 Unlike many people today, I'm an optimist. This strange condition began when I was 15 years old. That was 1996. I discovered that the future of human knowledge is on the web, and my textbooks were all out of date. So I told my teachers, I want to quit school and start my education on the web. Surprisingly, the teachers all agreed with it. A year later, I founded a startup, working on web technologies, and I get to join this fabulous internet community that runs with this crazy idea, an open, multi-stakeholder political system that runs the internet. Still, today. Today, as Taiwan's first digital minister, I'm putting into practice the ideas that I learned when I was 15 years old. Rough consensus, civic participation, and radical transparency. Surprisingly, it's working, and it's transforming our society. Two years ago, our president, Cai Yingwen, said an inspiring statement in her inauguration speech. She said, Before, democracy was a clash between two opposing values. But now, democracy must become a conversation between many different values. Indeed, in conventional thinking, social benefits and business profits, for example, are opposing forces and often contracted each other, forcing the government to make trade-offs in this paradox. However, the idea of social innovation brings a brand new way of thinking. For people working on social innovation, the core objective may be achieved by, for example, developing business models to address social issues or environmental issues, and the government's roles has changed. Instead of being the arbiter torn between different sides, we're now asking a different set of questions. We ask, What are our common values, despite different positions? And we ask, Given the common values, can we find solutions that works for everyone? And this is the spirit of co-creation, a spirit for subversion of paradoxes. Civic technology, the branch of technology that enables millions of people to listen to each other instead of one person speaking to millions of people, is a core ingredient to co-creation. Indeed, in the past couple of years, Taiwan has been consistently ranked the top country internationally on open data, on internet participation, on women's digital access, digital inclusivity, etc. And all this was because we adopted open data and crowdsourcing as national direction since 2014. It was capitalized and epitomized by an Occupy movement in March 2014. There was a live demo of mass participation we occupied the parliament for 22 days. At the time, the MPs in Taiwan were refusing to deliberate a trade service agreement with Beijing, and so the occupiers got into the parliament at night and stayed there. For 22 days, we demonstrated how to deliberate a trade service agreement with the host society. There were over 20 NGOs participating, the Greens, the Labour, the Independents, everybody. And we supported this whole deliberation with a radically transparent broadcasting, live streaming logistics system which we exported to Hong Kong for the umbrella movement in the same year was powered by this community called GovZero. GovZero is a civic tech community with a call to fork the government. We take the government websites which all ends in GOVTW and make better open alternatives that ends in G0V.TW. For example, the annual national budget is hundreds page long in a PDF file and it's very hard to read. But the GovZero community's very first project was Budget GovZero TW which shows the national budget in a way that everybody understands and you can drill down to each and every budget details. Today, the system is adopted by seven city governments powers a participatory budget platform for Taipei City at Budget.Taipei so that anyone can look at this map, find a part of city budget they care and type in any question they want to ask and the career public servants actually comes forward and answer for that part of the question. And starting next month, we're adopting this for the national government also. So this becomes a direct dialogue platform not through the city council or the legislative but for the career public servants to communicate directly with citizens. So why are there so many civic hackers in Taiwan like me who spoke to my clients during the Occupy movement saying okay I have to take a three-week leave because democracy needs me? I think it's because our generation and 37 years ago now were the first generation that enjoyed the freedom of speech after three decades of martial law and dictatorship. The freedom arrived in 1989 the year of personal computers. So for us personal computer revolution and freedom of speech is the same thing. Our first presidential election by popular vote 1996 is also the year that Royal Web got popular. So internet and democracy they're not two things, they're one and the same thing in Taiwan. So for the past 30 years when we see free software we always think freedom of assembly freedom of speech freedom from surveillance freedom from coercion and never free of cost because we know that freedom is never free of cost. Our parents generation our grandparents generation paid dearly for the freedom and we need to use the software freedoms to keep it free as we did during the Occupy movement. And the movement caused a revolution out of a peaceful revolution. There was a radical transformation of social expectations at the end of that year and we just found ourselves elected mayors when we did not expect it. And because of this the prime ministers resigned and a new prime minister and engineer said okay so from now on crowdsourcing open data is just going to be the national direction. And Occupyers and the civic tech people who supported them were then invited as mentors as advisors to the public service to solve issues international issues like Uber. And Uber is very interesting because it was a MIM a virus of the mind. A MIM was called Sharing Economy and it said that code dispatch cars better than laws and so we have to obey code instead of laws. The MIM spreads through apps from driver to passenger to drivers and you can't really argue with a MIM just like you can't argue with the flu it's not