We get volunteers from all various different ministries. At the moment, we’re, roughly speaking, 20 full-timers. We try to not recruit more than one person from a single ministry, [laughs] so we can be much more cross-pollination going on. In addition to the 20 or so full-timers, we also have 35 interns at the moment.
Usually the central government maybe use one or two interns, and they’re mostly in Taipei, just because of the location we’re in. But the 35 people who are our interns, they’re all over Taiwan. I work in a telecommunication/telework kind of way, so my interns can also work in any cities. Some of them are actually not in Taiwan, anyway.
Yes, they all work in our virtual work space, and collaboratively working on improving digital service. This is like a virtual, small office of sorts, but the salaries of all the various people from various ministries. For example, NCC still pays Yeh Ning’s salary, [laughs] and they join on a voluntary basis.
I don’t, for example, rate or rank his work. He provides his own assessments of his work. I just sign on it. This is a kind of peer-to-peer relationship.
Not exactly detached, though. Anyone who work here still maintain a connection with their original ministries. It’s the idea in software development we call on-site customer. We’re trying to improve the public service experience for all the public servants, so we need real public servants who can assess whether this is a good idea or not.
In a sense, they’re also evaluating this methodology in the context of the ministry they work in. Some of them just stay for six months or a year or so, and they go back to the ministry. This is how we work in a hub between all the different ministry who all want digital transformation, but none of them want to be exposed to too much risk.
Here is someone who can absorb all the risk, do all the pilots. If some of those things happen to work, then it trickles back into the ministries.
We’re good?
OK, right. I’m recording voice. As usual, I’m...
...your side. In any case, why don’t we start because we’re recording anyway? You both can join.
The CDCs, I was just reading your reply email. It is true that the constitutional draft bill is more a hybrid. It says basically around half of the button-up constitutional thing is statistically, randomly, very representatively driven, but the other parts are from the legislators, and one from all the indigenous drives.
There are three constitutional components. All around, it’s 146 people, where the indigenous people are six, the legislators are 35, and everything else is randomly sampled. It is a hybrid.
No. [laughs] This is to bind the legislation. Because Taiwan has an extremely high threshold for constitutional change, it first has to pass three-quarter in the Parliament for any amendment to go through. Then it has to pass a general referendum-ish vote.
The idea is that, by involving everyone from the legislative, as well as from the citizen assembly, there’s much more chance for the result, whatever the result is, to pass through the very high threshold that was there to begin with.
That’s correct. Because it can’t override constitution the itself for high the threshold from the Parliament is needed to change it...
[laughs] Yeah. I suppose the designer of this bootstrapping constitutional reform law imagined that one of the not quite binding -- but hopefully binding in the end -- resolution will be to lower the threshold for constitutional change. That’s just how it’s designed.
Yes, exactly. It exclusively cites the British Columbia, Ireland, South Africa, and Iceland as its inspirations, so to speak.
Right. Just to make it clear, it’s like this.
This is Article 9. Google Translator does a pretty good idea of translating it, anyway, but the high level summary. The Article 14 says that, from the beginning of this process, within two months, there needs to be a blueprint meeting.
The blueprint meeting is to set the scope, the agenda, the process of it. Then the blueprint needs to have this F2F component, as well as an online component. The blueprint meeting is very everyone. There’s several rounds.
Then 15 people from this larger assembly, about one-tenth of it, is selected as the drafting team, in which the citizen must not be less than two-thirds. At least 10 people are directly from here. It doesn’t say about indigenous nations. That’s the idea.
It translates the route for broad consensus from the blueprint meetings, and then starts one regional meeting, at least, per county or city. That’s about 20 to 30 regional meetings. Finally, there’s a general assembly-ish meeting that takes the round-trip meetings here, the regional ones, back to the assembly here for the final binding consensus.
That’s the general blueprint.
Yeah, definitely. I see Colin has joined us. Hi, Colin.
Fifth language. I was raised by a lot of people, but primarily by my grandma who speaks Taiwanese Huklo. My grandpa was from Szechwan, and so he speaks, I guess, Mandarin, but with a lot of Szechwan accent and idioms. Of course, when I go to school, I learned Mandarin-Mandarin, so that’s two and a half languages.
Then, when I was 10, I went to Germany -- Saarland, to be precise -- when my dad was doing his PhD there, on the Tiananmen incident -- he was doing his field research there -- and so I had to learn Deutsch, and so that’s the third. But because...
No. Not anymore. I used to be. I can still read just fine, I think. But this...
Yeah. Right. I’m sure that, with some practice, I can still write, but speaking and listening is not there anymore. Because Saarland is at the border of French, so, when I was 10 and I went there, I also had to learn some very basic Français.
Again, it’s all gone, [laughs] but like the vocabulary of 10 years old. That’s the fourth language. English is going to be the fifth. I learned that when already an adult and I went back to Taiwan.
That’s exactly right.
I learned it from Magic: The Gathering. Yeah.
As digital minister. That’s the official term.
Here are the staff.
They’re excellent people,and you can see that we have a dress code.
Yeah. Please, go on.
It depends.
Let’s see. I’m a political appointee. I wasn’t elected.
It’s true for all the heads of ministries. So there’s me. Each politically appointed Minister without Portfolio has a staff of exactly one or two people. I elected for two people, and they are my executive secretaries.
We have Zach, who is the political staff, and we have Shu Yang, who is the design — and community and international liaison and re:architect and many other things — staff.
Exactly. Thank you. Right. There’s no voting process. There is a general consensus.
By all means, these are really the only staff that I should have, and most other Ministers without Portfolio only has the staff of three people, three or four people. We have nine such Ministers without Portfolio.
However, I hacked the system so that it becomes possible for any ministries, career public servants, to join us by way of volunteering. Their salaries are still paid by their original ministries, but they can work on site in my office.
The original assembly, the "core team" as we like to say, these three are, say, co-founder of PDIS, but very shortly, like, within a week or so, we have 怡君 from NDC, the National Development Council, which is very important...
Yes.
The POs haven’t even started. I’m talking about at the very beginning of my work in the office, so, like, October 2016.
Right. These are all before POs. We have 怡君 from NDC, we have 葉寧 from NCC, the National Communication Commission, who is also one of the primary authors of the Digital Communication Bill, and we have 貢丸, from, now, the Minister of Culture.
They joined pretty much on the first week. It is interesting, because these three people were the original people who did the vTaiwan platform and the JOIN platform under Minister Jaclyn Tsai. I knew them already as an understudy minister, and so even though they are in NCC and NDC and MoC, to some degree, they just joined us within a week.
Then I went to the Institute of Information Industry, the III, which is like 18F, actually, but it was established from many decades ago, like, more than 30 years ago. The III has supported the public workforce by employing people whose pay grade is well above career public servants. They are a NPO, but they have a very strong government backing.
I asked each part of the III -- they have six different departments responsible for all the different parts of the technology -- and I asked that one staff, each, join my office. Suddenly, I have six more people.
I then asked the general secretary for whatever case that I work on, I need to have an onsite customer.
