, the Jade Mountain will be exactly one meter higher, because it’s growing five centimeters every year. [laughs]
It’s a metaphor, too. If you’ve been to Taroko Gorge, you can see how the plate tectonics clash, the Pacific on one side, and the continent on the other side. That’s actually what shapes Taiwan. In 20 years, we’ll have as many earthquakes and typhoons as, maybe more, because of climate change.
That describes not just the meteorological, as measured by the civil IoT system, but also the social changes as well. The authoritarian past, and the democratic future is going to clash event more violently than we saw in the referendums the past month.
If we do our earthquake prevention right, if we do smart governance through accountable and transparent institutions, then everybody raises higher. As you said, in a more benefiting from the plurality — we get to curate from the best of the direct, participatory, and representative democratic thoughts.
That’s if we make the society itself resilient enough to survive these ideological clashes. That’s for Taiwan. Whatever happens to humans, the Jade Mountain will raise.
Just this space, there’s a lot of thoughts put into universal design, accessibility, and things like that.
Scalable consensus.
I have read the light paper; I know the math.
Not all of it, but an overview of the problem space.
From sensors.
As long as you go to the DSP, you can see through the sensor things platform all the existing...
We’ll have a larger grant/competition next year, anyway. Feel free to make creative use out of it.
Closed beta and stuff.
That sounds good.
For early participants, you probably have to do at least read-only source access to the people running those nodes, because otherwise there could be a bottleneck for...
The open source community, I think, appreciates a project that is not just put out as a package, but actually has some discussion and some internal conversations around. That’s actually, when I was working with Apple, I think they handled the Swift open source really well.
It’s not just a shiny new language putting out there, but actually a real community, and also seeded with good actors, so to speak, and with the full intention of getting it portable to non-macOS systems, and fully interoperable by intention on day one.
