 Taipei is really cold and it's like, you live in Singapore for 10 years and you still think it's cold We're good? Yeah, we're good I think it's okay You think I said you can Yeah, you can Sure, we can go now Yeah, we can Actually, good laptop, so I have notes No, it's fine It's great, it's totally great You can put it on the table We've already touched the lens of something Yeah, it's just good Okay, so I guess the start off So next week is the Salzburg Global Law & Technology Forum Since you can't be there, but I happen to be here in Taiwan I can't physically be there We consider sending a robot, but it turns out the castle is a wheelchair family So guys, this is just sort of a hint that we should be looking at some new ways to enable telepresence Or we should develop quadruped robots Actually, the lab here could probably come up with it too That's right Taiwan seems to be the home of robotics That's right So I thought it'd be great to get your thoughts on On the topics that we'll be discussing there And what I'd like to do is record this and we're recording now So we can get your comments to the participants And so I really appreciate the time that you're taking to do this So Salzburg Global is a nonprofit organization That brings jurists, technologists, policymakers from around the world together To bridge divides and enable collaborations at multiple levels Whether it's from a legal perspective to looking for solutions at a grassroots level And the thought is that building these networks across a diverse set of individuals And these participants, this confluence of participants Will seed different ideas and enable change And one of the topics which has become quite challenging for countries around the world Is the impact of technology on privacy, security and even ethics It's been like that since the Industrial Revolution First it was a newspaper, then it became radio And then it was TV, now it's the internet The internet's turned finally So let's start with the basics Not everybody knows who you are Can you tell the audience about your role as Taiwan's first digital minister? Sure Hi, I'm Audrey Tong I'm Taiwan's digital minister in charge of open government and social innovation This post is new I joined the cabinet in 2016 But I've been advising the cabinet since late 2014 after the sunflower movement The sunflower movement is a movement where people occupy the parliament Because the MPs at the time were refusing to deliberate a trade service deal with Beijing And so people just took the parliament and did the MPs job for them Because they were on strike That's a legitimate theory anyway But the plus of that movement is demonstrated to the entire country That it is possible when you have half a million people on the street and many more online To get to some sort of rough consensus after 22 days of occupy And so people have been really looking forward for the digital to not create a position Or to amplify the polarized opinions But rather bring people together as we did day after day since the occupy And then just get people's general fear, uncertainty, and doubt around digital technologies And turn them into a plurality instead of a very narrow minded singularity point of view Which always antagonizes people Right, and so you've implemented several initiatives to enable open government here in Taiwan So there's V-Taiwan that is joined Which is every evening here So literally there's a pizza gathering every Wednesday So today is my office hour So here anyone can come and visit me and have 40 minutes of my time like we do now And as long as everything is published under Creative Commons on the internet And I also tour around Taiwan to meet with people in rural indigenous places While we connect back to the 12th Ministry here in the social innovation lab Again as a way of participatory rulemaking And anyone when they get 5,000 e-petitions on a joint platform can summon me anywhere So like next week I'll be summoned to the bottom to fish in Harvard Because the fishes people there would like all the harbors in Taiwan be open for fishing But the fishes people maybe don't like it that much So we'll be summoned there to solve the local issue that has a national impact And finally there's V-Taiwan which is volunteer run by the F-Zero project And that experiments with very avant-garde type AI power conversations And things like that for issues concerning digital economy Tell me about the successes that you found through V-Taiwan or Joan Sure Right so V-Taiwan is the earlier one So its main claim to success is actually the government trusting the civil society enough To run a multi stakeholder conversation process that led to various things For example it led to the diversified taxi plan Which is a compromise between the Uber camp on one side and the existing taxi on one side Or that it led to the FinTech sandbox Which is a way to get people's ideas tried out in the wild for one year And we took it from the UK and Singapore really And then we took that sandbox model and applied it to self-driving vehicle to 5G to platform economy So anywhere you're in Taiwan you can just apply for a sandbox experiment for one year And if the regulator thing is a really good idea as deemed by the society We merge it back into the regulation It's a kind of trade for one year monopoly And in return for people to open up the data and the lessons learned And if it doesn't work well everybody learn something The innovation can try another