The thing it’s not about undervaluing or overvaluing, I think it’s about it’s as important to have young, fresh blood as you said, working on horizontal kind of landscape and exercise scanning new horizons as the senior people taking the responsibility to implement vertically the support structures needed.
When I was in Japan, I was in Osaka, not too long ago, their journalists asked me what do I feel when the popular and of social media in Japan compare me to their very senior IT minister. I’m like it’s not a fair comparison, because Taiwan’s science and technology minister, and Board of Science and Technology, are all headed by people who are older than my father, they’re my father’s age or older.
We enjoy very good cross-generational solidarity, because we realize that I’m really good at horizontal power, but they’re really good at vertical power. Without a combination of those two, no work actually gets done.
To scale out, and up, and deeply, you require this kind of cross-generational solidarity and also the work of the public, career public service as kind of the glue in it. I think this structure is what we’re working on, it’s not about undervaluing one to overvalue the other, it’s about finding our common values and promote this kind of cross-generational structures.
It’s voluntary. If a department don’t send people to my office, it’s their loss. [laughs] Basically, I’m only working with the part of the government that are willing to engage people directly.
Because it’s kind of my working condition, that’s why I call myself a Lagrange point, between movement and government, there really is no resistance about that. Conversely, I don’t know anything about ministries of defense. I think it’s only fair.
It means that there are still parts of the governance issue that not everything is collaboratively governed at the moment. On the other hand, far more things could be collaborative government while they’re currently not.
There’s plenty of lower hanging fruits that are not picked yet, is my main point. I wouldn’t say that we’ll just drastically change everything, I would just say that we change everything that is ripe for change.
The smaller the jurisdiction, like if you’re a township, if you’re a town chief, there really is no risk of designing for the wrong thing, because you know all your stakeholders kind of face to face. If you get anything wrong, they’ll tell you in town halls.
In smaller jurisdictions, I wouldn’t say there’s much of a risk, it’s more about how to make the most of the more limited resources of the jurisdiction. Anything that’s above say a million people, that became very difficult because then numbers law says that we can’t really listen to one another without at least two levels of intermediaries. Each one have the principal agent dilemma that they may not represent well.
That become, then, a public administration theoretical problem, that it’s very easy for people to only setting agendas that are around the people they have the most connection with, but it’s impossible even mathematically for them to connect well to the actual constituents.
To counter that, of course there’s two ways. One is as we did in pol.is in vTaiwan, and now in the joint platform, to make sure people concentrate on issues or budget, but not people. Instead of elections, participatory budgeting, petition, and so on. Focus on one specific issue at a time.
There is actually a lot of good ways for a million people or so to come to common understanding. That’s one solution. The other solution, of course, is just to devolve, I think devolution, to just give more power.
Like in regional revitalization plan, 10 percent of all top-down regional revitalization budget is determined by township level. If they can get a modest stakeholder gathering, they can actually just require budget from the national government, no strings attached.
This kind of participatory budgeting from the township level is another structural way to solve this issue, because they probably know what they’re talking about. I think these two are approximations. They’re definitely not perfect, but if they come together, they can solve maybe 70 percent or so of governance issues that we encounter day to day.
Getting it right means two things. First, that there will be less reliance on bureaucracy. It’s great even for the bureaucrats, because not bureaucrats enjoy doing routine work. They also enjoy doing value judgment work.
A good judge makes excellent arguments if you use their time only on mechanized drunk driving, like any other person would do the same judgment, you’re basically squandering the judges time. The same goes for any regulator.
If the regulator spends time mostly doing machine-automatable work, in computer science it’s called trivial, it doesn’t mean it’s unimportant, it means its structure is simple. It’s simple-structured work I think are prime candidates for this kind of trust first relationship to then take away from the regulator’s burden.
The regulator can then become more like facilitators to those emerging issues, and spend far more time doing quality work on thinking creatively to merge different values together and create new values for society.
Essentially doing creative public administration work. That’s the first benefit, is that it frees up time for doing more creative work. The second thing, as I said, is that it lowers the risk for everybody involved.
It’s like just mechanism is not right, instead of two person pulling a rope to know which part of the rope that they want, one can flip a coin and you divide a cake, the other one choose the cake, each one thinking that they got a better deal.
Simple mechanism like this can make everybody feel that they have much less risk, and so everybody’s more or less a winner, or at least can live with it more at the end of the day.
You mean Taiwan, or in general?
I think the Taiwan public service is great at being nimble within their bylaw mandates. Basically, Taiwan has long used the KPI management in a way that only care about the endpoint.
The premier, for example, set the endpoint, but there is plenty of creativity within each agency and so on to deliver it however they want. That’s definitely a shiny example. I saw many very creative people in the public service. That’s definitely a good thing.
