https:/.../q-a-session-with-minister-tang.webm

We're very happy to have digital minister
of Taiwan, who's come to our DebConf '18.

I don't even have to tell him what to say,
because he knows what to do.

[applause]

Thank you, everyone, happy to be here.

To somewhat compensate the lack of Q&A time
in the previous session, we will start with

the Q&A.

If you have any device connected to the Internet,
please go to this website.

It's called slido.com, S-L-I-D-O.com.

Once you're on this website, you will be asked
to enter a number.

Without the hash, it's just seven two eight,
or today's date.

Once you enter the three digits, you can press
join or a small, green button.

Then you will be dropped into this anonymous
or pseudonymous chat channel.

Here, feel free to ask me anything, like literally
anything.

If you see other people's questions that you
would also like to see me answer, you can

just press like.

The questions with the most number of likes
will float to the top on this projection here.

For the rest of this hour, I guess, the next
15 minutes, I'll begin with a short introduction,

maybe 15 minutes, maybe 20 minutes, about
my work in the Taiwan administration in the

public digital innovation space, the PDIS,
as we're seeing here.

Meanwhile, as I'm talking, feel free to ask
me any and all questions, which will show

up on the phone here.

Once there's sufficient number of questions,
then I will switch right back to Slido.

My current favorite programming language is
text/plain character set UTF-8.

[laughs] It's one of the most versatile programming
language there is.

I'll explore that more in my talk.

I'm sure it's your favorite programming language
too.

[laughs] Let's get started.

Unlike many people working on democracy today,
I'm an optimist when it comes to democracy

and especially Internet democracy.

This strange condition began when I was 15
years old.

That was 1996.

I discovered that the future of human knowledge
and indeed future of democracy is happening

on the web and my education in school is a
little out of date.

I told my teachers that I found this wonderful
constitutional democracy called Debian -- no,

really, I did -- on the Internet, where people
use Condorcet voting methods and these very

advanced algorithms and policy development
process and so on.

I want to quit school and begin my education
on the World Wide Web.

Surprisingly, my teachers were very reasonable
people and they all agreed with it.

After that, I just dropped out of high school
and started a few web startups and just participated

in this wonderful community of the Internet
Society and the open-source and free software

communities to basically see that how people
can at least come to consensus or at least

consent through radical transparency and rough
consensus and so on.

Today I'm Taiwan's digital minister for a
year-and-a-half now.

I'm applying the lessons that I learned when
I was 15 years old, civic participation, rough

consensus, radical transparency to the representative
democratic system here.

Surprisingly, it's working
and it's changing, gradually, our society.

Two years ago, when President Tsai Ing-wen
first became inaugurated as our president,

she said an inspiring statement in her inauguration
speech.

She said, "Before, when we think of democracy,
we think about the opposition between two

opposing values.

But now, from now on, Taiwan's democracy need
to become a conversation between many diverse

values."

The key point here is the plural of this word
"value."

There's many values in Taiwan and we're going
to build a conversational, deliberative democracy

out of those very different but diverse values.

Indeed, previously, when people think about
the government or the state, or things like

that, people tend to have this picture, like
we have different departments.

We have different ministries.

We have different council within the parliament,
who talk to, for example, the environmental

agency may talk to the environmentalist groups.

The minister of economy may talk to developmental,
more capitalistic groups and so on.

There's different nodes within the government
to talk to the different sides of stakeholders.

People imagined that the government is what
brings people together and who arbitrates

between those conflicting or opposing forces.

This model of governance, as all of you know,
has become bankrupt within the previous decade

or so with the advent of the social web and
the Internet activism.

The reason is that people can organize now
perfectly fine without a representative organizer

from the mainstream media or from the representative
democracy.

Also, because there's so many emerging issues,
we can't have a different ministry or a different

agency for each of them.

If the government insists on being still this
kind of rope in between, not only is its organizational

value much lower than before, it would be
torn between so many different interests that

it become paralyzed.

The distance between the government and people,
while not increasing...The distance between

people and people have much shortened.

It leads to a recession or a distrust to the
democratic institutions.

The way we're working on this is basically
reimagine the questions governance systems

ask.

Instead of asking who we need to represent
or what is fair arbitration, we ask instead

what is the due process in which that the
various different stakeholders can find common

values, and given the common values, can we
come up with solutions that works for everyone,

that everyone can live with.

This is the idea of civic tech or, basically,
technology that enables people to listen to

one another.

This has, basically, a lot of international
metrics measuring this, like the diversity

of gender and participation in the Internet,
like the rank of open data and accessibility,

like the access to e-participation platforms.

Since 2015, Taiwan has been consistently ranked
number one or number two in all of those metrics

worldwide.

