Would you care for a coffee, or water?
I’m good, thanks.
Yeah, so, Kiwi Foo. I’m sorry I couldn’t make it.
It was awesome there. My first one.
(laughter)
You’ve been there before?
I have, yeah.
Oh, you did?
A couple, yeah.
I knew Nat for ~20 years, and the Foo unconference format, we have replicated it a lot here in Taiwan. However I didn’t know that Nat went back to New Zealand — and I didn’t know that he brought the Foo there with him.
It’s been going strong for a long time.
A decade or something?
It’s amazing. Every time, it’s still fresh. It’s really interesting, just the different constellations of people. Some projects go nowhere, and other projects head off in expected and really interesting directions. Other ones just go...
I think it’s a hundred new people every time? That helps.
The diversity status is also awesome... I was so surprised; it meant something. In Silicon Valley, when people threw up something like this, sometimes they just gather people very similar to them, but this time in New Zealand, it was perfect.
Silicon Valley is so yesterday.
[laughs]
First off, I bring greetings for Pia and the team.
Just give you a little background on myself, I’ve been working with the Service Innovation Lab at the Department of Internal Affairs. Pia invited me into the group. I’ve been doing stuff on and off there as a consultant part time, generally between one and two days a week since October of last year. My main job is public private sector engagement.
My own history is in the IT industry. I’m a dev by trade, started programming when I was 11 years old. I grew up in the States, in Los Angeles, emigrating to New Zealand on 1982. I’ve been there for around 35 years. I actually got rid of my US citizenship in 2015.
Wow. What made you do you it?
I’m a not native Kiwi.
A naturalized Kiwi.
Yeah, naturalized. I’ll always feel not quite completely there. But I tell my kids, "I’m more Kiwi than you are. I been here longer." They just laugh at me. When the current regime looked like it was going to take over in the States, I thought, "Well, I really don’t have much ties here other than my parents." I thought I’d just make the jump.
Anyway, I started a startup in the early ’90s during Internet systems integration. My wife and I started this business. Started in our garage, grew it to 40 people in Wellington and Auckland, and then sold it to a multinational accounting firm.
With the proceeds, I’ve been doing angel investments, and helping other startups, and building the startup ecosystem in Wellington in New Zealand. Since 2002 when I started doing that, it’s just completely mushroomed and blossomed.
There’s a point, up until about five years ago, I knew every startup and every founder in Wellington. You’ve been to Wellington?
Yeah. For the Open Source // Open Society conference.
Open source. That’s right. We met there.
Yeah. It’s lovely.
It’s a small town, but about five years ago I just lost track of [all the startups], and now there’s just so much stuff going on. There are so many different things happening in traditional tech startups, and social enterprise, and the NGOs, the government now is really taking that on. It’s really exciting.
I’ve invested in a bunch of startups, and I had a big exit last year which was great. There’s a company called Publons, and what they do is academic peer review as a service, giving researchers credit for the work that they do on peer review. That was acquired by Clarivate Analytics. The founders are absolutely ecstatic.
They get to work, basically play the big time now, and they’re all working really well. The investors were super happy, the founders are happy, everybody’s happy. It was really good.
Awesome win.
Yes. I have 15 other startups that I’m working with. I also work at Creative HQ, which is a local accelerator and incubator.
I’ve heard of it.
...in Wellington. I do that part-time, and work on my startups part-time. I’m really interested in a confluence of startup, government, social enterprise, open source because I’m an open source person from way back.
Before the term open source? That was in ’97...
Yeah. I’ve been doing...
...Free Software folks...
...Open Source. I installed my first Linux in ’92 or ’93 so...
...I joined around ’94 or so.
I’m a little bit older than you.
You don’t look that.
(laughter)
You, sir, are a liar.
(laughter)
Sorry about that.
It’s OK.
Anyway, been really following this stuff that you’re doing with interest. I talked to Pia before I came over. I’ve come over to work with David Kuo. He has this incubator, iiiNNO, triple I-N-N-O.
I’m working with him. He and I are both part of the Startup Nations group. This is people from the startup ecosystems from all over the world trying to coordinate stuff that’s going in their own country, not in a directive way but just in an assistive way, but also to help better connect our local startups with the world.
I think for Taiwan and New Zealand, we’re islands. We’re very geographically isolated. You guys a little less.
