Closing Keynote #OGPLocal #OGP16 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHJcl9Oy45U
[applause]
Hi everyone. I've got 10 minutes and I'll try to make full use of it. I'm the Digital Minister of Taiwan and I'm very happy to share with you the stories that we've had in the past few years in Taiwan by opening the government as now the fundamental value of Taiwan government.
This January we elected our new president, Dr. Tsai Ing‑wen. I voted for her, not knowing that I'll join her cabinet about two months ago.
I voted for her because I live with seven cats and two dogs, and she leads with very similar values, like animal welfare, crime reduction, marriage equality. It's considered radical and progressive by Asian centers and some are progressive by European centers.
One of those values is really the idea of trusting the people enough so that people can trust you back. It's the open government sphere. This is literally our first family.
During the election, which was January and the actual transformation of power took four months, it was during January to May and it was completely peaceful. It was orchestrated by our previous prime minister who is a independent, non-partisan super‑computing engineer. It was completely peaceful because he belongs to no parties.
Simon Chang's main contribution was placing Taiwan, second place on the world economic forum network readiness index and a first place in the global open data index by mandating all the ICT system should be opened by default.
Our new cabinet is made of more independent people than people of any party, so including the new prime minister and me, and the two independent prime ministers arranged transfer of power by uploading everything, a checkpoint of government to the Internet and asking the next government to download it. It's putting complete trust to the people.
There's the new norm, our Taipei City Mayor, our Vice President, our all through transparency independent politicians. This happened after three decades of bitter partisan politics in Taiwan, and so we occupied parliament for 22 days.
The MPs was on strike, not refusing to deliberate towards this agreement and the students occupied to deliberate it ourselves, using ICT technologies as a demo of how to scale deliberative listening, this half a million people.
Most of the ICT was done by this movement of gov zero. Basically we register a domain g0v.tw that stands for every government website, gov.tw for environment. If you change the "O" to a zero, you get into a shadow of government that is by open source and participatory, this solves the discovery problem that we have.
Thousands of hackers hacked on this new ICT shadow government which then gets adopted by the real government in the next procurement cycle.
We have a lot of student hackers, thousands of them. Why is that? It's because when I learned personal computer it was in 1989. It was also that year where Taiwan got freedom of the press out of martial law.
Our first presidential election which was in 1996, was also the year where I used to rally...Where everybody in the world used to rally for campaigning.
For us free software means freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and that is so far has been the primary value of the Taiwan civil society.
By the end of 2014 other occupy supporters become new mayors. We have issue just like in Madrid, in other places in Spain. We now have to take the street technologies to put them to use in the government.
Our first issue to tackle is a virus of the mind that has been sweeping the world, is the name of the sharing economy, in particular Uber.
What it does is it's something that's spread between friends and drivers and passengers that says, "OK, algorithm now rules this cab system better than laws and regulations."
If people are using this kind of means, there will be a lot of protest and contest in the society. We try to fix this through deliberation, because by listening to other stakeholders very deeply we can get people inoculated against future propaganda. The oppression to us is like a vaccine of the mind.
To scale deliberation, we use the focus conversation method of asking everybody the facts, and then the feelings of those facts there's no right or wrong. We curate across those ideas. The best ideas are the one that address to most people's feelings. Then we rectify it into regulation.
It wasn't always the case. Usually the government is speaking extra language with private sector lobbyist and the civil society, the independence, others. It was radically a different set of facts and feelings with people on the street.
Ideas in this environment, we saw facts and caring other people's feelings become ideologies that blinds us to other people's feelings and their facts.
The first thing that we did was pooling all the scientific observable data about Uber, also from the private sector and civil society. We used artificial intelligence system called Polis, it's open source that reflects everybody's feelings on this two‑dimensional map for three weeks.
For each yes or no, you get a cluster of those people that share the same sentiments and we give binding power, agenda setting power to anyone who's feeling who can convince the super majority of people's feelings.
This is how we end up with a set of recommendations that people are comfortable and can live with. Then we'll hold a live consultation with all the stakeholders and try to ratify them into law. We succeeded. The deliberation was completed peaceful because it was live‑stream, it was watched by thousands of people.
It was ratified from all those happy users. The thing is that it works very well with the controversial topics where the press loves it. Now, it's going into other ordinary day‑to‑day issues.
This is my FAQ page. Everybody can ask me any question, and it only appears when I answer it. It's 2,000 subscribers, I shortcut the traditional media so that I have a direct contact with a lot of people.
For all the meetings, I accept all the meetings, this is Uber's daily proof. It was always recorded in 360. By the time he enters my room until he leaves my room, and everything got machine transcribed immediately after the meeting and published at most 10 days after each meeting that I take. It's a radical transparency gesture that also empowers investigative journalists.
What we're doing now is we're changing the procurement laws so that the investigative journalists and researchers don't have to go to 50 different data portals.
We're building Open API standard into all our new procurement contracts so that everything can be motion generated and integral in the same place.
This is how we work. Internally we have a PDIS team that is much like Etalab here or GDS or anywhere else. This is how we draw our weekly road‑map.
If you can see we're now 15 people in two offices, while used to work like this. We're now used to work like this, it's an open source clone of Trello that we use day‑to‑day.
Based on the government cloud, we deployed three open software technology on this one‑click install, like an app platform called Sandstorm.io that we can share with anybody in other ministry in local government, the deployment cost is zero.
This is how we're effecting the local government and the national government with the public additional innovations in the PDIS space.
To conclude, would you please next all the way five steps. Voting is something everybody can do. Open data is something that people use to vote. We set up this finding questionnaire, answers and everything, so that people can all the way go up to the general sitting power.
We understand that not everybody can get to the higher levels, but on every level there is a connection to people ‑‑ up on the ladder and down on the ladder. It's a ladder of knowledge acquisition, so that people see exactly how much government trust them and we expect civil society to trust exactly the same amount back.
This is how we breakdown and filter bubbles. By setting up at least 60 days prior to every regulation change to have all the stakeholders' data cases in public and using this kind of technology to translate people who are not so good at writing and reading into automated translations, transcript formats and facilitation formats.
We try to get all the regulations into day‑to‑day cycle on open government's data. To conclude Dr. Tsai Ing‑wen during her inauguration speech said democracy used to be a show down between two opposing values. Now it has to be a conversation between many diverse values.
We need to build a unified democracy that is not hijacked by ideology. Efficient democracy that responds to scientist needs. Foremost, a pragmatic democracy that lets people take care of each other's feelings. We do this by listening.
As an anarchist hacker, what I do is to share all these tools that we build for ICT enable scalable listening and share it with the world.
Thank you very much.
[applause]
One last thing. I know people in the international community, some view Taiwan as a province or as a region or a country, it's all OK. We are very much willing to participate in whatever way we can. Thank you so much.