The reason is that at the end of 2014, there
is a radical U-turn of national direction

by embracing the wisdom of the crowd and open
government as the national direction.

It was catalyzed and epitomized by Occupy
movement back in 2014 where people occupied

the parliament for 22 days in a nonviolent
demonstration.

When we say demonstration, we mean it in like
the demo day sense.

It's a demo.

At the time, the members of the parliament
in Taiwan refused to deliberate a cross-strait

service trade agreement because they think
constitutionally Beijing is part of Taiwan.

In any case they refuse to deliberate a statement,
a treaty.

People occupied the parliament and did the
MPs work for them by basically deliberating

line by line what the service trade pact entails.

There's more than 20 different NGOs in all
the different streets around the parliament,

in a non-violent way, just deliberating aspects
of this cross-strait service agreement.

I was part of the movement that supported
the logistics and the ICT communication for

this movement.

It's called g0v.tw or just g0v.

The idea of g0v is very simple.

For any Taiwan government services that all
end in gov.tw, we just register this domain

g0v.tw so that people, whenever they see a
government service or website that's not to

the people's liking, they can just fork that
website and build a more interactive, open

version that just changes the O to a zero
on your URL.

It's very easy to discover.

It solves the discoverability problem.

Like for the legislation, legislative yuan
gov.tw, the corresponding shadow government

is just ly.g0v.tw.

It's very easy to remember.

It's a very neat hack. [laughs]

The first project of the g0v movement, back
in 2012, before I joined, was called budget.g0v.tw.

It's essentially interactive platform that
shows a visualization of the national budget.

Everybody can just look on the part, the specific
project that they are interested in, have

a real-time discussion on the discussion forum
center on that budget item as the social object

instead of on the budget as a whole.

The idea is forking the government.

Usually, the g0v projects are under a free
software license or really the Creative Commons

Zero license, which is not a license.

It's just a declaration of donation to the
public domain.

The result is that when the state-level government,
at the end of 2014, want to incorporate this

into the participatory budget program and
things, they don't have to ask anyone.

They just take the g0v forked versions and
merge it back to the state-level governments.

So far, there's like seven different cities
adopting this.

As of this year, the national government also
merged this in.

Today, in join.gov.tw, you can see all the
1,300 national projects and all its KPIs,

its deliverables, and have a real-time discussion
with the career public servants in charge

of that governmental project, essentially
bypassing the representative democratic system.

It enables a real discussion.

Why are there so many civic hackers in Taiwan,
who, during the Sunflower Movement, just a

lot like me...I just talk to my clients that
I need to take a three-week leave because

democracy needs me.

There's hundreds of people who did that back
in 2014.

Why is that?

I'm 37 now.

We're the first generation in Taiwan that
can actually do democracy after three decades

of martial law, which was lifted in 1989,
around the time of personal computers.

We only had our first presidential election
in 1996 which is about the year of the popularization

of the World Wide Web.

Internet and democracy, they're not two things.

They're not two different branches of people.

It's the same generation of people.

It's the same thing in Taiwan.

The advent of democracy and the advent of
Internet and direct democracy is the same

time in Taiwan.

We don't have 200 or 300 years of a representative
democracy tradition.

When we had democracy, we had also the Internet.

In Taiwan, when we see or when we talk about
free software, we translate it as [Mandarin]

. It's always free as in freedom to assemble,
freedom of speech, freedom to express, and

never free of cost.

We know that freedom is never free of costs.

Our parents' generation, our grandparents'
generation fought very hard to get those freedoms.

It's up to us to use the software freedoms
to keep the society free.

At the end of 2014 and after the Occupy, there's
many mayors, mayor candidates who were Occupy

supporters or Occupyers themselves, who very
surprisingly found themselves elected mayors

when they did not expect.

It's something that also happen in Spain also
[laughs] and in many other Occupys in that

time.

At the time, the premier during the Occupy
resigned, saying, "I don't understand you

people."

He just resigned.

A new premier, an engineer, said, "OK, so
from now on, crowdsourcing and open governance

is just going to be the national direction."

The Occupyers and us, the supporters of the
Occupys, the facilitators and the ICT experts,

were then hired into the national government
in early 2015 to help designing systems to

collaboratively solve issues, such as Uber,
at the time.

Uber, in 2015, has entered Taiwan and operated
legally using rental cars and professional

drivers for a while.

In 2015, they also introduced a new line of
service called uberX.

It is using unlicensed drivers and unlicensed
cars and without insurance.

The PR idea of Uber at the time is to use
this meme, which is a virus of the mind, this

meme called "sharing economy."

This meme means very different thing to very
different people.

For the Uber PR department at the time, it
means very specifically that code dispatch

cars better than laws, so we obey code not
laws.

