 Hello everyone. Welcome to our Federation of Engineer Institutions of Asia and Pacific Youth Talent Development Working Groups 2021 Meet and Greet Accomplish Engineer Series number four. My name is Richard Moe. I am the co-founder of FIAP YTWG, and is currently the chair of the Young Engineer Alliance Committee of the Chinese Institute of Engineers in Taiwan. And I am also the chairman of the MA Group Consulting Engineers Taiwan Company, a 46 year old multidisciplinary consulting firm. Today I'm very, very honored to be here to interview a very special guest, Taiwan's first digital minister, Ms. Audrey Tang. Thank you, Minister Tang, Audrey, for your kind acceptance to our Meet and Greet program despite your very, very busy schedule. Before I begin, allow me to give a few minute of housework reminders. Today we have over 140 registered engineers listening online. We're also on the live stream via the YouTube and LinkedIn. We have participants from 14 economies, Australia, China, France, Hungary, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Myanmar, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and the USA. Each span from 20 years old to over 70 years old. The participants include students to engineers, senior engineers, and a very experienced advisors of various engineering professions, including those in the industry, school professors, managers, researchers, and officers in various government entities. The session will last around one hour. And for the audience, if you have questions, please feel free to put in the questions in the Q&A section. We will aim to answer some of the questions in the last 15 to 25 minutes. So before I begin, let me allow me to introduce Audrey. Audrey is known as one of the top 10 computing personalities of Taiwan. She was a child prodigy, being able to read classical literature before five years old, programming by eight, and coding in the pro computer language by 12. She started her own business at 15 and worked in the Silicon Valley at 19. She worked for Apple as a consultant for computational linguistics, and she took the role of the digital minister in 2016. And since then has brought many positive impacts through the use of digital technologies and social innovations, including the effective solutions to combat COVID-19 when it first hit Taiwan in 2020. She's also an advocate to the United Nations 17 sustainable development goals. And in this dialogue, we will be hearing about her recent innovations. Her outlooks on how digitalization can play a key role in the UN's 17 SDG goals, and how digitalization can be used in traditional engineering industries. And also her views on the critical skills and mindsets that future engineers need to address the many, many challenges that we face today. Okay, without further ado, we will start now with some questions, and we welcome Minister Audrey Tang. Hello, good local time everyone really happy to be here well virtually. Yeah, thank you Audrey. Thank you for your precious time. I understand that upon taking the position of Taiwan's first digital minister, you have brought to the society very important concepts, including the digital social innovation, based on three elements of fast, fair and fun. And I'm sure today you have also carried out many new projects. Could you share some of the latest digital innovation projects with us? Certainly, one of the ongoing challenge in the past couple years is how to counter this pandemic, which we successfully did in Taiwan so far with no lockdown and counter the associated infodemic that's the disinformation crisis with no takedown. So to counter the pandemic with no lockdown means that we need to help the contact tracers to do their job. So one of the more recent inventions digital social innovations in Taiwan is the so called SMS based check in system. The idea very simply put is that any venue, any small shop or whatever can very easily print a QR code. But instead of requiring a specific app, you don't have to install anything just on the lock screen of the iPhone or Android just scan it and it will pop a SMS message, which contains a randomized location code and just hit send. And that's just like two seconds and everyone can complete this very quickly without leaving any privacy related details at a venue. So we've got a lot of adoption and we think the five major telecoms to act as data controllers so that they will store it just for 28 days before rotating it out. Now this is traditionally called this multi-party design. Previously people would really not prefer to have the contact tracing to be aggregated in a single store. But nowadays people can either trust the venue or they can trust their own telecom and no party has the specific whereabouts of any particular person. And this checking can only be used for contact tracing purposes and it has drastically reduced the work for contact traces. Previously they have to spend days to get a complete history. But nowadays it's usually completed within half a day. Okay, well, thank you. Those are very revolutionary inspiring concepts. What were the building blocks that allow you to think of new ideas to and then how did you implement these ideas. But in a sense, it's not my idea. It comes from this community called GovZero or GZeroVay. Now for all the government public service in Taiwan, it's usually done in websites that ends in something that GOV, that TWS is other countries' websites. However, in Taiwan, there's a bunch of people, tens of thousands actually, that looks to fork the government's pronunciations very important. Fork, the government fork in software engineering means taking something to a different direction while keeping its original functionality but develop it with a new imagination. And nowadays also a soft fork usually says, okay, we also relinquish the copyrights so that the upstream may choose to merge it back. So the idea is that GovZero look at all the digital services that Taiwanese government is not yet doing or isn't yet doing well and then they invent better alternatives to that. So last year the mass creationing map was a prime example where people can, as they're queuing in