Translation of http://goo.gl/OYKdU9

Empowerment-and-Companionship-TonyQ.txt

Empowerment and Companionship
Journey of a Junior Civil Servant
TonyQ

g0v summit 2016 - lighting talk
http://goo.gl/OYKdU9

Since I only have five minutes here...

My self-introduction
Please let me skip over it
It really is not that important who I am

It's enough that you know I write programs

All you need to know is that in a week
I would spend an average of 4 hours meeting with other civil servants

The time I spend delivering on-line counselling services
I estimate to be about 10 hours a week

If I add up the number of hours I spend delivering oral IT services:
2112 + 1056 + 448 = 3616

Alternative service + Executive Yuan service + general
(approximate)

I've heard that once you have done something for 10,000 hours
You would become good at it

However,
As I haven't reached 10,000 hours yet
I am still not good at this

About the civil servants I have met with
If I only count those that I have spent more than 4 hours talking to
And discount those who were forced to attend meetings as part of their duties
There have been about 60 of them

Those at deputy director, director, chairman, vice chairman, commissioner level: there have been about 10 of them
Those at section chief level: there have been about 8 of them
Those at clerk level: there have been more than 40 of them

I first got to know clerks and section managers
Before I got to know the "senior executives"
This is very important

Clerks and senior officials
Often come from different worlds

One of my dreams
Is to enable IT staff volunteers to experience the mechanisms of government operation
IT staff volunteer program

An IT volunteer who has speciality in a second field
Is placed next to a general civil servant
To do civic work

And allows the civil servant with good ideas
To submit their ideas

To put this another way 
You pair up a business person with an IT person
And let them work together

When they return
They write down their thoughts and file their reports

And they tell other people
Who are willing to take part in the change
(Within the ambit of the law)

What is the role of a civil servant?
What tools do they use?
What are their public duties?
What effects do they have on other people?

How do they work
And whether there are opportunities for us to help them?

How many things
Can use digital technology to improve the lives of ordinary people?

Because conscientious junior level civil servants
are really a long-suffering class

Every senior civil servant
who has heard me speak about this project
told me that I'm dreaming

Actually, I do feel that I'm dreaming

I'll say it again:
I'm dreaming

But by good fortune, I encountered the chance to do it

My country gave me a summon
To do community service for my country
An understudy role

I had many pathways and ladders
But I chose to do a low-paid job
I treated it as a form of social experiment

As a person with IT skills and capacity
I became an understudy boy at the Social Affairs Bureau
I infiltrated as an undercover agent

I made a lot of IT changes and cultural input
There are several points that should be noted

A "companion" has 4 never policy
  • Never pretend
  • Never mock
  • Never force it
  • Never fail to temporarily set aside the concept that "People are the masters of government" 

I looked at it as a casual miscellaneous job
As long as the civil servants felt that there is a need
I was ready to keep them company and had a good talk with them

The only feasible tactic of a companion
is by means of understanding and dialogue

There are things I must speak first
You cannot hold an antagonistic attitude

Actually, conscientious civil servants:

Really don't like to be accused of being salary thieves
Really don't like to be considered duty-shirkers
Really don't like to burn the bridges of like-minded people

Actually, conscientious civil servants:

Really dislike being scapegoats
Really dislike being stuck in the middle
Really dislike having goals but not knowing how to achieve them

Actually, conscientious civil servants:

Sometimes really dislike the gap
between the theory and practice of law enforcement

Actually, conscientious civil servants

Very much hope that the central law-making bodies and local ministers
would properly understand the primary needs
when they are setting the rules

There are too many things
that the government doesn't really have perfect answers for

Any choice they make
involves the sacrifice (broadly speaking) of different people

When civil servants come out and explain:

People may feel that they are making excuses
People may feel that they lack guts
People may feel that they are incompetent

Right now I am just another damned citizen
Surely my discussion of civil servants should be no problem at all

Full disclosure: My father is a retired junior civil servant.
But I don't have a very good relationship with my father...
...I don't have any motivation to defend him (huh).

