Although it would not be an internship, then, because only a minuscule part is happening in my office. Maybe you would consider actually interning at the TFCC, the Taiwan Fact-Checking Center, [laughs] which is actually the nexus of the social sector power.
That is one part. The other part is youth engagement. We have this yearly program where people go to check at whatever digital services in the national government or the ministries that they don’t like, and they improve it for the better.
There’s just this very regular way of working from July to end of August, which coincides with the time that you’re here. You can look at the past three years to see the portfolios that I made.
Last year’s cohort notably did a pretty good redesign, not only for the National Palace Museum, which is now being rolled out, but also on the one-stop registration for mountaineering and hiking.
These were highlight cases from the last year’s RAY program. That’s another part which is youth engagement. It all depends on your research interest, but these are the current focus. It’s mostly open government, social innovation, and youth engagement.
We’re more like mechanism designers. The day-to-day implementation is mostly the National Development Council. We do work with the Presidential Office on flagship projects that, every year, we mentor about 20 teams.
Here are the timeline, where again, it’s around the time that you go back to Taiwan. We will have the fresh cohort of five winning teams of this year’s Presidential Hackathon, which will be determined on end of July and then begins our process of integrating the five winners.
Each team receive a trophy from the president. The trophy is a micro projector. When you turn it on, it shows the president’s image handing the trophy to you, promising whatever you prototyped in the three months through a data collaborative across three sectors will be made into national policy and reality in the next 12 months.
Our work, along with NDC’s help, is more on ratifying the already champions of that year into this cross-sectoral and also cross-ministerial data flow. We are not doing this outside the Presidential Hackathon purview.
If you’re interested, of course, you can also choose one of the winning teams of the Presidential Hackathon, follow through its integration, and see how the open government data and the data collaboratives work.
They do, certainly.
Certainly. We’ve had a cultural anthropologist and a human geographer doing this portfolio of research. I can, of course, put you in touch with them. I think they did a pretty good work. One of the cultural anthropology work is to analyze not only my office but the wider g0v community and how that works with the ecosystem.
Not only PDIS, but actually, anything that looks like our office from the g0v culture is amenable to the cultural anthropology lens. I’m pasting you the ongoing dissertation from Li Mei-jun, who I think provides a lot of very good background of how kind of work came to be.
You can see at the section called drafts of dissertation where you can see titles like, “Meiyouren can do anything,” which is a very interesting title. If you want to take such a broad scope, then my suggestion would be putting you first in touch to Mei-jun and maybe Yu-shan.
They are also Taiwanese, and they are all doing degrees overseas. They took a very similar approach. Maybe they have some outstanding questions, and maybe you can form a research group or something. [laughs]
That would not only be about me or my office, but rather about this new, cross-sectoral way of data collaboratives working across sectors in Taiwan. That would be interesting, and I think Eaves would consider that interesting, too. That would be my suggestion.
Yeah, we do. The join.gov.tw platform does such analysis. There’s a little difference between rural and municipal, which is something that we’re very proud of. I think that’s because the e-petition part concerns a lot of local cases.
If you’re interested, of course, we can put you in contact of our NDC delegate. Then you can get the statistics from the NDC, who maintains this. Also, maybe worth considering is a similar system, this horizontal network, called the Participation Officer Network, is also being rolled out in Tainan City.
There is many different municipal governments using the Join platform, such as Taipei, Taichung, and so on. If you’re interested in how not limiting to the Taipei City or not limited to large municipalities, there may be interesting cases when you’re around that takes a definitely local nature and that may be worth following as well.
G0v is running its biennial summit in Tainan this year. I don’t know how close you are to the community in Tainan, but Tainan definitely is one of the main hubs, as of this year. A distinct character than Taipei, Tainan is much more closer to the, exactly as you said, this everyday, not super clustered, audience.
I’m pasting you the stakeholders in Tainan from the g0v community.
There is no standard model. [laughs]
The sample size is too few.
We have a colleague in New York, anyway.
There’s no requirement for that, because we have three physical sites, anyway. That’s not including the New York, Bristol, and London colleagues. We are a very distributed team. As with other researchers, of course, I’m around every Wednesday to the Social Innovation Lab.