different angle And V-Taiwan has also been used to make laws in the new company law Concerning social enterprises and benefit corporations In the sense that companies used to be for profit only But now they can declare their public purpose And then not just profit only But rather working on one of the sustainability goals And so all of these were creations of process led from the V-Taiwan discussion group Which finally formalized into the joint platform Where all the budgets or the regulatory pre-announcement for 60 days As well as the petitions and participatory budgeting Are all on the one stop shop in the joint platform That is run by the central government And then the central government basically appoints a team of participation offices In each ministries in charge of directly having a dialogue with the civil society on anything Whether it's on e-petition or regulatory pre-announcement That captures public attention That's going to be fun transcripting You're writing the transcript for this? That's why we can provide a transcript And actually we're going to upload it to YouTube Which usually gets a transcript about 80% That's right, it's automated That's going to be very handy Okay, so these participatory platforms I guess the biggest fear that most people have on the online side Is dealing with trolls How does the V-Taiwan deal with trolls? So the very simple one shot as you take away the reply button Once you take away the reply button You just really have nowhere to play Because trolls attach to the online discussions By making a harm in the attacks And derail the threat for a discussion But if you don't have the threat You don't have the threat of derailing the threat And so our usual design For example using the POTUS platform Which is the AI-based conversation platform That we just alluded to Basically all you can do for other people's reflections Or feelings about a particular matter Is that you can say agree or disagree On one statement posted by your fellow citizens And once you've clicked it You move alongside the people who share the same ideas Or feelings with you And you can discover that people on the other aisle Are actually also your friends And you just didn't talk about particular things over dinner So they're not nameless enemies And if 5,000 people came And vote exactly the same way We're not counting the headcounts And counting the diversity of opinion So 5,000 people coming voting exactly the same Is just going to be one dot It's not going to change substantially the agenda And so based on the same facts We're using this way to ask people Why are your feelings to those facts You can feel happy, you can feel angry It's all okay But more often than not When faced with such an interface Where you just keep clicking agree, disagree or a path People will want to share their more nuanced Selective feelings after a few yes or no For other people to go down And most of the time People do agree on each other's statements So people agree with most of their neighbors On most of the things, most of the time It's just if you just look at the polarized Social media or mainstream media They focus on like the 5 things That people don't agree with And spends like 95% of energy on it But using this kind of platform Where there's no replete We can focus on what we call rough consensus How we find the rough consensus While tabling this for the next Di-duration of discussion Okay so effectively what you're doing Is using the social graph to identify Common points of interest between What should be people would be People might consider as being Politically diverging groups of individuals They may still identify as divergent But based on this way of interaction Where they cannot attack each other People actually discover they agree On most of the things, most of the time With most of the people So what is the challenge of getting Local and city and national governments To adopt these types of platforms To encourage more conversation Well there's always the outside game If the governments flatly refuse To deliver substantially We can always go back and occupy the environment And so the outside game is really The key here by giving people a taste Of how it feels like In a few highlighted cases And by making it continuous We're not saying the one with 5,000 petitions and e-signatures We may consider responding If there's a regulation that we must Respond point by point And if it escalates to a referendum Then the legislation must also respond And so the two keys is first To give binding power by way of law And regulation of the consensus points Made by these platforms And second to make sure that these Platforms are continuous in the sense That once we have the rough consensus It's not that we're good Anyone can come back and challenge And modify and iterate on it This feels a grace into the Democratic citizenry Because then people can accept a Quit it with defeat for a time And then work on a more nuanced Comeback maybe two months afterwards Maybe two years afterwards Okay So there's always this sense of Balance of power within Government and citizenry Government right now isn't required To include these types of Participatory platforms As of last year They now have to For audiences that don't know Can you tell about how the regulations Changed here in Taiwan? We talked briefly about sandbox So that's one key piece It's not just a regulation because Taiwan is a continental system They actually act passed by the