It's very simple message that spreads around
the world.

It's not just in Taiwan.

It's like epidemic of the mind.

People, after becoming a driver for a couple
weeks, maybe they feel that there's no protection,

that they didn't actually earn that much.

They quit driving for uberX, but during that
two weeks' time, just like the common flu,

they would have spread through apps to their
passengers and to other drivers and to other

passengers.

It's impossible, actually, at the time, for
us to negotiate with an app or with a virus

of the mind like the "sharing economy" because
it's in a different category.

It's impossible to argue with the common flu
either.

At the time, many state governments try use
Old World methods such as confiscating.

In Paris, they confiscated office, confiscated
machines, put people to jail.

Then the next morning, Uber still operates.

It doesn't really work in the old governmental
methods.

We thought about it.

We thought that during the Occupy, where people
listen to each other's positions deeply and

feel each other's feelings around the CSSTA,
maybe we can reuse some of that technique

and to work on the Uber issue.

Basically, we think that deliberation is a
vaccine of the mind.

Once people have really felt and empathized
with different sides' positions and come up

with common values, people become immune to
specific virus of the mind in the future.

I promise to check the questions at this point.

I'm just going to do it right now.

There's 17 questions.

I'll finish this section and then switch right
back to questions.

A proper deliberation involves four different
stages.

We used a system invented in Canada, in 2005.

It's called the focused conversation method,
or FCM.

It's known as the ORID method also because
it separates the discussion into four different

stages.

The first is objective or facts, where people
ask each other.

Like the government publishes open data, all
we know about uberX.

We also ask all the private sector and civil
society to donate data into this shared, fact-checked

database.

Once people check the facts on the timeline
and we can all agree with the facts, the various

stakeholders then express their feelings.

For the same fact, you may feel angry, and
I may feel happy.

It's all OK.

It's not until we checked everybody's feelings
that we find that there are some resonating

feelings that people all feel as important
concerns to ideate on.

After the facts, the feelings is the ideas.

The best ideas are the ideas that takes care
of the most people's feelings.

Once we uncover those ideas, we then translate
it into legalese.

Using the old governmental method, the main
barrier is the language barrier.

The professional public servants, the private
sector lobbyists, and the independent academics,

and so on use a professional language, while
people on the street using a different language.

Under this situation, when people say the
same thing but mean very different things,

the facts and the feelings gets clouded.

Ideas in this environment become ideologies.

Ideologies are an even more potent virus of
mind that blinds people to new facts and to

each other's feelings.

After we get everybody on the same page, checking
the facts that by itself is important, we

use a free software system under AGPL called
Pol.is.

Pol.is is a so-called AI-powered conversation
that basically just provides a face to the

crowd.

We ask everybody to basically look at one
statement that their friends or just a random

person on the Internet propose about their
feeling, their [Mandarin] something.

I think that, or I feel that passenger liability
insurance is important.

As you agree or disagree with the statements,
your avatar will move among your social media

friends -- or you don't have to login -- among
well-known people on social media.

You can discover that your friends and your
family actually think about this in a very

different perspective.

They are still your friends and family.

You just didn't talk about this over dinner.

It makes it difficult for people to antagonize,
to treat people with different viewpoints

as enemies.

Rather it enables people to say that OK, after
answering a few yes or no questions, I can

also contribute my feelings.

People compete on feelings that resonates
with the most number of people.

We say if your ideas or if your feelings resonates
with a supermajority amount of people -- that

is, across all the groups, every group has
more than majority agreeing with you -- then

the feelings and proposals with the most resonance,
with the most consensus, we use that as the

agenda to talk with the stakeholders, with
the taxi unions, with the Uber people and

so on.

In this way, we send the same URL to everybody,
and then spread it.

One of the key interface design decisions
during a Pol.is discussion, unlike many other

social media venues, is that you don't see
the reply button here.

There is no reply.

What we discovered is if you have reply, people
focus their energy on discrediting the person

who posted a comment that they don't agree
with.

Like Slido, Pol.is, basically, if you see
something that you don't agree with, your

best recourse is to prepare something more
nuanced, that other people can agree with.

After a few weeks, in all the Pol.is discussions,
what we see is that people recognize their

differences in those divisive statements,
but they don't spend more time on it.

People instead spend a lot of time refining
the nuanced consensus, so that people can

resonate, kind of compete, with the most resonance
across the different groups.

We use a live consultation method, where all
the stakeholders are invited.

The taxi company, Uber, union people, and
so on, the co-ops and so on.

We just checked with them all the agenda set
by this Pol.is conversation, one by one.

Saying, "Do you agree?

If you don't, why?

If you do, why?"

