Audrey Tang: We get to co-edit for 10 days, and then we publish the whole thing to the Commons, if that’s OK with you.

Sean Wilson: Sure.

Audrey Tang: Let’s get started.

Sean Wilson: Thank you very much for meeting me, Minister Tang. My name is Sean Wilson, give you my business card. Thank you. I’m the R&D manager of a Taiwanese start-up. We have some products, a LINE chatbot that connects to a stock advice website, for the Taiwanese market. We also have done IoT cloud products for Taiwanese legacy hardware developers to bring their products into the IoT world.

Audrey Tang: Like adapters?

Sean Wilson: More like the cloud services and then training for their firmware employees who are developing for the cloud. We provide the cloud service. We’ve also done some things, a smart diaper, checking for humidity and temperature in a baby’s diaper to alert the parents. It’s a funny product for parents, but I think it has more applications in the elderly care space .

Audrey Tang: Elderly care.

Sean Wilson: Yeah. That’s still being developed. It’s on the shelves in stores here in Taiwan. I’m also a member of a, partner of this group. It’s called All Hands Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. I check out the website. It’s very interesting.

Sean Wilson: Thank you very much. We’ve had a few events so far, six, I believe. Most of our events average about 50 to 100 people. We’ve had events about getting hired. We’re having an event on green jobs. We’ve done events with headhunters, telling us what your resume should look like or how to talk to headhunters to get hired here in Taiwan. What are the realities of foreigners getting hired?

Sean Wilson: That’s the long and the short of what All Hands is doing. We’re trying to be a networking platform to help international talent and Taiwanese companies understand each other more. I think it can be even hard if a company here in Taiwan wants to hire a foreigner. What’s the process? I think that can be confusing.

Sean Wilson: "How much money do I have to spend? I met this guy, and he seems talented. I’d like to work with him, but what’s the..." I’m very fortunate that my employer took a chance and said, "Oh, it looks like you have some experience and I’d like to work with you, so let’s go through the proper channel and get you an ARC," which was wonderful.

Sean Wilson: I did print out the email I sent you today. I don’t know if you took a look. I don’t know if you have security concerns about PDFs.

Audrey Tang: I did look.

Sean Wilson: Thank you very much, by the way. It’s an interesting logo. I like it.

Audrey Tang: It’s the Sustainable Development Goals, the global goals.

Sean Wilson: What I wanted to ask you about today is I’m interested in the NDC’s, some of their initiatives, the National Development Council. Me being a software developer from Washington, DC, most of my work back home has been in government website development.

Sean Wilson: As a contractor, I worked for the Department of Education, the Smithsonian museum. I saw, as I was working there, that the development infrastructure for government websites was changing. I know you’ve been to DC, and I don’t know if you talked to anybody about 18F or the GSA, Global Services Administration, or President’s Fellows. I’ll talk about these if you haven’t heard those terms.

Sean Wilson: I wanted to discuss with you what I learned as I was a contractor. I know that the Taiwanese government has a Smart Government, phase five right now from 2017.

Audrey Tang: We dropped the phase five. It’s just Smart Government now.

Sean Wilson: I should be looking at the Chinese-language documents and not the English-language documents.

Audrey Tang: It’s fairly new, the dropping of the fifth phase. It’s really a addition to the fifth phase with a much more ambitious goal. It’s called SmartGov or Smart Government project. As you said, it’s led by the NDC, and it contain pretty much all the relevant ministries in it.

Audrey Tang: Mostly, there are five new scopes. You already mentioned something about the integrated digital services, digital.gov. The counterpart here will be what’s called the T-Road, which takes its name after the Estonian X-Road. That handles both the data exchange as well as the people-facing portal.

Audrey Tang: At the moment, www.gov.tw is very much just a index of links. There’s no coherent service or coherent experience across different ministries. That’s the experience part, and this is the data part. There’s, of course, a national plan on open government, protecting private data, the new eID, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: These were not items originally written as such on the phase five. This is a extension of the phase five scope while encompassing all the original to-do items in the phase five.

Sean Wilson: Apologies, I haven’t seen the slides yet. After this, I’ll go back and take a look.

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Sean Wilson: I’m a babe in the woods. I’m not sure what’s in the document. I’m interested to talk about what I knew about American government website development and talk with you as well about the bilingual initiative.

Audrey Tang: Which is another NDC flagship.

