Audrey Tang: Yes, we had that. We’re planning to extend it to foreign residents, non citizens as well to authenticate using their resident certificate number. That’s like the only missing link because our universal healthcare already covers most of foreign people who are residents.

Audrey Tang: In our case, we work with the mask distribution partners, including local pharmacy and local convenience store kiosks, and so on. We expect the elderly people to either take their health card or give the health card to someone they trust, and they can complete the reservation in a nearby pharmacy or a convenience store.

Audrey Tang: Of course, we have an online website as well.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Audrey Tang: Yes. The kiosk is like an ATM, but developed by the conveniece store chains. People would insert the health card. Because it’s just a terminal. We only have to build four authentication lines for all four major convenience store chains. That has more than 12,000 kiosks.

Audrey Tang: By inserting the card, they pick for the next week a nearby vaccination site, whether it’s morning, afternoon, or evening, in the day that they prefer.

Audrey Tang: It’s easy to self service, Of course, the convenience store staff may also help.

Audrey Tang: No, it’s not specialist help. If the elderly people professional help, I think they will seek a pharmacist. The pharmacist will make a more full explanation.

Audrey Tang: Yes, please do. I would love to learn about the way of digital transformation.

Audrey Tang: Yes. Thanks to the AstraZeneca shots from Japan, that you have so generously donated, I’ll be able to get my second shot, and therefore, travel.

Audrey Tang: Yes. I will be quarantining for at least a week after going back to Taiwan I’m sure. I’ll be also happy to join any online events during that time.

Audrey Tang: A lot of time to follow up with videoconference meetings and so on.

Audrey Tang: Yes, definitely. I love to talk about these. The planning is sound. It’s really good. From the digital services worldwide, we’ve learned that recruitment and procurement are the two things that if you fix everything else follow, but if one of these doesn’t work, then it’s tend to create pressure on the other pillar. It’s like walking with two legs.

Audrey Tang: As I understand, that means you can veto other ministries, digital products, and digital projects. Another thing to think is about work with municipalities and cities.

Audrey Tang: If you think design is not good for cybersecurity reason or really any reason, then you can veto it and basically force a better design?

Audrey Tang: Our approach, which may or may not apply in your case, is simply having the national communication commission, the telecommunication competent authority send its almost top ranked, director-general level public servant into my office and work with me on a day to day basis. It’s like an on site customer in the agile world and secondment basically.

Audrey Tang: In my office, there’s a secondment from 12 ministries. There’s no decision. There’s only coordination. They learn that if they propose something that requires a, for example, the check-in system, the 1922 check-in system that rely on SMS infrastructure.

Audrey Tang: We can get coordination going very quickly, because it’s the career public service brainstorming on a solution together.

Audrey Tang: This kind of permanent dispatch, or on a rotating basis dispatch, are the core organizational structure in my office.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Basically each joining ministries bring their own resources.

Audrey Tang: The minister overseeing the Department of Cybersecurity can call out projects for failing cyber security standards. The Executive Yuan’s chief information officer – the minister chairing the open data consultation committee – can also call out projects that doesn’t conform to the open data standards, including OpenAPI.

Audrey Tang: All this means that the resources that we have are procedural ones, not dollars. So we work within existing procurement laws, which has primarily two devices.

Audrey Tang: One is so called discretionary budget. That is to say whenever any minister see that there’s an opportunity to do something useful, as long as it’s less than one million NT dollars, they may sign the check and skip the bidding process.

Audrey Tang: We have many of those small tenders that only requires the respective minister to sign. Because it’s all based on existing open innovation, each procurement will be, of course, lower than the discretionary cap, which means that the minister may skip the procurement process altogether. That’s our first device.

Audrey Tang: Our second device is that of emergency procurement. During COVID, there’s certain systems that’s defined as emergency, for example the eMask rationing system. In this case, the social sector and private sector partners may work on a project ahead of the completion of emergency procurement process. Then we invoke use the emergency procurement clause, and they are guaranteed to get the payment later on. That’s for larger deployments.

Audrey Tang: Using these two devices, we were able to shorten the regular procurement process.

Audrey Tang: Yes, definitely. Taiwan invoked that also during the original SARS outbreak. There’s precedent for that back in 2003.

Audrey Tang: Do you have this concept of discretionary budgets?

Audrey Tang: I see.