Because it's live streamed, with thousands
of people watching, people become bound to

whatever they have said.

Uber, at the time, said, "OK, so we work with
our drivers, to help them obtain a professional

driver's license."

They're bound by the words they spoke at this
live stream meeting.

After this, we then worked on ratifying the
new what we call the diversification of taxi.

One of the highest score is actually contributed
by the free software community, by Irvin Chen,

from the Mozilla community here.

Who said that we should take this opportunity
to upgrade the taxi regulations, so that the

best practices from Uber, for example, taxi
doesn't have to be painted yellow, and there's

the two-way rating system, and so on, could
be used to facilitate better taxi qualities

here in Taiwan.

Led by that consensus and six other consensus
items, we then created a law so that now Uber

is operating legally in Taiwan, but only with
registered driver's licensed cars.

You also get email about your rides, insurance,
every Uber ride, and you can also call taxi

with Uber, and vice versa.

This is what we call a multi-stakeholder consultation,
after which people's consensus set the agenda

for the politicians to talk about.

Let's take some questions.

There's 13 people, I think, 15 now, would
like to know, "How can we help other governments

enable open standards?"

This is an excellent question.

In Taiwan, we have this idea of the GDSP,
or the Government Digital Service Principal.

It is modeled, loosely, after the Government
Digital Service in the UK, who also published

their digital standards.

The GDS is a thought leader in this area,
and they pioneered a lot of digital standards

that are not just open, as in open source,
or open as in open protocol, or format, but

open as in open innovation, where people,
everybody can contribute.

One of their key principles is being user-centric,
which we here expanded in Taiwan, meaning

that the users here not only include citizens
but also people working in the front line

in the public service.

The second thing that the UK GDS also advocates
is that when you build a digital service,

you need not to only test with people, and
the frontline staff, but also test with the

ministry and the cabinet from the beginning
to the end.

Ultimately, they're accountable for this digital
service, and they can then solicit more idea

of innovation from this service.

We adopted this spirit, and also call for
leader to be basically cross-disciplinary.

I think the person who asked this question
is maybe most interested in our GDSP number

eight, which says, "Open first," basically,
open is the priority.

To reduce the time spent on developing services,
and the total cost of ownership, open should

be the foremost principal when designing and
building services.

By open we mean specifically that all the
machine-to-machine data built by this system

need to be available under an open license,
most commonly the Creative Comments Attribution

4.0 license, which is the default license
for all the ICT systems built in Taiwan.

Also, we prioritize open source.

If the service component reuses existing open
source components, we recommend people to

use Linux Foundation's SPDX, or S-P-D-X, manifest
to solve this warranty issue for the system

integrators.

Once they declare their reusable free software
components under SPDX, the warranty in the

legal perspective has a clear delineation.

By this, we want to encourage people to innovate
based on what the government has delivered,

and improve on existing government services
by forking the government, occasionally getting

it right, and getting governments merging
it back.

Not only open data and open source, we also
say that it need to conform with open standards,

so that it could be reused and also, it builds
on common API and common components.

All this is so that we can quickly reiterate
and improve the services.

We have a support group of all the governments
who endorse this standard.

It's called Digital Nations, and previously
known as Digital Five, or Digital Seven, depending

on the number of people in it.

We have a chat channel.

We share GitHub repositories.

We communicate very regularly, so that the
governments who embrace open by default have

this venue.

I think our next meeting is Forward 50, in
Ottawa in Canada this November.

All the governments are solving very much
similar issues.

All the components that we deliver, it's not
just for improvement of our citizens.

Also, offering it, so that it could be reused
by the government and people building their

own self-governance system, not necessarily
state government or representative governments

worldwide.

The short answer to this is to develop and
adhere to a clear government digital service

principle, to publish and circulate this widely.

To encourage this in the procurement laws,
and to encourage this in the accountability,

in the auditing laws, in the statistics laws,
which we all have done.

Then participate internationally in support
groups in the democratic and open governance

governments and basically share these best
practice, or at least better practices, as

open toolkits.

That's the thing that we're doing.

12 people would like me to answer, "What do
I wish from Debian?"

I wish that Debian would live long and prosper.

[laughs]

[applause]

Really, along with other large endeavors,
like the Mozilla Foundation, and the Linux

Foundation, which I just mentioned, Wikimedia
Foundation, you folks are the foundation upon

which that we are advocating to the representative
democratic system that, "Hey there is some

merit in this kind of radical transparency,
and that kind of radical participation."

As a conservative anarchist minister, I have
three conditions going into cabinet.

The first is that I don't issue a command
to anyone, nor do I take a command.

Everything is by voluntary association.

This is straight from the Debian Constitution,
where, by constitution, nobody can really

be forced into doing any non-voluntary work.