parliament That's the parliament's seats The right to enforce their view Of reality on fintech Or self-driving vehicle or whatever For one year If the society thinks it's a better idea It has a better version of the regulation Then it can make an exemption And regardless of the only ministry Aside from money laundering And funding the terrorists Because we know what will happen If you experiment anything else So that requires an Explicit authorization by the legislation And the legislation passed that because No legislatures or regulators For that matter want to legislate Something that they don't have First-hand experience on This is very risky We just based on white papers Or just sci-fi stuff And try to regulate emerging things None of us have any first-hand experience Of how to integrate with society So the idea is that we Crousers essentially those legal Or regulatory experiments With the civil society and the private sector With the understanding that The idea is just for people to get The first-hand experience And then we regulate later And that is the new framework Of lawmaking that we are using The sandbox model And the same goes for the e-petition The e-petition has a national regulation That says 5,000 signatures The ministries must come And respond substantially If the petition can be solved In many different ways That people petition for better healthcare resources Of Taiwan, it can be solved by Deploying helicopters as ambulances It can be solved by building a larger hospital Building a faster road Or whatever, right? And if any of the ministries think other ministries own it Then that ministry is included In the multi-stakeholder process But it doesn't absolve the original ministry Of the duty, so this is what we call The ice bucket challenge clause In the regulation You can name other people that it doesn't absolve you From participating in ice bucket Challenge, and so like Five different ministries all come together To figure out a way to solve this In a way that is both feasible And also accepted by the general public And so because all this is mandated By regulations and laws There really is no option for the ministry To opt out of the system Which is why we have now Around 100 participation offices In the ministry level In the agency level and also in China city So it's now propagated From the central government down to The local government To municipalities at least Now If anything is shown Since the 2016 election in the United States And perhaps Brexit Is that nation states are using Technology to create asymmetries How do you How do you prevent An online platform Like In Taiwan Or join From From bots Well In join for example People do have to authenticate Using SMS numbers But they're allowed to Choose a pseudonym Because of power imbalances There was a public servant Who petitioned with very wide appeal That he used to be That we can only take half a day off As public service But now we can take an hour off As something as simple as this Was almost impossible for people To raise in the original public service But because of pseudonymity They can raise it with our fear Of repercussion and it's now Adoptive so I can take one hour In any case What I'm saying is that There is a trade between Asking for real names all the time Versus anonymity and bots You can solve for the authentication stage Using SMS But not disclosing the SMS number To the ministries running the consultation It is only known In the National Development Council Running the platform and it's only reserved To use to prevent trolling And also for criminal investigation Should a large scale Unibotnet or whatever Decide to take over the platform So we're pretty good at the cybersecurity Layer in Taiwan because We have a real nation-state Adversary for a persistent threat So if people Decide to engage in cybersecurity Lessons they don't have to Solve abstract Goals and whatever Challenges they can just look at Actual traffic and work On real cases. So because of that We maintain a very good relationship With the White Hat Hacker community We allocate 5% or more Of all the government procurement In cybersecurity To support the industry And the White Hat hackers get Meet with ministers, with the president Once in a while so that we make sure That they get paid And there's fame and they don't go To the dark side which always has cookies And because of that the cybersecurity Layer is well protected and we Build the participation layer on top of that So recently Asus Asus's Software update system was Cracked by Possibly from an advanced Persistent threat actor Yes And so The Shadow Hammer So Shadow Hammer For those of you who don't know Shadow Hammer Is the name given To the software program Used to hack the Asus Software update system And this is very much simple This is basically the equivalent of Let's say Google updates Or an Apple update Now Given that cybersecurity Is a very much a Community effort How Do you Protect the Anonymity of the citizens Using the platform? Right So a few things So we identify only the SMS number So you can always post Using your families Or neighbors When participating in the petition On the joint platform And that provides some sort of distance Between the people posting Versus the people making the comments It's not perfect So we're working on An even more advanced form Of what we call the B.A.I The public key infrastructure Something like what Estonia does So just as a background But as Estonia do I-voting