pharmacies, before going to the pharmacies, they can check their phone or chat bar or whatever to find a place that still has muscle in stock. And a same bunch of people, the civic technologists, this year co-developed this specification for SMS-based app-free contact tracing. And so what I did is like a reverse procurement. They did a standardization and then I just made sure that we implemented it in an affordable way through toll-free SMS. So when you try to implement these, what were the biggest obstacles you had to overcome in order to meet these ideas? Certainly. So as I mentioned, the building block really is moved to trust, right? To give no trust is to get no trust. So we need to trust the citizens to first experiments with, actually last year there was more than 100 different mass creationing visualizations in bots and analysis and so on. Not all worked great, but a few worked really well. And then we sort of soft-standardized on those de facto implementations which are then adapted in Korea and other countries as well for visualizing the PPE supply. Now this year also we've worked with not just domestic apps that's produced by local municipalities and local convenience chain stores and things like that, but also international developers like Singapore actually had two iterations of a very similar idea. And then we learned from the success as well as shortcomings of each and every all of it and we get the primary architects on the same Slack channel. And we did a very quick brainstorm for a couple of days before settling on this new specification. So the main building block is mutual trust and the main shortcoming if we're getting into a place where the government just hits on an idea and then say, okay, this is national standard, everybody else stop whatever you're doing. That would be a block because then the better idea would not have the chance to prove itself to a smaller bunch of people. Maybe if I could go back to one step ahead is could you explain what social innovation is and the concept of fast, fair and fun. Sure. Social innovation means everyone's business with everyone's help. So it means that it must be a social issue, right, something that affects all of us. And it must be open innovation, meaning that anyone who gets affected gets a say in contributing to the innovation. So for example, the free software community, the open source movement is a kind of social innovation because anyone who use a piece of program is empowered to fork to change the direction of that program while of course not having any copyright or patents losses coming their way. Now, fast, fair, fun refers to the fact that on the digital creation realm, everybody have plenty of issues, projects and so on to to work on. So how do you make sure that the digital social innovation that you're working on, for example, the mass rationing map gets the contributors that's required for a very quick brainstorming session and produce something that is a viable prototype ready to be rolled out to the entire country, 23 million people within just three days. So first, the fast part, the collective intelligence need to act in a way that's nobody need and anybody's approval to run their small experiments to start their own prototypes and things like that. We need a forum like in Taiwan, the PTT serves like Reddit, but it's not for profits, right? It's also governed in an open way. So anyone who have a good idea can receive in real time the uploads and downloads there and so on. And then whatever contributions that people make need to prove that it's fair. That is to say, for example, we must not make mass rationing algorithms that overprivileged people in urban areas at an expensive rural areas. We must not say that you have to learn to use a smartphone to scan the QR code for SMS based checking rather a feature from a flip phone. You can manually type that location code and send SMS manually as well. So leaving no one out, leaving no one behind, that's the fairness part. And finally, really to complete such a check-in is a very rewarding, gratifying event process because it's just so easy. If this like internet meme, right? If you get this internet meme in a few seconds and then you click share, that's another few seconds. If it's less than 10 seconds, then people will just virally share it. That's the basic reproduction number, right? It will go viral in a community. But if it requires like 5 minutes, 10 minutes to set up an app first, then of course that will not catch on because it's not fun at all. Wow. So what would be the foundation to allow social innovations, fun, fast, fair to work? Sure. Two things. One is broadband as a human rights in Taiwan, even on the tip of Taiwan, almost 4,000 meters. You're guaranteed to have 10 megabits per second for just 15 euros per month. Otherwise, it's my fault like personally, my fault. And so because of that, we do not say that you have to obtain some expensive connection, expensive equipment. Anyone who gets affected can just participate. And also there needs to be in basic education and lifelong education emphasis on digital competence rather than just literacy. Because literacy is just about receiving, right? Reading a book or watching a TV show or whatever and be able to comprehend it as literacy. But competence means that anyone needs to have this empowerment that says, OK, if you don't like it, well, go ahead and do a new version and people would be equipped to not just download the messages, but also participate in fact-checking, in measuring air quality, contributing to climate science, and all sorts of different ways to participate in the civic life even before they turn 18. Wow. So then in terms of the digital competence, right now we live in a world where there's five different generations. People 70 years old during the post-World War II, all the ways through new, right now, young people. So that's a big gap. I think in Taiwan it's quite well implemented in terms of digital competence. Could you share with that some insights? Definitely. So for example, when we designed the way for people to ask the Central Epidemic Command Sansa, the CECC questions, it's not just