Without the Internet, we would be nothing in the startup scene.
That’s right. Just getting people to cooperate with each other and share people, technology, and ideas is really important to us. We’ve been going to these Startup Nation summits for a few years together and trading startup teams, so we’re looking for ways to do more work together.
David’s just establishing the local Global Entrepreneurship Network Board here in Taiwan. I went to a meeting with him on Monday. Jaclyn Tsai was there. I met her. She’s fantastic.
She’s my mentor. I was her understudy.
It’s nice that you can do that across party boundaries as well.
We’re both Independents, as far as I know.
I thought she was in the last Cabinet?
She worked with the last Cabinet. But her Premier at the time, Simon Chang who came from Google as a director of engineering, is also Independent. Mayor of Taipei City for the matter of fact also Independent. Here we have a bunch of Independent people.
That’s good. Politics here are completely baffling to me. I’m trying to avoid getting too involved. I was really impressed with her history and what she’s doing. I was aware that she was one of your big supporters.
There are a couple things I wanted to discuss with you specifically. I guess the first one is how can we cooperate more between the Service Innovation Lab and what you’re doing here at the Startup Hub?
As a matter of fact, we’re in the "digitaln" Slack.
I know. I joined.
Brenda send us invitations. Our interaction designer, service designer, and myself -- I guess political designer? Have joined already the Slack channel, and we’d be happy to join Basecamp or Wikis, whatever.
As far as I know, you’re also checking out our GitHub repositories?
We are.
There’s this daily operational level that we can already coordinate a lot because we develop completely in the open. There’s no system that we use that are proprietary. If there were proprietary ones like Pol.is, we convince the hell out of the creator so that it’s not proprietary. [laughs]
Most of the time, I find the problem is not in the license. It’s in it was designed for Heroku or it was designed for a hosted environment. It’s very difficult to make it run truly independently.
We help that too. We have a container system called Sandstorm. It’s very easy to port application to run inside it. That’s what we’ve done. We ported Pol.is to run completely independently and publish how we do it last week.
We have a lot of interest in New Zealand civic tech applications. The first one I encounter is in 2014, Loomio. It was pretty ugly back then and doesn’t really work with mobile phones that well. But it has really matured and is now very beautiful.
I participated in the NZ digital service standards consultation...
...and brought our conversations here, how to avoid vendor lock-in, how to get minister-level support, how to consider front line staff as well as users and so on into the consultation process. I don’t know whether they’ll be received. But we’re doing a lot of those day to day operational connections.
For those guys, the Loomio team, it’s just a question of resources. They’re still struggling with their business model and how to continue funding themselves.
Because they build and survey social enterprise and coop-ish platforms social enterprise. Is that the norm in New Zealand?
OK. When I was visiting Enspiral, they’re like, "We’re connecting all this kind of platform coops." I was very impressed. Then they’re like, "Well, there’s nobody else in New Zealand doing this."
They’re thought leaders. They’re leading by example. People are waiting to see how successful they are in what they’re doing. Hopefully they’ll be super successful, and the world will rush in to that business model or whatever it develops into.
Are you advisor or friends, mentor?
Wellington’s a small town. I’ve known those guys for...I don’t know. The original Enspiral people, Joshua Vial...Did you meet Joshua?
Yeah, also I saw his presentation at OS//OS.
I’ve known him for at least 10 years, working around the same teams. We all support each other in Wellington, we try to anyway, because it is a small town. We try to all make progress.
If you’ve met Jaclyn, she’s also mentoring this growing open source by default ecosystem with very similar startups. That is also another norm in Taipei.
We have a very large open source community with annual events, with thousands of active supporters.
That’s great.
So we’re on pretty firm ground when people want to grow startup out of it. There’s also of course large corporations, social enterprises like Mozilla, who have hundreds of people in Taiwan. Recently, they downsized. People already agree with the free software protection model and went on to start their own groups.
We have a loose coalition of open source folks, some of them interested in civic tech as under the umbrella term of "g0v", or gov-zero. The underlying community is a 10 times larger open source startup system and ecosystem.
I think there’s a lot of coordination that we can do on the operation level.
That’s good. In terms of exchanging people as well, it would be great if we could get one or two of your team [to come to New Zealand].