The second one is that I get to work anywhere
on the planet, and it still counts as working.

It's teleworking, and it also enabled a lot
of e-government imperatives, when people discovered

that by a paper-based delivery they can't
really reach me.

They can reach me after a week or so.

It is far easier if you just use email.

The third thing, also very important, is that
when I develop those voluntary co-creation

methodologies, it is important for me to be
radically transparent.

By radical transparency I mean not just meeting
with lobbyists and journalists, are all published

online, even internal meetings that I chair,
we also publish everything as a transcript

two weeks after every internal meeting.

It looks like this, it's also using a free
software system, called SayIt developed by,

I think, mySociety, in the UK.

When David Plouffe, speaking for Uber at the
time, come to a lobby and have a conversation,

not only is our discussion on the record,
it's on 360 Record.

We can put it on VR or Cardboard or something,
and relive the conversation.

[laughs] Every utterance has a permanent URL.

You can get full accountability of who said
what, where.

This is important for the government service,
because the public servants in this situation

they become very innovative, contrary to popular
belief.

Previously, when something gets right, and
people like it, the minister always takes

all the credit, and if something gets wrong,
it's always the career public servants who

didn't execute well, or something and the
netizens has a way to blame the people in

charge for it.

In that situation, there is no motivation
for them to innovate.

Now, with this radically transparent system,
not only is the civil society more understanding

of the context before making a decision, but
also all the credit gets shared to the actual

career public servants who proposed something
innovative in the first place.

If anything goes wrong, well, because as far
as I know, I'm the only minister in the world

doing this, it's all Audrey's fault.

I can absorb that blame, while people share
the credit.

We get a lot of very innovative ideas, frankly,
from the public service, such as adopting

a thoroughly free software system called sandstorm.io
for our entire public service, in all the

different branches of government, not just
the administration.

We use only free software on this sandstorm.io
system.

Davros replaces Dropbox, EtherCalc replaces
Google Spreadsheet, Etherpad replaces Google

Doc, Wekan replaces Trello, and there's also
Rocket.Chat.

I'm sure you know the other tools that the
free software people uses.

Basically, we say any public servants, as
long as they have a gov.tw email address,

can enjoy this for free, and even develop
new applications on it, because it's cyber

security hardened.

We ask our best white hat hackers to attack
it, and they filed a few CVEs, so that we're

[laughs] reasonably sure that it's very secure
now, so that people can develop applications

by themselves, which is free software, and
planning travels together, ordering lunch

boxes together.

Unleash innovation within the government,
because they know that this system can absorb

the cybersecurity risk, and I can absorb the
political risk.

17 people would like to know, "It's good that
you discovered Debian, and what makes it interesting

at such a young age, do you run Debian yourself?

Have you contributed to Debian?"

Personally, my desktop environment when I
started learning -- I think it's around 1999

-- system-level programming -- I'm sorry -- has
always been FreeBSD.

[laughs]

I've never actually...I used the Debian compatibility
layer.

I don't know whether that counts or not.

[laughs] I've always been a FreeBSD developer
and contributed to also driver support in

FreeBSD.

Also, most of my contributions in the Perl
community and in OpenFoundry, here in Taiwan,

in early 2000s, were first committed to the
FreeBSD port system.

It's a different culture.

It's not copyleft.

It's not copyright.

It's copy center.

You go to the copy center and make many copies.

That's a [laughs] very permissive [laughs]
community.

That's my primary community, the FreeBSD community.

There's various efforts within Debian to reconcile
with, for example, the module signing system.

I piloted the module signing system in CPAN,
in the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network.

There's a lot of packaging issues and so on.

I basically chime in from here to there.

I did not participate in the Debian democracy,
but I really admired from afar, in the FreeBSD

camp.

[laughs]

"Does Taiwan has an open-source strategy?"

Yes.

I'm glad you asked.

It's called DIGI+.

I don't know how much of this is translated
into English.

Oh, all of it.

It's good.

If you go to smart.taiwan.gov.tw...We tend
to have one web page for each major government

policies.

There's smart.taiwan.gov.tw.

There's AI Taiwan.

There's bio Taiwan.

There's also CI Taiwan -- I think that's not
yet translated -- where the CI stands for

civil IoT, which is the shared open data and
also open algorithm platform for all the different

environmental data aggregated in a supercomputing
center that combines the people's, the g0v

site of air sensors and also the government
site of government sensors.

We can all talk with the same fact-based or
evidence-based policy-making process.

I encourage you to check out Smart Taiwan
and also links to Asia Silicon Valley.

When we talk about open society here and also
about the education, like interdisciplinary

digital talents, in the DIGI+ plan, we specifically
said especially in the basic education level,

that is to say K-12 level...