in the same category. So there's the protest the taxi drivers surrounded the Ministry of Transport demanding negotiation but how do we negotiate with a virus of the mind. For us the solution is through a deliberation that involves thousands of stakeholders. It is scaling down of the deliberation we just did with half a million people so we think we can do it. And deliberation thinking deeply about something together is an effective vaccine against a virus of the mind when everyone passengers and drivers, academics and public servants they listen to each other and form a consensus we become immune to divisive PR campaigns in the future. A proper deliberation with a focused conversation method involves four stages. The first stage is FACTS where we collect evidences, firsthand experiences, objective data and then after that is confirmed by everyone we move to collect everybody's feelings about us in FACTS you may feel angry, I may feel happy and it's all okay and after people converge on their feelings that resonate with everybody we then talk about ideas and the best ideas are the ones that address the most people's feelings. Then we translate them into legal deeds and slide them into decisions. However if the decision making process is not transparent then the people on the street would speak a different language than people in the government so they're not even agreeing on basic facts like let alone others feelings. And so in that situation ideas become ideologies virus of the mind so potent that they can blind people to new facts and to each other's feelings. So our first step is always open data that is making all the facts available and as the private sector and civil society to share what they have. And next we create an interactive survey on Polis to ask about how people feel. Four groups of people emerged taxi drivers, Uber drivers, Uber passengers and other passengers. And the Polis system shows each group how their share sentiments are received by other groups. And the interesting thing is it lowers people's antagonism because you see all these people on different sides are your Facebook and Twitter friends didn't talk about this over dinner. And so at the beginning the people were on all the corners but because we say we only give binding power of anything that people propose that convince a majority of all the different people so participants converge on feelings that resonate not only with like-minded people but across the aisle. So instead of distracting people with divisive statements we attract people to focus on consensus statements that we can then use as the agenda to discuss in the face-to-face meetings. After we get such a set of feelings that resonates with practically everybody it's now much easier for the government to engage the stakeholders and check with them one by one. Here's the consensus of the people so do you agree if you do agree how do we translate that into law? Because it's live streamed and there's a full transcript they're bound to the words that they said during this live stream consultation and the stakeholders eventually agreed. When we ratified their agreements in August 2016 everybody knew it was coming and everybody anticipated it. So today Uber operates legally under the new framework but so do the taxi companies who are now adopting the same model that Uber is using for dispatching its cars. So this method works. The next question is can we scale the process of listening? So right after the ratification I joined the cabinet as the digital minister to explore the possibility through PDIS the public digital innovation space. It's like a policy lab in a national level. We have designers, we have programmers and we're automating away a lot of this chores the public servants are doing in order to make participation possible. More interesting perhaps than the technical contributions we have a culture that we're bringing to the government. For example I'm a radically transparent minister by that I mean all the journalists or the lobbyists everybody get to ask me questions but I only answer publicly. So if I get a question from a private email I will reply asking if it's okay to give my answer publicly if they're not okay with it I'll just link to my previous statements. It's not just to the lobbyists and journalists but also for internal meetings for the hundreds of internal meetings that are held as I was the digital minister everything was transcribed. The written record is checked for 10 working days for all the participants and we publish it to the internet. The effect is very surprising. The civil service actually become very innovative and restating. They propose some very good ideas under this condition. That's because previously before the political transparency the minister would get a credit if things go right and the public service often gets a blame if things go wrong but now with this accountable record if things go right they get a credit because their name is not a transcript but because this experimental method if things go wrong is all my fault. So under this new condition they become very innovative and open to a lot of interesting ideas. One of the idea is adopting this thoroughly free software program called Sandstorm. It's a platform of our public service internal collaboration. We use the same tools but open source tools is like EtherPAT, like Weekend which is like Trello, Rocket Chat which is like Slack and how the free software community is organizing themselves these days we're also using it in a public service and previously the roadblock was on the cyber security issue but we were able to find a community platform and for people to publicly audit this open source platform to solve the cyber security worries it gets audited by our top-notch white hat hackers so that we're now reasonably sure that the free software running on top of it doesn't suffer from cyber security attacks and issues so we were able to do a lot of free software working methods just by adopting this like there's interesting system proposed and written by young public servants like an app for ordering lunchbox together or plan