through the internet, it's not just through journalists and so on, or live streams and so on, but also through a simple thing called a toll-free landline number, 1922. So anyone can pick up their landline phone or mobile phone and dial 1922 toll-free to speak their mind about the counter-epidemic approaches as well as make new suggestions. And instead of going to voicemail or anything, people with a lot of empathy listening to these people, there's more than 2 million calls last year alone this year, probably more. And any new feedback, even if it's from a very old person, very senior person, or a very young person, like I think there was a young middle schooler called last April saying, you're rationing our masks, that's great, but all I got was pink ones, I don't want to wear it to school, or the voicemail class have navy blue masks, and the very next day everybody in the Central Epidemic Command Sansa press conference wore pink, and Minister Chen even said pink panther was his childhood hero or something. So that means that the real-time accountability can take place in not four-year or two-year iterations, but 24-hour iterations, and it's as simple as picking up the phone and call a toll-free number in order to participate. So the execution of these ideas is not easy, especially to implement it so fast in such a short period of time. Could you share with us the challenges of how you executed these ideas? It's actually very easy. If you design the procurement contract such that instead of delivering one single service like filing the tax, one needs to serve not just human beings, but also what we call open API. It's a Linux Foundation standard that says if you built a website or an app or something, you cannot just build it for human beings. If a robot wants to read and write this through a JSON open API, you also need to provide that. Otherwise, the vendor will be discriminating against robots and could be disqualified. Well, we don't quite say that, but that's a fact. But the point here is that we installed this open API-based API-first procurement back in 2016, and so we are now benefiting from the fruit of that contract because when we redesigned the text filing service, we did it in a way that's collaborative. It started by some designer in our national petition platform, saying the old text filing system is explosively hostile. And then we invite anyone who have a gripe with the text filing system to co-create a new system. And because we designed a new system to be API-based like Lego Blocks, the participant to that collaborative meeting, including say the Ministry of Health and Welfare, the Ministry of Economy and so on, when it's their turn to build such a nationwide system for mask rationing, for stimulus vouchers, for vaccine dispensings and pre-registration and so on, they can go back and say, let's just use this API for, for example, SMS sending. Let's use this API for authenticating. Let's use this API for the pre-registration and so on, so that when we have a good design like the SMS contact tracing, from the GovZero community with the actual implementation, it's just like pulling a few libraries together, which could be completed within just three days. Wow. So do you have a big team of people to be helping you doing all this? As I mentioned, GovZero is tens of thousands of people. And that includes the lead architects and designers of many domestic and also international companies who in their spare time contribute back to the society. So that is by and large where the ideas come from. Now, if you watch international media, sometimes people say, oh, the mask rationing mail or whatever, it's Audrey's idea. None of this is my idea. This all GovZero's idea. And I'm just there kind of liaison a bridge into the cabinet level like resources and so on. So bridging the different resources and different entities, there's everyone have a different way of thinking. So how do you overcome these different ways of thinking? Different ways of thinking. Well, to be honest, I think everyone probably agree that when tackling a public issue, for public purpose, we need to feel safe. And we also need efficacy. We need it to be fast. So swift and safe. These are the two main values. I'm not sure about the fund. That's probably a few. But swift and safe. These two are probably the most important. And too often when we're stuck with the old way of business is usually doing things. Sometimes we make trade-offs. We do redesign something. We move fast and then we break things. So people feel less safe, cybersecurity-wise or privacy-wise. Or we become very risk-averse and we design a lot of protection mechanisms, which make it not at all swift and indeed burden with bureaucracy. But with digital social innovation, as long as anyone can propose something that is a little bit swifter and a little bit safer, that's like a Pareto improvement on the status quo. Then we just implement it as I mentioned 24 hours later. So because of that, each small step sounds incremental. But because it leaves everyone feeling safer and also everyone's burden reduced. So that leaves more time for people to brainstorm more designs and processes that can help on this swift and safe approach. I often compare it with the German highway system, the Autobahn. The faster you drive, the safer you are. Thank you. I move on to part of the questions about your application to the United Nations Sustainable Development. I see that a lot of these innovative concepts behind it is to reach the sustainable developments of society. So to you, how do you define the big words sustainable and resistance? Sure. So sustainability means prosper in this generation but more importantly prosper with future generations or to reduce it even further. To be sustainable is to be a good enough ancestor. And so this idea of good enough ancestorship means that of course we all do our part. We cannot design 100% perfectness. That will probably leave no room for creativity for future generations. But on the other hand, we cannot pollute the environment or destroy social trust to a point where it's impossible for future generations to improve upon the current