Also because in the next five years all the
college-level students also need to learn

computational thinking and programming, half
of it, I think, by the year 2021 or something.

All of it needs to be based on free software.

If the student graduates and joins the private
sector and choose to use proprietary software,

that is their choice.

Of course, the government can't do much about
it, but while they're still children, while

they're still in the schools, it is very important
for us to not let the children or the students

to be subject to vendor lock-in.

By the time they graduate, maybe the vendor
has already moved somewhere else.

Maybe the vendor lose interest in that product
line.

We see a lot of that dynamic.

At least in the education system, we're very
firm that we prefer free software for education.

When teaching computational thinking, when
teaching artificial intelligence, when teaching

all those different DIGI+ powered smart machinery,
green energy technology, and so on, we prefer

free software when it's in the school.

In the DIGI+, there is a strategy to raise
awareness and have talents in school.

There's also twoss.io, I think -- I hope I
remember this right -- which is not yet translated

in English.

it's somewhat translated to English.

In any case, what this tries to do is basically
by getting people sufficient education materials,

so people working on any level of education
can point to existing communities and introduce

their students to such community.

Even people working in like city-level government
or national-level government can also point

to the success cases of incorporating PostgreSQL
or OpenStack or Docker Ecosystem and/or TensorFlow

or whatever and which is the success story.

You're replacing proprietary systems.

It's not about procurement anymore.

We already change our procurement regulations
and the government digital service principle.

All that people need now is a boost of confidence
of [Mandarin] , basically, [laughs] by people

keep telling them it's OK to use free software.

This is the twoss.io.

If you find anything wrong with it or anything
you can contribute, please feel free to let

us know in twoss.

"Why is Taiwan so restrictive on Internet
access, captive portals, register with ID

for iTaiwan WiFi access, etc.?

Is there the reason, bad experiences or not?"

The reason is usually cited as "cybersecurity,"
but it is not a very strong reason.

We are actively looking, actually, like in
the Taiwan high-speed rails, to relax the

captive portal.

Especially when you're on a high-speed moving
train, it is very difficult to actually resume

from hotspot to hotspots if you need to go
through like five or three screens to register.

That's the first place where we will relax
this captive portal thing.

Once this is done and piloted and proven that
it really doesn't need two more cybersecurity

guards, that we can put other cybersecurity
guards elsewhere on the stack, not necessarily

on the personal identification level, then
we will also relax the internal.

Within the government agencies, we often provide
two WiFis, one for employees of the government

and one called iTaiwan, also for visitors.

The visitor WiFi, we then will also look to
relax more.

That's because those two venues, in the high-speed
rails and also in visitors to government agencies,

you already did your registration somewhere
else.

We don't physically actually need you to register
again.

I'm less sure about the city-level public
WiFi, like TPE-Free, or other city-level WiFi

because they have a certain level of autonomy.

We don't actually dictate what they do.

We just pilot this relaxed login portal thing
and also establish corresponding cybersecurity

rules.

Maybe the city-level people will also get
enlightened.

We'll see.

There's eleven people who want to know, "Is
it possible to be a citizen in Taiwan and

interact fully with the government without
using any proprietary software?"

I'm glad you asked because that's one of the
cases that I'd like to show.

[laughs]

It used to be very, very difficult.

Just last May actually, there was a petition
that talks explicitly about it, very explicit.

[laughs] Last May, there was an e-petition
or a national e-petition system.

After 5,000 people participate online...You
can use email or SMS.

It's not a real-name basis.

Basically, after 5,000 people counter-signed
a petition, the government is obliged to respond

to it.

This petition is by this user experience designer
卓志遠, which says that our tax filing

system is explosively hostile to users.

It's negative energy in that petition.

There's more negative energy in the body,
which I will spare you the quote.

Basically, at the time, about 80 percent of
comments in that petition discussion area

is very negative.

It caused for the resignation of the minister
of finance.

It caused...there's a lot of accusations to
the vendors who provide the system, and all

because in Windows there is a proprietary
Windows-based application for tax filing.

For Linux and for Mac and basically non-Windows
systems, there is a Java applet.

Because last year Oracle Inc. deprecated Java
applets, the user experience become very,

very bad.

People will see that "Please wait.

It's still installing some applet components."

Because the pop-up is by default blocked,
so nothing happens.

After 40 minutes, people are still waiting.

It really is very, very difficult to use.

After the e-petition, basically there's a
participation officer team in each ministry.

Each participation office, or POs, is responsible.

Just like media officer who talk to journalists
or a parliamentary officer who talk to MPs,

POs talk to such emergent petitions.