Based on what I understand and hear
in the g0v summit today

There is at least a dozen
civil servants who are willing to take part in the long run

We all stand on the same fronts:

There is no civil servants or people here
There are only "volunteers"

We are all equals.
In the pursuit of the goal of improving public interests,
we are all equals.

My undercover experience

The most important thing is
to choose your area of expertise
and have a second area of expertise outside of IT and media

People who are only good at IT
Need to have passion for and professional dedication to their specific areas

A companion needs to be "trusted"
There are not many people who are willing to teach from scratch every time
Professionalism is a good basis of trust

Using myself as an example:

Single-parent family, financial hardship
Have strong views about social welfare issues

I choose to go into the Social Services Bureau

I also began asking questions of social workers
About the front-line practical operation and laws and regulations

In fact, as long as you practise often
There aren't that many provisions in the legislations that you need to memorize

Practice is your key, the unit is your teacher

The focus is on:
Putting aside your own damn pride

They ask indirect questions because they are not familiar with IT tools
If you talk a lot of techno-mumbo-jumbo
They simply won't understand what you're saying

You must first understand your companion
Learn from your companion
Establish a relationship of trust
It's a bit like romantic relationships

The companionship should be ongoing
and should observe public and private boundaries

Pay attention to:

  • confidential official documents
  • information involving funding profile
  ... should be kept the way they were

But apart from these data
There are many other things you can learn

Especially about the "process"

Be a listener first
If you haven't been asked a question, don't give suggestions

Be a good student
If there is a part that is not clearly described,
Do you best to ask questions and raise examples to make sure that you understand

I am eager to discuss with you,
But please remember, I won't open my mouth and make demands.

That isn't because I am proud,
You know that I have no pride to speak of in front of you;

The only reason is that both of us must first agree,
Before we can have a meaningful discussion.

Actual cases and situations

Social Affairs Bureau
Subsidy, training

Subsidy = providing resource
Subsidy = rigorous scrutiny

Assessment
||
Never-ending information to be provided
Never-ending forms to be written

Assessment
||
Applicants believe that they are the worst sufferers
They believe that standards have been set to make life difficult for them

Assessment
||
There are bound to be some areas that standards don't cover
Disadvantaged groups

The weaknesses of the residual welfare model
Many lower tiers of society are made to bear to burden
Use low-income households as a standard to apply 

For example
Early applications by low-income households

They have to manually run to the Taxation Bureau to lodge application material 
And they have to gather all documentation before they can submit

It is impossible to do it in one go
Applying also does not mean succeeding
Sometimes they have to wait a while before getting the outcome

Many citizens are angry about this
They feel that the government is unfriendly to them

Every time I see people
Shed tears at the reception desks
I could also see the heartache of the social workers

I have also seen many tragedies
That I don't know how to resolve

Our government system
Should be carefully considered

Many things are related to IT:

Data collection
Information confirmation
Data transfer
Data analysis
Data review

If you look at the people service portion
You will see that a lot of the pain comes from

Inefficiency

The criteria of assessing low-income households are complicated
Households are also required to be reassessed annually
From assessment to passage, a case often takes
at least 1 to 2 months

Workload
Could suddenly explode in quantity because of a news report
Everybody gets together and work overtime into the late hours of the night

Endless amount of forms to fill in
Form that have an extremely poor in security system
Filling in the data interface is a painful form of torture
You can't expect them to not complain about it

But this is not the question to be asked
The issue is:
How is complaining going to help?

System modification involves IT expertise
No one has sat with them to discuss IT expertise
No one has told them whether this is possible or not

Even if the technology is feasible
There are still rooms for legal and regulatory challenge

Not many IT businesses are prepared
To engage with civil servants whom they consider difficult to handle
And to discuss IT issues with them

Not many IT businesses
Would go to the front line to observe the real situation
of civil servants performing their work?