condition to take opportunities away from them. So to prosper in a way that's intergenerational I believe is the point of sustainability. It also means that when this generation is faced with some natural disasters or with something that adversarial effects of many of our own creations then we cannot just say, oh, the next generation will figure it out. We need to build back better in this current generation so that the next generation stands a fair chance to realize whatever that they want to optimize in their generation. Then so how would digitalization play a role? Well, I think you mentioned before, social inequality. Yes. But are there any further roles of how digitalization can play a role? Yes. So without digitalization we naturally only care about our physical neighbors. It's very easy to design systems that makes ourselves and our neighbors happy while creating a lot of negative externalities, pollution and so on, somewhere else in the planet because without digitalization we're not aware of it or we choose not to be aware of it. But with the digitalization as we can see nowadays for counter-pandemic the entire world is a community. I often wake up to like Canadian or South American counterparts during the day of course with people in Asia and closer to the evening with people in Africa and Europe and so on but everyone has the same urgency. When I talk about vaccination, PVEs, contact tracing and things like that we're facing this issue together so we feel much closer to each other and the internet indeed was built for this, right? It was built for when it's almost impossible to travel physically after a nuclear war or something that's the initial grief. So we're now in a place where the internet was built for this kind of global neighborhood in a situation where a movement is restricted without the internet the access to this kind of social innovation will become almost impossible during the time of pandemic. How certain industries, that's a traditional industry they move very slow, they change very slow but digitalization is a tool or a way of change that's very fast. So these two ideas kind of clash against each other so how do you see the traditional industries such as civil engineering? I'm in public service, it's also a very old industry we're in a service industry I guess, public service but anyway, the point here is that when we're innovating we're not throwing out the old, we're not challenging the old we're simply saying there may exist ways that will realize our original values but in a more swift and safe fashion this is all what we're saying, right? So for example, as I become the digital minister I make sure that anyone with more than 5,000 petitions kind of signatures online can surface their newest ideas to the cabinet level and we can then work on cross-ministrial conversations and so on. So for example there was a case where we talked about eSport and the Ministry of Culture was saying okay, eSport doesn't have a traditional heritage so it's probably the idea of sport ministry and a sport agency says well it doesn't move the entire body so it's not a sport to us, it's probably the Ministry of Economy and the economy says well we work on the physical equipment for eSport but individual athletes probably not our business either and that shows the kind of old, more conservative pace that they're thinking about that you just outline in any traditional industry, there's a certain pattern of thinking but with the help of Digital Social Innovation and specifically with people on PTT because I post the entire transcript online for people to review and annotate so there are people on PTT on our equivalent Reddit that says oh but do you know Go, Weiqi, the AlphaGo, that board game is now an eSport, computer plays it better if people play it online and things like that so whatever we designed for bridge players and Go players and so on can be adapted for eSport players without changing the existing law or regulations so what I'm trying to say is that Digital is about connecting people with people, it's not about replacing people with machines as long as the Ministry of Culture Economy as well as the existing legislators all can see that their existing values are being respected, they're not they're not shying away from reinterpreting to site okay now Go is an eSport and we are now including more real-time eSports into our original implementations so this is about connecting it's not about tearing something down so how would this right now there's a lot of severe climate changes causing a lot of natural disasters Digitalization innovations are often used to support the natural disasters preventions or mitigating it are there any new ideas or new ways that's right now that you may know of that should be further so we run an annual presidential hackathon every year and the top teams become our national level policies and so this year the international track is all about climate action and last year even the domestic track I think the five champions all have something to do with climate action so without the time to go into details it includes for example an augmented reality tool that can have people plant plant the planting and have the future trees speak to them and commit for the local community to commit to the maintenance of the trees and so on and that aggregates it to become a kind of popular will to plant the trees or there was an app that can use push notification that tells you whether the climate is heating and probably you need to drink more the same app also displays the local like water stations so that you can walk into those stations and get a free refill of water while saving on the plastic and thereby also reduce carbon footprint and also learn something about local histories and so on there's new ideas about the use of smart meter to inform better the use of electronic appliances in people's homes so it doesn't have to wait for like 10 years or 20 years to gain back on the electricity bills but can just very easily use machine learning to analyze the usage pattern so that people can plant an entire industry or just your home battery when it comes to the energy