# In Gov. Communication and Collaboration we OPENDATA
2019.07.23

# Reforms and Conflicts - Vision vs Reality

In the past few years, there has been several tumultuous social conflicts and reforms in Taiwan, like the National Affaires Conference on Trade and Economics following the Sunflower movement and the occupation of the legislative yuan in 2014, in which the government first introduce the live video broadcasting via YouTube. And then there was the Pension System Reform of the Military, Education and Government service in 2016-2017 which results in a distrust and conflict between the civil society and the government / authority.

Then there is another National Affaires Conference in 2017-2018 and this time on Judicial matters, because the restore of the trust toward the judicial system in Taiwan was a priority for the President Tsai.

After the Judicial system Reform, we then have the Conference for the Energy transition white paper in 2018-2019, in which the government tried to include the public participation at different stages of the making of the white paper.

But from the results of the last year's referendum, we was surprised to learn that the most people in Taiwan have no knowledge of the energy transition policy and the white paper, almost half of the people thinks the principal source of energy in Taiwan was nuclear, which represents in reality just about 10% of the energy produced in Taiwan. And We have the similar problems for the judicial reform, for the pension system reform, the information flow between the Government and the civil society is broken, there is no trust between the people of Taiwan and their government, the distrust is mutual.

And with the misinformation as a plague, plus, the media are not really helping to clarify the dis-information, we saw that in the last 6 months, the government in Taiwan is transforming to a news agency, they social media like Facebook, line (the messenger the most popular in Taiwan) are playing a major role to communicate with the people. The Government use words, pictures, video, animation and comics to talk to people. And the results seem to be mitigated.

Simply because this is like a unidirectional communication, there is no dialogue, no discussion, no way to have a more deep conversation between the society and the government. The trust is hardly restored by this way.

# Our action plans to a more Open Governance

I was the committee member for the Conference on the judicial reform and on the energy transition white paper. In case of the Judicial reform, our group was focusing on matters of the open justice which aim to make the judicial system more accessible and friendly. For the Energy Transition White paper, I am in the group in charge of the Energy Governance, and we were discussing on subjects like how to helping people to acquire the knowledge on the energy transition, how to help the local government to build their energy transition plan with full knowledge / data and helpful tools to make the decision, to communicate with people, to build a local support community.

In fact, we were trying to make the government more open with better communication and participation from the civil society. We were trying to give the government the tools and the methods to face the challenge of the modern democracy where people demand to be part of the action and not just passively have a seat in the audience.

So in the case of the judicial reform and toward a more open justice. We were talking about a digital transformation of our Judicial system, like,
- establishing a 5 year Digital And Openness Transformation Action Plan
- use of the social media for a better communication and announcement
- e-helper for people to understand more easily the court's judgement
- service of online complaint form
- use of AI and voice recognition for auto-transcription
- use of AI and data analysis tool for a better decision making helper
- re-design of the website with user-centric in mind
- using information and Communication Tool (ICT) on the law and court process,
- introducing the structural data format for the judicial documents like the use of legalXML (Akoma Ntoso). The Court's judgment is now open data in Taiwan, but not yet implant the LegalXML format, and therefore the usability as for the data analysis is still a problem
- Open Access and Open information of the market of lawyers (like the range of the service fee, the disciplinary penalty announcement)

we then have a tracking system and website to help people to follow the process of the judicial reform. The problem is, nobody is watching this website, in fact, nobody really care about what happened in the justice reform. People only pay attention to the justice event, when there is a major crime or controversy over the court's judgement and to enforce their disbelief of the judicial system

In the case of the Energy transition white paper, the challenge was quite similar : a better communication with civil society, give the local government tools and knowledge (base) to build a viable action plan with the participation of local communities, better support system in human resources, financial aid, technical network etc.