You can always use the face-to-face ballot To override your online ballot That's something we also do here But most importantly It has a double envelope system Where the inside envelope Using a national PKI card To authorize the vote Is actually coming from you There's a separate envelope That makes sure that people running the election Cannot identify back to who Submitted the vote So basically it's a kind of two-way Isolated process And we're looking to implement that Our main hurdle at the moment Is that it only reaches about 20% Or so of population Instead of like in Estonia Which is in the high 90% Which is why next year We're planning to roll out the PKI card As an additional function To the paper-based national identity card And we expect people to Because it's free to adopt it And turn on the PKI functions Whenever they feel the need To file tax or buy a plane ticket Or whatever The PKI card's adoption And the referendum is another vehicle Because people can just get E-petitions on the E-referendum platform by next year So if you get 200,000 Or so E-signatures Your vote on the referendum Actually binds the legislation Unlike the joint platform Which only binds the administration And so that is also a high incentive For people to get a PKI function On their national identity card Next October next year So you've taken steps to Help bridge that digital divide Right Where are the other areas That you feel In the digital divide that persists Here in Taiwan or anywhere else That needs to be addressed Yes, so Taiwan is kind of unique because Where a really small geographic was It's just one hour and a half From Taipei to Galshung From the north to the south And so because of this Our internet penetration is Around 80% And we have This national policy Of broadband as human right So anywhere in Taiwan Actually even in remote islands like Dongcha If you don't have 10 megabits per second It's our fault And because of this we make sure That the libraries In the digital opportunities Are available to use So at least on the communication The hardware layer There is equal opportunity for people And so working from the statistics That we show For the people's survey on the Joint platform We don't have that much age gap When it comes to digital divide The active participants are in their 60s or more And the teens Mostly because these two Are the Especially indigenous areas Mostly because it's not just A linguistic translation thing It's also a cultural translation thing The indigenous nations They may already have a form Of participation of tribal assembly And systems like that So they're less Inclined to buy into A separate democratic process So I think the trick here Is to vote. The first one Is that we translate our participation Of the materials Not just to the six languages Including the Taiwanese languages But also Taiwanese indigenous languages Such as Amis The language of our spokesperson In the administration And the second thing Aside from the linguistic and cultural translation Is we make sure that in the places Where it's more than half Of the population speaking indigenous Or speaking a local language Or actually conducted over that language The public officials need to Learn that language, get certificates And public official documents Are also written inside The cultural framework of that language And this is a Long work And since the president apologized To the indigenous nations It's only been like two years or so But we'd expect that within a decade Or so we will slowly shift To recognize the indigenous ways And legitimacy Instead of asking them to come To the space of technology We'd bring the technology to amplify Your space There's a cost to technology And part of that Part of the fundamental Barrier in the digital divide Is that cell phones now cost 500 bucks Nothing actually In Taiwan we have those feature phones That's still running Android So it's really cheap It is really cheap And also cheap tablets Then also the hardware security And software security Who bears that cost So basically It's to vote the Critical infrastructure Of course the state Bears that cost We passed a new cybersecurity act just this year To make sure the critical infrastructure Is as well as all the government agencies Are upgraded to the hardware Supporting the latest security mechanisms And also dedicated personnel Are there to ensure the safety But for portable devices For personal devices At the moment what we do Is that we publish the security You know Track records of those manufacturers But we don't at the moment Interfer with, you know, citizenry When being advised That of their security records Do make such and such purchases We just make sure the critical infrastructure To connect to is not univunerable To the Trojans or to whatever Malware they're running on the system And we also have a set Of cybersecurity awareness campaigns In a basic education system As part of the information literacy That's part of the Curriculum that's taking effect This August And so I think we're one of the Actually the only jurisdiction In Asia that includes Media literacy, critical thinking Service security and so on And this is in class But as a kind of basic literacy Across all the different classes This is really important So Is Is this Required to In order to use Is this literacy required To practice It's K-12 It's K-12 Not just for For older adults It's lifelong learning of course But it's also K-12 And especially like starting