Sean Wilson: What I wanted to talk about is there’s several different government departments that were more relevant during the Obama administration. I’ve been here for about four and a half years. It’s been a while since I’ve been there.

Sean Wilson: In America, we have a government department called the GSA, General Services Administration. A lot of standard SOP things are given to them by other departments to handle, a lot of stuff like handling facilities, maintenance, or issuing ID cards. Everything that all government departments need would be part of that.

Sean Wilson: Part of those needs is website development. How do we build websites for the government that do what the customers need, at a decent, competitive price, but are also effective? One of the websites that came out of the GSA is the Obamacare website. There were two versions.

Audrey Tang: That’s how 18F started.

Sean Wilson: Right. 18F came out of that, and they started to build...

Audrey Tang: Things that actually work.

Sean Wilson: Right. In order to do that, they needed to take...I was a contractor. Obviously, I try to do a good job. I think it’s important to. I don’t want to have to go in front of Congress to explain why the security for the Department of Education is a...

Audrey Tang: [laughs]

Sean Wilson: ...Also, I care about the audience, the American people. I also know that if you have a big project, and it’s not being managed well, and maybe you’re not the manager, it can be a bear to keep working on it.

Audrey Tang: There’s multiple failure points.

Sean Wilson: Right. For a big push, for something like a Smart Government push, I was wondering do you see it making sense to bring more Web development in Taiwan for government department websites out of the hands of contractors and into something like an 18F or another internal start-up staffed with people maybe hired from industry or from contractors.

Sean Wilson: It changes their goal. Their motivation and your goals are more closely aligned when they’re part of the government, not a contractor.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Sean Wilson: That’s something that I’ve been thinking about, wanted to ask you about. I don’t have too much info about Taiwanese government website development. My company has had a contract or two, I believe. We did a government website or two. Obviously, we had to scan it for accessibility and security, had to go through an SOP.

Sean Wilson: I think most, if not all, of the work on the development of the website was on our plate. It’s not a bad thing. It’s great, obviously, to be promoting the economy, but if there’s a big push for something, does it make sense to bring more government web-site development in-house for the next term or after the elections? Is that something that’s been considered?

Audrey Tang: My office, PDIS, the Public Digital Innovation Space, is half delegates from each ministry, at most one per ministry. The other half is essentially, just as you said, contractors promoted into being part of the governance process.

Audrey Tang: All of them are hired by the III. The III is somewhat like 18F in both composition, but it’s much earlier than the 18F. It harks back to the personal computing era. It is a not-for-profit institute that is set up exclusively for joint ventures where the people in the private sector to also have partnerships with the public sector in terms of building things like websites.

Audrey Tang: The III is also the team to...For example, maintaining the space is also III. The III is also involved in the mentoring and facilitation of what we call the GDSG, the Government Digital Service Guidelines, which are not unlike the equivalent in the UK, the UK Digital Service Guidelines, as well as ones around the world. III already fulfills the same niche that 18F fulfills.

Audrey Tang: The main thing that I personally do as a system programmer myself is just to make sure that we have sufficient two-way communication. It’s not just III delivering the abstract guidelines. It’s also that people hired by III can actually be in my office fulltime and participate in the rule-making processes around not only digital, but also open government and social innovation.

Audrey Tang: It is a smaller-scale experiment, because it’s only 20 people overall -- 22 -- but it’s a beginning. I would be happy to share more about that experience.

Sean Wilson: That would be great.

Audrey Tang: In the other site that you mentioned, the guideline making, standard making, Taiwan is the first country to adopt the OpenAPI spec 3.0 in all government procurements. That role is fulfilled by the NDC.

Audrey Tang: The NDC sets the digital guidelines for the other ministries to follow, because the NDC is part of the national planning. That is to say, it audits and looks at all the one-year-or-more plans from each ministry to make sure that they make sense together.

Audrey Tang: It’s also the auditing and, to some sense, correction and budget making council so that it also reviews the budget as well as the execution of individual projects.

Audrey Tang: The individual contracts, of course, we have the National Audit Office that’s over in another branch of the government called the corrective branch. NDC already encompasses the planning as well as the project management roles. It’s about 500 people.

Audrey Tang: NDC is by far the largest team looking at national level strategies, but also interact directly with citizens through, for example, the national Open Data Portal, data.gov.tw, through a national participation portal, join.gov.tw, through schema.gov.tw, which was the commerce schemas across ministries, as well as many other things I’m sure in T-road and bilingual.