Audrey Tang: This regulation ensures the freedom of exploratory designs. One way our discretionary budget may work is that for each system, we may hire several different design teams exploring different possible solutions. We would eventually converge the experiments into actual implemented solutions.

Audrey Tang: If you decide on a waterfall model, then you cannot afford to pay five teams at once, because only one will win the bid. In our case, all five because there’s no bidding and because the budget is limited, we may just launch them simultaneously.

Audrey Tang: Excellent. Fortunately, I don’t have any meeting after this so, actually, I have 1.5 hours from now because these are very large topics. Instead of saying anything like the standardized answer, I prefer if we can just talk through the various points here. This call may be longer than our usual call then.

Audrey Tang: For the first question, the answer is “nothing about us without us”. If this is about the elderly people, then elderly people must participate in the design from day one. We hold many collaboration meetings that, in a structured way, makes sure that the people who are suffering from the pain and so on, can take the lead in setting the agenda.

Audrey Tang: We found crowd-sourced agenda setting could be really, really useful. For elderly people, 1922 is just a four digit phone number. If they have any suggestions to make for the counter pandemic, they just call 1922. It’s toll-free and works on a landline too. They just say whatever they want to make a suggestion of.

Audrey Tang: This large call center operation is actually behind a lot of our digital planning to make sure that the elderly people who have seen on the news of a new system, their concerns are answered from day one. I have a grandma who is 88 years old, and I run those new digital flows by her and her young friends, 77 years olds.

Audrey Tang: If they are happy with the flow, they tell me. If they are not happy, they tell me, also. This is important because we bring digital to elderly people. We’re not asking elderly people to come to technology. Elderly people are also digital. It’s just they use it in an unique way.

Audrey Tang: For example, the SMS based check-in system, they say they don’t want to scan a QR code. They don’t know how to use the scanner. They don’t want to install an app. We have to work with whatever apps that’s already on their phone. That’s how the SMS design came about.

Audrey Tang: Yes, so they just send SMS 1922 because they already trust that number. Then, type the 15 location code and then finish the check in. Only when it’s easier, and saves time compared to writing their phone number on a piece of paper, would they use the SMS. It has to save time.

Audrey Tang: Also, they need to feel safer. For example, if they write their phone number on a piece of paper and hand it to the venue when they check in, maybe the people who queue after them will see their phone number, compromising their privacy. If they use the SMS because the screen is private to them, nobody else will see their phone number other than their telecom – and their telecom already has their phone number anyway.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that they need to save time and they need to feel safer. These two cannot trade for one another; it must be simultaneous. Once they do, they love the process. They will take the lead to teach other 60 and 50 year olds.

Audrey Tang: Senior citizens also love to contribute to society. People who are in their 70s have a lot of time to contribute to society – most of them don’t have to do full time jobs. Because of that, they’re actually the best digital advocates. If they realize they don’t have to install anything, it saves their time and it reduces their risk, then they are glad to contribute.

Audrey Tang: I know. I’ve heard about the “nanakusa” app, I think. That’s her game published on the App Store.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. Masako Wakamiya is a great bridge to the culture of elderly people.

Audrey Tang: Yes, I worked with Apple for six years before joining the Cabinet. Especially when Siri is concerned, it is never the user’s problem. It’s always Siri’s problem.

Audrey Tang: Siri should anticipate what the user wants but never dictate what the user wants because people are more free form, freestyle when they talk to Siri. We need to anticipate that. There’s no reference manual. If you have to read a manual to talk to Siri, nobody would do that.

Audrey Tang: Because of that cultural influence, when I become digital minister, the first positions, the co-founder of my office is a designer from the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. Very shortly after, another service designer from Royal College of Art joined; our current design lead joined from IDEO.

Audrey Tang: Like many top designers, they find that interaction design, service design and strategy design are the bridging vocabularies connects the career public service on one side and the more IT-based programmers on the other side.

Audrey Tang: The two sides work on different timescales. As programmer, we build things out of thin air; the materials are very malleable. That is to say, as soon as you can think of it, we can implement it. The career public service works on the premise of certainty, where the laws and regulations defining the extent of possibilities. There’s no way that we simply invent five regulations and pass them after one brainstorming session. It doesn’t work like that. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The bridge between the two is the field of human-centered design. Taking a page from Apple, where both the product managers and engineers have to listen to the designer team, unlike in other communities where designers were subservient to the product managers and engineers.

