It’s good. I will check it out, and see how we can localize the context, and send the teams your way.
Bring their half-finished products and see how we can scale internationally.
If we can find four countries doing this, it would be a year-long recurring event.
I was talking with someone from Israel participating in the Vatican (hackathon, https://vhacks.org/ ). They are doing some kind of gov tech, gov hack too. They are also considering making it a longer process, but I don’t know the specifics yet.
There is the GovHack Australia, right? Pia started that community.
Really? Oh well. [laughs] There’s Gov 3.0 people from South Korea, when we visited there, they are quite interesting, and receptive to ideas. That was before the election though. I don’t know where they are at, at the moment.
Scotland, I remember them talking about that in OGP. Maybe we can just check this idea out in the DN network.
The DN network, Scotland’s probably not in there yet? We can just ask around.
You’re basically inviting all the points of contact of the seven countries?
Cool. Also, next month, I will be talking with our Minister of Foreign Affairs, and figuring out how we can join, either as a territory or an economy.
That is entirely OK.
No, it’s really OK. We’re fine with city-level engagement, actually. This is a city, you know? [laughs]
It is, it is.
Exactly. I’m totally fine with that, with joining through a city.
If other people in the network...I’m not too familiar with Uruguay, but otherwise, I think all the other ones are our friends already. Let’s make it happen.
If we’re going to some fellows all around the world, at some point, I will need to explain that to the Minister of Foreign Affairs.
We’ll still have to work on official level over the next year or so. The operation-level collaboration can start now.
The transcript? Not at all, not at all.
You can, after all, take out everything you said, so that it looks like me monologuing.
Somebody actually did that.
Yeah, because they’re a journalist. They said the way they framed the questions, as a correspondent, is proprietary or something, that they don’t want the other news outlets to access. I’m like, "Sure, why not?"
It’s usually the Minister who says that to journalists.
Anyway, non-journalists usually are OK with that.
Oh, yeah, a lot. I hear there’s going to be a direct flight.
Later, yeah, but it’s to Auckland, not to Wellington.
That’s right. I do look forward to visiting more often. At least there will be the OSOS-ish conferences, which I very much look to join.
At the very least, there’s Kiwi Foo. If I am invited again, I will be sure to share it with you.
Really? Half of people get rotated, you know. [laughs]
OK, cool.
Of course. Or Sheau-Tyng can help us.
Unless you strongly prefer selfies.
OK. [laughs]
Just use this.
OK. I’ll send you the links.
Yeah, next time.
Very much so.
See you.
Cheers.
My background is very transparent.
I’m Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Digital Minister. I’ve been holding this position for almost two years now, one year and a half.
I was an understudy for the previous Cyberspace Minister; I’ve been engaged in the public service since late 2014.
We did that because we occupied the parliament for 22 days. That’s called the Sunflower Revolution. We did that because the parliament at the time refuses to deliberate a trade-service agreement. We occupied the parliament to demonstrate in a demo-scene kind of way, to demo how to deliberate on all aspects of this agreement.
We are aligned with half a million people on the street and many more online. It’s a demonstration of what we call scalable listening technologies. People can see that technology’s not just for broadcasting but actually to listen and to come to rough consensus and come up with things that we can live with .
The magical thing is that after 22 days, the head of the parliament actually saw the consensus reached, including calling up a national convention, and agreed on that. It is a triumph of direct democracy.
Then all the occupy sympathizers and occupiers themselves won the city level election the end of that year. The central government faced a legitimacy crisis. There was a new premier, and with help of his deputy premier who was a Google director of engineering, they enlisted the civil technology people to come to the cabinet as understudies to solve issues like Uber regulation, and discuss AI, blockchain, and everything together using the same technique we did during the occupy.
Basically, we’re saying in Taiwan as well as many democratic countries the force of the social good and the force of capitalism, the forefront of business, are like this. The public sector we must not break because the society need to still have the empathy to reach out to these positions. All the tension is concentrated in our work. The public sector is like this rope in the middle.
Really? Have you worked in public service?
What’s your social mission, then?
Wow.
That’s awesome!
