Then there’s people working other ministries. I asked their minister to be stationed here. We have seven different career public servants stationed here. The implicit promise is that I won’t ask for more than one person from any ministry. Also, we have the technical team from the III.
From the Institute of Information Industry, the III. The III, again, supports six regular staff and three contractors, or consultants.
Nine people came from the III. Again, I ask each department of III for one person only, and not two people. Basically, it is a very crosscutting skill set, as well a very crosscutting composition, including NPO — if III counts as an NPO — and career public servants.
The idea is that whenever we lack any skill, we try to recruit people who are givers, who give more than they take, and they excel at something that none of the existing PDIS members are good at. That’s our only two recruiting criteria.
The benefit of the digital are twofold. First, that is can overcome space restrictions. We can connect these connected spaces. We can connect remote islands, rural places, and so on, using digital technology so they can be part of the policy-making process by having people speak in their own habitat and having the people in Taipei, or in anywhere, really, in the world to understand their life story more. That’s overcoming the space difference.
We can also overcome the time difference because everybody has two minutes of kindness. If we can let people join in their ideal two minutes, whether to sign a petition, to do online voting on pol.is, or whatever, then we engage people in their best, most altruistic public-minded time.
If we only say, "This town hall only opens for 15 minutes, and you have to travel four hours to Taipei for that," then it only includes a very small kind of people. By extending the time and reducing the time commitments, we get the best part of everybody.
Social innovation is anything that has a social mission, a social purpose. "I want the society to function in whichever way."
That it changes the social organization. It used to be like this, but now it organized like this, so you changed the social organization.
Then it, finally, has some social impact. Usually, we now define impact in terms of sustainable development goals, but there could be other metric, as well.
Again, a mission, an innovation in process and technology, or even organization, so a innovation, and then impact. Mission, innovation, and impact together defines social innovation, as opposed to, say, industrial innovation.
If the innovation is digital in nature, instead of purely face-to-face, then we say it’s digital innovation. It doesn’t mean that it’s wholly digital. It only means that it use digital technology as part of the enabler in the innovation part.
The mission, the purpose, and the impact, the outcome, these two are the core, and whatever models that’s operating in-between. It doesn’t always have to work, but always it has to make something new. If it fails, then it fails in a public way, so that everybody else can learn from it, and then do some other innovation.
Exactly.
We are trying to make a culture based on trust. We have the mutual trust between sectors as the core, because in our members we have people of all the different parties in Taiwan. A lot of us, like us, are Independents.
We have people from all the different generations, different discipline, different skills, different ministries, different stakes.
If we are to increase trust at all, we have to first build trust between people here, in PDIS. We do it by, first, being transparent. Everybody work out loud, so everybody knows what everybody else is doing, even though they may not partake in it.
Then accountability. Every week we review as the comment board, or every couple days we do a stand-up meeting so that everybody knows what people are blocked on and what kind of help any member wants. We can freely enlist each other’s skills to do worthwhile projects.
Yeah, but first within the team, and then trying to use the same model to influence the peer network, the vTaiwan network, the user advisory council network, and, basically, everything we touch.
We have this participation officer network, which is every ministry, by regulation, has to assign a team of at least one person -- but now they’re all three, or to five people now -- of all the different skill sets.
There’s people who work on public communication. People who work on information management. People who work on design. People who work on law, policy, and things like that.
Their core task is to engage with any stakeholders that show up. Instead of just with the representatives or with the media people, the professional journalists, they interact with e-petitioners, people who propose a referendum, people who somehow try to engage in any participatory agenda setting, is the participation officer’s business.
Anyone who could be impacted by a public policy and can declare that this is my stake is a stakeholder. Basically, we use the so-called open multi-stakeholder governance model, in the sense that anyone who can demonstrate to other stakeholders that "I really have a stake here," they don’t have to find a representative. They can, themselves, show up and become a stakeholder.
This is actually the first political model that I learned about when I was 15. That was in 1996.