We have fellows from Enspiral visiting a couple times. We also brought our startups and social enterprises to the Social Enterprise World Forum that was in Christchurch.
There’s this board of investors, local people looking to invest in these ideas and one of the Taipei startup person doing...What they do is that they hand handicapped, wheelchair people use iPads.
They become universal designers and prospect the hotels and whatever and build a network so that they can figure out word of mouth and evidence to let their handicapped community to choose the hotels that are friendly to their co-design. Pretty good business mode actually.
I think they’re well received in Christchurch, many of participants based in Wellington also who pretty like the idea. We look forward to do more of this in future.
This May on the 5th and 6th, we’re doing a Social Enterprise Summit. Then we’re also inviting people from New Zealand, I think Alex Hannant from Ākina is coming.
You know Alex well?
We had a long conversation around social enterprise and social innovation.
What we’re looking at for the May event is that we’re going to take all the best ideas and pitches here, maybe many of them already in Mandarin, in Chinese, but not yet in English, and provide all the translations, either interpreted or printed, so that they can see whether this idea makes sense.
If not that particular social enterprise, at least the social innovation can be brought back and inspire other people, that is our main goal.
When I was talking exchanging people, I was specifically talking about the Service Innovation Lab within the government as well. It’d be great to have a couple of our people come over here for a week or two.
We totally support that. One of our fellow interaction designer, Shu Yang, at the moment in Italy for the #crowdlaw gathering. A few months ago, she was in Tokyo for two months, just like the fellow idea you proposed.
Would you like to, for example, one person here, one person there, and we share for two months?
I think it’d be better actually if they didn’t exchange at the same time, but have one person go over and then another person come over. Do it that way.
OK, let’s do that. How soon? Where do I sign? [laughs]
I don’t have any budget control...
(laughter)
...unlike you. I will definitely talk to Pia and her boss about that...
...and see what we can’t do.
From what you see on the web, PDIS is 25 people plus 35 interns. But the hardcore, all full-time, not distracted here is about 20 people.
Not distracted!
(laughter)
How large is the lab there?
We currently have 11 people. Most of them are full time. Some of them are part time. Some of them are advisors. To be honest, the funding situation still hasn’t settled down after the election. As you know...
I thought you moved under Clare?
We are under Clare. Clare’s at the front. The machinery of government takes a while to catch up. [laughs] We’re still in that catch-up phase.
There’s a deployment process. [laughs]
Yeah. How should I put it? The machinery of government takes a while to move. Once that settles down and the budget’s finalized, we should be in a good position.
Is this fellow exchange idea part of the Digital N?
We could do it either as part of that, or not part of it.
Of course. I was just looking up...Because that’s Pia’s idea by the way, for each member state or place to mark the skills of the person we’re willing to share, once that we have abundance, and also declare the ones that we really, really need but we can’t find locally. Then do a global...
I like the approach of starting to work online together first. Then once we...
Certainly.
...figure out where everyone is, then we can figure out which skills would be best deployed in each place.
In addition to contributing, if we send a person over from New Zealand, it’s as much about us learning about what you’re doing and gaining skills for ourselves in this round and vice versa. I think the more we can exchange those skills and help build up each other’s skills and build a common language and common methodologies between us and common culture, it makes the future a much better place.
Are there particular people who would like to visit Taiwan? Do you count as one of those people?
I could I suppose. I’m interested.
Awesome. Welcome aboard! You’re hired.
(laughter)
I wasn’t doing this for myself though. That was not my intention.
I know.
I’m more concerned about the group. I’m an old bugger. I think it’d be really good for someone who’s earlier off in their career to have the opportunity. We’ll see where that goes. That was one thing I wanted to discuss.
Another thing is part of the portfolio of things that I do, Service Innovation Lab is only one small part. As I said, I do work down at Creative HQ with accelerators and incubators.
We’re running a GovTech accelerator program (https://creativehq.co.nz/portfolio/lightning-lab-govtech/) in July. We’d love to have a Taiwanese government team who wants to make really rapid progress in an external environment come to New Zealand for three months and be part of that acceleration program.
The teams are generally composed of one or two people from the public sector, one or two people from the private sector, the subject area expert in terms of the area that’s being developed. We put these people into, the three of them...
How long?
12 weeks.