Audrey Tang: From the ministries’ perspective, NDC is the main carrying and planning body for the strategies you mentioned, but the III fulfills a lot of the technical roles when it comes to delivery. They are largely speaking at arm’s length from policymaking, not just another contractor.

Sean Wilson: Thank you for that information. I have heard of III... I know that they work in great technical specification and technical guidance. I don’t know if maybe they also did something like digital.gov, which is a place for publishing government web-development best practices...there’s a design system that digital.gov has created that is interesting.

Sean Wilson: It’s here’s how the government should be designing websites, or here is how government websites should be designed. Here’s templates or guidelines for...

Audrey Tang: NDC has that. It’s called the Web Guide. If you look up Web Guide, you will see similar standards. I will note a difference, though.

Audrey Tang: While Web Guide does have guidelines for the entire website, it’s mostly about what we call user experience or UX. Of course, some UI elements as well. It did not have wide-ranging guidelines, what we call service design or SD. SD, as you well know, is not just UX for particular services, but about an integrated human experience across that whole lifecycle it demands.

Audrey Tang: That’s one of the cases what the smart g0v plan is trying to do, is that instead of thinking from which ministry provides which services angle, we should think in a life event angle.

Audrey Tang: When you’re starting a company, for example, you will actually look at seven different agencies, websites, some of them requiring you to type things. Again, some of them is Chinese-only and things like that. It’s a mess.

Audrey Tang: Individually, they may optimize the UX, but taken together, it may actually make a worse service design angle, because it’s just all over the place. It’s very recent, like in the last two years, to actually bring service designers and whole SD double-diamond design thinking into the planning stage.

Audrey Tang: Our first case -- our first substantial case, anyway -- is the tax filing experience. Now we’re working also on the Medicare system, the mobile version of the Medicare -- cardless Medicare -- and also with National Palace Museum on its registration website and process, which because they are part of the cabinet, very unusually.

Audrey Tang: What I’m getting at is that PDIS is now somewhat like a service design and internal consulting firm to the National Development Council. We also hire about 21 interns every year to, this year, look at 14 services provided by ministries, and then give out services like guidelines and so on.

Audrey Tang: There is a raising new philosophy of human-centric, citizen-centric design instead of the silo design. She is in charge of that internship program. Maybe you can chat more. That’s the initial positioning of our office.

Sean Wilson: Thank you. It sounds like you already know everything that I was going to talk about. I appreciate.

Audrey Tang: We learned a lot from our counterparts in 18F and also USDS as well.

Sean Wilson: I wanted to ask about...Maybe I just go here to the website translations. I think that’s enough.

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Sean Wilson: The question that I had for this was about looking at the bilingual 2030 blueprint about government agencies and websites need to reach an English or bilingual level within a year.

Sean Wilson: There’s several questions about that. Who does that?

Audrey Tang: The agencies who owns the website pays for it. There is no, as far as I know, extra budget as allocated by the NDC for the bilingual plan. Whomever build the website needs to pay for the translation.

Sean Wilson: That’s fine. I just thought that I’ve had talks with other people, other foreigners, and we’ve discussed thoughts about wouldn’t it be great if, for example...Like I said, I wasn’t part of this process. Maybe this is the way it was done. I just don’t know.

Sean Wilson: When creating, for example, the Gold Card website for high-level foreign talent .

Audrey Tang: I’m aware of that.

Sean Wilson: Were foreigners brought in at the beginning, and the end of the design phase for that and saying what information are you looking for, or when it’s closed or when it’s done, you could say could you try to apply and run through this, and see what are the problems that you have and have some fake reviewers, and then run through a launch.

Sean Wilson: Of course, there must have been testing, but I think that...

Audrey Tang: It’s very, very minimal, though. Before, we had a GDSG, it was not a widely practiced thing to look at websites just as we do with public construction, where we had a design phase of essentially feasibility planning and also surveys and focus groups to make sure that it actually solves what people want to solve.

Audrey Tang: That is actually minimal. It’s usually lumped together with the implementation or execution. That, again, usually goes to system integrators who may be great at project management but not necessarily great at service design. Then it goes to the subcontractors.

Audrey Tang: For a large-scale website where we have long been advocating and finally getting it now, we have multiple so-called pilots. Each one would be around or below one million NT dollars.

Audrey Tang: The main problem blocking that from happening was that three years ago, that budget, what we call discretionary budget, is tens of million NT dollars, which you can’t really do any serious service design using that kind of budget of only NT$100,000. Now it’s raised to one million.