use and so on so I think all of these qualifies as social innovation because everyone can also contribute to make it slightly better that's a lot of information to could you also share with us again I mentioned before the right now we live in an era of five different generations and for myself I grew up during this time when there's no internet to a lot of computer evolution in all kinds of computer to internet worldwide during college and then now to mobile phones and now even more ways of using digital so each generation has a different way of thinking and each generation has their own merits and how do we facilitate the understanding of different generations to other generations without a lot of communication and be able to implement projects better I think one of the keys of doing intergenerational innovation is that instead of identifying, I know some people identify with Gen X, Gen C or whatever but instead of identifying with anything focus on the common experiences for example I never say I identify as this gender or the next, I say I experience one puberty and then I experience another puberty and so it's basically the same history but narrative in a way that maximizes the commonality between different people the popular mobile game Pokemon Go when it was first released, we see a lot of grandparents and with their younger grandchildren and they're just catching some Pokemon monsters I guess but both sides have something to relate to, the older generation can share like you can catch this kind of fish because it used to be a lake here and so on the local histories and the younger generations can relate about the ACG world for you and things like that but this is something genuinely new for both generations and they can co-create, I think we need to choose the topics that focus on the common values and then engage the senior people as early as possible that's great thank you could you also share with us that in today's world everything is interconnected so cross-disciplinaries each person will probably need multiple types of skills and a more global attitude and more sensitive attitude to the sustainable environment so what are the skills and mindset that you feel that younger generations or people in college need to equip themselves to tackle the so many challenges that we're facing now that's a great question the key idea of competence that is to say you can make some contributions and be introduced to the community by your contributions and it's not just your own duty but everyone can just make a little bit of contribution so that it adds better, it adds together better this I think is very important because the old way of education in most of East Asia and certainly Taiwan when I was a kid focused a lot on the individual to individual competition within the class or within the school and so on but choose to be taught no large-scale issues and indeed none of the sustainable goal targets can be tackled by a single person alone it just doesn't make sense I mean if it's this simple to stuff it probably will be something not to be made into a global goal right so into tackle this global goals we need to work generations across cultural boundaries across disciplines and so on and the first thing to say is not okay I'm better than you on some discipline or I'm scored better I mean A you just scored a B or something like that but rather what can you bring to the table what can you contribute through your unique perspective through your life experience and so on what can you contribute to this common value and what innovations can you bring to the table that delivers on those common values and we keep asking those two questions how to get to our common values first and then how to innovate to deliver on those values without leaving anyone behind if we keep asking those two questions that's the path of building competence wow so so a lot of these start to need to start to build up since since elementary school middle school yes yeah yeah yeah okay so for right now because of the technological advancement there's a huge migration of engineering graduates moving away from the traditional industry to these new fields of IT or semiconductor etc we feel that sometimes there is an imbalance of the engineering capacity yeah so from your viewpoint how do we motivate engineers to continue to stay in their traditional industries well in Taiwan we have this saying of a xiegang or a slash so one can be an engineer slash designer or a designer slash poet slash politician making a poet but anyway the point is that as I just mentioned instead of identifying with one single rule or one simple discipline instead think of ourselves as someone who can contribute with this experience and with that experience because experience are inclusive if we experience the design worlds better for example then we start to see that the communication skill that's required is actually cross disciplinary instead of just staying in any particular industry the kind of design thinking can be taken to any particular industry and then connect it with other industries in other sectors so what I'm trying to say is that of course it's great to be a well trained engineer in a particular field but do not let that limit you to not learn about design to learn about specifically interaction design and service design which is widely applicable across industries and you can then serve as the bridge to connect the old and the new industries together so what kind of ways are there sometimes I also think about this question is how do we encourage people to think beyond what they were taught to be in school or being in one profession for too long your whole mindset is locked in into that that's right exactly so sometimes we try to find ways to let them break you know think out of the box but what from your experience what kind of message yeah my own office HR policy is that we invite one from each ministry but not more so to maximize the diversity and inclusion of the office and when we're holding collaborative meetings on the tax filing experience redesign instead of holding the group discussions from the ministry of finance participation