Three months. We’re doing exactly the same thing here as of this month. Did you know that?
No, I didn’t know that.
We call it the Presidential Hackathon. It’s the same idea.
A 12-week hackathon.
Presidential hackathon. ( https://presidential-hackathon.iii.org.tw/ )
[laughs]
The judge is me and a bunch of friends. The PM, the project manager, is the office of the President herself. She oversees the finalists, the final 5 teams. If any of them make sense to integrate into the public service, having the President as the PM means there will be no excuse from the senior executive of not giving the resource or data.
It’s very much the same idea. We have the front line staff. We have the private sector who actually maybe already have for years a better idea of how to run public service. It was blocked by budget, by cross-department communication issues, by lack of data, you name it.
That’s a polite way of putting it, "cross-department communication issues." [laughs]
Exactly, the silo effect. Our idea is to let people propose their ideas. They don’t have to have all the skills in their team. Then we do a public call for talents, actually overseas people are welcome too, which will happen three weeks from now or something to join one of those implementation ideas.
If you propose something that’s too out there, nobody will join. That would fizzle. If something actually works and is for social good, then likely a team will form.
Then the mentors who are all the equivalent of head of GDS or the equivalent of head of MIS and so on will become mentors and then see the idea to completion and to be judged by the President herself. That’s the idea.
How long does that process go?
Three months. We’ll be just fine. It’s starts at the open date, the call for ideas. It ends at June 2.
Is that written up anywhere?
Yeah, it’s Presidential Hackathon. I can send you that link.
That’d be great. I’d really appreciate it.
Yours start at...
In July.
Goes all the way to November?
July, August, September.
So it ends at September, what would you do?
We have a demo day. Typically, the New Zealand teams bid for funding from government. We’re integrated into the procurement process.
There is a earmarked procurement portion for this?
There is.
Cool. That’s something we don’t have.
It’s not a lot.
(laughter)
Don’t get too excited. It’s like $50,000.
Well, it’s something.
It is something. We’re working on tweaking that process as well. One of my dreams is to actually get a good chunk of funding available so that there can be pre-approved procurement.
Do you see the timeline of our two three-month hackathon perfectly coincide? We can have the winning teams come to your competition.
[laughs]
Seriously. Because I imagine there has been many very common problems. Maybe it needs a local domain knowledge and to tweak into the local regulations. I think the core social innovation will be similar.
What’s sorts of problems have you been tackling in past?
This kind of hackathon, at the Presidential level, is the first one.
How many have you run?
On the city level, directly backed by the city government, there was about two dozens. If you include ones from civil society, then it’s hundreds. There’s a hackathon every week now here in Taiwan.
I mean the three month one.
It was piloted at the city level. I think it’s been run for three cohorts. This is the first one in the national level, which is not that much larger than city anyway. The theme again stays disaster recovery and public health, youth, development, and job finding and social security and aging process, helping aging, and environment and energy, transportation and tourism. That is a very wide net.
It is. In terms of the specific projects that have dropped out, what’s the most interesting?
The feature cases I think...I really think we need to translate this, unless you happen to read Chinese.
I don’t, unfortunately. I feel very bad about that being here.
No, it’s just fine. I seen that on my laptop I just had. My country, things upside down.
The link is just Presidential Hackathon. There’s this video made by my friends. These are the highlights from previous cases. Let’s see if Google Translate respects their spirit. Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t.
There’s one using machine learning, supervised learning, to construct fire risk prediction model. It works Gaozhong City. This is the fire isle address.
The idea very easily speaking is to make a geospatial correlation and also future detection of what leads to fire and what leads to fire where and to deploy the fire fighter more effectively. I think this is already well integrated into the public service.
Like "Minority Report" for fires.
Exactly.
[laughs]
There’s less privacy concerns with just fires because we don’t put out fires before they start.
(laughter)
This one actually I was the project lead is the MoE dictionary. What it does is that it integrates the Taiwanese Hakka, Holo, in Chinese as well as English, French, Deutsch into this handy pocket dictionary thing.
In addition of being very popular on Facebook because if you want a OG graph, you just put https://moedict.tw/ plus whatever Chinese characters you want to say, it just makes a pretty OG banner for it, so you can share. You can tweak the fonts. The marketers love it.