The not-so-good thing, again, I think mostly is about public service anonymity. Before last year, there wasn’t even legal for a public servant to work on the side for a social innovation organization internationally aligned with the same sustainable goal as their day job.
That is something that is very common in the Commonwealth. I have many friends, that just goes from the UK, to Canada, to New Zealand, and so on, and just sharing their digital transformation and skill sets as they go, and as contractors and so on.
There really is no such flexibility in Taiwan, maybe because we’re not part of Commonwealth. In any case, that wasn’t even designed in. Last year we got the civil service ministry to do a new interpretation that now allows this. I’m now also on the board of radical exchange of digital future society, thanks to that new ruling.
It’s not just me. Any public servant can now do that. The culture of doing a side job that enable you to connect more with the social sector, that then empower your main day job work by bringing new fresh perspective, that needs time to grow. That culture is not yet the norm in Taiwan.
10 years. [laughs] It’s just like designing a K-12 curriculum. You have to wait for 12 years, for that to take effect. It’s like art. There’s no speeding up.
My experience in Taiwan, 30 years ago, Taiwan was still under semi dictatorship. The Martial Law was still lifted, being lifted, and so on. We went through this whole decade of gradually having more freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, and things like that.
A lot of people, especially senior people, still have this tendency of trusting the authority to make all the, not just decisions, but also agenda setting and problem definition.
It is the norm around our part of the world in the East Asian context. People care a lot more about social harmony than individualized expression. Taiwan is somewhat weird in the sense that we keep this common understanding culture, but still managed to legalize marriage equality and so on.
That’s only by figuring out a way together that legalized the bylaws but not the in-laws. We really have to walk a very fine balance between the different generational expectations, even more so for other jurisdictions around us.
My main observation is the public service there, even when they want to innovate, they are burdened by the social expectations for them to act essentially as arbiters and not as facilitators. That is an extra burden on them that is very difficult to shake off. That’s my observation. That’s the drawback part.
The good part, of course, is now public service nowadays really understood that there are things, for example, truly cross-border issues like disinformation, social media abuse, but also public health issues, and also, of course, climate.
Those are things that the governments really cannot take a local arbiter’s role any more. They have to at least give in somewhat to collaborative governance. Maybe the best thing is these global problems, because without those, it’s almost impossible to install a collaborative governance culture into highly authoritarian societies.
Now some part of them at least have to start shifting their culture this way. That may be a silver lining. I’m not saying climate change is a good thing. I’m saying it’s having good effect on many governance systems.
I think there’s plenty of public servants that are system-focused. When it’s actually kind of a criteria if you want to get into senior leadership, you have to be a structural systems thinker, because in a senior leadership position all you deal with day to day are wicked problems. If you’re not a systems thinker you don’t survive for very long, so that’s the thing.
I’m talking about liberal democracies, of course. [laughs] In any case, what I’m getting at is I think it’s not a lack of systems thinking, I think it’s the lack of time for the outside, for the social sector, and small, medium MSMEs.
Everybody but the largest lobbyists and journalists to have an access of the context, the why of policymaking. I think that’s the main thing that’s lacking, because if you only give out done policies for the public, of course all they can do is to organize protests.
If you share the entire policymaking context, then everybody can become a cocreator, even if they’re unhappy with you. If they don’t want to cooperate with you, at least they can collaborate with what you have done.
That kind of culture change, this kind of open innovation, is what every government can already do just by adopting a creative commons license, an open government data license, it’s as simple as that.
It’s a good idea even in authoritarian societies, like with the branding of social innovation. Nobody is against that. I think then it creates a circle of what we call working groups, or special interest groups around any particular sustainable goal that can then serve as collaborators to the collaborative governance system.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to hire them all into the government proper, it may be a good idea to kind of invite fellows to try for a while, or to send interns into each other’s camps, and so on. Some kind of circulation is good, but permanent employment by the government for all the social innovators, I think that again, destroys the diversity.
Just go ahead.
The best thing of my work as a transgender in the cabinet, is that I didn’t receive special treatment, it’s all the same. That I think is the best I can say about Taiwan’s public service, is that people simply don’t care much. That’s also my experience in the early Internet community.
When I entered Internet community in 1993, was 12 years old, I didn’t specifically mention any gender, and Internet community is fine with it. The computer, the algorithm, your compilers, don’t care about your gender. [laughs]
What they care is your volunteer contributions, what are common values, not stereotypes or labels, those don’t even make any sense in the early Internet. There’s simply no bandwidth to transmit these kind of things.
Therefore, because I kind of spend my adolescence on the Internet, I never felt that I must choose between being only boy, and only a girl. Physically I have gone through two puberties, I can empathize with peoples’ experience more.