Audrey Tang: We deliberately adopted this culture to turn human-centered design – including service design – into a shared vocabulary between the IT people and a public servant.

Audrey Tang: Yes. That’s a topic where we can collaborate on. It’s a good idea. We talked about that in one of our previous calls… Education happens every day, disaster only once in a while. We should focus on the everyday.

Audrey Tang: There’s two thoughts here. One is around digital competence. We talked about the Digido, making sure that kids, as well as elderly people who make their digital debut, their first experience is that of creating not of consumption. If it’s consumption, we would talk about literacy, but it’s somebody else’s work, and we just appreciate or criticize it.

Audrey Tang: If the first action they do is making one edit on Wikipedia, making one edit on OpenStreetMap, remixing one of the Scratch programs, or building their own Arduino clock, or whatever, then it becomes a maker, not a consumer, spirit.

Audrey Tang: We have designed competence education building a more tangible thing because when you’re younger, tangible things remember better. Only older kids have abstract memory. When you’re younger, something like Lego. Something you can touch makes a lot more sense. The same applies for very senior people.

Audrey Tang: The tangible things that enables people to measure air quality, measure water quality, to enter data collaborative. I believe that is something that both our countries excel. The MB IoT, or LoRa or the Internet of beings network. That’s one angle to approach. The other angle is when it comes to tele education because both our countries are forced into tele-education by the pandemic.

Audrey Tang: There’s no established traditions of tele-education in either of our countries before the pandemic, so just helping the teachers and the students and people who learn to motivate better on self regulated learning, is another way of approaching this.

Audrey Tang: I can recommend people, but I don’t “assign” people. This is due to the composition of my office. What I can do is that I will relay this conversation with the secondments of my office, which includes the ministries of Education, Culture, Communication, and Interior. These are probably the most closely linked secondments to this collaboration.

Audrey Tang: I will, with your permission of course, share the transcript to the secondments in my office. Then we can set up a time for more focused conversation, which I may join, but it will be led by the secondment to my office. If you want to explore, for example, youth development, there’s a secondment specializing in just that.

Audrey Tang: We need to have a more broad meeting and then dig into more narrow ones. It’s just I don’t assign people. [laughs] They join when they’re interested.

Audrey Tang: I want to stress that having a space and a culture of co-creation, is always better than having a single person to lead.

Audrey Tang: For example, this radical transparency protocol ensure that when the lobbyist come to talk to me from the private sector, they always make the case that makes them look good to future generations, because they know it will be published, so they reframe themselves accordingly. Because they will look very bad if they advocate for something that only benefit them to the detriment of other people or future generations.

Audrey Tang: Instead of having a single person enforce pro-social conversation, basically, the radical transparency protocol with lobbyists and private sector people is used in a space-defining way. We can simply say the camera or the tape recorder represents future generations, and they are watching to see if we are good enough ancestors. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That’s only for cross sectoral work though. Between the local and national governments, for interagency meetings, we still make the transcripts, but we don’t publish.

Audrey Tang: Also, if you look at the “Conversation with Jun Murai” transcripts, only my part is published. None of the words by “Jun Murai” is published. This is useful, because, first, everybody knows this conversation is happening. But I’m not compromising other people’s privacy by publishing.

Audrey Tang: So even if you relayed an anecdote about your friend who have not cleared it to publish, you can always go back and anonymize that.

Audrey Tang: “Radical” means “at the root,” means that my words are published by default, but it doesn’t mean that… It’s not extremism. I’m not forcing it to other public servants. They always get the choice of which paragraph and in which sense to publish.

Audrey Tang: I’ve found that the ministries that want to make the context clear join easily. They get calls from the members of the parliament or from journalists anyway. Even if they make a full explanation, it’s likely the MP or journalist would amplify one part of the message that they want to talk to the constituent. When we publish the transcript, there’s a full context, so we don’t have to explain the same thing over and over again.

Audrey Tang: Journalists and the MPs, they would at least link to the transcript or at least mention that there’s a transcript for people who want to know the better the context, and therefore, protecting us from having to explain the same thing to different people and have different parts misinterpreted. That’s my first answer.

Audrey Tang: Because this protects the public service. My uncle, aunt, and my grandparents, they were all public servants.

Audrey Tang: My parents are journalists, but their sisters and brothers and also their parents are all public servants serving in education, defense, and the civil service.