this year The first, the seventh, the tenth Grade will roll in the new curriculum And part of the curriculum Basically shifts the role of teachers Used to be teachers give Standardized answers People are asked to remember those answers And as a high school dropout Junior high school dropout I don't even understand why people Want to memorize things when computers Do it much better But in any case we're switching From the road memorization To what we call character building And the basic literacy building In the new curriculum So that the teacher is just another learner That learns alongside the children And that closes one of the mental Backdoors on which Information and malware And phishing Because there's no standard answering The children learn that It actually needs to start from Autonomous understanding Of the social or environmental Or economic issue that they themselves Want to solve And the teacher help them to navigate The wealth of information online and offline And so people learn to be critical thinkers Instead of being just Consuming information When we talk about say open data in Taiwan We always mean Open data both from the citizens And the private sector In addition to open government data So we have people in primary schools Measuring their own air quality Using like 100 U.S. dollars very cheap Air quality sensors And contributing to the data commons Data collaboratives and learn Themself how to be a responsible Data steward and all of this Helps shifting the narrative From a unit top down approach Was very susceptible To this information to a more grassroots Approach You've basically taken the U.N. STGs and implemented This here in Taiwan Despite Taiwan not being Recognized in the U.N. But Taiwan can help I mean literally doesn't it My name for it You should hope let me Get a headshot of that one That's actually worth it When I first saw the card I was like hmm We'll put it on Literally everything Like it's on my iphone Zoom in Smile Wait Let me do that again Taiwan can't help That's a Actually that should be a huge Slogan across All of Taiwan's communications Okay Alright Let's see what else is there We didn't talk about GovZero Can you tell people what GovZero Is about? Right, so GovZero Starts in late 2012 It's a very simple idea For all the public service Websites in Taiwan That all ends in GOV.TW Whenever people feel That the public service Isn't doing enough Or it isn't doing something that people really want to do People don't have to protest They can just set up an alternate Government website By taking an existing government website address Or ALY.gov.TW And change the O to a zero And then you get into the shadow government So we don't have to buy Google advertisement or Facebook advertisements People learn the habit Of changing O to a zero To get into the shadow government And so the inaugural project of GovZero Is budget GZW And it basically turns Every budget item in a national budget And later on That's the municipal budget Into social objects around which People can have a real discussion And the public service for example Can come out and explain Why this budget has been cut Or this budget has been increasing To people's ideas and things like that So making it fun To talk about individual budget items Rather than budget as a whole Because GovZero projects are relinquished Most of their copyright Under the Creative Commons license regime Tiger City And later on the joint platform The national platform all adopted This visualization So now if you go to join GovTW You see the same budget visualization For all the hundreds of the ministry And the public service is guaranteed To give you a response Whenever you type in something To ask about budget items And so it really kind of Makes a separate channel Aside from the mainstream journalism And from the representatives and the MPs So that people can have a real dialogue With the public service entirely online And so basically GovZero Is prototyping It's kind of like a pilot's face To see whether people like this idea And it's a good idea that the government Merges back into the public service Proper Alright, so looks like you've got someone else Coming here to see you It's my colleague I'm not taking your desk space Am I? No Alright Is there anything that you'd like To tell the policy makers in Europe And America who are attending this conference Your hopes For For transformative change In government Sure So there's three conditions That I adopted Publicly negotiated When I became additional minister In October 2016 And they are voluntary association Meaning you have all my colleagues For example, the lady just joined This from the ministry of education In our office We have the ministry of culture Of interior and national communication And so this is a horizontal scene A assemblage With all the different ministries And I don't give them orders I don't take orders What I do is that we ensure That any idea that they brainstorm Is radically transparent And that is very important Because previously the ministers take all the credit If things go right And they tell him the public service If things go wrong But now with radical transparency That the journalist and the general public Can identify who exactly is the public servant That came up with innovative ideas And so they get the credit But if things go wrong Well the system builder that's me Take all the blame And so by shifting the matrix Of taking out We do discover that the public service