Audrey Tang: The GDSG now specifically calls for multiple pilot or design phases before we even do the implementation. We’re now seeing a much better relationship between the targeted users groups versus the ministries that are planning to do so. It only took effect in the previous budget cycle, which means this January, so this is really new.

Audrey Tang: We are just working on a few pilot cases right now, but expected starting next year, this will become the norm for the ministries to do their work. It’s been a lot of groundwork just to get it to happen, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they completely ignored the target user survey until the very end where they already have a beta site and all you can do is just fix typos.

Sean Wilson: Right, I understand what you’re saying. Just because I thought that a lot of foreigners here also would be interested in being part of an initial survey without accepting money. I think if there was something like a foreigner volunteer website review board, they’d be happy to help.

Audrey Tang: I think this is a great idea.

Sean Wilson: I’ve got several different sources of those people or different ways to source those people. I’ve been attending meetings with... David Chang of Crossroads Taiwan, and started working with the Alliance for a Globally Oriented Taiwan about the Bilingual Initiative.

Audrey Tang: I know. I sent people to one of the meetings...

Sean Wilson: Right. I think there’s plenty of people who are part of that who would be happy to...

Audrey Tang: It’s a great idea. When I visited Toronto, I met with a group called GRIT, Gathering Residents to Improve Technology, GRIT Toronto. Their slogan is putting the "us" in usability. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: GRIT Toronto offers these usability testing services, which connects technology creators from the private, public, and non-profit sectors with diverse and underrepresented communities in the city. What they arrange to do is to have an explicitly designed to be inclusive usability testing group.

Audrey Tang: Usually, even within GDSG, when the designers hire people for usability, usually there’s two services. One is that for students already taking service design classes and their friends and families. The second is the extended network of the government contracting system integrators.

Audrey Tang: Notice that these two are great, but they are very unlikely to include the kind of people that you meet unless you happen to know someone who studies service design in graduate school. Something like GRIT would be really, really good.

Audrey Tang: To some extent, we’re already doing some kind of that citizen-science-facing thing through g0v -- G-0-V -- as well as the Presidential Hackathon. The thing with the Presidential Hackathon is that we can only give out that much political will every year.

Audrey Tang: Every year, there’s hundreds of cases that ask for the government to change our ways in doing ICT for sustainability, but every year we can only choose five things and give them the presidential trophy, which is projector that when turned on, projects the president handing trophy to you and is therefore very useful in internal negotiations.

Audrey Tang: What it carries is the presidential promise that whatever people have prototyped in the past three months will be part of public service by the next year. That is basically inviting everybody who prototyped into essentially the advisory group into the new public service, because they earned it by including the prototype.

Audrey Tang: Five per year. Even for this year, Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, our president, asked me to help all the 20 top teams along. Even 20 per year is very few. It’s very few as compared to easily thousands of government procurements and hundreds of websites are being updated or built every year.

Audrey Tang: A more systemic way would be something like GRIT Toronto, which systematically says for all the bilingual websites, here are a set of diverse, willing people that offer the service either for money or in kind, whatever. You can look at the GRIT...

Audrey Tang: Then we can introduce this group systemically as any others, what we call civic hacker group. Once they become involved in, for example, the Open Data Planning Committee or just part of the large g0v network, then that will give the political leverage needed to enter into the early-stage accessibility testing group.

Audrey Tang: This model is something that I would really love to see happening. We’ve mostly been talking about this in terms of ethnicity and, for example, indigenous nations, as well as underprivileged, what we call groups that qualify for low income, or single parents, or things like that.

Audrey Tang: These are great for physical services that government is developing. For digital ones, because of the bilingual strategy, just having people who have native language that is not Mandarin, or Taiwanese Hoko, or Taiwanese Hakka, or any of those Taiwan national languages, will actually be a very good addition.

Audrey Tang: It’s not just about people who are underrepresented economically, but people who are underrepresented in digital service. I think it’s a good idea.

Sean Wilson: Thank you very much. A lot of these people probably don’t have service design knowledge, but they may be a great focus group.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. We can just introduce our service designers to this group, just they know that there is such a group around.

Sean Wilson: I’m sure they’d love to do that. If you have any person, we’ll talk more. I was also wondering about how...We’re talking about these websites that need to be created. I know g0v has a history of being a great place for sharing and discussing...

Audrey Tang: Just building prototypes.