offices we deliberately invite say the sea patrol the ocean patrol or the ministry of interior or the national palace museum to hold such discussions but when it's time to talk about the ocean policy then maybe it's the ministry of finance holding the group and this is not just a gimmick this is something very deep because they are all career public servants very professional but too often they take only the position of that of a rule maker and policy maker but when a ocean affairs council officer takes the group discussion lead on tax filing design they necessarily take the position of a tax filing citizen right they would take the citizen side because they have nothing to do with the finance ministry and the finance ministry public seven if you assign them the job of holding the group discussion for the ocean affairs redesign of ocean services surfing and things like that then they take the position of a surfer certainly and not a ocean patrol right so to in the organization design cross functional teams and rotate the chair and facilitating positions so that it's the person who are way outside of their comfort zone but still cherished for their professionality and then very quickly they can build cross functional teams by themselves. I also understand Audrey you actually spent time going around the island to different countries to look at and hear people's voice or people's ideas. Multiple islands have been to Jimin also so. So those could you give me give us share an example where you you heard an idea from the local people and your thoughts. Yeah of course and a lot of very good examples I remember for example going to to Hengchun which is the south most almost the south most part of Taiwan and at that place they were petitioning for the helicopters the Black Hawk helicopters from the Ministry of Interior to be posted there to serve as ambulance cars and once we listen to them we start to understand that they when they have people who are hurt from injuries and so on they almost always send northward to Kaohsiung and so on but so they want a faster vehicle. Now the great thing about getting all the different ministries, participation offices to join us in a discussion also remotely from connecting from Taipei and other municipalities is that people start to think out of the box comparing the speed of a helicopter to that of an ambulance car people start to focus on so why would the professional surgeons not choose to operate in Hengchun what's preventing them why are the professional nurses not able to raise their family and stay in Hengchun and so on so we get into the deeper questions and then we start to realize that this is a kind of self-propitulating situation because the more people send their injured northwards to Kaohsiung the less they trust the local clinic and the local surgeons and the less trusted they are the less likely they will stay for long in Hengchun so to break the cycle we need to innovate digitally right we need to for example work on telemedicine we can get the surgeons to remotely train the local surgeons through telepresence even operate locally through telemedicine and that will require then very good investment on either 5G or good fiber optic communication we need to work on redesigning the ambulance so that it gets the diagnostics or even some preliminary treatment while they're still on the ambulance and so on and all this is much better cost-effective than sending Blackhawks to this particular town for ambulance purposes so again cross-functional teams works best if they're faced with a real issue with urgency and can engage directly with local people's names so how do you pursue your dreams like your inspirations each person often have a dream to they want to do something but to real world after graduation you have to go to the career to work etc but how did you move away from that your passion well I pursue my dreams by going to sleep I sleep for 8 hours a day that's my work time really so during daytime I really just having fun and also getting ideas from the entire society and the world but I don't pass judgements and I don't do my main work while I'm awake instead I just read everything and take all the sides in and then just go to sleep and after 8 hours almost always wake up with something that is good enough that people can live with and then I start to work on that so in a sense I don't have anything like personal aspiration instead during the day whatever aspirations that may be in pension or conflict with each other I receive with no personal judgment but I go to sleep and if there's a lot of stakeholders a lot of stakeholders like the Hongchun case or the Esport case then I work over time I'll sleep for 9 hours before waking up with a solution to get more inspiration that's right to jump into another question how do you view COVID-19 impact how people will be working or interacting I think the the pandemic is going to take some time before it there's going to be a new world how do you see people interacting? One thing is this global neighborhood thing we stop defining our neighborhood as something physical nowadays anyone who are time traveler or at least time zone travelers can connect to multiple communities across the world and limited only by broadband accessibility as I mentioned so it means that as long as we have pretty good internet connection cameras and such there's no real difference between what's previously thought as the intranet or the extra net right nowadays it's all part of the internet that can form such ad hoc groups that work on the common standards and tackling common issues and so on and previously it's very difficult to get this kind of truly global teams because each population have different urgency assigned to different global issues for example climate action it used to be that on smaller islands people feel more urgent and on larger continents people feel less urgent of course nowadays the urgency is more shared but it's also because we have success experiences working on a truly globally urgent issue that's the pandemic together and then we take that successful collaboration model and apply it to climate action to