I participated in the early transition of the early web, like Gopher, HTTP, Archie, to the modern web, which is based on the World Wide Web, HTTP, and the World Wide Web Consortium, the World Wide Web governance model.
The W3C model, again, derives from the Internet Engineering Task Force model, which, in turn, it derived from the early Internet culture. All this is based on the idea of rough consensus and running code.
Rough consensus meaning in our meetings we don’t make a voting. That the idea is we reject voting, kings, and presidents. The idea is that we ask what are the solutions that works for everyone and what are the core values that people can agree, despite their initial disagreements. What’s the non-controversial essence?
All these are written in a very Taoist way in a document called "The Tao of the IETF." It described rough consensus and all this idea.
This is the first political system that I ever engaged with. I was 16 at the time. I couldn’t really actually vote. I got the participatory democracy first, and then I learned about modern representative democracy, which is a pale shadow of it.
I’m having this indigenous digital native viewpoint and try to always test the applicability of the rough consensus model, multi-stakeholder model to actual day-to-day governance.
The what?
Running code means that as long as we have a rough consensus, or as soon as we have a rough consensus, people start implementing it in every kind of way. It’s called about early experimentation to test whether this rough consensus makes sense.
It’s running code in a sense that everybody can see how it functions. It applies to, for example, our new sandbox act, is the idea of running code, in a sense that if you want to try fintech experimentation that could be against the law, you get this six months of experimentation period.
Then you have to publish the data, the algorithm, the things that you want to test in this law-breaking sandbox under the new fintech sandbox act. This is the idea of, in Taiwan, at any given moment, there may be dozens of experimentation running. They’re all running code of maybe one central idea.
Maybe only one or two of them would turn out to be socially beneficial, and then the rest of them will actually go away after the sandbox period, but one or two good ideas will influence the regulators and become the new national regulation.
Not at all. There’s no obstacles.
Yeah, because we’re a voluntary organization, so people only join voluntarily, and they collectively vote on what to tackle. The only thing to manage is the culture, or the expectation. If anyone want a quick fix of anything, this kind of open model slow process is not for that. It needs time. It needs space. It needs trust.
Once people learn, "OK, so this process is only good for this kind of stuff, and other kind of stuff, maybe, is about matter of national defense, national security, so we don’t bring this here," as soon as we do this kind of expectation management, then we encounter no obstacles.
Definitely, which is why we make time for each other. The joint platform is known for its 60-day timeline, so every stage, like from the petition to a response, or from a regulatory announcement to the end of commentary period, everything is on this two-months’ period.
It’s not too long to waste the patience or the relevance of participation, but it’s not too short so the trust cannot form. We usually settle on two months, give or take one month, timeline.
It’s our values. It’s not objectives.
To facilitate and empower the civil society or innovation?
It’s very simple. It’s by introducing digital tools to simplify the frontline staff’s work. It’s by reducing or absorbing the risk of mid-level executives by having the minister or the president absorb the innovation risks. Should things go wrong, it’s always our fault.
For the senior public servants, usually they actually have a very good idea of where the country should be going, but they may have issues in explaining it. Previous ministers was taking all the credit and giving some, or most, of the blame to the senior public servants. We see that during the Sunflower Movement very clearly.
In this case what we’re trying to do is that we share the credit, so whenever a PO does something really well, we put him in the slides or put her in our communications, so everybody knows that it’s a senior executive that actually get this thing right and do the innovative thing.
Our full transcript of the drafting area of the pre-meetings of all those policies also help, because journalist can go back and see who actually proposed this good idea. Basically, by sharing the credit, absorbing the risk, and reducing workload we try to win the heart of all the levels of public servants.
Those things are not fungible, so we must not do two of them at the sacrifice of the other. That always backfires. All the improvement we do may be small, but they are Pareto improvement, meaning that they don’t sacrifice any level.
A lot, like hundreds.
The main working tool is that after every internal meeting we have this Etherpad, which is a collaborative document. It’s like Google Doc, but it’s a cyber security-hardened, white hat hacker tested.