By basically saying, I think, not only very
quick, like 36 hours after this petition,

our PO 楊金亨 just posted publicly that
everybody who complained about our tax filing

experience on non-Windows systems is cordially
invited to a co-creation workshop, some Friday,

in the Ministry of finance.

This is very interesting because just by proposing
this invitation...Previously, like 80 percent

of people were just flaming.

20 percent of people were saying, "Well, we're
using Windows.

It works kind of OK."

Nobody really took heed to them.

After this invitation is sent, 80 percent
of people started proposing useful suggestions,

useful recommendations.

Only less than 20 percent still remained trolling
or flaming people, but people don't pay attention

to them anymore.

Basically, what we did was inviting the trolls,
who turns out to be not trolls.

They were just fed up with the tax filing
system.

They had to vent their feelings.

After they vent their feelings, we all then
solicit ideas from them.

People who can make it to Taipei, make it
to Taipei.

Otherwise, people can still participate using
live-streaming.

One of the key thing here is radical transparency
and also accountability, meaning that people

who say that the words are explosively crowded,
we just put that, post it as words are explosively

crowded, that it is so brilliantly written
that people are confused.

Then we just post it.

People say instead of designing a system makes
people feel better, people don't feel good

at all when they think about filing taxes,
so we should shorten the experience instead

of trying to make people feel better and so
on.

Basically, people who proposed such ideations
online, we just use service design methodologies

and hold five co-creation workshops with all
the different stakeholders involved in the

tax filing experience.

This year, the tax filing experience for non-Windows
systems is entirely HTML5-based.

It adheres to the open standards.

People can just using any platform that can
run a browser to access the tax filing system.

The short answer to this question is that
it has become more and more possible while

we translate or transform existing desktop-oriented
or Windows-specific or Java applets into web-based

situations.

Now, if you insist that all the JavaScript
libraries and CSS libraries that government

system use has also to be open source or free
software, that would take a little bit more

time.

It will need the current generation of system
to be wholly replaced by post-government digital

service principle, post-GDSP, systems.

We are focusing on reducing the load on the
client side first.

At the time, I think you can complete most
of the interactions of the governmental issues

like filing taxes and so on if you're OK with
using a free software browser, but there's

still some proprietary JavaScript code.

This is the compromise situation we're in
at the moment.

With the rollout of GDSP, we're also looking
to make the JavaScript and CSS and also the

backend systems more non-proprietary.

Anonymous would like to know the shared objects
in the tax filing plugin is not open source.

Why?

Because the copyright belongs to, I think,
the vendor Chunghwa Telecom.

Back when we signed the agreement with the
Chunghwa Telecom, the GDSP was not in effect.

The contract, basically, attributed the copyright
to the vendor, who only conferred usage right

to the government and the citizens.

This is a mistake that we will not repeat.

At the moment, we don't have the legal recourse
for the current generation of plugin systems

to be relicensed as free software.

I tried.

[laughs]

The easiest way is just for the next version
of identification methods, such as the national

healthcare card, which, by the way, is currently
in public consultation.

If you want to contribute, like you demand
free software stack for the entire Medicare

system, please feel free to go to join.gov.tw,
where we are now asking for consultation on

people who are looking to virtualize their
universal Medicare card and/or to use NFC-based

authentication.

We want to know about people's preference
when it comes to the technology, to the regulations,

as well as to the total cost of ownership,
and also of usage.

If you feel strongly about it, please do contribute
online on Join platform, so that we can say

to the people writing the contracts that people
really feel that it is very important for

our next-generation authentication methods
to be nonproprietary.

Eight people would like to know, "What is
your opinion on e-commerce application refusing

to operating on restriction-free devices like
rooted Androids and jailbroken iDevices.

Is it fair?"

Mostly, I think they do this with the call
to "fraud prevention."

[laughs] It's not about fairness.

I think it is about the choice or the freedom
of choice or the liberty of users.

The reason why GDSP prefers free software
is because when it comes to healthcare or

tax filing, there really is no choice.

To be a citizen in Taiwan, you have to go
through some government-sponsored API endpoints

to produce some government-sponsored form
data and so on.

Because there is no choice, we really need
to be open so that people can hold us to account

to be more transparent and also innovate on
existing solutions.

For e-commerce applications where there are
no de facto monopolies, when people still

have a choice, the government, at the moment,
does not take a stance against the e-commerce

apps who uses fraud detection or prevention
methods that result in incompatibility with

rooted Androids and jailbroken iDevices.

I think one of the possible direction out
of this dilemma is to basically talk to people

who work on "fraud prevention," just like
how we talked with the high-speed rails and

the government agencies providing iTaiwan
software and WiFi for free.