That’s my office hour. If you book my time in advance, we can just chat for a while every Wednesday. That’s the easiest. My advice would be actually going to where the action happens. Like if you’re interested in the Presidential Hackathon teams, go to them.
If you are interested in the RAY part – that is the service design – you can go to specific service design teams and so on, because we don’t work in our office. There really is no point for you to be five days in a certain office, unless, of course, you want to learn about the bureaucracy.
I don’t really think it’s your goal coming back to Taiwan. There are, of course, some essential crew handling phone calls and things like that, but most of us are just on various different dispatches. Like me personally, I go around Taiwan every other Tuesday, and sometimes Monday and Friday, too depending on the e-petition systems.
Maybe if you would like to travel, of course, there is a lot of traveling. If you don’t like to travel, I would suggest that you focus on maybe one or two teams and build a stronger relationship with them.
Of course, the Social Innovation Lab is an open space, so you are always welcome.
Sure, why not?
The Social Innovation Lab is here. There is a pretty video and such. If you prefer the US internship over Taiwan, there is no open stake, [laughs] so there is still plenty of room to consider. I really appreciate that Professor Eaves has this gesture, and I really appreciate the time that you put into researching our office work and focus.
No problem, sure.
Yeah, we’ll just go back and forth on email. I will be emailing you in a couple days, anyway, with this transcript. I will continue this exchange over email.
Awesome. Anything else I can help you with?
Awesome. Have a good local time, then.
Bye.
All right. There’s three digital systems about identity currently in use in Taiwan. Since you are a Taiwan national, you are probably familiar with all three, right? There’s the national healthcare part, which I’m sure that you have to say SE card, but it is restricted to medical use.
The second one is the National PKI card, or the Taiwan citizen certificate. A little-known fact is that it’s also issued to foreigners, although there’s a little applications for foreigners, except for I think there’s an online system to query whether you’ve banned from entering Taiwan, but I don’t think it’s very useful.
In any case, it’s used for tax filing, of course, but also electronic signatures in general in all kinds. I think the PKI card is relatively stable, and there is a way to virtualize that card into phones already, so you don’t have to carry the physical card.
That is called the TFIDO, the Taiwan FIDO. This conforms to the international FIDO standard. That’s the second one. It’s based on the Taiwan National, like PKI card. The third one is based on the paper-based card, which is called the national ID card.
It’s not digital at all. The non-digital, paper-based card, on the other hand, has the photo, has all the information on it, and is actually, due to a very curious law, people, it’s mandated to carry with them all the time with them.
It actually has no enforcement rules, so if you don’t carry, I don’t really think anything happens to you. These three very different systems are in the process of virtualizing into mobile devices, using FIDO as the main idea.
Now, there is a lot of people who prefer if they can have the laser two cards, the National PKI card, and the paper-based ID card to be somehow glued together, so that you can have one card that serves both purposes, and add to that the NFC interface makes it easier for people to identify themselves without going through the physical IC-swiping card.
On the other hand, there’s people who prefer to have them as separate cards. We’re now developing technologies to allow both use cases on an opt-in basis, so that people don’t have to activate the PKI card on their ID card if they don’t want to, but they can if they want.
That is the current plan. There is also, in the civil society, a lot of experiments about decentralized identity, like self-signed identities, especially in the very vibrant blockchain communities, like I’m also on a foundation board with Vitalik Buterin to work on intersectional groups-based identities.
At the moment, that identity is only used for the general population in smaller scales. For example, the Orchid Island, which is a smaller offshore island from Taiwan. The Tao, the indigenous people, made an identity of the Tao coin, the T-A-O coin, I think.
That is the idea that they can have a self-signed, not only cryptocurrency, but also a kind of certificate authority to make sure that only people who identify with the Tao culture is part of their cryptocurrency ecosystem.
We see that as a really good expression of Taiwan’s transcultural nature to allow more than 20 national languages now to have their identities. That is currently in a more regional basis. Of course, without blockchain, the Taitung coin or whatever, they are also their own tokens of appreciation of being a virtual Taitung citizen and things like that.
That goes into gamification territory, and I will spare you with the details.