Sean Wilson: Yeah. I don’t know how much. I’m guessing quite a few government employees may attend.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, they do.

Sean Wilson: Maybe that’s the solution. I was thinking about how...Could the bilingual initiative be a way to pull together a conference system for organizing government employees to help improve websites and translation at the same time? It sounds like g0v serves that purpose.

Sean Wilson: I know there’s ongoing events around the year, and maybe there could be a set or a theme for a certain set of hackathon...

Audrey Tang: Yeah. It would totally be great. The g0v international team is actually one of the recent teams here in our co-working space, which is right here. I don’t know whether they’re around now, but it would be certainly good to keep in touch, that’s g0vintl, g0v International. That’s one.

Audrey Tang: Aside from g0v, it’s generally a good idea to let government agencies, especially the service designer, to know you as a group. There are several teams that hold weekly gatherings here or bi-weekly gatherings here.

Audrey Tang: If you want to use this facility for any event, as long as it’s public and you can declare which of the Sustainable Development Goals are your work corresponding to -- yours would correspond easily to the 17, 24, and things like that -- you can just use this venue for free.

Audrey Tang: Many nascent social movements like the universal basic income, as well as other movements of that nature, actually just use this facility and slowly build up its influence. Just across the C-Lab is Red Room. They are already a very established network as well for people who live in Taiwan who doesn’t use Mandarin as their first language. Maybe some kind of extended network would be great.

Sean Wilson: We have a relationship with Red Room. We’re actually having our next event tomorrow there. We’re doing an event on...We’ve already done six events at All Hands. We’re trying to think about what our audience, what kind of events would they like to see. Are we serving our audience as best as we can...?

Audrey Tang: Do they know about the AGOT initiative? Last time I talked to them, they don’t seem to.

Sean Wilson: All Hands?

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Sean Wilson: I’m actually helping doing some of the recording of notes. There’s a lot of idea people. I’m trying to record the good ideas that people are having and we’re going to...

Audrey Tang: Maybe you can bring out this testing group thing as an idea and see whether they like it.

Sean Wilson: I will do.

Audrey Tang: I think this is a great start. Since we have pretty good connections to pretty much all the service designers that’s going to take, for example, internship jobs, but also, more serious designing jobs, I think it’s good just to keep those two groups aware of each other.

Audrey Tang: I will see what kind of pilot is the best one to begin. Once you have some, I don’t know, street credibility to the ministries involved, I’m sure that we can talk about more collaborations.

Sean Wilson: Thank you. Back to what we were talking about, if there was a themed hackathon about language or translation, there could be a series of hackathons or trainings based on that. Looks like g0v is more of a prototyping thing, an example to show and tell.

Audrey Tang: It’s kind of incubator. Whenever people really like the pitch and the demo, people usually just schedule, as I mentioned, weekly or bi-weekly meetups to continue to grow the community.

Audrey Tang: I personally did that for the MOE dictionary, which started with Mandarin, Hakka and Tâigí, but quickly became indigenous German-English-French. The community just keeps growing because of other regular meetups.

Audrey Tang: Just recently, the co-facts both grew into a pretty large network and, of course, vTaiwan is still meeting every week here. All the projects that grew out of g0v can all have their own continuous meetups.

Audrey Tang: If you want to pitch this as a civic tech project, then I’m sure that there will be many people in g0v that are interested.

Sean Wilson: That’s great. I’ll go back AGOT and talk to them about those ideas. I think these are great. This one model could also be to review existing government websites, just in person at a hackathon, if different departments wanted ot have their site reviewd for English usability...

Sean Wilson: If you’re a department employee of this department, this group will be here, and if you would like, before a real form of pilot starts, it might be a good idea to say, come in. It’s a closed room. There’s no shame. There’s no loss of face. We’ll just talk honestly behind closed doors about something that is important.

Audrey Tang: There’s that screen. I would like to clarify this title, Minister without portfolio. Usually, I translate it as horizontal minister. There’s 32 vertical ministries and 9 horizontal ministries. Without portfolio simply means that we’re not limited to the purview of any single ministry.

Audrey Tang: As I said, about 22 colleagues, none of which is from a ministry of digital, are nevertheless dispatched from all the ministries. Together, they build the digital transformation. For example, the ministry of education delegate is here.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that we have the portfolio on emerging issues. My work, it’s open government, it’s social innovation, it’s youth engagement, that doesn’t strictly belong to any particular siloed box in a ministry.