In any case, we build on top of it a urban dictionary. It’s not just the national government but for indigenous people. The Siamese people here use this to revitalize their dictionary because all they had was what the missionary did back in the ’60s or ’70s.
Then we build this crowdsourced dictionary site so that everybody can add in more definitions to grow a language so to speak. There’s apps. There’s all sort of showcases that you can do with dictionary data.
Dumb question, I assume that’s open source?
Of course. It’s not just open source, it’s Creative Commons Zero.
I’m asking about the code rather than the content.
The code is Creative Commons Zero. One of the peculiar thing of g0v is that we use CC Zero code as well which makes it very easy in the next procurement cycle for the vendor to say, "Hey, we wrote this code," because CC zero is compatible with everything and integrates directly into the public service.
Just very recently, like last year, we have incorporated OpenAPI and SPDX compatbility into our procurement regulations. SPDX is a Linux Foundation thing that allows any project to list all the open source dependencies that it have and thereby waive themself of warranties and stuff.
We made this officially part of our procurement process so that people can use open source very easily including AGPL which was the major headache before.
What was wrong with AGPL?
AGPL says you have to allow if you have a website to completely download of not just the code it runs but also all the dependent code that it runs, so not just itself but everything it touches. Without things like SPDX, the border is a bit fuzzy to the procurement people. If you run it on Solaris, do you have to provide a copy of Solaris?
(laughter)
Of course, nobody interpret that that way, but because the government procurement did not ever rule for that, it could be interpreted in the most risky way, which is why the procurement people didn’t like AGLP. Because we made it into procurement rule now, there’s a standard interpretation.
Because we give away also our copyright even in the old procurement regime, because it’s Creative Commons Zero, this is also made into part of procurement process.
There’s a domestic violence risk warning system. There’s a typhoon outage forecast. It’s integrated with the National Weather System would have the integrated weather system of all the different layers of geodata and weather data and meteorological trends and so on. These are what have worked before. We’re reusing it for this time, this competition.
When the teams come out of the Presidential Hackathon, how many of them are successful in continuing on?
Depend on what do you mean by successful. In g0v, everything is CC0 or similarly liberally licensed. We have a lot of teams just starting like me to solve a particular problem which is the mobile phone doesn’t display the Chinese Mandarin dictionary.
Then because it’s CC0, people take it to all the indigenous places, the different cultures. These are not the same thing as the original team. People change a lot. The project continues.
Do people mind that?
Not at all. That’s the beauty of the g0v model because it’s just excuse for us to meet every week, every month, or every couple month, hundreds of people. We don’t attach overtly to the projects themselves.
I think that’s really how CC0 technologically affects a community. If there’s CC attribution, you see a long list of growing names. If it’s CC0, it’s just in the commons.
It is what it is, yeah. I’m just trying to work this back to the individual level in terms of people committing themselves, long-term, full-time to working on one of these projects, without that continuity, without the funding commitment from the government agency that’s actually using whatever it is that’s coming out.
There’s grants in the Open Culture Foundation, which a large part of the momentum. A part of g0v works on the civic tech that may probably paints the government’s misdoings in a bad light. For that, they tend to seek independent funding, for very good reasons.
I think the main sourcing mechanism for impact investing, or whatever we call it now, is outside of the government. The government has a national development fund. We match up to, I think, 20 percent of the stock options before.
Now, we match to whatever that is the largest investor. Technically, we can do 49 percent, but that rarely happens. There’s all these angel funds, matching funds, and grants from the government level, but none of them enable the government to have a majority stock or voting position. The majority always come from the private sector.
Are any of those projects taken on internally within government, so they say how this is...?
Internally?
Like the civil service become part of this resource?
Before I become the digital minister, it’s mostly on the data visualization level. Many project at this level become very popular with civil servants. We have visualization and simulation for labor law.
You can do your hours, and they tell it whether you violated code, or you would have the, this is the Taipei city budget. Taipei City commits to publish a machine-readable budget every year, along with the human-readable one.
I think this is really innovative, because not only you can drill down to the budget that you like -- and it has spread to, like, seven cities -- but also, each and every one is a discussion board. You can talk about it with civil servants.
This is the Taipei City level. Now, after I become the digital minister, I just took all those good ideas, and put them into a national level. Now, all the ministries are on board, and you can see visualization of each and every ministry’s budget spending, and how it’s being measured.