counter this information to other issues that would not be able to do in a way that if people are siloed within their own jurisdictions so the time passes very quickly so maybe the last questions that I have is that what would be one word or one phrase you would give to young engineers who will become the future leaders of our societies so just one word then if that's one word then is just to listen but if I am allowed more words then that's also take all the sides while listening so I'm not just talking about listening to obediently to an authority that's not listening really that's just obeying all this but rather to listen carefully and deeply so that you can take the other person's side while holding of course your original positions and values and as you expand your ability to do that and truly taking in all the sides then you start to see that's what superficially look like zero sum games can be transformed into positive sum games through open innovation Thank you for all the many many concepts and many ideas information I think listening is a big skill and everyone needs to train more on the way to listen I think if okay we will open the floor for a question or two anyone from the yeah there's one question is that what kind of activities you you may feel that the Federation of Engineer Institutes of Asia Pacific with 22 member economies there's a new platform for young engineers so what kind of activities could be possible to nurture these interactions Well I think the question was directed to you actually so maybe you can share your thoughts as well because I don't really have an idea of what kind of common urgency that everyone feels because the entire idea of social innovation builds upon common urgency then common values and then open innovations so I don't know what are you counting as urgent in FBI IAP actually there is just to share with Audrey we were thinking about also a competition that's very similar to what you mentioned about the presidential hackers competition to get ideas from the normal people on the topic of sustainable development goals some ideas come from the 14 year old but they just don't have the voice or the platform where this idea can be realized so that's something that the FIAP Youth Talent Development Working Group will be working on and I think if there's a chance we'll reach out to Audrey to give us some advices too but listening at scale that's right from all kinds of people so is there anyone from the audience that may have another question sorry there's one question from the audience hi Audrey thank you for your valuable insights I would love to get your perspective on parental currency blockchain technology where the new economy is going and how we can be active participants of creating the new economy that benefits everyone and leaves no one behind the common values that you mentioned sure well I work quite closely with the crypto community in particular with Ethereum because in presidential hackathon for example and the presidential culture award the voting system quadratic voting was first prototype and designed by Ethereum and we're learning from many other innovations there quadratic funding and so on that we can look at Ethereum as kind of a small jurisdiction that moves very fast and then we take some of those public governance ideas and apply to our jurisdiction so their research were developments and so I do believe that in the crypto space far more than just providing a way to store value a way for people to experiment with new ways of governance of collaborative governance and this goes beyond voting or funding systems we can already see that new forms of democracy are being created and because anyone can fork a chain very blockchain very easily so at any given time there's like thousands of different governance methods being experimented on and because the total attention of the developers engagement is bounded so that means through kind of evolution through kind of swarm application after a while we start to see the clear ideas emerge as better governance methods and that include not causing a lot carbon emissions running down blockchain and so on the energy transition sustainable transitions and so on so all of that I think serve as great inspirations for us working in the public service to look into those new innovations and that also help us to see democracy as a kind of social technology a lot of people especially in older democracies and republics already think that that's just exactly the way it was but democracy is a technology instead of just being constrained to you know uploading five bits every person every four years which is called voting we can improve the bit rates of democracy through these ongoing continuous democracy including presidential hackathon, sandbox, petition and so on and all of it has its counterparts of prototype in the internet governance community including the crypto space. Thank you. Another question is do you think pandemics would trigger the transformation into VR and AR? Yeah I do believe that shared reality is the killer app of this entire including 5G and co-presence and whatever people are calling made of us now or whatever but to me it's just this very simple thing a shared reality because public service is impossible to do without understanding the situation people are in but not everyone is well-versed in writing documents and powerpoint presentations so for people who are suffering for example because of lack of ambulance and things like that we actually needed to go there and share in their reality to actually take that car ride and so on to understand the deeper configuration and so the pandemic now prompted that instead of people just staying in their own offices people can go outdoors and thanks to low latency 5G and some lowest orbits and other communication technologies people can bring the ambience to the other side of the planet the other side of the countries and so on and start to share in the same reality so instead of thinking as virtual reality which sounds rather solo I always think in terms of shared realities and co-presence Thank you and another question is similar to the question