All that senior ministers can do
Is ask them to swallow the whole thing

Until 6 months later or 1 year later
The senior ministers receive feedback

But by then the people have been suffering for over 6 months already
Do they still have any spirit left to argue?

Amendment suggestions
Take at least half a year to come good
The worse thing is
Does a change really mean for the better?

Or does it mean
That everyone has to learn from scratch how to use a new system?
Not to mention a system that isn't better...

We are always talking about
The people's judgment
But even about their own system, civil servants
Have found it difficult to understand the prerequisite knowledge
So forget about having original ideas

Many people say
That the government is holding all the information in its hands
But
The information is kept in different units

Each unit
Only wishes to perform its own business

If other ministries help you
They need to spend more of their budget
And more of their resources
And they recieve no credit, no KPI

If other ministries to help you
They have to wonder whether they have to bear of the brunt of any fallout

Very often
When an incident makes front-page news and
Unit A is being pilloried at the Legislative Yuan
It is actually Unit B that made the spill in the first place

Performing a social welfare review
And accessing data from the taxation department 
Can take a number of years
There are various levels to consider

Not all the problems relate to IT
Commentary based on intuition
is very often wrong

The difficulty about interacting between ministries
lies in the need for a third-party unit
Or good relations between the two sides

For this reason, the key issues are:

How can you find a third-party coordinating unit
or
What is the portal by which the other party can cooperate?

We are only the small bananas
It's better that we have ability to help him thrash it out with a third party
In such a fight, we can't fail

We must have self-knowledge
Of course, if you have a positive or influential "relationship"
That's another matter entirely

I've seen dozens of issues
Being stuck in a dilemma that no one is willing to resolve
But in every process, there is bound to be further processes within the units
Many more possibilities can arise

Too often, we take the biggest problems too seriously
And let go of too many small problems that are valuable and important

In the entire National Administration
Very few departments
Have portals to processing IT-related issues

Local government is even worse
At least a certain percentage is led by manufacturers

In my own experience
The one that has some ability to push things through are:

Jaclyn Tsai, Office of the Political Commissioner
NDC Information Management Office
Taipei City's IT office
Office of R&D in other cities

(With the exception of Taipei City,
IT offices in other local government are all secondary units to R&D)

Too many ministries and political factors
Information tends to lack compatibility and flow

In a short period
It is unlikely that the ecology of government information can change

When I say this
You may feel that it is odd
What does this have to do with open data?

One of the purposes of open data is
To activate the efficiency of government via data

First, we have to have the data
Before we can open up the data
If we skip over the internal transformation process
Open data is just an empty shell

Some people may ask
Why do civil servants have to change?

It's because the times have changed
We have been massively invaded by the digital world

The National Treasury is tight
Human resource is tight, general resource is tight

Civil servants have the power to change
(Some ministries)

No amount of overtime is going to make this change happen
The process has to be re-factored
We have to make that choice

In the end
The government presently needs more information consultants

I don't claim to have the best solution
But by discussion, we can move forward step by step
At the moment, the effect is relatively good

Because time is limited
And my knowledge is limited
Our talk has to end here

But even if I am dreaming
One person means one more person
We hope that more and more people can join in

[S: Information volunteering: S]
How to collaborate

Currently, there are several ways:

1. Serve as a open data committee member of the various ministries
2. Other cities and counties are willing to invite IT experts to assist to perform consultancy services

Also showing

Many people have asked me
How do you find so much time?

Actually, I have been very lucky
My job gives me the freedom to handle my responsibilities:
  • Remote work
  • Self-directed duties
  • Self-appointed goals
  • Progressive responsibility

I'm actually just a person
with 2 full-time jobs

One in the public sector
One in the commercial sector 

And my company has been very supportive of me

In 3 or 4 months, our product will be available
For everyone to see (?)

But currently we are not recruiting
Just explaining how we do things

I can only say:

When you really want to accomplish one thing,
And you are really willing to sacrifice something for it,
Your environment and conditions will come together to help you complete it

People who work on public service
Are probably quite silly
But we are smart silly

Thank you!