Audrey Tang: I call myself a public servant of the public service, meaning that I’m serving the public servants that serve the people. I don’t directly serve the people… I serve the public servant who serves the people.

Audrey Tang: By saying this, what I’m saying is essentially the same message was sent to the elderly people when designing digital service to be “swift & safe” — I will not force you to work overtime on anything. Indeed, I will only design thing that saves your time. Also, I will never design anything that expose you or your superior to more risk. Indeed, my design are always reducing risk. These two happen at the same time. I will not design anything that wastes your time to reduce risk or to expose you to risk to save you time. I will never do that either. That’s my design principle.

Audrey Tang: My own experience working with public servants, as I mentioned, is in the family. I work within a culture where my family members, and this gets a little bit personal, but anyway. My father’s father came from Sichuan to Taiwan after WW2; he served in the air force.

Audrey Tang: My grandma, who is raised speaking Tâi-gí and Nihongo, actually had a Japanese name and grew up when Taiwan was considered part of Japanese territory.

Audrey Tang: Within my family, there’s easily four languages going on. Of course, they share the kanji writing system. Eventually, everyone learned Mandarin, but still with a heavy accent. I was raised by my grandparents and uncles and aunts along with my parents, and I learned about transculturalism very earily on.

Audrey Tang: There’s no particular side to take. Instead, I take all the sides. After all, all the different positions have the same shared value because they raised me together. They wanted the future generation to enjoy living at least as good or better than the current generation.

Audrey Tang: That’s their shared value because they raised me together – goes without saying. The same is in the public service. We in the public service want to make the world, the society, better – or at least not worse – for future generations. That’s our shared value.

Audrey Tang: Depending on our ministry, we take different worldviews. The ministry of economy will take a very different worldview from the ministry of welfare. Because if they share the same position, they will be merged into one ministry. [laughs] All the ministry that still exists represent different position, but they share the same value.

Audrey Tang: So that is how I arrived to this cross functional secondment to my office. I take all the sides to build shared values because of my own experience of being raised by people in, frankly speaking, very different cultures.

Audrey Tang: The civic tech people, as I mentioned, they want the government to procure based on the idea of rapid experiment. I talked about the discretionary or small scale tender. That’s one device. Another device we did is OpenAPI based procurement, because we also work with a lot of large IT vendors that works across the stack.

Audrey Tang: The challenge is that while they are good at building the infrastructure, databases, and whatever, if they ask what’s the experience should look like, they will get from their superior what worked from the previous project. The time changes rapidly, as to people’s expectations.

Audrey Tang: When we designed the procurement rule in 2016, we said, “Look, in our procurement template, there is a clause that says if you build a Web service for people with sight but shut out people with seeing difficulties, then you can be disqualified as a vendor for discriminating against people who have vision impairments.” I’m sure Japan has a similar idea, universal access, accessibility.

Audrey Tang: We amended that clause a little bit, saying, “If you build a service that can only serve human beings for reading and writing, the form, the Web service, but you build in such a way that prevents robots from accessing it from using the OpenAPI, then you can also be disqualified as a vendor for discriminating against robots.” Well we don’t literally say that, but that is the effect.

Audrey Tang: This is very important, because then it means that the large IT vendors, when they build a system, they always have electric sockets for the startups to plug into. The startup who are good at chatbots, who are good at VR, or whatever, they can then reuse those API, which must be in place for no additional cost.

Audrey Tang: If they charge us a lot, saying, “I have to charge you beyond the discretionary budget” to build their OpenAPI endpoints, they also get disqualified. We always get almost for free the OpenAPI for the underlying system.

Audrey Tang: With a similar spirit, we can change a few lines in the tax filing experience system to make mask rationing work, then change a couple lines to make the stimulus voucher work, and then change a couple lines now to make vaccine appointment work. It’s the same underlying system. We just plug in to a different ecosystem.

Audrey Tang: Yes. Each development is almost like just a parameter change. For each of those new services, we roll out in a few days. Three days is impossible to do cybersecurity audit, impossible to do penetration testing.

Audrey Tang: The only way to do that is to build upon something that’s already very well tested, the tax filing system and so on, the healthcare system, and only build a bridge that bridge them together based on the API like Lego blocks.

Audrey Tang: Yes. The most important thing is to maximize modularity.

Audrey Tang: If you have one about people with vision impairments, the text is going to be very similar to the OpenAPI requirements.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.