Audrey Tang: Social innovation, that is to say the social and private sector delivering public service before the public sector does, that is my portfolio. As long as the Social Innovation Lab is around -- we have a five-year social innovation action plan anyway -- I’m already in charge of the kind of work that you just mentioned.

Audrey Tang: Feel free to talk to me. We’ll make sure that the social and private sector prototypes, if it’s fruitful, is merged back into public sector. That’s what the national action plan is about.

Sean Wilson: I see. Thank you very much. I’ll go back and talk to different groups that I’m a part of and see if we can...I’m wondering what the next step would be just to interface maybe with g0v International.

Audrey Tang: That’s one part. The other part is that if there is a particular website that you would really like for its English version to be more friendly, maybe do a kind of internal survey or things like that, and maybe we can have another talk with people who are stakeholders, they stand to gain or lose if that particular bilingual project fails or succeeds.

Audrey Tang: Then maybe we can have a more in-depth meeting on one particular...It doesn’t have to be one particular website. It’s just one particular life event. That will be very useful.

Audrey Tang: For example, currently we’re evaluating a live event around getting preschool and early primary school parents all they need in terms of, I don’t know, vaccination, reimbursement, the essential parenting help, or whatever. It’s easily five agencies. For the young parents, it’s a single life event, which is their children going to preschool.

Audrey Tang: That kind of design is needed, unless people would be very keen to adjust their mind between the five agencies’ design language. I don’t think many people enjoy that. If they go to a physical district office, at least they know five people by talking to the different counters, but on a website, it’s pure annoyance.

Audrey Tang: Some kind of life event focus who would like this potential great Taipei or Taiwan to have, I think that would be a very good focus than to introduce the service designers and implementers of those life events to you.

Sean Wilson: Thank you very much. I will look into that and see what we can do. That would be great to have that meeting with the other stakeholders. The question would be what would be the format of our presentation. Does it want to be a typo level, fixed or...

Audrey Tang: It could just be another office hour gathering like this one, and I invite the right people from the government side to join the table.

Sean Wilson: Sounds great. Something else that is part of that is the translation standards. Are things translated the same way between different departments? I know as part of bilingual, ndc.gov.tw, there’s a section there for translation resources.

Sean Wilson: It’s interesting that there’s different formats for the data coming from different departments. Maybe it’s not that interesting. Maybe it’s very obvious over years and years of maintaining different databases.

Audrey Tang: Mostly, we have this thing called the NAER, terms that are in the NAER, for the canonical translation bilingually in the various different parts like Georgian architecture, or the floor space, and things like that. It’s pretty comprehensive.

Audrey Tang: If there are new emerging technology -- information technology changes very quickly -- they also publish the deltas. Actually, this website can really use an English translation. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I would suggest that you consult the terms in the NAER, because as far as I know, this is not just the public sector, but also the education, academia is using as a standard bilingual dictionary, a portal to all the dictionaries.

Audrey Tang: If you would like to give it a view and maybe let the NAER and me know what kind of improvement that you would like to see to make it a better resource for bilingual people, as well as for people looking to translate their websites. That would be tremendously helpful.

Audrey Tang: I can make sure that a conversation with the right people in the NAER happens, because before serving as digital minister, I worked in the NAER in the K-12 Curriculum Committee.

Sean Wilson: Sounds great. We can go back and talk about...I can talk to people in the AGOT about how is that. Just going to the new bilingual website, which is supposed to provide resources from bilingual.ndc.gov.tw.

Sean Wilson: It looks interesting. There’s a lot of different resources on there from "I want to learn English" to "I want to translate". There’s a translation resources section. It’s interesting that Urban Dictionary is the number one there. I think NAER is down there. Here we go.

Audrey Tang: This is the one that’s seen as more canonical. Of course, WTO has its own language, and the various different ministries. The only general-purpose one here is the NAER one. All the others are domain-specific as maintained by the government.

Audrey Tang: If we want to improve the general quality, NAER will be the one that I think will have the most impact. This is mostly about regulation-specific terms. This is here, I think, because all the regulations and draft bills that has a impact on foreign residents here need to be now published in two languages.

Audrey Tang: They really want to make sure that the same terms in the regulatory text is translated exactly the same way. It’s like programing language. For a website, this is the least of our concern, because most websites won’t just post the whole of the regulatory text on their website. NAER, I think, is still worth taking a look.