The procurement budget, how much of it is used, the main KPIs, and which company they contract open spending, basically. Again, people can talk about it. This is now firmly part of the government process.
How hard was it to convince people that this was a good idea?
People? The general public already loves it, right?
It’s the different ministries, right? Well, yeah, obviously.
The Ministers? My main strategy...
Not so much the ministers as the people below them.
The senior executives? Yeah, my main strategy is this. Everything I do is on a voluntary basis. As an anarchist, I don’t issue commands or edicts for the matter. It has to be voluntarily. If the Ministry of, say, Defense didn’t want to join this program, I don’t force them to. That’s the disclaimer.
Then I try to sell it either to save time for junior public servants, or reduce risk for mid-levels, or to create credibility for seniors. That’s the main three motivations. I think many civic tech projects fail, because they optimize for one or two of the heavy sacrifice of the other.
Someone will block. Because those three are not fungible, it won’t work if one of them is blocked. It has to take in the form a Pareto improvement, in the sense that you can improve one of it, and not sacrifice any other two. It will surely move forward.
For example, when this system was first introduced a year and a half ago, I say, "OK, only the major project, the national-wide project that is directly overseen by the executive here at the administration level, cross-ministry level."
We don’t publish the one that’s self-managed by the ministry. It’s a fraction, like 10 percent, but it reduce risk for the mid-level. It also saves time. As time goes by, people can see that by responding fully, the legislatures, the reporters stop asking them the same basic questions over and again.
They get much more interesting conversations, and they are less likely to be affected by rumors, because the one that’s automatically published is very good in SEO. If you search for a project, you’re likely to find the actual data, whereas before, they have to reply individually, mail-by-mail.
For the junior ones, it’s very much time-saving. They didn’t see that at first, but after a few months, they do. Again, there is credit at the senior executive level, because whenever we do a discussion like this, I publish the whole transcript online, after 14 days of editing.
I just praise. All my slides, basically, are heaping praises of senior executives. I never really absorb the credit. Instead, I just keep saying, "Someone co-designed a tax filing system, and someone did a really good thing, and took the good idea out of it."
It’s all, for example, the Ministry of Finance, then it’s the PO Yang Ching-Heng’s idea, and so on. We have participation officers, and try to commend them as much as possible, and not command them at all. That gives them credit.
After a year of running this, they see, "OK, it’s a good idea," actually at the ministry level, too. They start to scale deeply by establishing participation officer teams within the ministry to different agencies and offices.
At the moment, the Ministries of Finance, of Welfare, of Interior, of Agriculture, has done this. Many others, maybe. I don’t remember. Once they do have this, then they will be open to the idea of having the ministry-level spending and ministry-level KPI also published on the same system, because it’s no risk to them.
The idea is just the minister, me, absorbs all the risk, and they get the credit and time saving thing. It’s working surprisingly well.
I think you just summed up the secret to success in life, really, is enabling other people to do cool stuff, and not being too proud about what you’re doing.
Exactly. I learned from the best: Larry Wall.
(laughter)
One of my personal heroes, so that’s good.
Is there any appetite for participatory budgeting? Is that integrated into the system together?
Yes. Taipei has been running PB for a couple years now. It’s pretty successful. Taichung also has PB. Gaozhong also. The New Taipei City has a really interesting kind of Chicago-style of PB, in the sense that they have earmarked money for city councilors.
A city councilor could already suggest particular projects. The city councilor basically offers that part into participatory budgeting. It’s also a very important tension in PB dynamic, which is the city council seeing it as taking away their, the general city power.
Now, the city councilor who offers up their portion is seen as heroes. It’s naturally aligned in the political arena.
Is there good engagement with normal people?
In Taipei City, I think, yes. I don’t know that much about Taichung or Kaohsiung.
Right. This is all at the city level, but not yet at the national level?
We don’t really know how to do national participatory budgeting, actually.
We have the system for it, but we don’t really know how to do it on the political level.
The national project, they’re very long-term. Usually, it’s like four years, minimum.
It’s less clear how we can do this kind of rapid pilot, pivot pilot pivot thing that normal PB dynamic really wants. Instead, we do e-petition. We have people e-petitioning, like 5,000 people, for a helicopter to be stationed in their southmost part of Taiwan, because too far from the largest hospital.