We basically said, "You can do your fraud
prevention or cybersecurity on another layer

in this system and not in the particular layer
of requiring a captive portal and the MAC

address, which is very easy to spoof anyway."

I think just by talking to people like this,
or we talk to people who advocate copyright

protection through blocking of the Internet.

We say with IPv6, it's getting more and more
impossible.

Watermarking or real-time watermarking methodologies,
it infringes on the consumers' or customers'

experience is less.

It is actually a better solution overall than
just banning entire websites.

People have legitimate interest.

There are legitimate stakes.

As I said, often we think of it as like a
tug of war, but in many different cases, it

is possible actually with some what we call
social innovation, an innovation that basically

takes care of all the different sides of interest
and leaves nobody worse off.

I would encourage people who feel strongly
about it to contact your local, friendly e-commerce

association like [Mandarin] , who does have
a forum to talk about things like this.

We use that forum to talk about fraud detection
and prevention of people selling counterfeit

goods on Facebook to pretty good effect.

I would also encourage you to contact your
local association about it.

"Can we see any legislator supporting free
software in the government movement, like

Public Money, Public Code from the EFF?"

In Taiwan, when you see this government, the
GDSP, we already say this.

This is public code.

This is open data.

This is open standards and also common APIs.

We used also a Linux Foundation project called
OAS 3.0, which was Swagger, to state that

all the different systems built, as long as
it has a machine-to-machine component, need

to adhere to this machine-to-machine open
API specification.

The reason why we put an equal amount of attention
on the source code license versus the machine-to-machine

integration is that if we only talk about
public code or the license, it is very often

that a system integrator will deliver something
that is technically free software, but it

depends on, for example, expensive Oracle
systems or even more expensive DB2 systems.

That basically still restricts the reuse across
different ministries and agencies.

By saying for all the import and export, for
all the batch-level access, by basically treating

machine-to-machine accessibility the same
way we treat universal access, like for blind

people...

We basically say while you may still depend
on Oracle or DB2 at a point, the next vendor

can just build on your API and even batch
export what's in this public money-paid database

and rebuild a service without depending on
any proprietary technological stack.

I would argue that the freedom of portability
is as important as freedom to fork and freedom

to reuse.

Both are of course very important.

Constitutionally, I am not supposed to speculate
on legislators, but [laughs] there is various

younger legislators in all the different parties
who are also interested in this area.

Is there any chance, eight people would like
to know, that I can urge deans of higher education

facilities like NCTU to deploy IP version
6.

It's a bootstrapping problem, isn't it? [laughs]

This year, we see a surge of IPv6 adoption,
actually, after TWNIC changed hands and [laughs]

embrace a very IPv6-first roadmap.

We see, for example, Chunghwa Telecom has
drastically increased the IPv6 connectivity

of their mobile clients.

We also see other telecoms and other peering
institutions and ISPs starting to adopt this

trend.

Once there's sufficient amount of people using
the clients that are IPv6-enabled and even

IPv6-preferred, there will be sufficient pressure
then for the service providers to provide

as good, if not better, service over IPv6.

I feel your QQ.

I help you, your QQ. [laughs] 幫 QQ, right?

I think really, it is up to the students,
the clients, and the users of the Internet,

the last-mile providers to first build a useful
and usable IPv6 environment before we can

then demand the service providers to do so.

We are seeing pretty good trends as of this
year.

If you come back next year, I think there
will be sufficient demand from the user side

to have the institutional Internet service
providers to provide IPv6 also.

I'm technically out of time, so I'll just
take one last question.

What is my opinion of the European Union General
Data Protection Regulation, or the GDPR?

My opinion is that the GDPR is a much-needed
conversation that translates the idea of data

from what people will confuse with assets,
intellectual properties, which are leaky abstractions

that doesn't mean anything to a, what we call,
data agency a relationship-based worldview.

Basically, as a government institution, if
I hold your data, this is a beginning of a

relationship where you can ask what happens
to the data, who can update the data, so it

reflects the purpose.

If I try to use the data in any other way
other than pure statistics, I need to check

with you first, so that you can know what's
going on, and provide the most up-to-date

data.

Instead of leaving just a shadow digital trail
that's five years out of date, that results

in more bias.

I think data agency, data as a relationship,
and also data accountability.

Accountability interestingly only translate
in Mandarin as three different words.

For people who ask for accountability, it's
called 問責.

For us who are held accountable, it's called
當責.

A system within it that holds both sides together,
the relationship, is called 課責機制,

or an accountability mechanism.

So 課責 is a relational concept.

It is not a one-time transactional concept.

I think GDPR is a much-needed wake-up call
for everybody to see data as a relationship,

as not as some digital asset or intellectual
property.

Thank you very much.

[applause]