I asked before does the social innovation idea be brought into or applied in a conventional industry for its digital transformation such as the construction industry if possible what suggestions of how to do it or how to initiate it Yeah Yeah so one of the social enterprises that I worked with is a BIM information modeling company they deliver pretty good services to do simulations and modeling and managing common assets and so on and unbeknownst to many of its customers initially they work with people with different abilities that is to say people who would have difficulty going to the streets and so on people who are severely paralyzed and people who are suffering from other conditions so through a set of very innovative redesign of the basic working process of their software and hardware kits and working with professional social helpers and workers and so on they transform how the BIM workflow process can be done in a purely virtual way so it's like a pilot because we're now all suffering somewhat thanks to the pandemic similar to their situation but it's a leader in making such workplace innovations and so it not only of course delivered value and also dignity for people with different abilities but it's also social innovation that any social worker and also people with different abilities may join at any given time while of course creating more value to the society Thank you and there's a question from India thanks for the creative webinar and thanks to the speaker Audrey my question is how can you relate the role of civil engineers in tackling the pandemic how can the young generation start with that? Well I always think of civil engineers as makers of public infrastructure that is to say places where everyone can work and educate and collaborate in a pro-social fashion right so and one of the key element of a public infrastructure is that it's open to all it's for everyone to use and indeed that's the civil in civil engineering otherwise it's just private sector engineering and so I often think of the places both offline like the social innovation lab my office which is shaped like a park where anyone can just walk in there's no walls and so on now also the digital space like PDT or the joint petition platform or presidential hackathon as the digital equivalent to public infrastructure so I often call it digital public infrastructure that is to say in Taiwan a few years ago in 2016 we convinced the national budgeting office and audit office that investment to public infrastructure in the digital world that is to say any civil engineering project has some part that can accept digital social innovation sometime through for example we use drones and photogrammetry to scan our public infrastructures and also our movie sets and things like that into the digital world. So I often think of the public infrastructure that is to say our movie sets and things like that into digital assets so that people can co-create more cultural works or even video games online and then use that as a feedback to get more people's attention and engagement to then improve the public infrastructure or museums or the local heritage sites and so on building a kind of popular engagement via an incremental cycle of more engagement people care more and also distribution the community also care more and then people from afar then care more and people in the community care more. So instead of separating the cyber and the physical I now often advocate to create the digital twins or doubles in the shared reality so that people who are not physically in that space can still participate meaningfully and then will become committed to improve that space. So that's the interaction become a very important element between trends. That's definitely. So instead of thinking about user experience which is that the people you already know are already your users. We can think about the human experience like the entire humanity and how they may discover and make use of the assets you're producing without necessarily being your user or customer. So that will also have a big impact to the human development too. Yeah. Yes, definitely. Yes. Okay, we will move on to the last question as capacity building become an important topic in our generation in the future generation due to less kids etc. How do you think we can do this to reach this goal or maintain this capacity building or capacity sustainably based on digital expertise? Sorry, I didn't get a connection between that. The capacity building become an important topic in our generation. Are there enough engineers in the future? How would you think digitalization or digital innovation can help maintain a capacity? Yeah, but I mean logically if we digitally connect to the global neighborhood then we don't have to do most of the things ourselves because the wheels have been invented the open innovations are within reach we don't have to redo things we just connect things together like Lego blocks and so on. So the capacity become the capacity to connect instead of just the capacity to make and that is truly digital transformation because if we think of digital transformation as just going paperless then of course we still need to do whatever we're doing and we actually probably have to do double the work because we still have other stakeholders who prefer paper. But if we think of digital social innovation as a way to transform our work so that anything that could be automated or has already been done somewhere else in the world is just done that way and we just connect them together then we just ameliorate a lot of the chores that we find daily work and then we can then dedicate more of our time on the more innovative pursuits so instead of saying capacity building I'm still emphasizing on the idea of digital competence once we all become more digitally competent than our capacity the nature of our capacity changes. Wow, okay. Thank you very much for your inspiring talks and ideas. We take this opportunity to thank Audrey Tan. One hour passed very quickly we look forward in another chance to meet Audrey Tan again. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you everyone. Bye bye.