Is very good at innovating And so radical transparency Is location independence So that allows for me to travel around Taiwan To have very nice office space Like here and still counting As doing work And this is important because we need to empower The people who are closest to the pain And so by bringing the ministries people To the people closest to the pain Either through telepresence Or through co-location of the facilities We make sure that we can Mutually enhance the availability Of data by checking for example The air quality measurement And devising ways like through distributed ledger To make sure that nobody Can change each other's numbers We make sure that the effective partnership Is built by the presidential hecozone By the sandbox mechanism By the petition mechanism Participation budgeting And finally we make sure that innovation that we built Is open places that we can create Instead of being a colonizing power Like some other economies And so my job description As the digital minister Is a poem actually So it goes like this When we see the internet of things Let's take it to be the internet Of beings When we see virtual reality Let's make it a shared reality When we see machine learning Let's make it collaborative Learning And when we see user experience Let's make it about Human experience And whenever we hear That a singularity is near Let us always remember The plurality is here So that's my message Can we just do that one more time Because we probably lost audio From the door Yeah it's fine So just the last part Yeah Yeah okay Right so of all the sustainability I have one goal Which Taiwan can help Personally I focus on To build trustworthy data Collaboratives with the civil society And the private sector Through efforts like the presidential hackathon The personal tours around Taiwan The working with the social entrepreneurs And then we foster Effective partnership across sectors Just this year we're giving out Asia Pacific Social innovation partnership award That doesn't award individuals But rather partnerships across sectors And finally we make sure the innovation That we build this way is open In a sense that we're not controlling it In a colonizing way But co-creating with other International counterparts So my job description as the digital minister Is actually a poem It goes like this When we see the internet of things Let's make it an internet of beings When we see virtual reality Let's make it a shared Reality When we see machine learning Let's make it collaborative learning And when we see user experience Let's make it about Human experience And whenever we hear that a singularity Is near let us always Remember the plurality Is here We're good, perfect One last question Sure Network propaganda Is a serious Problem You as Digital minister How do you See government And your role here is addressing these We make viral video clips Like 60 Minutes After each popular This information or propaganda Or misinformation came online We have a citizen flag system That is built by the GovZero initiative Not sponsored by the governments That let us know what is the most Rampant rumors being spread Into and encrypted channels That just align Which is like WhatsApp here in Taiwan And so we take Basically a Punishable role with the line company To post our real-time clarifications Side by side In the line app And we make sure that our message is Clear enough, is timely enough Is structured data And we make sure that it goes viral Before this information goes viral And I think just by being proactive In our communication messages And by making it very clear That anyone who has any doubt about anything digital Can just come to me on Wednesday And really have a 40-minute talk We make sure that rumors and this information Is a very limited room to grow And we also rely, of course On independent fact-checkers Like the Taiwan Fact-Checking Center Part of the International Fact-Checking Network To do the due diligence And fact-checking in the front of the public And we work with large platforms Such as Facebook Which is committed to sometime this year Maybe in June to say if anything Is fact-checked as drawn by The Taiwan Fact-Checking Center They're committed to dial down the virality Of that message on Facebook To less than one-fifth of the previous So this is much like the spam Because email is private communication So state shouldn't pry into your email But if you flack your email as Span then it goes to a clearing house Called Span House and if sufficient People do this flacking The new incoming emails fitting this pattern Goes into the junk mail folder It's not per se censorship Because if you have too much time on your hands You can still go through a junk mail folder But it doesn't by default waste people's time How much of this is known by The Taiwan Civic Society What's the production of these videos Right, our premier And especially our deputy premier Has a viewership Easily into millions And our president recently Partnered with YouTubers And so people who follow those YouTubers Now naturally now that we're Shifting into a very fast-paced Communication side For people of an older age Or using Line Actually today is the day That they will discover that Line Has a separate section For the government real-time clarifications Maybe we should do that in Chinese That way Then you actually have a clip you can It's okay Alright great thank you Appreciate it Very very very very impressed Thank you Thank you