traveling together or whatever it's really good to have this choice also we established an ePetition platform as a way for people to participate at the beginning it did not receive much attention because while for single ministry issues people were able to get satisfactory answers for cross ministry issues people would get this very blank very bureaucratic answer that doesn't really solve their problem this explains why each individual ministry can't do much about it so after I become the digital minister we asked each ministry to send a team at least one person to serve as participation officer or PO's we assembled this virtual team of about 50 people online using rocket chat and auto send storm tools for engagement so now in Taiwan when people started petition they know that instead of just a beautiful response they would actually get to meet with all the relevant ministries in Taipei or we would travel to those rural areas and islands if they're about petition for local development we solve a lot of very interesting problems like this without exposing any public servants to risk so we relieve their fear uncertainty and doubt around civic participation for example a petitioner last May said we have an explosively difficult to use income tax filing system that doesn't work on Mac and Linux we invited all the people who complained the loudest and eventually we co-created this year's tax filing system and so by collaborating with the civic sector we're building a robust environment suitable for the social innovators to grow where the power of civil society could be brought into full play and the venue we hold those collaboration meetings today the social innovation lab was also co-created by 5 workshops of more than 100 civil innovators were invited to communicate their conceptions and expectations for the lab as such we achieve a blended consensus fulfilling all the purposes for example it has a resident chef a resident kitchen and cafe is the open until 11pm and people ask for me to personally stay here as a mentor like office hour from 10am to 10pm and I do that provided that my visitors agree to have our conversation posted online anyone can have a discussion with me in the social innovation lab and it's not just in Taipei city the different regional city social enterprises social innovators they also gather around me on my bi-weekly Taiwan tours it just me that travels but everybody else there's like 12 different ministries about 20 people remains in Taipei we still have a good video conferencing and transcription that makes it very easy for the public service in Taipei to see the local issues being surfaced and being resolved in a very quick fashion because all the related ministries are there and once the people solve it and publish online all the other unrelated ministries now also understand okay so this problem is to be solved this way and so it is a virtual learning team that's recurrently solved the social issues so we tour around Taiwan we see a lot of civil society initiated grassroots civic tech projects like the Gov0 air pollution observation network by combining the diverse talents in network communities this project utilize the simple air quality sensor air box which is becoming very popular and apply IOT technologies so that little by little and bit by bit thousands of contributors accumulate massive database about air quality that is closer to the actual places where people are active and the exceptional advantage in Taiwan is we fully support instead of reject this civil society grassroots initiative as part of the forward looking infrastructure plan we launch a IOT for public good program with a four year budget of about 5 billion Taiwan dollars in the program an enormous amount of environmental data on air products, meteorology water resource earthquake disaster relief are integrated into a high speed computing environment so that we can collaboratively discover the correlation between social activities and environmental phenomenon more quickly we're also working with research institute to assist with the manufacturing of domestic affordable high quality PM2.5 detectors so communities can yield data of a higher accuracy so why do we encourage such innovations currently there's many misunderstandings between government and people due to lack of transparency and insufficient data and using the air quality as an example establishing effective dialogue is difficult until the source of daily air pollution are disclosed from various sources to the whole society on the same platform including what pollution came from outside from fixed sources from mobile sources etc and we're very proud that the air box related projects and applications have been introduced over the world so to speak by uniting the strengths of the government and the public Taiwan proved to be capable of not only solving our own problems but providing such solution to other countries in similar situations as a reference moreover we have a sandbox act in Taiwan so if you want to experiment in fintech in self-driving vehicles you can apply for experimentation for 12 months up to 3 years to break some laws during that period do you need to explain why these laws need to be broken to achieve the common good for society and during that experiment we assemble a multi stakeholder panel that collectively decide whether the society think this is a good idea moving forward or if it's a bad idea if it's a good idea regulations and laws get changed because of social innovation if it's not a good idea well at least the risk is limited and everybody learns from it so we can try a different model next time through this way Taiwan contributes our experience to the planetary civic society focusing not just on one or two sustainable development goals but especially on SDG 17 which is cross sectoral, international and cross discipline collaboration in conclusion I would like to share a prayer with you about this version of paradoxes when we see internet of things let's make it a 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 when we hear the singularity is near let us remember the plurality is here