And to achieve these goals, we are asking the government in charge of the energy transition to build a new website in which all information mentioned above are represented and listed in one single place. We also ask the website to be open data compliant, this means, not only the website is designed for human eyes and browsing, the website should be built to facilitate the crawling to any spiders (bots, crawler, parsers) like those used for the search engines (Google, Bings, and all others) or anyone who wish to use the information / data on the website to build their own service or platform, to advocate, to promote, to make their own business use.

So two levels of information representation are required:
- a website of information / resources for human needs:
- A search engine based on keywords or on knowledge graph
- A data visualization with an education purpose
- a knowledge base
- support tools for a better decision making
- a website with meta tags to make the website machine readable
- use of json-ld to annotate and structure the data/content of the web page
- using Open API to allow a better machine to machine data mashup
- Let Google find the content, and then let Google understand the content (knowledge graph) for a better search result

# Using Open Data as media to connect people

But unfortunately, we made plans, and the Government didn’t follow. The digital transformation is rooted in the change of the culture. It is easy to build websites, to buy new hardware devices, get a new system, but it is quite hard to have a data centric mind and build a data governance to assure the quality of the data and maintain a flawless data flow.

So websites are built, information and visualization are made, but still, people keep ignoring all the information we put together. So only few people know what happened to our judicial system during the last 2 years, actually, I mean, no one really care. And the referendum of the last year told us, no one really care about the energy transition plan which should define the future of Taiwan in term of economic and social development. There are information available to everyone, just, no one sees it!

This could be the end of my expose, but I'd like to share something with you. I know that Honduras as a country member of the Open Government Partnership has a Open Government Action plan which aims to make the country more transparent and more open, as you demonstrated and your winning in the last Taiwan Presidential Hackathon.

As you might notice or not, I was talking a lot on how to open our data to make the data useful and connectable to other resources, on how to make the data discoverable by the search engine and understood by this one, a bit on data governance and data standard (legalXML and W3C - data on the web - best practice), because our challenge in these 2 examples is how to make our data / information consumable with ease, this means data and information be seen and be used via website, via search engine, via 3rd party app / webapp or any other services possible.

- Data / information needs to be found, to be seen, to be understood, then to be useful.
- Data / information needs to be consumed by connecting to other Data/Information, by being transformed and interpreted, by being integrated into a service responding to needs, then to be usable.

This means we do need to take care on how data/information is designed (data structure and metadata), is published (on the web or using a API). Simply put Data Open on a portal is not enough (cf https://data.gov.tw). We used to say, put your data on the web, and we will do everything you can imagine. And few years later, we found out that this is just an illusion.

With Data correctly published, we need to recognize that our target audience is not quite homogenous. We need to distinguish the audience in at least 3 categories who will consume the data in different ways.

- developers / service providers
- data hobbyists / civic hackers
- muggle / layman / normal people

A muggle / normal people doesn't need to know what data is, and they are generously seeking for answers not data to their questions. They can not read the raw data in general, and need someone to transform the data to insights, or any kind of information ready to be consumed. They are the visitors to our website or other service platform. They find their information from search engine or from social media when someone share the links to your website or service. Data or information should be SEO or SMO to be effectively found and consumed.

A data hobbyist is someone who has ability to use tools like excel / PowerBI / Tableau to import data and make something with it. They are occasionally data users and consumer, they know where to find data, and how to extract information from data, depending on their skills. They can be a valuable helper if needs, to be interpreters between your data and other people. And to this end, your data need to be discoverable (can be found) and explicitly explained (with a good metadata and documentation of the data)

For developers or any service providers, data quality is more important than anything else. And data quality is all about the completeness, accuracy, reliability, timeliness, Integrity etc. So beside from data discovery, data documentation, data access needs to be granted. Either with an Open API, or data are provided with structural, machine readable and open format to maximize the accessibility of datasets.

Althrough we are making a distinct between different user groups, there is nessecity to work and collaborate with theses groups of users, which will in return giving feedback to the usefulness of our data and forming a community with whome we will be able to do more.

Data as media, and as a linking bone, the goal is not just to communicate but ising data to form with civil society a network that we can work together. It's about the collaboration.