By bringing all the relevant ministries to there and have a five-hour discussion facilitated very well, we’ve discovered that actually, if we station a helicopter there to serve as an ambulance, you would take all their best doctors and nurse away, but they no longer have the experience of treating serious incidents there.
Instead, we should spend, I think, a few hundred million to rebuild the hospital building, to give them good service for their children, occasion, and so on, so it can retain the best talents. Before the dorm is ready, at least we should fly the high skill surgeons and whatever to this local hospital to practice.
So that when things happen, you can fly surgeons here, instead of flying people with a stroke there, which doesn’t make sense, and so on. It was a live streamed, focused conversation of 30 people. In the town hall, I was doing an ESPN anchor style play-by-play to the town hall people, who are not experts, and therefore needs translation.
Once they have questions that I can answer, I just answer. If they have good contributions, then they’re translated into expert language, and through Internet, go in into this smaller room. After this, everybody agree, "Yeah, building hospital, better idea. Helicopters, not so much."
That was a Friday. On the Monday, every Monday, I talk to the prime minister, and the other minister without portfolio. "This is our consensus last Friday. Do you think it’s OK if we spend a couple hundred million?"
The premier was like, "Are you sure that the local people will be OK with it?" I’m like, "Yeah, we explore all the other alternatives." A few weeks later, we got the budget there. It’s not quite PB. It’s e-petitioning, leading to budgeting, but we do that a lot.
Very exciting. [laughs]
It’s a fun job.
There are a couple of other things I wanted to run by you. One is that I developed a tool called the Lean Policy Canvas. You, as a ministry, must get involved in policy from time to time?
Yeah, of course.
We’ve just translated into Traditional Chinese. Have a look at it. It’s at https://leanpolicy.org. You can look at it right now if you want.
What’s the target audience?
The target audience is for people developing policies at the very early stage. I’m not a government person from way back. I’m a startup guy. Why don’t you download the Chinese one, actually? It’s bilingual.
No, it’s OK.
Go down. So, yeah.
Basically, are you familiar with the lean canvas?
Yeah, of course.
Basically, the lean canvas applied to policy development. It allows people to really rapidly work through, focus on the things that matter. What is the problem or opportunity that you’re trying to save? Who are the beneficiaries? What is the impact, before you start working out your interventions?
What I found was that people doing policy development, just like startup founders, they tend to focus on the product, rather than focusing on the problem that they’re trying to solve, or who they’re trying to solve it for.
It enables people to really rapidly sketch out policies, and use this as a discussion piece, either bring it further up the chain.
Lovely.
That might be something that you might want to consider using. It’s there on the site.
What we’ve been using is the Policy Lab canvas, the UK one. Let’s see how it compares.
I’ve seen that one.
You’ve seen that one?
Yeah. It’s a bit more complicated.
Yeah, it’s slightly more complicated. I think it doesn’t have the "roll-out strategy" and "key metrics" columns. Otherwise, it’s similar.
It is similar, yeah.
It’s good.
If that’s something you’re interested in, that’s good.
What we’re trying to do is, we’re trying to make this into an interactive system, where people can continuously fill in facts and discoveries in a collaborative fashion. Basically, make a Google Doc out of it.
We added plenty of hand-holding, what’s the term for that?
Like Clippy.
(laughter)
Hand-holding guides throughout the process.
We call it issue-based mapping, or IBM. I did not come up with that moniker.
(laughter)
In the government, it is called IBM. I’m sure it will sell much better, right?
This corresponds to the problem opportunity. This, to the stakeholders. This, to the current future resource part of the policy. Here is where you can interview the stakeholders and keep the interviews.
Here is what prompts it, whether is that from a ministry, from a petition, or the other political forces involved. The idea is that once we collaboratively fill it, it will automatically generate a canvas of this kind, or fill with Post-It Notes and connections between them.
This is more like a back end system for this front end system. This is something that we can also coordinate.
If you can send me a link to that as well, that’d be great. Is that multilingual, or is it...?
Not yet, but we’re happy to internationalize ourselves.
That’s exciting. Also, if you go back to the Lean Policy website, Brenda and I wrote a document called the...
Manifesto?
