Hi Minister Tang, my name is Marinda Chang and I’m interested on your thoughts on the digital literacy skills levels of the Taiwanese people…you’ve been quoted as saying “using digital services to assist public servants, welcoming contributions from civic tech, open knowledge, and collaborative innovations.” How will you go about this? Do you have an understanding of what the current digital capability levels of the Taiwanese government workers are at and how to improve them? Would love to hear your thoughts on this issue.
- I’ll work closely with the National Development Council, in particular the department of Information Management (in charge of open data, online civic participation, cloud infrastructure, etc.) and the Regulatory Reform Center (in charge of e-rulemaking policies and innovation-enabling policymaking).
- Taiwan’s Freedom of Government Information Law, enacted in 2005, is a relatively new part of the governance structure; many key clauses, such as disclosure of early-stage policymaking process, need voluntary participation of public servants.
- Learning from international experiences, the key is to ease the burden of following an open-by-default process — easier than the current paper-based process.
- We will first try out the processes within our PDIS team, then codify them into playbooks along with a promotion mechanism. Only then can we establish a trustworthy basis on which to develop digital services that enabled civic participation at all levels of government.