Sean Wilson: OK, I will definitely take a look at that. I think that’s pretty much what I wanted to cover. I don’t know if you attended any website technology conferences when you were in the US. There is something coming up very soon. Back when I was working as a government contractor, a lot of the work I did was in Drupal 7, which is a CMS like WordPress.

Sean Wilson: A lot of the American government platform has actually started to standardize around Drupal 7.

Audrey Tang: I think I gave talks in DrupalCamp.

Sean Wilson: I’ve attended some of the DrupalCamps here in Taipei, and they are interesting. I think this website is interesting because it’s from my hometown in Washington DC. There’s a Drupal government conference which is I think only open to government employees or government contractors.

Sean Wilson: Different people from different departments will talk about when they’re using Drupal, threats, virus threats, or hacking attempts. They talk about accessibility. They talk about things that are more government oriented.

Sean Wilson: A lot of these conferences are sponsored by those contracting companies. I think there is a lot of use coming out of the birds-of-a-feather discussions, which would be like, "Hey, we’re doing the same thing or we have the same problem, but we’re from different departments. Let’s meet over lunch during the conference and talk."

Sean Wilson: I’m guessing that sort of thing probably happens g0v conferences.

Audrey Tang: It does, and also the COSCUP, the largest open-source conferences here, has a Drupal track...

Audrey Tang: The Drupal track is actually alive and well. In the government, since we standardized on OpenAPI version 3, the API shift of Drupal 8 is particularly relevant. Previous to that in Drupal 7 and especially 6, there was no way to have a REST API-backed website that doesn’t require a lot of plugins and modules.

Audrey Tang: The 8 version of re-architecting to be API-first really makes it more acceptable as a government backbone here.

Audrey Tang: The T-road is all about using the OpenAPI standard for cross-agency exchange, because while you may use Drupal, that ministry may use something else, but using the REST API, people can still very easily talk to one another, instead of just RSS syndication, which is one small part of a website.

Audrey Tang: If there is some synergies here in terms of how Drupal 8 can be described using OpenAPI standard, as well as how to make sure that a new Web service is developed as Drupal modules and so on can be offered as OpenAPI. I see some early attempts, but they are like all back in the Spider days, but maybe I haven’t caught up to time.

Audrey Tang: That will be very useful for the Taiwan government, because then all of them are required to describe their basic services in OpenAPI 3. Some lessons, or lectures, or even online resources for making that to happen will massively increase the uptake on Drupal technology.

Audrey Tang: Most of them now do ASP.NET, which has built-in OpenAPI 3 support, as well as the other technical stacks such as the...A lot of people actually switched to Vue and React, with server-side rendering. That, again, is easy to make it into OpenAPI-based. Personally, our website is backed by the Discourse forum, which also has API.

Audrey Tang: I think the API angle of the new Drupal, because most people here, when they learn Drupal, it’s not at all API-based. Just getting people’s heads around this new Drupal core.

Sean Wilson: There’s also they changed to Symfony. They completely changed that. A lot of people I know back home are also reticent to get into it. I think they hit a wall with that. Hopefully, it can be overcome, especially since the government already standardized on Drupal 7...

Sean Wilson: There’s pros and cons to standardizing on a specific technology. We would all be able to help each other get over the obstacles. Now Drupal 8 is here. It has been for a while.

Audrey Tang: It does have a OpenAPI module, but it’s not at all used on 7. If you have a 7 website, you have to upgrade everything. That’s why we hear less from Drupal contractors when it comes to this API-based push on the T-road.

Audrey Tang: If what we’re doing is a redesign of the user experience as well as the whole service flow, then API-based redesign is needed, because we want to keep the original website running, but then we also want the people who use English, for example, to be able to access in a drastically different way, a different modality. If you don’t have a read/write API, there’s just no easy way to do that.

Sean Wilson: My time is up. Thank you very much for taking the time and talk to me today.

Audrey Tang: It’s really good to make acquaintance to a group that wants to improve public service in general from the social sector. That’s social innovation and that is my mandate.

Sean Wilson: Great. If you’re interested, I’ve put the website for...There’s a Drupal conference that’s happening in DC. You may be interested to see what kind of sessions they’re having. I think it’s next week.

Audrey Tang: Sure. I’d love to look at that. Oh, they’re all recorded. That’s good that there are recordings. Thank you. This is great. I see some further learnings on impact measurement. Thank you so much.

Sean Wilson: Thank you very much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.