"...The Government Innovation Manifesto."
Yes, I went over this one when I was following your work.
Oh, really?
(laughter)
To be honest, I’m not sure where it’s going to go, or what we’re going to do with it, but I felt frustrated at the time of working government. Just a lot of people within government didn’t really understand how hard innovation is, and what the constraints are.
It was a collective outpouring of support for the people that are actually taking risks and doing innovative stuff.
This is more radical than the service design principle. The latter, you can get all this people, and your executive to sign without raising eyebrows.
This was...
[laughs] This is more radical. I think it’s like the Agile Manifesto. It’s not like this is a checklist that you have to complete 100 percent.
Not at all.
Not at all.
If you...
Any lists, to a senior executive, look like checklists.
(laughter)
I am speaking about Taiwan people. I don’t know about New Zealand.
There’s always that risk that people are going to look at something, and just turn it into a ticking the box exercise.
Anyway, I think this is definitely in the right direction, the right mindset.
Again, there’s a Google Doc. It’s there for anybody to do anything with if people want to contribute to it.
First, I am going to introduce you to Shuyang who already wants to work with your team for a couple month, either issue-based mapping, or what we call Holopolis, a speculative design thing.
I read the blog post.
I am going to put on YouTube. I am going to send you the not-yet-translated, but I promise very soon, presidential hackathon website, and also, the issue-based mapping. Also, if you’re interested in us localizing the content of your Creative HQ gathering, do you actively welcome international teams to participate as a team?
Oh, absolutely, yeah.
As a team, or as individuals joining?
Either way.
Either way, it’s cool.
We’re specifically looking for teams, but I can see the...
You’re specifically looking for teams?
It’s good. I will check it out, and see how we can localize the context, and send the teams your way.
That’s really interesting.
Bring their half-finished products and see how we can scale internationally.
That would be very cool.
If we can find four countries doing this, it would be a year-long recurring event.
Are you aware of other countries doing something like that?
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.
It’s pretty disorganized, from what I understand.
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.
I think Scotland are doing something as well.
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.
I expect that to grow. That [the digitaln slack] only started a couple of weeks ago.
You’re basically inviting all the points of contact of the seven countries?
I think so, yeah.
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.
The whole political situation, again, is, I just don’t understand it. I talked to my Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They said, "Oh, we don’t deal with Taiwan Central Government. We happily deal with the city."
That is entirely OK.
There’s good stuff here. [laughs]
No, it’s really OK. We’re fine with city-level engagement, actually. This is a city, you know? [laughs]
Yeah. To be fair, in a way, it forces you think that way. That’s a good way to think.
It is, it is.
If things are starting at the local level, and then building up to the national level, I think that’s really healthy.
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.
I think you don’t need to be official friends to be friends, anyway. [laughs] That’s good.
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.
That’s good. Thank you so much for taking notes for me. [laughs]
Do you have much pushback to your transcript policies?
The transcript? Not at all, not at all.
You can, after all, take out everything you said, so that it looks like me monologuing.
(laughter)
Somebody actually did that.
Really?
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?"
What an ironic reversal. That’s so beautiful. [laughs]
It’s usually the Minister who says that to journalists.
Exactly.
(laughter)
Anyway, non-journalists usually are OK with that.
You can’t make this shit up.
(laughter)
Do you have any plans to come back to New Zealand?
Oh, yeah, a lot. I hear there’s going to be a direct flight.
From Taipei?
Later, yeah, but it’s to Auckland, not to Wellington.
Everything goes to Auckland. Wellington goes to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane.
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.
I’m sure you’ll get invited again. [laughs]
Really? Half of people get rotated, you know. [laughs]
Nat and Jenine are the people you need to talk to.
OK, cool.
Good. Let me get a selfie, if that’s all right.
Of course. Or Sheau-Tyng can help us.
Unless you strongly prefer selfies.
OK. [laughs]
Where?
Just use this.
One, two, three. OK.
OK. I’ll send you the links.
Thank you so much. It’s so great to meet you. I’m disappointed that I haven’t spent more time with you when you’ve in New Zealand. Next time you do come...
Yeah, next time.
...will be, if you want to hang out. We’re really impressed with what you’re doing. Let’s keep in touch.
Very much so.
See you.
Cheers.
Cheers.